by Cole Reid
For the time being, Liu Jingyu wasn’t critical but the black Infiniti didn’t stay put after the fender bender. The driver backed up and pulled around in the opposite lane to the right of the Lancer. The back left door of the Infiniti opened and the loud noise of a flickering light bulb reverberated in the Lancer. The light bulb was an MP5 machine pistol and the flickering sound was its automatic attitude. The gun had a suppressor on the muzzle but it didn’t suppress anything for Liu Jingyu. The bullets penetrated the side door and him. The glass window popped along with his jaw. His ears rang. His nose clogged and he felt dizzy before it ended. Bai Feihong caught the masked man as he reloaded and tackled him to the ground. His eyes shuttered as he fell on top of the masked man headbutting him. The headbutt did as much damage to him as it did the masked man, stirring the glass pieces in Bai Feihong’s right eye. Bai Feihong grabbed the shotgun with his weaker left hand but couldn’t maintain his grip as the masked man raised his left hand to Bai Feihong’s neck. The masked man tried to choke him but one hand wasn’t good enough. Bai Feihong was able to break free of the masked man’s grip and grab the shotgun with his right hand. An ice sickle suddenly impaled him. It pierced through his liver causing him to fall sideways. As he fell, his shoulder hit the concrete and he grabbed the wound on his stomach but found no ice sickle. Knowing he had been shot from behind he decided against turning around he lied on the concrete and waited for the kill shot. It came. The man standing over Bai Feihong’s body extended his hand to help the masked man to his feet.
Xiu Ying was in the Lancer, still alive but playing dead. He had been riddled with stray bullets and didn’t know what to do. He poked Liu Jingyu in the thigh. He poked again. Liu Jingyu didn’t move. Xiu Ying went back to his dead man mime and told himself he would escape the car when the gunmen were gone. His plan was altered by one final shotgun blast. With the window already broken, the masked man didn’t have to aim. He was close enough. The blast rang out like a fallen book in a quiet library, the kind of sound that seemingly lasts forever. For Xiu Ying, it lasted a lifetime.
• • •
The lack of information was as upsetting as the loss of four of their own. Mr. Cheung took Xiaoyu back to the garage before the news was known. Liu Ping and the seven remaining Sheltered Ones told Xiaoyu they hadn’t heard from Xu Dong or the ones with him. Their phones went unanswered. Being members of Hong Kong’s black society permitted them to do many things the average Hong Konger couldn’t. But the average Hong Konger could hold out hope for missing family members. A Triad didn’t have that luxury, unless a fool. There weren’t many Triad fools. Foolish Triads didn’t last so long. But Triad society had a different kind of luxury or lack there of. They lacked legal recourse. Allowing them to fill the gap. Xiaoyu had been filling gaps since he was a child. He gave himself the task of wiping the Fire Dragons off Hong Kong’s map, along with the other Triads—child’s play. Xiaoyu wanted to go after the Fire Dragons first to show the wrath of his hammer was swift. Liu Ping suggested the Fire Dragons would be expecting the swing. They wouldn’t act like nails, staying in place waiting to get hit. Liu Ping didn’t know where the Fire Dragons would hide their leadership. He told Xiaoyu he could find out but he would need the rest of the money from the cocaine sale. Then he would need to make a phone call.
The Fire Dragons and Sons of the Sun had always considered themselves cousins. In fact, two dragons representing both branches were tattooed on Xiaoyu’s back. They were right next to each other. The Dragon Head of the Sons was superstitious. Like Mr. Cheung he was a traditionalist. His house was loaded with tradition and superstition. A feng shui architect had done his interior design. No doors were too close together to avoid clutter. The house was designed to balance itself. In the living room, were pieces representing each animal in the Chinese Zodiac. Twelve fine pieces. A lot of money spent—well spent. He was thin and frail-looking. He was the longest serving Dragon Head. His time as the head of the Sons was taxing, Xu Dong could have related. He stayed busy because he lacked Uncle Woo’s natural understanding and sense of organization. He favored organization over clutter, but he didn’t know how to achieve it wide-scale. Like his house, he had to hire help to achieve a better design. His constant reliance on non-Triad advisors cost him as did his superstition. His name was Henry Yung. When he inherited the leadership of the Sons, he inherited the leader’s nickname, Sonny. Sonny was the wrong person to lead the Sons; everyone knew it. But he wasn’t the worst person, which kept him in place. Plus, he kept the money flowing to the right people. His superstition lead him to a valuable conclusion: Many people had to be vested in his survival. He stayed in place because others wanted to. One of the people vested in his survival was sitting right next to him—Emmanuel Ao—Head of the Fire Dragons. Sonny and Emmanuel sat on the long sofa in Sonny’s living room nursing their respective egos with rice wine. The same rice wine that was poured out at Deni Tam’s induction ceremony. It was expensive and customary when Dragon Heads got together. The house was crowded. There were thirty-seven people inside and a baker’s dozen outside sitting in cars. Those inside felt safe. Those outside felt tough. They could feel the strength in their numbers. Their confidence turned on them. It made them worth less but not worthless. A black Audi A4 was parked parallel on the street in front of Sonny’s house. The car had four occupants, two Fire Dragons and two submachine guns. Parked at the end of the street in a cul-de-sac was another black Audi A4 with two more armed Fire Dragons. A black Mercedes was parked in the garage. The car was empty but there were three Sons in the garage and three machine pistols to match. A navy BMW was docked on the adjacent street with three more Fire Dragons. The BMW had been positioned to out flank an attacker. But they had anticipated an attack on the house not on the car itself.
An L96A1 rifle was bolt-action firing one shot at a time, with sound suppressor the rifle was more the menace. The rifle could be fired in quick succession if the gunman was trained. Li Tao was trained. Two shots hit two targets in one second. The occupants of the BMW were to expect an attack. They weren’t to expect the attack would begin with them. The two occupants of the front seat were hit in the chest with high-powered shots. The third occupant was in the back seat. Without much initiation he relied on instinct. He leaned forward to inspect his front-seat colleagues. Leaning forward gave Li Tao an unclean shot at his chest. The cleaner shot was to the head. His head snapped back leaving him in a vegetative state, spread out on the back seat.
The shots weren’t heard in the house but disturbed the mood. The polite atmosphere brought on by a union of two Triad branches turned steely. Everyone in the house was armed, even the two Dragon Heads. They were the only two who didn’t have their weapons in full view. The house had been turned into a trade show for gun collectors. A standard MP5 submachine gun was available as were UMPs, both UMP9s and UMP40s. The inventive Glock 30 subcompact converted to machine pistol was the most personalized weapon in the house. The house itself no longer felt like a house but a gun bizarre. The problem with the house wasn’t one of quantity or quality but caliber. The Sons and Dragons had overlooked one person, Uncle Woo. Uncle Woo had always been the most organized of all Dragon Heads. His absence hadn’t erased the presence of organization in the Moons’ execution. Xiaoyu had been Uncle Woo’s keen observer. The Sons and Dragons weren’t expecting a targeted attack. They thought a bumrush was eminent, the kind of retaliatory melee common among Triads. The Sons and Fire Dragons had armed themselves with rapid-fire small caliber weapons. They were expecting a fight from wall-to-wall and room-to-room. Without walls, Li Tao could hit a number of the Sons and Dragons from his high-caliber distance. Their small caliber weapons were enough to bark but not enough to bite the Moons. The Moons maintained their positions out of range of the small caliber weapons. They were just too far away. Xiaoyu had not planned to enter the house. He planned the kind of organized attack worthy of the Moons. He adopted the strategy he used to survive in The Tank. He waited while his opponents became exhauste
d. The Moons stayed in the neighborhood but far from Sonny Yung’s house. The Sons and Dragons realized the men in the BMW were unresponsive. Likewise they were too smart to go to the car and investigate why the phones weren’t being answered. Triads didn’t hold out hope for missing family members. But the Sons and Dragons waited because they were forced to. Xiaoyu waited as well. Almost two hours went by and nothing happened. Not a single shot was fired but the time was productive. Li Tao quietly repositioned himself to take aim at the Audi parked across from the house. His shots rang out in an eerie order. Counting the number of shots was counting the number of kills. One. Two. The shots were more disturbing this close to the house because they could be heard. The sound suppressor could dampened the sound of the shots but the sound of a high-caliber rifle could not be subdued entirely. The two Fire Dragons in the cul-de-sac were put on alert. Although they could not hear the sounds of the rifle, the Sons and Dragons in the house heard the two muffled bursts. When calls to the Audi across from the house went unanswered the Sons and Dragons had their answer. Everyone in the house put on their best appearances but as time passed it became harder to do. It wasn’t the time. It was what their emotions did during the time. Fear was useless. They felt ready but didn’t know what they were ready for. The encroaching melee didn’t happen. Their numbers were being systematically dwindled—the feeling of being part of a system working against you, a cancer. It was an unsettling feeling for any Triad branch. Xiaoyu waited to make it last longer. Another hour went by with nothing. Sonny’s garage door suddenly began to go up. The three Sons in the garage were taking shifts: Two asleep; one awake. They couldn’t be blamed. There wasn’t much else for them to do. The long periods of waiting crippled their readiness. When the door came up they didn’t know what to think. They were even more stunned when it stopped. The door was only halfway up when drinks were served. Two Molotov Cocktails flew into the garage before the door came back down. Lin Jun was sitting on the opposite side of the Audi across the street from the house, controlling the garage door. Wang Xi joined him after serving drinks to the men in the garage.
The Audi at the end of the street in the cul-de-sac was told to return to the house. The engine was powerful giving the car a good start as it accelerated. The car was traveling at over sixty kilometers per hour when one wheel was shot out. As the tires erupted, a single-second switched the force of the car. The car was no longer using its own powerful engine but gliding with inertia. The inertia was a lot but not enough to keep the car going. The car dragged itself to a halt under its own weight. The shock of the abrupt stop caused the two men inside to freeze under sudden tension. Airbags deployed. For a few brief moments, the two Dragons in the car sat still. Stillness was disguised as a clear shot. Li Tao was in a prone position on top of the Astra now parked at the end of the street. Without much time, he cleared the barrel of his rifle twice, hitting his mark. He recovered his bullet casings before climbing in the Astra with Huang Sitian. The Astra stopped in front of the Audi A4. Lin Jun and Wang Xi got in the Astra and drove off. The rest of the night was silent. Xiaoyu and his Moons had left or so it seemed. Liu Ping, Yi Le and Yu Hong remained in the neighborhood, along with the GT. It was just before sunrise when the Sons and Dragons came out of the house. Neighbors were following their usual routine but suspiciously looked on at the scene. The night left seven people dead but the neighborhood still got sleep. Not a shot was fired that wasn’t born of a sound suppressor. The wild firefight being anticipated by the Sons and Dragons, didn’t happen. An Audi A4 was parked in the middle of the street with two dead Dragons. It had to be removed. Three Sons came to the car and started to push the car toward the driveway. Two men walked down the street to the adjacent street and found the BMW with its three dead bodies. They put their colleagues all in the back seat and drove the car back to the house parking it behind the Audi. Last was the Audi across the street from the house. It had to be stacked in the driveway behind the BMW. Over twenty combined members of the Sons of the Sun and Fire Dragons stood in Sonny Yung’s driveway looking at the mess the night had made. The Mercedes was still in the garage badly damaged by the fire from the Molotov Cocktails. The Sons had been able to put out the fire before it set the house ablaze. Yu Hong casually walked down the street in shorts and sunglasses with two letters typed into a prepared SMS message, O-K. He saw the Sons and Dragons standing in the driveway looking at the bullet holes in the windows of the cars. They were all relatively calm, all things considered. Walking casually by on the other side of the street, Yu Hong sent the text message. It wasn’t immediate. It took a few seconds for the text message to arrive and a few more seconds for the radio signal to reach the transmitters beneath the cars. When the signal arrived all three cars broke out into the same chorus—baritone. The sound was deep and booming. The two Audis and BMW exploded rocking the foundation of the house and those on either side. Parts and pieces multiplied mid-flight into shreds of metal. The twenty or so Triads standing in the driveway wouldn’t have wanted their bodies back. They wouldn’t get them. The windows of the house broke from shear force of the explosions and the walls cracked. Ironically, everyone inside the house wasn’t hurt including the two Dragon Heads. Ironic as well, through the night and accompanying morning Sonny Yung and Emmanuel Ao lost much of the body carrying their title of Dragon Head.
Yu Hong reacted hysterically as a casual observer. He even faked a phone call to the Hong Kong Police Force. Neighbors ran outside their houses. Yu Hong walked casually to the GT parked around the corner. He nodded at Liu Ping who was behind the wheel. And gave a thumbs up to Yi Le in the back seat with the radio transmitter. Liu Ping turned the car around and headed back for Hong Kong Island.
• • •
The next two weeks were uneventful, decidedly so. Xiaoyu gave Liu Ping the order to keep the Sheltered Ones at home in the garage on Jervois Street. They only went out for food and brought it back to eat. They ate and slept in the garage and they didn’t leave for weeks, all nine of them sharing the same toilet. Xiaoyu held to his practice of keeping them in the dark. They didn’t know if he was done or if he wanted to literally wipe the Triads from the map. The attacks were all over the news. The Sheltered Ones spent their days listening to the radio and playing cards to pass the time. The Hong Kong Police Force was aware of the ongoing Triad war and made the usual promises to end the violence and make arrests. And they made good on their promise. Most of the members of the Sons of the Sun and Fire Dragons were arrested after the explosion. It was impossible for their activities to be ignored. But it left the Moons in a confusing position. The status of their war was up in the air. There were only two branches of the Triad family that Xiaoyu hadn’t moved against, the Golden Masters and Flying Dragons. The Sheltered Ones couldn’t understand why they would continue with either branch. Of the least likely branches to be involved in Uncle Woo’s murder were the Masters and Flyers. The Flyers were the most non-existent of all Triads. They operated under unspoken neutrality. It didn’t earn them any respect but it was understandable. Violence wasn’t necessarily bad for business but too much violence was. The same couldn’t be said for too much peace. Many Flyers were just pick up and delivery men. There were almost no enforcers and even the Flyers themselves couldn’t say the last time they had a Jade Soldier. Most Flyers didn’t even carry guns. Except for the business they were in, the Flyers looked the most legitimate. The Golden Masters were on very good terms with Uncle Woo. He was at his favorite restaurant in their territory when he was killed. There existed a special relationship between the Moons and Masters. They weren’t cousins like the Sons and Dragons. They were stepbrothers.
Four weeks went by without a Triad killing another Triad. Xiaoyu didn’t declare his war over but the Sheltered Ones saw themselves as having little reason to keep killing. Xiaoyu knew it as well. But the Moons had a natural advantage in a mob war, they shared their turf with the Hong Kong Police Force. War or no war, their home space stayed relatively peaceful, for obvious reas
ons. It became clear that the war wasn’t really over. But there was a necessary cease-fire. It had been almost six months since Uncle Woo’s death. There was no way to know if his killer was already dead. Xiaoyu stayed silent but the obvious became evident. He didn’t know what to do next. In the fifth week, a decision came in the form of a phone call to Liu Ping. The same group that sold him information about the Sons and Dragons said they had some new information to sell. The information concerned the death of Uncle Woo. But they were only willing to trade with the Jade Soldier.