The see gay car descended to the Manhattan side, went north on the Bowery heading out of the Fifth and toward the Ninth.

Ninth and Midnight

On his desk were the crime-scene photos of the Chinese family, the Kungs, a file folder, and a note from P.O. Wong. As Jack had requested, Wong had arranged for a Chinatown car service to drive the grandmother home, and in a follow-up phone call, had learned that the family had made burial arrangements with the Heaven Grace Funeral Home in Flushing. The death certificates would be available there.

The next of kin, their worst fears realized, were en route to New York.

The photos brought it back to him, the idea that suicide was not uncommon, but that this case was different. The demise of entire families, especially involving young children, was particularly tragic.

The folders contained the reports from One Astor Plaza. The building manager’s narrative was just as Jack had remembered, straightforward, and practically mirroring the security officer’s report. They’d all gone up together and discovered the horror at the scene. The reports were standard TPO format: time, place, occurrence.

The Medical Examiner’s report on the dead family cited chemical asphyxiation as the cause of death. If the body doesn’t receive oxygen, it leads to collapse, coma, and death. Suffocation by carbon monoxide. All four bodies showed lethal levels of the invisible odorless poison. The mother and the children also showed large doses of sleep medication, the NyQuil, more than enough to have made them drowsy. The father had no trace of it. His job was to keep the briquettes burning, to keep the carbon monoxide flowing. He’d gotten sick during the killing and dying, maybe realizing in his daze the enormity of what he and his wife were doing, frantically knowing it was much too late to turn back.

Jack remembered the photos of the big red dragon bowls. Those bowls had held more charcoal and ashes than the saucepans and pots in the kitchen area.

He closed the file and placed it, along with the photos, back into the wire basket. He remembered Pa’s passing and thought about the cycle of events that the survivors would soon have to endure: the funeral home, the wake, the burial, and the church or temple. Later, the return to the cemetery, closure a long way off, if ever.

He began to wrap up the paperwork, drawing together the official loose ends of the case.

P.O. Wong had also left Jack a Post-it note, an unofficial comment at the margin of the reports; Wong intended to go to the Kung family wake, which was in Flushing’s Chinatown. Closure for him, thought Jack, a good thing. Having been touched by death, superstitious Chinese believed paying last respects was a way to close off the bad luck.

The shift dragged on.

Jack checked the blotter, the patrol reports, and the updates on the computer.

In Brooklyn’s Seven-Two Precinct a jewelry-store robbery had turned into a wild chase and a carjacking. Four of the seven armed robbers of the Galleria Gems Center got away. Three perps being held.

In Queens, a fight over a young beauty exploded violently when a teen slashed his roommate and was captured an hour later. The woman involved had no comment.

In the 0-Five, the Chinatown precinct, two gang members had been arrested while awaiting a ransom payment for a kidnapped and tortured Chinese immigrant.

Jack wondered if Tat’s Ghosts might be involved, but figured that it was more likely to be a Fukienese setup. The victim and the perps all had mainland Mandarin-sounding names, Zhang instead of Chang, Qiu instead of Chu. In a second Chinatown incident, an unidentified Chinese man had been ambushed by at least two assailants as he left a restaurant and shot numerous times, but was in stable condition at Downtown Hospital. Uniforms from the 0-Five had responded but were unable to get cooperation from area residents or merchants. No surprise there, Jack thought. What caught his attention was the unusual heavy-duty firepower involved, rounds not typical of Chinatown violence: .45 caliber, and .223 rifles, hitters strapping AK-47s, Colt .45, and 9mm Parabellums. The victim had apparently shot back with a .38 revolver, a pea shooter by comparison.

Power struggle, mused Jack, or someone had a nasty beef to settle.

Out on the edge of the Ninth, the reports had arrived early. Toys “R” Us had held a 7 AM sale where two shoppers were arrested for bashing each other over a ten-dollar talking Spider-Man doll. At Kmart, a riot had broken out, with aggressive shoppers trampling each other to get to a fifty-dollar color TV.

For Giving, thanks . . .

P.O.s and cars to the scene.

From Black Friday to the days before Christmas, businesses were marching from loss to profitability. Ads for sales and discounts lured shoppers into the stores and malls, feeding the frenzy of shopping that overwhelmed the moral and spiritual message of the holidays. The thought brought back to Jack one of Ma’s Buddhist sayings: To attain nothingness is true happiness. The saying flew in the face of capitalism and did not work well in this city, this country, this modern world of money and machines. A belief better left to monks on high mountain steppes, away from the din and roar of industrialized civilizations everywhere.

The way that things flowed, the tao, kept him on call, on edge, but even then the Chinatown things crowded back into his head. The killing of the Ping lady, which had provoked the Fukienese demonstrations, the burglaries, the gang crime and brazen gunplay, events outside his jurisdiction pecking at his sense of duty.

Old Chinese grandmothers get run over by trucks all the time on Canal Street. They walk too slowly and seem to believe no driver will dare run them down. They are at fault yet these are tragedies nonetheless.

Who really cares?

In a cop’s life, the more he touched upon tragedy, the more it rubbed off on him, became part of him. Too much tragedy drove some cops to eating their guns.

Trying to clear the black kharma from his mind, his thoughts came to Alexandra Lee, activista lawyer and friend. He remembered that he needed to thank her for her help in arranging his recent Hawaiian vacation. He decided to visit her NoHo office after the shift, but he’d go down to Chinatown first, drop by on Billy Bow, homeboy, at the tofu factory.

Approaching meal break, Jack ordered take-out sushi from Avenue B, a trendy joint where you could still get raw fish at 3 AM. Four blocks from the stationhouse, he considered the quick jog to Avenue B and back as exercise, movement of the blood.

EDP Avenue B

The trendy sushi spot was still jamming at three in the morning, full of weekend club crawlers slinking out of dance palaces like Webster Hall and Limelight, the party crowd needing to tone down what remained of the Ecstasy rush with sake and raw fish.

U2 jams kicking off the DJ jukebox.

Jack was paying for his Nabeyaki Special, a soup-and-sushi combo, when he heard a commotion outside, on the street that had been deserted on his way in.

The patrons turned their heads.

The restaurant’s manager, a young Asian Pacific dude, who tried to look yakuza but who struck Jack as more NYU Business Management School, pushed his way out the door to check out the disturbance.

Pocketing his change, Jack went toward the door.

When he stepped out onto the street he saw a short white man by the curb, in a fatigue army coat, howling up at the streetlamps beneath the cold black night. His hot breath was a rush of steam in the frozen air. He kept his hands in the coat pockets.

EDP, Jack recognized, emotionally disturbed person.