“Don’t ask so many fuckin’ questions,” Lucky warned. “And don’t forget, we still want the motherfuckers who been robbing our members.” He turned toward the back of the apartment. “Whaddya got back there? That the love nest?”

Koo Jai followed Lucky to his bedroom, the heavy footsteps of Kongo behind him.

“Shit, it’s hot as hell back here,” Lucky said.

“Makes the girls take their clothes off faster,” Koo Jai deadpanned.

Lucky noticed the black-faced and diamond Rado, lifted it from the folding table.

“Nice,” he said. “I know just the girl for this. You don’t mind, right?”

Koo Jai shook his head as Lucky pocketed the watch.

“It’s Christmastime, you know.”

Koo Jai nodded, keeping the smile on his face.

Lucky grinned at stone-faced Kongo. “Maybe I’ll get lucky, huh?” He laughed at his own joke, continuing, “Or maybe she’ll get Lucky.”

Kongo kept his eyes on Koo Jai as they left the apartment.

“Keep watching,” barked Lucky. “And keep that fuckin’ cell phone on.”

Koo Jai closed the door and listened to the sound of their footsteps thumping down the stairs. He sat on the sofa and retrieved his gun, suspicion in his heart about the change in the dailo ’s demeanor. He felt suddenly thirsty, and tried to find clarity in another bottle of Tsingtao.

Kongo led the way out of the tenement. Lucky squeezed the Rado in the sweaty palm of his big hand as they came onto East Broadway. They headed for the black Buick, Lucky thinking, Lee’s watches, wondering if Skinny Chin took better care of his list of serial numbers than he did of his merchandise.

White and Red

The Ecstasy sharpened his instincts, Lucky felt, but the more he took, the more he needed to get the same bounce. Now the ma huang and his instincts were bracing him up.

Gray light in late afternoon. The streets looked slippery, under a mushy white coating. He passed over the Gucci loafers, thinking how streetwise he was, and laced up the black steel-toed Doc Martens with the rubber traction soles.

Imagining himself in a fight, he raised his hands in a Wing Chun–style pose, striking a sloppy cat-stance. The loose-fitting carpenter jeans puffed up where extra pockets held a box cutter, a cell phone.

He popped another one of the red pills and washed it down with a chug of Grey Goose from a pint-sized bottle, a taste from the twenty cases they’d taken from Fook Lau Liquors.

Another gambling debt squared up and then some.

He sensed he should press the element of surprise, and ambush Koo Jai again. Kongo was holed up in a catnap with some Malay ho, and Lefty, fighting off a hangover from the free vodka, had crashed in the clubhouse.

Go alone this time, pull off a bluff, see what turns up.

He walked over to East Broadway, kept his gun hand near the nine in his pocket as he stepped up and knocked on Koo Jai’s door.

No answer.

He punched up Koo Jai’s pager, standing there quietly but heard only silence from within. He knocked again, waited another minute before going back down the stairs. At the rear of the street landing, he checked the fire escapes above him, didn’t see any movement there.

Head toward the far end, he was thinking, as he turned down East Broadway.

People on the street were hustling to buy their dinner groceries as the weather worsened. The fish vendors were barking at their customers, threatening to close shop. Lucky looked in the direction of Pike Street, intuiting that Koo Jai had gone that way. Halfway down the dark street he saw a skelly-looking white man outside the local methadone clinic, bobbing and weaving in the middle of the slushy sidewalk, forcing Chinese ah por, grandmothers, to shift their bags of choy, and walk around him.

Lucky brushed him with his shoulder as he passed.

In his junkie haze the man muttered just loud enough for Lucky to hear the words chinky shit . . .

Lucky took a few more steps and stopped suddenly, as if he remembered something, then turned, bringing his hands up as if he were adjusting sunglasses, stepping toward the man. An arm’s length away, Lucky leaned forward and drove the heel of his open right palm full force into the man’s chin. Shock crossed the man’s face, hate tearing up in his eyes as he tasted his own poisoned blood oozing from the dangling piece of tongue he’d bitten off. That froze him for the two seconds it took for Lucky to kick his heel through the man’s knee, feeling the ligaments give way like rotted rubber bands as he started to fall forward. Lucky grabbed him by his collar and twisted him so that he dove headlong into concrete and steel steps, spewing what looked like bloody kernels of corn from his mouth. Lucky swung a vicious kick with the steel-toed boot into the man’s ribs. The junkie mutt choked and started to vomit.

That good enough? Lucky roared inside his head, that enough fuckin’ chinky shit for you, hah? He wiped the slime off the Doc Martens, dragging his feet through the dirty slush as he left the scene, cursing as he went.

He could see flashing lights in the distance, too far away to tell if that meant cops, or emergency workers. At the corner, he changed direction. His Ecstasy-driven bravado was crashing.

He considered his options as the rotating lights got closer, and grudgingly turned back toward the Bayard Street condo.

It was Koo Jai, he thought, who was the lucky one tonight.

Sin

Grass Sandal had chosen the location well. The new condominium high-rise, Tribeca West, had been one of the Red Circle’s Manhattan real-estate investments, another opportunity to sai chien, to wash its dirty money. The condo stood at the edge of Hudson Square, conveniently near the Holland Tunnel and the Westside Highway if a need to escape the city arose. Since the building was only half occupied, Gee Sin’s movements would arouse little attention. He poured himself a tumbler of XO brandy and stepped out on to the dark balcony, thinking that the colorful lights across the river reminded him of Hong Kong. The Red Circle’s plans were in place, and besides the fleet of buses, other arrangements had already been set in motion.

The wind whipped up suddenly, and he went back inside, put the tumbler down. He looked around and was pleased: simple furnishings, all rented, so the triad would not be stuck, money tied up in idle property. The condo unit could be cleared on short notice and made available for sale.

All the Red Circle’s investments in Manhattan properties had been successful, and real-estate prices continued to rise.

Gee Sin went to the walk-in closet and tapped in the code numbers to the wall safe hidden there. From the safe he extracted stacks of plastic cards, then proceeded to the living room. In that quiet space, under the flood of light from a solitary overhead pendant lamp, he squared up the decks of plastic on the black-stone slab surface that separated the dining from the living areas. He dealt the cards out with his left hand, the blank plastic flashing smoothly between thumb and trigger finger, sliding out from the flick of the wrist.

Nine piles of eleven cards each. He shuffled them into neat stacks, three across, three down.

The black Visa card blanks, across the top. Black, the color of night, the shade of secrecy, the black of the hak se wui, secret societies.

The gold American Express cards. Wong, yellow, in the middle of everything.

And the Platinum MasterCard blanks.

Gold and silver, very much favored by the Chinese.

He took another swallow from the glass of brandy, caught his breath, and closed his eyes. They had learned quickly from past operations. Instead of selling the cards to amateurs who would get caught and call attention to the operators, he’d decided to use selected Chinese people in order to impose control and improve communication. The idea of using storage locations and closed warehouses was his way of gaining mobility and volume for the operators.