“Yeah? How’s that?”
“Between you and me, I didn’t like working with the Sarge.”
“Donahoe?”
“Yeah. Big ‘Irish Don.’ ”
“What happened?”
“I overheard him talking to another sarge, saying how the Chinamen cops were no better than the skirts.”
Jack knew that meant female officers.
“He said we’re short, and skinny,” continued Wong, “and he didn’t feel he could depend on us in a chase, or a firefight.” Wong shook his head disdainfully, continuing, “This coming from a guy who’s almost three hundred pounds and couldn’t chase a wheelchair down the street without catching a cardiac.”
“That’s messed up.”
“No doubt.”
“Look, forget that stuff,” Jack said, “You’ll get with other cops, good cops, along the way.”
“Yeah, right,” Wong said cynically.
They split up at the corner, heading in different directions. Jack, who had the longer trek, went toward the Riis Houses, four long blocks east, then another four or five depending on how the numbers ran. Nine to ten blocks, a half mile, under the falling snow, and into the river wind.
Watch and Wait
Lucky glanced up at the night sky.
The snow was sticking, blanketing the streets beneath the street lamps.
He’d met Skinny Chin coming out of the see-gay radio car from LaGuardia, in front of Lee Watch on Orchard, and they’d gone straight to his office safe. Skinny had pulled out the shipping invoices for the watches and copied them on his run-down China-made combo phone/fax/copier.
Lucky kept more than an arm’s length from Skinny, watching him as he reached inside his jacket like he was pulling a gun, but he only came up with a lighter and a cigarette.
The copier chugged out some copies and Skinny handed them to Lucky.
“So you found the shit?” he asked bluntly.
What am I, a fuckin’ detective? Lucky remembered thinking. “No,” he answered coolly, “the boys noticed a few Fuk bitches wearing Movado and Rado. They wanted to be sure before snatching them.”
“When did your kei dai punks ever need to be sure about anything they rip off?”
Lucky narrowed his eyes at him, saying, “There’s a fuckin’ truce on. You wanna start up some shit with the old men?”
“Hey, fuck that,” groused Skinny. “Just let me know if you find anything.”
Lucky nodded into Skinny’s smoky exhalation, thinking how easy it would be to wash him, make him fuckin’ disappear, if he didn’t watch his words and his tone. As Skinny walked away, Lucky scanned the invoices, seeing several long columns of bar codes and serial numbers under the brand names. What am I, a fuckin’ detective? he thought again, smirking.
He folded the papers and headed back to his condo. The black-faced Rado was in his safe, and he wondered if Koo Jai’s number was about to come up.
Revelations
At his window six floors above the Bowery, Lucky held up the back of the black wrist watch to the light, looked for the last digits as he snubbed out the roach of Jamaican Gold into a teacup. He compared the digits to the ones on Skinny’s list, blowing reefer fumes as he found what he was looking for.
He took a breath, checking the watch a second time for the full run of numbers, and matched up the eight digits. No doubt.
Fuckin’ scumbag, thought Lucky, but grudgingly he had to give the kid credit: he’d underestimated him. Showed balls, motivation, making money out there in no-man’s-land, banging around against the Fukienese hard boys whose dialect they couldn’t even understand.
The matching digits also showed what a sneaky, daring motherfucker Koo Jai really was, pulling the rip-offs and keeping the swag.
Fuck the dailo, right?
Four guys pulling jobs? Why not? If they’d planned it right, in and out quick. Blame it on the Fuks anyway.
Watch your back. He heard the thought crashing forward from the back of his brain. Play it off. Come down with fire on Koo Jai now and the Ghosts could lose East Broadway altogether. Play it cool and he’d get his piece, keep it all for himself this time, save the payback for later. The rasta pot had mellowed him and from the haze he saw how he was going to deal with Pretty Boy cool Koo Jai. He’d gas him that he’d showed chutzpah, but that his crew still had to come up with twenty gees, because that piece was due the senior crews. Then everything would be settled, brothers again.
Oh, by the way, that includes the thousand I paid to your bookie. See how I’m covering your ass?
Deliver U$ from Evil
The falling flakes had made it all seem dreamlike. He tugged down his hoodie as he rode.
The first delivery was easy, thought Hong, practically around the corner from the takeout. A pretty blonde girl in a red sweater was waiting inside the street door of Number 129 when he rode up. She came out, gave him thirty dollars, told him “Keep the change and Merry Christmas” as he passed her the steaming plastic bag.
He never even got off the bike.
Looking east, he blew some snowflakes off his lips, and put his head down into the wind, his teenage heart shining inside with thoughts of Christmas, full of love glowing like a neon sign in the night. It wasn’t like the city was shut down, he thought. Messy was more like it. He rode the beat-up bike through the slush, through the ruts and furrows in the snow plowed by people’s feet stepping quick to get home for Christmas Eve. The ride was a slog, bumpy, but there were few people on the streets and he felt he was making good time, even with the flurries flying in his face.
He glanced back at the bags of food, still secured on the rear carrier, then took a few quick deep breaths, exhaling bursts of steam.
He dug his China-made knock-off Timberlands into the pedals, pushing and leaning forward, rolling toward the soft lights and shadows of the projects in the distance. As he rode, he felt the quiet anxiety that lurked in the back of his brain, concern for his own safety. But at least the rickety bike was holding its own. He remembered past trips there when neighborhood kids accosted him as he pedaled away after a delivery, calling after him “Ching chong chinky chinky,” and yelling kung fu screams. But he also remembered the nice fat black lady who gave him a five-dollar tip after he delivered a large shopping bag of takeout for a party she was hosting. He could not remember which projects building that was, except that it numbered in the four hundreds.
He calmed himself by remembering that in the holiday season, people tended to be more generous with their tips, especially on cold, snowy nights. He thought about meeting up with his high-school friends later, and gradually made the right turn onto the long dim stretch of Avenue D, into the forbidding shadows of the Jacob Riis projects.
He passed several buildings, rolling beneath the naked branches of the tall trees twenty and thirty feet high, a skeletal canopy of limbs waving in the air above the lampposts, whipping shadows everywhere in the courtyard. He passed a raised platform of playground apparatus, realized that what he’d imagined were bodies huddled together were actually piles of black garbage bags somebody had hoisted there. A few more quick breaths.
On a hunch, he turned left, into a smaller courtyard hemmed-in by the high-rises, straining his eyes in the dim light looking for the numbers on the buildings. Following the curving line of lampposts that brought him around to brighter yellow glare, he began to decipher the numbers.