Metacarpus, phalanges. Broken fingers, both hands. Defensive wounds.

Fractured ulna, left forearm. Warding off the blows.

Fractured tibia, fibula, right side. A broken leg, dislocated kneecap. Kicked and hit going down.

Separated clavicle, the shoulder.

Three broken ribs on the left side. The bat.

An evidence photo of a Paul O’Neill Yankee Slugger, autographed model.

Shattered discs at the base of the spine, and higher, at the back of the neck. The bat, a swinging, killing club. Hitting home runs against Hong’s body flailing underneath the blanket.

The face has fourteen bones. In Hong’s face, twelve of these had been shattered. Mandible, palate, malar: jawbone, mouth, cheek. The black wood cracking through bone and gristle and teeth, crashing through nose and mouth.

A mutilated, destroyed face, then another photo showing a heavy metal Estwing, the claw hammer ripping out the nasus, the nose, the cartilage of septum, also the left eyeball (found in blanket). Facial structure crushed. Shattered occipital orbits, with skull fragments driven into the temporal areas. Displaced mastoid, and on and on, each notation consistent with a ball bat or hammer blow to the face.

Jack didn’t know if it was because of the side effects from the painkillers, but he felt sickened. He knew that this horror went on every day in this city, in America, in the world.

There were more than thirty incidences of blunt-force damage.

Jack took a breath, closed the report. In his head he was hearing grievous groaning and sobbing, the banshee wail welling up around the sad street of funeral parlors across from the playgrounds of his youth.

Death and Desperation

Koo Jai stepped away from Canal and went down Baxter, entering Chinatown the back way, through the park, and away from Mott Street where he’d risk running into Lefty. Or Kongo and the crazies crew. But he needed a sense of what was coming his way because he didn’t have what the dailo demanded. Fuck! That fuckin’ wristwatch and that stupid cunt were his downfall.

Coming around to Mulberry, in the distance, a funeral taking place. Fuck! He’d put together eight thousand, and of course the bunch of watches the dailo didn’t want. Fuck that, he wasn’t about to dump the Rolexes, Cartiers, and Rados, worth ten thousand at least, even if he was desperate. Fuck that. And none of the crew came up with any money, all full of excuses. They’d hoped to plead their case to the dailo, hoped that reason would prevail. Fuck them, too. He thought of Sai Go the bookie, whom he was now certain had complained to the dailo.

The funeral band started, warming up despite the cold day. Three brass trumpets and a trombone, and two drums, a snare and a bass. Pacing a slow walk to a sad dirge.

If he saw him at OTB, fuck Sai Go, too.

A few black-garbed relatives came outside to smoke cigarettes, the smell of incense billowing out behind them.

To avoid their bad karma following him, Koo Jai crossed away from the section of funeral parlors, and stayed to the park side, to where Worth led him around a bend to OTB, and later, back to East Broadway, anguishing, Right, where the fuck am I getting twelve thousand?

He thought momentarily of robbing the Fuk mahjong club but knew it would be heavily guarded during the holidays. fuckin’ hak, bad luck, he cursed. Black karma was following him.

* * *

Outside the Wah Fook funeral parlor, the drivers maneuvered their black Lincoln Town Cars for the day’s processions. Two trips in the morning, one in the afternoon. The Hong funeral, the smallest of the three, led off, a flower wagon trailing the dark hearse, ahead of four Lincolns and a minivan.

Earlier, the Fukien East Lions group had trekked down to the Alphabets and performed a lion dance in front of the New Chinatown takeout to drive away the evil spirits. One member set off a mat of firecrackers, the staccato blasts shooting forth bits of colored paper that settled on top of the frozen slush.

A squad car sat on the corner of Fifth Street, watching, but the uniforms refrained from citing the illegal fireworks ban.

At Alexandra’s suggestion, the Chinese Health Clinic had dispatched a team of Chinese-language grief counselors to the Hong home, an illegal basement rental in Sunset Park. The parents, who hadn’t slept in two days, were racked with grief, in stunned disbelief at their loss, their only son, their joy and their hope, the A-student who was going to be someone in Mai quo Fukienese America, gone, forever lost to brutal, senseless violence. Gone, their American dreams all gone. The murderers, hok-kwee black devils, teenagers too lazy or stupid to succeed in school, their brains dulled from drugs and alcohol, their hearts hardened by racism and hate, animal souls consumed by lust and violence.

The grief counselors were themselves stunned.

Sociopathic was a word not found in the Chinese language, an idea the parents could not comprehend. How could human beings have no regard for the evil they do? Unless, of course, they weren’t human beings but m’hai yun, a lower species of animal.

What could the grief counselors say? None of it made any sense.

In China, a criminal who committed murder would have received a Beijing haircut, a single nine-millimeter bullet to the head, followed by government’s bill to the executed person’s family for the price of the bullet.

In China, Jack knew, cops were liberal in their application of the law, justice there more pragmatic: do the crime, and you were executed. Simple as that, in a country with a billion people. There was no death row. There was no twenty years of appeals. China was six thousand years of civilization. They knew what worked. And they didn’t play.

He watched the funeral gathering from a distance, near the ball fields of his childhood.

The neighboring businesses on the street, from the undertaker at one end to the headstone cutter at the other, were all moved by the tragic death, and had contributed to the funeral, according to the Chinese press.

The Chin brothers’ Kingdom Caskets Inc. donated the simple bronze-colored coffin, a no-frills metal-veneer box.

Peaceful Florist discounted the floral wreaths, and the family’s village association paid for the funeral and the plot.

Several radio-car drivers had offered to drive the family for free to the cemetery in Brooklyn and back to Chinatown.

On the park side, a group of Buddhist monks from the Temple of Noble Truths concluded their prayer service and planted sticks of incense in the iron urn by the curb.

A group of Puerto Rican schoolgirls passed by and cracked jokes, goofing on the bald heads and saffron robes of the monks. Chino Viejo! Oh snap, like kong foo, their giggling cutting through the dirge.

Inside the Wah Fook parlor the air was thick, heavy with the pungent cloud of jasmine incense that cloaked the room. The overhead lights were dimmed to set off the glow of candles softly illuminating the gathering of grieving, sobbing faces.

A small gathering, barely twenty people.

Out by the main doorway, the reporters and photographers waited at a respectful distance. Jack walked by them and made his way to the incense urn, paying his respects by planting three sticks of incense and bowing. Stepping to the casket, he bowed again, turned, and came to offer condolences to the family before returning to the main door.

The reporters made notes in their pads, a sad end to another violent New York City story.

Another dead Chinese deliveryman.

There is enough anger here, Jack felt, in this small room. But where was the greater rage out there in the community? Would the Fukienese demonstrate again? Or would the old-guard Chinatown Cantonese make a statement?