The old doctor comes up next to her and stops moving, looks Loke over from boots to skull, then looks past him to this teen death squad overloaded with imported weapons, a few probably juiced on a quick premassacre crack-smoke, some seeing the legendary Dr. Cheng for the first time.
They look back on him with neither reverence nor contempt, but something like bewilderment. This is the man their uncles and grandfathers spoke of? This little toad is the man they spoke of, in whispers, at the markets and during the domino games? This man, in the ridiculous old robe, the hands and face so lined and wrinkled, the feet in slippers, for Christ’s sake?
And for the first time, Hannah can’t believe it either. And in that instant it becomes clear to her — the absence of any defense, the absence of that small army of loyal shooters ready to sacrifice their own lives and rip up the entire Park before letting any harm come to the doctor, the absence of a presumptive hit on Chak when he missed the monthly summit. At some point, she knows now, the doctor looked in a mirror and saw what the Hyenas are seeing now — a small, very old, very tired man who’s been condemned to a rare and awful fate: Dr. Cheng has outlasted his era.
And Hannah is suddenly overwhelmed with the weight of the old man’s self-knowledge. It’s a heinous destiny — to outlive your relevance to the environment, to overstay your welcome in the life of your street.
It’s as if a raging flu virus has infiltrated her body in a passing second. Her stomach goes and her joints seem to swell and her knees and neck weaken and she’s engulfed with a spasm of nausea and dizziness, as if she only now understood that this scene, this event, was happening around her. A moment ago it was a movie or a math problem, all instant calculation and clockwork deduction, the summing-up of distances and the assessment of firepower and the varying rates of probable speed. Now she understands why Cheng is walking into the mouth of the dragon. Now she remembers that she has never been a citizen of either the Park or the city proper, but a woman always in orbit, an eternal exile chronically passing through.
A run of bile starts to rise up in her throat and she gulps air and forces it back down. She stares at Loke and feels Cheng’s hand on her arm, actually pushing her away, trying to shove her off the site.
A horrible smile spreads on Loke’s face and then there’s Cheng’s voice near her ear, repeating in a softer croak, “Go now, daughter.”
And she decides to pull the.38. To blow that miserable fucking smile off Loke’s face. In that instant, it’s worth her life to plant a bullet in the center of his mouth, to explode the lips into minute scraps of pulp, to shatter the teeth into calcium dust, tear the pathetic tongue free, sever tonsils, rupture infinite capillaries, dynamite an exit crater through the rear of the skull that will obliterate forever that smug, ego-soaked, self-satisfied grin.
But as her arm begins to move, the street erupts with the sounds of shrieking tires and crack-stoked war cries and the pop and bang of an incoming blitz, a ground-level strafing, cruising in from the south. And suddenly the Hyenas are bailing off their cars, leaping to the ground, scrambling for new positions, screaming the whole time in Khmer and releasing their own barrage of gunfire.
Hannah butts Dr. Cheng to the ground, rolls and draws the backup gun, and faces the oncoming assault. It’s a platoon of Granada Street Popes barreling down Verlin Ave in candy-apple red Jeeps and wide-body fat-wheel pickups and a single beat and blown-out low-rider Chevy, all of them loaded with every gaudy option they can steal. And the Popes are pumped for blood and mayhem. This isn’t a hit-and-run drive-by. There are too many of them. Hannah spots six vehicles, each with a driver and three shooters in the bed. They’re here for elimination. They’re here for a last gamble on exterminating the Hyenas.
It’s a genocide carnival. The Popes sling their vehicles into a V-shaped wedge, then roll out to the ground on the far side, a flashy bunker to shoot from. It’s clear this isn’t a spur-of-the- moment offensive. Their moves seem integrated. There’s no suicide charge and no friendly fire. They’ve been trained and outfitted by the new mayor of the Latinos. Iguaran.
The Hyenas were ready to waste a ninety-year-old herbalist, not fight a do-or-die campaign. All they’ve got now is adrenaline jolt and the fact that Little Asia is home field. It’s not enough. The Popes begin lobbing smoke grenades and one lands in the Corvette and as a gray fog gets into the air, a long run of syncopated assault fire tears across the Hyenas’ front.
Hannah rolls back on her stomach, does an awkward lifeguard’s grab around Cheng’s chest, and drags him inside the doorway of the Herbarium. The old man is choking on smoke, but he seems unharmed. Hannah comes up into a sitting position and looks out the shattered storefront window. Through the smoke she can see that the three kids in the Firebird have bought it — their bodies pushed onto their backs by the barrage, their weapons useless on top of them. One kid’s hand is blown off.
The rest of Loke’s soldiers are trying to hold the line, returning blasts that pock the sides of the Jeep wall, but do nothing to reduce or even contain the enemy fire. They jump up from behind their cars in random spurts like pinballs popped from an electrified cup. They’re screaming the whole time, seemingly at some unseen force above them in the air. Their heads do a stutter-shake as they scream and fire. Their unified howl is both furious and horrified. More than anything else, they seem to be yelling for help or instruction, their heads whiplashing toward Loke and back to the fire line, as if their high-pitched, terror-clogged yelps in Khmer translated to do something, save me.
Hannah grabs the front of Cheng’s gown and pulls him close to her face.
“My car’s around the corner. At the head of the alley. We can make it out.”
She knows she’ll need the doctor’s cooperation. They won’t get two feet out the door if he balks or squirms in any way. But the old man seems beyond assent or objection. Hannah’s not even sure he’s following her words. He seems to be looking past her, out at the smoky fireworks in the street, like he was trying to memorize, permanently implant, the shrieks and roars of agony and panic and disbelief that make it around the muzzle blast and now, suddenly, the blast of music from what must be the Popes’ car stereos. They’ve got their stereos synchronized to a single station or tape. And Hannah understands at once that they’re mind-fucking the Hyenas, showing their Cambodian victims that this is more a party than a war, a badass blood dance to savor and celebrate.
The music is some kind of south-of-the-border post-salsa tune, all spliced up with machine-gun percussion machines and weird jungle-bird sounds that mutate into screeching, Gillespieish, bebop horns. Almost Tito Puente, but crossed by John Cage. It’s like a new-world, multiethnic cacophony. Tribal, but juiced with electricity. And it’s absolutely appropriate as the sound track to this bloodbath. The Popes are tearing into the Trans Am brigade, almost as if they don’t want to kill the poor bastards just yet but make them linger on the border of death, anticipating each bullet that infiltrates the hull of the car and the asphalt around their feet.
Hannah reaches down and takes Cheng’s hand, brings it straight to her mouth, and bites into his flesh. The doctor screams with as much surprise as pain, jerks the hand away, and Hannah sees the trickle of blood rising up to the surface. Before the old man can recover his thoughts, she grabs him by the gown, locks his arm inside her own, pulls out her gun, and lunges out the doorway in a crouched run.