“Aaahite!! He screamed. “Aaaahiite!!”
Jack put a fresh tape into the recorder.
“Tell it.” He thrust the machine forward.
Takeout
“When the delivery came Jamal said, ‘Run the cash, ching chong.’ Then the Chinese kid went into his pocket and Jamal hit him in the back with the hammer. The kid threw the money to the floor. He started yelling and crying, trying to git away. Then Tyrone stabbed him and Jamal tossed a blanket over him, still beating him with the hammer. Tyrone kept stabbing into the blanket ’cause he kept moving, kicking his legs. Then Jamal grabbed the bat and hit him real hard on top and he went down. Jamal, mo times wit da bat. The kid was still crying but not so loud anymore. Tyrone finished him off with the hammer, ’til he didn’t move no more.”
DaShawn took a breath, was quiet a long moment. “I thought we wuz jes gonna rob him,” he said. “I know Jamal wanted money for sneakers, but I didn’t know Tyrone and him wuz gonna kill the guy. Swear to God, yo.”
Jack leaned back and caught the rest of DaShawn’s version.
“After, Jamal got mad. He was bitchin like ‘Damn. Chinee muthafucka only had fitty-one dollas.’ Tyrone was laughing, saying, ‘Shit, Nigga. No Air Jordons fo yo nigga ass!’ Jamal started cursing ‘Ah’ma have ta git two mo dese chinkees fo enough paper, yo.’ Tyrone said ‘So call in another takeout, nigga,’ but Jamal slapped him, said, ‘Everyone is closed now, fool.’ Then he was yelling, ‘Come on, clean dis shit up! Move dis ching-chong mofukka outta here before five-o comes down.’ Tyrone saying ‘Lookit all the blood. Red, too.’ He thought Chinee blood was yellow. They was laughing.”
Jack felt his hatred rise. They were all laughing, a hysterical joke, even as they wrapped the body, sponged up the blood. He stopped the tape recorder, made DaShawn scribble a statement implicating the other two.
“It was dem who done it. Tyrone and Jamal, they killd the Chinee kid.”
Jack took the signed statement and the tape, left the room, and went back to the detective’s area. Pasini waited there, grinning like he was impressed.
Jack reloaded the rap tape, readied the photographs. He gave Pasini a nod and headed for the holding cell where Tyrone was waiting to turn on his pals.
The Medical Examiner’s report had been delivered by one of the uniforms, who’d placed it in the wire basket on the detective’s table. It had Pasini’s name on it but Jack opened it anyway, took a long hard look.
Grisly morgue pictures of the teenager Hong’s body. Seen at different angles the body had thirteen stab wounds, from a knife blade eight inches in length, front and back, torso, stomach, shoulder, back, and arms, just everywhere. Some of the thrusts pierced his stomach and exited out of his lower back.
One stab had pierced his heart.
Six additional wounds to the head and shoulders, round quarter-size indentations about a half-inch deep. Blunt force impressions. One of the gangstas had swung the hammer like he was doing demolition work.
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.