Bookie man. He felt his essence shrinking, becoming like a teng jai, sampan, in a dark tossing ocean.
In the beginning, he had felt that it wasn’t a crime. He was just making a living, taking bets. Allowing the Chinese hindaai, brothers, to chase their dreams. Chinese were superstitious and loved to gamble. Who was the victim in that? The families or the associations usually resolved any problems that arose.
Now, after a dozen years, crushed by this fatal sickness, he finally saw it for what it was.
An underground life full of careless sins, chasing the dragon of good fortune. The dragon was devouring him from inside now. All part of the same evil. He was part of the trail of dirty money that travels in a circle. Money from gambling that makes its way to the pockets of gangsters. Money that translates into bak fun, white powder, and guns. Money that finances the smugglers of human cargo, feeding into slavery, prostitution. Becoming money again in the banks, the vicious cycle turning without end.
Fresh Money
Lucky left Kongo and Lefty by the front door of Number Seventeen’s basement to cover the mid-afternoon delivery of that evening’s bank; a brown envelope containing the usual denominations of dead presidents and statesmen: Hamiltons, Jacksons, Grants, and Franklins. The On Yee house manager and the courier walked past Lucky and disappeared into a back office.
Maybe it was because the new year and the new stable of whores at Angelina’s had put him in a generous mood, but Lucky had had a change of heart; he was going to play wayward Koo Jai another way.
Copping a plea on the phone, Koo had told him he’d raised nine thousand cash, but he’d admitted he had only the remaining watches to make up the balance, although he claimed their value would be greater than the twenty K the dailo demanded.
Lucky had already figured he would take the cash for himself; he would let Lefty fence the remaining watches through his cousin’s shop in Toronto. Kongo would mule the watches north. They would split the proceeds.
He heard Lefty laugh as he and Kongo popped Ecstasy pills.
Lucky had answered Koo, “Okay, bring the shit. And bring the boyz, too. Let’s have a sit-down.” He wanted to keep them away from the heart of Chinatown to cut down the chances of the other crews noticing them.
“OTB,” he said, “At four-thirty o’clock tomorrow. And don’t fuckin’ make me wait.”
Legal End
Jack spent days following the arrests of the Hong boy’s killers at Hogan Place with the assistant district attorneys, starting the numbing grind that was due process.
At week’s end, Jack returned to Cabrini where they removed his stitches. There were two small scars on the left side of his chest, in the fleshy tissue slightly above but flanking the nipple. The little.22 bullet had passed through. Further down were the puncture scars on his left forearm, rounded indentations where the pit bull’s sharp teeth had clamped on. Fuckin’ mad dog.
Pasini called, reminding him of his appointment with the department shrink. Standard procedure after suffering serious wounds in the line of duty. No, dying in some stinking hallway in the ghetto housing projects was not how he saw himself finishing out the job. The arm was one thing, but the chest wound above the heart was a warning, somehow. Yet any doubts he nursed made him less a cop, and he wasn’t looking for a disability deal.
Afterward, after trudging through the thickening snow, he’d met Alexandra at Tsunami, halfway between her Loi-saida storefront and the NoHo precinct house. They drank sake and Sapporo, picked from the sushi and sashimi on the little wooden boats that passed by on the mini-conveyor belt that ran the length of the bar.
“It’s in the hands of the prosecutors,” Jack said, “The punks basically turned on each other and implicated one another.”
Alex broke out cigarettes and they lit up together, their conversation bracketed by puffs.
“We got oral and written statements,” Jack continued, after touching glasses with Alex in a silent toast. “DNA matchups on all three,” Alex smiled sadly. “The murder weapons. Prints all over.” He was quiet a moment, his stare going long distance as he said, “The victim. . he put up a helluva fight. Wasn’t enough. But he left sufficient evidence to hang them all.”
Alex put her hand over his, her eyes misting. She tapped her glass against his again, brought him back into the moment.
“What does your friend at Legal Aid think?” Jack asked.
“Defense,” she exhaled. “They may contend the original entry and search was illegal. No cause.”
He’d been following up a missing person. . there had been the smell of marijuana at the door.
“Or they may request a change in venue. Say they can’t get a fair trial in Manhattan, because there are too many Chinese, Asians, in the jury pool. They may want a Bronx jury, or one from Brooklyn. A judge of color, who’s sensitive to minority defendants.”
Technicalities and racial politics hacking into the case. .
“They can delay, file appeals, assert medical claims, demand more evidence.”
“This is going to take a while,” Jack said, finishing his sake.
“I get it.”
They shared the last of the big Sapporo over sunomono and seaweed salad.
Outside, the wind gusted up and rattled the big picture windows.
Jack paid the tab and they tapped glasses at the last swallow, with Alex saying “Happy New Year. To 1995.”
“Yeah, Happy New Year,” Jack answered with a forced smile.
They drained their glasses.
They caught a cab, and he dropped her off at Confucius Towers before going on to Sunset Park. They had traded cheek kisses and awkward looks afterward, finally shaking hands before she tiptoed through the snow and faded into the lobby of the high-rise.
Crossing the Manhattan Bridge to Brooklyn, Jack remembered the dead delivery boy. It didn’t feel like 1995 was going to be a happy new year.
Storm
The blizzard roared in overnight, an arctic juggernaut that blasted in from the northeast. Fifty mile gusts toppled tall trees onto rooftops and cars, ripping down power lines in the darkness. Half of Long Island and Staten Island were blacked out.
NYC Transit rolled out two thousand snow plows, hundreds of salt spreaders. Sanitation pressed its two thousand men into twelve-hour shifts against the blowing two-foot drifts.
The outer boroughs were flogged by the swirling whiteout.
The airports were snowbound, hundreds of flights cancelled, with thousands of travelers stranded at Kennedy, LaGuardia, and Newark.
Commuter transit from New Jersey and Conneticut came to a blinding halt.
The sub-zero overnight staggered to daylight, fifteen degrees. Wind-chill real feel was four degrees. The shrieking wind drove the thick flakes sideways. To augment Sanitation’s efforts, the city hired neighborhood kids to shovel the main streets. Still, the blizzard locked down the city: schools and businesses closed, disabled and abandoned vehicles made highways, bridges, and tunnels impassable. Frozen signals and switches crippled the subways and metropolitan railroads.
In Manhattan, coastal flooding closed the Westside Highway and the FDR Drive.
A broken water main on Delancey flooded the avenue and side streets, forming a half-mile slick of ice that further choked southbound traffic. In the Chinatown morning, shopkeepers chopped at the ice and shoveled pathways down the slippery streets, forming walls of slush-capped snow along the curb. Every so often a gap, a cutout in the wall, allowed for passage to the other side of the street. Fire hydrants were cleared; the Chinese were pragmatic to a fault.