Riding the Snake (1998) (23 page)

"That's an untraceable handgun. I was so hard by then, if that ugly Gomer had tried anything, I woulda gauged him on the spot and never thought twice about it. Then, my baby sister died in a drive-by and mosta my friends got sent upstate. That was my childhood, Wheeler. Dead babies in pigtails. Friends boxed up in jail or coffins, and the strange thing was it seemed perfectly normal to me. So don't tell me about the prison you were in in Beverly Hills. I don't wanna hear it." When she finished, the anger in her voice hung there, distorting the atmosphere like cheap perfume. What about him made her so edgy? she wondered. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to get angry. It's not you. It's me," she finally added.

Again, nothing to say. Waiters cleared the plates and time took the tension. After the busboys left, she went on, her voice softer now.

"When my mother died, I was at the mortuary," she said. "I was there to pick out a box for her, and I was in that room they have upstairs, where they have all the different coffins on display. I looked out the window and I saw this Beemer blow into the parking lot full of T
. G. S
. Not one of them was old enough to drive. I figured the car was probably a Valley hot-roller, but I was upset about my mother and I decided to let it slide. A few minutes later, these little boys are up in the same room with me. They're baggin', saggin', and braggin', struttin' around with their hats on backward. I thought they were trying to pick a coffin for a dead friend. Then I heard one say, 'Hey, J-Dog, this here be one top-rank box fer you t'possy out in/ It took me a minute before I realized those babies were in there to pick out their own coffins. They had so little belief in their futures that at age fifteen they came there with their drug money to pre-buy their own funerals, and they were right. Those little boys were all in the diamond lane to Forest Lawn, and there was nothing anybody could do about it.

"After my sister died, I made a promise to do something to help them. You wanted to know why I joined the police--I wanted to try and slow the carnage, but it was a stupid goal. The system doesn't want it, from liberal politicians with their welfare handouts that enslave us, to the conservatives who won't ban the guns that kill us. And we don't help either. The little T
. G. S
are being raised with such violent disregard for each other that their premature end is unstoppable." She looked down at her hands. "I haven't even come close to changing anything. And now I'm over here with you, on the other side of the world. I feel like a traitor to myself and to them. I think I'm just running away from my failures." She looked up at him. "I'm not judging you, Wheeler. I'm judging me. I don't like what I see. I think I need to go home."

They sat in the gathering darkness of the huge dining room as the sun finally set. Somebody turned on the chandeliers and adjusted them down until the Wedgwood china glittered gold. Wheeler signed the check, then looked up at her.

"I'm sorry," he said. "You're right. My problems growing up were nothing like that. But at least you had something to go after-- to strive for. My silly, goddamn curse was I already had everything. Nothing seemed worth the effort. I had no reason to exist, so I played golf, fucked around, and got drunk. I'd have been much better off someplace else."

To be polite, she nodded, but didn't understand. He had money, and no matter what they always said, she knew that if money couldn't buy happiness, it could at least buy change. What on earth was he saying? If she'd had money, they wouldn't have been stuck south of Crenshaw. They'd have lived someplace else. Her sister would still be alive. She wouldn't have to carry the burden of the two dead G-sters. Wouldn't have to wake up in the night, still seeing the disbelief in their eyes as she ended their zigzag existence in the back of that market. She could still feel their flesh separating at the end of her blade. What on earth was he talking about? Money would have changed it all. The cultural gap between them was cavernous. They couldn't have been more different if they'd lived in separate centuries. About all they had in common was their age and a knowledge of the L
. A
. freeways. It wasn't his fault. He hadn't made the choice, but she hadn't either.

"Don't go home, Tanisha," he said unexpectedly, his voice a whisper. "This is my first try at something important. This is the first thing I've wanted bad enough to give up everything for. I've got to find out what happened to Prescott. I don't know the right questions to ask. Without you, I'll fuck this up. Without you, I'll fail."

Chapter
20.

Constables

After breakfast the next morning in the coffee shop of The Pen, Tanisha and Wheeler spent an hour shopping in the huge underground mall next to the hotel. Tanisha picked out a change of clothes, deciding on a tapered pair of slacks and a silk blouse made in China. Wheeler found The Gap and bought jeans, a black polo shirt, and tennis shoes. They both stocked up on cosmetics. They packed their old clothes in a canvas duffel bag they found in a luggage shop that carried everything from llama
-
skin purses to rhino briefcases, all made in Communist China. The mall went down four stories underground and covered four city blocks, and it was already teeming with customers at nine in the morning.

They cabbed over to the address Julian had given them in Wan Chai and stood outside the police station for a minute, inspecting it.

"Looks like a prison," Wheeler observed skeptically. It was an extremely ugly and foreboding gray-brick seven-story building with lots of tiny windows, many secured with iron bars. The building and courtyard out front were surrounded by a high brick wall, festooned along the top with long steel spikes that curved inward, toward the courtyard, like deadly skeletal fingers. The effect was impressive, but unfriendly.

They walked through the wrought-iron gates and up a steep set of stairs into an equally foreboding gray interior.

"Fun place," Wheeler grinned nervously as they moved into the lobby, which had a narrow waist-high shelf on one wall that held a slew of shooting trophies won by Hong Kong's finest. Above the shelf, on chipped gray walls, were recognition plaques for marksmanship and police service. Other than these two minor concessions to decorating, the lobby was just a big, gray rectangle with a high ceiling, turning paddle fans, and a yellowing linoleum floor. Like cop shops all over the world, it smelled of mildew and disinfectant. Even at ten A
. M
., the place was surprisingly empty. Wheeler and Tanisha moved over to a Constable's desk and smiled at the young Chinese Sergeant, dressed in a crisp olive-green uniform with a Sam Browne belt. His badge shone brand-new. The police badges had been redesigned after the hand-over of the Colony on July 1. The old badge had a delicate relief that pictured a trading junk with Hong Kong towers in the background. This new one showed a bauhinia flower, the Chinese symbol for the Special Autonomous Region (S
. A. R
.), which Hong Kong was now designated.

"How may I help?" the Chinese Constable said in cultured English, looking and sounding as if he didn't intend to.

"We're here to see Inspectors Julian Winslow and Johnny Kwong," Wheeler said. "I'm Wheeler Cassidy and this is Los Angeles Police Detective Tanisha Williams."

Tanisha opened her purse and took out her LAPD badge and laid it on the counter before him. The Constable picked it up and looked at it carefully, studying it with furrowed brow before handing it back and picking up a phone. He spoke quietly in Chinese for a minute and then hung up.

"I'll buzz you through. It's the third door on the right. Take the lift to six. He'll meet you there." His English was perfect but without a trace of warmth.

"Thank you. You've been most kind," Tanisha said coldly.

They walked to the indicated door. He buzzed the electric lock and they passed into another gray corridor with a linoleum floor and walked under harsh fluorescent lighting to the end of the hall. They punched the elevator button, and when one door opened, they entered and rode up to the sixth floor.

"Pleasant fellow," Wheeler said sarcastically, as the old elevator lurched upward.

"Asshole," she corrected.

The doors opened and they were looking at a man who was shaped like a medicine ball in pleated pants. He was short, jolly, plump, and bald, with a handlebar mustache that overpowered his round face. He wore a patterned tie over a striped Savile Row shirt with black suspenders. He smiled at them through tobacco-stained teeth as they stepped off the elevator. "I'm Julian Winslow. Welcome to the People's Police Building," he said and shook their hands. His handshake was firm, warm, and strenuous. "And you must be my colleague from the LAPD," he grinned at Tanisha.

"Yes sir," she said, smiling. It was hard not to like him on the spot. He was impishly friendly.

"Good-oh. Well, let's be off then. Johnny was out to court this morning. Had a rounder in the docket. Bloody heroin dealer. Lots more of that now that we're part of China . . . opium dens and the lot. Just get my jacket. Come along."

They followed him down another narrow hall and finally he turned into a tiny office not much larger than a prison cell, with two desks and four chairs crammed inside. Julian's tweed jacket was over one of the chairs, and he snapped it off. "Sort of a dungeon, but we just got a brand-new complement of coppers from Beijing, so we're at full stretch around here. Johnny Kwong will touch up with us at the Police Museum on Coombe Road. Dour sort of place, really. No windows, ghastly criminal relics all about in tiny little rooms. It's got some of the strangest photos you've ever seen. My favorite is a before-and-after of a mass execution in 1880 ... all these pirates lined up on their knees in the courtyard in one shot, right next is a shot where the bloody pikers are still kneeling but their pig-tailed heads are on the ground in front of them. Photo was published in the Crown newspaper back then to set the blighters straight. 'Don't muck around with the Queen, what?' " he chuckled.

They left the small office and were moving toward a private elevator in the rear of the building. All of the offices they passed were just as tiny as Julian's and crowded with Police Inspectors-- most were Chinese nationals, but there were a few "round eyes" mixed in. Julian pushed the elevator button.

While they waited, Wheeler said, "We need to find out as much as we can about Wo Lap Ling."

"Not here, laddie. This ruddy pile a' bricks has more spies than the Turkish Embassy. Let's wait till we're with Johnny; saves telling it twice."

The elevator arrived. An old, scarred, American-made Otis eight-man. They got in. It rattled and shook, but took them down to the street entrance. They moved into the police parking lot and got into Julian's unmarked police car, a two-door English Ford Popular. He pulled his gun and clip-on holster out of the glove box and pushed it onto his belt. "My new People's Police ordnance .. . piece a' Russian junk. I used t'have a keen nine-millimeter Beretta. The new Chinese Superintendent issued us all these Bic disposable gats. Bloody seven-point-six-five-millimeter auto-fires. Jam like Chinese sewing machines. Eject port, throws the brass back at you. Put your bloody eye out, you're not careful." He put the economy
-
sized English Ford in gear and pulled out.

They drove the short distance to the museum in Wan Chi and pulled up in front of a small block building surrounded by a children's park. There was another car in the lot. As Julian got out, he nodded at it. "Johnny's," he explained as he closed the Ford's doors and locked them. "One thing you should know about Johnny Kwong," Julian said, turning to look at them. "A few years back, he was working the I
. C. A. C
.--that was our Independent Commission Against Corruption. They were trying to purge the Police Department of Triad members on the force. Johnny had made a good connection and was lining up on the most powerful Shan Chu, their supreme leader, of the 14K Triad. The blighter got word Johnny was after him and set fire to his block of flats, burned the whole bloody apartment building. Poor Johnny got it pretty bad. When he arrived unconscious at Extreme Casualty, he was charred to a cinder and nobody recognized him, so his police insurance didn't cover him. Nobody was gonna pay for skin grafts on some unknown Chinese. They moved him to Cinderella Services, which is like your charity wards in the States. He was completely out of it, delirious for almost two weeks. I finally got onto it, got a dental match, and pulled him out of there, then paid to get him a private room, but by then it was too late for a graft, so the poor lad is a bit of a mess. Looks like he's been dragged through a hedge backwards."

"We won't stare, if that's what you're saying," Tanisha said.

They started walking up the path toward the museum.

"Underneath all that scar tissue is a great copper," Julian continued. "He's a department hero. Awarded the George Cross and the C
. B. E
. That's the Commander of the Order of the British Empire--it's for extreme gallantry. He got assigned to the Special Investigations Unit of the Serious Crimes Group. Only the best of the best get that. Yours truly is still out doin' street busts on weenie-waggers in Chan Chow. So there you have it." He led the way past the children's park, and they climbed the steep flight of stairs and entered the windowless building.

As promised, the Police Museum was completely deserted and the walls of the rooms were full of old photographs. Glass cabinets with artifacts from old cases stood on the hardwood floors. They found Johnny Kwong in the Narcotics Room. He was bent over a glass case, looking at a beautifully carved ancient opium pipe, a priceless work of art. When he turned, it was hard not to gasp. Johnny's features had been completely burned off. His nose was gone, his lips were shriveled yellow lines. His ears were nubby protrusions on each side of his scarred, bald head. He smiled at them and put out a disfigured hand that had only two fingers left. The rest had been sacrificed to the flames. He shook with Wheeler and Tanisha as they were introduced by Julian.