Riding the Snake (1998) (35 page)

The South Division Station was heavily guarded. There were parking lot details that worked a constant beat; there were also police marksmen on the roof. The division was in the worst crime area in the city and the station had been bombed more than once, so it was protected like a fortress. The parking lot guards, armed with M-16s, looked up in surprise as the red Jag screamed down Broadway toward them, the horn honking, the high beams flashing. The guards brought their weapons up to firing position and sighted on the Jag.

"Is this one of our undercovers?" one of the guards screamed.

"An XK8? You fuckin' nuts?" the second guard answered.

They were getting set to fire when the Jag turned left on 77th Street and crashed through the fence and barricade, shuddering to a stop inside the parking lot.

The two parking lot guards ran toward the red Jag, weapons cocked and ready.

"Out of the car, hands in the air!" they shouted.

"Detective Williams," Tanisha shouted back. "Asian Crimes. I'm a cop." She had her badge in her hand, out the window.

"You fuckin' nuts? You don't come roarin' in here unannounced like that," the parking lot guard said, his heart pumping adrenaline, his finger tightly wrapped around the trigger. Then both guards stepped back, and still pointing their assault rifles, ordered them out of the car.

Chapter
30.

If It Has Four Legs and Is Not a Table, Then Eat It
.

Ellen Ming sat in the small room that housed the switchboard at Asian Crimes and listened in on the phone call she had just patched through to Captain Verba at his home. The call had come in from Tanisha Williams. It was two in the morning. Ellen had made the connection, waking the grumpy Captain, telling him that Tanisha had an urgent situation, and then she stayed on the line, undetected, and listened as the Black detective gave a brief description of what had happened on her way in from the airport. Tanisha told Captain Verba that she was still at the new South Division Station in South Central and needed to see him right away.

"Jesus, Tanisha, it's the fucking middle of the night," Captain Verba said, his voice filled with sleep and anger at being awakened. "That could have just been an attempted car-jack. You say you were in a new XK8?"

Ellen listened as Tanisha spoke slowly for emphasis. "Captain, it wasn't a car-jack. This is big. Bigger than anything we've ever worked on down there. Wait till you read this document we got out of Triad headquarters in Hong Kong."

The Captain agreed to get up, but he didn't want to drive all the way to South Division in the middle of the night. "I'll meet you in the coffee shop at the Westin in half an hour," he said, the Westin being a fifteen-story hotel on Hill Street that catered mostly to Asian businessmen. It was familiar ground, an Asian Crimes after-work watering hole.

"Captain, I don't think--"

"Listen, Detective, you got a pile of trouble right now." Verba's voice was gaining strength as he woke up. "I
. A
. went into your Police Academy ap. You told me you had family problems in Cleveland. According to them, you don't have any relatives in Cleveland. They think you're ducking them 'cause you're guilty, and frankly, so do I. I'll see you at the Westin in half an hour," and he hung up.

Ellen Ming disconnected the phone patch and sat very still in the Dispatch Center. She was thirty-six and delicate, with exotic Asian features. She had been in America for only four years, having grown up in Shanghai. She had gotten married at fifteen and had two children there. Her husband had died of dysentery, and her children had left China in their mid-teens, Riding the Snake to America. In order to secure their passage, she had personally guaranteed the huge cost demanded by the Chin Lo Triad. She had been a schoolteacher in Shanghai, but had lost her job. In order to pay for her children's voyage, she had finally been forced to dance at Triad nightclubs in Hong Kong. After three years of nude dancing and prostitution, she had finally gained favor with a powerful Triad enforcer who eventually arranged for her to join her son and daughter in L
. A
.

She managed to avoid dancing in Triad clubs in L
. A
.'s Chinatown by getting another job teaching school. She was extremely quick with language and soon mastered English. But her family still owed large sums of money to the Chin Lo, and they lived in squalor as she and her son and daughter all struggled to pay back what they owed. The Bamboo street gangs took everything her children made working in a Chinatown restaurant, plus what she made teaching school. They ate only what they could steal. Since she was a child in the streets of Shanghai, hunger had pursued her like a ravenous dog, growling in the pit of her stomach. There was a Cantonese joke about hunger: "If it flies in the air and is not an airplane, if it swims in the sea and is not a submarine, if it has four legs and is not a table, then eat it."

Her life in America seemed hopeless until one afternoon her Snakehead in Los Angeles called and demanded a meeting. She had been frightened that she or her daughter would be forced back into a strip club or, worse yet, prostitution.

But that was not what the Snakehead wanted. "There is a job for somebody who speaks many Chinese dialects," he said. "How many dialects do you have?"

"I speak Mandarin and Cantonese, Hakka and Fukienese," she said, naming only a few of the dialects that she had mastered.

"The Los Angeles Police need translators. It's always nice to be kind to your enemy." He grinned.

She had easily won the job.

Working at the LAPD, she had paid back much of what her son and daughter owed to the Snakehead. Soon her family would be free of the Triads. But until that day, she had to continue to perform acts of "loyalty" to survive. She picked up the phone and dialed.

The coffee shop of the Westin Hotel was completely empty at two
-
thirty in the morning. Tanisha and Wheeler sat in a booth with their backs against the wall. Both faced the room as a half-asleep Asian waitress moved to them with two cups of coffee, which she gently set down in front of them. At a quarter to three, Rick Verba moved into the restaurant and joined them. His hair was badly combed and he still had sleep in the corner of his eyes, not having bothered to shower.

"Okay, this better fucking blow the roof off my day, Tisha," he said without even saying hello.

"Captain Verba, this is Wheeler Cassidy," she said, introducing Wheeler.

Verba looked over but didn't bother to shake hands. Instead, his eyebrows climbed his forehead in surprise. "The Wheeler Cassidy?" he said disdainfully.

"What's that supposed to mean?" Wheeler countered.

"Well, not counting half-a-dozen D
. U. I. S
and assault charges where you kicked the shit out of angry husbands in country club parking lots, aren't you the trigger-happy citizen who peeled a clip of nines at three Bamboo Dragons and sent two of them off to live with their cloud ancestors?"

"You're packing more than your share of attitude, Captain. Why don't you slow down and look at what we've got," Wheeler said, unintentionally slipping into his snotty country club voice.

"Because Detective Williams, who happens to be under my direct supervision, keeps putting her booty in the bucket. She lied to me and to Internal Affairs. She's working this case off the board, and she's about to get drop-kicked into a no-pension retirement."

"Detective Williams is the best goddamn cop you've ever been around, and if you weren't such a constipated asshole you'd know that, and defend her instead of attacking her," Wheeler said hotly and with way too much emotion.

Verba looked at Tanisha, nonplussed. "Jesus, dear God in Heaven, don't tell me you're fucking this guy," Verba said. "He's on your case sheet, for Christ's sake."

"Can we get past the bullshit and deal with what we're here for?" Tanisha finally said, blushing, which is hard to see on black skin, but nobody missed it on her in the brightly lit Westin coffee shop. Tanisha pulled out of her purse the document that they'd stolen from the Red Flower Pavilion and put it on the Formica tabletop in front of him. "You can read Chinese, can't you, Captain?"

"I'm taking classes. I struggle along," he said, opening the document and looking at it.

"That agreement says that a Triad Shan Chu in Hong Kong named Wo Lap Ling has cut a deal to run, unopposed, for the Chief Executive of the S
. A. R
. in mid-'98. That's Governor
-
General of Hong Kong."

Verba looked at the document, scratching his head and yawning. "So what?" he said. "What's that got to do with Asian crime in Los Angeles?"

"It's why my brother and Angela Wong got murdered," Wheeler said, pulling a typed sheet out of his pocket. "This is a transcript of a tape we found in my brother's car. When we were in the Walled City at the library of the Red Flower Pavilion two days ago, I saw a collection of antique books on the history of California by Father John Stoddard. My brother has the same collection. What would a Chinese Triad leader want with a Dominican monk's description of the California gold rush?"

"How the fuck would I know?" Verba said, beginning to get annoyed.

"Because volume ten of that collection was the volume they were using for their key book code. All these numbers on this letter correspond to pages and letters in that book. I can explain how the key book code works, if you want."

"I know how a key book code works," Verba answered, looking at the document.

"What it comes down to, Captain," Tanisha said, "is Prescott Cassidy was a cut-out man for the Hong Kong Chin Lo Triad. The Triads have been flooding our markets here with illegal aliens, guns, and heroin. It's why 'China White' has made such a huge comeback in the last five years. Prescott was a local fund-raiser for politicians here in the U
. S
., funneling Triad cash into political campaigns. He also bribed I
. N. S
. officials to get green cards or political asylum for Snake Riders. His secretary, Angela, was a Chinese national. Her real last name was Kwong, not Wong. Her son, Johnny Kwong, was a Hong Kong cop. They were part of the Triad criminal pipeline--mostly working on illegal immigration, I think, but probably some dope and gun deals, too. Prescott Cassidy had been contacted by the FBI. They were asking him questions. He and Angela were killed because the Triad was afraid Prescott would spill to the FBI.

"Willy can't let this document come to light. If the two signatures at the bottom of that agreement can be verified as his and Chen Boda's, and I think they easily can, then this paper is political dynamite.

"The Communist leaders in Beijing want to convince us they're living up to the Sino-British Joint Declaration, but they're not. All of these paid-off Senators and Congressmen, the d's and r's in this letter, are supposed to carry the ball in Congress to get Wo Lap political acceptability in the U
. S
., so our government will support his election in Hong Kong. Our current political fund
-
raising scandals reach right back to this criminal empire," Tanisha said, tapping the document as he struggled to read it. "This represents proof that the third-largest banking center in the world has been sold to an international criminal organization."

There was a long silence while they waited for Verba's response.

"Gimme all that again," he finally said, looking up and then waving at the waitress for a cup of coffee.

Twenty minutes later, they had gone through it again, this time adding a detailed description of their Hong Kong adventures in the Walled City. They described the deaths of Johnny Kwong and Julian Winslow, their penetration of the City of Willows, the escape from Macao, and the attempt on their lives coming in from the airport. When it was over, Rick Verba sat in the booth looking at them speechless, his eyes peeled open in wonder.

"That is the most preposterous fucking story I ever heard," he finally said. He folded the document and put it in his pocket just as four Chinese businessmen in suits arrived in the coffee shop carrying briefcases. The group sat at a table directly across the restaurant from them. Tanisha kept her eye on the men over Captain Verba's shoulder, as he motioned for the bill. Tanisha thought two of the Chinese businessmen were improbably young, maybe nineteen or twenty. The suits all looked brand-new and very cheap. Now two of them opened their briefcases and started to rummage inside, pretending to look for papers.

"Captain, are you packing?" she said softly.

Verba looked up, "Huh?"

"You strapped?"

"Yeah," he said, "a nine under my wing and a twenty-five on my ankle. Why?"

"Give him the twenty-five and get the nine unhooked," she said, still watching the Chinese businessmen over his shoulder.

"Why?" the Captain asked.

" 'Cause right behind you is a four-man posse. We're five seconds from getting splashed on. I'll call it for you. . . ."

Without turning, Verba reached under his arm with one hand and down to his ankle with the other. He slid the .25 across the table and yanked the 9mm out of the upside-down rig he wore under his arm. Tanisha had the Glock out of her purse. Suddenly, the four Chinese men got up. They all had 9mm automatics in their hands.