Changes (21 page)

The driver slammed on his brakes; I tackled Yam before he made it to his feet again and pinned him in a tight
Chin Na
shoulder lock.  The clerk must’ve done as I’d told her.  I heard the sirens.  I remembered the bandage on my forehead and was glad.

I wouldn’t have to lie to Tracy about that Triad run-in after all.

62

John arrived about ten minutes after the patrol cars did.  "Heard the address on the scanner and I just had this funny feeling you had something to do with it," he said after telling the officers on the scene to un-cuff me.

I rubbed my wrists, got out of the police cruiser, and said, "Hey man, I was just shopping.  I didn’t intend to partake in any disorderly conduct…"

"Yeah, well, maybe you need to start shopping at some of the chain stores," he said.

"I like to support the mom and pop joints," I said.

He glanced over at the store, with its mutilated display racks and bullet holes, looked back at me, and said, "Obviously."

"Hey, go ask the clerk, she’ll tell you – I’m the good guy here," I said.

Knox leaned on the side of the cruiser.  "I did ask her.  She doesn’t speak English."

I leaned as well.  "You’ll just have to take my word for it then, won’t you?"  I said.

He rubbed his temples and said, "You want a ride back home?"

"I think I can walk the block and a half, but thanks."

"Got a call from your girlfriend.  I think maybe you’d be better off taking the ride," he said.

"She told you about the message."

"Yep."

I nodded and agreed to the ride.

63

We picked Tracy up at my place and drove to IHOP, the closest place that was still open, for coffee.  The ne’er-do-wells were packed up in a couple of squad cars and safely on their way to the station for processing, and Knox decided to let them sit and sweat for a bit before getting down to business.  This suited me just fine; I was starving.  Our waitress, a helpful bottle-blonde named Pammy, had just brought my stuffed French toast when I made the mistake of looking up at Tracy.  She had dark circles under her eyes.  They were emphasized by smears of mascara that told me she’d been crying.  She looked as though she could start again at any moment.

"You okay?" I said, smooth as ever.

"I don’t know.  I’ve never gotten a death threat before, Randall."

Knox and I both simultaneously said, "Don’t worry, we’ll find them."

Clearly, we’d both been studying our Good Guy handbooks.  Extra cool points went to Knox, though; he didn’t have strawberry sauce on his chin when he said it.

"How can you be sure?" She said, "I mean, it’s not like you guys have a ton of leads or anything."

Her tone implied that we were a couple of bumbling Inspector Clouseau types.

"Au contraire, madam," I said, "we are practically bathing in clues… or we will be soon, anyway.  The jerks I roughed up?  Somebody’s going to talk. 
And
, if Samson manages to recover, he can give a description of the killer."

Knox cleared his throat.  I looked over at him.  He shook his head slightly. 

"What?"  I said.

"Samson hung on till early yesterday, but he never regained consciousness."

Tracy’s eyes widened.  "He… died?"

Knox nodded slowly.

I took another bite of French toast and tried not to think about it. 

Knox smoked. 

Tracy was on the verge of freaking out.

Knox was in mid-drag when he grunted, jerked his chin in a reverse nod, and elbowed me in the ribs. 

"That reminds me," he said, "I’d been meaning to tell you, I finally wrestled a report from the investigations guys…the CSI types."

"On Mei Ling?" I said.

"Yeah."

"Glad it was a priority for them…"

He shrugged and said, "Actually they did alright.  It interested them.  It just took some time to figure some stuff out… there’s some weird shit.  Like, check this out – the ink used to write all those curses and stuff?  They found blood in it.  Yeah, blood and some herbs and some type of mercury."

"Cinnabar," I said.

"Huh?"  Knox said, eyes narrowing.

"Mercury Sulfide…It’s Cinnabar.  Taoists used to use it in different immortality potions; it’s poisonous.  It’s in the ink, along with the blood and herbs, to increase the strength of the curse."

"Why is it that every time I find something out, you already know it?"

I shrugged.

"Well I’m getting real goddamned tired of it.  What else do you know about the scene that you haven’t told me?"

When I was done chewing and swallowing, I said, "Nothing, really.  I told you that the whole thing was set up as a sort of perversion of a Taoist burial ceremony, sort of like how Satanists invert crosses and pentagrams.  The main difference here is that any pothead teenager can listen to heavy metal records and scribble out that crap but it takes someone with a background in Taoism to pull off something like this.  What I can’t figure out is the why… Taoists are usually pretty detached.  I just don’t see what could’ve brought on this much hate."

"Hell, I dunno." Knox said, "I’m still trying to figure out the Monopoly money at the scene."

I winced.

"What?" He said.

I glanced over at Tracy.  She looked tired and hungry.  I offered her some of my French toast.  She declined.

"Do you really want to know?" I said to Knox.

"Yes, I goddamn well want to know.  I said I’m trying to figure it out, didn’t I?"

"I just didn’t want you to get mad at me when I tell you."

"Why would I do that?" Knox said.

"You just said you were tired of me knowing things you don’t," I said.

He exhaled smoke through his nose and stared at me.

"Alright, alright…" I said, "It goes along with the rest of the ceremony.  It’s an insult.  You know what hell bank notes are?"

He stamped out his cigarette in the ashtray and sighed.  "Why don’t you tell me," he said.

"You go to any Chinese store around here, you’ll find bundles of hell bank notes.  It’s paper money that you burn at Chinese funerals.  Supposedly, the fire conveys the energy of the money to the deceased so they have money in the afterlife.  You can even buy paper TVs now, and houses… anything you can think of."

"So the dead person can be comfortable in hell?" Knox said.

"Well… in the afterlife.  The word hell probably came from the Christian missionaries, but it stuck.  We’re not talking brimstone and lakes of fire, here… "

"So the killer, as an insult, left stacks of fake money instead of these afterlife things… so she’d be broke on the other side?"

"Right."

"So…" Knox started, but his cell phone rang and interrupted him.

He took it from his belt and answered.

"Yeah," he said.

He listened; from the tight line of his mouth and the furrow of his brow, I could tell the news wasn’t good.

"Yeah," he said again, hung up, and stood.

"What’s up?" I said.

"Gotta go."

"Alright, let’s go."

"No.  You two are staying," he said.

I stopped and said, "You drove.  We have no way home."

Knox lit a cigarette and said, "Take a cab.  Or better yet, don’t.  Stay put."

Tracy looked at me, I looked back.  I turned to Knox and said, "What the hell, John?  You wanted to know what I knew, I told you.  Your turn.  What’s going on?"

Knox threw some cash on the table, enough to cover the bill plus tip, and said, "A hit.  On our boys."

Tracy said, "What?"

"Look, I gotta go.  You two want to tag along, I guess that’s fine, but you gotta stay in the car.  There’s gonna be a shitload of coverage – cops and press – in the area, and the last thing we need is you guys on the front page of the friggin’ Post Dispatch, alright?" 

Tracy and I stood and put on our coats.

64

The scene was less than five miles from the police station.  We turned right on Dr Martin Luther King Drive and the sky flashed red and blue from the myriad visibar lights.  The street was blocked off now and closed to traffic, but Knox pulled in beside another unmarked car and got out.

I saw wisps of smoke in the near distance and smelled the hot metal through the air vents.  A few firefighters milled about; some of them talked with police.  The way everyone moved, the looks on their faces, told me everything I needed to know – the slow, methodical way they approached the scene meant death.  Any survivors would have been rushed away already.  This was the clean-up crew, searching for the how’s and why’s. 

We did as we were told and stayed put.  Tracy slept, huddled in the back seat.

I watched the reporters from the local stations collecting a "no comment" from every cop they encountered.  I’d nodded off by the time Knox returned.

"C’mon," he said, gesturing for me to get out. 

"What about us being front page news and all that?" I said.

"We’ll sneak in the back way," he said.

I leaned over the seat to wake Tracy and Knox said, "You should let her sleep.  She should be alright out here."

Considering that whatever had happened occurred a few miles from the police station, I didn’t feel comfortable with those shoulds.  I woke her and together the three of us wove between a tangle of buildings and emerged from an alleyway and into the crime scene.  A uniformed officer nodded to Knox, lifted the yellow police tape and helped us through.

The entire area was maybe sixty feet of street, obscured as much as possible from the public view.  I saw masses of twisted, smoking metal.  Broken glass littered the ground and caught bits of flashing light, reflecting it; reminding me of the way moonlight bounced off the ocean waves.

"The SUV’s slid into position there," Knox said, pointing.  At the far end of the enclosure, I saw three black Cadillac Escalades blocking the street.

"The gunmen hid in these alleys and hit them here.  If you look, you can see that they picked staggered alleys to avoid a crossfire."

We walked into the street, glass crunching underfoot, to the first patrol car. 

"Officer Cox drove this one.  He was transporting Scarface and Kip Yam.  Shooters on the driver’s side here hosed the length of the car.  Early guesstimates, based on number and pattern of shots as well as caliber, suggest that the shooters used MAC-10s."

"So they’re dead?" Tracy said.

"Yeah.  Very much so.  Officer Murphy, with the rest of the Chinese grocery thugs, tried to turn around.  Dispatch caught part of his call for backup.  Then, according to a witness, another black escalade pulled in here," Knox said, point to the other end of the street, "gunned down Officer Murphy’s vehicle, picked up the other drivers and gunmen, and fled the scene."

"Did anyone survive?" I said.

"Yeah.  One of the unidentified kids in the back of Murphy’s car.  Little shit hid under his dead friends.  Took one slug in the gut, but he’s still kicking… for now, anyway."

I felt Tracy close to me.  She seemed so small.  I put my arm around her to ease her shivering.  She had never been this close to this kind of carnage before.  I knew I hadn’t.  There was an immediacy to the violence that echoed through the place; I was happy to feel her next to me.

Knox’s cell rang again.  He answered. From where we stood a few feet away, I heard an anguished cry from the other end of the line.  "…Baby…Yes, baby, of course it’s me," Knox said.  He turned away from us and walked a little ways away.  "No.  No, I’m fine.  I swear to you, alright?  Turn off the TV and go back to bed.  I’ll be home soon.  Yes.  Soon, I promise."

He glanced over his shoulder and looked at me.  I tried to look like someone who had never eavesdropped in his life.  He hung up the phone and said, "Story’s on the news… couple cops dead, my precinct… she got scared."

"Sure," I said.

He cleared his throat and wiped his eyes and looked around at the wreckage like he’d never seen it before.

"Shit." he said, "I brought you out here like you’d have some kind of insight into this… but it’s just all fucked, isn’t it?"

65

The sky was the color of maraschino cherries when I called to make our reservations.  Tracy was asleep against me; John drove.  At Tracy’s, the good detective was kind enough to check the place before we went in.  I’d never seen him draw his gun before.

When he was satisfied that the place was clean, we went in, and Tracy grabbed some clothes, her CD’s and a fleshy, clawed ball of hatred for mankind.  I stood around, fully prepared to kung-fu something, if necessary. 

We left, and John drove us to the Ritz. 

I steeled myself for the barrage of dirty looks we were likely to get.  I’d received glares from people there while dressed in a tuxedo.  Considering the way I looked now, I’d be lucky if the hotel staff didn’t just shoot me.  We went inside, bidding John Knox a good morning, and attempted to saunter up to the front desk in a prosperous manner.  When the concierge was finished staring down his long, skinny nose at us, I smiled and said, "Reservation for Charles.  Nick and Nora Charles."

With key in hand, we rode the elevator to our floor.  It was a much more pleasant experience than my previous elevator trip.  I looked at Tracy.  She looked at me.

We knew there would be no resisting it.  On our floor, every step made it clearer and clearer.  With our door unlocked, we entered our suite.  I locked the door behind us.  Tracy let Tito out of the duffel bag he’d been hiding in.  And at last we gave in - we were both asleep before we could even get under the covers.

66

I developed some rudimentary form of what humans call consciousness around ten a.m.  In the blissful void of sleep I became aware of a recurring smooth raking sound.  My mind conjured nonsensical images of ninja, clad only in strawberry stuffed French toast triangles.  One of them was on the balcony, suction-cupping one of those circular glass cutters, the kind that show up in every spy movie, to the sliding door; my dream self cowered in the corner, cursing myself for not considering pastry-covered assassins when choosing a luxury suite.