Beg Me (25 page)

“You and I have a mutual friend,” I went on carefully. I didn’t know how much to say in front of these others. “There’s a dude who lives on Staten Island named Isaac. Maybe you’ve heard of him. Whatever he’s planning, I think he’s reached out to you or to one of your competitors. He’s about to be stopped. So if you’ve hooked up with him, that means you’ll get caught in his mess. I’m offering you a heads-up in trade for what you can tell me.”

Shu laughed and turned to his crew. There were rapid streams of Chinese back and forth and more laughter. I saw Shu hawk and spit onto the cement, and I couldn’t believe Lee did business with this little thug.

“You snotty cunt!” he barked. “You come here? Try to tell me my business? Maybe we fuck you up, eh?”

This was wrong. Not the reception I’d expected at all.

“I came in good faith!” I snapped. “I’ve done nothing to you, and I know nothing about your business. My end is Isaac. Ah Jo Lee told me—”

“Who?”

“Ah Jo Lee…? He told me to come to you, to go see Shu—”

More rapid Chinese interrupting me, and now I understood things were
seriously
wrong.

But before I could figure it out, everyone turned. The clerk was shouting back in the store. About ten Chinese guys in shades and suits stormed through the open door onto the loading bay, and I heard multiple clicks of guns.

Suddenly I was in a John Woo standoff.

12

O
ne short thin guy in a white linen suit and, of all things, a loose bowtie hanging around his open-necked shirt stepped forward and spoke to Shu—quite gently, quite reasonably.

Then he looked down at me from the shallow steps near the loading bays and said, “You Teresa Knight?” American accent, born and raised.

“Yeah.”

“There’s been a mistake.”

“No shit!” I said.

Shu was cursing a blue streak, and, frozen there in the middle of the shooting gallery, I don’t know how but I could
tell
he wasn’t speaking the same language as he’d used before. I heard
loh fann
this and
loh fann
that, and the Chinese playboy on the stairs answered back in an obvious negotiation.

“Whoever you are,” I said to him, “you mind if we go to lunch now?”

“He says you have to entertain him before you leave.”

“Fuck him!” I said instantly.

Way to increase the tension, darling.

The guy on the stairs took a breath and explained, “He wants you to fight one of his girls.”

“What for?” I demanded. “You mean if I lose they kill me?”

“No,” he replied, with a note of embarrassed apology. “They’ll let you go. I think they just want to see you hurt first.”

“I don’t do Thunderdome,” I said.

“They’re not giving you a choice.”

I was about to ask if he came all this way with his guys why didn’t he tell them to forget it—but that was when one of the biker chicks took a swing at the back of my head.

I spun into her and grabbed her arm, did one of the few throws I happen to know. It couldn’t have been much fun landing on that hard cement. Poor baby.

“What was that?” asked Bowtie, chuckling.

“I don’t do sucker punches either.”

Another girl stepped forward. She’d been sucking on a lollipop, which she now tossed away, and she stripped off her light sweater and handed it to one of her friends. Hair in pigtails. Might be able to use that—for yanking. Pretty girl, actually, and I swear she couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred pounds, soaking wet. That wasn’t going to help me unless I took her out with one hard blow, fast.

I saw her kick off her shoes—nice, looked like Via Spiga—and figured I’d better do the same, even though I wasn’t crazy about my bare feet on this cement. Biker-jacket girl was the warm-up. This was the main attraction.

She took up a Wushu guard, and, yep, I was definitely in trouble. I
hate
Wushu fighters.

If you’re trained like I am, in karate, you begin stiff and static and then over the years you loosen up, develop fluidity with combinations. Wushu people get their lessons in fluidity from the start and then learn power. Karate, at least my style of Shotokan, emphasizes taking out your opponent with one solid strike—preferably. Wushu…well, I’m no Wushu expert, but from what I’ve seen with friends and done with them in sparring, they’re quite happy to take you out with multiple strikes.
Bam, bam, bam.
Punch, punch, kick. Punch, kick, punch. Drives you crazy.

She had excellent footwork. I saw this flash of tiny fists and then felt a sting of a crescent kick in my side. You little…! Darting out again before I could connect.

Around me I heard cheering and whooping and saw bills traded in bets, and when I backed up too far, two hands spitefully pushed me back in. The girl launched herself at me with another flurry of quick blows:
bam, bam, bam!
Kick to thigh, kick to shoulder, punch to my chin, and this was getting old
real
fast. For every two blows I could block, one sailed through.

Enough defensive. I gave her a front snap kick, but she repelled it with her instep, and I launched another and that was blocked too. Her kick got in, and I grunted.

The only good thing was that her blows were flicky, not enough finishing
kime
in them. Not enough
oomph.

Fighting in the street is not like in the movies. Somebody breaks your rib, you
will
give up. You get hit hard enough in the chops, you
will
go down, and you do not keep standing, ready for more.

But I couldn’t break through to land a punch, and though I was taller and weighed more, my reach and my size weren’t helping me. In karate, you often learn to fight according to your strengths, and you also have the strategy of the swallow—imitating the bird’s style of flying, in and out attacks for small people. I thought of a steamroller approach to counter this, but her blocks were blindingly fast.

Agile. Quick. But not very creative.

There were jeers and laughter as the girl and everyone else watched me kneel down on the cement. She wasn’t stupid. She knew it was a trap. But she couldn’t tell what kind—and she had to come to me to find out.

She sent a kick flying to my head, and I had one shot at this. I grabbed her leg, and now she was hopping in the air.

I put her on the ground fast, and it took only a second to vise an arm around her throat. If I had wanted to, I could have killed her in an instant.

“Are we done?” I asked.

Chinese—addressed to Shu, not to me.

“She says you cheat,” said Bowtie.

“Right, of course I do. Can we get out of here, please?”

Shu’s gang sulked but allowed us to go.

Out on the street, Bowtie gave orders to his men, and they put a bit of distance between us while watching our backs. I couldn’t wait to turn to this guy and say, “What the bloody hell is going on?”

“Ah Jo Lee sent you to Shu,” he said.

“Yes!” I said impatiently. “That was Shu!”

“
I’m
Shu,” he explained. “He’s
a
Shu but not the one you’re supposed to hook up with!”

“Oh, shit.”

“Exactly. It’s Lee’s goddamn fault. What was he thinking? Sending a black chick into Chinatown!”

“Thank you very much—”

“Hey, lady, no offense, but you think I could stroll around Nairobi like it’s my backyard? Or even your Chinatown in London?”

“Chinatown in London isn’t that—”

“Whatever! There’s political correctness and then there’s just boneheaded. Listen. A lot of Chinatown action is controlled these days by new immigrants from Fuzhou, back in Mainland China. Most of the nice, middle-class Cantonese moved out to the ’burbs by the late nineties. Lee’s intel is out of date. He sent you to me, thinking there’d be only one Shu to worry about.”

“But the address—”

“Is a place we let them take over,” he added quickly.

“You’re related or something?”

“Triads don’t work like that,” he explained. “That’s why it took years for the
loh fann
cops in this country to clue in. The police thought in terms of families, like Mafia. The ‘uncle’ who heads up a group will recruit from his village back home, but not necessarily the brothers, the cousins, the family tree. Which brings me to my next beef with you.”

“What? What did I do?”

He gave me a sideways grimace. “You nearly blew my fucking cover, that’s what.”

“You’re a—”

“Jesus,
don’t
say it!” he barked, checking over his shoulder. “I speak Cantonese, Mandarin, and that guy’s Fujian dialect. Do you know how many Chinese undercover cops there are in America? Never mind New York, but
anywhere
? It’s not top-of-the-pile career choice, okay? Call it a ‘cultural difference.’ It took me years to build confidence with these guys, and if they ever find out, I’ll be lucky if they slice my balls off
after
I die. I don’t know what you’re selling, honey, but it fuckin’ better be the second coming.”

“Look, I don’t know about you, but I really could use lunch,” I said.

“Lunch! You got nerve to—”

“Lunch. You never get hungry?”

He relented and took me to a place on Mulberry Street—an Italian restaurant, where a black girl with an Asian guy was far less likely to draw attention.

When the menus were taken away, I let out a heavy sigh. “I’m sorry about all this. I might have blown everything by giving it away to Shu Number Two.” I gave him the condensed version of Isaac and his lab operation.

His verdict was “Holy shit.”

“But shooting my mouth off to your friend back there—”

“Don’t worry about him,” said Shu, giving me a wink. “He’s small-time. He’s due to be busted tonight anyway on a people-smuggling charge. His op will come to a grinding halt as his boys try to figure how to bail him out. He would have had to report anything important to his uncle, and that’s not going to happen. Plus I happen to know for a fact they’ve got no associations with black organized crime.”

“That’s good,” I said. “But who does?”

He bit his bottom lip and answered, “I know of a few operations. This is bad, very bad.”

“I know.”

“Last thing we need is an alliance between some wack job with the brothers and the bastards I deal with.”

“You can’t shut him down yet,” I told him. “I’m trying to prove he committed a couple of murders.”

He looked at me as if I’d grown another head. “What do you think this is, lady?
Cradle 2 the Grave?
We’re not partners! This is my job! You’re a civilian—hell, you are officially a tourist. A foreign national!”

“You can’t connect the dots yet,” I argued. “You shut down the lab, you won’t be able to make a case his people are involved. Trust me, they’re very careful. I’ve seen the financial trail. It’s almost invisible. If you’re patient, you can get them all.”

“Tell me where the lab is.”

“I’ll do better,” I said. “Here.” I passed him the samples of pills I’d stolen. “Have your forensics-thingy guys analyze this.”

“Great, but where’s the lab?”

I didn’t say anything.

“I could have you detained as a material witness,” he threatened.

“If you do,” I said, “I won’t get back to their mansion, and my absence will be noticed. That’ll tip off Isaac and Danielle, and they might pack up shop and bugger off. You’ll still have no case.”

“Are you this annoying to British cops?”

I thought of poor Carl at the Met. He had been so happy I was going to America. “I have a certain reputation, yes.”

“Lucky me.”

“What do I call you?” I asked. “Your name isn’t really Shu, is it?”

We shook hands. “For your information and only your information, Detective John Chen. Don’t you dare call me that once we go back outside.”

Our dishes arrived. He had lasagne, and I had fettuccine Alfredo. Neither of us, it seemed, had much imagination when it came to Italian food.

“There’s something wrong with the whole scenario,” I piped up, scooping up noodles. “Isaac. He makes a lot of disparaging comments about East Asians. He’s got a real thing about them, especially Asian men. It sounds genuine—not like he’s putting up a front.”

“So? Wouldn’t make him the first creep who puts aside his bigotry to do business.”

“That’s just it,” I said. “If he hates them so much, does he really need to work with the triads for his drug business?”

“You got a point,” said Chen. “I don’t see why he’d go to them at all—especially if he’s making his own stuff. I know heroin comes in from the Golden Triangle, and I’m no expert, but I’m sure the local community gets their ecstasy too from Thailand, Holland, and other places. They wouldn’t let him use their distribution network unless he’s got really hot shit that’s better than what they’re importing.”

“So Isaac should be a rival, not an ally?”

He shook his head. “If Isaac has carved out a territory, doesn’t make sense for them to even overlap or butt heads. Even if they’re vying for the stuck-up, rich white kids in the clubs, they don’t have to make contact or scout each other out. There’s no reason for this Isaac to be in Chinatown unless he needs something from a player here. Or he’s trying to sell his shit and is working with someone local. But as you said, why pick here?”

“Then what’s going on?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” said Chen. “You’re the one on the inside. Maybe we have to be partners, after all.”

I shook his hand for the second time and smiled. “Okay, then, partner. Can you help me find out anything on Isaac Jackson?”

“You haven’t dug into his background already?”

“He’s a cypher. The mansion on Staten Island is in Danielle’s name—her
real
name of Zamani—and I managed to use the mortgage records to trace her back with the help of a few friends.”

I didn’t think it would be a good idea to give him the names of my chatty friends in the insurance business.

“As far as I know, she’s got no criminal record. Maybe you can tell me different. She’s American, but she lived in Britain and France for a while. She’s the power, but I think he’s the key.”

“Fair enough, but do you have anything else besides his surname?”

“Uh-uh.”

He shrugged. “We love a challenge.”

“Thanks.”

“Teresa…Ah Jo’s a pal, and I’m sure you’re getting top dollar—”

“Pounds. Sterling.”

“But this sounds like some freaky shit you’re involved in.”

“They killed Ah Jo’s sister,” I explained. “And my friend. Her body was dumped in a dirty alley in Brooklyn.”

“
Anna?
They killed Anna?”