Chasing the Dragon (26 page)

“What the hell’s going on?” asked Mason Wu.

Wu emerged from behind the desk. He held a chrome-plated shooter but the action seemed to have died down and he pointed the barrel toward the floor. His eyes were on the heroin.

“You’re dead,” said Yi.

“Huh?”

Wu glanced up from the heroin. He understood then, but it was too late. Yi shot him in the face. Wu twitched about on his feet, then collapsed to the floor. The twitching went on for a while. Yi shot him again. There was blood everywhere.

“We were supposed to kill the Italian first,” Yi said to Williams. “He was the only one who knew how to use a gun.”

“Fakir got in my way.”

Williams glanced at Brother Fakir laying there. He felt something like remorse feathering at the inside of his chest, but then it passed away. Maybe he would feel more later on, when he thought of how Fakir had taken him in, and how the loss of Fakir would tear Cole Valley asunder, but he had never felt such remorse in the past and there was no reason why he should feel it now.

“Go down there and make sure.”

“There’s no light.”

“I get the drugs. You take the money. Then we go our separate ways.”

“All right.”

Williams remembered the plan. They were to kill Fakir and Mason Wu, too. And to make things neat and clean, this Italian as well. Yi got some kind of reward of his own—something to do with the local drug business. He himself got a new identity. Free to roam with a trunk full of cash.

Williams headed down the stairs. He looked into the darkness with some foreboding. The truth was he didn’t know if he had wounded Dante or killed him or even hit him at all. He did know that he didn’t much want to turn the corner into the room where the Italian had vanished.
Because the Italian’s eyes will be adjusted to the darkness
, he thought.
Because the Italian knows every bit of this building and I know nothing. Because if I turn that corner and he is still alive, then he will shoot me dead
. And as these thoughts went through his head, Williams considered the idea of not turning the corner at all, just firing into the darkness at the bottom of the landing, pretending he had finished the job. Occupied as he was with his thoughts and his fears, he sighed, not realizing he had done so. Then he heard a little scratching noise around the corner, like mice scuttling, or fingers tapping on the floor. He fired blindly into the darkness, then fired again. The noise stopped. “That finishes him,” he said.

“Are you sure?” Yi asked from above.

Williams was not sure at all. He only knew he wasn’t going around the corner.

“Absolutely,” he said. “He’s dead.”

He peered a moment longer into the darkness. He did not notice that Yi had taken position at the top of the stairs behind him, gun arm extended, waiting for just that answer.

Dante lay with his cheek pressed onto the floor. After he had fallen, he had blacked out. Now he was awake again, but the bullet had torn through his shoulder, and the pain made him grit his teeth. He scuttled his good hand over the floor, looking for his gun. He had heard the men talking and Williams coming down the stairs, and then two shots had rung out in the stairwell. Even if Dante could find his gun now, he did not know how much it would help. He would to have twist himself around somehow, firing upward, and accomplish that movement without giving away his position.

After the gunfire, he sat as still as he could. The men exchanged a few words. He heard Williams in the stairway, pronouncing him dead. And then there was another shot and he heard Williams stumble down the stairs, slamming into the cabinet at the bottom. Dante twisted about, looking for the gun, but the noise he made scampering was lost because just then there was a fusillade of shots from up above. Williams pitched around the corner. Dante saw the man’s shadow. Then he collapsed onto the spot Dante had been only a moment before.

Dante listened to the man die, and he waited.

Meanwhile the pain was wild in his shoulder. He heard Yi moving up above and then the pain became too much and he drifted under. He drifted back again, then away, and somewhere in this drifting, before he slipped into the blackness, he heard the speedboat outside roar back to life. Then that sound, too, diminished.

PART FOUR

Dante was high. He lay in bed, in the trauma wing of San Francisco General. It was a busy night in the trauma ward, as Saturday nights often were, but the medic had wrapped his shoulder and given him a painkiller. Morphine, maybe. Demerol. It didn’t matter. He was high and it felt good. When he closed his eyes, he saw the dream-dark streets and the long sweep of the bay and the city lights glimmering just as he had seen them from the jet window the evening he’d descended into San Francisco.

He opened his eyes and Angelo was by his bedside, his ex-partner. The Homicide chief stood there with a dour expression and his hands in his pockets. Though it would have been nice to think so, Dante didn’t guess Angelo was here for old time’s sake. Alongside him was a woman whose face he didn’t know, but everything else about her was familiar. The blue jacket. The hard eyes. The lips that never turned a smile.

“What happened out there?” asked Angelo.

They had come in a moment or two ago, not long after the nurse had administered the shot. If he shuttered his eyes, it wasn’t hard to imagine they were not here at all.

“Why don’t we start from the top?” Dante said. His tongue was thick and he needed something to drink. “If you could pour me some juice. My shoulder, as you can see . . .”

The woman gave him a look that said she wasn’t going to pour him any goddamn juice.

“This is Special Agent Waldorf. FBI,” said Angelo. “She has a few questions for you. And I do as well.”

There would be jurisdictional issues, Dante thought. City cops and FBI did not necessarily work so well together. Angelo poured the juice and handed it to him. The taste was so cold and wonderful that Dante managed for the moment to forget everything he disliked about his ex-partner.

“Ying?” asked Dante. “How is Detective Ying?”

Angelo sucked in his cheeks and let out his breath and looked away. Then the chief’s gray eyes settled back on him, and Dante knew the answer.

“Not so lucky as you,” said Angelo. “Gutshot. Bled to death out there on your dock. His wife . . . It wasn’t easy to tell her.”

Angelo played the good cop. Now as always. Back then, too, he’d been the one to call on the loved ones, to knock on the door and tell the folks the news. Angelo enjoyed it, Dante thought. Enjoyed examining the bodies, sifting through the personal effects. Seeing the grief on the relatives’ faces. Going over it later, alone, as you lay in bed at night. It was a weird kind of pleasure, as Dante knew. But after a while it wore you down.

Angelo had grown a notch or two heavier since Dante had seen him last—a soft-spoken man, out of shape and overweight—a man without much of a physical presence who nonetheless was fierce beneath the surface and full of ambition. His hair was steel-gray and his eyes were milky. Though they had been a good team once, best of buddies, Angelo had distanced himself as soon as he saw Dante going down over the Strehli business.

“We’d like to know the details.” said Special Agent Waldorf. “What happened out there at the warehouse?”

The woman had frizzy hair and wore a blazer over her print dress. She might have been attractive if not for the way she carried herself. Her shoulders were square, and she wore a perfume that smelled like aftershave.

“They way it looks,” Angelo said. “There was a drug deal going down at your place—and it went bad. I want to know what Ying was doing there.”

“I don’t think I need to explain to you how serious this is,” said Waldorf. “A policeman is dead.”

Dante closed his eyes. He saw the streets again, the smear of dark and light, the sky overhead all bruised up with beautiful colors. He would disappear into that beauty if he only he could keep his eyes closed. If only he could go there and never come back.

“You don’t talk to us, I’ll return later with three more agents,” said Agent Waldorf. “We’ll keep you up all goddamn night. You can forget your pain medicine. Forget the juice and the hospital bed. We’ll take you into federal custody.”

Dante kept his eyes closed. He did not want to talk to these people, but sooner or later he would have to. Sometimes it was best to take the initiative.

“It was a DEA operation,” he said at last. “Or that’s what I was told. I was working with them on assignment.”

“You’re with DEA?”

“I was on assignment,” he said. “And Ying was brought in at the last minute because of his connections with SI. The DEA was supposed to provide backup. They were supposed to make arrests. Instead, they left us in the lurch.”

“This sounds like so much bullshit,” said Agent Waldorf.

“Give me your cell. I’ll call someone—give you everything you want.”

The number he dialed was forbidden but he dialed it anyway. The voice on the other end was the voice of the insect. Maybe not the same insect—but the species shared a certain consciousness.

“This is Dante Mancuso.”

The insect said nothing.

“You left me hanging. And I’m thinking it wasn’t an accident.”

“Where are you?” the insect asked.

“I’ve got the FBI with me. Explain it before I do. Get these pricks off me. Either you tell them what’s going on here, or I’ll tell them myself. And then I’ll go to the goddamn media. Blow every whistle I can.”

“That wouldn’t be wise.”

“Why don’t you talk to Agent Waldorf?”

Agent Waldorf put her pale lips to the receiver. She listened for a while but she did not say much and she was not on the phone long. Then she turned to Angelo. “My suggestion is we continue this later.” The pair of them left, Angelo trailing behind. It was pretty apparent which of them was in charge.

Dante slept. When he woke up, the uniformed cop outside his door was gone. The Bureau had pulled rank on Angelo and the guard had been taken away. Agent Waldorf had talked to somebody down at the company, he figured, and the company had told them to back off.

The sting was successful in the ways the company had wanted, he guessed. It had never been about capturing Fakir and Wu—at least not alive. Instead they’d gotten rid of Fakir and discredited him in the process, linking him to the drug trade in a fiery death. And Mason Wu was dead, too. Rumor said that Love Wu had wanted to remove his grand-nephew, and apparently that’s what the company wanted as well. They’d gotten Yi to pull the trigger. Given him a higher post, no doubt. At least temporarily.

In the process, they went after me, too
, Dante thought. Part of him understood. For the convenience of it, just to get rid of him. And that’s the way it had gone, almost. Charles Yi had taken the money and the drugs—and left him for dead.

But Ying? Why kill him?

The only answer he could come up with was that Ying had been with SI once upon a time, and Ying’s fingers, like his own, had touched the Strehli business.

Still, he could not quite link it all together. The Wus. The company. The dead family in the shipping container. The intersection of Hong Kong and San Francisco and the criminal underground, the place where government overlapped with druglords, with smugglers, with legitimate commerce. It was an old business, all these interconnections, as old as the city, and their exact nature shifted on you, just like the nature of the company itself.