Chasing the Dragon (25 page)

Or maybe there was no way to know at all. Maybe the past had just vanished and all you got was what you saw. Still, something stirred Dante as he set foot onto the family pier. And Ying, too, as he headed toward the loading dock with his clipboard. And Williams and Fakir, heading down the Embarcadero. And those three Chinese on the speedboat, descendents of the Wu clan, ancient smugglers. Maybe they all sensed for a moment that which lay unexpressed in the land as they converged toward the Mancuso warehouse. Or maybe they heard only the superficial sounds, the slap of the waves, the cries of the gulls, the groan of abandoned machinery. Maybe there were no secrets. Just noise and cacophony. Like the blare of that foghorn in the distance, sounding for no apparent reason on this clear and sunny day.

It was fifteen minutes before ten when Ying saw the speedboat. It was a modern craft, very low and sleek, and it moved like a knife through the water. The boat cut its speed and turned toward the pier. There were three men on board, dressed for a pleasure outing, though nothing in their demeanor suggested they were enjoying themselves. The boat eased closer. Then it moved out of view, under the pier.

Ying stood with a clipboard in hand. He stood alongside another man with a clipboard who was verifying the particulars of a shipment of restaurant supplies as it was transferred from the dock onto a waiting truck. Ying’s apparent role was to double-check the shipment on behalf of the warehouse, and neither the other clerk nor the crew paid him much attention.

Now two men from the speedboat appeared on the dock, and a dockworker came forward to lead them toward the main building. The dockworker was a very big man who wore a black sweatshirt with two words printed on the back:
MANCUSO STORAGE
.

Ying recognized the two men from the boat: Mason Wu and Charlie Yi.

He knew them from his days with SI, because he had studied their faces in photographs and once ran a stakeout outside Wu’s house. Wu was the money man, the higher-up. Yi provided the muscle. Together they pretty much ran the Wu family’s drug trade.

A third man had stayed behind on the speedboat at the landing beneath the pier. The wheel man, as the expression went. He would watch the craft and keep it idling, waiting for Yi and Wu to return.

Meanwhile, the crew had done loading and they were backing the truck off the dock, so now Ying stood out in plain view, alone with his clipboard. A tactical squad was embedded here, Ying had been told, but he had not been told where or which group it might be, only to take inventory with the loading crew. But now the loading crew was gone, the dock empty.

He had no cover.

Wu and Yi paused. The man in the Mancuso sweatshirt turned and gave a look in Ying’s direction. There was a brief conversation, then Wu nodded his head and the men all disappeared inside the warehouse.

Ying had the vague feeling they had been discussing him. The hackles rose on his neck.

Now the man in the black sweatshirt reemerged. He strolled toward Ying. Something about the man seemed vaguely familiar—his gait, maybe, his smile. He was with the tact squad, Ying determined. And he’s on his way to direct me out of harm’s way. To tell me to get the hell off this dock.

For the last half hour, Dante had been sitting in the front office: an odd, sprawling room shared until recently by his cousin Gary and his Uncle Salvatore. Before that his uncle and his father had inhabited these quarters for some forty years, and the walls still bore the marks of their presence. Pictures everywhere.

Grandfather Pellicano, in his fishing gear, out on the pier.

Dante’s grandmother in her black shawl.

His mother—before she’d gone mad.

His father.

Himself.

The Pelican—back when he was still with the force. When everything had been his, the streets and the people and the wild smell of the city. The whole goddamn business.

The office was an oversized room, very wide, with doors at either end and an open stairwell dead center. The stairwell led to a storage room below, and from there to a landing beneath the dock: a platform that hovered over the water. He remembered going down there when he was a kid, and sometimes his father and his uncle used to bring down their rods and go fishing in the shallows under the pier.

Dante hit the stairwell switch, and the surge blew the bare bulb that hung over the bottom of the steps. It always happened with that light, ever since he could remember; the circuit was faulty. He turned the corner. It was darker still and the door onto the platform would not open. He could hear the gulls outside and a speedboat idling in the water.

Dante went back upstairs. A little after ten, the door opened and in came three men. Dante recognized Wu and Yi. The third man Dante hadn’t seen before: He was a big man in a company sweatshirt. One of Serles’s undercover operatives, maybe, posing as an employee at the family warehouse. The big man delivered Wu and Yi then went back out the way he had come.

“Where’s the product?” said Wu.

Dante looked out his window toward the parking lot. An old Nova had just pulled in, one of the big models from the early seventies, battered, painted the original chartreuse. Williams was driving.

“Coming,” said Dante.

Fakir had his misgivings. Brother Williams had told him about the Mancuso warehouse, and how the owners were interested in renting out part of the space to the bakery. He’d been skeptical, and as Williams wheeled the ancient Nova into the lot, his skepticism returned. Fakir had grown up in the city, his mother had worked swabbing bowls in North Beach, and he’d never known the Italians to do anyone any special favors. But the bakery needed new quarters, and Brother Williams insisted the owners were sympathetic. More importantly, they were willing to cut a deal.

Brother Williams had changed these last weeks. He’d always had a darkness in him, a quiet place you couldn’t penetrate, but now Fakir sensed a certain urgency. He’d seen it before when men got out of prison, and it wasn’t always a good sign.

“Ready?” said Williams.

“Yes,” said Fakir. “We will see.”

They headed toward the building. Fakir had a memory of coming down to this area when he was a young man, looking for a job—but the landscape had changed. The cannery across the way had been razed, and there were weeds growing in the lot.

Williams held his leather case by the handle, and he walked with his eyes forward and his back straight.

“What do you have in the case?”

“Information about the bakery. Some pamphlets.”

Fakir nodded.

“Also some baked goods. Sister Lakeesha’s cookies. You know—something sweet to pave the way.”

Fakir nodded. “Wise,” he said. “But in my experience, they take the sweets either way. We should be careful about anything we negotiate here.”

“Today’s just about talk,” said Williams. “We take a look around at the facilities. We don’t sign anything.”

They were at the door now and Fakir felt in his gut the same wariness he felt anytime he did business with the man.

“Another thing,” said Williams. “The partners will be here.”

“Partners?”

“A couple of Chinese.”

They were in the lobby now. “What else haven’t you told me?” Fakir asked.

“The orange door,” said Williams. “We just knock and walk in.”

Williams led the way. There were three men inside. An Italian stood next to a stairwell. And two Chinese. One of the Chinese wore khakis, and the other had a black mustache of the type painted on samurai dolls. The man in the khakis smiled and shook his hand, but Fakir didn’t believe the smile. There was something up. Some kind of bullshit.

“What do you have for us?”

Williams stepped forward and put the case on the desk.

“What is this?” Fakir asked.

No one answered.

Williams stepped away, behind Fakir. The man in the khakis snapped open the case. As he did so, the other Chinese reached into his pocket, and in that instant Fakir caught a glimpse of the Italian—and the Italian’s eyes bore into his own, then flitted away, sizing each man there even as he, too, reached beneath his jacket. And Fakir knew then that he had been had, and he understood that the instrument of his betrayal was the man behind him: Williams. He swung around, knowing it was too late. The mechanism had clicked and the barrel was pointed at his head.

Outside, Ying watched the man in the black sweatshirt coming across the dock. He was a big man, but he moved quickly. He had a wide, pugnacious face and a quick smile and very bright eyes, and once again Ying had the feeling he’d seen the man before but could not pin it down.

“Detective Ying?”

“Yes.”

“Back this way.”

He followed the man back between a couple rows of pallets stacked high with wooden crates. The sun was overhead and Ying could hear some wind chimes coming from across the water somewhere, and their sound was mixed with the calling of the gulls.

When the man turned, he held a gun in his hand. Ying recognized him now. The man leaned forward in the same manner he had that night at the New Asia Restaurant and Lounge, when he’d asked Ying for the time. He smiled now just as he’d done then. Ying saw the wristwatch on his gun hand. The same watch. The second hand made its sweep.

“Detective Ying, you have been betrayed.”

The man gave it an instant to sink in, then he fired. Ying lurched back. He might have fallen immediately but the stacked goods broke his backward momentum, and he stood remarkably straight for a long moment, leaning against the pallets.

“Who?” Ying said, or tried to say. He wanted to know who had betrayed him. Dante, he wondered. Or the informer. Or Bill James, down at SI.

He heard the wind chimes, and the sound was like that of the small pagoda chimes he had heard as a child, hanging on his mother’s porch.

He touched his wound. His legs failed him and he slid down the box. He sat on the ground, legs splayed, head against the box. The man stood watching. He smiled as before.

“Who?”

The man leaned over and whispered in Ying’s ear.
Nothing happens that Master Wu does not want to happen
. The man arched himself up now, regarding him with both curiosity and pleasure.
Maybe he will not shoot me again
, Ying thought,
maybe I won’t die
—and for the briefest of moments he thought of his wife, standing by the window in her tennis shorts. The blood was thick now, and a great yearning passed though him—a wave of darkness, and in that darkness he heard the chimes again. This was not a mystery he was going to solve. Too many loose ends, all unraveling. Though there was another part of him still piecing things together. A frayed bit of consciousness, fast dissolving. Miss Lin had told the Wus he was pursuing Ru Shen. But Agent James had told him to come here. . . . Under whose instruction . . . ? Someone with connections to SI . . . Someone with connections to the Wus . . . Someone who wanted him to die here, on this dock . . .

Who?

The man in the black sweatshirt watched. Then Ying’s eyes opened all of the sudden, his body moved with an unusual vehemence, and the man fired into Ying’s torso. The man studied Ying for another instant. He could have killed him last night, but they had wanted his corpse here. Just as they had wanted the woman in the polka-dot dress to fall from her bedroom window. He did not ask the reasons. He did his job. Now he fired a final shot, just for good measure. Then he went to wait for his colleagues down at the boat.

Dante had seen the way Fakir’s face fell into confusion at the sight of the heroin. And he saw Williams reaching for his gun, and Yi, too—and he realized that the company’s stated intention was not their intention at all, and this was not a sting so much as an execution. The company wanted Fakir, and Williams had brought him here. And judging from the quick look that had fallen between Williams and Yi, he guessed that Fakir was not the only one they meant to kill.

There were no videotapes recording the transaction for prosecution later on. No tactical crew waiting to make arrests outside. It was just Yi and Williams, recruited as murderers. And afterward, the company would distance themselves—a drug deal gone bad.

He saw all this in an instant, realizing it before he had time to think out the details. In the same instant, he went for his gun, heading toward that stairway that dropped toward the nether regions beneath the dock.

Just then Fakir swung around, sensing Williams behind him. But Williams shot Fakir in the back. Yi and Dante exchanged fire but Fakir staggered into the way and was hit once more. Meanwhile Mason Wu had dropped to his knees behind the desk.

Dante clambered sideways across the floor. He pitched himself down the stairwell, his body spinning in midair then plummeting downward. He landed at the bottom of the stairs. Williams then appeared at the top, firing wildly into the hole, and Dante was shot. Williams fired again and Dante tried to steady himself. Then he turned the corner and fell face forward into the blackness.

Williams stood at the top of the stairs.

“Did you kill him?” asked Yi.

“I think so.”