Free Year of the Dog by Henry Chang Page B

sympathy.
    She paused, only to say, “I’m sorry to blow this out on you, Jack.”
    “It’s a rough day,” he said. “I had a couple bad ones myself—”
    “So my parents tossed you a luau ?” Alex interjected, jerking the conversation another way.
    Alex had hooked him up, he recalled, with the Hawaiian vacation package, when he’d needed the break badly, after his troubles in the Fifth. He’d been wounded, but still brought back a perp from San Francisco to cap the murder of Chinatown tong godfather Uncle Four. There had been a promotion at the end of it all.
    “Yeah.” Jack smiled, remembering. “Roast pig , poi, mahi-mahi , the works.”
    She nodded, smiled, then the hardness came back into her face.
    “The kid who was the shooter,” she said sourly, “had three outstanding warrants, and should have never been released from juvie. He had a history of violence and somebody screwed up.”
    The phone jangled again.
    Jack could see it was important and started to leave.
    I’ll call you, he mimed with his index and pinky fingers, pausing at the door.
    In turn, Alex pointed at the plastic containers. “Thanks for the bok tong go ,” she said quietly, smiling a sad smile as Jack backed away.

Day for Night

    The sixteen-story mirrored glass office building at Two Mott Street was the tallest building in the area, anchored at street level by a Citibank branch and a tourist-trade gift shop. The On Yee Merchants Consortium was rumored to be one of the landlords, and they occupied the entire third floor, as well as the penthouse level. The tong made their arrangements in the penthouse, Lucky remembered, as he strode through the lobby.
    It was the Ecstasy that was powering him through the nights, but now in the daylight, it kept him from the sleep he needed.
    Lucky rode the closet-sized freight elevator to the roof landing and went to the far end. He took a deep gulp of the cold morning air, exhaled, and torched up a sensimilla joint, sucking deeply so that the tip burned a bright orange. The smoke settled him, allowed him to slow down, to see the bigger picture of the forces circling around him. When he looked out over the jumbled patchwork of rooftops, the expanse of Chinatown reached for the horizon. To the east, across the square, he saw the growing enclave of Fukienese Chinese immigrants, their Fuk Chow Native Association building flying the red flag of the People’s Republic high above its tiled pagoda balcony.
    Lucky remembered a childhood time when mainland supporters, the commies, would never dare fly the crimson flag for fear of being attacked and having their businesses vandalized or torched. Men wearing masks would come around, guns in their waistbands, to administer a beat down or a stabbing.
    Times had changed.
    While the old men of the tongs dithered with their deals, the young men who contested the streets had considerations of their own: controling the dirty money flowing through their rackets.
    Lucky sucked heartily on the jay, scanning the view of old Chinatown, the core streets that the long ago Chinese bachelors first called home, eking out small lives under the heels of the whites, who didn’t like them and didn’t want them here. Still, the community grew. Now, the Fukienese were driving the boundaries north and east, their numbers swelling into the tenements that had housed the WASPs, the Irish, Italians, and Jews, and the Toishanese and Cantonese before them.
    The windy rooftop refreshed him, and the marijuana brought him back down. His thoughts were still scattered from the Ecstasy, but he was beginning to see a pattern forming. As street boss of the Ghost Legion, Lucky was no student of history, but he was an admirer of the Romans, and before them, of the Mongolian hordes. He’d seen the videotapes Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, with Chinese subtitles, and The Great Khan, both movies left behind by some loser in Number Seventeen gambling basement.
    He’d learned that the Roman