Free The Way of Things by Tony Milano

CHAPTER ONE
    Spiderhead
     
    Some days are better than
others. This did not feel like one of those days. It was six in the
morning on a rainy day in New York and the city's finest were
already at work, in fact they had been up all night. That is how
stakeouts work. The department likes to keep things simple, just
two detectives sitting in a car, no backup, just a cup of coffee to
keep the wheels of justice rolling forward.
    Detective John Nash and his new partner
Detective Tommy James have been keeping an eye on The Green Dragon
restaurant in Chinatown. It is a known hangout for Chinese
mobsters, unlike the street thugs you see on the corners, only the
truly connected Triads have access to what this restaurant has to
offer. The city documents will tell you that a little old couple
from China owns the place, but every cop and criminal knows who
really owns it, Chenglei Chung.
    Chenglei Chung is a big time Triad leader
from Hong Kong. It is estimated that he is in the top one hundred
of the richest men on the planet. You gotta love a rags to riches
story like his. He started out as a bagman for some no-name boss in
Hong Kong and worked his way up the ranks by dealing drugs, selling
guns and murdering other mobsters when it was necessary, until
there was only one more step on that ladder, his boss. Rumor has it
he tossed his boss off of the second highest building in Hong Kong
while his boss's wife watched and screamed, he liked the screaming
so much that he threw her off next.
    John Nash was a highly decorated New York
City police detective. He made his bones just recently during a
bank robbery that he stumbled across by accident. He was standing
in line at First National waiting to talk to someone about his lost
debit card when three masked men rushed into the bank. They shot
the door guard before he could say anything. In less than two
minutes they had everyone face down on the ground and they were
attempting to crack the big safe in the back. Not a very bright
thing to do in the middle of the day on a Tuesday. There was easily
twenty customers and employees in the building. John managed to
call his Police Chief on his cell phone and get the building
surrounded before the crew could get their slimy hands on any of
the loot.
    The whole event lasted about thirty minutes
and ended with SWAT coming in the back door and dropping the two
members of the crew that were working on the safe. John managed to
distract one of the crew by dropping his badge on the floor. The
masked man flipped out when he saw the badge and he got close
enough to John for him to wrestle the gun away from him and get the
guy in a choke hold, it was not pretty but it worked just the same.
For his actions he received a few medals and he got to shake the
hand of the Mayor.
    John was not always a New York cop, he
started his career in San Francisco walking a beat like any other
rookie. He did not mind doing the little work like looking for pick
pockets during parades or directing traffic when the system went
down. To John it was all a part of being a cop. He loved it.
    His wife, Victoria, did not share his
enthusiasm for the force. She had been with John since he was in
the Army and to her this was just another version of that horrible
experience. She used to stay up late at night waiting for him to
come home from long deployments overseas. She would sit there
looking out the window waiting for his car to roll up the driveway,
it never did. Sometimes the phone would ring and she would be too
scared to answer it for fear of the news that he had been killed in
some country that she had never heard of, or worse that he had been
captured.
    When John joined the police force Victoria
was happy for him but as time went on she found herself doing the
same routine as before, sitting and waiting. She thought that John
would spend more time at home when their baby girl, Lucy, was born.
But that is just not how the real world works. John felt the burn
to work harder and to