Flood - Andrew H. Vachss [128]
I pulled the lapels of my jacket to show Max I was talking about clothes, made the sign of something falling softly through the air, bowed deeply to show my appreciation of the robes he had given to Flood.
Max dropped his own head in the briefest of bows, flowed into his own version of Flood’s crazy kata and ended with a two-finger strike, his hand darting in and out so quickly that only the rush of the silk sleeve ripping through dead air alerted me. He looked the question at me—could Flood do that? Could she finish the job, or was she just a dancer? So I told him about Goldor and the Cobra and what I wanted to do, how I wanted it all to end—a hiss came from Max. He was warming up.
He followed me to the workbench where we cooked up another stencil out of some cardboard we kept lying around. I found a dozen or so of the little spray cans and pointed toward the car, made signs to show all the doors opening at once and people jumping out, walking down the street looking straight ahead—walking like warriors. I explained what the spray cans were for as Max smiled.
It was still about a half hour before six so Max and I got out the cards and we played gin until it was time. My mind was on other things but I still beat him—Max is too superstitious to count cards like I had showed him. I hooked up the on-line phone set and dialed the gunrunners. James answered on the first ring—I guess he does all the public speaking for the two. “Yes?”
“It’s me. I have a proposition for you. I’ll pick you up in two hours, right where you are, and we’ll talk, okay?”
“Certainly,” he said, and I rang off.
I gestured to Max that we were going to meet the same characters who had been in the warehouse before. He made the sign of a man reaching for a gun and I told him no—it wasn’t going to be a duel, just more talk. Seated at the table, I reached for an imaginary steering wheel and turned it a few times as if I were peering through a windshield. I looked a question at Max, pointing first at him then out into the street. He nodded, he would get us a car. I pointed at my watch and Max held up one finger—it would take him about an hour.
Max faded out the door and I hooked up the phone again and called Flood. “Hi, baby.”
“Hi. Are you working?”
“Working hard.”
“Anything yet?”
“I got most of the ingredients, but . . . uh . . . the cake’s not in the oven yet.”
“That’s good—I’m very hungry.”
“Me too. I’ll be working late tonight. Okay to come by when I’m finished?”
“Yes, call first. How late?”
“After midnight.”
“I love you, Burke.”
“You don’t have to motivate me—I told you I was on the job.”
“Don’t be a coward—you can say you love me too.”
“Later,” I said, and hung up. I disconnected the phone, went back inside, and looked through the paper Max had left. I couldn’t even concentrate on the race results. Stupid Flood.
45
THE ASHTRAY WAS filling up by the time Max roared into the warehouse at the wheel of a Blood Shadows war-wagon—a huge black Buick Electra four-door sedan. The Chinese street gangs prefer the four-door models so the maximum number of shooters can hit the street at the same time. The Blood Shadows all come from Hong Kong with burning ambitions and psychopathic personalities as standard equipment. Thirty years ago a Chinese street gang was about as common as a forgiving loan shark. But in one quantum leap the Hong Kong kids overtook their ethnic counterparts all over the city, passing up territorial warfare and gang rape for the more practical activities of extortion and homicide. Shaking down their elders with complete disregard for the consequences, these kids made the old Tong Wars look like a polite debate—the intensity of their disputes was always measured in body counts. The only time they killed Caucasians was by accident, so they weren’t considered a major law-enforcement problem.
Chinatown was their base, but they were moving into Queens and Brooklyn,