Strega - Andrew H. Vachss [47]
I use money orders to pay the yearly registration on the Plymouth. Juan Rodriguez is a straighter shooter: he pays his bills, never gets a parking ticket, and he's never in an accident. He insures the Plymouth through this outfit in the Bronx which specializes in cheap coverage. He even votes regularly. Not only that, he lends me his car whenever I ask him, and he's in no hurry to get it back.
When I have to use the Plymouth on a job, I get the Mole to strip off the paint. The cops are used to seeing old cars in the process of getting painted, especially in the neighborhoods I work. I also have some vinyl sheets in different colors I can just press right over the paint. That kind of cover doesn't last long, but I only use it for a few hours and then pull it off. The Mole has thousands of license plates in his joint—he takes a couple of them and splits them in half, then welds two halves together to make a new set of plates that won't come up on any computer.
Julio wasn't the only reason I had to see the redhead—I had to find out what she knew about me and then go back and erase the tapes.
As I drove through Chinatown, afternoon was fading into evening. The streets were clogged with women making their way home from the sweatshops—their eyes were down and their shoulders slumped, the only hope in their hearts that their children would have a better life. And as they walked from the blackout–curtained rooms, where a straw boss watched their half–paralyzed fingers fly over the sewing machines, to their walk–up apartments with toilets in the hall, other children took over the streets. But these children had no dreams. The Blood Shadows—they took their name from the chalk outline the police coroner draws around a body on the sidewalk. Wearing their trademark black leather coats, silk shirts, and glistening black shoes, they were living proof that hell is cold. The newspapers called them a "street gang," but they were nothing like the bopping gangs from East Harlem or the South Bronx. No cutoff dungaree jackets with their colors on the back for these boys. And no social workers either. Every year Hong Kong disgorges more of them, nobody knows how they get here, but they keep on coming. And America tolerates it like any toxic–waste dump as long as there's money in it for somebody. The Blood Shadows disdain common street mugging—they don't do their gang fighting with knives and chains. Chinatown runs on gambling and dope—organized extortion of these industries forms the Holy Triad, and the Blood Shadows were the sole survivors of a territorial war with other cliques for vulture's rights. The other gangs either merged with the Blood Shadows or got very dead. That left the old guard—what was left of the Tongs.
The old men had first tried to recruit the Hong Kong boys to their own use, but that wasn't working anymore. The old men retreated deeper and deeper into the networks they had spent years developing—but all their political contacts were useless against young boys with flat eyes and hungry guns, kids who didn't play by the rules. The old folks didn't have a chance. They had to import muscle while the kids were growing their own.
I nosed the Plymouth through the alley in back of the warehouse. Clotheslines stretched across the alley, and children ran past, shrieking at each other in a mixture of English and Cantonese. The kids were like birds in a jungle—everything was safe as long as they were making noise. When they went silent, a predator was walking the trails.
I pulled around the front and into the garage. I left the engine running while I pulled the door closed behind me. The Mole had once offered to wire the door so a light would blink and tell Max someone was around, but Max bowed his thanks and said he didn't need it.
I wasn't going to call the redhead from anyplace that could be traced—with cocaine accounting for half the gross national product of the city, half the pay phones in town have been tapped by one agency or another. I'd have to wait for