Deadfall

“I know you consider yourself a ballerina, but just sit still till they get this moving by a professional.”

I thought I was graceful enough to be able to extricate myself—with Mike’s help—before someone with an engineering degree was roused and reported in.

I unlatched the door and peeked out over the edge, then pulled back in immediately.

“I’ll never trust you again,” I said, collapsing back onto the floor. “I’m forty feet up, at least.”

“At least forty,” he said. “But things could be worse. You’re not dangling over Tiger Mountain.”

It was almost an hour before the workmen showed up. The tram was physically closer to the point of departure, so they figured how to get the bucket started again, going in reverse.

“Close your eyes,” Mike called out to me, as the car started to move.

“They’ve been closed since I was stupid enough to look out at you.”

“I’ll catch you when you land, Coop. Don’t kick the bucket along the way.”





FIFTY


“Everything aches,” I said.

Mike had opened a can of chicken noodle soup when we reached my apartment at midnight, and it had helped settle my stomach and my nerves.

Then I took a steaming hot bath and let him wrap me in a huge towel, holding me close to him, when I finally stepped out of the tub.

“Better rub something on those scratches on your face,” Mike said. “You’d think the bushes had fingernails on them, the way they scratched you.”

I covered my face with lotion, hoping the aloe would calm the red marks, and I dabbed some on Mike’s nose too.

Mercer and Vickee were waiting for us in the living room. They had helped themselves to drinks and mixed a vodka martini for Mike—crisp and cold—when we came out to join them. I was beyond alcohol at this point.

“Blood ivory,” Mercer said. “That’s the reason Paul Battaglia died.”

I stretched out on the sofa, taking a cashmere throw from the back of it, covering myself to stay warm.

“Was it Kwan?” I asked. “Was it George Kwan behind the whole thing?”

“Kwan was the puppet master, Alex,” Mercer said. “He was the man pulling all the strings.”

“And doing it for a very long time,” Vickee said, “cloaked in the respectability of his grandfather’s business reputation.”

“You’ll have to clear it up for me,” I said. “Did you get him today?”

“Nine tonight,” she said. “At JFK, on his way to Hong Kong.”

I put my head in my hands, shaking it from side to side as I looked down.

“How long has this been going on?” I asked.

“Kwan’s not talking,” Mercer said. “I’ll give you the pieces we’ve got so far.”

“Doesn’t matter if he keeps mum,” Mike said. “We’d only get the hard-luck story from this guy. Kid on the streets. Chinatown, Ghost Shadows. Killed a man by the time he was fifteen.”

“Yeah, so his grandfather takes over back in Hong Kong. Gives George the best of everything—including his own name—educates him, and sets him up in the family business,” Mercer said. “Kwan Enterprises. Legitimate—the real deal.”

“But this guy was always looking to break bad,” Mike said. “Am I right?”

“Right. That’s why he was positioning himself to grab a piece of the Savage dynasty, when it was beginning to crumble,” Mercer said. “It gave him all the global reach he needed, and he could get it done on the cheap because he already had deals going in China, India, Pakistan, and even in Africa.”

“What kind of deals?” I asked.

“The family had factories in some of the cheap labor markets,” Mercer said.

“I remember that, from the Savage investigation.”

“Well, George folded some drug dealing into the enterprise,” Mercer went on. “They were in all the right places for their legit businesses, but he saw the chance to seize on the drug connection to make an even greater fortune.”

“Nothing new under the sun,” I said.

“Don’t give us Shakespeare in the middle of the night, babe,” Mike said, stirring his drink with his finger.

“Ecclesiastes, Detective,” I said. “The Old Testament. My book.”

“Meaning what, in this case?”

“Kwan Enterprises has been around so long, I bet if you trace it back six or seven generations, we find George’s ancestors were involved in the opium trade, just as we suspected.”

“The dirty underbelly of the evolution of global trading,” Mercer said.

“Scores of families made their wealth trading opium through Hong Kong in the 1800s,” I said. “The Kwans, no doubt, just like the Delanos.”

“Delanos?” Mike asked.

“Yes. As in Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It’s what made his grandfather rich,” I said. “It probably did the same for the early Kwan tradesmen. I bet it’s how they built the original export-import business.”

“I’m on it,” Vickee said.

“How about the animals?” I asked. “Do you have any idea how that started?”

“We don’t know when,” Mercer said. “But it’s all about supply and demand, like Deirdre Wright and Stuart Liebman both told us. The endangered species can be sold for a fortune, as we know, and the products—like horns and bones and tusks—are worth their weight in gold.”

“Or blood,” I said.

“Easy for Kwan,” Mike said. “Same markets, same shipments as his kilos of heroin, same porous borders in countries with corrupt politicians.”

I was playing back the mental tape of tonight’s encounter at the zoo. “How does he enlist a small army of workers here, like Henry Dibaba?”

“First of all,” Mercer said, “he can afford to pay them. There are kids like Dibaba all over this city, looking for their first dime.”

“But armed with rifles?”

“Pretty unusual. They do have an instructor, though, and they’ve been training at a shooting range in Brooklyn.”

“Tell me it’s Pedro Echevarria,” Mike said, high-fiving his friend. “Did I nail that one or not?”

“Indeed you did,” Mercer said. “There’s a whole bunch of sharpshooters in training, and I’ve got a good list of their names. All taking lessons from Echevarria.”

“The Grand Slam sheep hunter,” I said. “The man who was supposed to go shooting with Battaglia next week.”

“That dude, exactly,” Mercer said, giving me a thumbs-up.

“Now, how do you suppose he got mixed up with George Kwan?”

“It all came together in the record checks, once we had Kwan’s birth name, today.”

“How?” I asked.

“George Kwan—birth name Ko-Lin Kwan—told you his mother was Maria Alvarez,” Mercer said. “A Mexican woman George’s father met in LA when he emigrated here.”

“Yes. She left his father because of his gang involvement.”

“When his mother returned to LA,” Mercer said, “she married an old friend from Mexico, whose surname is Echevarria.”

It took me a few seconds to process the connection. “So Pedro is George Kwan’s half brother?” I said, leaning back against the soft sofa cushion.

“He is.”

“Kwan’s personal sharpshooter,” I said. “A blood brother, whom he could trust with every aspect of the deadly work.”

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