Kill the Dragon

  Kill the Dragon

  Narc #5

  Marc Olden

  A MysteriousPress.com

  Open Road Integrated Media

  Ebook

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Preview: The Beauty Kill

  Copyright page

  1

  PETER JOE FIRED AT the dragon’s gigantic wooden head. He pulled the trigger rapidly, sending four bullets from the .375 Magnum speeding into the huge, bulging eyes painted red, gold, and blue. The powerful bullets ripped loose chunks of painted wood, sending them spinning crazily in the air.

  Underneath the dragon’s head, a seventeen-year-old Chinese boy screamed and died, spinning around and falling into the boy behind him, driving him back on his heels. As the roar from the four shots bounced off the walls and ceiling of the empty high-school gymnasium, Peter Joe shouted, “Now! Kill the dragon!”

  Immediately, the three teen-age Chinese boys with him raced toward the dragon, firing as they ran, eyes bright with the nervous thrill of killing. Under the twenty-foot-long dragon of cloth, wood, and papier-mâché, six members of a rival teen-age gang struggled vainly to throw it off. Too late.

  As they died, the dragon came to life for brief, bloody seconds. It moved with the jerky panic motions of the doomed teen-agers as they spun and screamed under the impact of bullets tearing holes in the blue-and-gold cloth.

  The six teen-agers scrambled to throw off the dragon and failed, falling down fast and hard, feeling the sudden pain of hot metal powering into their legs, backs, throats, faces. They were dying, they knew it and cried out against it, their bodies contorting grotesquely under the huge cloth.

  Now the dragon lay bleeding on the highly polished floor, its bullet-gouged head still fierce in death. Both of its eyes had been shot away, revealing plain wood around jagged empty sockets. Legs in bloodstained jeans and sneakers protruded from under the bullet-ripped covering. The dragon was turning a dark red where it drank the blood of the teen-agers beneath it.

  Peter Joe stared down at the covered bodies. They were members of the Flaming Spears, a rival gang in New York’s Chinatown, and eighteen-year-old Peter Joe, with three members of his Sun Eagles, had executed them on the orders of Gabriel Ling Tsu, Chinatown’s biggest dope smuggler.

  No problem, thought Peter Joe. Hit them quick, then move out. They won’t be marching in any parade tomorrow. We’re the biggest gang in Chinatown, working for the man dealing more dope than about anyone in New York City, and these clowns rip us off for two kilos of heroin.

  He tucked the Magnum in the small of his back. It’s almost finished, he thought. Just one more thing. Turning to the other three Sun Eagles he snapped, “Move!” One word. It was enough.

  They ran across the hard wood floor, shoes echoing loudly in the huge room. Peter Joe followed them, backing up slowly, his eyes still on the dragon-covered teen-agers.

  He reached the door, turned, and picked up the soda bottle full of gasoline. Half of a handkerchief was jammed into its opening. The lighter was in his hand, and he spun its tiny wheel into orange flame, touching the flame to the handkerchief. Spinning around, the flame throwing tiny, flickering shadows on his intense young face, he drew his right arm back as far as he could, then tossed the fire bomb high in the air, his eyes following its fiery arc as it sped toward the dragon.

  It exploded on landing, a loud whoosh sound followed by a roar, as a huge red fireball swallowed the dead dragon and everything under it. Flames shot up toward the ceiling and spread out across the floor. From somewhere in the crackling flames a high-pitched scream came at them as a shrill voice, tight with agony and fear of death, screamed, “Mother! Mother!”

  Peter Joe smiled, his clear blue eyes catching tiny points of orange light from the flames. Finished. As ordered. He felt no pity for those he had just killed. He had done his job, and done it well. All he felt was satisfaction mixed with contempt for anyone foolish enough to oppose him.

  He flinched, instinctively drawing back from the awesome heat now fast filling the gymnasium. The smoke was beginning to burn his eyes. Shit, he needed air. Grinning once more at the funeral pyre, he turned and moved toward the door, where the three other Sun Eagles stood watching the fire.

  They quickly parted to let him walk between them.

  The Mafia capo and the Chinese dope smuggler were talking a four-million-dollar deal. They sat in an empty Chinatown restaurant owned by the Chinese, Gabriel Ling Tsu. He dealt strictly in brown rock heroin, smuggled into New York from Hong Kong, and tonight’s deal was the most important one he had ever made.

  That’s why he’d had Peter Joe and his Sun Eagles kill the teen-agers. If people thought his organization weak, they wouldn’t do business with him.

  “You sure it’s been settled?” asked the Mafia capo. He was Johnny Fist, born Giovanni Fistello. At five-feet-nine, he weighed 287 pounds and breathed loudly though his mouth. His forty-seven-year-old face was made smooth and round by fat, which bunched up around his eyes, making them small and piglike.

  “Yes,” said Gabriel Ling Tsu, folding his hands in satisfaction. “Tonight. About an hour ago.” He turned in his chair, smiled at Peter Joe standing behind him, then turned forward again, his folded hands resting on a red-and-white-checkered tablecloth. He and Johnny Fist sat alone at the table. Behind each man stood three others.

  The Mafia capo had brought his soldiers, large, faceless men who never smiled and whose eyes stayed on Gabriel Ling Tsu. Behind Gabriel stood Peter Joe, born Peter Chou in Hong Kong, and two of his Sun Eagles. Dealing in “brown sugar,” street name for brown rock heroin, had earned Gabriel the nickname “Sweet Sue” in the drug world. But no one called the slim, fifty-year old tong leader that to his face.

  Johnny Fist nodded his head at the news that Gabriel had taken care of the people who had killed one of his couriers and grabbed two kilos of brown heroin. That was the Marc of a good man. Anybody rips you off, you take care of them. Otherwise, it gets around that you ain’t so strong, then you got problems. Then everybody tries to stomp you into the ground.

  “This kid here, he take care of that for you?” The fat capo looked up at Peter Joe and smiled. Peter Joe looked at him without smiling back. The teen-aged killer was icy, totally controlled, and tenacious in refusing to allow himself any emotions. He was without fear, and he either had contempt for people or he used them. At times he would smile, thinking that one day soon Gabriel, the great Gabriel, would learn that Peter Joe was using him.

  “Peter Joe?” said Gabriel, allowing himself a small smile of pride. “Yes, he is extremely dependable.”

  Sure, thought the cool, teen-aged killer, whose reputation for cold violence had made him feared in Chinatown. Sure, I’m extremely dependable. For as long as it suits me to be.

  An ice cube, thought Johnny Fist, who had heard of the kid’s reputation. Anyone who turns his back on that round, blue-eyed baby face ain’t gonna wake up in the morning. In checking out Gabriel—Sweet Sue—he’d learned a lot about his organization. Sweet Sue owned real estate, gambling clubs, restaurants, and nightclubs, and all of that had made him rich. In addition, he headed the Blue Tiger Tong, largest in Chinatown.

  He also smuggled more “brown sugar” into the country t
han any other chink in New York City. That was making him even richer. Up to now, the chinks had been bringing the stuff in for themselves, smoking it mostly, rarely injecting it. Now things were different.

  You couldn’t get any white heroin, the European stuff. Those fucking federal narcotics agents. Making seizures in Europe and the States, leaning on everybody and locating the labs in France that turned opium base into white heroin. Then closing them down.

  That kind of shit was bad for business. You couldn’t buy enough heroin in New York City to get a flea high. What street heroin you got was weak, only one percent skag. So, what the hell, you go to the chinks and you try to do business. They got the stuff, but they can’t distribute it in New York City except to each other.

  The blacks, Cubans, other Latins—they controlled dope these days, heroin, cocaine, pills. You name it, and the niggers and spics are selling it and getting rich. The Italians? shit. They’ve been sucking hind tit for years, thought Johnny Fist, and why? Because of the old man, that’s why.

  The old man. Boss of bosses. Ruler of the Mafia in New York, and that’s the same as running it in fifty states. The old man. That skinny, dried-up bastard didn’t want any of the families dealing dope, even though some of them did it anyway. Still, a lot didn’t, and all because he was against it.

  And why? Because he was scared, that’s why. Scared that narcotics would bring the heat down, draw narcs and cops by the boatload, which could fuck up other rackets.

  So, no dope. The old man’s orders. But the old man wasn’t getting any younger. He was sick, in his seventies, with a good chance he wouldn’t see the old year out and the new year in. A lot of people in the society planned to use that to their advantage. At least ten guys wanted the top spot. Johnny Fist was different He wanted it, and he was going to get it.

  With help from Sweet Sue and “brown sugar.”

  Gabriel adjusted blue-tinted, rimless glasses on his small nose. For him there was no such thing as enough money. He wanted all he could get. “Delivery date. We have settled that, no?”

  Johnny Fist nodded, the gesture creating more rolls of fat under his chin. “Ten days. One hundred kilos, forty thousand each. You sure about the quality?”

  Gabriel nodded, pleased at the idea of getting four million dollars ten days from now, but controlling himself, letting the pleasure stay hidden inside. Control. A man must have control, he thought. Control yourself, and you control others.

  “Forty-five percent,” he said. “No lower than that.” Brown rock heroin, coarse-grained and the color of Ovaltine, was relatively impure heroin. That was the reason for the color. It was grown in the Golden Triangle—Burma, Laos, Thailand—processed in Bangkok, shipped to Hong Kong, and from there smuggled to America. Gabriel and Johnny Fist both knew that there was no way a white man was going to get direct overseas connections with Asia. Asians would always deal with Asians.

  No sweat, thought Johnny Fist. Over here, I’ve got him by the balls if he wants to get bigger. No chink could come up with a distribution setup in this country that can put his stuff on every street corner. You had to be American and you had to know people to do that.

  But we need each other, me and Sweet Sue. We need each other, because when I kill me some blacks and some spics and take over their distribution setup and customers, I’m going to need something to sell.

  That was Johnny Fist’s plan. He was going to war just as soon as he got his four million dollars’ worth of brown rock heroin from Gabriel. Killing anybody now would be dumb, because he had nothing to sell. In ten days he would have something to sell, and that’s when it made sense to start wasting blacks and Cubans and take over their business.

  First I take over dope in this town, then, with the promises I got from some of the other guys and my cutting them in on a piece of what I take from the niggers and spics, I take over the old man’s spot. Then I become boss of bosses. Me. Fat Johnny Fist.

  Gabriel’s hands were palm-down, flat on the table. He knew of the fat man’s ambition, knew that he wanted to take over from blacks and Cubans, then become the number-one mafioso in this very large city. That was fine with Gabriel. He would like to see that happen. Because then Johnny Fist would need more drugs, more brown rock heroin, and there was only one place he could get it from.

  They were using each other, exchanging something for the privilege. Johnny Fist was trading money for dope and power. Gabriel Ling Tsu was trading dope for money and power here in Chinatown.

  “About the place,” said Johnny Fist.

  “No problem. As you know, I’ve lost a couple of couriers, both to federal agents and to certain private businessmen. So I prefer to make one delivery to you, just one. Eliminates risk. We’ll arrange time and place the day before. But you have my word, the heroin will be here in ten days.”

  “I’m countin’ on that.” Johnny Fist’s small, piercing eyes were on Gabriel’s face, wondering just how far he could trust this polite, funny-smelling chink. What the hell kind of cologne was he using, anyway? Smelled like a whore’s armpit.

  This was their fifth meeting. Each had felt out the other, asking questions, making mental notes, doing hurried research between meetings, and finding out all that was necessary to bring them to this final commitment.

  Chink’s got the stuff, all right, thought the fat capo. Brings it in regular, with help from a mystery Chinese connection called “the Monk,” who’s supposed to have some kind of pull with the Chinese government. The Monk. The Italians didn’t know his real name. Just the Monk. He lines up the dope in the Orient, sees that it gets where it should go, maybe even gets a cut from Gabriel here, thought Johnny Fist.

  Damn. The Monk could come up behind Johnny Fist, bite him in the ass, and he still wouldn’t know him. All them fucking chinks look alike, except for the kid here, him with those weird blue eyes. Who ever heard of blue eyes on a Chinaman? But this kid has ’em, that he does.

  A hard-ass, this one, thought the capo. Heavy rep down here. Good hit man. Gun, knife, even that kung-fu shit. He’s supposed to be the best around at that. Wonder how he’d do against Carmen here. Carmen, two hundred pounds, an ex-boxer with bad legs and no endurance, was Johnny Fist’s bodyguard and chauffeur, jobs traditionally going together in the Mafia.

  Yeah, that would be something to see. Kid’s got a rep, but Carmen has fast hands and maybe forty pounds on him. Yeah, Carmen would put him away, that’s for sure.

  “Ten days, Mr. Fist.” Gabriel smiled. He was always polite, and now that he was the first dope dealer in Chinatown to go into business with the Mafia on a large scale, he could afford to be even more polite. Tonight’s four million dollars was just the beginning.

  “Ten days, Mr. Ling Tsu,” said Johnny Fist. He grinned; his thin mouth spreading wide. He had almost called the chink Sweet Sue. Bet he would have flipped his fucking eggroll over that.

  2

  PANIC WAS COLD AND huge inside him. He was going to die right here in Washington, D.C. He knew it, and he resented dying so stupidly. Fucking resented it. Why? Why do I have to die in such a dumb, shitty way? thought John Bolt.

  He was on his side, and moving, mouth open, eyes bulging and giving his face an expression of sudden shock and surprise. Instinctively, his right hand still clutched the Colt .45 APC Commander. Soon he would drop it, and it would all be over.

  Five back-up agents were watching him, shouting and running toward him, but there wasn’t a goddamn thing they could do but yell and watch him die. He was scared, and soon, soon, he knew he’d be screaming louder than anybody around him.

  John Bolt was being dragged across the concrete floor of a huge garage, the small loop on the left sleeve of his overcoat caught on the door handle of a speeding limousine. The driver could smash him into a steel pillar or another car or squash him against a cement wall like a bug. In seconds. Bye-bye.

  Tires squealed as the car turned sharply left. One of Bolt’s shoes came off, bouncing behind the car, and he felt a sharp pain in his
foot. The exit had been blocked by an agent’s car. Rushing air flattened Bolt’s hair against his skull, watering his eyes and blurring his vision.

  His left arm was killing him. It hurt from the armpit down to his wrist, then back up to his brain. The goddamn thing was being torn loose. Cars, running men, walls, steel pillars—all whirled past his eyes in one huge blur of many colors. He tensed, cringing, waiting for the impact he knew would come. Concrete, steel—which would it be?

  Pain raced up his left leg, into his hip, and his left foot felt as though it were on fire. His clothes were being shredded by friction with the concrete, and his skin was coming off with the cloth.

  Then …

  The car braked. Braked!

  Bolt, his ears ringing from the noise of speeding wheels and squealing tires, breathed deeply, this chest rising and falling rapidly. The gun. He still had it.

  He turned to face the car door, his stomach now tight against it, the agony racing from his left armpit across his chest and his back. Clenching his teeth, he peered in the open window, and through blurred pain saw the Chinese chauffeurs perspiring face. As the chauffeur turned to look behind him, hand reaching for the gear shift, a voice from the back seat shouted in Chinese, and the chauffeur’s head snapped toward the narc.

  The chauffeur’s right hand dropped to the seat, clawing at the nickel-plated .32 he carried on the seat between his legs.

  A wave of hot black pain squeezed the narc’s brain, and he closed his eyes against it, feeling it burn his body and try to drag him down. Opening his eyes wide and breathing loudly through his mouth, he saw the small, bright gun come up in the chauffeur’s black-leather-gloved fist.

  With an incredible effort of will, Bolt brought his right hand up, shoving his arm stiffly through the open window, pulling the trigger again and again and again. The noise from the heavy handgun, trapped in the small space of the limousine’s front seat, was explosive. The smell of gunpowder was harsh and sickening.

  The chauffeur’s face exploded into red pulp and pieces of yellow bone as the .45’s bullets destroyed his skull. He went backward fast, his body falling hard against the far door, his right hand flopping onto the horn and staying there, pressing down on it and sending a flat, ugly noise throughout the garage.