Riding the Snake (1998) (9 page)

"But . . ."

"The alarm went off earlier yesterday. The cops were here. They shut it off. Now your front-door lock is broken. I heard someone inside. Gimme the keys to the pool house."

She reached into her purse and gave him her key ring, then he moved quickly up the driveway, his heart pounding.

Who the hell is pulling this shit, anyway?

He got to the pool house and silently unlocked the glass door and slid it open. He slipped inside, then slid it shut. His brother kept his hunting rifles and some target pistols locked up in there. Wheeler went to the cabinet where the guns were stored, but none of the keys on Liz's ring worked in the lock. Finally, he found the gun cabinet key on the ledge over the door.

He opened the cabinet and took down two 9mm Beretta target pistols, both nine-shot semiautomatics. He grabbed a box of ammo, checked the clips on both guns. They were empty. He started thumbing cartridges into the first clip, dropping four or five in the process. They rolled loudly on the white terrazzo floor. His hands were trembling. He slammed the first clip home and tromboned the slide. He had the second clip loaded with five rounds when he heard a noise out by the pool... a lounge chair scraped. He stopped loading the second gun and moved silently to the door and peered out.

Sitting by the pool, having a cigarette like he owned the place, was a Chinese boy. It was hard to tell at this distance, but he looked to be only seventeen or eighteen. He was very skinny and dressed in black: baggy black gangster jeans, a shiny black windbreaker, and a red headband.

Holding his breath, Wheeler watched the boy, his heart slamming harder in his chest.

"Breathe, you dirt-eating asshole," a Southern voice in his memory instructed. It was his old Special Forces training officer, Kale McCoy.

McCoy had told the platoon in his South Carolina drawl that under combat circumstances, your body gets fed large jolts of adrenaline, which causes you to burn oxygen faster. If you don't breathe, you'll get light-headed. "Light-headed gyrenes end up as junk on a bunk," he had warned them.

Wheeler took a deep breath, tried to steady his nerves.

He watched, not sure what to do, as another youth came out of the den in the main house. He could faintly hear their voices floating across the garden in the night air. They were speaking in Chinese; a singsongy, high-pitched melody of language and laughter. Then both of them put out their cigarettes and went back inside.

"The fuck am I supposed t'do now?" Wheeler said to himself. He chambered the second gun, then tucked it in the back of his belt. He held the other in his right hand. "This is nuts," he whispered, and heard his own voice echo in the empty pool house.

He'd been poised on that cliff wondering what he should do for too long. Suddenly it seemed clear. He was going to find out what was going on; why his brother's secretary had been murdered and why these Chinese boys were in Pres's house. He was going to find out who was pulling all this shit and, more important, why.

After many months of soul-searching, gut-wrenching indecision, Wheeler Cassidy, Jr., slipped his watch off his wrist to protect the expensive timepiece and put it into his pocket. Then he slid open the glass door to his brother's pool house and finally got into the game.

Chapter
7.

Night Maneuvers

"THIS IS A NIGHT maneuver. Work on purple vision," the six
-
I foot-four South Carolina Platoon Commander screamed A in Wheeler's distant memory.

Wheeler stopped and gave his eyes a minute to adjust to the night, then, as he'd been taught fifteen years before, he softened his focus slightly and let his peripheral vision come into sharper play. Suddenly, his bowels went soft. He needed to shit. Combat runnies. Damn. Fuck it!

He forced himself to ignore the feeling. He moved slowly, keeping his back to the wall the way his Special Forces training had instructed, keeping the light in front of him so his shadow wouldn't announce him. Then another voice inside his head spoke. The Prankmeister wanted to go home and have a tall one.

"What're you doing, you asshole? What're you trying to prove? Cut the crap. You're no hero."

He moved up to the glass door that led into his brother's den and stopped, remembering something important.

"When you're goin' through a kill zone, you become a snake.

Slide on your belly, scope the fire zone before you clear your position."

Wheeler dropped to his stomach by the den door and slowly slid forward to look around the threshold into the room. He could see the legs of tables and chairs, but nobody seemed to be in there, at least as far as he could tell.

He slid the door open from the floor, inching it slowly so it wouldn't make noise. Then he held his breath and listened.

He lay there as he'd been taught, his ears probing for any sound that would give him an edge. After what seemed like an eternity, he wriggled into the den, careful not to scrape his belt buckle on the metal track of the sliding door.

The den had been thoroughly searched. His brother's antique
-
book collection was emptied onto the floor. Old leather volumes of Dickens and Poe were spilled, face open, on the carpet. The drawers in the big TV credenza across from the bar had been pulled out and dumped. Then he heard distant voices upstairs speaking in Chinese.... He froze while the Prankmeister shrieked at him: "Hey asshole, listen to me! How's it gonna help anybody if you get killed? You're a fuck-up! They threw you outta Special Forces, or maybe you forgot that?"

Wheeler moved slowly in the den, staying on his belly, remembering how they taught him to clear a building. "A well
-
trained force will deploy. Watch your back," his Platoon Commander cautioned.

Still on his belly, Wheeler snaked out into the hall. Then suddenly, a racket in the kitchen. Someone was opening and closing drawers, spilling the contents loudly out onto the tile floor. Simultaneously he heard two, maybe three more voices upstairs, speaking Chinese. He felt a tinge of panic.

"You're in between two fire zones. Preserve your exit line. Regroup."

He back-slid out of the hall, into the den again, and sat up with his back against the curtain wall.

And then the intruder in the kitchen moved down the hall, past the den door that Wheeler was hiding behind. Wheeler could see the man's Nike tennis shoes and black pant legs as he climbed up the stairs.

"Go vertical," his training officer whispered.

Wheeler slowly stood up and edged toward the stairs. He put his weight carefully on the first step, thankful that the house was new and the staircase didn't creak. He kept his back pressed against the wall and began slowly climbing the stairs, remembering to keep his knees bent for quick lateral movement.

"This is nuts, Wheeler. You're gonna get killed here. Use your fucking head."

Wheeler crept slowly up onto the landing. So far, so good. He could hear drawers opening and closing in the master suite. He had turned to move in that direction when, unexpectedly, somebody came out of Hollis's room behind him. Wheeler spun with the Beretta in front of him and found himself face to face with a young Chinese man. He was about five-six, rail-thin and around nineteen, dressed in black with a red bandanna.

There was a moment frozen in time while the two just stared at each other. Then the Chinese intruder started to reach under his jacket . . . and Wheeler aimed the Beretta directly at the boy's chest. The drama was playing without sound until the Chinese boy yanked his gun out and screamed something in Chinese. Suddenly, still frames went to fast-forward. In milliseconds, the youth was blasting at Wheeler with an ugly square-barreled foreign automatic. For some godforsaken reason, Wheeler hesitated and then watched dumbly as the automatic in the gangster's hand spit fire at him. He felt a searing pain in his thigh that blew his leg out from under him. His gun flew from his hand unfired, landing at his feet. Blood oozed ominously out of his wounded thigh.

"You happy? Is this what you wanted, asshole?" the Prankmeister screamed in terror.

The boy ran up and grabbed Wheeler's Beretta. Two other Asian gangsters came out of the master bedroom. They all held guns on him, chattering at each other in Chinese.

"Who are you?" Wheeler asked, his voice shaking from the adrenaline pump.

They ignored him and kept jabbering, their high-pitched conversation singsongy and piercing. It seemed they were deciding what to do. Whether to kill him. No . . . how to kill him.

"Does anybody speak English?" he asked, his voice almost a whisper now.

"No English. You dead," the oldest and tallest said.

Wheeler then propped himself up on his elbows, while his right hand snaked unobserved behind his back where the second Beretta was tucked and chambered.

"Make this good, soldier

The oldest, who Wheeler assumed was the leader, aimed a revolver at him, about to fire. Then Wheeler did something the gangster didn't expect, and it bought him a few seconds. Wheeler smiled. It was his old Prankmeister smile. His U
. S. C
. frat-house grin.

"Lemme show you guys something," he said pleasantly.

They looked at each other, puzzled by his attitude, as he pulled his right hand away from the small of his back and, without warning, started firing the second Beretta.

The sound was deafening on the enclosed landing.

He got the oldest one on the first shot. The bullet went right through his neck, blowing him backwards. The one who had come out of Hollis's room pulled down on him with Wheeler's own Beretta. Wheeler's second and third shots blasted him in the chest and knocked him over the banister rail. He fell, cartwheeling, hitting the big chandelier in the entry, taking it down with him in a loud shower of breaking crystal. The remaining gangster ran back into the master bedroom. Wheeler fired twice, missing him, and then he heard sirens out front as the balcony door slammed.

Wheeler had emptied all five shots from the second Beretta and was still lying on the hall floor, clicking the trigger maniacally on the empty automatic. Finally he became aware that he was reflex-firing and stopped.

The silence was overpowering. Then he heard running and shouting outside, two more gunshots, then quiet. The front door opened and a man's voice called to him.

"Mr. Cassidy? Police! ... are you okay?"

"I've been hit! Think I'm okay," Wheeler tried to call out, but now his voice was barely a whisper. Feeling dizzy and weak, he lay back on the hallway carpet. He heard footsteps coming up the stairs to the landing.

"Good fucking ground op," Lieutenant Kale McCoy drawled proudly.

"Whatta you talking about, you cornbread asshole?" the Prankmeister whined. "We almost got fuckin' killed here."

Before the cop reached him, Wheeler had gone into shock.

Chapter
8.

Willy's Garden

Li Xitong didn't get out of the black Hong Xi (Red Flag) limousine. He was extremely fat and the effort it would require to exit the car and climb the steps to the lobby of the Kun Lun Hotel was not worth the gratitude it might engender. Instead, he sat in the car with the red window curtains pulled shut and struggled to breathe. His belly, when he was seated, pressed up on his diaphragm and his exhales came in gasps. It was the day before Chinese New Year and a fitting time for the meeting that was about to take place, a meeting that he knew might well determine the political future of Hong Kong.

The Kun Lun Hotel was large and ornate, with beautiful sculpted gold pavilions on all four corners. It was located on the east side of Beijing. Everybody knew that the silent partner of the Kun Lun Hotel was the Chinese Public Security Bureau, which was just the fancy name for the State Police, who made a small fortune running the place.

The visiting Triad leader from Hong Kong had made a wise decision when he elected to stay at that hotel. Li Xitong was force
d t
o revise his earlier estimate of the man, because the choice showed a delicate understanding of Guan-Xi. The visitor from Hong Kong could have also chosen the beautiful Palace Hotel in central Beijing, because that establishment's silent partner was the People's Liberation Army. In either hotel, he would appear politically respectable.

The meeting about to take place was with Chen Boda, the head of the Chinese Communist Military Commission and, therefore, also the head of the Public Security Bureau.

Li Xitong was the ex-Mayor of Beijing. He had retired because of health problems, but was often called upon by Chen Boda for special assignments that included escorting and hosting important visitors. Li Xitong was fun to be with, or at least he had been until his prodigious girth made him perennially uncomfortable and consequently grouchy. His nickname was "Five Oceans" because of the awesome amounts of fiery white Mao Tai liquor he could consume.

The door of the Red Flag limousine was suddenly opened and Willy Wo Lap Ling entered the car.

Ling appeared surprisingly fit. In 1994, he had been a shriveled old man with dying kidneys and a yellow-gray complexion. Now the seventy-three-year-old Triad leader seemed reborn, trim, with carefully barbered white hair and robust red cheeks.