bad moon rising
Instead of doing an obligatory Mardi Gras day post (which I'd really like to do, but I don't think I could without turning it into a rant), I'm going to post the first chapter of what I hope will become my new long-term fiction project. This is only the first draft, but so far I like it. Feedback is welcome. And yes, it's related to New Orleans.
It's my pleasure to present...
Adam Webb's
"Bad Moon Rising"
The ship was called “Sweet Horizon,” but the name didn’t fit. Based in Hong Kong, it had been hijacked and the crew had all washed up on a beach in Hawaii. The driver of the ship, Sin Yang, had orchestrated the whole thing, though his Fu Shan Chu liked to tell the bosses in Hong Kong that it was his idea.
Sin had taken his allegiances years before but knew to keep his membership in the Sun Yee On quiet because of the crackdown that Hong Kong police had been orchestrating. Triad activity in the city, the Chinese government felt, had become a threat to international relations and the safety of tourists, so Beijing ordered a series of heavy-handed raids and arrests on all of the triad masters. Yang’s Shan Chu, a man called Cheung Li, had survived the raids.
Sin wasn’t the only 49, or Triad soldier, on the ship. There were another 30 below deck. Seated behind him, however, was Cheung Li. He had a navigational chart on a table in front of him, and was tracing their route with his finger.
“How much longer?” Li asked.
Sin turned and bowed to his Shan Chu. “Not much, master. Another day or so.”
“How long until the canal?” The Panama Canal. It wasn’t far away-Li could see land approaching, but he knew it wasn’t their destination.
“Just another hour, master.”
He looked up. “Excellent. Perhaps our destination will allow us new opportunities. The authorities at our destination are predisposed with local problems as it is.”
Sin smiled at his master. “And perhaps you’ll be able to rule the streets again.”
Li laughed. “Someday. For now, let’s just worry about our options.” Their destination was already in trouble. Corruption, crime, angry people, and a shaky infrastructure. At the same time, the people were festive, highly energetic, motivated, and hospitable. It was one of the oldest cities in its region, and the people appreciated its history. They also appreciated and respected other cultures and loved people from somewhere else, because half of the city’s population was transplants from somewhere else.
He looked back down to the map, and stared at a large red X. The city’s name was half-blocked by the ink, but it was still legible. Li knew that it would be a good place to start again.
Darren hated the alarm clock. It was his least favorite sound in the morning, and sometimes he just wanted to grab his gun and turn the damn thing off for good. Not that anybody would ever call the cops on him, seeing as how he was the cops.
He sat up in bed and stared out his window, down Elysian Fields and toward the UNO campus. The sun was coming up over the Victorian across the street and it was reflecting in his window off the river, and then he thought about how much trouble that river had caused the city.
And then his phone started singing “When the Saints Go Marching In.” That meant Jason, his partner, was calling.
“Reeves,” he said, still half-asleep.
“Morning, sunshine. Homicide down on Claiborne at Esplanade. You up?”
He rubbed his eyes and looked at his still-living alarm clock. 7:30. “Only because my alarm doesn’t know how to shut up. Give me 20.”
“You oversleep again?”
He half-grinned. “You would too if your damn neighbors didn’t know how not to fuck like a couple of monkeys at 4 a.m.”
Boudreaux laughed like a five-year-old. “Still trying to have kids, huh?”
“I hope to hell they move to Metairie when they do. See you in 20.” He closed the phone, ran a wet comb through his neck-length brown hair, dressed, grabbed his gun and shield, and walked down to the street.
It was a cool spring morning in the Marigny. The coffee shop next to his shotgun-style house was already busy, and as he walked by, one of the female workers ran out and handed him a Café au Lait. He handed her a five and told her to keep it. Darren knew she liked him, but she was 10 years his junior. A little young. Oh well, he thought.
He took the remote to his car out of his pants pocket and pressed the middle button. The lights on the car, a 2008 Dodge Charger, flashed twice, and he opened the driver’s side door. As the engine came to life, he looked in the mirror and thought, Damn, I need a vacation.
Darren parked his car at the outside of the intersection of Esplanade and Claiborne, his dash-mounted strobes still flashing. As he stepped out of the car, he flashed his shield at the uniformed cop standing at the tape and he limboed under the yellow line, to find his partner knelt down next to a gunshot victim.
Jason turned around to see Darren walking towards him, and he stood. All six and a half-feet and 280 pounds of him. He looked at his watch. “Not bad. 20 minutes. You are punctual.”
Reeves took a drag on his café. “I’m also highly caffeinated and sleep-deprived. What else is new?”
Boudreaux looked back down at the body. “Mailman found him lyin’ on the corner about an hour ago. Vic can’t be more than a teenager. No ID in the pockets. CSI is on the way and we already took prints, but the lab is apparently a little backed up.”
“You look for jewelry? Kids these days have taken to wearing dog tags and monograms.”
Jason looked back down at the body. “Oh, this kid’s got plenty of bling. Big gold ‘F’ hangin’ around his neck. That’s the only identifying mark we got right now.”
Darren looked at the kid’s hands. “You notice this?”
Jason had a confused look in his eyes. “Notice what?”
Reeves knelt down next to the body and pointed at the boy’s right hand. The top section of his little finger was missing, though it appeared to have been long-healed. “That doesn’t look like it was an accident. Vietnamese gangs do that as a symbol of loyalty.”
Boudreaux looked at the kid’s face. “He does look Asian. Think he’s from New Orleans East?”
Darren nodded. “Yeah, but what the hell is he doing way out in the Seventh?”
“Beats the hell out of me. You wanna send a couple uniforms out to East and show his picture around?”
Reeves stood up. “Not smart. They don’t talk to cops up there.”
“We could send Chen up there. He was born in Pyongyang.” Jack Chen was one of the other detectives in Darren’s crew, the Goodfellas. Gang and organized crime task force.
“Koreans and Vietnamese don’t look the same. They’ll smell him a mile away. Plus, he doesn’t speak the language.”
Jason let out a sigh. “You wanna go over to OPP and convince Wei to do it?” Johnny Wei was the former leader of a Vietnamese gang in East, who had finally been caught for murder and was serving 20 years at Orleans Parish Prison. OPP was New Orleans’s version of Rikers Island.
Darren looked at the kid again. “Get a judge to approve it. Just make sure it isn’t one of the bastards the FBI’s investigating.”
“So you want me to call the regional office?”
Darren yawned and nodded at the same time. “It’s in Dallas. Just ask them for names. If they ask you for a security code, use mine.”
“Which is?”
He pointed to the front bumper of his Charger. “License number. And if you tell anybody what it is, I’ll kill you and toss you in the canal with my other dead partners.”
Boudreaux laughed. “I’ll remember that.” He took a notebook and pen from his coat pocket, which Darren grabbed.
“You think I’m kidding. See this face?” He pointed to his bed-wrinkled face, a half-grin on it. “This is the face of a cold-blooded, angry cop.”
Jason laughed. “And it’s such a pretty face, too.” He took the notebook and pen away from his partner and went to write down the license number.
As Boudreaux walked away, Darren took a sweeping glance around the crime scene. A crowd was forming around the tape, mostly residents of the neighborhood. Most of them just wanted a glance, but he could tell from some of the people’s eyes that they knew something. Nobody had come forward to say that they had heard or seen anything, but he expected that. Crime had been on the rise since the storm, and while NOPD was close to catching up with the spread, something like this always became the wrench in the works.
His unit was about to be merged with the special investigations division, based at the Lakefront substation, and he had been named the new unit’s commander. That kind of responsibility usually went to a Captain, but given his experience and his high level of intelligence and comprehension of the way the city worked, the Chief somehow found him uniquely qualified for the job. Darren’s only condition was that he wasn’t limited to a desk.
A pair of NOPD cruisers stopped outside the tape and a blue van drove under the yellow line. In big white letters on the side were the words “New Orleans Medical Examiner.” CSI had arrived. At the wheel of the van was the Medical Examiner herself, Dr. Carrie “CD” Deluce.
She jumped down from the van’s cab-all five feet of her-and smiled at Reeves. The two of them had been high school classmates and both went to college at LSU.
“Mornin’, Big D,” she grinned.
He laughed. “Everybody’s big compared to you, CD. What took you so long?”
She gave him a disdainful glance. “Sorry, some of us do need to bathe in the morning. And besides, you aren’t going anywhere until we process the scene anyway.” One of the investigators, Jack Pope, walked up and leaned up against Darren, like he was using him for a leaning post.
“Wow, she actually got your ass out of bed for this one, Jack?” Darren said.
Jack grinned. “Gimme a half-hour and I’ll actually be awake. I’m never working swing shift again. Not for Greg, at least. I had to process six bodies in a house fire over in Algiers last night. Longest twelve hours of my life.”
“Never ends, Jack,” CD said. “If only people will stop dying in this town, we can actually relax once in a while.” She crouched down and popped the lid on her scene processing kit.
“I can run to the coffee shop up the street and get you and CD some coffee if you want, Jack,” Jason said as he rejoined his partner.
“I appreciate it, Jase.” Pope handed Jason a ten. “Just a couple black coffees. Unless you want something to eat, CD.” He looked over to his partner/supervisor.
“Croissant,” she said, in perfect French, as she opened her fingerprint powder jar.
“Beignets for me. Light on the powdered sugar,” Jack said.
“You got it.” He took the money and walked to his car.
Darren stood and watched as CD and Pope started to process the body. They scraped fingernails, removed trace evidence from the three wounds in the kid’s chest, and took photographs. CD was spending a lot of time examining the victim’s right hand. She grabbed a bluelight from her kit and waved it over the hand, and then she waved Darren down to her side.
“Is that GSR?” Gunshot residue. The kid had fired a weapon.
She nodded. “This wasn’t an ambush. He saw it coming.”
And then Jack took four photos of the kid’s left wrist. “I found a tattoo. It’s a name, written in Chinese.”
Darren cocked an eyebrow. “Chinese? That isn’t the native language in Vietnam.”
Pope nodded. “I don’t think this kid’s Vietnamese.” He pointed to a scar along the side of the kid’s face. It was long and faint, but in the shade it was visible. It was a plastic surgery scar.
“You mean this isn’t the kid’s real face?”
“Nope.” Pope took a closer look at the tattoo, and then stood up and backed away.
CD stared at her partner. “What’s the matter?”
“CD, that tattoo isn’t a name. It’s a logo.”
“Of what?” Darren asked.
“It’s a Triad branding tattoo.”
Darren walked around the body, knelt down next to the body, and looked closely at it. He had seen it during one of his international crime seminars.
“Shit,” he said.
“What’s the matter?” CD asked.
He sighed. “It’s a Hong Kong 49 brand. He’s a Sun Yee On soldier.”
CD looked confused. “What’s Sun Yee On?”
Darren stood up and reached for his cell. “The last people we want in the city at this point. They’re the most violent crime syndicate in China.” After a pause, Darren said into his phone, “Special Agent Greg White, please. Detective Darren Reeves, New Orleans Police Major Investigations Team.”
It's my pleasure to present...
Adam Webb's
"Bad Moon Rising"
The ship was called “Sweet Horizon,” but the name didn’t fit. Based in Hong Kong, it had been hijacked and the crew had all washed up on a beach in Hawaii. The driver of the ship, Sin Yang, had orchestrated the whole thing, though his Fu Shan Chu liked to tell the bosses in Hong Kong that it was his idea.
Sin had taken his allegiances years before but knew to keep his membership in the Sun Yee On quiet because of the crackdown that Hong Kong police had been orchestrating. Triad activity in the city, the Chinese government felt, had become a threat to international relations and the safety of tourists, so Beijing ordered a series of heavy-handed raids and arrests on all of the triad masters. Yang’s Shan Chu, a man called Cheung Li, had survived the raids.
Sin wasn’t the only 49, or Triad soldier, on the ship. There were another 30 below deck. Seated behind him, however, was Cheung Li. He had a navigational chart on a table in front of him, and was tracing their route with his finger.
“How much longer?” Li asked.
Sin turned and bowed to his Shan Chu. “Not much, master. Another day or so.”
“How long until the canal?” The Panama Canal. It wasn’t far away-Li could see land approaching, but he knew it wasn’t their destination.
“Just another hour, master.”
He looked up. “Excellent. Perhaps our destination will allow us new opportunities. The authorities at our destination are predisposed with local problems as it is.”
Sin smiled at his master. “And perhaps you’ll be able to rule the streets again.”
Li laughed. “Someday. For now, let’s just worry about our options.” Their destination was already in trouble. Corruption, crime, angry people, and a shaky infrastructure. At the same time, the people were festive, highly energetic, motivated, and hospitable. It was one of the oldest cities in its region, and the people appreciated its history. They also appreciated and respected other cultures and loved people from somewhere else, because half of the city’s population was transplants from somewhere else.
He looked back down to the map, and stared at a large red X. The city’s name was half-blocked by the ink, but it was still legible. Li knew that it would be a good place to start again.
Darren hated the alarm clock. It was his least favorite sound in the morning, and sometimes he just wanted to grab his gun and turn the damn thing off for good. Not that anybody would ever call the cops on him, seeing as how he was the cops.
He sat up in bed and stared out his window, down Elysian Fields and toward the UNO campus. The sun was coming up over the Victorian across the street and it was reflecting in his window off the river, and then he thought about how much trouble that river had caused the city.
And then his phone started singing “When the Saints Go Marching In.” That meant Jason, his partner, was calling.
“Reeves,” he said, still half-asleep.
“Morning, sunshine. Homicide down on Claiborne at Esplanade. You up?”
He rubbed his eyes and looked at his still-living alarm clock. 7:30. “Only because my alarm doesn’t know how to shut up. Give me 20.”
“You oversleep again?”
He half-grinned. “You would too if your damn neighbors didn’t know how not to fuck like a couple of monkeys at 4 a.m.”
Boudreaux laughed like a five-year-old. “Still trying to have kids, huh?”
“I hope to hell they move to Metairie when they do. See you in 20.” He closed the phone, ran a wet comb through his neck-length brown hair, dressed, grabbed his gun and shield, and walked down to the street.
It was a cool spring morning in the Marigny. The coffee shop next to his shotgun-style house was already busy, and as he walked by, one of the female workers ran out and handed him a Café au Lait. He handed her a five and told her to keep it. Darren knew she liked him, but she was 10 years his junior. A little young. Oh well, he thought.
He took the remote to his car out of his pants pocket and pressed the middle button. The lights on the car, a 2008 Dodge Charger, flashed twice, and he opened the driver’s side door. As the engine came to life, he looked in the mirror and thought, Damn, I need a vacation.
Darren parked his car at the outside of the intersection of Esplanade and Claiborne, his dash-mounted strobes still flashing. As he stepped out of the car, he flashed his shield at the uniformed cop standing at the tape and he limboed under the yellow line, to find his partner knelt down next to a gunshot victim.
Jason turned around to see Darren walking towards him, and he stood. All six and a half-feet and 280 pounds of him. He looked at his watch. “Not bad. 20 minutes. You are punctual.”
Reeves took a drag on his café. “I’m also highly caffeinated and sleep-deprived. What else is new?”
Boudreaux looked back down at the body. “Mailman found him lyin’ on the corner about an hour ago. Vic can’t be more than a teenager. No ID in the pockets. CSI is on the way and we already took prints, but the lab is apparently a little backed up.”
“You look for jewelry? Kids these days have taken to wearing dog tags and monograms.”
Jason looked back down at the body. “Oh, this kid’s got plenty of bling. Big gold ‘F’ hangin’ around his neck. That’s the only identifying mark we got right now.”
Darren looked at the kid’s hands. “You notice this?”
Jason had a confused look in his eyes. “Notice what?”
Reeves knelt down next to the body and pointed at the boy’s right hand. The top section of his little finger was missing, though it appeared to have been long-healed. “That doesn’t look like it was an accident. Vietnamese gangs do that as a symbol of loyalty.”
Boudreaux looked at the kid’s face. “He does look Asian. Think he’s from New Orleans East?”
Darren nodded. “Yeah, but what the hell is he doing way out in the Seventh?”
“Beats the hell out of me. You wanna send a couple uniforms out to East and show his picture around?”
Reeves stood up. “Not smart. They don’t talk to cops up there.”
“We could send Chen up there. He was born in Pyongyang.” Jack Chen was one of the other detectives in Darren’s crew, the Goodfellas. Gang and organized crime task force.
“Koreans and Vietnamese don’t look the same. They’ll smell him a mile away. Plus, he doesn’t speak the language.”
Jason let out a sigh. “You wanna go over to OPP and convince Wei to do it?” Johnny Wei was the former leader of a Vietnamese gang in East, who had finally been caught for murder and was serving 20 years at Orleans Parish Prison. OPP was New Orleans’s version of Rikers Island.
Darren looked at the kid again. “Get a judge to approve it. Just make sure it isn’t one of the bastards the FBI’s investigating.”
“So you want me to call the regional office?”
Darren yawned and nodded at the same time. “It’s in Dallas. Just ask them for names. If they ask you for a security code, use mine.”
“Which is?”
He pointed to the front bumper of his Charger. “License number. And if you tell anybody what it is, I’ll kill you and toss you in the canal with my other dead partners.”
Boudreaux laughed. “I’ll remember that.” He took a notebook and pen from his coat pocket, which Darren grabbed.
“You think I’m kidding. See this face?” He pointed to his bed-wrinkled face, a half-grin on it. “This is the face of a cold-blooded, angry cop.”
Jason laughed. “And it’s such a pretty face, too.” He took the notebook and pen away from his partner and went to write down the license number.
As Boudreaux walked away, Darren took a sweeping glance around the crime scene. A crowd was forming around the tape, mostly residents of the neighborhood. Most of them just wanted a glance, but he could tell from some of the people’s eyes that they knew something. Nobody had come forward to say that they had heard or seen anything, but he expected that. Crime had been on the rise since the storm, and while NOPD was close to catching up with the spread, something like this always became the wrench in the works.
His unit was about to be merged with the special investigations division, based at the Lakefront substation, and he had been named the new unit’s commander. That kind of responsibility usually went to a Captain, but given his experience and his high level of intelligence and comprehension of the way the city worked, the Chief somehow found him uniquely qualified for the job. Darren’s only condition was that he wasn’t limited to a desk.
A pair of NOPD cruisers stopped outside the tape and a blue van drove under the yellow line. In big white letters on the side were the words “New Orleans Medical Examiner.” CSI had arrived. At the wheel of the van was the Medical Examiner herself, Dr. Carrie “CD” Deluce.
She jumped down from the van’s cab-all five feet of her-and smiled at Reeves. The two of them had been high school classmates and both went to college at LSU.
“Mornin’, Big D,” she grinned.
He laughed. “Everybody’s big compared to you, CD. What took you so long?”
She gave him a disdainful glance. “Sorry, some of us do need to bathe in the morning. And besides, you aren’t going anywhere until we process the scene anyway.” One of the investigators, Jack Pope, walked up and leaned up against Darren, like he was using him for a leaning post.
“Wow, she actually got your ass out of bed for this one, Jack?” Darren said.
Jack grinned. “Gimme a half-hour and I’ll actually be awake. I’m never working swing shift again. Not for Greg, at least. I had to process six bodies in a house fire over in Algiers last night. Longest twelve hours of my life.”
“Never ends, Jack,” CD said. “If only people will stop dying in this town, we can actually relax once in a while.” She crouched down and popped the lid on her scene processing kit.
“I can run to the coffee shop up the street and get you and CD some coffee if you want, Jack,” Jason said as he rejoined his partner.
“I appreciate it, Jase.” Pope handed Jason a ten. “Just a couple black coffees. Unless you want something to eat, CD.” He looked over to his partner/supervisor.
“Croissant,” she said, in perfect French, as she opened her fingerprint powder jar.
“Beignets for me. Light on the powdered sugar,” Jack said.
“You got it.” He took the money and walked to his car.
Darren stood and watched as CD and Pope started to process the body. They scraped fingernails, removed trace evidence from the three wounds in the kid’s chest, and took photographs. CD was spending a lot of time examining the victim’s right hand. She grabbed a bluelight from her kit and waved it over the hand, and then she waved Darren down to her side.
“Is that GSR?” Gunshot residue. The kid had fired a weapon.
She nodded. “This wasn’t an ambush. He saw it coming.”
And then Jack took four photos of the kid’s left wrist. “I found a tattoo. It’s a name, written in Chinese.”
Darren cocked an eyebrow. “Chinese? That isn’t the native language in Vietnam.”
Pope nodded. “I don’t think this kid’s Vietnamese.” He pointed to a scar along the side of the kid’s face. It was long and faint, but in the shade it was visible. It was a plastic surgery scar.
“You mean this isn’t the kid’s real face?”
“Nope.” Pope took a closer look at the tattoo, and then stood up and backed away.
CD stared at her partner. “What’s the matter?”
“CD, that tattoo isn’t a name. It’s a logo.”
“Of what?” Darren asked.
“It’s a Triad branding tattoo.”
Darren walked around the body, knelt down next to the body, and looked closely at it. He had seen it during one of his international crime seminars.
“Shit,” he said.
“What’s the matter?” CD asked.
He sighed. “It’s a Hong Kong 49 brand. He’s a Sun Yee On soldier.”
CD looked confused. “What’s Sun Yee On?”
Darren stood up and reached for his cell. “The last people we want in the city at this point. They’re the most violent crime syndicate in China.” After a pause, Darren said into his phone, “Special Agent Greg White, please. Detective Darren Reeves, New Orleans Police Major Investigations Team.”