it all happened as fast as he realized it had occurred, all in a quick, smooth, metallic SNNNIIIKKKKK that pinned his hands together behind him first one and then the other and he went, “Hey!” Still not scared just surprised, and the big man leaned over right by the boy's ear and whispered, “Now no big deal. Don't worry. I just get off this way, dig? I like to have a guy—you know, vulnerable.” Big smile. “For MY protection. I mean I could be doing something and you hit me in the head and take my car. I don't know you from Adam.” And then he was putting his weight on the boy and doing something to one of the legs and more steel no this time a kind of nylon rope was being snuggled up around his knee, then again at his right ankle and the big man getting up with a great effort and waddling over PULLING THE BOY BY THE ROPE as he walked, pulling him effortlessly, the boy protesting but even as he did so feeling his leg pinned up against the trunk of a willow. The kid feeling the first fear now for real. Leg right by the tree, and the man pulling out a huge knife.
“Hey, now, mister, please—'
“Oh, no sweat, babe. Really. I'm just cutting rope here.” And Chaingang bent over with a smile still plastered to his scarred face and sliced the rope near where he'd made it fast and brought the cut end over and started to tie it around the other ankle and the boy was going to kick the hand away but Chaingang had the ankle before he could make a move and then he ran the other end over to another tree, not tying it as tightly.
“There,” Chaingang said, repositioning the blanket and dropping beside the kid's body with a groan. “That's better, eh?” The kid was now nude, on his face in the hot sandy dirt, hands handcuffed behind him, legs spread. Nobody within howitzer distance. A passing barge maybe.
“OH,” the kid cried out.
Chaingang had eased the handle of the knife into the boy's rectum. Just playing.
“Sorry, I didn't mean to frighten you.” Very tender. And with that Chaingang took his own pants off and entered the boy from the rear. In that position the kid looked just like a girl from the back, he thought, and he began doing it to the boy, who only grunted under the enormous pressure.
“You like it, don't you?” he said to the boy.
“Yeah,” the kid said unconvincingly just as Chaingang quickly orgasmed. The kid saw a blur of movement and Chaingang was off him and up and moving away from him. The kid wondered if the crazy man were going to leave him trussed up like this. Damn. He had to get loose somehow.
“Yes,” Chaingang said with an immense, dimpled grin spreading across his doughlike face. He pulled a well- worn .22 Colt Woodsman, blued metal with checkered wooden grips, from the kid's belongings. He would bury everything else. “Yes,” he repeated, “I think we'll just hang on to this.” He looked at the kid on the ground. “As a souvenir.” And he racked a long rifle round into the chamber and tried it for balance.
It felt good and he aimed to the left of the kid's head about an inch but he missed, shooting the boy in the back of the left ear. There was screaming and lots of blood, and he barked out a laughing cough and muttered, “Calm down. I'll get the hang of this with a little practice.” And he shot the boy again, this time on purpose. “See? No problem.” He squeezed the trigger again. The trigger pull was crisp but it was okay. He could live with it.
“They know where she is,” Eichord said to the smaller man beside him at the rail of the ferry.
“Yeah.” Jimmie Lee nodded. “I ‘magine so. You have to understand the way these people think. This ain't Chinatown, Jack. This is a'—he searched for the right word—'whole world with a set of laws and rules and traditions you can't begin to realize.'
“Try me.'
“You're not just an outsider here, coining in to investigate a murder in Chinatown. With all the aura that goes with any policeman in the States. All the force and backing and cultural influences. But here'—he shook his head at the hopelessness of it—'they see you as nothing. Or me. Any cop from the Occidental world. Our ways have no meaning to these people, so our laws don't either.'
“Yeah, well, there's law and then there's right and wrong. This woman is a killer—and she's murdered again and again.'
“Thing is, Jack, it's a society that takes care of its own. And she is'—again Eichord felt him trying for a way to put the disparate values into currency a Westerner could spend—'connected to something that is bigger than anything you've ever come up against. No puny Mafia or organized religion or even philosophy can touch this thing the Chan woman was. She is'—and he said a Chinese name—'which means Shadow Clan. But that is not what it means at all.'
“Yeah?'
“You don't give a shit, right?'
“Right. I don't shiv a git. I ain't goin’ back without her.'
“Right.'
“Not after coming this far. Not after having my chain yanked by those asshole lawyers. Not after fightin’ ‘em even to ARREST much less fucking go after a twenty-year-old prosecution. And then get all THAT rammed through and then track her this far and then lose her murderous old butt because she's, uh—'
“Shadow Clan,” he supplied in a quiet voice.
“Frankly, Scarlett, I don't care if the bitch is Knights of Columbus. We're going to take her down.'
Jimmie Lee stood looking down at the water beneath them. “You just don't understand. To you everything is cut and dried. Right and wrong.'
“Yep. In this case that's what it is.'
“Law and order. Rules and regs. Bad guys and good guys. Black hats and white hats.'
“I know if a woman is killing little kids and a husband she deserves to fall no matter how connected she is.'
“By rights...” He paused. “By rights I shouldn't have pursued this once I found out she was in the thing.” He looked at Eichord. “That's what makes it all so impossible for an outsider. Even ME, as Western as I am, as far removed from this culture as you can get, James Lee, the all-American chink,
“How so?'
“Literally, in that my father was her brother. My brother too.'
“Huh?” Eichord was shaking his head.
“All the clans are interconnected. By the secret societies—the triads they call ‘em now. The brotherhood.'
“The triads are CRIME societies. Your family isn't part of that.” Lee said nothing. “Right?'
“The triads back home are one thing. The triads here go back thousands of years. Before they were the triads the brotherhood was a sort of caste system of warriors. My father was a descendant of that. My older brother chose to emulate that life-style. I was never a part of that. I wasn't raised here, as you know. I never even knew my father, and my family now regard me an outsider—a stranger. I'm not part of their world.” He tried to explain about what his father had been, about the codes and systems that had been a part of the old ways.
“Are you telling me your father was a warrior like a ninja—if I'm saying the word right?'
“No. But you're on the right track. The ninja were like our early mercenaries,” he began, “but there is a vast difference between the Japanese and Chinese cultures.” He told Eichord about the codes and castes of feudal Japan, and their concept of Shugendo. How men of honor formed an elite, professional warrior class. Fearless, militaristic, practicing old martial arts and sciences of violence, purity, and austerity. Building lives on a dying caste system. He told him about the code of Bushido. The way of the warrior. The ninjitsu. The ancient ways. He compared the Shadow clan to the feudal Kunoichi, with their secret death vows. He linked that world to the children of the samurai who still practice the ways of the warrior class in Japan. And to the Japanese Yakuza.
“We have the brotherhood in China. What you've learned about the triads, the crime societies in America, and here'—he pointed—'is only the cutting edge of an ancient system.” He tried to explain to Jack how all the things he
