Crime Fiction by Jo Ayker
I noticed the two cops approaching as I passed a cup of coffee – vanilla soy latte, extra hot – to the businessman. The woman was a tall brunette. The man was a lean guy in his late thirties. I had seen them a few times before. I smiled politely at them and mumbled a “Good morning”.
They stopped in front of me but didn’t reply, eyes scanning the hand-written menu fixed to my coffee truck.
“Can I have a large Americano?” the woman asked.
I wrote it down, feigning an earnest expression.
“A Mocha for me,” the guy said.
“Anything else?” I asked in my thick Chinese accent.
“I will take a jam donut,” the guy added.
I nodded as if it was a wise choice. The guy passed me a ten-dollar bill.
I picked out the change, started the coffee machine, then gazed into the street.
Directly across from me was a large glass-and-steel building that held an insurance firm, an accountant’s office, and a high-end travel agency. Those who worked there rarely deigned to come to Young’s Coffee, which was where I worked, manning a coffee truck on the sidewalk. The cops from around the corner, however, were more or less keeping this little place afloat.
“You need to cut back on those donuts, Flynn,” the brunette said, hands plunged deep in her leather jacket.
“Why? My wife has left me anyway,” the man retorted, squinting into the watery sun.
“Without your abs, your ugly face won’t have a chance in hell of finding a girlfriend.”
Flynn swerved his head around. “Oh? You like my abs, Kelly?”
Kelly – I had never figured out whether it was her first or last name – pretended to swoon. Flynn chuckled and said, “I need the energy.”
I could barely hear Kelly sigh over the sound of the traffic.
“I don’t know what the super was thinking, sending only ten men to raid Muffet.” She blew on her hands before rubbing them together. The temperature was in the low thirties. Everyone was wondering when it was going to snow.
I willed my hands to be steady and put the lids on their coffee.
“Thanks,” Kelly took them from me and made to go.
I gave them a little bow.
“Hey, where’s my donut?” Flynn asked.
“Oh sorry,” I said, slapping my forehead, and used a pair of tongs to put a jam donut into a paper bag.
Flynn rolled his eyes at his partner, full of arrogant impatience, probably thinking I wouldn’t notice.
“I guess realistically, only ten of us can get up at three in the morning,” he said to Kelly while snatching the paper bag from my hand. “We’re just going through the motions. To show the tax-payers we are doing something about the crimes.”
“Whatever. Muffet is just going to get away, like always,” Kelly complained as they walked outside of my earshot. Not a single eye contact with me during the whole exchange.
As soon as they turned the corner, I wrote “Ten men, after 3 AM” on my notepad. Then tore off the top page and put it in my pocket.
***
The police have a network of confidential informants in this city. They pass tidbits on their fellow man in exchange for money, favors, or maybe good conscience. Who knows what’s their motivation? I was never one of them.
I was the opposite. I made the information flow the other way. I consider myself a confidential disinformant.
I knew the English language wasn’t constructed this way. A disinformant is someone who spreads false information, not someone who snitches on the police, but it was not as if anyone was around to correct me.
The first time had been personal. A grizzled old-timer had stopped for coffee with a young rookie. They were waiting for their order when the old guy said, “I want you to tag along this evening, son.”
“To search Tannon’s house on Fourth?”
“Yes, the warrant finally arrived.”
I put their coffee into their hands, trying hard to keep my face blank. I concentrated on the coffee truck’s reflection in the glass-fronted building opposite. The letter ‘u’ in Young’s Coffee was shaped like a cup of coffee, and the letter ‘o’ – you guessed it – looked like a jelly donut.
“I’m sure he has the stolen goods,” the young guy said with enthusiasm. “We are going to nail him.”
No, you won’t, I thought as I watched them walk away. I put the “Back in 5” sign on the counter and ducked out of sight to call Tannon, my half-second cousin-in-law and small-time jewelry fence.
Well, I admit it wasn’t exactly personal, considering Tannon was only one-quarter Chinese. But he was family. He was grateful for my tip, too. After selling the goods that he had transferred to a safer location in the nick of time, he showed his appreciation by offering me a tenth of his profit.
That got me the idea. From then on, I kept a vigilant ear out for the conversations from boys-in-blue. Girls too, I am nothing if not politically correct.
The police never gave me a second glance. I supposed they had never seen those World War Two posters that warned “Careless Talk Costs Lives”. Which suited me fine. Being a Chinese helped, too. People take notice of the White, shun away from the Black, and feel wary around the Brown. But a set of Asian features is only a step below from invisibility. I just need to keep a serene face and a vacant smile. They thought my vocabulary didn’t go beyond the coffee talk, having no idea I could probably spell better than most of them. For heaven’s sake, I read Churchill’s Second World War during my free time.
***
“Hello?” the cautious voice answered on the second ring.
“It’s me. Kevin from Young’s Coffee.” My name is Kangqian, but you get along better when they can call you by a pronounceable name.
“What’s up?”
“Ten boxes of bacon will be delivered to your house after three o’clock.” They knew it meant three in the morning. If it were afternoon, I would have said fifteen. And it didn’t take much imagination to go from bacon to police.
“Alright. The payment will be in your account after delivery.”
We clicked off and I returned to my place behind the coffee truck. Muffet and his crew were scary guys. No doubt about that. They doled out severe punishment to people who crossed them, but they always paid well to those who gave them a helping hand. It wasn’t all about the money, though. It was the thrill. I was invisible standing behind my coffee truck, attracting less attention than a fly on the wall, while the police talked as they drank their coffee and smoked their ciggie. I felt like a brave spy, stealthily gathering information behind enemy lines.
Of course, some days I heard nothing but inane banter. And most of what I gleaned was gossip. I knew Dumont was accepted into an elite squad because of his uncle in a high place. I was aware Beckman and Murphy were an item, although they thought they kept it well hidden from the rest of the force. I understood Conner was a poor shooter and that was why he was transferred to the Fraud and Forgery Department. Never was so much learned by so few. But occasionally, I could catch some golden nuggets of information. Information that got me the down payment for the house on the riverside.
Low-level criminals made up the majority of whom I dealt with. I had told Tannon’s friend Johnny to get his alibi ready because the police were on their way to question him about the burglary at his ex-father-in-law’s home. I had told a college kid to get rid of his favorite sneakers because forensics were analyzing a shoeprint recovered from the hophead he had beaten up. I had told a pimp to relocate his paperless prostitutes unless he wanted to lose them to a raid that night (I received a special bonus that time).
But Muffet, he was the guy that controlled half of the city and the police knew it. And it frustrated the hell out of them that they couldn’t prove it. At first, they believed the guy had a lucky star, him always seemed to be able to escape by the skin of his teeth. A good tip would run to the ground. Or a witness under protection would be dug out and silenced, one way or another.
Eventually, the cops caught on that someone was leaking information, for all the good it did them. It took all my strength not to laugh as I listened to them trying to identify the mole in their ranks between mouthfuls of donuts.
***
It had been snowing heavily the following week, the sky always an inscrutable gray. Young’s Coffee didn’t see many customers. Pedestrians kept their heads low, eyes to the ground, so as not to slip on the treacherous snow. The few cars there were drove by excruciatingly slowly. Fresh snow was beginning to fall again when I saw a black sedan stop at the curb and a man get out. It took me a moment to recognize Luker, a lieutenant on Muffet’s crew. His hoodie was pulled over on top of a beanie hat. Something was bulging in his right pocket.
I smiled to myself. It was going to be quite a thick envelope.
Luker stopped in front of my coffee truck and smiled at me. He always had an ugly smile because of the two-inch scar on his left face. But it looked especially hideous that day. Must have been the cold.
“Hello, Kevin.”
“Can I get you something? It’s on me,” I said in my perfect English. No need to pretend with these guys.
He shook his head.
“Well then?”
“You need to come with me.”
That had never happened before. I could feel a bead of sweat forming on my back between my shoulders. Sweat on a snowy day.
“Why?” I was glad to notice there was no tremor in my voice. Not yet.
Luker shuffled his feet. He didn’t want to stay here long, with the police station just around the corner.
“Just follow me.” His voice was still cordial. When I didn’t move, he pulled his right hand slightly out of his pocket, and a glint caught my eyes.
It wasn’t an envelope full of cash in his pocket. It was a gun.
He jerked his head and I numbly put the “Back in 5” sign on the counter. He smirked at that, which scared me more than the gun.
He pulled the car door open and slid in after me. Another low grunt whose name I never bothered to remember was behind the wheel. On the front passenger seat was Dillon, Muffet’s third in command.
“Where did you get the information about the raid?” Dillon asked without any preamble.
“It’s good, right?”
“Tell me where.”
“As usual. I eavesdropped on the cops.” I relaxed a little as I got onto familiar grounds. “Straight from the horse’s mouth. Or do you say the pig’s mouth?”
They didn’t laugh. They didn’t even smile.
“The thing is,” Dillon said slowly and motioned for the driver to start moving. “There were more than ten cops on the raid. There were more than fifty as far as I could tell.”
“What?” I asked with incredulity and got a punch in the stomach from Luker.
“Don’t interrupt.”
“And they didn’t come at three in the morning,” Dillon continued. “They came at nine in the evening when we were all hunkering down. We had packed everything into the vans, waiting for midnight. The cops had a field day.”
I tried to swallow. But it was like swallowing ice. Must be an especially cold day, I thought again. Although the dashboard told me it was over sixty degrees inside the car.
I opened my mouth, then closed it again. What could I say? The cops changed their minds at the last minute? It sounded lame even to myself.
“I don’t know what happened,” I tried.
“So, I’m the one in charge now,” Dillon said as if I didn’t speak. “Which isn’t a bad thing in itself. But I need to make sure things like this don’t happen again. I need to set an example.”
The car rounded the corner and I caught sight of the police station. A guy was swiping the ground in front of it. A woman stepped out of the door holding two cups of coffee. It was Kelly. And when the guy straightened up, I saw it was Flynn.
They turned toward the car and looked right at me.
I took a breath to shout for help, then felt the gun dig into my stomach.
“Don’t even think about it,” Luker snarled.
I held my breath until we passed them, so close that I could see the snowflakes on their hair. I thought about what these people were going to do to me. I’d seen guys missing for days only to come back hollow-eyed, unable to form a complete sentence. I’d heard of stories about mangled corpses washed ashore that matched the body parts recovered from dumpsters around the city.
I glanced at the police station one last time as we turned toward the east, where rumor had it that Muffet kept a storage unit with all sorts of tools. My spirit soared when I saw Kelly and Flynn were still looking in my direction. Maybe they felt something was amiss. Maybe they would come to my rescue.
Then they turned toward each other and exchanged something that looked like a smile. Flynn bent down again to sweep the sidewalk. Kelly scratched the side of her face with her middle finger before walking back into the station. What was that about?
“Damn! He pissed his pants,” Luker yelped with disgust.
The driver laughed. “Slant eye here got no fortitude.”
Fortitude? Wasn’t that the name they gave that operation during World War Two, just before the Allies invaded Normandy? Operation Fortitude, a deception plan that fed the Germans disinformation about the invasion, through the Ghost Army, double agents, and – I thought of Kelly’s middle finger – unwitting helpers.
Bio: Jo Ayker loves reading and is especially a sucker for crime fiction. She currently works as a bank auditor in Beijing after having studied math in upstate New York and forensic science in London.
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