Wim Tat Nam was born to an angry prostitute in Hong Kong. Her mom used her small, slick pussy like a fist gripping the handle on a coal miner’s shovel. She was a money and hate machine. Forced into prostitution by the Japanese wars and poverty, she spread her legs by the time she hit 12 years of age and kept after the money until she died of syphilis at 45.
Her daughter Wim Tat Nam came along after the Vietnam era, when more and more American sailors came to Hong Kong. The China Doll, her mom’s nickname, lived in a tenement house along the waterfront on the third floor and was forced to hawk for action out her damp, tall window overlooking the myriad of commercial junks fishing, foraging, and maintaining ships in the harbor. They were like horse flies on a bowl of stagnate water moving quickly from ship to ship looking for work or gifts thrown from the iron decks above.
A lucky junk captain could make as much money painting the hull of a ship as he could pulling alongside a departing vessel while the crew tossed their un-used coins to his children below holding their grass-weaved, pointed hats upside down.
Wim’s mom, at 24 dolled herself up and wore her best Cheongsam, silk embroidered form fitting dress and leaned out her window to lure sometimes innocent, and sometimes hardened sailors up to her flat. Some American sailors and servicemen hated all Orientals as if they were all born in Japan or Communist Vietnam and they abused the tiny Chinese girls. It wasn’t fair, but neither was the war and most guys didn’t know what the hell was going on or who was the real enemy?
Once in a while, she lucked out and caught a young, good-looking white kid fresh from the states, maybe from San Francisco, where folks knew and appreciated Chinese immigrants, their abilities to run laundries or Chinese restaurants. They knew they were generally friendly and humble people.
She cooked a warm meal for her suitors, fed them heartily and fucked them for all they were worth. Her flat was dark but clean and the kitchen was a part of the living room. The smells of cooked fish and spicy curry wafted around the room and she kept cold beers iced down.
Once in a very rare while, she bonded with a sailor who would come back after a night on the town, but it was rare. Most had to report back to their ships by midnight, but on one rare occasion a tall young sailor had brunch with her and sex. He paid her well and tipped her.
He returned from the glitter of the city at nine and wasn’t drunk. He ate dinner with her, had fun on her slim 2-inch mattress and then went back to sea, never to return. She became pregnant and ultimately nine months later had Wim Tat Nam.
Wim grew up bitter and angry in the ever-changing squalor of Hong Kong, which constantly pushed her kind farther and farther from the city center and the docks with more wealthy high-rise buildings and gentrification.
She contained just enough Angelo to give her ample boobs, rounded features and beauty, which she abhorred. She wanted desperately to be a guy, to be a very tough guy, a murderer. She didn’t fuck, but she used her shapely exterior to her advantage to demonstrate the weakness of men before killing them, which she often did.
She loved to find an adversary and lure him into her web with softness, kindness and the hint of sex and slit his throat once he softened to her touch and his weakness for the opposite sex exposed itself, but she got bored. Her psychotic tendencies whipped to the surface more often.
As soon as she arrived in Los Angeles her first target was the aging boss of the long-standing Chinese opium cartel, Chen Jung. A short round man, who was once the bastard bad-ass leader of the opium trade on the coast, with a little guy complex. Yet, over the years he softened with wealth and power.
Younger members contacted Wim in China before her arrival. She built a cadre of comrades and murdered Chen Jung, in his own home, the first night she arrived. His security team was already on her side.
She immediately partied with the leader of the gang’s obstruction movement and befriended him, a middle-aged, tall good-looking guy who ran his mouth too much. He made it out that she had come stateside to do his bidding and assassinated his boss. Now he was the boss.
She met with the leaders of this clan on the second night after her arrival at the Lucky Plum Tree family owned, Chinese Restaurant on Broadway, in downtown LA Chinatown. They reserved one of the Plum’s lavish conference, dining rooms.
Dressed to the nines in a Crimson red silk dress cut low to expose her silken voluptuousness and wearing pearls she strolled into the room with the leader, Hop Joy, a sloppy boisterous bastard with a slicked black pompadour and the sides of his head shaved. She held his arm as he was an easy foot taller than her, even with her 5-inch tall high heels. As she rounded the table all the members, all ten of them immediately stood and clapped.
The room, sealed off to the rest of the restaurant, went quiet when Hop Joy raised his hand, “With the help of Wim Tat Nam we have for the first time in years taken back our business,” he said with a grin while drinking his third cocktail. “From now on this organization will run for all of us, not just one man.”
His hand crept around Wim’s waist and slid down over her shapely ass. “Wim will…” His eyes grew wide and his expression turn to questioning.
Wim spun toward him and drove a 7-inch blade under his bottom rib just an inch under his heart and drove the ivory handle toward the outside of his body severing the descending aorta Inferior and Vena Cava the unoxygenated blood flow from the lower body. In less than five seconds she shut off all the blood to the left ventricle and the right atrium. He died quickly and slumped forward.
Wim removed the deadly sharp stiletto and wiped it on his jacket sleeve as he buckled toward the banquet table. She looked directly at two of the startled young Chinese men, “Remove him, quickly. There’s a body bag behind me on the floor. Take him to the van behind the restaurant and return to your seats immediately.”
She returned her knife to her slick bejeweled, delicate purse and sat abruptly at the head of the table. She motioned for the young startled member at the other end of the table to open the door for waiters to enter. Then she indicated for him not to sit at the end of the table but to take one of the side chairs.
For a slight woman, barely over 100 pounds, she had the commanding expression of an angry villain. Her narrow eyes were harsh and direct. She didn’t say a word until orders were taken, and the two delivery men returned.
“Did you handle it?” Wim said.
“Yes, Wim,” one said and lowered his gaze as if to bow.
“I will never be anyone’s assassin,” Wim said angrily in a tone that snapped like a slap to a delicate cheek. “I will never be anyone’s whore, or girl. And never, ever mention my name.”
After lovely Chinese dinners were served in the elaborately designed and detailed dining room. Wim looked around the room at the diverse interior design melding modern art and pastel colors with traditional woodwork and thought briefly about her mother the China Doll.
“I want reports on every gang in the city,” Wim snapped, “their illegal activities, their enemies and their leaders. We are going to control the drug trade in Los Angeles or die trying.”
In the next two weeks, she met with and killed the leaders of several gangs. Her Ming Cartel became the most feared organization in the city, but it all wouldn’t be a cake walk as news spread of her treachery.
Bandit drove the rickety van to Montebello where a large contingent of bike clubs hung out. He watched the warehouse club house for two days and ate burritos from the street stand around the corner. He slumped and wore tattered sandals and old sweats with a hoodie and kept his face concealed.
Marko kept him informed with local police reports and his vast connections. “She’s hitting them hard. She’s bound to get around to bike clubs.”
On the third night Bandit dressed in his Biker duds with Levi’s, his brown leather vest and brown cowboy boots and crawled out of the van and started to walk toward the club house. This club was mostly made up of Hispanic brothers and probably didn’t sell smack or opium products but may be dealing crank or speed.
He wanted to warn them and perhaps find an ally or two. The street adjacent to the industrial side of town was peppered with small ‘40s stucco homes. Pepper trees and Oaks lined the street and buckled the narrow sidewalks.
As he reached the corner, a couple of brothers passed on lowered Softails sporting loud fishtip pipes and chromed highbars. A brother glanced at the tall biker rounding the corner as they rolled right and blasted up the street.
Just as Bandit made the corner in the semi-darkness, he could make out the clubhouse, on the left, in the industrial park, with the club banner hanging over the open roll-up industrial door. Bikes and brothers were everywhere as he approached.
He came to the alley opening and began to cross the grooved-for-drainage, narrow cracked concrete. He spotted two shiny black SUVs peel around the block up ahead and screech to a stop in the street in front of the short cinderblock fence, next to the sidewalk, in front of the club house. The SUV doors opposite the industrial landscaped barrior sprang open and short men didn’t get out but stood on the door jams and leveled automatic weapons and fired on the bikers.
Shit started to fly, and the noise split the air like an axe through a hard log. Bandit reached into his vest and pulled a Wather 9mm, cocked it and took out the first two soldiers. He shot out the headlights and moved onto the next vehicle. All hell broke loose and the attackers jumped back into their vehicles and came flying after Bandit.
He bolted down the alley, until he found a gate ajar and ran behind a garage into a small patio. He ran around the garage and back into the alley as the two slick SUVs careened down the alley in front of him. He loaded another clip into the semi-automatic and shot out the taillights and rear tires of the second SUV. The trailing vehicle wobbled as the two vehicles turned on the next street.
Bandit ran across the alley and between two small stucco single-car garages, and through a dinky patio. A small Corgi dog busted out of the rear doggy door barking for all he was worth, as Bandit ran between the narrow walk between the homes. The two vehicles stopped in the middle of the block. Small men clamored out of the rear vehicle carrying their wounded.
The front SUV driver door opened, and a short Asian armed guard sprang from the vehicle. Then the front passenger door burst open and an even smaller suspect scrambled into the street. “Stop,” she shouted. “Get back in the van.” She leveled her automatic weapon and shot the wounded team down in the street. One of them attempted to run between two parked cars, but she nailed him as he entered an open space in the front yard.
She jumped back into the SUV and it peeled toward Bandit, who stepped into the street in full view of the speeding vehicle. This time he held two stainless steel Wather PPKs and started to fire into the flying vehicle.
Gritting his teeth, he unloaded all 16 rounds into the vehicle’s armored windshield and sheet metal. The vehicle swerved to strike Bandit and he stepped between two vehicles and behind them as the slick black vehicle side-swiped the family station wagon.
The assault vehicle had tinted windows, but he stared down the unknown passenger. He knew who it was. Brothers came flying in every direction loaded to kill, but the SUV was gone.
He followed the brothers to the clubhouse, where several bikers were wounded, and one died. He was the young prospect son of the president. An ambulance arrived and the brothers did their best to protect wounded compadres and move motorcycles inside. Their headquarter turned into a war zone.
Bandit approached the boss of the Comancheros. “I was headed over here to warn you.”
“I heard the rumblings on the streets,” The big man with the long black mustache fumed. “We don’t do smack. She has tried to set up a meeting with me.”
“Don’t go,” Bandit said. “You won’t come back.”
“What’s this got to do with you?” Franko asked.
“It’s personal,” Bandit responded, and then looked him directly in his dark angry eyes. “But we need to do something immediately. I’m going to get out of here before I’m questioned. Let’s stay in touch.” And he handed the president his Cantina card.
Bandit slipped out the back and took the long way around all the flashing lights to find the funky van. As soon as he fired it up his cell rang. “You pissed her off this time,” Marko said. “She’s coming for the Cantina.”
“I’m coming for her,” Bandit said, “which dock did she arrive at? Do we know? More shit must be arriving soon. She’s been clearing the way for big business.”
“Reportedly it was the Yang Ming shipyard,” Marko said. “That’s an easy one to watch.”
“There’s another way,” Bandit said. “We may have a brief window to prevent her from blowing up the Cantina. We need to find the distribution truck in Wilmington that’s going to get the load from Yang Ming. That’s where we’ll find her, and the drugs are more important than a hit on the Cantina. Let’s hope, but we need to move fast and perfectly.”
Bandit drove quickly, 20 miles from Montebello back to the harbor and into the grubby area of Wilmington lined with homeless RVs, corrugated steel fencing and sketchy big rig truck parking lots. He searched every dusty and grim-filled lot. Groups of underpaid drivers huddled around 50-gallon drum fire pits. Tattered and wounded junk yard dogs darted in and around trucks hunting for food scraps.
The drivers fucked with the homeless and the homeless attempted to beg from the drivers and mechanics or sell them anything from a bottle of cheap wine to girls and drugs, anything to make enough to get high. The roads contain limited concrete sidewalks if any, potholes and busted fences. Most lots were dirt, no asphalt paving or infrastructure.
He roamed up and down desolated streets piled with homeless trash, old bicycles and bottles of piss. There was no-end to the beer cans, busted empty bottles of cheap wine, needles and assorted drug paraphernalia.
He began to get the Wim Tat Nam picture. He knew a girl, once who almost messed with his life. She also was a psycho, driven only by lust and anger. She trusted no-one and no one trusted her. If Wim would kill her own team members for convenience sake, she’d kill anyone for whatever pleased her ambitions. Bandit’s options diminished. The dark streets spoke of nothing but old tires, filth, homelessness and the diesel truck industry. It was all wrong adjacent to the largest, richest port in the world.
Bandit became more anxious as he cruised one sullen, trash strewn street after another. A thin homeless, hippy looking creature ran into the street and tried to reach inside Bandit’s driver window. “Gimme some money!” He said.
Bandit pried his fingers from the edge of his window. “I need something to drink,” the man shouted obviously drunk. Bandit saw the desperation in his cloudy eyes and was beginning to feel a similar level of desire to find an answer quick. Everything he had resided in the Cantina and even more. His entire crew relied on the Cantina for work, family, emotional support, you name it.
Marko, Frankie, Buster and Clay were standing guard with Mandy, Tina, Sheila and Margaret, but were they enough? Bandit sped away from the homeless creep, but the drunk shouted after him and cussed his existence.
Bandit crossed new railroad tracks. The port told the city new tracks would lower truck traffic, but it would take years and tons of government intervention and regulations to get the job done. In the meantime, they allowed trucks to fill the streets 24/7, as the numbers of container shipments increased daily.
He turned north on Samson, the desolate road to the welding supply on the corner of Samson and Anaheim. Suddenly a stretch of the street was clean as a whistle, as he rolled past another 10-foot tall gated lot. The lot walls were wrought-iron framed and made private with 4 by 10-foot sheets of polished diamond-plate aluminum. The gates were somewhat ornate and made private with 1/8-inch aluminum plates.
Bandit looked at the gate and the cameras and kept rolling. He parked two blocks away, near the welding supply and suited up in his all-black jogging togs and hoodie sweatshirt. Creeping back toward the large corner lot, he made his way behind the facility and hoped for access or an elevated position to check out the action.
A fresh, new Blacked out GMC SUV stood in the middle of the yard. The yard was paved with fresh asphalt, plenty of lights and a 40-foot container turned office. There were three semis in the yard, all new as required by the Port of Los Angeles, in their drive to head off climate change, as if it would matter.
Bandit moved to a better location to see between the black, heavy wall, square tubing, fence posts and the aluminum diamond plate. It was the slickest, most expensively adorned yard in the area, a dead giveaway. Bandit could see the three drivers sitting across from a desk, in the container office. They sat quietly for the most part, but one of the Hispanic drivers was asking questions and the conversation turned heated.
Suddenly shots were fired, and the questioning driver went down. One of the others sat frozen in his seat, while the other bolted for the door. It sprang open and office light flooded into the yard. Two more shots were fired, and the young Hispanic driver stumbled on the doorway landing made from pulled metal grates, galvanized tubing and angle iron. He stumbled down the sharp iron steps and fell on the pavement.
The final driver lifted his hand in submission. A slight feminine hand shoved a cash, envelope toward the young man and he was handed a manifest with instructions to pick up a particular Yang Ming container and deliver it to a downtown warehouse.
Bandit used the adjoining roof to creep over the 10-foot-high steel spiked wall and into the yard. He crouched down behind one of the trucks and waited to see what might happen next.
Two soldiers and Wim’s driver came out of the office and headed anxiously for the SUV. Wim, the tiny, hot looking Chinese broad with her long stunning black hair pulled into a ponytail strolled onto the metal landing and shouted, “Who the fuck set up the drivers?”
One of her soldiers nervously reached for one the chrome door handles. Bandit pulled and cocked his Wather PPK and suddenly there was banging on their front gates. “Police, open up.”
Her soldiers and driver jumped into the SUV and fired it to life. The truck driver shifted his idling diesel into a low gear and gunned it toward the gate smashing it open. The truck peeled onto the narrow street blindly and headed north. The SUV left Wim behind and peeled into the street turning South, tires squealing. Wim fired at the SUV and cursed.
She jumped off the landing and ran for the area between the aluminum wall and the back of metal container office, right into Bandit’s arms. He slapped her twice, spun her against the fence and grabbed the barrel of her silenced automatic, yanking it from her small hand breaking her right index finger. She yelped, like a wounded puppy. He tossed the weapon to Marko, who had faked being a cop.
Bandit spun the young thing to face him in her buttoned Cheongsam dress. He snapped open the dress and yanked it off her, checking for any additional weapons. She stood naked before him, whimpering, yet her expression was all anger. He tossed the dress to Frankie, who held his sawed off shotgun at the ready.
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“Lift your arms,” Bandit demanded. He slipped a canvas smock over her head and arms and yanked it down over her youthful body. He spun her around again and handcuffed her wrists in the back. “You’re leaving this country just like you came.”
He pushed her head into a large burlap duffel bag, yanked off her high-heeled shoes, synched it up and put a padlock through the iron clasp. He tossed the keys to Frankie. “Throw these in the harbor.”
“Is Brad ready for her?” Bandit asked.
“You asked for a container going to China, right?” Marko said.
“Yep,” Bandit replied and tossed the bag over his shoulder. “Doesn’t matter where, just China.”
“It’s all set,” Marko said as they made their way outside the walls to their vans. Bandit loaded Wim whatever in the back of the the Cantina company van. Marko climbed into the driver’s seat. Frankie climbed in the passenger seat.
“I’m ready for a Jack on the Rocks,” Bandit said, “and one of the Chinaman’s most excellent burritos. See you back at the Cantina.”
