It was dark and quiet. He worked fast with his spade, careful not to make too much noise. It struck the top of the casket and he worked quickly to remove all of the soil off of it. He used the spade head to pry the top off the casket. First looking around to make sure no one could see, he struck his lighter to see what was inside. He found a small skeleton with long gray hair and a blue blouse and black silk pants.

He had never done anything like this before and was a little nervous. He didn't know why he had chosen this particular grave of all the graves he could have done, except that it was particularly well hidden from view, especially from the main road at the bottom of the hill. In the dark it looked like an old grave and he knew that old people used to bury things with the casket in the grave.

A dog was barking somewhere in the distance. He heard a bat fly by overhead and then the strange cry of an animal he had never heard before. It was almost like a child crying, or a cat. It made him feel funny inside and he almost began to vomit. He recovered his nerves and quickly checked all inside the casket for anything. He was becoming quite angry at finding nothing when his hand swept beneath the pillow and touched the silk handkerchief.

He brought it out and held it up and struck his lighter again. He found the gold chain with the jade monkey inside and he quickly put it into his pants pocket along with his lighter, and then he walked quickly down the hill to where he had stashed his motorcycle behind some bushes.

There were no cars on the road that early in the morning and as he made a few turns and got further from the cemetery he began to relax a little and feel the cool wind against his face and body. He never wore a jacket when he rode his bike, and he always wore only a thin white cotton t-shirt and black shorts with slippers.

He did not know exactly where he was going, or what to do with what he had found. He was beginning to feel pretty happy, though, and just kept driving here and there around the island until the sun began to break over the horizon.

He finally pulled in at his favorite coffee shop that opened at six every morning. The shopkeeper brought him some hot coffee with cream without speaking. The people there all knew him, as he had grown up on that corner. But no one dared talk to him or cross him as they were all now very afraid of him.

He was a big and rough and crude man. He liked to drink warm stout in the afternoon and curse and laugh and make front of people. The shopkeepers were too afraid not to serve him or to tell him to leave. He was fond of frightening little children away and sometimes liked to catch a cat prowling around the place for food, and to tie its paws up and watch it struggle to free itself.

He had never married and his father died when he was young. His mother had been a vegetable seller at the morning market, and all his relatives worked at the same market selling vegetables and fresh fruit and cassette tapes. He would help out sometimes when he was young, otherwise his mother would beat him with a cane. But he didn't mind the pain too much and would run off to play and gamble with his friends the first chance he got. He was always big for his age and would lord it over boys several years older. They would throw coins or gamble in the back lanes, steal fruit, sneak into the movie theaters by the side door and walk the whole day to go swimming up in the hills.

He had seven brothers and four sisters anyway, and so no one ever missed him much. He went to school for just a few months but found that the teachers were too strict and didn't like him. So he stopped and helped his uncles with their vegetable stalls.

He remembered the Japanese as a young boy. He would make extra money from them by running errands for them. He didn't mind them much and they seemed to like children, although they would thump him hard on the head if he ever made them angry or fail to bow to them.

After the Japanese left he fell in with an older group of boys who would make money by selling and buying contraband from the foreign ships that would dock in the strait.

He remembered the night they stole their own sampan from a pier by the docks. They had found an old, half-empty can of red paint. They rowed it all night around to the other side of the island, beached it, scraped off its numbers, made a few changes in boards inside, and painted the whole boat bright Chinese red. They waited there until night again, and, feeling pretty hungry, rowed back again to a special hiding place in the docks.

They bought and sold cigarettes, fruit, lighters, pens, beer, sodas, clothes, anything, to the sailors and merchantmen of the ship for about a year, and made quite a bit of money, which they always managed to gamble away.

One night a marine police boat came upon them and gave them chase. They narrowly escaped the searchlights of the craft and just floated quietly in the water. The water was pretty rough and it didn't take them long to drift away and into the shore.

The next day they scrapped the paint off the boat again and then rowed it down to the Jetty and sold it for fifty dollars.

After that, his band of young men broke up and went their separate ways. He began meeting people who introduced him to other people and he was then told by a couple of men to join the Triad.

He was nervous at the initiation ceremony. They took him blindfolded to place in the middle of the night. He walked through a warehouse door and a line of bare-breasted men held broad swords above his head. He was told the rules of the society. He killed a goat with a sword and drank its blood from an urn, and he made his blood oath on pain of death always to do the bidding of the society and to never reveal its secrets of initiation to anyone or become a rat to the police.

Sometimes someone would come and he would have a job to do. They would have fights with other gangs or help a member out of trouble. He got the scar across his right cheek in one of these fights. But they always won the fights, because he was always bigger and stronger and quicker than the others, and he would fight fiercely--chopping off people's fingers and even a hand, and breaking open skulls. He knew of at least one man he had killed that way, according to reports he had read to him from the newspaper the following day.

He was still a young man barely in his thirties and he was already a legend in his part of town. People knew of him and feared him. Everyone was always respectful towards him, and everyone steered a wide berth around him and avoided talking to him when they could.

He never married. He had plenty of women. Whenever he had a lot of extra cash he liked to go up to Thailand. The girls there were much nicer, younger and prettier than the bar-girls in town. The Thai girls knew how to take care of a man. But he never had a steady partner. Once there was a woman he had taken a liking to, but one day he scolded her and slapped her for spending money he had given her on clothes and she left him.

Now he was too old to care. He enjoyed his freedom too much and liked coming and going when it suited him. He finished his second cup of coffee and decided to get back on his bike and ride for a little while longer. He was feeling hot and thought the breeze from the ride would cool him down again. He was not sure what he wanted to do with the necklace yet. He could think best while he was riding his bike.

He headed for the back roads leading up to the hills. It was his favorite place when he wanted to be by himself awhile. He knew the island like the back of his hand--all the places to duck away at, all the routes to escape police, shortcuts to get somewhere in a hurry. Now he was climbing up the small winding hill. Soon it became too steep for cars and his bike went slowly. It was a fast and powerful bike. He had won one in a lucky bet and sold it and bought himself a brand new one with some protection money he had earned. He crested a small hill and turned into a small trail along the side of the road. The trail lead up a small ravine and came out on top of a small hillock. Huge Durian trees cover the spot from above and hardly anyone ever came by there. It was his own secret place and from there he could survey the town, his town, below.

Sitting astride his bike, he decided that he would sell the chain for a good price to a broker he had dealt with before. He wanted to keep the chain for himself but knew he needed the extra cash at the moment to pay off some money he owed for gambling. He knew that there might be trouble if he didn't soon come up with the money, and it worried him a little.

He only began robbing people after he began having debts from gambling. He didn't like to do it. He only did it if he felt really worried about his debts. He would take a lot of time figuring out how to go about it and in choosing a victim. At first he used a knife that he tucked in his pants. He would come up to someone on his bike at night in a lonely spot, at a bus stop or by an alleyway and stick the knife in their ribs and take everything they had. He was so big and frightening that they never fought him or yelled out or try to escape. It never took long. He was fast and he always planned his escape route so that he would be well away from the scene in no time. Most of the time he only scored small--a few twenties or a few small pieces of jewelry. But once in a while he struck it big.

One night the young man he tried to rob pulled a knife out of his pocket and lashed him across his wrist, almost dropping his own knife. He punched the man with his other hand, and fled away. He bled a lot and had a hard time stopping the bleeding.

After that he bought himself a little gun and four rounds of ammunition with money he had won at the races. He liked to go the races on weekends and watch the horses run. It was an old police revolver that had been stolen. He hid it in a box he kept hidden beneath the floorboards of his small room he rented from above an old shop house, and only took it out when he intended to use it.

He already used one of the rounds when he shot a man he was trying to rob. He wasn't intending to do it--the old gun just went off accidentally in his hand and the bullet grazed the old man's temple, bringing him down. The report of the gunshot stirred the sleeping neighborhood so he sped off before anyone came to investigate.

He had only three bullets remaining when the police came to raid his little apartment. They called out and bashed down the door, but someone had tipped him off before hand and he escaped out the window and across the red-tiled roofs without firing a single shot. He took his revolver with him.

The sun was now already overhead and he turned his bike around and rode back down the hill. It was growing hot upon his back and shoulders and the traffic in the streets was already heavy.

He got stuck behind a big blue bus that was belching out black choking smoke. He grew impatient and swung around the bus upon its left as it was pulling up to a stop, almost hitting a woman coming off the bus. He accelerated and wove in and out of the cars, dodging out of the way of the oncoming cars.

He turned a corner and pulled up to a small shop house where the pawnshop was. The small man inside had no shirt on and was behind a wire mesh. He showed the man the necklace and asked the man to weigh it for him. The broker weighed it and set a price at $1,200 dollars. The robber figured he could get at least $2000 for it and became really angry. They began bargaining and his voice grew louder and louder until he began shouting at the little broker. But the broker held firm at $1,500 and finally the robber gave in. At least it would be enough to cover the debt, he thought as he pocketed the money.

He rode back to his coffee shop again at the corner. By now it was close to 2:00 o'clock in the afternoon and he was getting thirsty. He ordered a beer from the timid shopkeeper.

He knew that gambling was his undoing. All the money that had passed through his hands during his lifetime would have made him a rich man if he hadn't gambled it all away. At times he would get really disgusted at himself and then would stop gambling for a few weeks, but always he came back. Most of the time he lost, and he frequently had sizeable debts to pay off. The people who dealt with him were more unscrupulous than he was, and they knew where to find him, so the one thing he never did was welsh out of his debt.

But he had made a big Towkay mad one time. This Towkay then sent eight men after him to punish him for failing to pay back his debt. They caught him outside of the coffee shop one evening and pulled him into an alley. They tried to hold him down and poke his left eye out with a metal rod, but he managed to free himself and beat off his attackers. They fled at his rage after he managed to catch the hand of the man holding the poker and thrust it back into his cheek.

Because he was angry at what had happened, he decided not to pay this Towkay back what he had owed him. It was after that he decided to buy the revolver with the money instead. He knew that one day this Towkay would try to get his revenge, but he didn't know how or when it would come about. And as he didn't like waiting for things, he decided to quit worrying about it and forget about it for the time being.

He had already scoffed three beers and was beginning to feel really relaxed. The only time he felt good any more was after he had a couple of beers. He ordered another stout and the reluctant shopkeeper brought him another and removed all the bottles from his table. It was approaching evening when he decided to go down to his favorite bar and hang out for a while. There they at least talked to him and gave him news of what's been going on around town.

He rode down the road to the bar and parked his bike by the door in the alley in back of the bar. He went in and everyone knew him. He sat down at the bar and the bartender served him a bottle of stout. The bartender told him that someone he hadn't recognized was asking about for him. It was a short, well-dressed young man. It made him start wondering who it could be. He thought of all the people he knew who fit the description but came up empty.

He drank another beer and was beginning to feel the affects of all the alcohol on an empty stomach. He was also beginning to get angry again and scolded a girl sitting next to him. He got up and left when he realized everyone was staring at him through the darkness.

Outside, the breeze blew. He met a couple of people he knew coming into the bar. They had been in a few scrapes together and were the only people in whose company he felt comfortable any more.

They decided to ride out on their bikes together to the nightclub along the north coast. The long ride would feel good and they liked the action, the music, the lights and the well-dressed women at the club. He didn't go down very often because it was a $10 door fee and beer was $30 for a pitcher. But that night he had extra money and so he didn't much care, forgetting about his debts, his past and his enemies all at the same time.

Together they had about three pitchers of beer and were getting very boisterous when a man at the table next to them with a young lady told them to quiet down. This led to the exchange of a few nasty words and finally a fight broke out. They beat the poor man up and left him lying unconscious on the floor and the girl crying. They figured they'd better leave and went their separate ways again.

When he got back to his room he remembered he had left his gun outside on the bike. As he opened the door he found three men inside. They said that they were detectives and that he was under arrest. Two more men came up from behind him and stuck the barrel of guns into his kidneys. They led him outside and into a dark sedan car that was waiting outside with its motor running and lights off.

The brief article in the news the next morning read that police reported that a notorious and wanted criminal had been arrested had been killed when he fell off a bridge three-storeys high.

Some rumors at the corner coffee shop surrounding his death held that the police had beaten him to death and then tossed his body over, breaking his lower right leg completely in half. Other rumors held that he had been picked by a gang who pretended they were the police and then killed him. No one seemed to know the whole truth, and no one felt very bad about what had happened.

Blanket Copyright, Hugh M. Lewis, © 2005. Use of this text governed by fair use policy--permission to make copies of this text is granted for purposes of research and non-profit instruction only.