by Dawson, Mark
Chau was standing behind him, a fog of blue smoke hanging before the barrel of the little Kel-Tec P-32 that he was holding in his hand. He moved to the man who Beatrix had hit with the stool and, point blank, shot him in the top of the head. The third man was conscious and shuffling away on his knees, his hands raised in supplication. Chau executed him, too, shooting him in the throat and then, again, square in the face.
Beatrix was confused. She put out a hand to steady herself, but a ripple of pain washed out from the puncture in her side. It amplified, spreading all the way up and down that side of her torso.
She suddenly felt faint.
“Shit,” she said.
Chau put the gun into the inside pocket of his jacket and hurried across to her. “Miss, you have been hurt.”
“I just need…to sit down,” she muttered. She reached out for a nearby stool, but miscalculated the distance between her and it. The heel of her hand slipped off the edge and she fell to her knees, knocking the stool onto its side. She tried to get to her feet, but was assailed by weakness.
Chau hurried to her side and clumsily helped her up. “We must leave. They are triads. Wo Shun Wo. If others come, they will kill you. Please. I help you. I have car outside.”
Beatrix lifted her arm so that he could loop his beneath her shoulder. He bore her weight as they stumbled, like a pair of drunken lovers, into the tumult of the main bar and then onto the crazed Kowloon street outside.
CHAPTER TWO
CHAU HELPED her into the street. He was slight, an inch shorter than her and of a similarly slender build, but he was wiry and stronger than he looked. He said that his car was parked in the lot around the corner. He bore her weight as they passed along the packed street, a fast-moving tributary of pedestrians that bumped and jostled them as they made their way.
The lot was a temporary arrangement, a wide square of cleared land that stretched between two buildings that were being demolished. Chau had a brand-new Mercedes CLA, shiny and red and hopelessly ostentatious. He blipped the locks, opened the rear door, and helped her inside. She dropped down onto the leather seat, removed her hand from her abdomen and looked at it. It was soaked with blood. She felt more throbbing and oozing from the gash and put her hand back, pressing down as hard as she could. She had seen wounds like this before, had inflicted them herself more than once. She knew that she was going to need some help. Unless she got treated, she was going to bleed out.
Chau got into the driver’s seat, started the engine, and screeched away. Beatrix was pressed back into the seat by the sudden acceleration. He drove west on Saigon Street, forging through Kowloon’s heavy evening traffic. Beatrix glanced out at the ubiquitous red taxis, the high-end Jaguars and Rolls Royces of the garish rich, the blinged up hatchbacks and the triad-driven minibuses.
They ran up against a queue of traffic gathered at the junction with Nathan Road. He braked and turned to look back at her. “You okay?”
“Been better,” she grunted.
“I will help.”
Beatrix was tempted to tell him to stop the car and let her out. The sidewalks were thronged with people, a seething morass within which she would be able to disappear after just a few steps. But then she looked down at her side again, at the blood that was seeping between her fingers, and she felt the lethargy in her legs. She knew that her body was going into shock. She was losing too much blood. It galled her to admit it, but she needed help. The knife had left a neat and tidy wound that she wouldn’t be able to stitch up herself.
Chau looked down, too. “You need to see doctor.”
“No hospitals,” she said.
“What do you mean? Your side—”
“I don’t want to go to a hospital.”
I can’t, she very nearly said. I can’t go to a hospital. If the Group was looking for her, and she knew that they would be looking, she couldn’t take a risk like that. She knew the reach of the intelligence service was pervasive, and the last thing that she needed was to put herself in a position where her details might be uploaded to the Internet.
She had to stay in the shadows, hidden in the depths, find out what she needed to know so that she could surface with the element of surprise on her side. It was her only chance for vengeance.
“My apartment, then. I fix you up there.”
“Where?”
“Five minutes. I take you there, yes?”
She closed her eyes. She felt faint. She knew enough medicine to know what was happening to her. It was hypoxia. Not enough blood pumping around her body meant that too little oxygen was getting to her brain.
“Do not sleep,” Chau urged.
“I’m all right,” she mumbled.
She closed her eyes.
#
BEATRIX WAS vaguely aware of the car door opening and Chau leaning into the cabin next to her.
“I call friend,” he said.
“No—”
“You are badly hurt. Very bad. More than I can fix. My friend is doctor. He will be able to help.”
Beatrix wanted to resist, her old instincts still trying to impose themselves, but she had no strength for it and she knew that he was right.
She felt her eyelids drooping.
“Stay awake,” Chau urged her. “No sleep.”
“Yes,” she said. “No sleep.” The words felt sticky in her mouth.
Her eyes felt heavy.
Chau shook her gently. “No sleep.” He shook her more vigorously.
Chau was speaking to someone in Cantonese. The unfamiliar words came to her as if she were underwater or in a coffin that was slowly being buried.
“No sleep!” Chau said angrily. And then, when she didn’t respond, he struck her across the face.
She prised her eyes open. Chau was halfway in the car. How had that happened? He was just wearing a vest. Where was his garish shirt? She glanced down. He was pressing it against her side. The shirt was an obscene scarlet, soaked through with her blood. How could she have any more blood? She had lost so much.
“Talk to me,” he said. “Your name is Beatrix, yes?”
Her reluctance to share her personal details seemed frivolous now. What was the point? “Beatrix,” she said, wondering if she had spoken aloud. “Beatrix Rose.”
“My friend is coming, Beatrix Rose. Ten minutes.”
“No hospital, Chau.”
“I—”
“No hospital. Promise me.”
“Okay. No hospital. I promise.”
She closed her eyes again.
“You must stay awake.”
Beatrix knew that he was right, but, despite that, the promise of sleep was too attractive to ignore. She allowed her eyes to close, focusing all of her attention inwards. The darkness seemed to be layered, textured. She felt as if it had substance and the deeper she delved, the more that seemed to be true. It wrapped around her, warm and pliable and comforting, a cushion for her body and the softest of pillows for her head. She felt someone with her, a presence in the darkness, and, as she looked, she saw Isabella. Her daughter was smiling, her arms held aloft, inviting her mother’s embrace. Beatrix felt herself smile as she knelt down and wrapped her arms around the darkness.
CHAPTER THREE
HER DREAMS seemed to be eternal. The darkness swallowed her and held her, allowing visitations from Isabella and her husband, Lucas. He looked at her with love and forgiveness, but his affection did not excuse the neatly drilled hole in his forehead and the trail of blood that seemed to run and run. She tried to remember what had happened to him, but her memories were wispy fragments, and, as she reached out to collect them, her fingers passed through them like smoke.
#
BEATRIX WAS awakened by a sound she did not recognise. At first she thought it was a mosquito, buzzing around her head. She prised open eyes that were gummed together with sleep and stared up at the false ceiling. She heard it again, an urgent scurrying, and she realised that, wherever she was, it had a problem with rats.
; Her repose had not been entirely natural. She noticed a scattering of small glass ampoules on the floor next to her head. She picked one up and read the English translation beneath the Cantonese: midazolam hydrochloride. A drug used for sedation and anaesthesia. She picked up another: metronidazole hydrochloride. Antibiotics.
She was lying on a futon in a tiny room, just long enough for her to stretch out and with barely a foot of space on either side. A cotton sheet was bunched around her midriff, disturbed during her sleep. She was wearing her underwear beneath a pair of mens’ pyjamas. She sat up, wincing with pain, and saw a foil container of half-finished soba noodles with a pair of chopsticks resting in them. Had she eaten? She didn’t remember. She was cold, too. There was an ancient air-conditioning unit on the wall, dripping water and wheezing out frigid air.
She got up, wincing with pain. The skin on the left side of her torso felt tight, unusually taut, and, as she raised her arm and looked down, she saw a neat row of stitches that held together the puckered lips of a small inch-long stab wound. There was an enormous bruise, too. It stretched from just above her hip all the way to her armpit.
She remembered: the men in the bar.
The triads.
She probed the wound. It was sore. She pressed with her fingertips and tried to assess the damage. There was no way to tell how deep the incision was, or what structures had been damaged. She remembered the blood. The knife must have caused a haemorrhage. An operation would have been necessary to fix it. Where had that happened?
Here?
She edged away from the futon, her arms spread out against the wall to help with her balance. Eventually, she felt strong enough to stand unaided.
She opened the bedroom door.
She was in a flat. Chau’s? It was tiny. The bedroom door opened onto the kitchen diner. She stepped inside. A sofa bed had been pulled open, a mess of sheets dumped atop it. The bed was empty. The apartment was quiet. She went to a window and pulled back the wooden shutters. The glass had a film of dampness on it, the cause of the rinds of mildew that limned the edges where it met the frame. The room smelt ripe and was stuffy. Beatrix unlatched the window and pushed it open. The window gave onto a shaft. The poorly tended nasturtiums that drooped from the window box of the next apartment along had attracted aphids and blackflies, and Beatrix gazed through the buzzing cloud to the three walls that completed the deep well. There were air-conditioning units fixed to the walls, lines that held drying washing, and, at the foot of the well below, a jam of green industrial refuse bins. She looked down. It was a vertiginous drop, maybe a hundred feet, and she felt a little dizzy.
She went back into the bedroom. There was a surgical stand in the corner of the room, a drip tied around the bracket at the top. There was a wastepaper bin next to it and, inside, she saw three plastic bags. The insides of the bags were slicked with scarlet fluid, thick and globulous. She retrieved one, saw that it was marked AB, and remembered the blood that had poured from the wound. She must have been given a transfusion. There were bloody bandages and surgical pads in the bin, too.
There was a stool at the other end of the futon. Two piles of clothes had been neatly laid out atop it. The first comprised the clothes that she had been wearing when she had been injured (she realised that she didn’t know when that was). She picked up the plain black T-shirt that she had been wearing. She held it out and saw the gashes in the fabric, one on the back and one on the side. The garment had been boiled to remove the blood that must have leeched into it, but it was ruined. She tossed it into the bin. Her olive trousers bore a discoloured patch where the blood had seeped in too deeply to be cleaned. She folded them, put them back on the stool and examined the second pile. These were new, a T-shirt and trousers from The Gap, matched to the ones she had been wearing. She took off the pyjamas and dressed. The clothes fitted perfectly. Chau was nothing if not diligent.
He had taken good care of her, but it made no difference.
She couldn’t stay here.
The front door was locked, but she opened it and stepped outside. The corridor had a bare concrete surface that was decorated with a repeating oblong design. The walls were bare, and the lighting was provided by flickering strip lights. Exterior windows admitted brightness from outside, and the interior windows opening onto the corridor were all barred. Plastic jugs of water stood outside the front doors, and, at the far end, Beatrix saw a painted sign that advertised ‘Deluxe Hotel’.
She stepped over to one of the exterior windows. This aspect offered a view of streets that she did not recognise and, in the near distance, the dome and minarets of a mosque she hadn’t seen before. She looked up and down the corridor, unsure which way to go for the elevators, but, before she could proceed any farther, she felt a terrible wave of lassitude. She had to put her arm out to brace herself against the wall. The pain flared from her side again, a sudden pounding that darkened the edges of her vision.
She was still weak.
Too weak.
She looked back at the open door to the flat.
She weighed it all up.
She knew that she didn’t have the strength to get very far. The prospect of just a few extra steps down the corridor was too much for her to contemplate. She was certain that she would collapse.
Could she stay here?
What about Chau?
Whatever else he had done, he had saved her life. He could have abandoned her or left her here to die, and he hadn’t done either of those things. She had been vulnerable and he had cared for her. There was nothing to suggest that would change now that she was recovering.
And she didn’t have much of a choice.
She walked slowly back to the flat, went inside, and closed the door behind her. She crossed to the bedroom, undressed slowly and methodically, and lay down in the bed again. She was asleep within moments.
CHAPTER FOUR
JACKIE CHAU DROVE around the block three times before he was satisfied that the building was not being observed. He was on Kai Hing Road. It was on the southern edge of the Kowloon peninsula, part of the extensive dockside and within close proximity of the Kwun Tong Bypass. The area was home to a large concentration of warehouses and businesses that profited from the goods that were unloaded from Hong Kong’s unusually deep natural harbour.
It was dark. The street was lit by two unreliable lamps and the fat gibbous moon overhead. He turned off. He backed into the narrow alley at the rear of his premises, the car pointing out and the engine still running. He glanced in the mirror. There were two men outside the complex of warehouses. They were smoking cigarettes. He thought he recognised them. Men dressed in the uniforms of the import/export business that was based two warehouses down from him. He knew Donnie Qi could very easily have left a couple of lower ranking triad members—maa jais, or little horses—in the vicinity to wait for him to come. But he had already postponed this visit for a week. The Dai Lo must have suspected that he would run. Chau knew that Donnie Qi respected his intelligence. He had to hope that he respected it enough to conclude that he wouldn’t take such a foolish risk.
Because it was a risk.
A foolish, stupid risk.
But one that he had to take.
He would just make sure that he didn’t stay for long.
He left the door of the Mercedes open, collected his little pistol from the seat next to him and made his way to the building’s back door. He heard the cawing of gulls from the docks, but paid them no heed. He walked quickly. He had to pass along an alleyway, an unlit shortcut that was full of trash and huge cat-sized rats that thrived on the scraps tossed out of the neighbouring warehouse that was used to smoke fish. He reached the door. A drop of stale water from an antiquated air conditioner fell onto his head. He unlocked the door and, his nerves jangling because he knew that it would creak, pulled it open.
The warehouse was quiet and dark. He paused in the doorway, listening hard, but he could hear nothing save the familiar drip of the tap that he had been meanin
g to fix for weeks. He knew the inside well enough to leave the lights off. He made his way, slowly and carefully, along the aisle that was formed by racking that held his cleaning products and equipment, finding his way to the stairs that would lead up to his office.
#
THINKING ABOUT Donnie Qi prompted other recollections. Regrets, too, and the sure knowledge that he had arrived at this juncture because of a series of increasingly poor decisions that had been motivated by greed. Chau had owned this business for five years. He had been doing well. He had a series of reliable contracts with small commercial landlords that paid a decent amount each month, enough to live on, even in an expensive city like HK. He had a nice apartment in Kennedy Town, he had been able to afford the payments on the Mercedes, and there was enough money to treat the Tsim Sha Tsui hookers he frequented to nice gifts and treats on their birthdays.
Running the business was hard work, but it was a comfortable, reliable, secure life.
He could have maintained that life for as long as he wanted it, but he had been greedy. He had been approached by a first cousin who said that he had a job that he might be interested in. Chau had known very well that the boy, a callow youth called Liang, had been associating with the local triads. He had heard that it was just a case of a youngster looking up to the glamorously tattooed criminals and their money and status, but he had been quickly disabused of that notion. Liang was a maa jai and very much part of the crew. Normally, Chau would have eschewed the invitation, keeping his fingers crossed that his rebuttal wouldn’t be regarded as a snub. But he had looked at the boy, remembering the buck-toothed kid who now drove a Lexus and spent money like water, and he decided that he wanted some of it himself. No, the prospect of making some quick, easy money was attractive, and he had been unable to resist.