The look Bai bestowed on Jason didn’t brook any argument. While looking at Tan, Jason’s expression remained unreadable. Sammy Tu moaned softly in the background as Jason stared. No one moved.
Finally, he relented. “I’ll expect full cooperation on weeding out any of Shan’s followers.”
The question wasn’t rhetorical. Everyone in the room waited for the answer.
Showing respect, Tan again bowed low. “You’ll have it, Hung Kwan.”
“In that case, welcome back, Brother. You can thank Bai for your life.”
Jason turned to one of his men and nodded. The man pulled a phone from his jacket pocket and made a connection. The call would take Tan’s name off the list of those to be hunted down and killed.
There was a knock on the door. One of Jason’s men answered with his gun drawn. Two men in emergency response uniforms stood in the hallway with a wheeled gurney.
“Let them in,” Bai urged.
As they wheeled the gurney through the door, she directed them into the next room where a young woman clung tenuously to life.
Tires squealed as the ambulance turned a tight corner. Bai’s hands gripped the sides of the gurney for support while the vehicle pitched and swayed as it raced through the streets of downtown Vancouver.
Bai hovered over Jia while feeling helpless, unable to do anything to aid the injured girl. A paramedic attempted to insert an IV drip into Jia’s arm but seemed to be having a problem. He shook his head in frustration as he labored over her while talking to Bai. “We need to hydrate her, but her blood pressure is so low the veins have collapsed,” he explained. “Wait a minute! There you are, you little bugger.” He looked up with a grin. “I got it!”
The paramedic was young, exuberant, and freckle-faced. He looked like he was twelve years old. Bai nodded in encouragement and felt like a lame cheerleader.
“We can’t give her anything for the pain,” he added. “We don’t know enough about her injuries. I’m afraid anything we give her might stop her heart. She’s weak; her pulse is thready.” He attached an intravenous drip and hung the bag on an overhead hook where it rocked back and forth. “We’ll just get some fluids in her and wait for the doctors to make the hard calls.”
“How far to the hospital?” Bai asked.
“We’re almost there. Our trauma team is really good, and they’re fully staffed.”
“Has it been a busy night?”
“It’s been a crazy night,” he asserted brightly, then seemed to regret his choice of words. “That’s to say, we’re getting more calls than usual. There seem to be a lot of gun-related incidents tonight.”
“Seems to be a lot of that going around,” she agreed.
The ambulance swerved suddenly, throwing Bai to the side before coming to an abrupt halt. She felt the vehicle back up then stop again. The rear doors flew open. Men dressed in blue scrubs reached in to tug at the gurney.
Bai jumped out of the back of the ambulance and into frigid air as men wheeled Jia through a set of automatic doors that swooshed open at their approach. A current of warmer air, smelling of disinfectant and floor cleaner, enveloped them.
Orderlies rushed the gurney down a brightly lit hallway with Bai right behind them. Walls of white tile flew by as they ran. Wheels rattled and clattered when the gurney slapped through another set of metal doors and into a room of curtained cubicles. Jia’s gurney was smoothly eased into the nearest open bay where people in green and red scrubs dropped on her like raptors on roadkill.
A blood-pressure cuff was hurriedly strapped to her arm. A trauma nurse pressed a stethoscope against her chest while another clipped a pulse monitor on her finger. To assess her medical needs, they quickly checked her temperature and respirations; drew blood; and peered into her eyes, mouth, ears, and every other orifice.
Jia fought them feebly. Pitiful moans escaped bruised and swollen lips while Bai’s stomach clenched in empathy as she watched from the sidelines. She couldn’t help the feeling it was her child lying on the gurney.
Almost immediately, Jia was pulled out of the cubicle as doctors and nurses raced the gurney down another hallway, all the while spouting medical jargon. Bai tried to follow, but a woman in a white doctor’s coat put an arm out to hold her back. The physician was taller than Bai and very white, with alabaster skin and red hair. She was striking.
The doctor gripped Bai’s shoulders. “You’ll have to wait here.”
Bai tried to push past her. “I need to be with Jia.”
The doctor refused to let go. “There’s nothing you can do but get in the way.”
Bai turned and almost struck the woman. The doctor must have seen something in Bai’s expression because she flinched but, to her credit, didn’t let go. Bai took a deep breath and a step back. She faced the doctor and brought her emotions under control.
“I need to be with her,” Bai repeated.
“I’ll come and get you as soon as we’ve done x-rays and ultrasound. We may have to run a CAT scan as well. You’re better off in the waiting room until we can assess your daughter’s condition.”
The doctor’s tone left no room for argument. Her stare was direct and commanding.
Bai thought the woman was a bitch—and liked her for it. She acquiesced to the doctor’s orders, even though it pained her to do so. She wanted access to Jia. If that meant giving a little to get a little, she’d play the game.
She didn’t bother denying she was Jia’s mother. “You’ll let me know as soon as you have something?”
“Of course I will.”
Bai stuck her hand out. “My name’s Bai. You do everything you have to do to make that girl whole. I don’t care what it costs or what specialists you need to call in. Do we understand each other?”
The doctor looked at Bai’s hand and then took it in a firm grip. “I think we do, Bai. My name’s Shannon, Doctor Shannon Brian. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a patient to see to.” She turned and walked away without a backward glance.
Bai followed the signs to the emergency waiting room. It proved to be an antiseptic purgatory complete with blue plastic chairs, dog-eared magazines, and scuffed linoleum floors. It was also, thankfully, unoccupied.
She wandered out into the hall and found a coffee machine. After feeding the mechanism a dollar, it sloshed out a cup of lukewarm mud that tasted like shoe polish. Thinking it might have enough caffeine to keep her going, she tried to drink it. She made it halfway through the cup before she gave up and tossed it in the trash, where it landed on a small mountain of mostly full coffee cups.
Walking back into the waiting room, she settled into one of the disgusting blue chairs to wait. Time dragged. She checked her cell every five minutes and felt as if she’d been caught in a time warp as the minutes ticked away like hours. Just when she thought she couldn’t stand it anymore, Shannon returned, her face grave. Bai braced herself for bad news.
Shannon’s voice was harsh. “What exactly happened to your daughter?”
“A sadistic man beat her repeatedly.”
The color in the doctor’s neck turned from white to red.
“Where is he?” she demanded.
“Where he’ll never hurt anyone again.”
Shannon stopped herself. Whatever she’d been prepared to say was abandoned as she stared at Bai and tried to read her. Finally she nodded. “Good!”
It was a terse but heartfelt endorsement.
“What about Jia?” Bai asked.
“We’re prepping her for surgery now. She’ll probably lose her spleen. I don’t think we can save it. Her kidneys are bruised, and she has internal bleeding. We’ll know more once we’ve opened her up.” She paused for a moment as she looked at her clipboard. “Her right wrist is fractured. Repairing that can wait until she’s out of surgery. We’ll set it while she’s still sedated. Four of her ribs are fractured, but her lungs, miraculously, are all right—no punctures we could see. Her breathing is good, given the circumstances. Other than that, she has
facial lacerations, a couple of loose teeth, and a hairline fracture of her cheek that will have to heal on its own. Oh, and a dislocated shoulder that’s got to hurt like hell. We’re packing it in ice to get the swelling down before putting it back in place. She may require follow-up surgery if the tendons are too severely damaged.”
She dropped the clipboard to her side. “I can’t say for sure your daughter’s out of danger. She’s sustained a lot of tissue damage. There’s always the danger of clotting. But she’s young, and that will work in her favor. We’ll know more in a few hours. Right now, she’s stabilized.” She paused a moment before continuing. “Even if she makes a complete physical recovery, the long-term psychological damage may prove more difficult to repair. The prolonged abuse she’s endured can have lasting effects. You should see to it she gets professional help.”
Bai looked at Shannon and asked the question candidly. “Was she raped?”
“No. And that’s even stranger. Usually when girls are brought in with these kinds of injuries, sexual penetration is the first thing we look for. Your daughter’s hymen is still intact, and she appears not to have been molested.”
Bai digested that bit of information as she reflected on Shan’s hatred for women. She took into account his high voice and his raging temper. Her observations led her to speculate that he might have been abusing steroids. Shrunken testicles from prolonged steroid use would explain a lot of his symptoms.
“Can you refer me to a good therapist in San Francisco?” Bai asked.
“Not offhand, but I can make some calls. We’ve still time for that. Your daughter won’t be leaving here for a few days, at the very least.”
“When do you expect she’ll be out of surgery?”
“If everything goes well, you can see her in a couple of hours. Your daughter’s been assigned a private room with two beds for pediatric patients. Why don’t I have an orderly take you up and get you situated? She’ll be wheeled up as soon as she’s out of recovery. I’ll give you an update before then.”
Bai thought about the offer. She had a number of things to attend to, but she was dead on her feet. She’d been up for nearly twenty hours, killed two people, and seen another two executed. Mrs. Yan still waved at her every time she closed her eyes. Her nerves were so frayed she felt like she was rattling.
“That’s very kind of you.”
Shannon waved aside the courtesy “Forget it. You look like you could use some rest.”
“My people have a saying, ‘Forget injuries, never forget kindnesses.’”
Shannon looked at her with a thoughtful expression. “I’ll have to remember that.”
The doctor smiled for the first time, and Bai was taken by how beautiful she was.
“Follow me,” Shannon said, and turned to walk down the hall.
She led Bai in the opposite direction of the emergency room. At the first nursing station, Shannon turfed Bai to an orderly who took her to the third floor and deposited her in a room with two hospital beds, the kind with metal rails. A drape, suspended from a rod on the ceiling, divided the room. A utilitarian bath with a shower was accessible through a door near the entry. The walls of the room were painted with clouds and rainbows, but the room still smelled of disinfectant and floor wax, the unmistakable aroma of hospital.
Bai sat on the bed farthest from the door. She leaned back to rest her head against a starched, brittle pillowcase, thinking she might rest her eyes for a moment. And slept.
Bai awakened to someone’s tugging on the sleeve of her jacket. Jason stood at the bedside with her overnight bag in his hand. It took a moment for her to remember where she was. She sat up groggily.
“I thought you might need this,” Jason said, holding up her bag.
Bleary-eyed, she looked at him. “You just can’t stand it when I sleep. Is that it?”
He smiled and put the bag down at the foot of the bed. “Since you’ve obviously decided to move on, I don’t see any reason to be nice to you, unless, of course, you’d consider changing your mind.”
He walked around to put his hands on her shoulders and knead the muscles of her back. She almost purred. Despite the rude awakening, his flirtation brought a smile to her lips. She turned her head to look out of the window. Dawn was breaking. Crimson rimmed the horizon.
She put a hand on Jason’s, which continued to rest on her shoulder. “You must have news, or you wouldn’t have wakened me. What’s going on?”
“While you slept,” he prefaced, “I’ve been working on extracting the truth from Sammy Tu. No easy task given his penchant for lying. I’ve met some terrific liars before, but nothing compares to the ingenuity of his stories.”
“You woke me up to tell me he’s a big fat liar?”
“There’s more to it than that. It turns out he did hold a contract on you. But it wasn’t to kill you. His job was just to lure you away from the protection of Sun Yee On.”
His comment grabbed Bai’s attention. She sat up straight to wipe the sleep from her eyes as she thought out loud. “Did you get the name of the contractor?”
He walked around to sit on the bed and face her. “That part was easy. You ever hear of the law practice of Hung and Chin?”
“Hung and Chin are my attorneys! There’s no way Benny and Robert would handle a contract on me. We’ve known each other since we were children. The idea of their being involved in this is preposterous.”
He smiled and shrugged his shoulders. “They may not knowingly have handled the contract. And this is where it gets really interesting. It seems the contract was a blind document handled by Hung and Chin without their being privy to the contents.”
“Does that make any sense to you?” she asked.
“That’s something you’ll have to ask them. I’m not an attorney.”
A sardonic, lopsided smile twisted his features. He seemed amused by the turn of events.
“Do you think this is funny?” she asked.
“Maybe a little. Not like laugh-out-loud funny, but the situation does reek of irony. Think about it—your childhood friends unknowingly assisting in your demise.”
She dismissed his warped idea of humor with a flick of her hand. “I’d liked to have been there when you questioned him. Are you absolutely sure he told you the truth?”
Jason dropped the smile and spoke candidly. “Trust me; you wouldn’t have wanted to be there.”
Seeing his features harden, Bai understood. It would have been impossible for her to stand by and watch someone tortured for hours on end. Then again, she’d been the one to hand Tan the knife that severed Sammy Tu’s ear. She was beginning to have serious doubts about who she really was.
She took a deep breath and let it out before asking, “Did he have anything else to say?”
“He had plenty to say—mostly atrocious lies. At one point he swore he was an undercover DEA agent. Then he tried to convince me he was an unwilling pawn. That Shan had set you up. The only interesting information was a story about Jimmy Yan. Sammy Tu sent one of his girls to entice you into looking for Jia. It seems Jimmy had been coached to tell you Sammy Tu had left for Vancouver. The idea was to draw you away from Chinatown and Sun Yee On. Jimmy got caught up in his own macho bullshit and got kicked in the balls before he could deliver his lines. How’s that for a classic cock-up?”
She shook her head in amazement. “The trip to Oakland should never have happened.”
“Sammy Tu went ballistic when he found out Sun Yee On was involved and we’d burned down his house. Now that, you’ve got to admit, has really good potential for humor. This whole setup was pretty much a comedy of errors. The fact we still ended up coming to Vancouver gave him the impression we’d already exposed his involvement. He thought Sun Yee On was gunning for him. That made him nervous enough to call on his best client, Shan, for help. It seems Sammy Tu’s been providing girls to him for quite some time.”
She took a moment to sort out the interwoven relationships. She was starting to think she might
need to draw a flow chart. “So Jimmy was involved in this from the beginning? Does he know his mother’s dead?”
“That’s another macabre story.” Jason’s smile faded as he seemed to gather himself. “According to Sammy Tu, Mrs. Yan balked at Jimmy’s selling his sister to gain admittance into the Wah Ching. Sammy Tu told Jimmy to take care of it. He lured his mother over to Oakland and went after her with his pocket knife, the preferred weapon of newbie tough guys. Sammy Tu said Jimmy chased the old lady around for about twenty minutes before she grabbed her chest and fell over dead. Sammy Tu professed regret at not killing Jimmy then and there. It seems he couldn’t stop laughing long enough to pull the trigger.”
Bai put her head in her hands. Jimmy, as it turned out, was an even bigger idiot than she’d imagined.
“And you’re certain he was telling the truth? It all sounds so crazy.”
“In the end, he gave us everything he had. I feel confident he told the truth. And, like all good deeds, his part in this won’t go unpunished.”
“You didn’t kill him, did you?”
“No. I’ll leave that to someone else.”
She couldn’t bring herself to feel sorry for Sammy Tu. He’d sold girls to Shan, sending them to a brutal death.
“‘Do good, reap good; do evil, reap evil,’” she said sadly.
Jason chuckled at the adage. “Let’s hope not.” He brushed a bit of imaginary lint off his shoulder and smiled at her. “How’s the girl?”
“They think she’ll live. She’s probably going to lose her spleen. I hope that’s the worst of it. The doctor said she’d come by when Jia came out of surgery. That was a couple of hours ago.”
“Did they say how long she’ll be hospitalized?”
“They think a couple of days, at least. Why?”
“Because our private jet is headed back to San Francisco in a little more than an hour and I’d like you to be on it.”
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