“His uncle who owns the hospital. I’m afraid you’ve put too much trust in too many people, Harry. He sold you to the Chinese, sold the story to me when I came along. He had to try and cover it up after you started shooting everything in sight. That’s two dead Chinese and one in custody in the hospital. It’s an international incident, Harry. And the girl slips out in the middle.”
Harry sat on the bed. He tried to keep the gun up, but his arm was starting to shake. Jessica poured him a glass of scotch. “You look like you could use this.” She brushed past the gun to put the glass next to him, then sat back at the desk and sipped her own drink.
Harry laid the gun down next to him and took up the glass. He drained it in one. “You rescued us in Beijing.”
“The Chinese arrived just a little before Huang’s men. If the Chinese get their hands on the girl, she disappears forever. Neither of us wants that.”
“And then you let me go.”
“If we had the girl I would have told them to shoot you. With the girl on the loose, you had a better chance of finding her than anyone. That’s why I didn’t kill you then, and why I didn’t kill you this time. Yet.”
Harry decided to change the subject. “That doctor,” he started, “the one in Huang’s pocket…”
“Is in America waiting for the girl, so he can finish what he started.” She looked him in the face. Her eyes narrowed as she studied his expression, “And you still don’t really know what that is, do you?” She smiled, at him and stood up and started for the door. “She was supposed to be getting treatment in America ten days ago. If we could get the girl to the doctor it might not be too late. She might still walk away from this Harry, and we could both walk away with a lot of money.”
“You’d be happy to give me a cut from your take, I suppose.”
She turned to face him. “Harry, do you really think it’s all about the money for me? That’s just a bonus for being on the right side.” She put her hand on the door.
Harry picked up the gun. “What makes you think I’m gonna just let you walk out of here?”
She stopped and turned to him. “Because if you fire that gun, the police will be here faster than you could crawl to the door. And then your precious little girl has no-one looking out for her, does she?” She turned her back to him and opened the room door. Harry was struggling to hold the gun pointed at her head.
“I suggest you get some rest, Harry.” She closed the door, and the gun clattered from Harry’s hand as he passed out.
*
“She was here?”
The morning sun hurt Harry’s eyes. Jim James was eyeing him, and he could feel that James’ opinion of his condition was not good. He blew on his coffee.
“Right where you’re sitting. Said she followed Chang.”
“Huang would give anything to get his hands on you. But she didn’t give you to him.”
“She wants me to find Mui, before the Chinese do. She figures she has a better chance of getting the girl off me than off them.” Harry opened the bottle of painkillers and tipped a few down his neck. It was getting better, but slowly, very slowly.
“I was on to some old friends yesterday. The tap on Chang’s systems isn’t coming from Hong Kong, Harry, it’s coming from America. Washington DC.”
“She said it wasn’t all about the money. So you think she’s still CIA?”
“Could be CIA, could be DoD, but she’s got some friends in high places, that much is for sure.”
“So she’s still working for America. But I guess Huang doesn’t know that,” said Harry.
“In which case she would still have to give Huang something to keep him happy.”
“Like what? Unless…” James grabbed his phone first and dialled Chang. Harry could hear the phone ringing at the other end. It rang, and rang, and rang.
Chang’s office was dark and quiet when they arrived. The door was unlocked. Harry pushed it open, gun in hand. Chang was lying in the middle of the floor, his hands tied behind his back, blood spread around him in a heart shape. Harry didn’t need to check if he was still alive, his face was a purple and black mess, his legs sprawled and twisted to unnatural angles. A bloody slit, turning black, lay between his chest and what remained of his skull. His glasses were on the floor nearby, ground into the carpet. James’ walked over to the computers. They had been unmethodically smashed. A spray of blood decorated the broken monitors.
James said, “There’s nothing to retrieve. Let’s get out of here.” Harry said nothing. They turned and closed the door behind them, James making sure to wipe their prints off the door-handle.
Harry felt sick to his core. A wave of nausea ran through him, and it wasn’t just the meds. They sat in the car outside, not wanting to talk or plan or do anything, but both knowing that time was probably running out. James said, “It must have been Huang’s boys. Probably his son, Tony Huang.”
“It could have been the Chinese.”
“Too violent, too inefficient. I guess Jessica felt she could afford to sacrifice him. To keep Huang feeling that something was happening.”
“Meantime, she knows that the Chinese will be coming after Huang next. She has to get Mui out of the country before then.”
“The boyfriend is our only lead. We have to find him.”
“Can you hack his e-mail account?”
“I guess so if I’ve got the address.” James opened his laptop. Ten minutes later he was in. “Okay, he last accessed it from a place in West Kowloon. Hang on, a place on Tung Chau Street.”
Harry said, “Then that’s where we start. Take me there.” The place was a small PC room, set in an unremarkable building. Cars lined each side of the street, so James found a parking spot forty yards down the road, keeping an eye on Buchanen’s email from his laptop. Harry went in to a café opposite, up to the second floor, and took a window seat so he could see who was coming and going on the other side of the street.
The PC room was on the fifth floor, but from the café Harry could watch the entrance to the building. There didn’t seem to be much else happening in the building anyway. He hadn’t eaten since yesterday, but didn’t think his stomach could handle anything. He took a small bottle of whisky from his coat and topped up his coffee.
With his sore legs and stiff knees stretched out under the table, he took a cigarillo from the box in his pocket and blew smoke into the space above his head. Below on the street he watched the people coming and going, ignorant and oblivious, in the stores and restaurants around him. The PC room was twenty-four hour, so it was going to be a round the clock operation. He took another deep lungful from the cigarillo, and settled in to wait.
At lunchtime he got some sandwiches in the café and hobbled down the street to James in the car. James wound down his window to take them. “Thanks, I was just about to ring.”
Harry said, “It won’t be safe to go back to the hotel. You should find us a motel near here and get some rest later.”
“Eight hours rest each? Okay. In a few hours time.”
About five o’clock, James dropped the laptop with Harry and left to get food and a motel. At eight o’clock the café closed, so Harry had to find a new place. Out on the street he looked around. There wasn’t much. A block further down was a church, and he ended up sat on a bench out the front, trying to watch the entrance to the PC room over the parked cars, now fewer in number, and the small crowds heading to local bars and restaurants.
He stood up occasionally to stretch out the stiffness from his legs. By midnight Harry was almost alone on the street. James pulled up alongside him in the car.
“Do you want the car? The motel’s three blocks away.”
“That’s okay. I need the walk anyway. I don’t suppose much is going to happen overnight.” The PC room had a regular stream of students entering and exiting, but the number had dropped off in the last hour. There were always a few who would be gaming all night.
Harry walked back to the motel, picking up a bottle of s
cotch from a small grocery store on the way. The motel was a dank, musty place, the lowest link on the accommodation chain. It would do. He sank a handful of pills with the whisky and settled back on the bed.
*
The next morning, after a stretch, his body felt a little looser. The swelling had mostly disappeared, just leaving great purple bruises mottling his body. His knees and elbow were almost bending normally, with just a soreness around the ligaments of his left knee. He was back in the café and eating breakfast by eight. Commuters filled the street for an hour, and then it was back to the usual traffic.
James sat in the car outside. After lunch, James rang Harry, “Mui just accessed her e-mail. She used a proxy server, but she was off too fast to trace it.” Well at least she was being careful. He wondered how much money she had left. Another week, if she was being careful with that too.
Nothing happened that day. James disappeared back to the motel at five, and returned at midnight to relieve Harry. The next morning, Harry felt almost back to his old self. He sat after breakfast, smoking and sipping his coffee and scotch, watching the people and stretching his knee under the table. By now the café staff must have been convinced he was some kind of crazed stalker, but they wouldn’t do anything about it. Nobody ever calls out random strangers about their odd behaviour, and he hadn’t done anything dangerous. He watched a man marching to work, suit, tie, briefcase, and wandered what it was like. His phone rang. James said, “Harry, he’s on.”
“I didn’t see him. Have you got a sighting?”
“He’s not in that building, he’s somewhere else. It’s close.”
Harry leaped up, spilling his coffee, and ran down to the street. James was in his ear, “Shanghai Street, east three blocks.” Harry turned and ran through a narrow alley between the buildings. He heard James in the car going around on the road. He sprinted across a square, a playground; the knee felt good. He weaved through the traffic at a junction, with horns blaring at him, to reach the top of Shanghai Street. A PC room?
He started running, checking the signs that overloaded the sky above him. James again, “Okay Harry, he’s off. I’m passing you now.” The car came up from behind and sped past him. There, a PC room thirty yards ahead. Crossing a side street he glanced down to see Buchanen’s long blonde hair disappearing behind a small school. James had already gone past. Harry shouted into the phone and turned to give chase.
Buchanen hadn’t spotted him yet. There were small, old apartment buildings behind the school, and Harry turned the corner in time to see which door Buchanen disappeared into. As Harry crashed through the swing doors the lift was on its way up. It stopped on sixth. Harry stopped to breathe deeply as he waited for it to come back down. He was wheezing, and he didn’t want to risk his knees by taking the stairs, and arrive in no shape to do anything.
By the time Harry arrived on sixth he was ready to go again. He had his hand on the gun in his pocket but didn’t think he’d need it. Buchanen shouldn’t be too dangerous. He told James the building and to wait in the car, and hung up. He was in the centre of the building. The stairs ran down behind the lift shaft, and a single corridor stretched across the front of the building, blocked to the elements by scratched and cobwebbed plexi-glass that cast a sickly yellow pall over everything.
Six apartment doors dotted the corridor to his left, and six to the right. He started down to the left. Each apartment had a narrow, barred and frosted window onto the corridor. No sounds from the first apartment, or the second. The third one had the window open, and Harry saw piles of clothes and toys amid old prams and tiny bikes in the small room inside. Not that one. The fifth apartment was quiet, and then the sixth, dark and empty through the open window.
He was at the end of the corridor, and Buchanen could be in almost any of them. Suddenly the door to the fifth apartment opened. Buchanen walked out, a look of mute fear in his young pale eyes as he glanced up at Harry, and then Harry saw the gun in his back, quickly followed by the scarred face of Tony Huang.
Tony saw Harry and smiled, the red vertical line on his cheek creasing gruesomely. He shoved Buchanen towards the lift and pointed his gun at Harry. Three more suited thugs came out behind him, one taking care of the boy while the other two took pistols from their jackets and pointed them in Harry’s direction.
Tony Huang leered at Harry. “I’ve been waiting for this.”
“Yeah, I bet you have.” Harry’s hand gripped the pistol in his pocket, but he was outnumbered and outgunned, and he didn’t need to do anything rash. Tony Huang walked up to him, his gun in Harry’s chest, and butted Harry hard in the face. Harry went down, blood spilling from his mouth. Huang strode back towards the lift. “Bring him.”
The other two gangsters approached Harry, one holding a pistol against his temple, while the other took the gun from Harry’s pocket. Then Harry was marched to the lift with a barrel in his back.
Downstairs, Harry and Buchanen were pushed to separate SUVs. Harry looked up and down the street, scanning every parked vehicle as quickly and secretively as he could, but Jim James’ car was nowhere in sight.
9
The warehouse was cavernous. Around the edges, huge wooden packing crates were piled six high, but in the centre, where Harry and Buchanen were, it was empty. They stood there, next to the SUVs, surrounded by Tony Huang and his three thugs. All the guns pointed at Harry. Harry took in the warehouse, the crates, scanned the walls for an exit, measured the distance to each of the men. He didn’t have a chance, any way that he could see.
Tony Huang directed one of his men to get a chair and tie Buchanen to it. He said, “There goes all your luck, Harry Vee.”
“I’ve never been the luckiest man in the world.”
“Yeah well you fucked with the wrong guy, you dumb piece of shit. That’s unlucky. Nobody fucks with me and lives to talk about it.” His face glowed red with anger.
“I know at least one person who is fucking with you right now.”
Huang’s punch knocked the wind out of Harry, who fell to his knees. The others stood watching, happy to enjoy the show. Huang slowly circled Harry. “Tell that to your friend Chang. That’s what happens when you fuck with me. And I think you just run out of friends.”
From the floor, Harry said, “With enemies like mine, who needs friends.”
Huang’s boot connected solidly between Harry’s legs, the pain exploding through his body, quickly followed by the nausea as he curled up on the floor. Huang walked over to the side of the warehouse, coming back with a chair and a shiny metal baseball bat. He threw the chair at Harry on the floor. “Tie him up.” Two of Huang’s thugs uncurled Harry off the floor and tied his hands to the back of the chair, his legs to the chair legs.
Huang went on, “You see Harry, we need him,” he jerked the bat at Buchanen, “to lure in that fucking girl. But I don’t think we need you for very much at all.” Using the bat as a battering ram, he swung the tip of it into Harry’s stomach. The air exploded out of Harry’s lungs, leaving him gasping and spluttering.
Huang chuckled, circling him like a vulture. The line down his face was scarlet with effort and rage. “But your friend had it easy, Harry. I was in a hurry with him. With you I can take my time and enjoy it.”
Harry started laughing. “It doesn’t matter. None of it matters.”
It drove Huang crazy. His fist connected across Harry’s jaw, spraying blood onto the floor. He was almost screaming now. “Doesn’t matter? You’ll think it matters when you’re begging me to let you die.” He punched Harry again, twice. Harry spat blood from his mouth. He could feel it pouring over his chin.
“You were never the bright one were you Huang. How long do you think you’ve got? An hour, two hours? The Chinese are cleaning this place up, and you with it.”
For the first time, a moment of doubt crossed Huang’s face. “You piece of shit. I fucking own this town.”
“They’re gonna scrape you up like trash. That’s if Jessica Lee doesn’t kill
you first.”
Huang’s confidence wavered. He shoved the bat in Harry’s face. “Your bullshit talk isn’t going to save you this time.”
“Nothing’s gonna save you, Huang. Jessica or the Chinese, you’ll be dead before the end of the day, without my help.”
“Enough talking.” Anger returned to his face. He leaned in close to Harry’s face. “Let’s see what sound you make when I do this.” He lined the bat up on Harry’s kneecap, taking a few slow practice swings, as if it was golf. Harry braced himself. Then the large aluminium door at the far end of the warehouse started to slowly rise on its motor. The three thugs swung their guns that way and squinted into the bright sunlight that slowly revealed itself.
When the gap reached about eight feet, they heard a car revving, and a sleek black saloon with dark tinted windows slowly crawled over to the centre. Huang stood watching, while his men’s guns followed the car all the way. Harry looked across at Buchanen. He was watching the car, too. His face was a picture of sheer terror. Harry spat more blood into the dust on the floor.
The car stopped ten feet away, and Jessica Lee stepped out from the driver’s side. The thugs lowered their guns. Jessica took in the scene, then looked directly at Huang. “What’s going on here, Tony?”
Huang directed his mad stare at her. “Fuck off Jessica. This is my business, not yours.”
“You idiot. We can use these two to get the girl.”
“No, we use him,” a nod at Buchanen, “but this fuck is mine.”
“You’re not pretending, are you. You really are as stupid as you appear to be. Who do you think the girl cares about more? The guy who used her or the guy who tried to save her?”
Huang’s temper snapped, “We don’t need him and we don’t need you, you bitch. I got them here and you failed. Don’t you dare talk to me like that.” He pointed the bat at her, “Who the fuck do you think you are?”
The tiny silver pistol appeared with a flash from her pocket. In a second, four shots were fired and the three thugs were on the floor. Huang’s mouth dropped open, as Jessica walked slowly to one of them who was still moving, and put another bullet in him. She turned the gun on Huang. “You just don’t get it, do you? We need you least of all.”
The Sky Might Fall (Harry Vee, PI) Page 15