by Reece Hirsch
Chris recognized that the element of surprise was the only thing he had going for him. Once the killer spotted him, it would come down to who was more proficient with their gun, and Chris was pretty sure that was a matchup he could not win against a professional hit man. Chris had fired a gun before, but he was no marksman.
The wet bed of ground cover steamed a bit after the rain, sending up a loamy scent. The branches around him ticked faintly, weighed down by the rain.
Chris stared with all of the focus he was capable of, trying to see as deeply into the trees as possible to spot the man as soon as he came into view. If Chris fired too soon, he would plant a bunch of slugs in the trees, and the killer would proceed to take him out in short order.
A branch rustled in the distance, about thirty yards down the hill from him. Chris made himself small, hunkering down into the underbrush without making a sound, and tried to steady his aim by resting his forearm on a log. He desperately hoped that the killer was alone and didn’t have a partner who had already outflanked him and taken Zoey.
The branch rustled again, and a man came into view. It was the Chinese man who fired at them on Beale Street. And he had not seen Chris yet.
Chris took a breath, exhaled slowly, then squeezed the trigger and fired every bullet he had into the area where the man was standing. The gun sounded incredibly loud and kicked up in his grip. The shots tore and whistled through the leaves and branches.
When the chamber was empty and he had steadied from the recoil, Chris lowered the gun and looked at the place where the man had stood. The man wasn’t visible, and Chris had no idea whether he had hit him.
Chris reloaded and then held perfectly still. The hit man might be lying in wait for him to advance to check for a body. But if Chris turned and headed back to the house now, the man could hunt him down from behind.
After a few interminable minutes, Chris realized he had to do something, and he decided that if he was going to be gunned down, he would rather that it not be in the back. He rose into a low crouch and began to advance through the underbrush.
Although he tried to move quietly, that proved impossible. To his ears, Chris sounded like a rampaging wildebeest as he made his way forward, cracking twigs and rustling bushes. The killer would definitely hear Chris coming—if he was alive.
Chris slowed as he neared the trees where the man had been. Then he stepped forward quickly into the spot, gun raised and swiveling.
No one there. Chris scanned the surrounding woods but found no figure in sight.
There was a spot at his feet where the ground seemed to be spattered with blood. Chris leaned down and touched the leaves, and his fingers were red when he brought them up. A bit farther down the hillside there was also a red smear on a tree trunk. If the killer was retreating down the hillside, then he must be badly wounded.
Chris advanced a few more steps, but the man was nowhere to be seen. He decided to turn back to make sure Zoey was safe.
36
By the time Tao saw Bruen crouching up ahead behind a fallen tree, it was already too late. Before he could get off a shot, he felt a punch and a sting in his left leg and right side. He had been hit and, even in the first numb moments when the gunshot feels no worse than a hard slap, he knew that he’d been badly injured.
Tao threw himself on the ground. He might pass out soon, and he needed to escape back down the hill as quickly as possible. Almost immediately he began feeling the effects of the blood loss, the sensation that his head was a balloon slowly filling with helium and drifting away from his body.
Going back the way he came through the brush would create plenty of noise, and he would be easy to follow. Tao gambled that Bruen would be frozen for a few critical moments, trying to decide whether Tao was dead or not, whether he should advance or retreat.
Tao ducked out of the woods onto the grass and staggered back down the hill as quickly as he could. Each time he put weight on it, his damaged left leg sent an electric spike of pain through his body, but he could not stop. If Bruen happened to step out to the path to look for him, he would have a clear shot. But Bruen did not emerge from the bushes, and Tao succeeded in putting some distance between him and the man he had hoped to kill.
Now he was far enough away that an amateur like Bruen would not be able to make the shot even if he saw him. Of course, if Tao collapsed before he could make it to the road, then he would make Bruen’s job easy. He wondered if Bruen was the type who would turn him over to the police or shoot him on the spot. Tao certainly knew what he would do in that situation.
Tao made it down to the street that ran into town. His car was parked only a block away. He looked back up the hill and saw Bruen standing on the grass next to the dirt driveway, staring at him.
They spent a long moment sizing each other up from a distance, like two infantrymen across a muddy field of battle. Tao wondered if he had underestimated Bruen and his abilities. Bruen was probably thinking the converse, entertaining the mistaken notion that he could confront a professional killer and come out on top.
Tao gave a nod that he wasn’t sure Bruen could see at that distance and then limped away. This was not over. Not even close.
He got in the car and drove away quickly. Although he needed to tend his wounds, he was still too close to the house. He wanted to make sure Bruen didn’t appear behind him and start firing into the car while he was wrapping bandages.
The seat of the car was slick with blood as he drove slowly through the quiet town, past the yellow crime-scene tape strung in front of Dallesandro’s grocery. The police cruiser remained parked out front and had been joined by an ambulance to remove the body. Tao slowed momentarily, like any ordinary rubbernecker, then rolled out of town and onto winding, forested Highway 1.
When he was a couple of miles outside of Stinson, Tao pulled off the road and onto a patch of gravel near a beach. He removed his shirt and tore it into long strips, leaving his undershirt on. He tied one strip around the bullet wound in his leg, which was leaking a mixture of blood and pinkish fluid. Fortunately, the bullet hadn’t hit a major artery, but it remained lodged somewhere in his leg.
He then tied two strips of the shirt cloth together to make a binding for the bullet hole below the rib cage on his right side. The wound was large and it ached, but there was no way to tell if the bullet had damaged organs. At least that bullet had gone clean through.
He needed medical attention but could not show up in a hospital emergency room. Tao needed a place that would take him in and hide him, and that meant returning to Chinatown.
By the time Tao made it into the city and was driving down the steep incline of California Street, the streetlights had started to strobe and glow with an unnatural brightness. He felt like he was piloting a plane approaching a landing strip, wobbling on every axis like an aircraft in rough air. He had lost a great deal of blood, but he felt he could probably survive if he could just make it to Ms. Wan and her antique shop.
Tao left his car blocking an alley behind Chongqing Bazaar Antiques. He knew better than to enter through the front door looking like he did. If he were that indiscreet, Ms. Wan might very well kill him herself.
He went to the rear of the shop and leaned his forehead and a forearm against the iron door to steady himself, then pounded on it with his fist as forcefully as he could. Tao wasn’t even sure what time it was. If the shop was closed and Ms. Wan had gone home, then he would probably bleed out where he stood in the grimy alleyway.
After what seemed like a long time but might not have been, the door began to open with a metallic groan, pushing him backward. Tao staggered back a step or two so that the door could open wide, and Ms. Wan appeared.
She looked him up and down with a look of unabashed disgust. “I take it the target is still alive?”
Tao nodded.
“Looks like you’ve made a mess of yourself. I suppose I’m
going to have to help you. Come inside.” Ms. Wan offered him her shoulder to lean on and led him into the building. “They’re not going to like this.”
“I will finish the job.”
“Forgive me if I have my doubts at this point.”
Ms. Wan sat him down in the leather desk chair in her office and immediately began making calls. Although he knew that what she was saying was very important, he found that he could only take in her conversation as a low, comforting hum. The hum filled his head, and he grew drowsy. He imagined himself in a darkened room watching an episode of Game of Thrones on television with his brother. He and Wenyan were both about ten years old, so the chronology wasn’t correct, but somehow it all made perfect sense to Tao. Before he slipped away entirely, he thought that if this was the afterlife—watching Game of Thrones for eternity in a dark room with his brother—then it was not so bad.
Not bad at all.
Tao drifted upward into wakefulness to the glare of a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling in the sort of metal light fixture you would expect to find in a factory. The bulb threw shadows on the face of a tall man standing over him. In the harsh light, the lines of his face looked like crevasses, canyons viewed from an airplane.
Tao realized that he was no longer in Ms. Wan’s antique shop. He was stretched out on a table covered with thin paper like the kind that was used to cover a toilet seat. He looked down at himself and saw that his chest was covered in blood, and the man was suturing the wound in his side. This did not look like a hospital or a doctor’s office, though.
“Where am I?”
“Give him another one,” said the man in Mandarin to someone other than Tao.
Ms. Wan came into view and pushed a fat white pill into his mouth. She placed a hand behind his head and raised it enough to pour a swallow of water into his mouth. He coughed as he swallowed the pill. His stomach muscles tensed with the cough, and he felt a nearly unbearable pain in his lower torso.
“Where am I?”
“You’re in Chinatown.”
“Am I in a hospital?”
“Does this look like a hospital to you? Don’t worry. Your friend here has arranged everything. You’re safe.”
“Who are you?”
“That’s not important. What’s important is that you lie still and let me finish sewing you up. Those pills work fast, so you should be—”
Tao didn’t hear the rest.
37
When Tao awoke again, he was on a bed in an apartment that was empty, save for a straight-backed wooden chair and a suspended IV bag dripping a clear fluid. It seemed that every time he awakened, he lay in a different place. It was very confusing.
He could see through the open door into the living room, which was entirely bare. Tao knew he was still in Chinatown, based upon his view of shop signs in Mandarin and English through the gap in the curtains. He must be in an apartment above the shops of Grant Avenue or one of Chinatown’s other main thoroughfares. It was dark outside, and he wondered if twenty-four hours had passed since he had been wounded in Stinson Beach. Or it could have been forty-eight hours—seventy-two, for all he knew.
Whatever he had been given for the pain was wearing off, and his entire body throbbed. It felt like the pain was a knife and he was the whetstone; each time it came back a little sharper.
As he reconstructed the events that had brought him there, he realized just how close to death he had come. He had been lucky that Bruen wasn’t a good enough shot to kill him on the spot on that wooded hillside in Stinson Beach. Lucky to make it all the way back to Chinatown without bleeding out. Luckier still to have received the services of Ms. Wan’s back-alley doctor.
It was an embarrassment to have been outsmarted by an amateur, an affront to Tao’s professional pride. But he also took the fact he was still alive as a sign that he was meant to finish the job.
He heard footsteps approaching on hardwood, echoing in the bare rooms. A man appeared in the bedroom doorway. He was Chinese, in his midthirties, wearing tobacco-brown slacks, a cream-colored pullover, and an expensive-looking leather jacket.
“You don’t look so good,” the man said.
Tao tried and failed to pull himself up in bed. “Who are you?”
“I’m a person who knows when things happen here in Chinatown.”
“What do you want with me?”
“I represent a local benevolent organization. We provide community services, small business loans, that sort of thing.”
“You mean a tong.”
“That word carries so many negative connotations. It’s a remnant of another time.”
While he might object to the use of the term, Tao doubted that the tongs had evolved beyond their well-known control of prostitution, gambling, and drugs in Chinatown. “What brings you here?”
“Ms. Wan told us why you’re here in the US.”
“That was supposed to be confidential.”
“Ms. Wan understands that we are not people that you withhold information from. You’re going to have to leave.”
“Why?”
“Because we can’t be seen to be harboring someone who is opposing the US government. We have enough trouble with local law enforcement. We don’t need to bring the feds down on us.”
“You’re not harboring me. I assume that you didn’t arrange for this apartment.”
“No, we didn’t. But this is our turf, and we are accountable for what happens here. To suggest that something like this could happen under our noses without our knowledge is, frankly, a little insulting.”
“No offense was intended.”
The man picked up Tao’s pants, which were hung over the back of the chair next to the bed. He fished out the wallet and examined his ID and passport.
“I assume that these are fake.”
Tao shrugged in acknowledgment.
“My boss asked me to find out who you are. I’m going to need to have an answer for that question when I return.”
“I’m not going to give you my real name.”
The man approached the bed and examined Tao’s wounds. “Those look painful. You really want me to do what comes next?”
Tao knew what was coming next, and he hoped to avoid it. “I can tell you this. If you want to know who I am and what I do, take a look at the ‘White Wolves Professionals’ page on the Silk Road website. I work under the name Red Sun. Hopefully that’ll be enough for your boss.”
“Maybe. We’ll see. But you’re still going to have to go.”
Tao attempted to move, then groaned at the sharp pain it caused. “I’m not in any shape to leave yet.”
“I think that probably depends on how motivated you are.”
“If you know why I’m here, then you must know who’s backing me. Don’t you feel some loyalty to your homeland?”
“We respect the tradition, but we’re Americans now. This is our homeland. And, most importantly, we have to live with American law enforcement. Gambling and prostitution, even drugs, is one thing. Condoning a hit sanctioned by another government on US soil is something else entirely. We can’t tolerate that kind of trouble.”
Tao winced as he tried again to straighten himself up in bed. “I’m not sure you understand.”
“Please, enlighten me.”
“I take my orders from representatives of the People’s Liberation Army. You should be more concerned about them than the FBI.”
The man laughed, though his expression didn’t change. “Are you actually threatening me?”
“I’m explaining the dynamics of the situation.”
The man said nothing for a moment, perhaps trying to decide how much clout Tao might actually have within the PLA. “Your case would be more convincing if you identified yourself. We have no way of knowing that you are what you say.”
“You know that Ms. Wan
vouched for me.”
“Ms. Wan is an interesting person. She plays so many roles that sometimes I think even she forgets where her best interests lie.”
“I’m not asking you for anything, just to let me heal and be on my way. If you plan to stand in the way of that, just know that you are interfering with the PLA’s plans. If I were you, I wouldn’t want to do that.”
“Most people here in Chinatown know better than to threaten me.”
“Maybe that’s because the people backing me are not from around here—and I know what they’re capable of. I just want to make sure that you know that too.”
“Whoever you are, you’ll do well to watch your mouth.” The man moved closer to Tao. “Do you understand?”
Tao offered only the merest nod.
At that the man took a step back from the bed. “I’ll speak with my colleagues.”
“Aren’t you a decision maker?” asked Tao. “They call tong bosses dragon heads, correct? Aren’t you the dragon head?”
The man winced at the distasteful term. “I’m not the boss, but I speak for him.”
“What you’d better do is speak to him.”
But the man had already walked out of the apartment, slamming the door behind him.
38
When Chris opened the door to the cabin, wet and muddy with the gun dangling at his side, the room was dark, and it took him a moment to notice her. Zoey was standing to one side of the door, gripping a large kitchen knife. She had been poised to leap at whoever came through the door, and her eyes showed what it had taken to ratchet up her nerve to that point.
When she saw that it was Chris, she let the knife clatter to the floor. She ran and threw her arms around him.
“I heard gunshots,” she said, her voice choked with emotion. “I thought you were dead.”