At two in the morning, Xie Jia Hua was driving along the night road.
He had just finished handling a suicide case. The deceased had been a fanatical stock-market investor who borrowed an enormous amount from loan sharks to speculate. Then the recent violent market turmoil wiped him out. Creditors kept coming to his door demanding payment, so the man took his wife and son to the roof intending for all three of them to jump. At the last instant, his conscience returned. He shoved his wife and son backward and fell alone. Twenty-five stories. By the time he hit the ground, he had become a mass of blood and flesh.
Hong Kong was an international financial center as well as an offshore jurisdiction with no controls on the inflow and outflow of foreign-exchange capital. Every day, billions to tens of billions—in funds circulated through its various financial markets. The economic boom since the sixties and seventies had also given ordinary Hong Kong residents more capital to invest. Retail enthusiasm rose with the tide, everyone dreaming of making the right bet and becoming rich overnight. At the same time, inadequate regulation, the impact of foreign capital, manipulation by financial predators, and the herd mentality of ordinary investors kept the local financial markets in constant turmoil and conflict. Since joining the police force, Xie Jia Hua had participated in maintaining order during more bank runs and disturbances at financial institutions than he could count, and he had personally handled—or heard colleagues discuss—innumerable suicides by people ruined through financial trading.
No matter how many death scenes he had witnessed, he still found it difficult to forget those bloodstained bodies and the eyes of the families left behind. During the police investigation just now, the dead man’s wife—who had narrowly escaped death herself—had clung tightly to her son throughout. Her face showed no grief at all, only rigid, wooden numbness. The dead were gone, but the enormous debt he had left behind, their inability to support themselves, and the prospect of homelessness remained. For this mother and son, whether survival was a blessing or another disaster was impossible to say.
Xie Jia Hua had his subordinates contact a social-work assistance organization for the pair. Once the scene had been processed, he drove home carrying a body full of exhaustion and the lingering smell of blood, intending to take a quick shower and collapse into bed. Tomorrow, plenty more cases would already be waiting on his desk.
Unexpectedly, the moment he stepped from the elevator onto his floor, professional instinct told him something was wrong. Scattered traces that looked suspiciously like blood dotted the floor, winding intermittently from the stairwell all the way to his front door.
He rested a hand on the gun at his waist and cautiously approached. Examining the tightly closed lock, he found faint scrape marks—the door had been forced open with some kind of tool. He drew his gun, took out his keys, and turned the lock as silently as possible. He listened for movement inside, then kicked the door open with his weapon raised.
The corridor light illuminated the living room. No one stood opposite his gun. Xie Jia Hua stepped cautiously into the apartment and found that the blood trail continued onto his sofa, where it had left the outline of someone slumped there, before winding farther into his bedroom.
Someone gravely wounded and bleeding heavily had somehow evaded the security guards downstairs in the middle of the night, climbed the stairs, picked his lock, went straight to the sofa as though he knew the place well—and then climbed into his bed…
Xie Jia Hua had already half-guessed who it was. Gun in hand, he hurried toward the bedroom and switched on the wall light. Lu Guang Ming lay crookedly across his bed drenched in blood, Xie Jia Hua’s blanket pulled over his waist, his shoes still on his feet. A huge amount of liquid—whether blood or water was impossible to tell—had soaked the sheets and blankets. Combined with the sharp smell of blood and the salty reek of seawater, the entire scene looked like the aftermath of a murder.
Xie Jia Hua’s heart seemed to miss several beats. He rushed over and began checking him. Lu Guang Ming’s entire body was ice-cold. His face was covered in blood, his hair soaking wet, and his lips held the bluish pallor of someone on the verge of death. There was blood everywhere. Xie Jia Hua could not even count how many injuries he appeared to have.
“Lu Guang Ming! Lu Guang Ming—!” Xie Jia Hua called him several times without receiving any response. Finding that he was still breathing, he hurriedly bent down and lifted him. But the instant he moved him, Lu Guang Ming frowned and mumbled. His body twisted free and dropped back onto the bed, dragging the blanket with him as he rolled toward the corner.
“Hrr…” A faint snore escaped him.
The blood in Xie Jia Hua’s body turned cold. “Lu Guang Ming!”
“Mm…” Lu Guang Ming mumbled vaguely again.
Xie Jia Hua climbed onto the bed and ripped off his blood-soaked clothes. One after another, he pulled more than a dozen packets of fake blood from his body. Some had burst; others had not. Beneath them, Lu Guang Ming was wearing a bulletproof vest with several projectiles from the blank rounds embedded in it. Xie Jia Hua stripped him completely naked from head to toe, even yanking off his underwear, and inspected every inch of him. Aside from bruising where the shots had struck and a few shallow scrapes from hard objects, there was absolutely nothing seriously wrong with him.
Eyes wide, Xie Jia Hua dropped backward onto the bed. His heart finally fell back out of his throat. He sat there stunned for a moment, then slapped Lu Guang Ming across the face.
Lu Guang Ming woke from the blow. Holding his cheek, he opened his eyes, glanced at Xie Jia Hua, muttered, “What are you doing?” and closed them again to sleep. Xie Jia Hua shoved him hard. “Get up! Get out!”
“So tired… don’t make noise…”
“Look what you did to my bed! Get to the bathroom and wash yourself!”
Lu Guang Ming plugged his ears and played dead. Xie Jia Hua seized his arm, dragged him off the bed, and shoved him into the bathtub. His hands were shaking with rage. He returned to the bedroom, pulled back the sheets—and discovered that even the mattress underneath had been soaked completely through with fake blood.
He flipped the mattress over, put on fresh sheets, threw a clean blanket onto the bed, cleaned the apartment, then hurried back out to remove the bloodstains in the stairwell before they frightened the neighbors and security guards in the morning. By the time he finished everything, he was drenched in sweat. With a face black from fury, he went into the bathroom to check on Lu Guang Ming.
Water was overflowing from the bathtub onto the floor. Lu Guang Ming sat inside with his head tilted to one side, sleeping soundly.
Xie Jia Hua patted his face, trying to wake him, only to discover that the face that had been ice-cold earlier was now growing hot. Scooping up water, he wiped away the blood and pale corpse makeup from Lu Guang Ming’s face. His skin beneath it was flushed red. He had started running a fever.
…I really want to shove his head underwater and drown him.
Xie Jia Hua quickly scrubbed Lu Guang Ming clean, carried him from the tub, dried his hair, stuffed him beneath the blanket, took his temperature, and fed him fever medicine. After another long stretch of chaos, Xie Jia Hua finally washed himself and lay down. Exhausted, he looked at the alarm clock beside the bed.
Six in the morning.
That was when he normally got up to exercise.
Fuck morning exercise. Xie Jia Hua reached out and reset the alarm for two hours later. Once I wake up, I’m strangling this little bastard to death.
…
Poor, overworked Senior Inspector Xie had slept for less than half an hour before his phone woke him again. Another homicide had occurred in his district early in the morning. He left fever medicine and a glass of water on the bedside table, splashed water on his face to force himself awake, then left to begin another day’s work.
By evening, he returned home once again. The moment he opened the door, he saw Lu Guang Ming sitting cross-legged on the sofa wrapped in a blanket, crunching on a dry brick of instant noodles like a squirrel while watching television.
Xie Jia Hua walked over and touched his forehead. “Did you take the medicine?”
“Mm. Crunch, crunch.”
“Why didn’t you order takeout?”
“Didn’t bring money. Crunch, crunch.”
“What happened last night? Why didn’t you go home instead of hiding here?”
“Crunch, crunch. None of your business.”
“…”
“Hey, I have a fever. Have some conscience. You’re not allowed to hit a sick person.”
“Once your fever’s gone, get the hell out!”
Lu Guang Ming struggled to swallow the crumbs in his mouth and blinked at him. “Brother Jia Hua, I’m starving. Can you order takeout? I want roast goose.”
“…”
“Help! Police brutality!”
…
The setting sun was bloodred as it poured through the floor-to-ceiling windows, staining the private account statements in He Chu San’s hands crimson. He sat alone in his office, expressionlessly looking at the negative figures marked in red on the page, but what appeared before his eyes instead were the bloody scenes from the night before: the downpour, the gunshots, the corpse bundled inside a burlap sack, the dark and eerie sea.
The paper slipped from his fingers onto the desk. He looked at his faintly trembling palm, as though it were covered in blood.
He knew he had become immersed in the role.
To convincingly play an underworld bookkeeper who could kill for the first time without blinking or showing mercy, a schemer who betrayed his Boss and plotted to seize power, a sociopath obsessed with money who treated human life as worthless weeds—it would have been impossible without immersing himself in the role.
Last time, he had gambled with his own life.
This time, he had gambled with someone else’s.
He had made every preparation he could the day before. He had given Lu Guang Ming corpse makeup, put him in a bulletproof vest with packets of fake blood, and loaded the gun with blank rounds containing very little powder and much lower killing power. But blank rounds fired at close range could still injure a person. Worse, Lu Guang Ming then had to be tied from head to toe, weighted down with stones, and sunk into the sea. Kevin and several men in diving suits had been waiting underwater, but the wind and waves had been violent the night before, and reefs lay beneath the surface. One mistake could have cost several of them their lives.
And that was not even considering what would have happened if his acting had failed to intimidate the Old Shopkeeper’s proxy and the man had seen through the deception. He Chu San had only blanks in his gun and embarrassingly poor marksmanship. Even with bodyguards hidden nearby, there was no guarantee he could have protected either his own life or Lu Guang Ming’s in time.
He had known all those dangers.
Yet he had still done it.
Was what he was doing really right?
Risking his own life, risking Lu Guang Ming’s life, using a method he considered more “secure” and “clean” to avenge Brother Liu Yi and Lu Guang Ming—was that really right?
If it was right, why had Brother Liu Yi looked so sorrowful yesterday morning? How hardhearted had He Chu San been to ignore that trembling “Don’t go”?
Had everything that brought him to this point really been right?
He Chu San leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes, allowing all that bloodred color to disappear into darkness. Slowly, he let out a breath.
But there was no road back anymore. He had gambled everything and sacrificed everything for this war.
He had to win.
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