by R. J. Jagger
Ten minutes later they were inside.
Inside a small cubical with a sofa-bed and a bathroom, to be precise. “I couldn’t live here in a million years,” Teffinger said.
“This is typical Hong Kong.”
“Two million, even.”
A photograph on the refrigerator showed that Nuwa Moon was in fact the dead woman with the carving on her stomach. There was another woman in the picture, too—a young woman, equally g-punk, with her arm around Nuwa’s shoulders and a cynical smirk on her lips.
Pretty.
“It looks like our victim had a friend,” Fan Rae said. “I’ll bet if we talk to her, she’ll know something.”
Teffinger agreed, but that’s not where his thoughts were.
He walked over to the only window, pulled the curtain shut and found it was thick enough to bring the room into a deep darkness. Then he picked Fan Rae up, carried her to the couch and laid her down on her back.
“Here?” she said.
“I can’t wait another minute.”
Then he took her.
Hard.
Like an animal.
Chapter Twenty
Day Five—August 7
Friday Morning
______________
FION SEEMED LIKE A NICE GIRL. Kong had no desire to scare her to death, but a job was a job. The pilot climbed to ten thousand feet, put on the autopilot and started the digital camera transmission. Then he whispered in Kong’s ear—“Jump in exactly three minutes”—and hid in the back. Kong took the blindfold off Fion, got into character and slipped the parachute on as she watched.
“I don’t know what you did to deserve this,” he said. “But look at it this way—we all have to die at some point. You’re luckier than most, actually, because it’ll be so fast that you won’t even feel it.”
The plane pitched and tossed.
Violently.
Loudly.
To the front and above, the sky was clear.
The clouds were below.
Black.
Twirling.
Laced with lightning.
Kong couldn’t see the ground. It would be insanity to jump, but the game had gone too far to back out.
The woman screamed and pleaded and pulled at her bonds, louder than Kong thought.
He ignored her as best he could.
His thoughts were on what he was about to do.
A violent downdraft suddenly grabbed the plane and dropped it for one, two, three, four, five seconds. Then it slammed into a floor of air. If Kong had jumped just then, the wing would have cracked his skull.
He checked his watch.
Ten seconds.
Nine.
Eight.
He muscled the door open.
The force of the wind was incredible.
It was all he could do to get his body wedged in.
“See you in hell!” he said.
The woman screamed.
Kong listened for a second.
Then he jumped.
Chapter Twenty-One
Day Five—August 7
Friday Noon
______________
EMMANUELLE TOLD PRARIE the story as they drank coffee and walked outside at the harbour’s edge. The sky was mean and complicated. The story by contrast was short and simple. Emmanuelle made a move on the rock star after Prarie left last night. He wasn’t rude but was interested, either, and ended up leaving an hour later with curvy black-haired beauty in a tight red dress. Emmanuelle followed them to an apartment six blocks away, which she surmised belonged to the woman because she pulled keys out of a purse just before they entered.
Emmanuelle hung in the shadows across the street, waiting for the rock star to emerge.
He didn’t.
Not for an hour.
Or another.
Or another.
Then he did, shortly before dawn.
She followed him to the Causeway Bay Typhoon Shelter. There he fired up a dinghy at a wooden dock and disappeared into the darkness. “Obviously one of the boats moored out there is his, but I have no idea which one,” Emmanuelle said.
“So now what?”
A seagull swooped out of the sky, grabbed a chunk of bread off the sidewalk, and took off.
Two other gulls gave chase, trying to steal the food in mid-flight.
“At this point, I think we need to buy a pair of good binoculars,” Emmanuelle said. “It shouldn’t be too hard to find him from shore if we’re patient enough. The main thing is for you to get a better look at him so we can figure out if he’s the right guy or not.”
“I’d be clearer if I could hear his voice,” Prarie said.
“Understood, but that might not be so easy,” Emmanuelle said. “We need to be careful. If he sees me, he’ll know something’s up. And we definitely can’t let him see you.” Prarie must have had a look on her face because Emmanuelle said, “How are you holding up? Are you okay?”
Prarie nodded.
“I’ve sort of given up hope on finishing out the semester,” she said.
“Sorry.”
“My head’s so far out of the books at this point that it isn’t even funny. It looks like I’m yours until this thing is resolved.”
EMMANUELLE PULLED OUT HER CELL PHONE and called the art galley guy, the one who had her $1,000 HKD in his wallet. “It’s me,” she said. “You were going to make some calls regarding a replica painting.”
“Yes, I’ve been waiting for you,” he said. “Do you have a pencil handy?”
She did, and wrote down a name—Danny Wing Wan—and a number.
“Do you want some advice?” the man asked.
“Sure.”
“Forget the painting,” he said. “Most of these replica guys are involved with fraud to one degree or another. Sometimes they’re not nice people, if you catch my drift.”
“Consider the drift caught. Thanks.”
She hung up, looked at Prarie and said, “Got a name and number, but it comes with a warning.”
The wind blew Prarie’s hair over her face.
She pulled it to the side and held it.
“So what do we do?”
“We keep moving forward,” Emmanuelle said. “Things are going to get dicey from this point on. When we pick up the binoculars, we’ll get a couple of survival knives too.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
No, she wasn’t.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Day Five—August 7
Friday Morning
______________
INSIDE THE APARTMENT of the victim, Nuwa Moon, they found a pile of newspaper clippings about young women who had disappeared. “I wonder if one of these missing girls was a friend of hers,” Teffinger said.
Fan Rae titled her head.
“More to the point, she must think they’re all connected somehow. Why? What does she know that we don’t?”
Teffinger shrugged.
“I don’t know, but she probably talked about it to this woman right here,” he said, tapping the photograph on the fridge.
After five more minutes of looking around, they figured out the friend’s name.
It was Syling Wu.
SYLING WU lived at Flat 301, 3F, No. 137, Sai Wan Ho Street, Sai Wan Ho, six kilometers east of Central. The street was typical Hong Kong, with street-level shops and housing above, accessed by a single door and a flight of stairs. Several scooters sat on the street to the right. Many of the shops had sun-bleached canvas canopies. Signs cantilevered out from the buildings, but they weren’t as large or as many as on the streets to the west. The buildings weren’t as high, either—most topped out at four stories.
The sky was dark and twisty.
“It’s going to storm like the devil today,” Fan Rae said.
Teffinger looked up but then spotted something more important.
“Would they sell coffee over there?” he asked, pointing.
“Yes.”
Beautiful.
Beyond
beautiful.
Five minutes later, with coffee in hand, they climbed three flights of stairs and knocked on the woman’s door.
No one answered.
Teffinger tried the knob.
It didn’t turn.
He frowned and said, “Now what?”
Fan Rae stood there for a second sipping coffee, then turned and knocked on the door across the hallway. The door opened timidly for a few inches before a chain snagged it. The face of a young woman appeared. She was holding a baby.
Fan Rae talked to her in Cantonese for a couple of minutes.
Then the door shut and she said, “She doesn’t know where Syling is and doesn’t know much about her, other than she works as a hostess girl at a placed called the High Tide Bar.”
A hostess girl?
“What’s a hostess girl?”
“You don’t know what a hostess girl is?”
No.
He didn’t.
“You’ll find out tonight, if she doesn’t show up beforehand.”
TEFFINGER ALMOST PRESSED THE ISSUE but his thoughts had gone elsewhere—to d’Asia. He came here to help her and hadn’t done a thing.
He needed to get refocused, right now, this minute.
THEN SOMETHING POPPED INTO HIS HEAD.
“Have you ever heard of someone called Billy Shek?”
“Billy Shek?”
“Right.”
She paused, processing it, then looked at him and said, “No. It’s not ringing a bell.”
“He’s a photographer.”
She shrugged.
“Don’t know him. Why?”
“D’Asia knows him,” Teffinger said. “He’s the one who told her to come and see me.”
“If you want, we can head back to the office and run him down,” she said.
He wanted.
“No problem,” Fan Rae said. “I want to get back there anyway and pull the files on all these missing women. I’m really anxious to see if they’re connected somehow.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Day Five—August 7
Friday Morning
______________
KONG PLUNGED TOWARDS EARTH. The wind was more dangerous than he thought. It created a wicked vacuum that hardly let him breathe. Then things got worse—he entered the clouds.
Arcs of lightning exploded around him, deafening, deadly.
He tried to see the ground to gauge his height but saw nothing. His fingers held the ripcord with an iron grip.
Pull now?
Wait?
Five seconds, wait five more seconds.
He waited three seconds and pulled. The chute opened and snagged him. Then it collapsed, and he dropped, almost as fast as before but not quite.
His heart raced.
He was going to die.
He should have known better.
He should have never jumped.
The chute’s drag slowed him to some extent, but he released it before he got tangled. He dropped faster. Then suddenly he saw the ground, closer than it should have been.
He was too low, way too low.
He pulled the cord for the emergency chute as fast as he could.
It snagged him and fluttered, about to collapse.
Second after second passed.
Then he hit the ground hard, three times more forceful than he should have. He tucked and rolled.
He didn’t die.
He immediately got to his feet, desperate to see if his body still functioned.
He walked, forwards, sideways, backwards, testing his legs, waving his arms, rolling his neck.
Everything hurt but nothing was broken.
Then something bad happened.
IN THE DISTANCE, THE PLANE PIERCED through the bottom of the clouds, nose first, spinning out of control and heading straight down at an amazing speed.
Pull up!
Pull up!
But the pull didn’t come, not at all, not even at the last second.
Then an explosion came. A bright orange fireball rolled upwards into the sky followed by the thickest, blackest smoke Kong had ever seen.
He wrestled out of the chute, dropped it to the dirt and ran in the other direction.
THE IMPLICATIONS WERE ALREADY UPON HIM. His life had changed, just like that, because Fion and the pilot were dead. If Jack Poon got tied to it, he might be criminally liable.
Kong was one person who could tie him to the event, meaning that Poon might be better off if Kong was dead.
Would Poon kill him?
Chapter Twenty-Four
Day Five—August 7
Friday Morning
______________
KONG HADN’T BEEN ON THE GROUND for more than ten minutes when Jack Poon called and said, “We need to talk.” An hour later Kong walked into Poon’s penthouse, apprehensive. “You’re probably wondering what happened,” Poon said. “Let me show you.”
A flat-panel TV turned on.
Kong watched.
He saw himself jump out of the plane. He watched Fion go absolutely crazy with fear. When the pilot finally emerged from hiding and started to make his way to the cockpit, a terrible downdraft rolled the plane and sent it spiraling. The pilot fought to get to the controls but never made it. Then the transmission stopped.
“It’s not my fault and it’s not your fault,” Poon said. “The pilot is the one who had the responsibility to stay out of the sky if the plane couldn’t handle it. I didn’t hold a gun to his head and neither did you. We could have done it tomorrow just as easily.”
Kong nodded.
That was true to some extent.
“You did your part and you did it good,” Poon said. He handed Kong an envelope and added, “So good that I’m kicking in a little bonus.”
Kong took it and opened it briefly, just long enough to see it was a lot of money.
He shoved it in his back pocket.
“Thanks,” he said.
“Even though what happened isn’t your fault or mine, it would probably be a good idea to never tell anyone what happened.”
“Exactly.”
“Good,” Poon said. “We’re in agreement. Of course, using the transmission is now out of the question. One of the rules is that the person being scared can’t actually die or be harmed. So I have to think of something new. My question to you is whether you want to be a part of it, once I get it figured out.”
Kong shrugged.
“Sure, why not?” He grinned and added, “As long as there aren’t any parachutes involved.”
Poon grinned and slapped Kong on the back.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Day Five—August 7
Friday Afternoon
______________
THE WIND GOT MEANER and then the rain came. Prarie and Emmanuelle bought a good pair of binoculars and two eight-inch, lightweight, razor-sharp survival knives, which went into their purses. Then they hugged the east shore of the Causeway Bay Typhoon Shelter and surveyed the boats—hundreds of which were moored in an eclectic seascape of old meets new, east meets west. Many of the vessels were modern, expensive yachts. Just as many were old, Chinese junks, throwbacks to an age all but gone, with live-aboard families.
A sizeable break-wall ran along the north edge of the shelter, giving it protection from Victoria Harbour.
Breakers bashed against it.
Even inside the wall, the water was anything but calm.
Choppy whitecaps bobbed the boats and stretched their mooring ropes.
Prarie trained the binoculars on the vessels for all of two minutes and said, “Forget it, no one’s out. Everyone’s taking shelter from the weather.”
They headed for the Metro, soaked.
Before they got there, something weird happened.
The storm blew past just like that.
They sky got calm.
The sun peeked through the haze.
They headed back to the water.
FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER, they spotted th
e rock star on a fairly large sailboat that had Dangerous Lady written in English on the side. He got into a dinghy with the same name, pulled the rope of a small outboard motor, untied a line at the stern and headed west, towards the Royal Hong Kong Yacht Club.
“Come on, hurry,” Emmanuelle said.
The rock star was just leaving the area when they got there, nicely dressed and carrying a briefcase.
“He’s going somewhere,” Emmanuelle said.
“I see that.”
“What I mean is, a meeting or something. He’s not going to be back for a while. This is our chance.”
“To do what?”
“To go aboard, what do you think?”
“Why? What’s onboard?”
Emmanuelle shrugged.
“I’ll know it when I see it,” she said. “Here’s the plan. I’m going alone. I’m going to use his dinghy, because that’s what’s supposed to be tied to his boat. You’re going to stay on shore and call me if he shows up.”
“And what if he does?”
“I don’t know,” Emmanuelle said. “Hopefully he won’t.”
“Be careful.”
“I will.”
“You can swim, right?”
Emmanuelle hesitated.
“Not exactly.”
“You can’t swim?”
“No.”
“Not even a little?”
“No.”
“Well if you fall in, you’re dead.”
“I won’t fall in.”
Prarie exhaled, wondering if she was going to actually say what she was about to say, and then said it—“I’ll go, you stay here.”
“I’ll be fine.”
“I’m not going to argue about it.”
Emmanuelle looked as if she was about to reply, but then she said, “The hatch might be locked. If it is, pry it open with your knife. If you find a laptop, grab it.”
THEY TOOK ONE LAST LOOK AROUND to be sure the rock star was gone, then walked down to the dinghy, which was tied at a wooden dock, dinghy city. People were around, but no one paid attention. Prarie got in as if she owned it, fired up the outboard and pointed the bow towards Dangerous Lady.
An old woman on a colorful junk hung clothes and gave Prarie a long stare as she motored past.
