Dragon Day

by Lisa Brackmann

  Weird thing is, there’s these bright splotches of color on the soldier, on the building, on the tank. Orange, and neon green, and bright red.

  Paint.

  Oh, fuck. It’s Sidney’s paintball playground.

  CHAPTER TWENTY SIX

  ★

  FIRST THING I think is, Keep going. Get through this maze, however big it is, and to the other side. At least there should be some cover along the way.

  Second thought: painted in big stenciled letters on the big shed to my right is ARMY WEAPONS DEPOT. The door’s open.

  I’ve got a second to decide.

  I haul ass into the shed.

  Inside, I can see racks of protective clothes, pads, goggles, supplies. And paint guns.

  Spread out on a table is a clutter of gear, as if the last players just left it there when they finished playing. Including a couple guns.

  Somebody didn’t field-strip his weapons, I think. Lucky for me.

  I grab one. It sure doesn’t look like the paint guns I played with a few times when I was a kid, which looked and felt like plastic toys. This thing resembles an AR-15, and it has close to the heft of one, too.

  I pop open the hopper, and it’s about half full of paintballs. I close the lid and pray the thing works. I don’t have time to do anything else. I don’t think Marsh rolled down the hill like I did, but it’s not going to take him that long to jog down here.

  I poke my head around the entrance. I don’t see Marsh, but I think I hear him. I scramble across the courtyard, past the dummy soldier, to the tank. It’s actual metal, not a wooden mock-up. Maybe PLA surplus or something. I duck behind it and wait.

  Now I do hear Marsh for real: a crunch of footsteps on gravel. “Come on, Ellie,” he says loudly. “I was just kidding around.”

  I risk a peek. There he is, standing by the soldier, scanning the area, gun dangling loosely from his hand at his side.

  I stand up, brace the stock against my shoulder, put my finger on the trigger, and unload.

  Clack, clack, clack! My first two balls miss, and Marsh starts to raise his gun arm; my third shot hits him in the chest, and he flinches a little as the burst of green paint spreads across his black designer T-shirt. His gun’s level now, he’s taking aim, gun turned sideways like he’s seen too many stupid movies, and I fire again, semiauto, and I hit him right in the face.

  “Motherfucker!” he yells, hitting a high note, and he’s clawing at one eye, and I think, Good. And I fire a couple more times and get him in the face again.

  I may have been a medic in the National Guard, but I shot expert in basic training.

  “You fucking cunt!”

  I hope I put his eye out. Muzzle up, I run, deeper into the maze.

  More crumbling walls and “bombed” houses. The shell of a burned-out car. I zigzag through it. I don’t know how big this place is. I don’t know where it ends or if I can get out the other side. A jolt of pain goes up my bad leg every time my foot hits the ground; my chest is burning, and I can’t catch my breath.

  The course has opened up some, like it’s the town square. Not as much cover. A couple more burned-out cars. A dry fountain. Buildings and walls along the perimeter. I need to get to cover, I think. That low wall at the back. I’ll be able to see if Marsh is coming. Have a chance to keep running, if I can.

  I make it to the wall, collapse behind it.

  You can’t stay here, I tell myself. You need to keep running.

  I look back the way I came, and I don’t see Marsh yet.

  Maybe I did put his eye out.

  I hear light running footsteps behind me.

  I twist around, paint gun ready, and see Meimei.

  “Jesus!” I hiss.

  She drops down next to me.

  “Go get help,” I whisper. “Marsh has a gun. He’s—”

  And she’s pointing a handgun at me.

  This is it, I think. The end. I feel nothing but empty.

  She flips the weapon around and holds it out to me, butt first.

  “Take it,” she whispers, her eyes bright. “It’s loaded.”

  A revolver. A .38, I think.

  Now I hear Marsh, or someone, coming across the plaza. Not running. Just steady footsteps.

  I risk a glance. There he is by the fountain. He’s wearing goggles now, his face and chest still splashed with fluorescent green paint.

  “Stay down,” I whisper to Meimei.

  “What the fuck, Marsh?” I yell out. “What are you doing?”

  “Hey!” he yells back. “Cool. Let’s talk.”

  “Talk about what? How’s this gonna fix anything?”

  “They need someone to blame for that dead girl.” His voice echoes across the square. Still moving toward me. Taking his time, ambling almost. “Crazy Iraq vet with all kinds of problems, bad political associations—might as well be you.”

  Okay, I think. Okay. Let’s talk. And keep talking. Let me get a bead on where you are. So I know where to aim.

  “You’re gonna shoot me? How’re you gonna explain that?”

  I try to remember the terrain. A burned-out car. A blasted concrete wall.

  “You know they don’t care.” He’s talking loud, but he doesn’t need to shout anymore. He’s getting close. “Besides, you’re going to shoot yourself. That’s where you’ve been heading anyway, right?”

  “Fuck off!”

  He laughs. “Hey, I was wrong. I can help you.”

  Come closer, asshole. Just a little bit closer.

  “You just keep pushing,” he says, “because you’re hoping somebody puts you out of your misery. Let me take care of it for you.”

  I squeeze my eyes shut. “Fuck you.”

  “Come on,” he says softly. Like a lover. “You want it to be over. You know you do.”

  “Back the fuck off,” I say between clenched teeth. “I mean it.”

  Don’t make me do it, I think.

  “Or what? You’ll shoot me with a paint gun?”

  Close enough.

  I hold the revolver in both hands, the way I was taught, one hand braced against the other. Tell myself I am going to stand up no matter how much it hurts. With the strength of my good leg and all I can muster with my bad one, I spring up, pain making my vision go white for an instant. See Marsh’s dark mass in front of me. Fire. Three shots.

  He drops in his tracks.

  Ears ringing, I limp around the edge of the wall, weapon ready.

  He’s lying spread-eagled on the ground, outstretched fingers grazing the butt of his pistol. I hobble over and kick the gun away.

  I stare down at him. He looks up at me. Like he’s confused about what just happened. I can see blood coursing out of a hole below his ribs. Somehow the blood looks blacker than his black T-shirt.

  I take off my jacket and kneel down beside him, fold up the jacket, and press it into the wound, because that’s what I was taught to do.

  He gasps.

  “Just lie still,” I say. “Help’s coming.” I have no idea if that’s true or not. I lift the goggles away from his eyes with my free hand and push them onto his forehead. I can see speckles of green paint on his nose and cheeks, swelling around one eye where the paintball hit.

  The confusion in his face is fading. He gets it now. “You shot …”

  “You asshole,” I mutter. “Why did you make me do it?”

  “I …”

  His eyes roll up and to one side, like he sees something coming. Whatever it is, it scares him.

  “You’re gonna be okay,” I say.

  He nods a little. I hear it in his breathing now, a gargling sound as his breath passes through fluid and mucus that he can’t cough up.

  I hear a noise behind me. Meimei, watching intently.

  “Get help,” I tell her again.

  I turn back to Marsh. I can see it in his eyes, the dimming of the light. A labored breath, then another.

  He exhales, a last, long, rattling sigh. His pupils dilate. His bladder and
bowels release, and I can’t smell the blood anymore, just shit and piss.

  “Is he dead?” Meimei asks.

  “Yeah.”

  Meimei retrieves his gun. Stands up. For a moment I wonder if she’s going to shoot me.

  Maybe he was right. Maybe I don’t care.

  Instead she fires two times over the wall where we’d been hiding.

  Then she crouches down, puts the gun in his hand, presses his fingers around the butt and the trigger, lifts his arm, and fires a third time, into the air.

  “So there won’t be any questions,” she says, matter-of-fact. “You had to do it. You had no choice.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN

  ★

  YOU KNOW HOW they say things happen in a blur? Not for me, not this time anyway. I remember all of it. But it’s like I can’t feel it properly, like I’m watching the whole thing through a pane of glass.

  I killed a guy. Somebody I knew. Maybe he deserved it. Maybe I really didn’t have a choice. But I could tell by the way he held his gun, he didn’t know what the fuck he was doing.

  I did.

  “Don’t worry,” Meimei tells me.

  “How are we going to explain this?”

  “Easy. I was … target shooting.”

  “Target shooting?”

  “Sure. My father has guns, as you can see. He likes to shoot sometimes.” Her nose wrinkles. “He’s not very good at it.”

  We’re standing there by the body. By Marsh. I keep expecting people to show up, to come running down. I mean, there was live fire. Wouldn’t somebody notice?

  Maybe Meimei’s target-shooting story is more believable than I thought.

  “So … why did you have a gun?” I ask. “I mean, really. Don’t tell me you were going target shooting.”

  “I saw Marsh leave, and I suspected something. So I took one of my father’s guns and followed him. When he went after you, I knew to go around another way.”

  She’s a cool customer. Either she’s telling the truth or she had her story worked out in advance.

  “Where’d he get the gun? Marsh. One of your father’s?”

  She does a little shrug. “I don’t know. But I think from Tiantian. You can get guns in China, if you know the right person. If you have money.”

  “And Tiantian told him to kill me?”

  “I doubt if he told him that. Just to … take care of the problem.”

  I stare down at the body. Flies are starting to land on it, their buzzing louder than the ringing in my ears. “What do we do now?”

  “We call the police.” She looks like she’s thinking it over, but I’m pretty sure she already has something figured out. “We say Marsh tried to kill you. I saw it, too. Perhaps he would have killed me as well, but you stopped him.”

  “Why? I mean, what do we tell them? Why was he trying to kill me?”

  “What he told you. That he wished to blame you for that fuwuyuan’s death.” She pretends to think about it some more. “We can say he admitted to killing her. And that I heard him confess this to you.”

  “You think the police are going to believe all that?”

  Now she laughs, a light chuckle. “If my father wants them to, they will.”

  “And Tiantian and Dao Ming? They just walk?”

  “Of course,” she says. “What would you expect?”

  Justice, I think. But truth be told, that’s not what I expect. It’s what I want. And I already know I’m not going to get it.

  Meimei gets out her iPhone. “I’m going to call for help,” she says. Her finger hovers above the touch screen. Then she stops and clasps her hands, the phone held between them.

  “I will share something with you,” she says. “Tiantian does not like my father. Or trust him. He is afraid that he won’t receive my father’s money and businesses when he dies. In Tiantian’s mind, if someone must be blamed for this girl’s death, let it be an associate of my father’s. Especially let it be someone who tempts my father into spending his money on some crazy projects, like this museum.”

  I decide not to mention this new idea Sidney has to give away his entire fortune. “But he’s a billionaire,” I say. “It’s not like the museum will take up all his money.”

  “True. But Tiantian can’t see things that way. He’s always been terrible at sharing.”

  She smiles. This time I think I’m finally seeing her real smile, and it’s cold.

  “Now Tiantian will never get what he wants,” she says.

  It hits me all at once that if anyone inherits Sidney’s empire, it’s going to be Meimei.

  I don’t know what to do with the gun. I don’t want to carry it; I don’t want to touch it anymore. But I can’t just leave it lying around or tossed in the dirt. It’s a weapon. It killed someone.

  I killed someone.

  You had to do it, I tell myself.

  The gun is also evidence.

  So I take it with me as we walk up the path that leads to the gardens at the back of Sidney’s fake French palace, carrying it cradled in both my hands.

  When we get to the house, Sidney is waiting for us on the terrace. “Fashengle shenme shi?” What happened?

  “Marsh tried to kill her,” Meimei says. “He might have killed me, too.”

  “But … why?”

  “He works for Tiantian as well as Gugu.” Funny thing, now I hear emotion in her voice. A ragged edge of anger.

  Sidney starts to say something, I don’t know what. Some form of denial, I’m guessing. But he doesn’t get there. He stops himself, covers his face with his hands for a moment. “Duibuqi, Meimei. Qing raoshu wo ba.” Please forgive me.

  Maybe he’s thinking about how he could have lost her.

  He turns to me and just shakes his head. “I am very sorry, Ellie. This should not have happened.”

  Things go down the way Meimei said they would.

  The police come. Meimei puts on a little show for them. It’s pitch-perfect: she’s not quite hysterical, just slightly breathless, and shaken. “I still can’t believe it,” she says more than once. “He was completely crazy!”

  As Meimei suggested, I tell them pretty much what happened, with a few key additions and omissions. They don’t speak much English, so I tell them in a mix of English and Chinese, with Meimei filling in some of the Chinese details. They don’t separate us to keep us from getting our stories straight. They don’t even try. They ask me to write out an account of what happened and why, and I do that.

  I went for a walk. Ran into Marsh. He said something to me about the dead girl. How he needed someone to blame. I was able to get away, distract him with the paint gun. That’s when Meimei showed up, to go target shooting.

  “I gave her the gun, because she was a soldier,” Meimei tells the police. “I knew she could shoot better than I.”

  One of the policeman nods. “Americans all have guns anyway,” he says to his partner. “Of course they know how to shoot.”

  I still have to wonder if Meimei set Marsh up. Pretended to make some kind of deal with him. Kill her to save yourself. Kill her and you can fix things for me, too.

  I don’t think she wanted me dead. But maybe she wanted to use me to kill.

  Guess I’ll never know, because it’s not like I’m going to ask.

  Here’s how I get out of Xingfu Cun.

  John shows up.

  It’s been a few hours, late afternoon, the sun heading for the hills on the left end of the vineyard. The PSB is still here, more of them now, technicians or people pretending to be them who convoy down the hill to the paintball course, carrying cameras and evidence bags. A little while ago, I watched one of them bag the revolver I used. Now I’m standing out at the back of the garden watching them. Same spot I was in when Marsh found me. I’m finding it hard to believe that there’s actually a CSI: Xingfu Cun, but I could be wrong.

  Nobody’s told me that I can’t leave yet, but then I haven’t asked.

  “Ellie.”

  I turn, and th
ere’s John, dressed in his usual snug black T-shirt and black jeans.

  “Hi,” I say. “Thanks for coming.”

  He doesn’t say anything. Neither do I.

  “I talk to the police here,” John finally says. “They say you cooperate well with them.”

  “I gave them a statement.”

  “I think it’s okay if we leave now.” John slips his hands into his front jeans pockets. “If you want.”

  “Yeah. I want to leave.”

  Before I leave, I figure I’d better have one last word with Sidney.

  I find him sitting behind his massive carved desk in the wood-paneled room lined with bookcases, the room with the giant stuffed deer head. Maybe it actually is his office, and not just for show. Vicky Huang is there, too, sitting on the couch with her ever-present iPad, taking notes.

  Sidney rises when I come in. Gestures at one of the leather club chairs.

  I shake my head. “I’m going now,” I say.

  I’m a little curious to see if he tries to stop me.

  “I am making certain arrangements,” Sidney says. “I do my best so Yang Junmin won’t bother you or your family.”

  “Thanks.”

  He shakes his head and waves his hands in that little brusque gesture that won’t allow any discussion. “I cannot do business with him anymore.”

  “And Tiantian?”

  Now Sidney sits back down. “He has made his choice,” he says curtly. “He is not my child.”

  In spite of everything that’s happened, in spite of feeling mostly numb, I still have this weird corner of sympathy for him. “Meimei’s really smart,” I say. “She could help you run things. And Gugu …”

  What can I say about Gugu?

  I think about how he was yesterday on the set, how focused and … well, sober he was. I think about the night he went to the gallery, because he wanted to learn about art, even if he was too drunk to appreciate it.

  “He’s okay,” I say. “He’s interested in art. I think he’d like to work with you. If you’ll listen to him sometimes.”

  Sidney doesn’t say anything. He stares down at his desk, face dark.

  I steal a glance at Vicky, who sits there utterly still. It’s funny how a person as pushy as she is can turn into a piece of furniture when she needs to.