Hunt Among the Killers of Men

Chapter 8

Gabriel reached forward to pull the pedicab driver out of the line of fire.

The man was already dead, holed through the neck and chest.

The pedicab came to a lurching halt, pitching forward, crashing into a gent on a bicycle and sending him cartwheeling into the air.

Gabriel and Qi dived out and flattened in opposite directions, hugging cobblestones slicked with night mist.

Rolling on his back, Gabriel groped for his newly acquired Colt, still wrapped in cheesecloth and now sitting in the middle of the street as citizens, heedless to the silenced gunfire, crowded around and stumbled over him.

Then he had to claw the big .45 cartridges from his pocket. Conventional wisdom with guns like this held that one should load five shells and leave the hammer down on an empty chamber, since the gun had nothing that could remotely be interpreted as a safety. Gabriel always—always—loaded six.

Qi had already whipped out a sleek automatic from a spine scabbard and was seeking targets.

Several gunners in black, with hoods, materialized out of the throng to rake the pedicab with machine-gun fire. It vaporized into toothpicks and floating chaff as Gabriel rolled, sighted prone, and discharged his new gun for the first time. It kicked hard and roared like a cannon, a curling gout of fire licking from the muzzle. One of the gunners arched into the air and fell—a high center hit—knocking down several people who were stampeding at the sound and sight of gunfire.

Gabriel lifted the shattered wheel of the pedicab and with one mighty swing dislocated the jaw of a second shooter who’d run toward him. Almost instantly two more thugs focused their attention on the guilo and Gabriel found himself in an unwilling three-way.

He kicked out at one guy grabbing him, heard the picket crack of a blown kneecap, and swung the man into his nearest neighbor. Gabriel had dropped his gun; he retrieved it now and put a round into the chest of one attacker.

Where were the police when you wanted them? A show of force by some of China’s ubiquitous uniformed keepers of order might have put an end to this melee. But the police were no more anxious to rush headlong into a situation that might get them killed than anyone else would be, a guilty reality that could cost you your existence if somebody abruptly opened fire on your pedicab.

As he took down another attacker with a slash of his gun hand across the man’s face only to see two more pop up in his place, Gabriel wondered, How many shooters were he and Qi worth?

In the words of a famous bank robber: All of them.

Gabriel rather indecorously shoved a woman laden with wicker baskets aside as he thumb-cocked the hammer of the Colt one-handed and blew a round into an assailant who surely would have shredded the woman for a chance to nail Gabriel. The big lead slug spanged off the attacker’s AK-47, destroying the breech and rendering the gun useless except as a club. It also took away two of the attacker’s fingers, putting him out of the fight.

Bullet Number Four reaped a lucky hit, passing through one gunner and into the guy behind him. They would probably live, too, but they dropped their weapons and fell down, and that was all that mattered to Gabriel at the moment.

Gabriel looked around furiously, finally catching sight of Qi as she discarded her now-empty weapon and took on a barreling adversary by imploding a wire birdcage over his head and then delivering an expert pointed-toe kick to a nerve bundle near the man’s groin that put him down, spasming. Qi swiftly took charge of her victim’s pistol.

Gabriel reversed-out to a kneeling position and fanned his last two shots, blossoming two bright glurts of blood across the chest of another black-clad man seconds away from doing the same to him.

Gabriel leaped to his feet and barreled toward Qi, taking advantage of an instant’s lull. If there were a second wave coming, it was stalled long enough for Gabriel to locate Qi and turn an ambush into hot pursuit.

“Come on!” he yelled, grabbing her hand and almost spoiling her aim as she plugged a masked gunner.

“No, this way!” she yelled back. Gabriel accepted the change of direction; she’d know the streets here better than he would.

Two blocks away, Gabriel and Qi folded into the shadows of a wet bricked alleyway. “Lose your jacket,” she said, quickly stripping off her top and revealing a black lace brassiere with a thick backstrap. She mussed his hair, ripped the bandage from his head. “I’m a prostitute, you’re a client, we’re both drunk.”

With his jacket discarded on the ground, the spent Colt was conspicuous in his hand; he had no place to hide it. He reluctantly plunged it into a nearby vendor’s basket at the alley’s far end. As they moved out of the shadows, Gabriel could not help a mournful backward glance at his forsaken hogleg. Its weight in his hand had been comforting and familiar. But it had done its job. It had saved his life.

Threading her arm around his waist, Gabriel led Qi back out into the seething crowds on the street. She bumped one hip into him and forced him to misstep. She was like a warm, skittish animal in his grasp. She laughed and chewed on his neck. Two gunmen were walking right toward them when she grabbed a fistful of his hair and spun him into a devouring full-on kiss, working his mouth hungrily as though she really meant it.

The gunmen split and walked around them, scanning the shadows past them in a desperate attempt to spot their prey.

Gabriel half expected Qi to turn and go after the men from behind and he raised one hand to stop her, but she whispered, “No,” as if reading his mind. “We must get back to the motorcycle.”

Gabriel’s lips were still tingling. She tasted like mangoes and rare spice. Night-blooming jasmine. “The motorcycle,” he agreed.

“Don’t you dare get an erection, or I’ll have to shoot you.”

They were immersed to the collarbones inside a large cauldron of steaming water, which they had bucketed over from a wood fire inside the second of the leaning pagoda’s shrine rooms. Pressed herbs floated on the cloudy surface. Qi had insisted Gabriel join her—for purely therapeutic reasons, she explained, after she had applied antibiotic ointment to his head wound and to a new gouge, raw and red, that he’d acquired on the side of his neck.

As she’d climbed in across from him, Gabriel had noticed that Qi had a tattoo of some Chinese character on one hipbone. Oddly ridged with skin, as though to mask a wound. He did not ask about it.

She closed her eyes. After the action of the day the heat was penetrating to the bone, making them both dopey.

“You may ask me now,” she said, not opening her eyes.

“I’m not an interrogator,” said Gabriel, squeezing water between his palms. “But I would like to know.”

“My father used to bathe me. One day, I remember, he took very special care to make me presentable.”

“Special day?”

“Mmm. The day he sold me.”

Gabriel’s eyes narrowed. “Sold you?”

“At the Night Market. Where we just were, today. And he bought me.”

“Cheung?”

Qi opened her eyes, gazing at him, frank, stark, unashamed. Her eyes were like black volcanic glass in the flickering light. “It fed the rest of my brothers and sisters. This is not America, Mr. Hunt.”

Gabriel already knew that centuries of entrenched Chinese dogma and cultural preference held that female children were “undesirable.” The modern one-child-per-couple mandate had only made the situation worse. In the past, female children were abandoned; today they could be aborted if an ultrasound revealed a female child in utero—a practice some called “gendercide.”

It also stacked the census deck to the point where Chinese men had begun to outnumber women by a significant degree. Far from making unmarried women more desirable, women had come to be treated even less humanely…and the world’s second oldest profession—bond slavery—had come into a new underworld vogue. The border between China and North Korea was commonly called a “wife market,” as thousands of female Korean refugees from economic privation flooded forth to find Chinese husbands. They were destined to be sold in the bars and karaoke clubs of the Chinese mafia, if they weren’t scooped up first by the predatory “women hunters” who preyed on the exploding market. Few men were willing to say they had bought a wife, but that didn’t mean they weren’t willing to buy one. They knew they were getting someone pliable, hardworking and submissive. And from the women’s point of view, better that than starving to death in North Korea, watching your family die around you. A Korean woman cost between 240 and 1,700 Euro (about $300–$2,500 American dollars, depending on exchange rates) in a country where the per capita rural income was little more than a hundred bucks a year. Korean customs officers were routinely greased to the tune of $80 per person to cross the border. The bought women were then provided with the birth stats and name of a dead Chinese (for an additional fee), prompting an upsurge in identity traffic among China’s legitimate dead.

Needless to say, beauty, age, physical condition, virginity and health were all factored into a woman’s price. Qingzhao would not have been brought to market as a mere baby factory or working wife. She was young, attractive, robust and healthy, and even more importantly, not Korean, and so had been brokered to the extreme high-end of the human traffic sector—the highest bidders, the shielded and protected elite who gathered at only the most clandestine rendezvous.

“My tag was here.” She pointed to her left earlobe. A triangle of piercings there. Gabriel had assumed it was for jewelry.

“And this.” Standing, she indicated the tattoo Gabriel had glimpsed on her hip, distorted with scar tissue. “Cheung put it there. I tried to cut it off once. It didn’t hurt.” She poked the area. “Now it has no feeling—none at all.”

She dismissed the topic with a haughty sniff and sat down again. The last thing she wanted was pity. “In time, I became Cheung’s administratrix of protection. Head of security.”

“You were his bodyguard? Like that guy I saw take Cheung through a plate glass window at the casino?”

“Not like him. No simple employee could ever gain that much of Cheung’s confidence. No woman, either.” She pulled her knees to her chin in an aerobic stretch.

“Who is he?”

“Longwei Sze Xie. His given name means ‘dragon greatness.’ He is commonly called ‘Ivory.’ No one knows why.”

“How did you leave Cheung’s…employ?”

“Cheung and Ivory became convinced that I would serve as an adequate sacrifice for a bad business decision.”

“Michelle Quantrill was in the same kind of situation,” said Gabriel. “She was falsely implicated, too. When Cheung killed her sister, he left Michelle to take the heat. I got her out of jail and told her to stay put, but she assumed her sister’s identity to come here and…” Gabriel trailed off. “Well you know the rest. It didn’t work out.”

“And why did you come?”

“To talk her out of what she was trying to do.”

“Why?”

“Because I knew something bad would happen to her, like what did happen to her. I think she knew it, too. I just don’t think she cared.”

“She came as a ghost, then,” Qi said contemplatively. “She was already dead. I knew we were linked when I first saw her. I just knew.“

They sat regarding each other for a silent moment. The connections between people are not reducible to hard statistics, Gabriel knew. Sometimes attraction was a thing of looks and moments, half-drawn breaths and secret approval. Intuitive, as when things denied logic yet felt correct. He resisted the urge to lean forward, to taste the spice again.

“I betrayed no one,” Qi said, “regardless of what they claimed. And I survived their attempts to destroy me. Twice now I have tried to take him, and twice I have failed. Once in the Pearl Tower. Once at the Zongchang casino. I failed the second time because your friend was in my line of fire—on a similar mission, though I did not know it.”

“And you think you owe yourself another stab?” Gabriel could not quite bring himself to say, Let it go; get past it. Qi would just ignore him if he did. “He’s not just going to forget your face. He’ll see you coming.”

“I want nothing less,” she said quietly.

“Then you’ll die, same as Michelle did.”

“As long as he dies first.”

Gabriel had encountered fatalism before, and zealotry, and devotion to a cause; but rarely held with this combination of unquestioning conviction and yet so little emotion.

“I know when the children will next be sold at the Night Market,” she said. “Cheung will be there. From high places, the rich bid on the poor. I can kill him there. But I cannot do it alone. Think on this for a night. Do not answer now. I am going to sleep.”

With a complete absence of shame or self-consciousness, Qi rose from the cauldron naked, stepped over its iron side and walked away, leaving a trail of wetness on the ground. Her body was lean and hard, muscular, pantherish. Before she’d turned, Gabriel had seen there was another ungainly X of scar tissue beneath her left breast, where some other possessive malefactor had tried to brand her, or take something away from her. Gabriel watched her until she was out of sight, engulfed by the night.

After a moment sitting alone in the cooling water, Gabriel rose dripping and got his gear, because there was work to do before sunrise.

It took the better part of two hours for Gabriel to clean, hack and chip away the main debris around the base of the giant bronze statue presumed to be warlord Kangxi Shih-k’ai, in the second shrine room. He had to work by fire and lantern-light, with brushes and chisels, the way the old-school guys had before the intrusion of modern conveniences like floodlights. Had workmen built this cumbersome thing inside the shrine? Had they built it somewhere else and hauled it here, and if so…how? It was impossible to calculate the sheer tonnage of the idol, but it would take an earthmover to budge it.

It had to be constructed of sections, Gabriel concluded. Components. Which meant seams. He had thought of this angle of attack while puzzling over the cunningly engineered box back at Tuan’s. The base of the idol was a crude rectangular metal slab, not nearly as detailed as the rest of the statue. It was aesthetically offensive. Why? Nothing about the composition of an idol like this was an accident.

Here, on one face of the pedestal, were ideograms. Spackled with the “alpha decay” common to archeological bronze, the writing was invisible until Gabriel was able to sculpt out the calcareous accretions. Perhaps here were instructions, clues, leads; unfortunately, the language variant was one Gabriel did not recognize. And on the other faces of the pedestal—nothing. No marks at all.

The dry environment of the room and mountainside had helped retard corrosion, but nothing could stop the process. Using an improvised potter’s cut-off tool he fabricated from a nail and a paintbrush handle, Gabriel was able to scrape the patina of ages from a small seam about two inches down from the top of the base. Following it, he was able to describe a small, rough rectangle about a foot high. It did not appear to want to travel anywhere laterally, so Gabriel struck it with a hammer. The metal made a loud clang like a muffled bell, but Qi did not come running.

Decay and flakes of oxidized metal sifted floorward. Gabriel hit it again.

The rectangle had sunk into the pedestal about an eighth of an inch. Maybe the pedestal was hollow. Rough acoustics indicated it might be.

Bang, again. And again.

Whatever this little component did, it had not done it for nearly a century, and it resisted easy cooperation. But every time Gabriel struck it, it retreated into the base a bit farther until it was sunk nearly half a foot…

…revealing a small inset on the right-hand side, like the dado joint on a drawer. Gabriel could just curl his fingers around it. It was meant to be pulled out, like a lever.

Using all of his strength and most of his weight, Gabriel was able to budge it about half an inch. He then lost another half hour devising a rudimentary block-and-tackle system to loop around the exposed end and leverage it.

He had to have more than one warm body on this line. He took a break to wash down some caffeine pills he found in one of Qi’s bags with a draught of strong (though cold) coffee, and went to seek his mysterious partner.

He found her asleep on a pallet on the third level of the pagoda, still naked though tightly bound up inside the punctured sheet of tin, which she’d wrapped around her torso and secured with wet leather thongs that constricted as they dried. It was like a penitent’s scourging corset and looked intensely painful, but Qi seemed sound asleep.

Then Gabriel caught the flickering residual tang in the air and realized that among the other provisions Tuan had supplied Qi, besides food, weapons and equipment, there had been a dose of opium. The long pipe was still at her side like a snoozing demon lover.