Jackpot

57

Li Feng made her way back to the main street where she was less worried about being recognized than being murdered or arrested. If she couldn’t even get up the nerve to take down a street thug, how was she going to kill Sonny Ma?

That didn’t mean she had to go begging to Arrow Donaldson for help again. He saw her as a charity case, and was doing things for her because she was doing things for him. That was no position for a woman like Li Feng to be in, owing people favors. She would do what she’d been trained in her upbringing to do when she needed something done that she didn’t have the skill for: hire someone to do it.

Though Sonny Ma had cut her potential criminal career short at the request of her parents, Li Feng still had knowledge of Macau’s underworld workings, both through her job and through her own explorations online of the digital hubs of crime in Macau. She knew there was one place in the part of town she was in where she could find what she needed and she headed to the pawnshop near the Golden Desert Casino.

Many of the men who ran illicit businesses in Macau owed her family or her family’s corporation money and she didn’t want to do business with any of those people lest it turn out just like with Ziggy Peng and Arrow Donaldson. But she knew the man who ran the pawnshop by the Golden Desert Casino was as close to an honest and independent man as you could get in the criminal world. She couldn’t remember his real name, but online everyone referred to him as Donny Pawn. She had no idea where the name came from, but it was easier to remember than the man’s real name or the more complicated name of his business.

Even though Donny Pawn was the name everyone used for him online, it didn’t seem like the sort of name the man would be comfortable with her using in front of him at his place of business. She steeled her memory to make sure she wouldn’t accidentally say it. Once inside the shop, it didn’t matter. Names were not necessary, and it only took a few minutes of seemingly banal small talk loaded with double meaning for her to walk out of the pawnshop with the phone number of a man who would take her money to kill Sonny Ma.

Teddy motioned for Dale to sit next to him on a bench in front of Macau’s replica of the Eiffel Tower when his phone rang. The call was being forwarded from the number they’d left with the pawnbroker. It had to be Li Feng.

“You’ve reached the man,” Teddy said, quoting a line from a movie where he’d played a hitman in his Mark Weldon identity. Peter Barrington had written the script, and it seemed appropriate to use Peter’s words to set this plan in motion.

“I have a man I wish to have you deal with,” the woman said.

“Is this man important?”

“My money is what’s important, and there’s plenty of it for you to claim.”

Teddy wanted to meet her in person to make sure that Li Feng was the one hiring him, and he wanted to meet somewhere that criminals would meet. The only place he could think of was the karaoke bar where they’d talked with Kwok Lin, which seemed shady enough for his purposes. He named an amount off of the top of his head, and instructed Li Feng to meet him at the bar with the cash in fifteen minutes.

“How do I know you won’t steal it from me when we meet?”

“You don’t,” Teddy said. “If I do, you can hire someone else to kill me and get your money back.”