I wake with a start, throwing my arms up in front of my face. The flight attendant jerks back, looking offended. Sun pushes my hands back into my lap.
“He not thirsty,” he says in English with an apologetic smile. She turns her head away smartly.
I’m hot, sweaty, breathing heavily.
“Easy,” Sun says.
I close my eyes, see blood, open them again. “In fact, I am extremely thirsty,” I say.
“Here.”
He passes me his ginger ale. My hands are so shaky that I have to hold the cup with both of them. I take a cool, fizzy sip and close my eyes again, play back the tape—the end of Zhao, Sun’s one-handed disassembly of the three guys in the hallway, who were cutting each other out of their zip ties with a scissor, the harried descent down the stairs, catching our breath in the back of the taxi, the bizarrely mundane stop at a pharmacy. We changed clothes in the bathroom of an upscale mall, and then Sun instructed me on how to clean and bandage his finger. He diligently dabbed my face with concealer and foundation. The airport was crawling with cops, uniformed and plainclothes, but we went through the sixth security lane and the ninth customs desk, just like Flat Head Chen told us to, and nobody so much as blinked an eye at us.
At the gate I forced myself to slow down my mind, to count my breaths for ten minutes before calling Lang from a pay phone. I told him that Rou Qiangjun killed Dad and that he was staying at the pregnant-lady house on Beacon Street.
“Where the heck are you?” he said. “I’ve been trying to get ahold of you.”
“I’m in Beijing. It’s a long story. I promise I can explain everything. I’m at the airport now, and I’m landing at LAX at six tonight. But Rou Qiangjun is a flight risk. I really think you should arrest him as soon as possible.”
“Yeah, look, Victor, that’s not how it works. What flight did you say you were going to be on?”
“Air China nine eight five. I’m telling you, I have evidence.”
“Okay, sounds great. I’ll meet you at the airport, and you’ll show me what you’ve got, and then we’ll talk.”
With that, he hung up, leaving me to wonder if Rou would make his way out of town unhindered while Lang arrested me instead. Just in case, I suggested to Sun that we leave the plane separately, and if I didn’t show up at baggage claim, he could take a taxi to the house. Then I called Jules and told her that Sun was coming with me, but she should ignore him if she saw him, because Lang was going to be there, too, and could she please print out the emails that she translated with Eli? She took it about as well as I expected.
Eight hours. Eight more hours to cross six thousand miles of ocean, and not a single fish knows that we are up here. Eight more hours until LAX. Has somebody contacted Rou and told him that Zhao is dead? Are the emails between Rou and Ouyang admissible in court? Thinking makes my brain hurt, but not thinking opens up space that Zhao’s bloodied corpse rolls right into.
I killed a person.
Zhao Chongyang is a dangerous criminal, and he must be eliminated—I didn’t kill your father, you know—he has a competing operation in Seattle!
It was Flat Head Chen’s victory, not ours, when I ended Zhao’s life with that blow to the temple. And then Sun picked up the sword and the really graphic visuals began. Now he’s dozing beside me as I replay the last few days on a loop in my mind. Something about his peaceful breathing leads me back to Wei Songqin and the stolen money. If Sun can be a ruthless killing machine and also the most pleasant person I’ve ever met, then maybe Wei could care about me and still rip me off for twenty thousand dollars. She must’ve known that I would have given it to her if she had asked. It wasn’t just the magical nap—there was also the hour of oblivion behind the speakers at Yugongyishan, back before Sun and I had ruined her job and she needed the money to survive on. I couldn’t be certain that she was playing me all along. If I remember her fondly or bitterly—well, that’s up to me.
Dad was no different. I’m still outraged by all the lying he did, and the way he entrapped Sun and trained him to kill. But I keep coming back to the inconvenient fact that he told all those lies so he could escape his life in Beijing. So he could give Jules and me the peace he didn’t have as a kid.
And yet he had revoked that peace with his last wishes. He had sent me back into the world that he’d been trying to forget for decades. Had he wanted me to know how people’s lives were bought and sold? To get blood all over my own hands? To see the faces of murdered men every time I close my eyes?
On ten tiny screens hanging from the ceiling of the fuselage, a handsome Triad undercover as a detective shoots a handsome detective undercover as a Triad, and the theme music plays, and the credits roll, and the first movie of our transpacific flight comes to an end.
Seven and a half hours to go.