Lang is looking antsy, glancing at his watch and drumming his fingers on his wide thighs, but he flashes a genial grin once he spots me coming through international arrivals. I’m feeling better about my chances of not going to jail when he sticks out his hand in greeting.
But Jules jumps onto me before I get to him. “Victor! Oh my God! I’ve never been so happy to see anyone so stupid.”
“Hey.” I blink, smile.
“Hey, bud.” Lang squints into my face. “You wearing makeup? Someone tune you up?”
I give him the abridged version of the last few days: Dad’s relations needed my help settling some affairs in China, and while I was there we heard a rumor about Dad’s killing and had a little dustup with some involved parties. As he peruses the printouts that Jules brought, I explain the stolen laptop and the context of the emails between Rou and Ouyang, vaguely outlining a smuggling operation without getting into the details of Ice.
Lang’s eyes go vacant and he nods slowly, thinking it over. “It’s good. It’s motive. If we can blow up his alibi, then it might be enough for an indictment. But emails from a computer you stole in China—I can’t use that for an arrest warrant.”
My heart sinks.
“But not to worry.” Lang shoots his cuffs like a magician and then pulls an envelope out of his breast pocket.
“What’s that?”
“I got a search warrant instead. I had a hunch you would come through, so I pulled some strings. This way I can turn over the house and see if Mr. Rou’s got anything lying around that the city of San Dimas might find interesting.”
“Like another computer with these same emails.”
“There you go, kiddo. I’m going to head over there right now. I would’ve gone already, but I figured you might have some ideas about what I should look for. But listen, you should get home, put it out of your mind, and get some rest. I’ll be in touch with you tomorrow.”
And with that, Lang claps me on the shoulder one last time, winks at Jules, and saunters off toward wherever cops park at the airport.
“Well, that went pretty well,” I say, turning to Jules with an anticipatory grimace. Now that Lang is gone, I’m expecting her to unleash a fresh salvo of invective on me. But she just stands there with her hands on her hips, coolly looking me up and down.
“I’m really glad you’re okay,” she says, and then turns on her heel and starts walking toward baggage claim.
Sun’s not there. His suitcase is the last one circling the baggage carousel. It’s small enough to carry on, but he told me that if he doesn’t check it, security tends to ask a bunch of questions about his little black drill.
“Maybe he’s in the bathroom or something,” I say.
We pull his bag off the belt and wait, craning our necks around, looking for a little man in black. I pull out my Nokia, then realize that it doesn’t work in the States.
Just when I’m starting to despair, he comes jogging up, waving his hands side to side. “Sorry, sorry. I am anxious,” he says, a little breathless, then remembers himself and sticks out his hand. “Good evening, Lianying.”
She accepts the handshake with an aloof air.
“Where were you? What are you anxious about?” I ask.
“I watched you talk to the policeman. Then I heard him say that he is going to search the house now.”
Jules and I glance at each other. “So?” she asks.
“I followed him to his car. He doesn’t have a partner. He’s going there alone. I don’t think he’s very prepared. I think we have to go, too.”
“I’m not sure I’m following you,” Jules says.
“He doesn’t have a partner,” Sun repeats, a little flustered. “If Rou Qiangjun is there, he will kill him. I tell you, Rou has the ability.”
Juliana raises her eyebrows at Sun like he’s a little dumb. “He’s a cop. He’s got a gun. He’ll be okay.”
“No!” Sun shakes his hand. “His gun won’t help him.”
Jules folds her arms and shakes her head.
“Okay.” Sun nods to himself, looks around at the exits. “I take taxi.”
“Wait! Wait.” I turn from Sun to my sister. “Jules, Sun tends to know his shit about this kind of thing. If he’s right, Lang could be in a lot of danger. You saw his attitude—I don’t think he knows what he’s up against. Look, we’ll just go spectate, and if Lang can handle it, then we don’t have to get involved. And if he does get in trouble with Rou, we’ll just call the cops and make sure he gets the backup he needs. Okay?”
“Victor, for the last time, I’m done with this shit. If it’s so important for you to do this, then you drive yourself.” Jules pulls her keys out of her jacket pocket and tosses them at my chest. “Level three, HH. I’ll take the FlyAway to Union Station and you can pick me up there. Because we need to have a little talk.”
Without waiting for a response, she turns and walks away.
“Jules!” I shout after her, but she keeps walking toward the exit, her head tilted at the ground.
Sun looks with concern from her receding back to the keys in my hand. “You don’t drive,” he says.
I weigh my options, clench my jaw, start walking toward short-term parking. “It’ll be fine.”
“Okay,” says Sun. Then he says, “We should run.”
So we run.
I keep Jules’s little hatchback at the speed of traffic or just above, pushing a bit but not enough to attract police attention. We don’t hit much traffic on 105, and I spot Lang’s gold Buick in the slow lane when we’re about halfway to Alhambra on 710.
“Doesn’t seem like he’s in much of a hurry,” says Sun.
“Never really does, does it?” I say. “I’ll pass him. Then he won’t notice us following him. We know where he’s going, anyway.”
It’s not yet nine o’clock when we cruise by the house on Beacon Street, but all the windows are dark. There are no cars in the driveway or out front. On the planting strip, an empty garbage bin lolls around on its side in the midwinter wind. Sun suggests that we drive past the house and park a couple of blocks away.
We stroll back down the block and take a position behind the trunk of a jacaranda tree in the yard across the street and two houses down from the pregnant-lady house. Peeking through a fork in the trunk, we have a decent view of the front door. After a minute or two, Lang’s Buick glides in and comes to a stop just a few yards away from us. We watch as he opens the glove box, pulls out a small handgun and a shoulder holster, and bends forward to strap it on.
Lang strolls up to the house and rings the bell. “Open up, police,” he calls out. He tilts his head from side to side, peering through the little rectangular window in the front door. After a minute he rings again. Scratching his head, he glances at his watch, then peers up and down the avenue before drawing his handgun and using the butt to bash out the glass in the little window. After another modest wait, he holsters the gun, reaches his right arm through the window, and starts fiddling around for the dead bolt.
Then, quite suddenly, he lurches forward with an unnatural movement, his head, neck, and torso crashing into the door. He goes loose and then slams hard back into the door, and again and again, bouncing around like a rag doll as someone inside the house yanks on his arm repeatedly. A few houses down, a dog starts barking.
“Shit!” I pull out my phone and start dialing 9-1-1, but Sun closes his hand over mine and shakes his head.
“Watch.”
Lang slumps to the ground, his arm resting at an awkward angle. The dog pipes down. After a moment, Rou opens the door, knocking Lang’s head aside. Crouching forward, he looks up and down the street. Then he closes the door and disappears back into the dark house.
“He’s alive. Rou left him out there,” Sun says. “That means he’s getting ready to leave right now by another door. Probably throwing things in a bag. There’s no time to wait for more police.”
He closes his eyes. His lips move a little as he talks to himself. Then he switches back on. “Stay here for thirty seconds, then go to the front and get the policeman’s gun, and wait there. I’ll come in through the back. You go through the front when you hear glass break. No, no. Wait another ten seconds for him to come looking for me. Listen for him. Be careful.”
“Are you crazy?” I hiss. “You said it yourself, he’s leaving Lang alive! And you wanna go jump in his escape route? If he gets away, he won’t get that far.”
“If he gets away, he’s coming for you!” Sun whispers as loudly as he dares. “You think he doesn’t know who killed his boss and put the cops on him? You have his passport, remember? He can survive on the streets. He’ll wait until your guard is down. There’s no time to argue!”
“Wait. Sun!” But he takes off in a crouch-run before I can get another word in.
I look at Dad’s watch. Thirty seconds. It really feels like we should be calling the police instead of cowboying into this one. Somehow the dimensions of our recent criminality didn’t sink in until now that we’re back in the States, breaking laws where laws are enforced, where cops don’t simply torture you a little and then ask for a favor. Twenty seconds, fucking fuck. Do I creep after Sun and pull him back? He does have a sterling record in these situations. But what’s our story when we have to answer questions? Would Lang cover for us? Of course not. Ten seconds. I put my phone back in my pocket. There’s no time for this. I try to settle my heart rate for the final few seconds, and then I’m out from behind the tree, trying to move as stealthily as Sun did.
Lang is faceup and wheezing on the wooden porch. In the dim light I can see cuts around his neck from the broken glass. His sleeve is torn and bloody, too, and his shoulder looks dislocated. His eyes flit open for a moment, then close again, and he mutters something incomprehensible.
“I’ll get an ambulance,” I murmur to him as I pull his Beretta from its holster, release the safety, and chamber a bullet. I crouch up against the door, and long seconds pass. I examine the shadowy shrubbery, trying to adjust my eyes to the darkness, and listen to the night sounds—cars tooling up and down Mission, a hooting owl, the gallop of my anxious heart. I smell jasmine. Then, somewhere deep in the house, glass breaks.
The neighbor dog starts barking again. From inside the house I hear footsteps trotting down stairs, moving toward me. I flatten against the door as Rou pauses on the other side of it. I hear him breathing as he takes a look out the little window at Lang. Then his footsteps recede back and to the right—toward the broken glass. I wait a few more heartbeats and then peek into the house.
By the moonlight filtering in through windows, I dimly see a staircase leading down from the second floor. Past the foyer and to the right there’s a den, with a doorway leading farther into the house. I reach through the broken glass and flip the dead bolt, slow and quiet, and then pull open the door, slide through, and close it after me.
I move through the foyer and the den as quickly as possible without making any noise. As my eyes adjust, I begin to see how weird a place this is. The walls are bare, and the only furniture is a mismatched assortment of lawn stuff: plastic chairs, tables, and chaises scattered higgledy-piggledy around the floor. There’s an odor, too, a dense mélange of soy sauce, sesame oil, and fabric softener.
I skinny up next to the doorway, the gun low in my hands, and peer through. The blinds must be closed in the next room, because I can’t see a thing. The food smell is stronger here, and I get a sense of space and depth, like it’s a big room. I’m trying to figure out what to do with this information when I hear Sun call out, “Rou Qiangjun! Put down the knife. You are surrounded.”
In an instant the room fills with light. Rou is about fifteen feet from me, in the kitchen, with one hand on a light switch and the other holding a knife, cocked and ready to throw. He squints and hurls it into the part of the room that I cannot see, and I hear it smack into drywall. Rou pulls another kitchen knife off the magnetic strip on the refrigerator and starts aiming again, bobbing his head around for the angle.
“Drop it, or I’ll shoot you.”
I point the gun at him while keeping most of my body behind the doorjamb. Rou looks at me, startled, and then tosses the knife to the floor. “Li Xiaozhou?” he says, incredulous, as I step into the light of the kitchen. It’s a split-level with a short flight of stairs leading downward into a high-ceilinged living room, also filled with plastic furniture. Sun crawls out from under a patio table, tossing a glance back at the knife stuck in the wall behind him.
“And you—Sun Jianshui? What are you doing here?” Rou looks back and forth between us in disbelief.
“You know exactly what we’re doing here, you bastard. It was you who killed my father.”
“Killed your father?” Rou’s eyebrows shoot up, and his voice goes high and panicky. “You really think I killed your father?”
“Don’t lie to us. You won’t fool us,” Sun says hotly, striding up the stairs.
“Tie him up and let’s call the police,” I say.
Rou waves his hands in front of his chest. “No, no, no, you’ve got it wrong. I only threatened him. I did threaten him. Ouyang said to kill him if he continued to cause problems. But he gave in! I’m telling you, he gave in! I have an alibi!”
“Shut up, you prick!” Sun screams as he delivers a ringing slap to the side of Rou’s head.
Rou drops his hips and snaps out a punch that Sun deflects with a forearm, but Rou’s next blow, a heavy, quick palm strike, catches Sun in the chest and sends him tumbling to the ground.
“Stop! Don’t move!” I holler, taking a step closer and raising the gun toward his head.
Sun gets up off the ground, takes one slow step away, and then spins quickly and sinks the kitchen knife into Rou’s chest.
Rou howls in agony and reaches up for Sun’s hand, but Sun jerks the knife free and just as quickly plunges it in and out of Rou’s chest again. Sun stands to one side as Rou falls to his knees, and then with an otherworldly shriek and one explosive movement of his entire body, he swipes the knife across Rou’s throat.
“Holy fuck.” I lower the gun. My mind races and reels as connections between memories fly apart and realign. “Holy fuck.” I say it again.
Rou is lying facedown on the kitchen floor. A pool of his blood spreads across the linoleum. Sun steps around him and starts rifling through his pockets. “This situation is not good,” he says, bent to his task. “We will have to make up some kind of story.”
There were a couple of calls to and from China in the days leading up to his murder—Someone broke into the restaurant a few nights after your father was killed—We had a long talk on the phone and he saw how foolish he had been acting—He gave in! I have an alibi!
I walk up to where Sun is kneeling over Rou, point the gun off the center of his calf, away from the bone. He doesn’t turn around or look up. He trusts me completely, because I’m a complete sucker, and he’s the best player in the game.
Two precise stabs in the chest and a clean slash across . . .
I squeeze the trigger.
Sun screams in pain and clutches at his leg, scooting back onto his butt in the pool of Rou’s blood.
I kick the knife down into the living room. Then I step back, out of grabbing or kicking range, and take aim at his head.
“You lied, Sun,” I say, my face hot, the tears already starting to gather. “He didn’t kill my father.”
Stringing together a series of Chinese obscenities that mostly go over my head, Sun rolls up his pant leg and shoots me a bewildered look. “What are you talking about? What is the meaning of this?”
“You heard me.”
“You believe that man?” he cries incredulously, pulling a kitchen towel off the oven handle and pressing it against the twin holes in his calf.
“I saw him lie before, and he wasn’t that good at it. Not like you. You killed Dad exactly the same way you killed Rou—‘two precise stabs in the chest and a clean slash across the throat.’ You wrote that letter and broke into the restaurant beforehand to put it in the safe. You planted the gun and passport at the massage parlor, and then you must have forged instructions from Dad to get the lawyer to do his part. You planned this whole bullshit adventure. It’s true, isn’t it? I don’t want to hear any more lies. I swear it, Sun, if you lie again, I’ll shoot you in the head.”
Sun looks up at me with some wonder in his eyes, then goes back to managing his twin bullet holes, working methodically, talking to his bloody leg.
“You want to know something? I often wished I had never let Old Li buy me lunch all those years ago. I thought, Maybe it’s better to live on the streets than to kill for someone else’s money. I had begun to consider walking away from Happy Year. Then Ice came up, and Old Li refused to go along with it. ‘This is it, Young Sun,’ he promised me. ‘We will be finished with Ouyang and Zhao once and for all, and make amends for our past. And then you can do whatever you want.’”
He stares at his leg as he repeats Dad’s words, then glares up at me. “It was his idea, Xiaozhou. He decided to go after Feder in order to expose them. For one last time, he would be the face and I would be the fist. I was never so happy. He wrote the letter to you in case something happened to him. It’s the truth. When I gave it to you later, I only changed the last page.”
I train the gun on his face, blinking tears out of my eyes, shaking my head—no, no, no—but I don’t even know what I’m denying. I know it’s all true.
“You see, Zhao and Ouyang, they didn’t really want to kill Old Li. They just wanted to bend him to their will. So they sent Rou here to work around him. In this way, they gave him a way out, and they also raised the stakes: they told Old Li that Rou would hurt you and your sister if he interfered with Ice. And what do you think Old Li did?”
Heat rises in Sun’s voice, and he reaches up to the countertop and pulls himself up to standing on his good leg.
“Do you think he kept his word? Do you think he stood up for what he thought was right? I came here to persuade him to stick to our plan, but he became defensive. ‘We cannot beat these men at their own game, for they are more willing to be vicious than we are,’ he said. ‘We have to bide our time,’ he said. ‘Wait for a better opportunity.’ Once again, I would have to prioritize his clueless children and their perfect lives. He told me how protecting you from his past was his one great triumph, something he couldn’t put at risk. Your obliviousness was a source of pride for him, but to me, it was a constant insult, a glass house outside of which I had to waste my life, standing guard in the shadows, looking in, pulling weeds. When I protested, when I called him a dealer and a coward, it was the first time I had ever questioned his authority. He was very surprised. He dared to speak to me about loyalty. I was loyal enough to become a killer for him! What about his loyalty to me?”
Standing in front of me now, his face six inches from the barrel of the gun, Sun spits out the words with a hatred I didn’t know he had inside him, but then it vanishes just as quickly as it appeared. He looks down at his hands.
“We quarreled. I had many years of anger inside of me. I lost control of myself. I had not gone there to kill him. So I—” His voice quavers. “Afterward, I struggled with myself. To some part of me, Old Li was still my father. It was impossible for me to turn my back on my actions and go seek my own happiness. I thought about killing myself. Instead, I decided that Ouyang and Zhao had killed your father, not me. I would avenge his death by keeping to his plan. But I couldn’t do it alone, especially since they would be hunting me in Beijing. I needed you to play his role, to be the face. I didn’t know anything about you except that I despised you.”
He shakes the emotion from his face and draws himself tall in front of the gun, fixes his eyes on mine.
“I guess apologies do not mean much at this point,” he says.
I stare into the soul of this strange man who feels like a brother, and a long silence passes between us as versions of the past and the future flit through my head like so many destinations on a split-flap display.
“Sun, why did we come in here? Why not let Rou get away?”
He frowns. “Like I said, because he would have come after you if he got away.”
“Not because you wanted to tie up loose ends? Silence the last person who could shake up your version of the story?”
He shakes his head. “Running from the cops, he was basically framing himself.”
“But that’s what I am now, right, another loose end? And Jules would be, too. She’d have to know what happened, because that’s not something I could hide from her. But then she’d—and you’d have to—” Salty water and snot choke my throat.
“Goddamn it, Sun, can you even—I don’t fucking want to shoot you, okay? I don’t—I can’t hate you for what you did, not after the way he used you. But Jules and I would be the only two people to know, and if I don’t shoot you right now, maybe you’d kill us both if you didn’t trust us not to say anything. I want to believe you, I really do, but if I’m wrong, it’s her life, too, don’t you see—”
I take aim at him, my shoulders shuddering, and I bite down on my lip hard, try to get some air into my lungs.
“I understand,” he says. “You don’t trust me not to come after you and your sister. I don’t blame you, either. I understand.”
He looks to the side, away from the gun. He exhales deeply. He closes his eyes. He is ready to die.
I lower the gun, wipe my eyes, seek a semblance of control over my breathing.
“I don’t want to look over my shoulder for the rest of my life. I don’t want to risk Jules’s life because I trusted you. But I can’t shoot you. So let’s make this really simple.”
Sun’s eyes blink open. I flick the safety on and toss the gun to him. He catches it against his chest with both hands and looks at me blankly.
“I’d rather you kill me, if that’s how you’d play it, if that’s how wrong and dumb I am,” I say, my breathing slowing now that I’ve made up my mind, my heart still going like a hummingbird’s. “I’d rather bet my life that you won’t do it than kill you just in case you would. So if you really are gonna kill me eventually, do it now, and then Jules won’t find out that you—that you killed our father. You can pin my death on Rou. She’ll blame you, she’ll hate you, but she won’t know your secret, and you can let her live.”
Sun grips the gun in his right hand and looks at it, shaking his head. He bends forward with his other hand on his knee and takes a few deep breaths. Then he flicks off the safety.
“That was scary,” he says. He raises the gun and fires two shots into the doorway behind me. He fires three more shots into the wall in the living room.
He wipes the gun down with a dishrag and then wraps it into Rou’s right hand. Then he stands up in front of me, nodding to himself, and he closes his eyes for a moment. He tilts himself forward in the slightest of bows, then straightens up, and I glimpse a sad smile flicker across his face.
I breathe, slower and slower, closer and closer to normal.
“You won’t have to look over your shoulder,” he says.
Then he hobbles down the steps and into the living room. He adjusts to the injury with each step, moving more fluidly, limping a little less, until he reaches the broken window at a jog, vaults through it with one hand on the frame, and melts into the night.