the nail around the perimeter of the wound.
Red Mask flinched at the touch, felt his entire body tremble.
‘Bad blood. Dead blood. It must come off.’
Red Mask shook his head. ‘It cannot.’
‘It must.’
‘No! I am… unfinished.’
The old man’s eyes roamed the room, as if he was staring at things no one else could see, dissecting things in his mind. After a long hesitation, he returned to his desk, which was on the far side of the room, under another large shelf of jars. He sat and read and talked to himself in a dialect Red Mask could not understand. The words sounded lost and rhetorical and far too fast — like the clucks of chickens.
For the first few seconds, Red Mask raised his head off the table and watched the old man, but soon his shoulder throbbed and his neck shook, and he gave up the struggle. His head dropped back onto the hard wood of the table, and he moved no more. His body felt as heavy and old as the earth itself.
‘I must be going,’ he said.
The old man laughed. ‘Are you in such a hurry to find your grave?’
Red Mask did not reply. His eyes roamed the room. On the wall hung several prayer banners. For Health. For Harmony. For Prosperity. He murmured them aloud, at the same time trying to find the source of the horrible smell that overpowered everything else in the room — even the strong stink of the ginger root. It took Red Mask several minutes before he realised that the stench came from him.
His body was turning rancid.
And all because of the gwailo. The White Devil.
‘Ahhh!’ the old man said, the word like a sigh. On wobbly legs, he stood up from his desk, then shuffled over to the sink where he gathered and mixed ingredients Red Mask could not see. When at last he turned around, he was carrying a large poultice, dripping with yellow and purple fluids, the colours of an old bruise. In the centre of the cloth, a hole had been cut. The old man draped that hole over the wound on Red Mask’s shoulder.
The coolness of the compress sent tingles up and down Red Mask’s neck and arm, and he shivered violently. When the old man pressed down firmly, Red Mask screamed. Thick, yellow fluid oozed out of the hole, and a deep bone pain radiated all through his body.
The old man shook his head. ‘It is still in there.’
‘Cut bullet out.’
‘This will cause much, much pain.’
But Red Mask barely heard him. His sole focus was now on the television set, because on the screen was a picture of the cop — the White Devil who had confronted him at every turn. The News was touting this man as the one who taunted death in order to save the lives of the children. He was a legend. A hero.
The sight caused Red Mask’s body to shudder, so hard it shook the table.
The old man washed his hands at the sink. When he returned to the table, a tray of crude steel tools rattled in his withered hands.
Red Mask turned his thoughts away from the pain of his shoulder, away from the tools that littered the old man’s tray, and focused on Detective Jacob Striker — the cop who had almost killed him twice; the cop who had almost prevented him from finishing his mission; the cop who had killed his loved one and sent a life’s worth of planning into ruin.
They would meet again. Red Mask knew this. It was unavoidable.
‘Are you ready?’ the old man asked.
Red Mask nodded, and moments later he began to scream.
Friday
Fifty-Six
Edward Rundell’s house was worth more than most people made in their lifetime. Situated on the West Vancouver bluff, it overlooked the forked waterways and dotted isles that populated Bachelor Bay. The best view was from the master bedroom, which was set high above the water’s edge, out on the precipice. The drop was straight down. Two hundred feet to jagged rock and angry frothing foam. Dangerous, and beautiful.
And the Man with the Bamboo Spine took little notice of it.
He stood in the centre of the master bedroom: a room with a vaulted ceiling, three skylights, two overhead fans, and a heated floor made from alternating stripes of white oak and black walnut wood.
The Man with the Bamboo Spine looked out the window, at the heavy darkness beyond, and he lit up a cigarette. An unfil-tered Marlboro. Strong for this country, weak compared to the ones back home in Macau. The smoke tasted good on his lips, and the smell overpowered everything else. Even the stink of the blood.
‘Huh… hu… hu… hu…’ Edward Rundell made a series of soft sounds on the bloodstained bed, barely audible.
The Man with the Bamboo Spine ignored them as he finished his cigarette. As always, his eyes were dark and steady. Like black marbles. Without emotion.
In his left hand was an industrial cheese-grater, almost twelve inches long. The steel was slick now, growing sticky from the brown-black blood. The holes were clogged with red chunks of meaty tissue. Most of it had come from Edward Rundell’s back and the outer parts of his limbs — areas away from the major arteries. Precision was critical for this kind of work.
If Edward died too fast, his employers would not be happy. Extreme, disproportionate levels of violence was their calling card.
It fostered fear and was a tool of prevention.
The questioning had lasted for well over four hours. Edward laid prone on the bed, his thin, pale body stripped of skin and muscle, and glistening with redness. He twitched involuntarily — in the beginning this had been from the pain; now it was all shock-related — and once again let out a series of uneven, raspy breaths.
‘Huh… hu… hu… hu… hu…’
And then the sound stopped and he became still.
The Man with the Bamboo Spine saw this, and he nodded absently. The job was complete. He finished his cigarette, dropped the stub in a plastic bag and stuffed it into his jacket pocket. Then he stepped around a pool of congealing blood on the hardwood floor and moved up to the side of the bed. He checked Edward Rundell for a pulse.
Found none.
The cheese-grater made a loud clunking sound when the Man with the Bamboo Spine dropped it. He moved into the adjoining ensuite and washed the blood off his hands — for he never wore gloves — then he walked down the hall to the front door, where he exchanged his bloodied black sneakers for a new pair of clean ones, also black. He drove away from the house in darkness, in the black Mercedes he’d been provided with, never once looking back.
Target One — the connection that linked them to the modified Honda — was down. His employers would be content.
Target Two remained unclear.
Fifty-Seven
Like the previous day, it was early when Striker awoke. The sun had not yet lightened the skies. Outside his bedroom window, the night was black and deep and cold. It was a perfect start to Halloween. Unsettling. There seemed to be something wrong with the world. Then again, maybe it was just his world.
God knows, that was how it felt at times.
