‘So.’
Striker gave him a hard look. ‘It’s venous blood, not arterial. Means he lived longer through the process.’
Meathead said nothing, and Striker continued to study the body. When he shone the flashlight on the crotch and saw the peeled-away flesh and dismemberment, he closed his eyes, looked away, and turned off the flashlight. He let out a heavy breath.
‘Seen enough?’ Meathead asked.
‘Too damn much.’
Striker exited the town home, stopped just outside the front doorway, and took in a deep breath of the clean, cold air. It felt wonderful in his lungs. Like it was cleaning his insides of the terrible odours he’d breathed in.
Felicia neared, asked him what had gone on in there, but he couldn’t answer her. Flashes of the brutality bombarded him, and the scene still felt wrong.
‘Something here doesn’t make sense,’ he said roughly to Meathead.
‘What doesn’t make sense?’
‘The murder-suicide.’
‘It makes perfect sense,’ Felicia interjected. ‘Shen Sun couldn’t face his father. Couldn’t tell him that Tran was dead. Couldn’t tell him about the horrible things they’d done. So he murdered him and then killed himself. Who knows why? Some twisted form of family honour. Shame. Embarrassment.’
Meathead agreed. ‘Yeah, shit, who ever really knows why?’
Striker ignored Meathead, looked back at Felicia. ‘You wouldn’t say that if you had been in there. That man is completely stripped of his flesh. Skinned alive. It’s one thing for Shen Sun to murder his father and then commit suicide, but why the torture? That makes no sense at all. It’s something he would never do.’
Never do.
The words hung there, and they made Striker reflect on the whole situation. A thought occurred to him, a nasty one, and he turned to face Meathead.
‘Who identified the gunman?’
Meathead said nothing at first, he just scratched his head and looked at the group of ERT guys behind him.
A sinking feeling invaded Striker’s guts. ‘ Who identified him?’
Meathead flustered. ‘It’s him, Shipwreck. He drew down on us.’
‘Jesus fuckin’ Christ — no one’s done it, have they?’
‘I think Holmgren might-’
Striker pushed past Meathead, shoved through the cluster of ERT members, and knelt down in front of the body. The face was obliterated, and it reminded him of Tran Sang Soone — White Mask — back at the high school. There wasn’t much to go on. At approximately five foot eight and one hundred thirty pounds, the physical frame of the corpse somewhat matched that of Shen Sun Soone. Lean, wiry, and that of a middle-aged man.
Striker turned back to Meathead. ‘Gimme your knife.’
‘Noodles hasn’t even-’
‘I don’t give a fuck about Ident, just give me your goddam blade!’
Meathead removed the knife from his belt and handed it to Striker, who flicked it open, slid the blade under the dead man’s shirt, and cut away the fabric. The first thing he saw was the tattoo on the man’s right shoulder — a circle, drawn crudely, with a Chinese character he didn’t recognise in the centre.
Striker stood up with a jolt.
‘You stupid sons-of-bitches,’ he said. ‘It’s not him.’
Eighty-Eight
Shen Sun crept out of the bushes and turned away from the police. He moved steadily into the adjoining cul- de-sac and began trying the door handles of the parked cars. He tried four of them before finding one that was unlocked — a grey, older model Honda Civic.
His favourite type.
He jumped inside, searched for a hidden key, found none. Taking his gun, he unloaded the clip and chamber, then used the butt end to break the ignition. Once the console was split open, he hotwired the car. Seconds later, he reloaded his pistol with the few bullets he had left, then drove south down Glen Street until he found a clearing.
He turned off the headlights, left the car running. From this vantage point he could see the group of cops on Raymur Street below. They were still standing out front of Father’s apartment. Before, they had been calm — now they were arguing. And in the centre of them all was the Homicide Detective. Jacob Striker.
Something bad was happening. Shen Sun could see it in the cop’s face.
He waited with great patience until the gwailo signalled for the woman cop to join him and they both jumped into the car. They did a quick U-turn, tires skidding on the road, then accelerated north on Raymur before turning east.
The lane was one that Shen Sun knew. It rounded back onto East Hastings Street. Sure enough, thirty seconds later, the cruiser breached the roadside, turned east, and sped down Hastings at a high rate of speed.
Shen Sun put the Civic in drive and followed them, flooring it to catch up. The road was busy with Friday-night traffic, made worse by the Halloween crowds. Shen Sun used this to his advantage. He followed the undercover police cruiser east. When the tail-lights lit up and the car came to an abrupt stop on the corner of Venables and Commercial, Shen Sun knew exactly where they were going.
The Parade of Lost Souls.
He pulled over not a half block away, and watched the two cops get out. He smiled when they both pointed at the crowd of costume-faced partygoers and hurried up the Drive. There was urgency on the gwailo’s face. More than Shen Sun had seen before.
The sight intrigued him. Jacob Striker had been the calmest adversary he had ever faced — back at the school, at the Kwan residence, at the hospital. He had been a man of ice.
So why this sudden urgency?
The answer came to him like flowers blossoming in his heart. Only two things would cause this emotional reaction from the hero cop: either he was going after Riku Kwan, or he was going after his daughter Courtney.
Shen Sun leaped from the Civic, stuffing his pistol down the back of his pants. A momentary euphoria flooded him as he hurried towards Commercial Drive. He was nearing the end of his journey; he could feel it. And it now seemed so long ago that Kim Pham had come to him with the promise of a place in Macau, sent down from Shan Chu himself. The question of why the Triads had chosen him for the St Patrick’s High mission never crossed Shen Sun’s mind. Not once. He knew why. It was because he was logical. He was ruthless. He was without emotion.
But more than all that, he was a survivor.
The Angkor had proven that.
The St Patrick’s High mission had been simple and straightforward: kill the firstborn of every individual who had disrespected the gang and dared to steal from the underground bank on Pandora Street. Almost thirty-eight million dollars had been lost. And all of it 14K property.
It was sacred.
The most frustrating part was that the plan had been perfect. The firstborns would have been killed, the parents made aware of the cost of their larceny, and then the issue of interest-owed repayments would have been addressed.
Unless they wanted to lose their other children, too.
Fall guys had all been put in place. Sherman Chan, Que Wong and Raymond Leung would have been labelled as teenage spree killers, thereby keeping the police and public anger contained. And when the police eventually did discover that there were other possible suspects — through times of death and blood testing — Shen Sun and Tran would be long gone.
Far, far away in Macau.
