door, behind the doctor, a knife in each hand. He looked up at the ceiling as Lee Chang’s footsteps made their way across the second floor and down a flight of stairs.
As promised, a minute after being called on the intercom, Lee Chang entered the room and the door shut behind him. Lee Chang looked around the room, and as he turned to the corner over his left shoulder, the kid from Southie kicked the inside of Lee Chang’s knee. A quiet snap accompanied the tearing of ligaments. It was DiMarco’s signature move—years of practice told him that an injured knee took the fight out of most people.
“Lee Chang?” DiMarco asked, moving the doctor and himself to the middle of the room. DiMarco tried to determine if the face of the man in pain on the floor was the same one he had seen in the local paper.
Lee, sprawled on the tiles, grabbed his knee and grunted through the agony.
“Yes,” Lee Chang answered. “And you’ll never make it off this island alive.”
DiMarco raised his arm and flicked his wrist with a powerful follow-through. Five inches of steel stuck in Lee Chang’s neck, blood spilling on the tile floor like a broken liquor barrel in a prohibition raid. Lee Chang looked up at DiMarco and tried to speak. Only gargles escaped. Lee Chang’s hands moved from his knee to his neck as he choked on the blood that flooded his throat. DiMarco, and the doctor in his grasp, watched as Lee Chang bled out—choking and spitting blood.
“Nothing personal,” DiMarco said into his dying eyes.
DiMarco had the doctor’s attention.
“Now what?” the doctor asked. “You said you would let me live.”
“I will, but I’m not finished yet. I’m looking for a girl. Her name is Wei Ling. You deliver her and I will keep my end of the deal,” DiMarco lied. “Call the work building and have her sent over.”
“I can’t do that. I’m just a doctor here. The foreman only takes orders from Lee Chang.”
DiMarco cut the side of the doctor’s neck and blood trickled down. A flesh wound for compliance, which the doctor quickly understood.
The doctor moved slowly, never turning around, keeping the distance between himself and DiMarco constant. He sidestepped Lee Chang on the floor and moved slowly toward the storage room. With each deliberate move of his feet, the doctor measured the movement of the killer on his shoulder. The doctor wasn’t afraid. He wasn’t rattled by the Boston accent, the scar, the tattoo, or the knives.
“I need to get a key out of my pocket,” the doctor said.
“Do it slowly.”
The doctor twisted the key in the lock and pushed open the door. Wei Ling shook her shackled hand and muffled something inaudible through her taped mouth.
The doctor’s demeanor didn’t change. DiMarco had done him a favor by killing Lee Chang. It was something he was going to have to do anyway. A father can only be embarrassed by his son so many times. Whether DiMarco knew it or not, the doctor had allowed him to kill Lee Chang. Lee Chang’s death was one that wouldn’t be on the doctor’s conscience, on the outside chance that the practicing atheist found himself standing in line to chat with St. Peter.
Wei Ling was different.
“Now may I leave?” the doctor asked again.
“Not yet,” DiMarco said, pushing the doctor into the room in front of him. “Is your name Wei Ling?” DiMarco asked looking at the girl with the taped mouth, the IV in her arm, the shackles on her wrists and ankles.
Believing that DiMarco was a savior coming to rescue her, Wei ling nodded vigorously, shaking her hands and arms, rattling the metal that held her in place.
The split second DiMarco stepped toward the girl and moved the knife off the doctor’s neck was the last mistake of his professional life. The doctor reached up, grabbed DiMarco’s knife-wielding hand, and jammed his powerful fingers into a precise location on the underside of DiMarco’s right wrist. The nerves in the muscles that controlled his metacarpals flexed, and the knife fell to the floor. Another finger to the side of the neck and DiMarco crumpled to the floor.
The doctor quickly went to business with a series of pressure point holds that DiMarco wished he knew. With Wei Ling watching in horror, the doctor placed one hand on the side of DiMarco’s throat and applied a second finger to the side of his neck under his ear. The tough guy from Southie lost consciousness without a whimper.
The doctor moved swiftly, wrapping Wei Ling’s already taped mouth with enough medical adhesive to re- attach a missing limb. He rummaged through the medicine cabinet and filled the needle with an elephant-sized dose of potassium. He dragged DiMarco’s body into the main room of the infirmary and injected the full contents of the syringe into the unconscious man’s leg, shoving the needle into the upper thigh and the major artery that ran straight into the heart. He waited three minutes, checked for a pulse, and made the medical determination that DiMarco was dead. The poison would baffle the police for a while. An unnamed Caucasian stabs a local businessman then falls dead of a heart attack. It would take days to figure out what happened.
Wei Ling watched with tears running down her cheeks, her mouth so tightly covered that the muscles in her face couldn’t move. The doctor prepared to move Wei Ling. He couldn’t have police milling about the premises with a girl tied to the bed. The police, as understanding and appreciative as they were to Chang Industries and the family, would not overlook a girl gagged and chained to a bed.
Not with two dead men on the floor.
Wei Ling was going back to her mother country. The doctor picked up the phone and called C.F. Chang. “We are coming home. Get me on a charter flight out. Have people at the airport in Beijing. This afternoon.”
“It is done,” Laoban answered. “And my son?”
“As you ordered.”
The doctor filled a clean syringe with Seconal, walked up to Wei Ling, and delivered a measured dose in her moving arm. Just enough to knock her out until they were on the plane, safely in the air over international waters. Once back in China, he could do anything he wanted with her, as long as the baby was born healthy.
The doctor went to the bathroom and put an adhesive bandage on the small present he had received from DiMarco, the blood from the cut on his neck already beginning to dry on the edges. He went back to the murder scene, opened the drawer in the desk, and pulled out Wei Ling’s file and passport. He put the file in his medical bag and flipped open her passport. There were two stamps on the first page and a valid work visa for the U.S. Just a Chinese citizen going home before her visa ends. ***
The Saipan Police questioned every non-seamstress employee on duty, and started contacting the long list of guards who had worked for Lee Chang in the past. No one came forth with any clues as to the identity of the dead white man on the infirmary floor next to Lee Chang. The girls were locked in their rooms while the police questioned the foremen and guards, employees untrained and unskilled in any form of security other than keeping a hundred girls in line.
Police Captain Marco Talua arrived as the bodies were removed from the premises. Saipan’s only official coroner vehicle, used by its only coroner, carried Lee Chang in its long rear section. The dead American with a scar on his neck and a tattoo of the grim reaper dressed as Santa Claus rode in an ambulance, covered in the obligatory white sheet. Captain Talua walked over to the soon-to-be transported bodies and took a look at their faces.
Looking at Lee Chang, the captain bowed his head for a moment of silence. He stared at the white American, forewent any visible indication of prayer, and gave the nod for the bodies to be moved. He turned toward the facilities of Chang Industries and stopped one of his officers on the scene.
“Did anyone question the girls?”
“No, sir. Not yet. All indications are that they were at work. They couldn’t have seen anything.”
“No surprise, I guess.”
“No sir, I guess not. Do you want to question them? It could take all night to do it right.”
“If it takes all night, it takes all night. They may not have had the opportunity to do any killing here today, but every last one of them had the motive.”
“I’ll get the foreman. He should be able to lead us around.”
“Fine. I’m going to take a look at the crime scene. Come find me.”
“Yes, sir.”
Captain Talua stepped into the infirmary and looked at Lee Chang’s coagulated blood on the tile floor. A crime scene investigator, who issued parking tickets during the week, milled about taking snapshots. He measured the distances between objects in the room and the locations of the now absent bodies. The quiet clicking of the camera shutter and flashes of light filled the room. The captain looked around at the empty beds in the infirmary, all
