The Survivor (31 page)

‘Rest, rest,’ the old man soothed.

Red Mask focused on the old man, who now stood at his side. He was thin, with a sickly pale face. As if he had been ill for a long time. As if he, too, had come from the camps.

‘The blood is dead.’ The old man pointed a long brown fingernail at Red Mask’s shoulder, then lightly dragged 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.

He kicked the blankets off his legs. They were damp from the sweat induced by his nightmares. Too many images, all mottled together. Kids screaming, gunmen on the loose, fires and dragons and debate clubs. Amanda dying on him back at the hospital, and of course Courtney was in there somewhere.

She always was.

He got up, walked down the hall, cracked Courtney’s door open and looked inside. She was sprawled out across her sheets. In her flannel PJs, she looked more doll than person.

Striker’s heart pained him.

The previous five years had been hard on her, but the last two had been hell, and their constant fighting didn’t help. Lately, whether she was away at school or right there in the room with him, she felt a hundred miles away. They fought, then they got over it, then they fought again. At times their relationship seemed more bipolar than Amanda had been, and he prayed it was just the teenage years shining through.

The room was cold. Striker snuck inside and pulled the blankets up to Courtney’s chest. She muttered in her sleep, grabbed them and rolled over. He left the room. For a moment he considered going back to bed, but knew sleep would not come. His body might have been tired and depleted, but his mind was going a million miles an hour, and Striker couldn’t help feeling he was missing something.

Something big.

He thought of all the crime scenes he and Felicia had attended – St Patrick’s High, the garage where the stolen Civic had been recovered, the underground bunker where they’d found the body of Raymond Leung, the docks where they’d found Que Wong’s body, the intersection of Gore and Pender where Dr Kieu and the two goons had been found dead in the white van, and lastly the shootout at the Kwan residence.

There were so many.

The Kwan residence bothered him. He’d been so busy rushing Patricia off to St Paul’s Hospital in order to save her life that he had yet to spend any investigative time at the house – and he knew he had to go there or else he would never sleep again. He showered, grabbed a protein bar from the top of the fridge, and left the house.

It was barely five o’clock.

The Kwan house was under police guard.

Normally, Patrol dealt with guard duty for the first twenty-four hours, but due to the abnormal number of crime scenes, management had given the okay for the Road Sergeant to hit the Call-Out list. Striker didn’t know the cop on duty – some redheaded woman with freckles. He said hello, badged her, and went inside.

The first thing he noticed was the foyer wall. Huge white chunks of Gyprock had been torn out from the bullets, giving the entranceway a Swiss-cheese look. Air blew strong from the heating vent. Striker closed it, then walked into the living room.

He stopped in front of the TV, where Patricia Kwan had been lying when he’d first come into the house yesterday. A dark red patch stained the carpet. This section was cut off from the rest of the room by a yellow smear of police tape. To the right of the tape, the front window was cracked and full of holes, and there were jagged pieces of shiny mirror all over the sofa. Plastic numbers had been placed across the floor. Noodles or someone else from Ident had already been here.

Striker bypassed it all and circled back to the master bedroom.

The room was ordinary. Untouched. The bed was made; the dresser drawers were closed, and the closet was shut and blocked off by a hamper full of laundry. Everything smelled of lemon-scented laundry detergent. The furnace air hummed as it blew through the vents.

Striker stepped into the room and looked around. A few things caught his eye – a dresser full of knick-knacks, a pile of folded clothes on a chair and a photograph of Patricia and her daughter, Riku.

It was a grim reminder of their failure. Despite the Amber Alert and the unprecedented manpower, the girl still hadn’t been found. It was distressing because everyone knew the rotten truth: the more time that passed, the less chance of survival.

Striker looked hard at the photo. Mother and daughter were at an outdoor event somewhere. Both looked hot and tired, but were smiling and drinking red punch. Striker felt uneasy while studying the photo. The people in the frame might have been Patricia Kwan and her daughter, but it could just as easily have been him and Courtney.

He tried not to think about it, and approached the dresser.

It was made of dark maple wood. Solid. In the first three drawers he found nothing. Just socks and underwear and belts and shirts – the usual stuff. In the bottom drawer, he found something that made him pause. At first the drawer looked filled with only papers – mostly bills and lawyers’ invoices – and change, but mixed in with the copper pennies and silver dimes was a glinting of dull, rounded brass.

A bullet.

Striker pulled some latex from his pocket, gloved up, then reached into the pile and plucked up the round. He held it up to the light and studied it. Forty calibre, for sure. The casing was dull and scratched, and the head was partly compressed, as if it had been loaded one too many times, which was probably why the round was sitting here in the drawer, unused. Striker looked at the top of the round, studied the inset of the head.

It was a frangible round.

Hollow-tip.

He got on his cell, called the Info channel and got them to run Kwan for an FAC – a Firearms Acquisition Certificate. Within seconds, the reply came back negative. She didn’t have one now, and never did. Which begged the question: why did she have a round in her dresser drawer, and where did it come from?

The thought tugged at his mind, and he rolled the round back and forth between his thumb and forefinger. He looked at the photo again, saw the two women smiling back at him, and something grabbed his attention. The T-shirts they wore were exactly the same – dark grey with a small red and blue crest on the upper left side of the chest. Striker couldn’t make out the numbers in the crest, but he was pretty certain they were 499. Which meant one thing: the Larry Young Run – an annual event funded by the Emergency Response Team. It was the same shirt Meathead had been wearing the other day.

Striker looked at the round in his hand, then back at the shirts both women were wearing. He got back on Info, ran Patricia Kwan all ways, then waited for the response. When he got it, he hung up and called Felicia. She answered on the third ring.

‘Get up,’ he told her.

‘What? It’s barely six.’

‘I’m at the Kwan house.’

This seemed to wake Felicia up. ‘You find the girl?’

‘No.’

‘Then what?’

‘Patricia Kwan,’ he said. ‘She’s a
cop
.’

Fifty-Eight

Courtney woke up and stared at the ceiling. Morning light broke through the curtains. The outside porch lamp seemed abnormally bright, and it bugged her eyes, worsened the dull thud in the back of her brain. She felt like she was hungover. Like she’d drunk a two-litre of coolers. Her mouth was dry. She needed water.