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Chapter 86
The next day, I took Roberto to see Chaoxiang, my connection for everything black market.
Chaoxiang was a criminal, but he wasn’t triad. More like ‘triad adjacent.’ He was a free agent who did business with all the triad groups – and anyone else who would pay him. He was good at procuring whatever people needed; in return, gangsters didn’t fuck with him. As a result, he enjoyed a great deal of independence without having to bend the knee to a single triad boss.
I didn’t tell Chaoxiang I was coming to see him, though. If he had known I was bringing a laowai around to buy plastic explosives, he would have told me to fuck off.
Luckily, though, Chaoxiang had a crush on me. I used that to my advantage when we walked into his office in the back of the noodle shop.
As soon as he saw me, his scruffy face lit up.
“Ahhh – my favorite beauty queen has come to see me!” he said in Cantonese.
Then he saw Roberto.
“What the FUCK, Mei-ling?!” Chaoxiang roared. “What are you doing bringing a fucking cop around?!”
“Do you know any cops that dress like that?!” I shouted back at him. “His suit is worth more than what a cop makes in three months!”
Chaoxiang stopped yelling, but he didn’t look happy.
When he started speaking Cantonese again, I told him to use English so Roberto could understand him. Chaoxiang’s English was pretty broken, but it would do.
Once he realized he stood to make a lot of money, Chaoxiang chilled out and went into salesman mode.
He overcharged Roberto for the gun by at least 25%, but I figured he deserved it.
Chaoxiang seemed pretty happy, all in all –
Until Roberto asked about the C4.
Chaoxiang stared at him in disbelief, then turned to me.
“Is this fucker for real?” he asked in Cantonese.
“Yes,” I replied in English. “He knows what he’s asking for.”
After Chaoxiang got over his initial shock, the second round of bargaining began.
When it was all said and done, I was sure Chaoxiang had overcharged by 100%.
But fair was fair. If a gun could get you 14 years in prison, I assumed plastic explosives would get you life. It probably would have meant the death penalty if Hong Kong hadn’t abolished capital punishment back in the 90s.
If Chaoxiang was willing to take the risk, then he deserved to be adequately compensated.
He had to get the explosives somewhere else, so Roberto and I left the noodle shop and returned in two hours.
Chaoxiang came through for us. He opened up a Styrofoam takeout container, and there it was: death distilled down into a little brown block of putty.
“Jesus,” I murmured.
Roberto asked how to arm the explosive, and Chaoxiang gave him the basics.
“What if I want it so that if I let go of the handle, it detonates the C4?” Roberto asked.
Chaoxiang frowned, then asked me, “Is he talking about a death switch?”
That was the term for it in Cantonese. The translation into English was a little different.Original from NôvelDrama.Org.
“A dead man’s switch,” I suggested in English, and Roberto nodded.
A dead man’s switch, indeed.
It terrified me to know that Roberto might be forced to use the goddamn thing, but if this was the price of getting free of Lau…
So be it.