Don Winslow - The Trail to Buddha_s Mirror

“Yeah, I beat the crap out of those guys back on the Peak! Thanks for leaving us back there, by the way! Now don’t come any closer! The lady has a gun! Show the boys the gun, Lan!”

Li Lan showed the gun.

A boy inside the parked car stuck the barrel of an M-16 out the window.

Li grabbed Pendleton’s hand and ran. The sniper in the car couldn’t sweep fire without hitting his own guys, and was about to pop off a single round into Neal’s chest when the car took off after the runners. The car doors swung open and the other punks scrambled into it as it headed up Waterloo Road. Neal ran after them and saw Li lead Pendleton into an alley. The car screeched to a stop, and three of the hunters got out. The car went on to circle the block, probably to cut off the other end of the alley. They were setting up a classic block-and-sweep operation wherein the three “sweepers” would drive their quarry into the “block”-in this case bursts of fire from an M-16. Li and Pendleton were trapped.

Neal flattened himself against the wall of the building. He looked up and saw a fire escape. Jesus loves me, he thought, this I know… Hong Kong or no Hong Kong, a city is a city, and nobody does a city better than your friend Neal Carey.

Pulling himself up onto the fire escape, he climbed to the roof of the building, then crawled to the edge and peered down through seven stories of darkness into the alley. He could just make out Li and Pendleton, who were working their way along the near wall, trying to make it out to the other side. Shit, didn’t they realize they were caught in a trap? He could also see the three hunters spread out across the alley, moving steadily and confidently.

Well, maybe he could worry them a little bit.

It took him maybe thirty seconds to find something. A concrete block had been set near the door of the stairway, probably to prop it open in the heat of the day. He carried it to the edge of the roof, tiptoeing along until he was even with the line of sweepers. He hefted the block up to his waist and flung it over the side.

It missed the end sweeper by a good foot, but the sound was like an explosion, and fragments of concrete flew everywhere. The three men dropped to the ground. One of them held a hand over his eye and screamed.

Lan and Pendleton stopped and looked up.

“Don’t go out the alley!” Neal yelled.

They squatted behind some garbage cans and froze.

Ah, rooftops, Neal thought. Tar Beach. The last refuge and repository of the cityscape. The final storage place. He found a cardboard carton overflowing with beer and wine bottles, evidence of some husband’s secret tippling. He carried it over to the edge of the roof and looked down to see the two unwounded sweepers get up carefully and slowly begin moving up the alley.

Neal was impressed with the aerodynamics of the wine bottle as it plummeted through the night sky. He had given it a slight backflip, so it revolved end over end in a gentle arc before smashing on the concrete of the alley floor. The sound was spectacular. The two sweepers dove for cover on either side of the alley. He aimed his second one at the sweeper on the far side and scored a direct hit on his back. The sweeper yelped and rolled backward to the near side. Neal launched another one, and then another, and then risked a long peek over the edge. The two sweepers had their faces pressed up against the near wall.

Your basic standoff.

A burst of machine-gun fire raked the edge of the roof and sent Neal sprawling. Lying flat along the edge, he risked opening one eye, and saw the boy with the M-16 advancing from the other end of the alley, gun held at his hip. He was shouting to his comrades. You didn’t have to speak any Cantonese to understand that he was asking them what the fuck was going on, or to comprehend that they were trying, as quickly as possible, to tell him to shut the fuck up. The boy stopped and just stood there in the alley, rifle on hip, finger on the trigger, waiting for something to happen.

Nothing happened. Li Lan was either too scared or too smart or both to go against an M-16 with a pistol, although the boy made a perfect target standing for a one-shot deal. Maybe, Neal thought, she can’t see him from where she is. That must be it. Maybe I’m the only one who can see him, which really stinks. Why me?

Neal reached out and pulled the carton away from the edge. Crawling on his belly, he pushed the box in front of him. It seemed to take forever to reach the point where he figured he’d be about even with Machine Gun Kelly. He inched the carton to the roof’s edge and peeked over. The boy was starting a cautious advance, moving sideways, close to the near edge of the wall so as to give Li Lan as small a silhouette as possible.

Neal wished he had paid even a little bit of attention in Mr. Litton’s physics classes back in high school. Litton had always been hauling the students up to the roof to drop shit off and then perform calculations, but Neal was goddamned if he could remember what the calculations were or what they were intended to prove except the fact that he was the dumbest kid in physics class. So he just shoved the carton off the edge of the roof and hoped for the best.

One of the sweepers must have seen it go, because he shouted a warning to the gunner, who had a natural but stupid response: He looked up.

That cost him the two precious seconds in which he might have ducked, or run, or even just covered his head with his hands. But he didn’t do any of those things. He just looked up into the darkness, not seeing anything at all until the whole sky was filled with one massive, empty beer bottle hurtling straight toward his face.

Then the alley became a cacophony of shattering glass, thumping bodies, trashcans tipping over, and the clatter of a rifle hitting concrete.

And pistol shots.

The two sweepers hit the dirt as soon as their buddy with the rifle went down, and Li Lan popped a couple off above their heads to make sure they stayed down as she and Pendleton came back up the alley toward Waterloo Road.

Neal got up and ran across the roof. Shit, he wasn’t going to lose them again. He hit the fire escape and scurried down as fast as his legs and his ribs would let him.

“Hurry!” Li Lan yelled.

She and Pendleton were standing on the sidewalk waiting for him.

“Why didn’t you grab the rifle?” he asked her as he hit the street.

“Come on!”

They ran after her down Waterloo onto Nathan and followed her as she turned right onto the broad street. She hailed a taxi on the corner and they all got in.

“Wong Tai Sin,” she told the driver.

“Haude.”

The driver took a right and headed north, up the Nathan Road. Way up, through the sprawling tenements of Mongkok, past Argyle and Prince Edward Street and into Kowloon City, a nest of shiny skyscrapers that literally towered over the surrounding slums. The driver turned onto Lung Shung Road and stopped in front of a massive building with red columns and a garishly yellow roof.

Li Lan paid the driver and gestured for the men to get out.

“Where are we?” Neal asked.

“Wong Tai Sin Temple,” Li answered. “We are coming to thank Kuan Yin.”

“Who’s Kuan Yin? Your case officer?”

She shook her head and laughed. “Kuan Yin is goddess of mercy. She has been very kind to us tonight.”

“Goddess? What kind of communist are you?”

“A Buddhist communist.”

“And this is a twenty-four-hour temple?”

“Gods do not sleep.”

“Mao wouldn’t like hearing this.”

“The Chairman is dead. He has met the Unpredictable Ghost.”

“Who’s that?”

“The Unpredictable Ghost guards the next world. He guides souls to the next world.”

“Which next world? Heaven or hell?”