John Sandford - Escape Clause

“Pretty slow for a Ferrari,” Jenkins said.

“Pretty slow for a Yugo. On the way over here, he was driving a casual eighty, in and out of the traffic. Now he’s five miles an hour below the speed limit, in the slow lane.”

“He made us,” Jenkins said.

“I think so. I don’t know how. I’d be interested in knowing, because I swear to God they didn’t know when they went into the store.” Virgil thought about it for a few seconds, then said, “You know what? They were meeting Peck. Peck was in the goddamn parking lot and saw me go into the store. That’s the only thing that makes sense.”

“Could have been,” Jenkins said.

At the Loews Hotel, the two Asian men took a bag of groceries out of the car and disappeared into the lobby as a valet took the Ferrari.

“Goddamnit,” Virgil said.

“What do you want to do?” Jenkins asked.

“I don’t know. If they know we’re watching them, then staking out Peck’s house won’t work. You and Shrake might as well go catch some lunch. Go to a movie. Hang out. I’ll call you when I think of something.”

Zhang Xiaomin drove his father in near silence back to the Loews Hotel, the silence broken only by the elder Zhang’s muttered expletives in Chinese. Zhang Xiaomin spoke only fair Chinese, having left China when he was seven years old. He didn’t recognize all of the words his father was using, but he recognized the tone.

His father was the kind of man who’d grown up rough, out on the countryside, without phones, running water, or indoor toilets. When he arrived in Shanghai, at exactly the right time to make money, he’d made it, and that had conferred on him, in his own eyes, a kind of nobility.

That reaction to new money wasn’t confined to Zhang Min, by any means, or even to nouveau riche Chinese; but Xiaomin’s old man had it bad. He was a tyrant at work and at home; and when Xiaomin was a boy, he would beat him mercilessly and bloodily for even small faults, or even non-faults, if alcohol was involved.

Xiaomin never fought back.

When he was seven, his father, then with his first flush of real money, began secretly moving some of it to the United States, out of reach of China’s authorities, should they come looking. He invested primarily in real estate-houses-another great move in the California of the eighties. He sent his wife and son to look after the houses. Xiaomin had grown up in San Marino, speaking Chinese to his mother, English everywhere else.

–

When they got back to the hotel, Zhang Min stalked without expression through the lobby, with his son padding along at his heels, carrying the groceries. In the elevator, Zhang Min pushed the buttons for both the penthouse level and the skyway level, and when the doors closed, he began slapping his son’s face, hard as he could, saying over and over, “Fuckin’, fuckin’, fuckin’” along with a few Chinese phrases, and Zhang Xiaomin took it, head down, the impacts batting his face back and forth. He knew if he raised his hands, his father’s hands would close and the open-handed slaps would become blows with fists.

When the elevator doors opened at the skyway level, both men were staring straight ahead, and only a close examination would show signs of blood around Xiaomin’s eyes, nose, and lips. Zhang Min said, “You disgust me. You are an insect.”

He led the way into the skyway and Zhang Xiaomin asked, “Where are we going?”

Zhang Min didn’t answer, but took a cell phone from his pocket, punched up an app, and called for an Uber car. One would meet them, a block away, in five minutes. They dumped the groceries in a trash can and a moment later passed a fast-food place, where Zhang Min stopped long enough to pull a few napkins from a dispenser. He handed them to his son and said, “Clean yourself. You are a weak bleeder. Clean yourself.”

Zhang Xiaomin pressed the napkins to his nose and face while his father made another call. “Peck: we are not followed. We will take an Uber to the same exit, but to the other side. I saw a sign for a Best Buy there. One half hour.”

He listened for a moment, then said, “Yes, I am sure. We were moving too quickly for them to set up on us. One half hour.”

The two men continued through the skyways to a Macy’s store, where, after a moment of confusion, they found their way down to street level. They waited inside the door until the Uber car showed, and in the car, Zhang Min told the driver, “A Best Buy store at Radio Drive east of St. Paul. I will point you when we get there.”

“There are Best Buys that are a lot closer…” the driver ventured.

“This is business, that’s the store we want,” Zhang Min said, in his softly accented English. “I will tip you twenty dollars above your Uber fee when we get there.”

“Outa here,” the driver said.

–

Zhang Xiaomin kept his face down, dabbing at it with the napkins. Although outwardly submissive, he was raging inside. Having Hayk Simonian slap him around was bad enough, but Simonian was a professional thug. His father was a small man, and yet…

The Uber driver dropped them at Best Buy. Two minutes later, Peck called them on Zhang Xiaomin’s cell phone.

“Are you absolutely positive you are clean?”

“Yes, my father knows how to do this, from the old country,” Zhang Xiaomin said. He gave a quick explanation-the fast turn-around in the hotel, the sneak through Macy’s, the Uber.

“I’m coming in,” Peck said. Another two minutes, and he rolled his Tahoe up to their feet. Zhang Xiaomin got in the backseat, the old man in the front passenger seat, and from there he began shouting at the two of them.

“Two people are dead? Am I hearing this now? You have killed to get these tigers? Are you this insane? I have nothing to do with this now. Nothing to do with this. I know nothing of this…”

Peck said, “Since you’re the one who employed the Simonians, I don’t think the cops’ll buy it. Besides, they don’t know who killed them.”

“Shut up! Shut up! They will know! They will! Because you two are incompetent fools, to kill someone for the tigers.”

“It was Hamlet’s fault-he left his fingerprints where the cops could find him. Hamlet was the guy you picked, not me,” Peck said. “Soon as they put pressure on him, he’d have rolled over on us. Had to be done…”

“Shut up! Shut up!” The old man stormed on, out of control, all the way to the barn. “No more money from me. No more money.” To his son: “You can get a job or you can starve.”

At the barn, he waved a hand at the house and asked, “Who is living here? Are they seeing me?”

“Nobody lives there, except me, for a while,” Peck said. “The animals are in the barn. When we finish with them, I plan to soak it in gasoline, along with the house, and burn them both to the ground. They’re wrecks, and I know for a fact that they’re insured, and people will think that the owner burned them for the money. No reason even to look for a tiger hair.”

Zhang Min walked once through the barn, stood a moment inspecting Katya, who inspected him back, then looked at the hanging corpse of Artur, and finally turned on his heel and said, “I have seen enough.”

He marched back to the truck and got in the passenger seat. Zhang Xiaomin trailed behind with Peck, and on the way said, “I have had enough. We will kill this old piece of shit. You think of a plan and we will do it. When I have the money, I will give you one hundred thousand dollars.”

“I don’t think so,” Peck said. “You’ll inherit something more than a hundred million. The fiancée goes away. For helping get this flea off your neck, I want one. One million dollars cash. Then I will go away and you will never hear from me again.”