The Setup

The sky had been overcast all day. It wasn’t until after dark that the rain finally came: light, steady, the kind that discourages movement.

The wanted notice had gone out that afternoon. The city had responded the way cities do when told there is something in the streets they cannot identify by looking at it: it stayed inside. The roads were quiet. The bus stop outside Happy Community was empty except for one person sitting under the shelter, watching the rain come down.

Wen Yiqian had been there for a while.

Across the road, a figure appeared.

He watched it without changing his expression, though something at the corner of his mouth shifted slightly.

The street was nearly empty of traffic. The figure crossed without hurrying and came toward the shelter with the particular deliberateness of someone who has already decided how the next several minutes will go. A black raincoat, full coverage. And a mask: bright-colored, somewhere between a rabbit and a snail in its design. Cheerful at a distance. Wrong, up close, in ways that were difficult to name precisely.

Sea Hare.

“Later than I expected,” Wen Yiqian said, glancing at his right wrist.

Sea Hare stopped. “You knew I would come.”

His voice was hoarse. Nothing like the face, which was the point of the face.

“You’re confident in your abilities,” Wen Yiqian said. “You knew the police couldn’t confirm your identity as the killer in any reasonable timeframe. So when the warrant went out this afternoon, you’d have started asking yourself where you went wrong.” He paused. “The answer wasn’t hard to find. Your only real mistake was the bus. Provoking me. Which meant I was the one who told them.” He shrugged. “And since you already knew where I lived, you knew that last night, the logical next step was to come here and deal with me before I could do anything else.”

“So you’ve been sitting here waiting.” Sea Hare’s voice was even, uninflected. “You want to kill me.”

Wen Yiqian nodded.

“I gave you a chance last night.”

“I know,” Wen Yiqian said.

A short sound from Sea Hare. Not quite a laugh. “Killing that woman made you angry.”

Wen Yiqian watched him without answering.

“I don’t like that expression.” Sea Hare reached up and pushed the mask to the top of his head, leaving his face visible. Handsome. Completely at ease. “Let me show you something that might change it. Would you like to hear about last night?”

He described it carefully. The knife, the sequence, the way An Zhi’s expression had moved through its stages: fear first, then pain, then something past pain. He spoke about it the way someone speaks about a piece of music they have listened to many times and still find worth returning to. His eyes were half-closed. He was breathing slowly.

“That feeling,” he said, “is unparalleled.”

“Will you wear that same expression when you die?” Wen Yiqian’s face had not moved.

Sea Hare smiled. “You’re welcome to find out.” The knife appeared in his hand: short, bright. His eyes changed. “I’ve heard you’re capable in a fight. Knives only, as a rule?”

“Mm.” Wen Yiqian’s expression shifted into something that was almost curiosity. “Which is faster, do you think: your knife or my gun?”

He produced a handgun and leveled it.

Sea Hare went still. The ease left his face.

Several seconds passed.

“Why haven’t you shot.”

“I wanted to see your expression first,” Wen Yiqian said pleasantly.

“This one?” Sea Hare pulled his chin back, performing fear with his face while his body was already calculating angles.

Then he moved: a sudden hard slash at Wen Yiqian’s gun arm, faster than the conversation had suggested he would move. Wen Yiqian released the weapon and pulled his hand back. The pistol hit the ground. Sea Hare pressed forward with two more cuts, driving him back, and when Wen Yiqian reached for the gun Sea Hare was already between him and it.

Wen Yiqian ran.

Three steps. Then he tripped on nothing in particular and went down hard.

Sea Hare stopped. Looked at him. Looked at the gun on the ground. He picked it up, weighed it in his hand.

Toy. Lightweight plastic. No mechanism worth the name.

“A prop.” The mockery in his voice had shifted into something that contained real contempt. “You thought you could manage me with this. How naive.” He aimed the toy at Wen Yiqian, who was on the ground, backing away with the expression of someone in a television drama who has run out of options. “Bang,” Sea Hare said, and pulled the trigger.

“Bang.”

The second sound was not his.

The gunshot split the quiet street and the echo rolled out across the wet pavement. Sea Hare looked down. A bloom of red on his chest, spreading through the black raincoat.

He turned his head with considerable effort.

A man stood some distance away with a gun still raised. Dark expression. Sleepless eyes.

Li Weiguo.

Sea Hare turned back to Wen Yiqian.

Wen Yiqian was still on the ground, looking up at him. The expression on his face was not fear, and it was not relief. It was the specific expression of someone watching an animal that has failed to understand its situation.

Sea Hare understood his situation.

The toy gun. The fall. The positioning. Every word of the conversation, the timing of the moment when his knife had come out, the exact second when he had pointed the toy at Wen Yiqian’s face: all of it had been constructed so that Li Weiguo, arriving at a calculated moment, would see only one thing. A killer pointing a weapon at an unarmed man.

The police had not intervened. They had been deployed.

Every move. Every word. Every action.

Sea Hare went down.

Wen Yiqian stood, kicked the short knife away from Sea Hare’s hand, and stepped on the gunshot wound.

Sea Hare coughed blood and made a sound that was not dignified.

“That expression,” Wen Yiqian said, looking down at him. “I’m very dissatisfied.”

He pressed his heel into the wound and ground it slowly.

The sounds Sea Hare made were not dignified either.

“Stop!” Li Weiguo’s voice, from across the street. Gun still raised, now aimed at Wen Yiqian. “Step back. Now.”

Wen Yiqian turned.

He was smiling. A perfectly constructed smile: cooperative, slightly puzzled, the expression of someone who has been misunderstood.

“I’m applying pressure to the wound,” he said. “If I stop, he’ll bleed out.”

Li Weiguo looked at the smile.

Something cold moved through him.

He had come here because of an anonymous tip: a location, a time, a name. He had come to make an arrest or prevent a murder. He had arrived to find a killer pointing a weapon at an unarmed man sitting on the ground, and he had done what the situation required.

He had not, until this moment, considered who had sent the tip.

Or why the timing had been exact.

Or why Wen Yiqian, who had no weapon and no backup, had been sitting in the open at a bus stop in the rain, waiting.

The smile didn’t waver.

Li Weiguo had never been anyone’s instrument before. He found he did not like the feeling.

(End of Chapter)