A Good Show

Two hours earlier.

The anonymous caller had asked for Li Weiguo specifically. No other officers. The caller wanted a meeting location, wanted Li Weiguo’s personal number, and made clear that if anyone else showed up, the meeting wouldn’t happen.

Li Weiguo had gone. That was simply his nature: the demand didn’t frighten him, it just meant he went alone. The location was two streets from Happy Community. He waited there, turning over a vague unease he couldn’t resolve into anything specific.

Then his phone received a text. Anonymous. “Come to Happy Community. Quickly. Help.”

He ran.

What he arrived to see: Wen Yiqian on the ground, a figure in a black raincoat standing over him with a pistol leveled at his face.

Li Weiguo had not hesitated. He drew and fired.

Standing here now, with Sea Hare bleeding on the pavement and Wen Yiqian on his feet with that smile, Li Weiguo saw it whole for the first time.

The informant. The waiting location two streets away, close enough to reach in under a minute. The text arriving at exactly the right moment. Wen Yiqian sitting in the open at a bus stop in the rain, no backup, no real weapon.

Every piece of it placed deliberately. Li Weiguo had been positioned, moved, and fired on schedule.

The truly unsettling part was not the deception. It was the precision. The understanding of how Li Weiguo would respond to each stimulus, and the confidence that this understanding was accurate enough to stake a plan on.

“Step back,” Li Weiguo said, gun still raised. “Step back now or I will shoot.”

“You should feel some satisfaction right now,” Wen Yiqian said, conversationally. He pressed his foot against Sea Hare’s cheek and turned the man’s face toward Li Weiguo. “This is the one who killed An Zhi.”

Li Weiguo’s breathing changed.

“If we send him to hospital and he survives,” Wen Yiqian said, his voice dropping into something quieter and more even, “that becomes your problem for however long the process takes. Years, possibly.” He tilted his head slightly. “Or we wait two minutes. He finishes dying. We call it in. The case is closed, you have your result, An Zhi has her answer, and no one is the worse for it.”

He paused. “Everyone wins.”

Li Weiguo looked at Sea Hare.

Sea Hare looked back at him. His hand extended across the wet pavement, reaching. His face had rearranged itself into something that might, under other circumstances, read as pitiable.

“Please,” he said. “I don’t want to die.”

He meant it. The taste of it: being alive, being able to move through the world doing what he did, was genuinely precious to him. Even prison was not the end of things. Mask had reached people out of worse situations. If he lived, there were still possibilities. If he died, there were none.

“Please.”

Li Weiguo’s gun arm dropped slightly. An Zhi’s face moved through his mind, the way it had been when she was not aware of being observed.

He knew what he was. He was a police officer. He knew what that meant and what it required. He had known for a long time, and he had never had serious cause to question it.

He was also a person. He had that too: the anger, the grief, the specific weight of having treated someone like a younger sister and then having to retrieve what remained of her.

A thing like this, living another day in the world.

“There are cameras on this street,” Li Weiguo said, not quite to either of them. His head dropped slightly.

“Are there.” Wen Yiqian tilted his head.

Li Weiguo looked at the nearest camera housing.

Dark. Lifeless. The indicator light that should have been red was off.

He checked the next one. The same.

All of them.

Of course. He understood, looking at them. Someone with this level of preparation would not have left the cameras running. Whatever happened here was already unrecorded. Whatever Li Weiguo chose, no one would know except the three people present, and one of those was bleeding out.

He closed his eyes.

Held it for a moment.

Opened them, raised the gun again, and said, with a steadiness that cost him something, “I’m a police officer. I can’t do this.”

Wen Yiqian looked at him for a moment. Then he nodded. “You did well.” He raised his hands and stepped back.

Li Weiguo moved forward quickly.

Sea Hare was not breathing.

He checked twice to be certain, then straightened up. The expression that settled on his face was complicated enough that he couldn’t have named it precisely. Relief and guilt were both present. He wasn’t sure of the proportions.

He understood now what Wen Yiqian had actually been doing. Not trying to maneuver him into letting a man die. Buying time. Every second of the conversation, every temptation extended, had been another second of pressure on an unattended gunshot wound. Li Weiguo’s hesitation had been part of the plan regardless of which way it resolved.

Then Wen Yiqian’s legs went out from under him.

He sat down hard on the wet pavement, face gone white, and stared at the body.

“He’s dead,” Li Weiguo said, watching him.

“I killed someone.” Wen Yiqian said it quietly first. Then again. Then a third time, and something in his face cracked open, and he started crying in earnest: the full, undignified, uncontrolled kind. “I killed someone. Mom. I killed someone.”

Li Weiguo looked at him for a long moment.

He had formed a theory about Wen Yiqian over the past week. Two distinct states, not entirely continuous with each other. One that was functional, sociable, a little odd, thoroughly harmless. One that was something else entirely: cold and precise and capable of constructing something like tonight.

The person sitting on the wet pavement weeping into his own hands was not the person who had set up this meeting.

“Stop,” Li Weiguo said. “You didn’t kill him.”

“I did,” Wen Yiqian said, muffled.

“I killed him.” The words came out louder than intended. “Stop crying.”

Wen Yiqian looked up. Sniffed.

A silence.

“Why did you do all of this,” Li Weiguo said.

“I just.” Wen Yiqian wiped his face with his sleeve, which didn’t help much. “I didn’t want the person who killed An Zhi to get away with it. And I was stupid enough that I had a chance to stop it and I missed it, so.” He stopped. Started again. “It’s my fault she died. I should have been smarter.”

Li Weiguo said nothing.

“Come to the station later and give a statement,” he said finally. “This doesn’t fall on you.”

It wasn’t generosity. It was the reality of the situation. Li Weiguo had fired the gun. The cameras were dead. There was no evidence for anything Wen Yiqian had done tonight that would constitute a chargeable offense, or at least not one worth the paperwork relative to what it would accomplish.

And Li Weiguo, if he was being honest with himself in the privacy of his own chest, felt something he would not have been comfortable saying aloud.

He was satisfied. Deeply, completely, profanely satisfied. The man who had killed An Zhi was dead on the pavement, and Li Weiguo had pulled the trigger, and nothing about any part of that felt wrong.

He was not going to examine that feeling closely tonight.

In the shadows at the edge of the street, Fox closed her phone.

She had watched the whole thing from the moment Wen Yiqian sat down at the bus stop. She had a professional appreciation for good construction, and this had been good construction. Clean lines. Correct assumptions about every person involved. No wasted movement.

She opened the notebook on her phone. Found the document she had been adding to.

Wen Yiqian.

The light from the screen caught her face. The smile at the corner of her mouth was the kind that meant she was genuinely pleased.

“Interesting,” she said quietly, to no one.

(End of Chapter)