“Wish I could go, too,” I mutter, hugging her around the neck.
Mom’s just coming out of the bathroom with her Dopp kit. She sees me playing with the dog and hesitates by the door.
“You know, you can tell me the truth,” she says quietly, so John won’t hear. He’s pacing around the living room, scowling at his phone.
“I really can’t,” I say. Not about this.
Not about a lot of things.
When she’s ready to go, Andy comes over to carry her bag, which is just a little wheeled carry-on, but she’s kind of got her hands full with Mimi and the tote bag with Mimi’s things.
We’re all standing around the door, me and John on one side, Mom and Andy on the other, Mimi prancing in place between us.
I can tell my mom’s trying not to be upset. She’s got a smile on her face and everything. “I’ll call you or email you as soon as we get there,” she says.
“Actually… don’t. I mean…” How to put it? “I’ll get in touch with you in a couple of days. Unless you have a problem, and then call me right away. Not that you’ll have a problem or anything.”
She nods.
“But… when you do go online? Make sure you always use the VPN. The thing I downloaded for you so you can log on to Facebook.”
Her face twists, and I can tell she’s about to lose it. She gathers me into her arms and hugs me tight, and she’s crying now. I hate that. I pat her on the back, and I hold my breath, and I tell myself, You have to keep it together, you can’t lose it, too, because I’m scared if I do, I’ll break down completely. Curl up into a little ball and just wait for someone to come and put me out of my misery.
Finally my mom lets go. Steps back and glares at John.
“I don’t know what your story is, John,” she says, “but if you have anything to do with the problems my little girl is having? I’ll come back here and I’ll kick your ass.”
“I… I,” John stammers, and then falls silent. Looks away. “I will take care of her,” he says.
“You’d better.”
Yeah, like he’s done such a great job so far. But I don’t tell my mom that.
“Now what?”
Mom and Andy and Mimi have left. It’s just John and me, circling each other like a couple of wary cats.
He stops and massages his forehead, as if he’s trying to pull out a solution with his fingers. “We should go. I can take you someplace. Someplace safe.”
There are all kinds of things I want to ask, questions swirling around in my head so fast that I can barely separate one from another.
First and foremost, how is he going to keep me safe from a guy who apparently has the fucking PLA to do his dirty work?
But there’s no time for that right now.
I hustle into my bedroom, grab my daypack, my laptop, a light jacket, a T-shirt, and clean underwear, my Percocet, the old iPhone I keep because I can buy anonymous SIM cards for it, just in case something like this should happen, and my Beanie squid, for good luck.
God knows I’m going to need it.
Chapter Sixteen
★
“Let me carry your bag.”
“I can carry it myself.”
John grits his teeth. We’re in the elevator heading down. An ad for cognac plays on the little flat-screen TV by the door.
“Right now we just pretend we are boyfriend and girlfriend,” he says. “Boyfriend carries girlfriend’s bag.”
“Whatever,” I mutter. I hand him my daypack. “Are we gonna hold hands, too?”
“We should act like nothing’s wrong.”
“Why? What difference will it make?”
“Just…” He hisses through his teeth. “Just do what I say, for once.”
Fuck you, I think really loud.
“Can we go out another way?” he asks when we reach the ground floor.
“What about your car?”
“Better to just leave it here. In case…”
In case someone bugged it, I’m guessing, while John was talking about restaurant locations with my mom.
“Yeah,” I say. Behind my building there’s an alcove where they keep a couple of dumpsters and a little yard that has a long bike rack crammed with rusting Giants and a few old Flying Pigeons and some battered electric scooters. It’s enclosed by a cinder-block wall with shards of glass embedded in the top, but there’s a little gate with a triangular metal tube barrier that no one watches and you can slip through if you want, which has never made sense to me, but whatever.
“This way.”
We exit onto a tiny hutong that runs perpendicular to the alley off Jiu Gulou Dajie. If we hang a right, we can head up to Xitao Hutong and over to the Gulou subway station or keep going north to Deshengmen and the Second Ring Road to catch a cab. Or we can head south, to Gulou West and Houhai. Plenty of cabs there, too.
“South,” John says.
“Why?”
“Other way is where car would go, maybe to get on Second Ring Road or Jiugulou Dajie. Or to go on subway. This way maybe they don’t expect us to go.”
“Okay.”
We head south, down an alley lined with grey brick walls. There’s a worker with a bicycle cart hauling empty Yanjing Beer bottles who looks up as we pass. He has a PLA-green cap pulled low over his head, but I can see his eyes, staring at us.
“So where are we going?”
“A safe place I know. Where Yang Junmin can’t find you.”
“A DSD safe place?”
John shrugs.
“Because your boss wants to nail my sorry ass to a wall, so how the fuck is some DSD off-the-books shithole where you lock up dissidents you don’t like safe?”
Okay, I’m yelling. But it’s been a really lousy day so far.
“He is not my boss,” John mutters, his jaw tight.
“Oh, great, here we go with the man-of-mystery routine again.”
We’re getting close to Gulou West. We turn a corner, down another little alley, past one of those tiny shoe box-size stores that sell beer and toilet paper and snacks.
And see two guys heading toward us. Young. Buzz cuts. Sunglasses and fake leather jackets.
“Keep walking,” John murmurs.
“Just…?”
“Keep walking.” He places his hand flat on my back for a moment, urging me forward.
My heart’s racing. I feel the pain shooting up my leg, and I tell myself, I can do it, I can keep walking, just walk right on past these guys, we’ll make it to Gulou West, grab a cab, and get the fuck out, and we’re just about even with them when one of the guys bumps his shoulder into John, hard.
“Watch where you’re going,” the guy snarls.
John lifts his hands, chest-high. “Duibuqi,” he says. Sorry. He takes a step back.
That’s when they rush him.
John drives the heels of his palms into the first guy’s jaw, shoves a knee into his groin. First guy goes down, but as he does, the other guy drives his shoulder into John’s side, a football tackle, and they hit the ground, scrambling and punching and kicking, knocking over a crate of empty Yanjing Beer bottles.
One of those rolls in my direction. I pick it up. Hold the bottle in both hands. Wait till I have a clear shot. And smash it over the guy’s head.
It’s not like the movies. The fucking thing doesn’t break. But I hit him hard enough that he collapses for a moment, lifts his hands to the back of his head like a reflex, and that gives John enough time to roll away and slam his heel into the guy’s ribs a few times. I hear a sound that might be one of his ribs breaking, and I shudder, I can’t help it.
Thankfully, he goes limp. He’s breathing, and he’s conscious, but the fight’s gone out of him.
John scrambles to his feet, my backpack still on his shoulders.
I hear a tinkle of glass, and a beer bottle rolls past my feet. Turn and see a middle-aged woman poking her head out of the doorway of the tiny shop.