She flips the weapon around and holds it out to me, butt first.
“Take it,” she whispers, her eyes bright. “It’s loaded.”
A revolver. A.38, I think.
Now I hear Marsh, or someone, coming across the plaza. Not running. Just steady footsteps.
I risk a glance. There he is by the fountain. He’s wearing goggles now, his face and chest still splashed with fluorescent green paint.
“Stay down,” I whisper to Meimei.
“What the fuck, Marsh?” I yell out. “What are you doing?”
“Hey!” he yells back. “Cool. Let’s talk.”
“Talk about what? How’s this gonna fix anything?”
“They need someone to blame for that dead girl.” His voice echoes across the square. Still moving toward me. Taking his time, ambling almost. “Crazy Iraq vet with all kinds of problems, bad political associations-might as well be you.”
Okay, I think. Okay. Let’s talk. And keep talking. Let me get a bead on where you are. So I know where to aim.
“You’re gonna shoot me? How’re you gonna explain that?”
I try to remember the terrain. A burned-out car. A blasted concrete wall.
“You know they don’t care.” He’s talking loud, but he doesn’t need to shout anymore. He’s getting close. “Besides, you’re going to shoot yourself. That’s where you’ve been heading anyway, right?”
“Fuck off!”
He laughs. “Hey, I was wrong. I can help you.”
Come closer, asshole. Just a little bit closer.
“You just keep pushing,” he says, “because you’re hoping somebody puts you out of your misery. Let me take care of it for you.”
I squeeze my eyes shut. “Fuck you.”
“Come on,” he says softly. Like a lover. “You want it to be over. You know you do.”
“Back the fuck off,” I say between clenched teeth. “I mean it.”
Don’t make me do it, I think.
“Or what? You’ll shoot me with a paint gun?”
Close enough.
I hold the revolver in both hands, the way I was taught, one hand braced against the other. Tell myself I am going to stand up no matter how much it hurts. With the strength of my good leg and all I can muster with my bad one, I spring up, pain making my vision go white for an instant. See Marsh’s dark mass in front of me. Fire. Three shots.
He drops in his tracks.
Ears ringing, I limp around the edge of the wall, weapon ready.
He’s lying spread-eagled on the ground, outstretched fingers grazing the butt of his pistol. I hobble over and kick the gun away.
I stare down at him. He looks up at me. Like he’s confused about what just happened. I can see blood coursing out of a hole below his ribs. Somehow the blood looks blacker than his black T-shirt.
I take off my jacket and kneel down beside him, fold up the jacket, and press it into the wound, because that’s what I was taught to do.
He gasps.
“Just lie still,” I say. “Help’s coming.” I have no idea if that’s true or not. I lift the goggles away from his eyes with my free hand and push them onto his forehead. I can see speckles of green paint on his nose and cheeks, swelling around one eye where the paintball hit.
The confusion in his face is fading. He gets it now. “You shot…”
“You asshole,” I mutter. “Why did you make me do it?”
“I…”
His eyes roll up and to one side, like he sees something coming. Whatever it is, it scares him.
“You’re gonna be okay,” I say.
He nods a little. I hear it in his breathing now, a gargling sound as his breath passes through fluid and mucus that he can’t cough up.
I hear a noise behind me. Meimei, watching intently.
“Get help,” I tell her again.
I turn back to Marsh. I can see it in his eyes, the dimming of the light. A labored breath, then another.
He exhales, a last, long, rattling sigh. His pupils dilate. His bladder and bowels release, and I can’t smell the blood anymore, just shit and piss.
“Is he dead?” Meimei asks.
“Yeah.”
Meimei retrieves his gun. Stands up. For a moment I wonder if she’s going to shoot me.
Maybe he was right. Maybe I don’t care.
Instead she fires two times over the wall where we’d been hiding.
Then she crouches down, puts the gun in his hand, presses his fingers around the butt and the trigger, lifts his arm, and fires a third time, into the air.
“So there won’t be any questions,” she says, matter-of-fact. “You had to do it. You had no choice.”
Chapter Twenty Seven
★
You know how they say things happen in a blur? Not for me, not this time anyway. I remember all of it. But it’s like I can’t feel it properly, like I’m watching the whole thing through a pane of glass.
I killed a guy. Somebody I knew. Maybe he deserved it. Maybe I really didn’t have a choice. But I could tell by the way he held his gun, he didn’t know what the fuck he was doing.
I did.
“Don’t worry,” Meimei tells me.
“How are we going to explain this?”
“Easy. I was… target shooting.”
“Target shooting?”
“Sure. My father has guns, as you can see. He likes to shoot sometimes.” Her nose wrinkles. “He’s not very good at it.”
We’re standing there by the body. By Marsh. I keep expecting people to show up, to come running down. I mean, there was live fire. Wouldn’t somebody notice?
Maybe Meimei’s target-shooting story is more believable than I thought.
“So… why did you have a gun?” I ask. “I mean, really. Don’t tell me you were going target shooting.”
“I saw Marsh leave, and I suspected something. So I took one of my father’s guns and followed him. When he went after you, I knew to go around another way.”
She’s a cool customer. Either she’s telling the truth or she had her story worked out in advance.
“Where’d he get the gun? Marsh. One of your father’s?”
She does a little shrug. “I don’t know. But I think from Tiantian. You can get guns in China, if you know the right person. If you have money.”
“And Tiantian told him to kill me?”
“I doubt if he told him that. Just to… take care of the problem.”
I stare down at the body. Flies are starting to land on it, their buzzing louder than the ringing in my ears. “What do we do now?”
“We call the police.” She looks like she’s thinking it over, but I’m pretty sure she already has something figured out. “We say Marsh tried to kill you. I saw it, too. Perhaps he would have killed me as well, but you stopped him.”
“Why? I mean, what do we tell them? Why was he trying to kill me?”
“What he told you. That he wished to blame you for that fuwuyuan’s death.” She pretends to think about it some more. “We can say he admitted to killing her. And that I heard him confess this to you.”
“You think the police are going to believe all that?”
Now she laughs, a light chuckle. “If my father wants them to, they will.”
“And Tiantian and Dao Ming? They just walk?”
“Of course,” she says. “What would you expect?”
Justice, I think. But truth be told, that’s not what I expect. It’s what I want. And I already know I’m not going to get it.
Meimei gets out her iPhone. “I’m going to call for help,” she says. Her finger hovers above the touch screen. Then she stops and clasps her hands, the phone held between them.
“I will share something with you,” she says. “Tiantian does not like my father. Or trust him. He is afraid that he won’t receive my father’s money and businesses when he dies. In Tiantian’s mind, if someone must be blamed for this girl’s death, let it be an associate of my father’s. Especially let it be someone who tempts my father into spending his money on some crazy projects, like this museum.”