Unless, of course, he’s fronting for someone else who does have the juice.
I shudder a little, the muscles between my shoulder blades twitching, and I tell myself, Don’t be paranoid. And what’s done is done.
I pause for a moment at Sparrow’s station. She’s making a show of rearranging the brochures on the wall.
“Ni hao,” I say.
“Hello,” she says, not meeting my eyes.
“So about that river rafting…”
Now she stops shuffling pamphlets. Gives me a quick look. “You have my card,” she says in a low voice.
That’s right. I do.
I DON’T CALL HER right away, not with Erik probably still hanging around. Besides, I’m feeling like I need to lie down. My leg really hurts, it feels warm and swollen beneath the compression bandage, and I’m thinking ice, elevate, and some aspirin.
When I do get back to my little room at Maggie’s with a bag of ice from their café, I take off my jeans, sit on the bed, and contemplate the bandage. I really don’t want to take it off and see what I’m dealing with. But I was a medic once, and I know how things can go wrong, and given how fucked up my leg was-all the surgeries, then the blow, and the pain I’m having now-it could be a DVT, a deep vein thrombosis. The danger with a DVT is a blood clot can form, dislodge, and travel to the lungs, which I’m really not in the mood for.
I unwind the bandage.
There’s my leg, crisscrossed with scars, the indentation on the quad where no amount of PT can make up for the chunk of muscle I lost. And there’s the bruise from where that asshole hit me, a deep purpling red. I have this flash of something that happened, something I saw that was really bad, back when I was a lil’ ol’ 91 Whiskey medic, but I push that out of my head. No fucking point going down that road again.
There’s generalized swelling as well, but there’s no way I can be sure what it’s from-maybe just, you know, because the guy hit me and I fell, and I’ve been walking around like an idiot since it happened.
I take some aspirin and a Percocet, make a pile of the extra pillow and a rolled-up quilt, put a towel over my leg and the ice pack on top of that, and I lie down. I switch on the TV, landing on a Chinese game show that seems to be a rip-off of America’s Next Top Model, which is weirdly compelling, especially when they do a photo shoot where they’re dressed up like Red Guards and qipao-wearing class traitors, except with kohl outlining their eyes, their arms and legs posed like displaced puppets in front of deconstructed Qing-dynasty sets.
After the ice melts and the Percocet kicks in, I retrieve Sparrow’s card from the bottom of my little canvas bag.
It says SPARROW in English on one side, Chinese on the other. There’s a phone number. And an address in Chinese. Something about birds.
I tap out the number.
“Wei?”
“Is this Sparrow?”
“Shi. Yes.”
“This is David’s friend.”
A pause. “Wo xianzai meiyou kong.” I don’t have free time now. “But if you want, you can visit me at the sanctuary tomorrow. It’s very interesting. For tourists.”
“Oh, yeah?” I look at the card again. There’s the character for “bird.” After that, one I don’t know, then the character for “prohibit,” and then another I don’t recognize with the radical for “animals.”
“Thank you,” I say. “I’ll check my schedule.”
After we hang up, I open the Pleco Chinese Dictionary app on my iPhone and trace the characters. “Birds.” The next two are “prohibit hunting.” Which means “sanctuary.”
Bird sanctuary.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“ELLIE? HI, HON. IT’S Mom. Just checking in to see how you’re doing. I’m back in BJ, no problem. Your apartment’s fine, except I wasn’t sure if I should tip the water man. The guy that brings the dispenser bottles? Can you let me know? In case he comes back? Anyway, hope you’re doing well. Give me a call when you get a chance. Okay? Bye. Love you!”
I stare at the phone.
Okay, I heard it ring, I picked it up, I saw that it was my mom calling, and I was going to answer it, but I was just moving kind of slowly. I’m not feeling that great, and I didn’t have that much to drink last night… did I? Just some beers, on top of Thai food. Which isn’t sitting too well either. I slept… twelve hours. More. Not like me.
Probably the Percocet. I’ve been taking a lot of it.
Is it really such a good idea to go out to Sparrow’s bird sanctuary? I’m pretty sure it’s not smart.
What the fuck is wrong with me?
Because I know I’m going to do it anyway.
I stand up and test out my bad leg. It feels better, I tell myself. I probably don’t have a DVT. Probably.
I make a cup of instant coffee, suck it down with a couple of aspirin, take a shower, and get dressed.
By the time I get out the door, it’s around noon. Not too cold, but grey and on the verge of drizzling. I should eat something, I guess, maybe just some jiaozi or pizza or something.
As I stand on the little street off Xi Jie, my phone rings. Vicky Huang.
I don’t want to answer it. But I’ve put her off I forget how many times already, and at least I’m in Yangshuo, where I said I’d be.
“Miss McEnroe? This is the third day. Are you available for a meeting?”
I’m so not up for this. I’m still so tired I can barely see straight.
“I… uh, sure. I have an appointment right now, though. Maybe later? Like, for dinner? I mean, are you actually in Yangshuo?”
“We have representatives. What time?”
“Seven?”
“Location?”
“I… uh… look, can we, like, figure this out later? I’m running kind of late. And if there’s a restaurant you like, feel free to name it, ’cause I don’t really know.”
A pause.
“I will research and call you in the afternoon.”
“Great. Looking forward to it,” I lie.
I head down the alley, in the opposite direction from Xi Jie, because I am really not in the mood for the crowds and the wooden-frog vendors. Though, actually, I bet my mom would like one of those frogs. They’re supposed to be good luck; they attract money or something. She’d be into that. I could buy her one of those and maybe a Yangshuo T-shirt or one of those embroidered bags.
I hesitate, and then I turn toward Xi Jie.
And see two guys up the block, staring at me.
Dark sunglasses. Zipped windbreakers, one with a white logo that says US POLO TEAM. Slacks. They turn away, pretending to have a conversation, like they’re considering checking in to Maggie’s Guesthouse.
Forget the frogs.
I want to turn and run, but that isn’t an option. Besides, this isn’t a country road. This is the middle of the tourist zone in Yangshuo.
So I pretend I haven’t made them. I keep walking back to Xi Jie.
I mean, what are they going to do? It’s not like they can kidnap me off the street, right?
As I pass them on the left, I think, well, yeah, actually, they could do that. This is China. If they’re DSD…
I keep walking.
By the time I walk the remaining half block to Xi Jie, my heart’s beating double time and I’m sweating like I’m running a race in a heat wave.
Who needs coffee when you’ve got adrenaline?
The tourists are out, Chinese and foreign, surrounding me in a comforting blanket of… well, potential witnesses. And there are enough foreigners up here where I’m not going to stand out, so maybe I can hide in plain sight. I weave through the crowd, taking a moment to glance behind me like, I hope, a clueless tourist, praying that maybe I just imagined I’ve got two Chinese rent-a-goons on my tail.