“Do you know Sonny Ma?”
“We are acquainted,” Dale said
“Does that mean you’ll help me fake his death in front of an audience?” Teddy asked.
Teddy remained silent while Dale contemplated her options.
“You need this to wrap everything up, don’t you?”
“We all benefit, yes. Including you if Li Feng agrees to testify against Arrow Donaldson to the U.S. government and they send him away.”
“I don’t need this as much as you, but I would be in a better place with Sonny Ma owing me a favor. I’m in.”
“Li Feng is not likely to try and kill Sonny Ma herself,” Teddy said. “She had the perfect opportunity when she was alone with him at his mother’s house.”
“With her influence and family connections, there was no shortage of people she could have chosen from to carry out the job. But she can’t use those connections now.”
“That leaves hiring someone through the street scene grapevine. We should start at the pawnshop by Arrow’s casino where Bingo followed me.”
“Lunch first, then the pawnshop,” Dale said.
Lunch was pork chop bun sandwiches with iced lemon tea at a shop that looked like someone had opened a bodega in an abandoned maintenance shed. The pork chop bun was one of the greasiest and most delicious things Teddy had ever tasted.
When they arrived at the pawnshop, Teddy noticed the conversation was easier and less hostile than the last time he was there. Looking back on that interaction in hindsight, Teddy also suspected someone, probably Bingo, had been in the back room watching their interaction, which had probably been a source of stress for the man behind the counter.
Teddy wrote down an untraceable phone number that forwarded calls to the phone in his pocket. He slipped it across the desk, on top of a few large bills. “If Li Feng comes to you asking for someone to be a killer, you give her this number. That’s all. You know Li Feng?”
The man nodded. Teddy waited for him to glance back toward the room behind him, maybe indicating that someone was watching, but the man kept his eyes on Teddy and Dale as he took the paper and the money, and discreetly placed them in his pocket.
56
Millie knew exactly where Li Feng would be going. Without the ability to draw on her family name and connections, she would need to consult the criminal underground. The only criminal underground she suspected Li Feng knew about would be the pawnshop near the casino. And since Li Feng wouldn’t want to risk being seen by anyone, she’d keep her travels to alleys and the more out-of-the-way paths.
The cab dropped Millie off at the pawnshop, and she worked her way back toward the safe house, hoping to catch Li Feng off guard. Her plan paid off. Several blocks later, Millie spotted her quarry coming out of a restaurant. Millie sped up her pace.
The sting of seeing Sonny Ma and his pathetic dismissal of her anger at him was still raging inside Li Feng as she made her way through the darker and more anonymous parts of Macau.
Ziggy Peng had been right to question her elaborate plan that she could now admit was also silly. As she wandered the streets, her anger increasing rather than dissipating, she thought about killing Sonny Ma. Ziggy Peng had been dismissive of her and had whined about every aspect of her plan. She had no more patience for pathetic men to do her bidding for her. She would kill Sonny Ma herself.
She ducked into a small café to get something to eat. She expected that the combination of food and the clarity that she would be the one to kill Sonny Ma would put her at ease, but all it did was raise more questions in her mind. It was taking everything she had and all of her concentration to just stay in the shadows and not get recognized on the street. This was only reinforced in her mind when she stepped out of the café and back into the alley and was accosted by a street thug. It was a dirty kid who had an inch or so on her and was about twenty pounds heavier. He pressed her against the wall with his arm against her throat and his other hand over her mouth.
“Money, now. No mouth,” the thug said.
She shook her head and tried to speak.
“I don’t have any money,” she mumbled through the thug’s hand.
She heard a click and felt a prick against her neck as the thug held a switchblade to her throat. A second person appeared from the shadow, probably an accomplice. Li Feng was certain she was about to die.
“Saia daqui agora,” the second person said in Portuguese. Li Feng knew that meant Get out of here now.
“Saia daqui agora,” Millie said, feeling more comfortable with her Portuguese than her Mandarin at the moment.
The thug dropped his arm from Li Feng and scrambled away.
Putting one hand over the small wound on her neck, Li Feng looked at her rescuer.
“My name is Millie Martindale. I’m with the CIA and I can help you.”
“I don’t need your help.”
“You’d be dead right now if I wasn’t following you.”
“What do you want from me?”
“I was the one who was supposed to be protecting you when you testified before the U.S. government.”
“Brilliant job. Thank you.”
“Without your testimony, I’m worried that Arrow Donaldson sees you as a loose end. I can protect you. I can get you a new identity and get you out of this country if you testify on the record against Arrow Donaldson.”
“I have business in Macau beyond Arrow Donaldson.”
Millie reached into her back pocket and pulled out a pair of zip ties and held them up.
“I can arrest you now and you get nothing.”
Li Feng also took a more upright stance and flicked her wrist to show that she was now holding the switchblade knife she’d taken from her attacker.
“Come and get me.”
Millie raised her hands in surrender and backed away as Li Feng came away from the wall, knife first. Li Feng turned and backed down the alley, then finally turned and ran.
57
Li Feng made her way back to the main street where she was less worried about being recognized than being murdered or arrested. If she couldn’t even get up the nerve to take down a street thug, how was she going to kill Sonny Ma?
That didn’t mean she had to go begging to Arrow Donaldson for help again. He saw her as a charity case, and was doing things for her because she was doing things for him. That was no position for a woman like Li Feng to be in, owing people favors. She would do what she’d been trained in her upbringing to do when she needed something done that she didn’t have the skill for: hire someone to do it.
Though Sonny Ma had cut her potential criminal career short at the request of her parents, Li Feng still had knowledge of Macau’s underworld workings, both through her job and through her own explorations online of the digital hubs of crime in Macau. She knew there was one place in the part of town she was in where she could find what she needed and she headed to the pawnshop near the Golden Desert Casino.
Many of the men who ran illicit businesses in Macau owed her family or her family’s corporation money and she didn’t want to do business with any of those people lest it turn out just like with Ziggy Peng and Arrow Donaldson. But she knew the man who ran the pawnshop by the Golden Desert Casino was as close to an honest and independent man as you could get in the criminal world. She couldn’t remember his real name, but online everyone referred to him as Donny Pawn. She had no idea where the name came from, but it was easier to remember than the man’s real name or the more complicated name of his business.