Identity remained unknown.
Striker bypassed the body and approached the second examination table. He studied the thin boy on it. There was a bullet-hole in his right cheek, the skin around the area blackened and pulled inwards. The skin of his face was looser than when Striker had last seen him, and a large Y-incision had been carved in his chest, then sewn back together.
It was Sherman Chan. Black Mask. The one Laroche had deemed ‘possibly innocent’.
This was the kid Striker had killed.
He looked down at the boy. Here, dead on the table, he looked so young. Too young to be the monster he had turned out to be. He smelled bad. Of old blood and strange-scented body cleaners.
Felicia took the black binder from the counter top and flipped it open. Striker gave her time to read the report. He looked over the body and waited for her word. After a good ten minutes, she finally spoke.
‘How many shots you think you fired?’
He shrugged. ‘I don’t know, I can’t even recall changing mags.’
‘Me neither, it’s all a friggin’ blur,’ she agreed. ‘Not that it matters. He took it twice. The Forensic Firearms Unit hasn’t confirmed the round yet but, according to Doctor Beautiful’s notes, they’re going to have to test your gun first to see if the bullets match. Right now they’re proceeding under the assumption that everything matches.’
‘Of course.’ Striker picked up a pointer from a nearby tray and placed it perpendicular to the bullet-hole in the boy’s cheek. The path through was about a 120-degree angle.
‘Read me the path-following entry,’ he said.
She found the relevant section. ‘Entered through the zygo-matic arch, passed through the nasal cavity, deflected medially and inferiorly, and eventually, the remainder of the round got wedged in the rear of the skull at the posterior fissure of the parietal bone.’ She looked up and smiled. ‘I think that means head.’
Striker held his hand flat to the boy’s chest, right at nipple level, angled approximately ninety degrees.
‘And the second bullet?’ he asked.
‘Entrance wound was between ribs four and five, left side, right at the costo-vertebral joint — that would be the back of the rib, near the spine.’
‘I know where it is.’
Felicia nodded like she didn’t care, ran her finger down the page as she read: ‘Says here that Black Mask must’ve been spinning after you got him with the first round, because the second one hit almost dead centre. It passed right through the left lung and aorta, then exited through the costal cartilage. Says here, “The resultant shock from such an injury would most likely have been fatal”.’
Striker let the pointer drop to his side, then looked at the body for a long moment before finding Felicia’s eyes again.
‘The paragraph about the first bullet,’ he said. ‘It say anything about tissue damage inside the body?’
She scanned the notes. ‘Yeah, she’s listed a few things damaged by the bullet fragments. Occipitalis and trapezius muscles — and there’s a few notes here on brain matter. Why?’
‘What about the second bullet?’
She looked through the pages, shook her head. ‘None yet.’
He said nothing for a long moment, then called her over. She put the black binder back on the counter and joined him beside the dead body of Sherman Chan. When she was set, Striker pointed to the bullet-wound beside the boy’s sternum.
‘Look at that. Not the first entry hole — I have no problem with that — but the second one.’
She did. ‘Okay.’
‘Now look at this.’ He placed one hand under the boy’s left shoulder and one under the boy’s hip, rolled him onto his right side, then used a hand to stabilise him. ‘Look at the exit wound of the second bullet.’
‘Okay,’ she said again.
‘Describe the exit wound for me,’ he said.
She gave him an odd look, but said, ‘It’s probably a half-inch in diameter, I guess, and almost perfectly circular, except for the distended skin. And it’s relatively clean with distinct edges.’
‘That sound like a hollow-tip round to you?’
She paused. ‘Well, no, actually it doesn’t — but I doubt the pathologist-’
‘With all the killings over the past two days, she’s had even less sleep than us. She’s done her examination assuming the rounds were hollow-tips. But they weren’t.’
Felicia looked over the wound, noting, ‘That would explain why there was less internal tissue damage from the bullet fragments.’
‘Because there were no fragments — it wasn’t a frangible round.’
‘But that doesn’t make sense.’
‘It makes perfect sense. Sherman Chan was shot in the back — and by a Full Metal Jacket round. They shot their own, Felicia.’
Fifty-Five
‘I am glad that you know Sheung Fa,’ the old man said. ‘He is a good man to know. But this wound… the infection is very bad.’ He spoke the words softly, with a sense of practicality.
Red Mask heard them like a flutter of wings as he fell in and out of consciousness. He opened his eyes and glanced around the room. He saw shelf after shelf, each one covered with different-sized jars. Hundreds of jars. Containing roots, flowers, stalks, fermented creatures and many other things he could not even describe.
‘Very bad,’ the old man said again. ‘The arm may be lost.’
Red Mask felt removed. He looked from the flowers to the floor to the old television set, bolted high in the far corner of the room. At first glance it looked part of a video-surveillance system, all black and white and shoddy of picture, but then the BCTV News crest lit up the screen, and Red Mask realised he was simply looking at a very old television set.
The late-night news was on. St Patrick’s Peril.
Looking in that direction hurt Red Mask’s neck, and he had seen enough. He turned his eyes away from the screen.
‘Bullet… in shoulder…’ he murmured.
‘Rest, rest,’ the old man soothed.
Red Mask focused on the old man, who now stood at his side. He was thin, with a sickly pale face. As if he had been ill for a long time. As if he, too, had come from the camps.
‘The blood is dead.’ The old man pointed a long brown fingernail at Red Mask’s shoulder, then lightly dragged the nail around the perimeter of the wound.
Red Mask flinched at the touch, felt his entire body tremble.
‘Bad blood. Dead blood. It must come off.’
Red Mask shook his head. ‘It cannot.’
‘It must.’
‘No! I am… unfinished.’
The old man’s eyes roamed the room, as if he was staring at things no one else could see, dissecting things in his mind. After a long hesitation, he returned to his desk, which was on the far side of the room, under another large shelf of jars. He sat and read and talked to himself in a dialect Red Mask could not understand. The words sounded lost and rhetorical and far too fast — like the clucks of chickens.
For the first few seconds, Red Mask raised his head off the table and watched the old man, but soon his shoulder throbbed and his neck shook, and he gave up the struggle. His head dropped back onto the hard wood of the table, and he moved no more. His body felt as heavy and old as the earth itself.
‘I must be going,’ he said.
The old man laughed. ‘Are you in such a hurry to find your grave?’
Red Mask did not reply. His eyes roamed the room. On the wall hung several prayer banners. For Health. For Harmony. For Prosperity. He murmured them aloud, at the same time trying to find the source of the horrible smell that overpowered everything else in the room — even the strong stink of the ginger root. It took Red Mask several minutes before he realised that the stench came from him.
His body was turning rancid.
And all because of the gwailo. The White Devil.
‘Ahhh!’ the old man said, the word like a sigh. On wobbly legs, he stood up from his desk, then shuffled over to the sink where he gathered and mixed ingredients Red Mask could not see. When at last he turned around, he was carrying a large poultice, dripping with yellow and purple fluids, the colours of an old bruise. In the centre of the cloth, a hole had been cut. The old man draped that hole over the wound on Red Mask’s shoulder.