Nothing to Lose (18 page)

“You're going to help me find your friend,” he said. “You and I are going to get the money. As soon as I return with the money, we will let your friend go.”

The expression on Ling-Kung's face was grim and determined. “If he is not back here in one hour,” she said, nodding at Philip, “I will hurt your friend. If the police come here, I will hurt your friend. If
anyone
comes, I will hurt your friend. Understand?” she said. “I have nothing. I have no life to go back to. If the men who killed my father find me, they will kill me. If I am sent back to Fujian, I will be killed. I get the money or I die. You understand?”

I understood.

I looked at Morgan. “I'll be back, I promise,” I told her. “Don't worry, okay?”

“Next time Billy wants to boycott an event, I'm boycotting it too,” she said. She tried to smile, but her lips were trembling. I squeezed her arm, stood up, and shouldered my backpack. Philip wanted me to bring it to carry the money and the identity papers. Under his supervision, I began to wind my way through a maze of basement rooms and corridors.

“You seem to know this place pretty well,” I said.

“It belongs to my father. He owns several buildings around the city.” I followed his directions until we came to a set of concrete steps with a door at the top. Philip took hold of my arm and held tightly as we climbed the steps together. Did he think I was going to make a run for it? Did he think I was going to abandon Morgan?

When we got to the top, he yanked me still and held me while he pressed an ear against the door to listen. He must have been satisfied because he opened the door a crack and peeked out. Then he nudged me through. I blinked in the brilliant afternoon sunlight.

I glanced at my watch. It had seemed as if I'd spent a lifetime in that basement, but it had only been half an hour since I'd left Nick. “He'll still be at the parade.” When Nick made a promise, he kept it. When he said he was going to repay a debt, he wouldn't quit until he had repaid it in full.

“Nick probably thinks whoever was going to meet him got delayed,” I said. “He'll wait.”

Philip eyed me suspiciously.

“He told me that your cousin died saving his life,” I said. “Your cousin who used to deliver pizza.” His eyes widened in surprise, then filled with understanding. “Nick would have done anything for your uncle,” I said. Including breaking a few laws. “I'm sure he'll still be there. If he isn't, I know how to contact him.” Assuming, of course, that he went home after the parade and assuming that he answered his telephone when it rang.

Philip kept a grip on my arm. His eyes roved from left to right, up the alley into which we had emerged, down the alley behind us. Now that we were out in broad daylight, I took a good look at him. He looked serious. He also looked scared, and that made me nervous. But he sure didn't look like any desperado I had ever seen. He was wearing a grey knee-length wool coat over a dark gray suit, a white shirt, and a conservative tie. Everything looked grubby, probably from four days on the street, giving him the look of a disheveled junior executive. I remembered that he'd said he had been working for his father when Ling-Kung showed up.

“I was with Nick all day yesterday,” I said. “He went into stores all over Chinatown. I think he was collecting money.”

If Philip was surprised by this, he didn't show it.

“I don't get it,” I said. “Why would all those people give him money?”

“Because they hate the snakeheads,” he said. “The snakeheads lie to people about what the trip will be like. They tell them, you'll be on a ship with good food and a swimming pool. They don't tell them they'll be locked inside a container with no way out. They don't tell them that if the authorities start to suspect the ship, the snakeheads will throw them overboard. The snakeheads don't care how many die. People here want to help, but they're afraid.”

“So what happened? You and Ling-Kung ran. Then you called your uncle and he told you to lay low until he could get some money and papers for her?”

He didn't answer, but I could figure out most of it myself, based on what I had seen Nick do and what Nick had told me. People had helped the only way they knew how—they gave money.

“Where did a guy like you get a gun, Philip?”

“It's the gun Ling-Kung's father had when he went to see the snakeheads. Ling-Kung said that after he heard what had happened to her brother, he went to a countryman and borrowed a gun from him.”

“A countryman? Someone he knew from back home?”

He nodded. “Someone from Fujian. Someone who helped him, the same way people are helping Ling-Kung now.”

“But if her father had the gun—”

The expression on his face was bitter. “I told you. Ling-Kung followed her father. She tried to stop him. They argued. She got the gun away from him. Then the snakeheads showed up. Someone must have told them. They believed he would make trouble for them. So they shot him. He had no weapon, but they shot him anyway.”

I didn't know what to say.

We reached the end of an alley. Philip peeked out into the street. In the distance, I heard a familiar Christmas carol being blasted by a brass band. The parade wasn't over yet. Philip dragged me back toward the parade route. His eyes never stopped checking to the left, to the right, in front of us, behind us. Neither did mine, although we were probably looking for different things. He was checking that we weren't being followed or hadn't been spotted. I was looking for a cop.

We turned onto a street that ran across the parade route, just south of the hospital where I had left Nick. I wondered if he would still be there. If he was, he'd certainly hand over the bag to Philip. Then what? Would Philip really let Morgan and me go? Or would he be too afraid that we would go to the police? The crowd along the parade route hadn't thinned at all. If anything, there were even more people clogging the sidewalk. As we wove our way through the crowd, I began to search for a bright pink hat. I started by scanning the crowd where I had last seen Nick. That's when I became aware of a van driving slowly alongside us.
People trying to figure out how to get around the parade
, I thought. But where was Nick? Where was that hat? Had he given up and gone home? I started to glance at Philip, but something caught my eye.

Something pink.

Bright pink.

“Hey,” I said, “there he—”

Philip yanked on the strap of my backpack. At first I didn't understand. What was he doing?

“Hey,” I said again. “Over there. Look.”

But he didn't. Why was he facing the street? Why was he—?

And then I saw.

The van had stopped right next to us, the rear side door partially open. I could see a man crouching inside— holding a gun. He was pointing it directly at Philip and me. He said something in Chinese and signaled for us to get inside. I looked toward the crowd, frantically searching for that flash of pink. This time I spotted it easily. Except the hat wasn't on Nick's head anymore. He was holding it in his hand; it dangled as he clung to his crutch. The bookstore bag with the big Christmas tree sticker on it hung from his other hand. He was looking directly at me and frowning, as if he knew that something was wrong but hadn't figured out exactly what.

Someone got out of the front of the van and said something to Philip. Philip tensed up—I think he was considering making a run for it. But the man grabbed his arm and said something that made Philip's face turn pale. He got into the van. Then the same man told me to get in. I stared at that gun. I turned to look at Nick. The man poked me with something hard. I don't know how I managed it—I didn't want to move and my knees were wobbling—but I obeyed. The door slid shut behind me. The van made an abrupt U-turn and I toppled over. Then someone slapped some tape over my mouth and bound my wrists.

I felt hands moving over my body, checking my pockets. I heard the
zzzzzttt
of the zipper on my backpack being undone and felt hands rummage around inside. I glanced at the guy holding the gun. He didn't look anything like a junior executive. He looked like a serious gangster. He also looked exactly like one of the men I had seen in the alley behind Mr. Li's restaurant.

I felt cold all over, especially when I saw who else was in the van. Lying on the floor beside me, their mouths taped over, their hands trussed behind their backs, were Ling-Kung and Morgan. Morgan's eyes were wild. I could tell she had been crying. I didn't blame her.

The man with the gun signaled me to lie down. When I didn't move fast enough, he pushed me facedown onto the floor of the van. Someone threw something over me. A smelly old blanket.

 

 

I don't know how long we were in the van. Time can expand or collapse depending on whether you're nervous or excited or scared to death. The first time Nick had picked me up at my father's place, he had been five minutes late. It had seemed more like five hours as I paced up and down, wondering if he had changed his mind or had gotten into some kind of trouble. The evening that we spent together had lasted a couple of hours, but it had seemed more like a couple of minutes—time really does fly when you're with someone special. Maybe we were in the van for ten minutes, maybe more like thirty. All I know is that when the van finally stopped, I didn't move. I didn't dare.

The men who had grabbed us off the street spoke among themselves. Philip and Ling-Kung probably understood what they were saying, but I didn't. Then the blanket was lifted off me. Someone grabbed my arms and jerked at me to get me up. I was shoved out of the van and onto a concrete floor. I stumbled. My hands were taped behind me so I couldn't grab onto anything to steady myself. I almost fell. No one made a move to help me. My backpack slid off my shoulders and hung from my wrists. My scarf slipped off my neck. When I finally recovered my balance, I found myself face-to-face with the man from the front of the van, the one I had recognized from the alley behind Mr. Li's restaurant. This time, I barely noticed his face. My attention was one hundred percent focused on the gun in his hand.

I've seen real guns before. My father used to carry one every day. So did most of his friends. But he never let me touch it. He told me over and over: “Guns aren't toys, they're weapons. Getting shot in real life isn't like getting shot in the movies. Getting shot in real life wounds and maims and kills.” The words echoed in my head.

I glanced around. We were in a huge, dark, dank building.
Some kind of warehouse
, I figured. Philip had been pushed out of the van after me, followed by Morgan and Ling-Kung. The man who had been in the back with us jumped out last. He and the man who'd been up front with the driver prodded us toward a door and down a corridor to a flight of stairs.

We were directed down the steps and along another corridor lit only by a naked lightbulb that dangled overhead. Finally, we were shoved into a small, concrete-walled, windowless room. The heavy metal door clanged shut. Then something
tchonked
. The lock.

Ling-Kung stared at the door for a moment. Then she went over to Philip and stood back-to-back with him. At first I was too rattled to pay attention to what she was doing. Then I saw that she was picking at the tape that bound Philip's wrists. She kept at it until his hands were finally free. He ripped the tape from his mouth and undid her hands. She undid mine; he undid Morgan's. I pulled the tape from my mouth, but Morgan just stood there, trembling, her arms wrapped around her body, her eyes glazed. As gently as I could, I peeled the tape from her mouth. She slid down to the floor and started to cry.

She was in shock. I think we all were. I was shaking so hard that my teeth rattled in my head.

“Those guys—” I said.

“They killed my father,” Ling-Kung said.

Morgan made a gurgling sound. I didn't blame her. The men who had brought us here had already murdered someone. There had been a witness to that murder. And they had the witness. You didn't need any special insight into the criminal mind to figure out that they would want to dispose of that witness—and anyone who might be able to link them to the mess.

I sat down beside Morgan and put my arm around her. I knew I should say something, but what? “It's okay? Everything's going to be just fine?” Right.

“They didn't blindfold us,” Morgan said.

True enough.

“That's bad, right?” she said.

If they had been worried that we could identify them later, they would have blindfolded us. But they didn't, which meant that they weren't worried. They knew we were never going to be in a position to identify them.

Philip said something softly to Ling-Kung. She went up close to him. He dug in his pocket and pulled out the gun. Morgan stared at it. Hope flickered in her eyes.

“They didn't take it,” she said.

“They didn't even search me,” he said.