When Choy Lee got to the restaurant, the door was locked. He pounded on it until Sally opened it.
Of all the things he had to say, the only thing he could think of was, “What happened to your window?”
“Someone threw a brick through it.” She locked the door behind him and headed for the bar. He trailed along.
“Want a drink?” she asked.
“A beer.”
When he had it, he sat down on a stool. Sally sat on another one at the end of the bar with her gin and tonic. The television was on. “Want to tell me about it?” she asked.
He stared at the video. And at the little ribbons with headlines running across the bottom.
“Talk or take your beer and get out,” Sally said.
“I’m a spy,” he managed.
“I thought you might be.”
“Honest to God, I don’t know a damned thing about any nuclear weapons. I don’t even know if there is one. Or two or three or whatever. I’ve been watching the harbor, reporting on navy ship movements, since I got here. That’s all I did.”
“And Zhang?”
“I don’t know about him. I thought he was a watcher, too.”
“Maybe he’s something else,” she said, cool as a frosty morning.
“Maybe.” He thought about it. His head began to bob up and down. “Yeah, he probably is. I ran out on him while he was tying up the boat this evening. He’s making me nervous.”
“Don’t you think you should call the FBI?”
“Christ, Sally, let’s you and me just get the hell outta here.”
“How?” She gestured at the television, which was showing a sea of taillights on a highway somewhere.
He sipped at the beer. It was cold and delicious. Sally hadn’t touched her drink since he sat down.
“You’d leave all these people here to get murdered by Zhang?”
“You don’t know that he’d do that.” He smacked the bar with a palm. “Damn, woman, we don’t know anything, and if I make that call, you and I won’t be able to get out of here, have a life of our own.”
“Is that what you want?”
“Yes. I want to marry you. I’m in love with you, in case you haven’t noticed.”
The look on her face softened.
“Lee,” she said, “if there is only one chance in a thousand that there is a bomb hidden somewhere, we can’t run. You have to call the FBI, and you have to tell them what you know. Help them find Zhang. Unless you do, there is no future for us.”
“There won’t be one if I do.”
She didn’t say anything to that.
“Why the hell do you think I haven’t already called? I want a future for us.”
“Do it now. There’s the phone, right there on the podium by the door.”
He turned to stare at it. He had seen Sally answer it a hundred times, taking reservations. He looked back at her. She was watching him.
“It still works,” she said.
He walked over to it, picked up the receiver and got a dial tone. Better call 911, he thought. He dialed it. Got only a busy signal. He was going to have to call the FBI, see if anyone was in the office.
“Where’s your phone book?” he asked.
She got it from under the bar and brought it over.
As Zhang approached the door to the restaurant, an old car with a bad muffler drove into the parking lot. The windows were down.
“It’s another fuckin’ chink,” the driver said. White guy. Young.
Zhang heard the words but didn’t understand them. He saw the shotgun barrel poking out of the rear window. He fell flat and rolled toward the front of his car as the shotgun boomed. The remaining window in the front of the restaurant dissolved into a cloud of glass fragments, most of which went into the place.
Choy Lee and Sally fell on the floor as glass fragments sprayed the room. Sally stayed down, but Choy risked a look through the front-door glass. He got a glimpse of Zhang, and the dark car rolling slowly. Then the shotgun settled on the front door. He ducked as it went off and the glass flew into the restaurant.
“It’s Zhang,” he told Sally, then grabbed her and ran for the back door.
Zhang Ping was shielded by his car and wouldn’t have done anything if the old clunker hadn’t stopped and the doors opened. Three guys put their feet out. Only one had a gun.
It was about ten feet to the guy getting out holding the shotgun, a kid with long sloppy hair. Zhang was on him before the boy could get the gun pointed. Jerked it from his hand and used the butt on his throat. The kid went down gurgling with a crushed larynx. He swung the gun onto the driver, another kid, and pulled the trigger. The driver’s face instantly turned to a mass of blood as the shotgun boomed. This guy went over backward onto the asphalt.
The other young man who had climbed from the car ran. Zhang pumped the gun to chamber another shell, pointed it at the fleeing man, then lowered it.
He went over to the empty hole in the wall of the restaurant where the window had been and climbed through it.
The lights were still on. No one in sight. He glanced behind the bar, then ran into the kitchen. The rear door was standing open. He paused to pull the shotgun’s slide back far enough to check that there was a shell in the chamber. He saw brass. He slammed the slide forward and charged out the door.
Sally’s Toyota was in the alley. Now the motor howled, the tires squalled, and it shot forward. Zhang Ping aimed at the driver’s window and fired. Not enough lead. He missed. Got the rear passenger window. He jacked the slide and tried again. The gun clicked. Empty.
He ran back through the restaurant with the shotgun in his hand, charged out the door and ran over to the body of the punk who had gotten out of the clunker with it. The kid wasn’t dead. He was turning blue and twitching. Had pimples. Maybe eighteen or nineteen. Zhang patted him down, felt more shotgun shells in the kid’s jeans. Helped himself. Got five of them, 12-gauge.
Then he jumped into the driver’s seat of his stolen car. Took the time to shove three shells into the gun’s magazine, racked the slide to chamber a round and put the thing on the passenger seat behind him. In seconds he had the engine running, checked that he would clear the clunker and backed up. Ran over one of the bodies. He felt the bump and ignored it.
Slammed the gearshift into drive and ran over the body again as he accelerated away down the street in the direction the Toyota had taken down the alley.
“So what do you think, Lee?” Sally demanded. “Is Zhang just a watcher? Is there a bomb?”
“Put on your seat belt,” Choy shouted. He used his right hand to get his across his lap and latched, then turned right at the first street and stood on the accelerator. He was trying to figure out how to lose Zhang, who he knew to a certainty was coming after them. Choy didn’t turn on his headlights; maybe that would help. No traffic on the streets — they raced from the glow of one streetlight to another, running stop signs and red traffic lights.
Sally brushed bits of safety glass from her hair. She had a few cuts on her face from the glass. Apparently none of the birdshot had entered the interior of the car, or if a few pellets had, they hadn’t hit them.
“The police station,” he roared at Sally over the howl of the motor. “Where is it?”
“I don’t know,” she replied.
He glanced in the rearview mirror and saw an SUV coming fast under the streetlights. No headlights either.
He took the next left as fast as he dared. The tires squalled.
The helicopter ride to the airport at Naval Base Norfolk took about an hour. From my window I could see interstates and highways due to the ribbon of headlights that filled them. Everyone was apparently going somewhere at five miles per hour. Or less. Whatever illusions I had about the power of the Internet these days, I lost on that ride.