Hong Kong
Three Years Later
The way in which Three-Ox Liu met Christie always seemed to him to have been ordained by fate. Nothing else, he felt, could have explained the confluence of events. Word had come to him that one of the small operators in arms and heroin trading had decided to overstep the bounds that the independent groups were permitted to occupy. The Red Phoenix Triad was not so large as the Green Pang or the 14K, and to permit an upstart like Lo Whan to infringe on their territory would be an intolerable loss of face. For this reason, Liu went to oversee the chastisement personally.
He spotted the girl as she came up an alley between two crumbling tenements. A girl of thirteen, just the age of his own son Sheng, moreover an English girl with stark white hair, working as a runner attracted attention, and of course Liu had gathered as much intelligence as possible about the capabilities of his enemy before launching his attack. He himself was following two of Lo Whan's men who had fled their master's warehouse where the Red Phoenix had already dispatched eight.
The two men, in their panic, did not know they were being followed. Liu was deliberate in his pursuit, had sensed the shifting of the crowd as the two men passed through it, the essence of their fear tangible among the greed of the stall owners and the day-to-day concerns of the shoppers. When the two men had turned aside to go down the alley, their progress had been as easy to follow by the consternation left in their wake as if they'd laid down a blazed trail of red paint. Christie had been coming the opposite way when they met her.
"You!" one cried. "It is you who has brought this bad fortune upon us! Lo Whan was mad to ever have taken you in!"
She looked at him, amazement plain on her face.
"What's happened?"
"What has not happened?" the other man barked. "The Red Phoenix has come, that's what!"
"I told Lo Whan he was a fool, but you inflamed him with greed! You made him think he could be bigger than he was! You brought death to all of us!"
This was interesting, thought Liu. Did the man blame the girl out of superstition and bigotry, or did they mean something else, something tangible? In any case it bore watching and it was this curiosity which piqued his interest.
"Now we will return the favor!" bellowed the thug, and the two of them rushed her. The girl was already in motion, though, reaching into the pocket of her baggy leather jacket and pulling out a tiny pistol, .22 or .25 caliber. She fired without hesitation into the body of the nearer man, the shots no louder than the pop of a firecracker.
The gun, however, seemed to have little effect. Certainly it did not stop the thug's momentum; he crashed into her, knocking the gun away. The second of Lo Whan's men, a step behind, had pulled out from beneath his coat a hand axe, as if he was a "hatchet man" in an American pulp novel. He raised the weapon to swing, but never got the chance.
Liu's hand closed around the thug's wrist. It was a big hand as Liu was a big man. At six feet, three inches and two hundred and sixty pounds, he was massive for a Chinese, especially since there was not an ounce of fat on him. His nickname had come from a story that in his home village it had taken three yoked oxen to match his strength. It was a ludicrous tale, not the least because Liu had been born and raised in Hong Kong, but there was also essential truth in it. His strength stopped the thug's blow effortlessly, not deflecting it but merely negating the attack with raw force. Liu pulled, his grip not merely incapacitating the man's weapon arm but using it as a lever to control his body. The thug's torso was easily exposed to a brutal strike that shattered ribs.
Liu did not let up for an instant. Like the tiger, his style of fighting was to attack, always attack relentlessly. His size and strength let him shrug off incidental blows while he quickly moved to crush his opponents, in the philosophy that the best defense was to incapacitate one's enemy so they could not mount any offense at all. In under a minute the would-be hatchet man was left dead.
Meanwhile, the wounded man had seized the girl's throat in an attempt to strangle her. She did not try to break the hold but instead raked at his eyes with her nails. They tore away the sunglasses that he wore in imitation of American or Japanese gangster's, but he jerked his head back to avoid further damage, his longer reach keeping her at bay. She tried to kick out at his groin, but he took the blow off his thigh. Whether he'd been fatally wounded by her bullets, or even if so he'd last long enough to finish strangling the girl was an open question, but by that time Liu had finished off the other man and he coolly snapped the thug's neck from behind.
The girl looked up at him warily. The marks on her throat were plain, standing out an angry red on her pale skin. She had strange eyes, Liu thought, as pale as her skin but with a strange, shifting color he found hard to define. For a moment they would look blue, then appear to have a violet tint, then again the color would fade to be almost white.
Opal eyes, he thought. Ghost eyes.
Her body was tense, poised to run or to try to defend herself, though Liu suspected she knew that would be futile.
"Don't make me chase you," he said.
"Are you going to try to kill me, too?" she replied in flawless Cantonese. It wasn't quite a shock, from an English girl who'd probably grown up there, but still caught Liu off-guard.
"That's make saving you a waste of my time." Liu bent down, picked up her gun, and gave it back to her. She put it back into her pocket, which he watched the whole way to be sure. He'd seen that she was willing to defend herself with lethal action.
"I'm glad that you did, but why?"
"They were Lo Whan's men."
She smiled then, knowingly.
"You're Red Phoenix."
"Yes." Further explanation was unnecessary. "Come with me. I want to know what this dog was talking about." He nudged the corpse of the man she'd shot with his toe.
"All right."
"That easy?"
"I took Lo Whan's money. I wasn't one of his gang, but you know that."
Liu did. She was a child, a female, and she wasn't Chinese. It impressed him, though, that she said it as calmly as she did. He had Sze Kau, 49s, who didn't have the courage she did when facing possible death.
"You're not afraid of inconvenient truths, are you, Ghost Eyes?"
"It seems to me that truth is a weapon like any other, to be used when needed."
Liu's hand flicked out, taking her by the shoulder. She had, he noticed, superb reflexes and had seen the move coming, but had not known the correct way to avoid it. He exerted pressure, forcing her to her knees.
"You speak wisdom, but you don't know how to apply it," he said. "I watched you fight. You have the will to battle, to kill. You do not shy away from death, but you don't know how to create it. Not yet."
"Yet?"
He gave her a hand up, smiling broadly.
"Let's get out of this stinking alley. Then we can talk."
Liu took her to Grandmother Pai's noodle house, a place he'd frequented often while growing up. Pai had been an old woman when Liu was a child and looked exactly the same now. Her Cantonese was laced with a broad northern accent, which perhaps explained her liking for noodles rather than rice. No one ordered at Pai's; she set the steaming bowls before them, full of fresh seafood and tender yet crisp vegetables, to be washed down with pots of hot, strong tea. The girl ate with gusto, knowing enough not to discuss business until their bowls were empty. Good manners--or perhaps just hunger.
"So then," Liu began. "Let's start with your name, Ghost Eyes."
She told him. Her last name rang a faint chord in his mind, but he could not place it.
"I'm Liu," he replied, and her eyes widened.
"Not the one they call Three-Ox Liu?" she asked.
"Some people do."
"I've heard of you! You're a 438 with the Red Phoenix!" she said in an excited whisper. With a grin she added, "Lo Whan would soil himself at the mention of your name."
Since Liu's men had made a very graphic example of Lo Whan for the benefit of those who would infringe on Red Phoenix territory, he found it eminently reasonable, but he still found the reaction gratifying.
"One acquires a reputation. Now, those men in the alley seem to have given you a reputation. The one accused you of bringing down Lo Whan."
"Sung was a superstitious fool. He hated me because I'm British and female. I don't know which was the worse sin."
Liu was not particularly fond of the British, himself. For the most part he found them arrogant, as if the fact that for a generation they'd possessed the greatest empire on Earth made them somehow the only civilized people on the planet. This was, however, a generalization rather than a rule, useful only in talk and worthless in drawing conclusions about individuals.
"Undoubtedly true, but there is more than that."
She watched him carefully.
"You seem very confident of that."
"Only greed would have made Lo Whan stupid enough to challenge the Red Phoenix. Only the chance for an extraordinary return would have given him the courage to risk it. What was of value to him could be of value to us--and we are far better equipped to deal with threats."
"And what do I get for cooperating?"
"Is your life not enough?"
"Death and I are old friends."
He recalled again her immediate response to Sung's attack, her lack of fear or hesitation in firing her gun, the way she'd gone after his eyes. The germ of an idea he'd had then began to take root.
Master Su.
Maybe, just maybe Liu could meet Christie's price after all. There would be no loss of face in that...not if the payment he had in mind was something that would benefit him and the triad when all was said and done.
He wanted to laugh at the absurdity of it. It was almost as if he were offering a bribe to himself.
"Not yet," he answered Christie, "but that will change."
-X X X-
NOTE: The danger in introducing characters from a foreign culture is obvious. Without sufficient research, it's all too easy to give them names that make no sense whatsoever (as if, for example, a non-English speaker gave an American male the name "Jennifer"...or for that matter "Pencil"). Worse yet are the names that turn into puns, or translate themselves into something like "maggot nesting in camel dung."
My knowledge of Chinese is absolutely zero. If any of the ethnically Chinese characters in this story possess names which fit the above patterns, then I hope at least my ignorance gives those who do know the language something to laugh at!