Killing Rain

And you couldn’t bear that burden any more than I could. I won’t let you.”
    I realized there was a lot of shouting and commotion around the side of the boat where the passengers would be exiting any minute. While we were engaging Al-Jib, I’d been too focused to notice.
    Delilah and I walked forward, into the crowd. The people closest to us recognized that we had been involved in what just happened, and gave us wide berth. The farther forward we moved into the crowd, though, the less we encountered that kind of courtesy. The people closer to the front hadn’t seen what happened. They didn’t know who we were and they didn’t care. They had heard shooting and a commotion, and just wanted to get the hell off the ferry as soon as it docked. We reached a point where the crowd was so dense that we were lost in it, just two more scared passengers. We couldn’t move farther forward. We simply had to wait, along with everyone else.
    A few seconds later, we were docking. The moment the boat was in position, people started surging off it. There was a lot of shouting in Chinese and I wasn’t sure what was being said. I did know that we wanted to get out of there before anyone started pointing at us.
    We headed out of the pier building, past the clock tower and the crowds shopping in the area. We cut through the underpassbelow Salisbury Road, then headed east to the impossibly dense and crowded shopping districts around Nathan. An Asian man and a gorgeous blonde—we would be easy to pick up from a description of what had happened on the ferry, and at the China Club just before that. But I didn’t want us to split up yet. I wanted to finish this.
    We reached the southeast corner of Kowloon Park and went inside. The park, set on a sprawling knoll above the streets below, was dark and, at this hour, reasonably deserted. We walked past the skeletal aviary and the silhouetted Chinese-style gardens to the Sculpture Walk, where we sat on the steps of a small amphitheater beside one of the Walk’s silent statues. I took out the prepaid cell phone, turned it on, and called Dox on the throwaway he was carrying.
    He picked up immediately. “Hey, partner, I hope that’s you.”
    I couldn’t help smiling at the sound of his voice. “It’s me. Are you okay?”
    “I’m fine. I’m here at the bug-out point. Where are you?”
    “Kowloon.”
    “Pardon me for asking, but isn’t that the wrong direction?”
    “Unfortunately. Delilah and I chased Al-Jib onto the Star Ferry.”
    “How’d that turn out?”
    “With Al-Jib dead.”
    “Well, that’s a happy outcome. Another victory for the good guys, and a blow to the forces of evil. What about Delilah?”
    “She’s fine. She’s right here with me.”
    “Ah-ha, so that’s why you hightailed it to Kowloon. You sure we have time for that sort of thing right now?”
    “I’m sure we don’t. What happened with Hilger and Gil?”
    “If you’re talking about the guy who was shooting at Hilger, he’s dead.”
    “How do you know?”

    “Hilger shot him, and when Delilah went to help, old Ali just about fucking flew over them and headed down the stairs. After that, Gil was doing a damn fine job of returning Hilger’s fire upside down and on his back from the stairs, but eventually Hilger put another round in him and then imitated Ali’s levitation trick. He paused just long enough to turn and shoot the sumbitch point-blank in the head.”
    “Goddamn, I wish we’d managed to get you a gun.”
    “Yeah, I would have liked to shoot him, and the opportunity was there. I did manage to sling a chair at him from the landing as he made his getaway, at least. It knocked him down, but he kept going after that.”
    “You and the chairs,” I said. “You ought to market it. ‘ Chair-fung-do.’ ”
    He laughed. “Yeah, the odd piece of furniture can come in handy from time to time, I’ve discovered. Anyway, I couldn’t get to Hilger in time after he was down, seeing as he was armed and dangerous and I was only dangerous. These jobs can be awkward without a proper rifle at hand. I don’t know how you do it.”
    “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Hilger’s known in the club. Hell, he had reservations there tonight. The police are going to pick him up for sure. And then we’ll see if we were right about him running his own operation.”
    “Think the powers that be will disown him?”
    I paused and considered. “I’m getting the feeling he has . . . enemies. People