This seemed to be a voice out of his dreams, so familiar it made him tremble, fulfilling his long-held expectation.
Fei Du's tightly-knit brow slowly relaxed and he let himself give into his involuntary drowsiness amidst the imagined smell of cigarette smoke. Before he sank into deep sleep, he kept thinking of holding the hand covering his eyes—unfortunately, there was an IV in one of his arms, and the other was firmly immobilized by a cast. His limbs were very useless; he had to let it go.
As soon as Fei Du had his self-awareness, it seemed he had once again grasped the staff of fate. It was as if there was a guardian mountain in his heart where not a blade of grass grew, which couldn't be hurried, which didn't require any will to live; by nature it could skillfully sweep away all distracting thoughts and strive to the greatest extent possible to cooperate to readjust his failing bodily functions. Each time he slept was time for "recharging his batteries." Each day he woke, the speed of his recovery was visible to the naked eye.
Of course, Luo-shixiong's "care" couldn't go unmentioned.
This person claimed to be coming over to take care of him, but in fact all the regular work was done by the nurse's aides.
Luo Wenzhou's daily task was to come over and eat three meals, then idly watch basketball games and cooking shows on the TV in his hospital room. When he'd seen that Fei Du's strength was used up and he'd fallen asleep, he'd leave.
The most angering thing was that each time he ate, he had to find a place with a draft, making the smell of pork rib soup float over without wasting a single sliver. At the same time, the TV was broadcasting the process of a steak being cooked in high definition, accompanied by sizzling—it looked and sounded delicious, surrounding Fei Du, who, like a rigid corpse, could still neither speak nor move, ganging up to make him experience from the heart how it felt to have kindness requited with enmity.
Fei Du, who was on a nutrient fluid drip, fixed his silent gaze on Luo Wenzhou.
Luo Wenzhou met his gaze, seeming not to notice the silent condemnation in it, continuing to issue a small oral treatise. "My mom's boiled this pork rib soup into I don't know what. I keep telling her that with her rather low skill level, she should braise in soy sauce, but she won't listen. She keeps saying soy-sauce braised meat isn't healthy, it has to be clear broth. Look. The seasoning was added at the wrong time, the amount of salt isn't right, and don't even mention the cooking time. If you fed it to a cat, I figure the cat would go out and bury it."
Then, before Fei Du's eyes, as he jabbered distastefully, he downed half the bowl in one go.
Fei Du: "…"
Luo Wenzhou exchanged a long look with him, then seemed to suddenly understand something and leaned forward. "What are you staring at me like that for? Do you want to eat?"
Fei Du blinked his eyes at him lightly.
Without any hesitation, Luo Wenzhou put the last piece of pork rib in his mouth. "Wait until you can call me 'ge,' and I'll give you a taste of something good."
Fei Du: "…"
Actually, he wasn't at all interested in the pork rib soup. He only thought looking at Luo Wenzhou was very interesting. On his own, this gentleman could make as much noise as a hundred people. As soon as he walked in, the cold and spacious hospital room became lively.
When he was finished eating in front of him, Luo Wenzhou didn't trouble the nurse's aides. Limping and jolting, he cleared away his bowl and chopsticks, then snuck a look outside like a thief. Seeing that the medical personnel didn't intend to come back for the moment, he quickly closed the door and strolled over to Fei Du's bedside. "I'm going to do something that transgresses discipline. Don't make it public."
Fei Du lowered his eyes, sweeping a glance over his body, feeling that from head to toe there was no place affording an opportunity for "transgressing." Thereupon he looked rather expectantly at Luo Wenzhou, wishing to learn some fashionable means of entertainment from his shixiong.
…then he saw Luo Wenzhou pull out a small bottle of honey from somewhere.
"Oh," thought Fei Du flatly.
He really wasn't the sort of person who couldn't stand to go a month or two without eating extravagantly.
"On the down-low." Like an opium-peddler, Luo Wenzhou kept his voice down and said to Fei Du, "I'll just give you a mouthful. There won't be more."
Saying so, he poured a few drops of honey into the bottle cap, mixed in a bit of water to dissolve it, then dipped a cotton swab into it, carefully daubing it onto Fei Du's bloodless lips.
While Fei Du thought that this degree of "transgression" didn't accord with his expectations, he was very willing to give him face and gently licked, thinking, "Peach blossom honey."
As the same time, his gaze swept over the man in front of him—Luo Wenzhou seemed to have gotten a little thinner. You couldn't make up for serious injuries with some pieces of pork rib. He couldn't quite put weight on his injured leg; it hung weakly in the air, making it hard for him to maintain his balance. His rolled-up sleeves revealed nearly healed scrapes; there were only a few shallow traces remaining. Coming close, you could smell whiffs of washing detergent warmed by his body heat coming off his cuffs and collar.
"That warm skin must feel very nice." The thought came into Fei Du's mind out of nowhere. He narrowed his eyes slightly, noiselessly switching over into a beast in human clothing's point of view, thinking that Luo Wenzhou's currently somewhat haggard face looked very stirring.
Though President Fei, his body crippled but his will obscene, was only a living corpse who could blink his eyes, it didn't prevent him from sweeping his gaze over Luo Wenzhou a few times, "from the neck down to the knees up," feeling that he was definitely more delicious than the much-criticized soup.
Luo Wenzhou was feeding him the water with single-hearted devotion, afraid the cotton swab would hurt him, taking care not to let the sticky honey water get everywhere. A single bottle cap of honey water nearly caused him to break out all over in sweat. He had no attention to spare to notice a certain capitalist's serene but ill-intentioned expression.
"Listen, what were you doing getting in the way back there? If you'd just hidden behind your car, at most you'd have gotten a bit of a scratch," Luo Wenzhou said softly as he unknowingly fed him water. "Weren't you a professional psychopath planning on opening a Killing Without a Trace training center? What are you doing getting out of your sphere and into the sacrificing your life for others business?"
Fei Du's eyes curved gently.
"Like hell you're smiling," Luo Wenzhou said. "I nearly thought your 'masterpiece' was about to become a lost art. A couple days ago I went on purpose to buy a frame for it. Now it's been mounted, I'm going to hang it at the head of the bed later."
At first Fei Du was rather perplexed, not understanding what this so-called "masterpiece" was supposed to be.
After a good while he finally came around—at the meeting that day, he'd drawn two portraits while taking notes. Both were of Luo Wenzhou. One had been properly dressed and posed, while other one had been rather more "relaxed"; in it, he'd been dressed rather casually…wearing only a tie.
The former had been smacked against the artist's chest by the great Captain Luo; the latter had been torn out by him on the spot.
Fei Du involuntarily imagined that drawing "hanging at the head of the bed," greatly admiring the thickness of Luo Wenzhou's face. He subconsciously pursed his lips, and a water droplet rolled down. Luo Wenzhou hastily reached out to wipe it away—
By coincidence, Fei Du licked, the tip of his tongue touching his hand. The two of them froze simultaneously.
Then, before Luo Wenzhou could react, Fei Du simply pursued his advantage, circling Luo Wenzhou's fingertip with his tongue, drawing a half-circle on the pad of his finger.
Luo Wenzhou: "…"
As though nothing at all were the matter with him, Fei Du unhurriedly withdrew the magic powers of his lips and tongue, looking calmly at Luo Wenzhou. His eyes, larger because of his drastic weight loss over the last few days, curved in a half-smile, their corners hooked; in those eyes was the President Fei-style gaze that had once given Luo Wenzhou such a headache.
Though he didn't make a sound, Luo Wenzhou read from his expression that he was saying, "Wait until you call me 'ge,' and I can answer, and I'll give you a taste of something good."
Among those lying seriously injured and ill, only able to slightly move their features, Fei Du could have been a world champion of taking advantage.
Luo Wenzhou had underestimated the enemy for a time. He felt the finger he'd licked was somewhat numb. He heated up, his throat rolling insistently. "You…"
Just then, the phone is his pocket vibrated. "…just you wait!"
On the other end of the phone, Tao Ran was bewildered. "Huh? Wait for what? Is it inconvenient for you to pick up the phone right now?"
"I wasn't talking to you." Luo Wenzhou irritably put the phone on speaker. He thought about it, was still unreconciled, and tapped Fei Du on the forehead. "What progress have we made today?"
Suspended and on sick leave, at his leisure in the hospital, he could still remotely control the Criminal Investigation Team's operations.
"We've found a record of something Dong Qian received from abroad," said Tao Ran. "It was just when Zheng Kaifeng sent his first 'deposit.' The sender's address was the shell company's foreign illegal private bank's exchange point. The contents were listed as a contract. We've found a duplicate of that contract—Dong Qian stored it at his fleet's warehouse, anonymously. None of his colleagues knew that the things in that box were his. We only found it after getting the agreement of the manager and the other employees who'd stored things there and carefully searching through everything.—It's a 'Foreign Investment Proxy' contract, written in English. I figure Dong Qian didn't understand what it was, so he left it behind and didn't send it to Dong Xiaoqing with the rest."
Many foreign illegal private banks operated under the cover of being a pawnshop or a currency exchange. Illegally-obtained cash would change hands several times in their underground network, then be deposited into a bank under the name of some organization, again called an "investment"; it would be converted into some sort of property, being washed completely clean as it went in and out several times, and would "legally" return to its owner's hands.
In order to assassinate Zhou Junmao, Zheng Kaifeng had paid two sums of money to the truck driver Dong Qian. Owing to the police force's unexpected involvement, the enemy had been spooked and the remainder payment hadn't gone through, but they'd already cleared up the trail of the deposit—the money had been remitted from Zheng Kaifeng's company abroad, had passed through the illegal private bank and been washed clean. The whole process had been nearly complete. If this plot hadn't come to light, in a while, Dong Xiaoqing may have received some unexpected investment income and lived on in ignorance and prosperity.
While Dong Qian's family hadn't been prosperous, neither had they been poor. Cautious and conscientious common people who had never seen such a sum of money wouldn't necessarily be moved if they did see it—because they'd know it was dirty money, and they'd simply have no concept of what to do with such a sum, unable to work up true covetous thoughts. So why had Dong Qian been willing to give up his life?
Luo Wenzhou said, "What else was in the anonymous storage in the warehouse?"
"A photograph of Dong Qian's late wife and a paper man—the kind you burn for the dead—kneeling, with Zhou Junmao's name written on the back of its head," Tao Ran said. "We went through all the shops in the area that do business in funeral goods, and one of them recognized the paper man. It had been made to order a month before Zhou Junmao's car crash. The owner found the bill, too, and the signature and contact information really were Dong Qian's. Because the kneeling little man was very strange, the shop's owner suspected he was doing some kind of evil witchcraft, so it made an especially deep impression on him. The physical description he gave matched, too.
"I'll try to sum up the whole case.—Dong Qian's wife died in a car crash twenty-one years ago. He's been raising his daughter alone all these years, never knowing the truth about his wife's death. Then one day, suddenly, a mysterious express delivery person comes to his door when he hasn't bought anything and delivers a mysterious package to him. Inside, the truth about his wife's death is revealed.
"When the shock passed, Dong Qian began communicating with this mysterious person. He pretended to be shopping online, repeatedly purchasing things and returning them. In reality, through the delivery person, he was communicating with the mysterious individual behind him, who sent him evidence and proposed a collaboration with Dong Qian.
"Dong Qian wasn't concerned about how much money he could get. The circulation of this cross-border dirty money was too complicated for him. He must have had his heart entirely set on revenge. He didn't even feel like getting someone to translate that complicated capital contract. During this whole process, Zheng Kaifeng didn't show his face, and he wholly concealed his own role in the old case. He must have even used Zhou Huaijin's name to put a hit out on Zhou Junmao—that's why after she found out part of the truth, Dong Xiaoqing ran the risk of going to stab Zhou Huaijin."
Luo Wenzhou said, "Then how do you explain that package sent from Dong Qian to himself before his death?"
"I surmise it must have been sent by Dong Qian," Tao Ran said. "While Dong Qian's goal was revenge, there was still a large sum of money involved that would later come to his daughter's bank account. If Dong Xiaoqing didn't know anything, she might have been scared out of her wits by so much money.—Only he didn't expect Dong Xiaoqing's temperament to be so fierce."
Luo Wenzhou was still frowning. "So according to your reasoning, who was responsible for running over Dong Xiaoqing?"
"Do you remember the security camera over their neighbor's door?" Tao Ran said. "The one that caught the arsonist.—Our technicians discovered that the security camera's web host had been invaded. Someone was watching Dong Qian's house through the camera."