Fei Du quickly hailed a taxi outside. With an earbud in one ear, he smiled at the driver and told him the address.
The driver looked at him a good number of times in the rearview mirror and accidentally met Fei Du's eyes. He froze, then displayed a rather fawning smile. "It's all rich people living over there. I can only stop outside. I can't go in."
Taking a break from scrolling through his phone, Fei Du nodded to him. "Fine."
The end of the year had come, and the better part of the population of Yan City, like migrating birds, had flown off; the streets had emptied at once, making a taxi's business more difficult. The driver had probably been driving around on his own for a long time; he didn't notice that his passenger wasn't especially willing to chat. He kept attempting to make conversation. "Do you live over there yourself, or are you visiting friends or family?"
At the same time, a request for instructions came over Fei Du's earbud: "President Fei, there's a car following you. We chased, and it looks like they just noticed. They're trying to shake us."
"Follow the one that came to the door," Fei Du instructed lightly. Then he looked up at the rearview mirror at the front of the taxi.
The driver met his eyes again and inexplicably felt a chill climb up his spine, like a frog with the gaze of a viper fixed on it.
Fei Du looked at him, not quite smiling, and civilly said, "Sorry, I didn't quite hear, what did you just say?"
The driver didn't dare run off at the mouth anymore. He kept quiet as a cicada in winter the whole way, periodically looking in the review mirror, quickly and steadily taking Fei Du near his old house. He pressed a button on the fare meter. "There you are, we've arrived. Would you like a receipt?"
Fei Du sat without moving.
The driver turned his head to look at him. Perhaps the heating was turned up too high; there was some sweat at the corners of his forehead. Sweating, he smiled at Fei Du. "Sir, I can only come this far. This estate you live in doesn't let outside cars drive in at random."
"The estate I live in? Did I say that I live here?" Fei Du had his legs crossed and his elbow propped on the car door in a very relaxed posture, but there was a dangerous light seeping from his eyes. "Do you read people's fortunes in their faces, sir?"
The driver's eyes flashed, and he forced himself to add, "Going by the way you're dressed, you seem to belong to the class of people…"
Fei Du laughed silently, his eyes seeming to stay over the surroundings. The driver subconsciously followed his line of sight and saw a small-scale SUV driving from the other direction, going slower and slower, and then stopping by the side of the street. All the muscles in his body tensed rigidly, and one hand subconsciously went towards his waist.
"I always thought that they would be the first to come see me," Fei Du said unhurriedly. "I hadn't expected them to be more composed than I imagined, and much more cautious. To the last they've only dared to take a roundabout path, not meeting me face to face before Wei Zhanhong was ferreted out and my ill intent towards them was unfortunately revealed. Now, at the heart of the struggle, I figure they would love nothing better than to bury themselves deep underground and not come out. It won't be possible now to make them contact me voluntarily… But I really didn't expect that you people would be the first to appear in front of me."
Fei Du had his head propped on his long, slender hand, tapping his temple from time to time, the frequency setting off the driver's nervous breathing—each time he took a heavy breath, Fei Du would tap the side of his forehead once, as though pursuing his breaths with a forceful tempo, so the driver at once felt even more panicked and short of air.
"I've been considering it this whole time—what intersection do I have with you? I don't think there is any. Or has the great individual behind you suddenly been inspired to come see me? Oh, yes, what do you call him?"
"We call him Teacher." The feigned oiliness and flattery vanished from the driver's face. In the midst of his tension, there was also some unspeakable grimness in his expression. "Since you've gotten involved in this business, you can't say you have no intersection with us. Besides that—President Fei, I'm only an errand runner, a useless nobody. Even if you capture me, you won't get anything useful out of me. But you're different. No matter how great your resources, right now you're still sitting alone in my car. Won't your people hold back for fear of involving you?"
The finger at Fei Du's temple slipped downward beside his lips. Without batting an eyelash, a joking expression appeared at the corners of his eyes, as though he were restraining a laugh, as though the threat he'd just heard had been adorably childish. The driver was inexplicably drawn in by his not-quite-smile, for a moment nearly suspecting he'd said something idiotic. He tightly clutched the weapon at his waist, the veins climbing up his neck.
Meanwhile, in the hospital, Luo Wenzhou was carefully considering the past events Director Lu had just told him about.
He couldn't help thinking, why was it Binhai again? The members of the Su family had buried the bodies of the kidnapped girls in Binhai, Fan Siyuan had even chosen to jump into the sea in Binhai, and that patch of land in Binhai belonged to the mysterious Guangyao Fund—they'd investigated the Guangyao fund, arranged to talk to the company's representative, but just as Fei Du had said, it was only a frail shell, a tentacle that could be cut off any time.
Perturbed, Luo Wenzhou pulled out his phone to look at the time, and found that there was a notification light flashing, showing there was a missed call or unread message. He opened it and only then saw the message Fei Du had sent.
Ordinarily, Fei Du occasionally went back to the office, and before winter vacation had started, he'd gone to school almost every day. While he no longer went out to fool around with his drinking buddies, he still had some indispensable social engagements. He wasn't always home. But he did things very considerately. No matter where he was going, he'd tell Luo Wenzhou, both when he was leaving and when he was coming back. And once he'd told him, he would take it seriously, punctually keeping to the times he'd said.
"Going home to get something" didn't fall into the category of "running around"; Luo Wenzhou ought to have read that and let it go. But perhaps because the hospital felt oppressive to him, Luo Wenzhou was suddenly uneasy. By the time he pulled himself together, he found he'd already called back.
Luo Wenzhou thought he was being kind of annoying. While he brought the speaker to his ear, he searched for an excuse to cover up his clingy behavior. Then he heard a mechanical female voice come over the phone: "The number you have dialed is busy…"
Luo Wenzhou paused, hung up, absently waited two minutes, then dialed again—it was still busy!
Fei Du wasn't the sort of person who talked endlessly on the phone. Luo Wenzhou knew his habits. Normally when he picked up the phone, he'd exchange a couple of polite remarks at most, then say whatever he had to say. If more than a minute passed and he couldn't say it clearly, he'd arrange to talk in person; he'd very rarely keep talking unimpeded.
Luo Wenzhou stood up. Just then, a nurse came over in haste. "Where are Fu Jiahui's relatives? Who can sign? The patient's condition isn't very good."
Tao Ran's expression altered at once. Lu Youliang leapt up. Luo Wenzhou's phone suddenly rang; he thought it was Fei Du and eagerly picked up without looking, but it was a colleague's voice that came over the line: "Captain Luo, we've found one of the cars, but the person in it ran away!"
Luo Wenzhou took a deep breath, hearing the nurse saying to Director Lu, "That won't do, it has to be a relative who signs…"
The colleague on the phone said, "Captain Luo, what do we do now?"
Luo Wenzhou's gaze turned to Director Lu, hastily saying something to the nurse, then went past them to the opaque door of the operating room—he didn't know whether Lao Yang was conscious in the underworld, whether he was watching, or how he would feel when he had seen.
Luo Wenzhou said, "Call for reinforcements, search all the surrounding surveillance cameras, contact the traffic advertisements, the nearby shopping centers, and the subway. Put out a missing person notice. Find Yang Xin and tell her…"
"Tell her what?"
"Tell her her mom's dying and get the hell back to the hospital to sign!"
When he'd said this, Luo Wenzhou hung up the phone and gently pressed on Tao Ran's relatively intact shoulder.
"Go on if you have something to take care of," Tao Ran said quietly. "It's no use staying here. I think if she gets the chance, she won't want the last thing she sees to be the two of us… Go on."
Luo Wenzhou didn't say a word; he turned and left—
The beep of someone trying to call in came over Fei Du's earbud for the third time. He ignored it. As though humoring a child, he said entirely insincerely to the driver, "All right, your threat is a great deterrent—will that do? Do you think you should tell me why you came?"
"Someone gave me some words to pass onto you, President Fei," the driver said very tensely. "He said that you've seen him before, and he regrets being unable to come in person this time…"
Fei Du frowned faintly. "I've seen him before?"
The driver didn't answer, only relayed the message with dedication: "Some things seem confusing, but it's because that person is too crafty. But while the net of heaven has large meshes, it lets nothing through. There are no walls in the world that air can't pass through, and hands that have been stained with blood can never be clean. He must already be at his wits' end—there's one important clue you ought to know."
Hearing this bewildering message, Fei Du frowned and asked, "What ought I to know?"
"I don't know that.—He also said, he hopes that this case can be resolved openly and clearly, in strict accordance with the rules, not leaving any points of suspicion, so in the end there can be an entirely unflawed accounting." The driver slowly asked, "President Fei, can I leave?"
Fei Du's gaze swept his tense shoulders. "A knife? A narcotic? A taser? Or…a gun? This is my first time running into someone holding a weapon asking me whether he could leave."
Then, without waiting for the driver to speak, he laughed, pulled a hundred yuan bill out of his wallet, and threw it on the seat, opening the door and getting out of the car. "I don't need a receipt, and there's no need for change."
Then, hands stuck in his pockets, he crossed the street to the villa estate without a look back.
The driver's back was covered in cold sweat. He turned his head and saw a furious girl getting out of the SUV parked across the street, angrily brandishing her handbag at the side mirror, hopping and cursing. Then a guy hurriedly jumped out of the driver's seat. Without even locking the car, he trailed after the girl, explaining something.
The driver let out a heavy breath. He hadn't expected that the car that had filled him with dread would contain unrelated passersby, a couple of young lovers who had stopped by the side of the road to argue. Fei Du had tricked him!
When he looked again, Fei Du's figure had already disappeared.
The driver realized he'd been taken in, smacked the steering wheel, and angrily shifted gear. He stepped on the gas pedal, and drove away…not noticing a low-key luxury sports car slipping out of the villa estate behind him, following him at a middle distance.