The shots came in pairs.
Two flat cracks swallowed almost entirely by the *Street Fighter* cabinet beside the door—the kind of noise that takes a room full of teenagers a full three seconds to process before their bodies understand what their ears just heard.
Chen Dadong—Dong-shu, Uncle Dong, the man who had run the Xichang She since before half these kids were born—lay on his back between a row of slot machines, one fist still closed around a handful of coins he'd never gotten to spend. Two dark-red blooms had opened across his chest. Blood ran thick and slow down the base of the nearest machine, soaking into the cigarette-butted floor beneath him.
Then someone screamed, and the whole place came apart.
The crowd hit the exit like a burst pipe. In the middle of it all, two men in motorcycle helmets stood their ground, unhurried, feeding their sawn-off shotguns back into canvas duffels with the calm of men clocking out after a long shift. One of them paused at the counter on the way out and palmed a pack of Double Happiness cigarettes. No hesitation. No glance at the body.
In the alley behind Nongken Tower, a Wuyang-Honda sat waiting with its engine cold. They threw a leg over the seat, kicked it to life, and the rear wheel spat gravel as it found traction. The bike disappeared into the wet Beihai night before anyone outside had finished deciding whether those sounds had been gunshots.
---
The two weeks since Sang Biao's death had been quiet on the surface. Underneath, the current was moving fast.
The Liang brothers had become the Xichang She's most valuable asset overnight—which, in the mathematics of the street, put them one step from being its most dangerous liability. A lieutenant who outshines his boss doesn't stay a lieutenant long. Everyone in the life understood this. Including Uncle Dong.
His body had been hollowed out by the white powder—the old man was mostly yellow skin and habit by now—but the instincts were still there, preserved in whatever brine kept men like him alive. He sat in his colonial-era house on Haijiao Road watching the last of the daylight leave the water, and felt the cold patch between his shoulder blades that he'd learned, over a long career, never to ignore.
A-Rong had been *too* clean at the Fulihua. Too fast, too willing. That kind of ferocity didn't answer to anyone for long.
"A-Kun." Dong-shu drew on his cigarette. His skin had the flat yellow of old wax. "The boys are getting restless. We took a third of Sang Biao's ground—that's enough. Leave something for the Chengdong stragglers. Don't bleed a stone."
Liang Bingkun stood in the room's shadow, peeling an apple with a folding knife. The skin came off in one long unbroken spiral, curling toward the floor.
"Uncle Dong, it's not about bleeding anyone." His voice was quiet, carrying that particular edge that doesn't need volume to land. "The brothers need to eat. Beihai's development money is moving now—land is gold. If we pull back, the whole city decides the Xichang She went soft the minute the top changed."
"*Changed tops?*" Dong-shu's eyes sharpened. He sat forward. "A-Kun. What the hell are you saying?"
Kun-ge extended the peeled apple across the table and offered a smile—the kind of smile that, under a forty-watt bulb, reads as something other than warmth.
"Uncle Dong. You misheard me. I'm saying we need to change how we operate."
Dong-shu took the apple and bit into it. It tasted like nothing. Like chalk. He didn't register the look Kun-ge threw over his shoulder on the way out the door—a look directed at the two bodyguards standing against the wall.
Their names were Deng Laowu and Pei Xiaoliu. Both had come up with Uncle Dong in the old days, loyal by history and proximity. But it was Liang Bingkun who was paying their gambling debts. Had been for months. Loyalty, in Beihai, had a current price.
---
On the twentieth of February, 1993, Kun-ge built his trap.
He sent word to Uncle Dong that Nongken Tower's arcade had taken delivery of new *dianzi haima* machines—electronic seahorses, the ones where a single play could multiply thirty times over. Dong-shu had no great vices left besides this one: sitting in a smoke-thickened game hall, feeding coins and killing hours.
"Uncle Dong, I can't make it myself—A-Rong's already over there keeping an eye on things." Kun-ge's voice on the phone was easy, the voice of a man with nothing on his mind.
Dong-shu didn't hesitate. He took two of his close men and went to Nongken Tower. What he didn't know: before those two men walked through the door, they'd been persuaded—separately, quietly—to remove the firing pins from their sidearms.
At the moment Chen Dadong died, Liang Bingkun was seated at an open-air seafood stall on Waisha beach, drinking his morning tea.
A pot of Tieguanyin. A basket of shrimp dumplings. The South China Sea doing what it always did.
A-Rong came in from the street at a run, sweating through his shirt despite the February cold. He dropped into the opposite seat, grabbed the teapot, and poured half of it down his throat without ceremony.
"Done, ge. The old ghost didn't make a sound."
Kun-ge lifted a dumpling with his chopsticks and held it to the light, studying the translucent skin, the pink filling visible through it.
"A-Rong." He set the dumpling down. "How many times have I told you—when you work, you *finish* the work. Don't call him that. From now on, he's *xian bangzhu*—the late chairman. Tomorrow, we take the whole She and give him a proper send-off. Big procession. Flowers. The works."
A-Rong lowered his voice. "What about the two boys who pulled the triggers?"
"Give them enough to set up somewhere. Send them to Hepu, out in the countryside, until things cool down." Kun-ge paused, and something moved behind his eyes. "If the police get to them first—Sang Biao's remaining men wanted revenge for their boss. That's the story. They push everything onto a dead man. Dead men don't contradict."
He stood, walked to the sea wall, and let the wind off the bay work at his hair.
Beihai now had a vacancy at the top. He had no intention of leaving it unfilled.
He turned back to A-Rong.
"That Mercedes. Plate number 8888. I had someone put the order in already." He studied his brother's face—the blunt jaw, the restless hands, the violence sitting just beneath the skin like a tide waiting to come in. "Starting tomorrow, when you go out in this city, every face in Beihai is going to know yours. I want that."
He was done with operating from shadows. Shadows were where men hid when they were afraid. What he wanted was the other kind of power—the kind that walks down the center of the street in broad daylight and makes an entire city step aside.
The Beihai that had belonged to Chen Dadong was finished.
The sea was still the same sea. But it answered to a different name now.