Chapter 4
Shao Lan thought for a while, then looked at Jiang Mingran.
“You’re in the School of Competitive Sports?”
Caught off guard by the question, Jiang Mingran nodded blankly. “Uh, yeah.”
“Can you run fast?”
“A hundred meters in eleven seconds flat, I think…” Jiang Mingran scratched his head. “Why don’t you just tell me what you need me to do?”
Shao Lan gave him a look, a little surprised he’d caught on so quickly.
“I’m used to it.” Jiang Mingran rubbed his head. “Everyone around me’s treated me like a pack mule since I was a kid.”
“…”
Shao Lan asked him to go into the living room and quickly check whether the old landline worked.
Ordinarily, there were only a few things to do when faced with a serial killer: run, call the police, or fight.
Shao Lan didn’t want a direct confrontation, and escape had already proved impossible. Calling the police was the obvious thing to try next.
Especially since the newspaper had even supplied the task force’s phone number. That couldn’t be a useless clue.
And the only thing in the apartment they could call from was that old dial phone.
“Sure.” Jiang Mingran nodded.
Shao Lan raised his eyebrows in surprise. He’d agreed a little too readily.
The job sounded simple, but it was extremely dangerous. Only one door separated the living room from the kitchen. If the woman came out, Jiang Mingran would have nowhere to hide. He was a whole size bigger than Shao Lan and couldn’t fit under the sofa.
Jiang Mingran scratched his head. “It’s okay. I’ve trained in kickboxing. If the killer comes out, maybe I can just take her down.”
Shao Lan considered that.
He wasn’t so optimistic.
“It’s fine. Even if I really die, I’ll still have two lives left, right?” Jiang Mingran pointed at the small goldfish in the tank. “Lan, you’re way better at figuring things out than I am. If I can buy you more time, it’ll be easier for us to beat the game later.”
Shao Lan glanced at the kitchen and patted Jiang Mingran’s shoulder.
“Don’t make a sound,” he wrote. “If the phone is working, bring me the wastebasket from the living room.”
Jiang Mingran raised his eyebrows in puzzlement, but didn’t ask why.
He took off his shoes, opened the bedroom door without a sound, and headed for the landline.
The living room was silent. Shao Lan cautiously poked his head out and glanced toward the other bedroom.
That was Uncle Bing’s room. Its door was shut. All was quiet.
Suddenly, a creak came from farther away.
The kitchen door opened.
Shao Lan’s heart lurched. In the living room, Jiang Mingran stopped what he was doing, his body instantly rigid.
Cold sweat sprang up over both their backs almost at once.
Had they been spotted?
One second passed. Then two.
Water ran in the kitchen, followed by the sound of a burner being lit.
The woman hadn’t come out. She seemed to be boiling something and had only opened the kitchen door to let the heat escape.
Shao Lan wiped the cold sweat from his forehead and beckoned to Jiang Mingran.
Jiang Mingran had finished checking the phone cord. He picked up the wastebasket and hurried back to the bedroom.
They shut the door and sat down against it, waiting for their racing hearts to slow.
“I checked. The phone’s plugged in. It works,” Jiang Mingran wrote. “But we can’t move it in here. There’s no socket in this room.”
All he’d been able to bring back was the wastebasket, though he still had no idea why Shao Lan wanted it.
“I looked around the living room during the last loop. There weren’t any clues. This is the only thing I didn’t search.” Shao Lan pointed at the wastebasket. “We have the police number and a phone. There’s just one thing missing.”
“What?” Jiang Mingran wiped the sweat from his forehead anxiously. He couldn’t think what else they needed.
Shao Lan looked at him. “Do you know where we are?”
Jiang Mingran froze.
No. He didn’t.
Both of them had been brought here while unconscious. They’d simply woken up in this place.
The last thing they needed was an address.
Shao Lan had already begun searching the wastebasket.
Soon, a faint smile touched his lips.
“Found it.”
He held several scraps of paper. Fitting them together, he reconstructed half an electricity bill.
“Amount due: XX yuan. Payment deadline: XX/XX/XXXX. Mailing address: Building 7, Xingfu Estate.”
The part after Building 7 was missing.
Shao Lan searched the wastebasket again, but couldn’t find the other half.
He went to the window and leaned forward to look down.
Rain veiled everything in white mist. Visibility was less than five meters. He could see neither the building opposite nor anything below, and couldn’t tell which floor they were on.
They’d run into the stairwell in the first loop, but even after racking their brains, neither Shao Lan nor Jiang Mingran remembered seeing any numbers on the walls.
“Never mind. Building 7, Xingfu Estate should be enough,” Shao Lan wrote. “The police will know exactly which estate and which building. If they check each apartment, they’ll find the killer soon enough.”
Next, they had to make the call.
That was the hardest part.
They couldn’t move the phone into the bedroom. To use it, they had to go to the living room.
But if they spoke there, she would very likely hear them.
Especially now, with the kitchen door open while she cooked soup.
Shao Lan eased the bedroom door open a crack and looked toward the kitchen.
A large number of dark yellow paper bags were piled outside it, stacked into a little mountain. He couldn’t quite make out what they were.
What they were didn’t matter, though. What mattered was that the gap between the pile and the corner was just large enough to hide a grown man.
“I have a plan.” Shao Lan turned back and picked up the pen and paper.
“We’ll leave the bedroom together. I’ll go to the living room and make the call. You hide behind that pile of junk beside the kitchen door.”
“Best case, she doesn’t hear me on the phone and stays in the kitchen. Then, once I’ve called the police, we both come back to this bedroom.”
“But if she leaves the kitchen…”
Jiang Mingran’s gaze sharpened. He mimed a tiger clawing out someone’s heart. “I’ll ambush her!”
Shao Lan shook his head. “No. Just give me a signal.”
“She can’t see. As long as I stop making noise and move away from the phone the moment you signal, she won’t be able to locate me right away.”
“You move away as soon as you’ve signaled, too. After that, it’s hide-and-seek. If we stay quiet, we have a good chance of buying enough time for the police to arrive.”
“Even if we do have to fight, put it off until there’s absolutely no choice,” Shao Lan said. “Remember, we’re trying to stay alive.”
Jiang Mingran nodded, thoroughly won over by Shao Lan.
But Shao Lan wouldn’t be able to see the kitchen door while he was on the phone. The signal would have to be a sound.
A sound that wouldn’t make her suspicious.
“I’ve got it.” Jiang Mingran’s eyes lit up. “I can squeak like a mouse.”
Before Shao Lan could stop him, he let out two squeaks. The imitation was remarkably convincing.
Shao Lan glanced toward the kitchen door. Nothing had changed. The woman hadn’t come out to investigate.
Apparently, mouse squeaks wouldn’t attract her attention.
“All right. That’s settled, then.” Shao Lan nodded.
It was the best plan they had.
The night was silent. Only the bubbling of soup came from the kitchen.
Jiang Mingran slipped behind the pile without trouble and gave Shao Lan an OK sign. Then he sucked in his cheeks to mimic a little mouse again.
Shao Lan gestured that he understood and went to the living room.
The old landline sat on the small coffee table beside the sofa.
Shao Lan picked up the receiver and quickly punched in the number.
Whether the parts were worn out or it was simply his imagination, the buttons made distinct clicking sounds, startlingly loud in the night.
The call connected after a single beep.
“Hello, municipal police task force.”
Shao Lan breathed in relief and spoke urgently. “Building 7, Xingfu Estate.”
He’d lowered his voice as much as he could, but like the clicking buttons, it still sounded exceptionally clear in the dark.
The person on the other end apparently couldn’t hear him. “Hello? Could you repeat that, please?”
Fortunately, there had been no mouse squeaks or sounds of a struggle. The person in the kitchen hadn’t come out.
Shao Lan raised his voice a little. “Building 7, Xingfu Estate. Someone’s threatening us with a knife. Right now.”
As he spoke, he kept alert to his surroundings.
Everything was quiet where Jiang Mingran was hiding. No signal came.
The reply was immediate. “Understood. We’ll…”
Shao Lan hung up.
That was enough. The essential things in a police call were when, where, and what was happening. A threat with a knife was the sort of emergency that would bring an immediate response.
Now he just had to return to the bedroom and get Jiang Mingran to leave his lookout post.
Suddenly, Shao Lan sensed something wrong.
A cold current of air brushed the back of his head, like a night breeze coming through a window.
But the window was in front of him. And it was shut tight.
So it wasn’t the window.
Someone was standing silently behind him, breathing cold air onto his skin.