“ding dong.”

“Coming,” John opened the door and said, “Hey, Cinkarry.” He grinned because he really meant to grin. “Hey, John. Just here to join the dinner,” Cinkarry slightly lifted his mouth corner, but he wasn’t smiling. His sunglasses hid his expressions in his eyes. “You remember you told me about the ballistic nylon,” John stepped one step back and couldn’t stop his mouth as they walked to the rectangular table. “Yes?” Cinkarry stepped in. He felt something in him didn’t work out. A very familiar feeling surrounded him. “I watched some videos about it, and …….” John kept uttering, but none of them formed a word to Cinkarry. A feeling of suffocation suddenly popped up and dominated Cinkarry’s mind. He breathed harder and faster in his imagination. He wheezed and wheezed again and again. All senses of him went totally blurred. He could see the table in front of him anymore; he couldn’t hear John’s words anymore; he smelled nothing but the smell of blood, narcotics, and his own heavy odor. “Ja…Ja……” He wished to exclaim that word out right now, but he only pushed himself into worse suffocation, and he coughed. Like a man that just got out from drowning, he coughed. “Cinkarry? Mr. Wright, are you fine?”

Cinkarry suddenly raised his head. His forehead was covered with bean-size sweat drops. He looked toward where he heard something, and he saw John staring at him worriedly. “Yeah, I just choked on my saliva,” Cinkarry fake smirked after he answered. He stretched his waist that just bent hard when he coughed. “You know you’re sweating, right?” John queried as he sat on his chair. “I should take my jacket off.” Cinkarry sat right opposite John and put his black jacket on the chair next to him. “You really loved black,” John snickered at Cinkarry’s black shirt. “Like you love blue,” Cinkarry immediately spoke back. “I am not that extreme,” he glanced at his white shirt with blue tassel belts and his blue joggers. “At least a bit,” he said. They laughed. They laughed differently, one from heart, the another phony and compassionate.

“Here is the last dish,” Mrs. Zhang Came to the table with a big pot in her hands. The golden liquid filled the whole pot. Remainings of chickens and carrots were somewhat flown or submerged. “How do I eat this one, Mrs. Zhang?” Cinkarry asked with his fake grin. “Just use that spoon there to put soup or other things into your bowl. Easy, right?” the granny said with kindness and patience. “I feel like I can smell gingers in it,” John mentioned it directly after his grandma’s sentence. Those gingers weren’t cheap stuff to the granny. White Bastard knew it. He stunned there and contemplated at the soup, or John, or his grandma. All the fake laughs and smiles he did made him ill. Those weren’t anything challenging for him before. He knew why he was so broken today. He said silently to himself, “I am going to kill this man in front of me today or tomorrow. And now, I am still eating at the same table with him, eating delicacies his grandma made………… I’m sorry…… I will be sorry… I will be so sorry.”

“Cinkarry. Give it a shot, come on,” John said without knowing anything that just happened in Cinkarry’s mind. “I, I, I just realized that there’s something I get to do. I am sorry. I am in a hurry,” Cinkarry stood up and ran out from Zhangs’ home. As he kept running, a drop of tear fell down from his face, formed a tear stain. He hurried to his van and dressed up immediately. “If I could finish my job before John finished his dinner, I could avoid fighting him… I have to avoid fighting him,” White Bastard repeated the last sentence a few more times, “I have to avoid fighting him, I have to avoid fighting him.” He drove out of the alley.

His aim this time was another factory of heroin, the second one this year. There weren’t many cars on the street at night. Not even a vehicle was on the road. It was how it was supposed to be. As White drove through a row of bungalows, a red motorcycle caught up to the rear of him from very far behind. “Shit! Why does it happen!” White Bastard yelled at himself. He gripped the steering wheel as hard as he could and glanced at the rider behind him again. He was Oriental Blue. White could see Blue’s rage from his frowned brows and eyes. He even brought a new belt made of hemp rope with him. He moved to the side of the van and got next to White Bastard with only a poor side door between them. They, at the same time, stared at each other and soon turned into peeking. Before White did anything to counter him, he lightly bumped side-by-side at White’s door and smashed his window with the left elbow. At the exact same moment, White bent his right leg over its maximum and pressed it on the side door. When his window crumbled into glass pieces, he tugged the door handle. His feet sprang and thrust the side door to knock down Blue. Blue stretched his left leg backward and stopped holding the left throttle after being knocked by the door. He fell on the ground and rolled a few laps. His motorcycle simply fell down on one side and whirled on the road. The white van turned leftward after the crush. White jumped down from the car, but the angle of the car hid Oriental Blue from his sight.

White speedily climbed to the top of his van. As he got there, he saw Blue noticed him a moment later. They both attempted to reach their weapons. White went to his shurikens beneath his left forearm. Blue came to the hemp rope belt with a red cloth tied on it. Oriental Blue drew the belt faster than White. As he directed his arm toward White, his waist-length rope went to point in the same direction, too. It was when White Bastard got to see the real trick hiding in this rope. The rope was tied with tens of slip knots, which gave the string a structure similar to chains. When the rope is thrown out, one end of the rope flies out, and the force that comes with it will untie all of the knots one by one. In the end, the actual length of the rope will be at least ten times longer than Oriental Blue’s waist length. White Bastard recognized that weapon was an old Chinese weapon he had seen before, but the distraction this weapon caused had made him lose the best chance to dodge or catch the rope. According to White’s memory, there should be a dart on the end of the string and customarily hidden under a piece of cloth. Unfortunately, White memorized it right. The dart pierced into his left chest, located in the clavicular head. If the dart went right for a few centimeters, White lost his life. If the dart went left for a few centimeters, he lost his arm.