Finally, the Sky Dragon spoke. “So you will help us.”

“I will deal only with Lee. I don’t want any connection to the other side of your business. And I’ll need to see the farms myself to do my diligence before we make any formal arrangements.”

Knight pinched a piece of tiger meat in his chopsticks and held it up for the Sky Dragon. “I need to know what we’re insuring.”

CHAPTER 29 DEALER’S CHOICE

CHAPTER 29
DEALER’S CHOICE

hong kong

“Hello, I am calling from the police department,” Inspector Audrey Lam said to the receptionist who answered the phone. “I was wondering if you have seen any cases of strychnine poisoning in the past month.” She waited as the woman reviewed the hospital’s recent admissions records.

Early in her career—God, was it twenty years now?—Audrey had investigated a string of heroin overdoses in the slums of Sham Shui Po, on the outskirts of Kowloon. Toxicology reports on the victims revealed that the heroin had been spiked with fentanyl to increase its potency. The information about the addition of fentanyl, which was fifty times the strength of heroin, had not trickled down the supply chain to the end users, who proceeded to shoot their normal heroin dosage into their veins, with ghastly consequences.

One of the deceased young women Audrey had come across was on her knees with her face prostrate on the floor and her arms resting limply at her sides, as if frozen in some bizarre yoga pose. She had collapsed to her knees so quickly that she couldn’t even control her arms to break her fall, instead smashing her face on the floor and cracking her cheekbone. Audrey and her colleagues managed to identify the source of the tainted shipment, which by that point had ended ten of the eleven lives it would ultimately claim. The eleventh was the dealer, who leaped from the thirtieth-floor balcony when Audrey and her colleagues came to arrest him for manslaughter.

Audrey suspected that her son’s poisoning had followed a similar pattern, and was spending her day off work calling every hospital in the area to ask whether they had seen cases similar to Joshua’s. The hospital receptionist on the other end of the line revealed that indeed there had been two cases of strychnine poisoning in the past week. Audrey scratched down the numeral “2” next to the name of the hospital. Each of the hospitals on her long list had a number written next to it: 2, 1, 0, 3 . . .

The receptionist revealed that one of their two poisoned patients had died, while the other, like Audrey’s son, narrowly pulled through.

“Can you give me the name of the one who survived?” Audrey asked.