“So you know what it’s like to witness loss.” Again, it isn’t a question.

He’s seen far too much of it. “Yes. Everyone has their own way of dealing with it.”

“Human beings are complicated creatures,” says Edison. “But they’re motivated by primary emotions. Love, lust, greed, hate, jealousy. My son, I never understood what motivated him until that woman died. It was love. I didn’t think he was capable of feeling that strongly about a person.”

“Justice,” Brazuca says. “He wanted justice for her death.”

“Justice is a moral construct. Something being right or wrong. My son once said to me that morality is for the lower classes. I think he heard it somewhere. So he only felt morality in relation to one person.”

“At least he felt it.”

Edison Lam shakes his head.

The bodyguard speaks for the first time since Brazuca got into the car. “The drugs that come here, they’re synthetic. The chemists that make them adapt to new formulas, new laws. These aren’t large-scale industrial activities. They’re small and are easy to dismantle. Producers are on edge, especially now with people being so scared of potent opiates accidentally contaminating more recreational drugs. How did he intend to track down those little labs?”

“I never asked him, but I warned him over and over that it was a futile game he was playing,” Brazuca says. He looks at the driver. “Can you take me a few blocks down?” He doesn’t want to talk about morality and justice anymore.

The driver nods. Strangely, Edison Lam doesn’t remove his hand until Brazuca gets out of the car. Standing on the pavement and watching the SUV drive away, he can still feel the old man’s touch. The lingering warmth. He might be imagining things, but it felt like a promise between them.

Brazuca hopes to hell that Bernard Lam’s father finds Dao before Nora does. Nora’s tough, but by his calculation she’s all out of lives. He has no doubt that if she comes up against Dao she won’t be left standing at the end of it. He’d seen the kind of rage Dao has inside him for Nora. She can’t compete with that.

If Nora faces down Dao, she will die. He is absolutely certain of it.

He returns to the apartment an hour later with two steaming orders of noodles and tofu in a vegetable broth. It’s the only kind of food his stomach can take at the moment. Nora’s not there, and neither is Whisper. He waits until the noodles have gone cold and then forces himself to eat, though he’s not hungry.