Hong Kong Young Writers Anthologies Fiction 4567 | Page 207

“How’s the heroin bust going?” I asked him. His name was Arjan, and he was one of the rare Sikh policemen
who’d survived the disbandment of the Municipal Police two years before. He was tall and imposing, but
quick-witted too, and probably not afraid of the dark. An all-around effective officer.
“That’s one of the reasons I wanted to talk. We found the stockpile yesterday afternoon, and a man to go along
with it.”
“Wow! Where was it?”
“This’ll interest you. In sight of your post. That Jewish liquor store is a front.”
I froze.
“The guy we got looks after the place full time, but someone does come around at dawn to check on the
stockpile. He won’t give us the kingpin, but we made a deal.”, he went on. “He helped us with a sketch of the
middleman who does the checks. If he plays along until tomorrow, he walks. We’re planning a stakeout
tonight- that’s why we needed your help.”
The street before us slowed down. “What do you need my help with?”
“We’ll have men around the store, but they can’t be visible. Our eyes will be in your control tower.”
“Well,” I searched for words. “You’ll have a hard time figuring out which of the 20 people who goes in there
every morning is the middleman.”
“Oh, no, we won’t,” his eyes glinted. “She’s a woman.”
-
Morning dawned like it always did, on me in my folding chair. Only this morning, there was no radio and my
hands were gripped unusually tight around the controls. I didn’t know what I had expected- maybe that the
sun would never rise, that the universe would conspire with me to give her enough time to figure things out and
escape. But just like me, the universe messed up. I thought about the many millions of ways things could have
turned out differently. If just one out of hundreds of mornings I had opened a window and called to her, perhaps
she would have stopped in the middle of the crosswalk-
“Ease up”, Arjan said. “You don’t have to do anything differently. Just act like we’re not here.”
It was hard to ignore the crackle of the walkie-talkies, but I wiped my brow and stared at the street that ran
alongside the Bund, waiting for her to appear. I didn’t know her, but I had wanted to. She was the only one
who ever kept me company in the mornings. She was the one who turned the street on. Maybe I had created a
mythology out of her, but I wasn’t going to let it be ruined.
A dot of yellow appeared in the distance.