1. The Other Party’s Scheme
I was startled and immediately rushed over to see what was happening. Just as I reached the fat guy, he kicked me, and I stumbled and fell to the ground. Almost simultaneously, another bullet whizzed past, grazing my back and hitting a candlestick on the other side.
The candlestick was struck, sending sparks flying and toppling to the ground. I thought it would catch fire immediately, but the oil extinguished right away. It seemed that the floor here had aged over the years, and the thick patina made it quite safe.
A few flames stuck to my body, and I was patting them off when the fat guy yelled at me, “At your age, you should be smarter! In times like this, you shouldn’t run; you should just drop down!”
“What about you? I thought you had been shot in the head,” I said, seeing blood all over his face. “I was worried about you!”
“Worried my ass! If I die, you won’t have to bury me. I’ve got plenty of people to send me off,” the fat guy replied, covering his temple with one hand. I thought to myself that it couldn’t be a serious head injury; otherwise, he wouldn’t be speaking so fluently.
“Do you know who I am? It’s not that easy to take me out. If it weren’t so damn cold here, I wouldn’t have dodged it,” the fat guy said. “Back in school, I was famously known as the ‘big meat bun that couldn’t be hit.’”
I looked at his temple; it really was just a bruise. I thought to myself that the other side must really suck at shooting—how could they miss such a big target? The fat guy continued, “For people like us who navigate the underworld, we constantly do spiral head movements in easily targeted places. It’s called being prepared for a rainy day.”
He does tend to sway his head while speaking, and I thought about it for a moment, realizing he must be talking nonsense; this was definitely his second-rate habit. Just as I was about to retort, another shot rang out, and I couldn’t tell where it hit, sending wood chips flying. Both the fat guy and I instinctively shrank our necks.
“Who the hell is that?” I said. “Didn’t those Germans let us go? Did they let us go just to have two moving targets?”
“If that group of Germans wanted to kill us, it would be too easy for them; it can’t be them. If it were the Zhang family, a clan with such good skills, they wouldn’t use snipers. The role of a sniper is usually to win with fewer against more. If there are more than six of them, they would just come in shooting; we would be no match for them.”
The fat guy covered the grazed area with his clothing and looked around, clearly trying to find a way to break this situation. “So the person sniping at us is probably very few in number, maybe even just one person, watching for us to be alone, trying to take us out.”
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