And now, in contrast to the last post...
Dec. 3rd, 2003 02:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
camwynThis one was also a writing exercise. The idea was to start with a murder. We had to invoke all five senses, and we could work from the actual murder or the finding of the body. We were also supposed to plant at least one clue as to the killer's identity.
This is not a properly self-contained story. It would have to be expanded out into either a very long story, or a shortish novel, in order to properly make sense.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
cadhla had made some suggestions as to setting, but I think I'm going to say that it takes place in the same universe and time frame as Ira Dayan and Kenshiro Aoi's antics. A few years earlier or later, perhaps, but it's the same general universe.
“Wayne! Wayne!”
Detective Zhuang grimaced, chucking the Bic lighter into his desk drawer and slamming it violently shut. “I didn’t even light the damn thing!” he yelled, and even then he wasn’t sure if his partner would hear him over the thunderous drumming from outside.
“Light what?” Apparently, he had. Dennis Hu cocked an eye at the gangly, over-tall detective. “You been playing with fire again?”
“It’s been a bad week. Cut me some slack.”
“You think it’s bad now? It’s gonna get worse. I guarantee it.”
“What do you- Dennis, please don’t tell me-”
Hu grinned. “Afraid so, my friend.” Outside the drumming was getting worse. Two blocks away from the damned Chinese New Year parade and still the street was packed four and five deep. God, there were days when Wayne would’ve given an eyeball to be assigned to any other goddamn precinct in the entire goddamn city of Vancouver.
“Well, shit.”
“You can say that again,” Hu agreed. He held up Wayne’s keys. “Let’s go.”
Stupid fucking stupid Chinese stinking stupid New Year – I swear to God, if I ever get the chance I’m applying for a transfer to a different ethnicity – Wayne drummed his fingers along the edge of the car window, waiting. Dennis was talking to the shopkeeper, waving his arms frantically and yelling at the top of his lungs in what sounded like Hakka. Dialects other than Cantonese had never been Wayne’s strong suit. That was just one more shovel of crap on the pile that was Chinese New Year, so far as he was concerned. All the dialects. All the people.
Dammit, why did these things keep happening to him! He might’ve been wrong, but he’d gotten the very real impression that his grandparents hadn’t actually LIKED China. That was why they’d come to Canada, right? That was why their goddamn children had assimilated, right? That was why his name, his actual, official name, right on his damned birth certificate, was nothing more and nothing less than ‘Zhuang, Wayne’. Zhuang, comma, Wayne. As in, first name Wayne, last name Zhuang, nothing else. No goddamned generational syllables, no references to ancient officials or poets or stretches of countryside he’d never seen and never planned to see. Was it his fault he’d picked up French and Cantonese with equal ease in high school? No. It was not. He’d only wanted to learn the French, but his teachers wouldn’t take no for an answer. He’d planned on moving to Ontario, where they had real, hard-core, American style crime instead of all this people-smuggling, pot-smoking, endangered-species-trading weirdness you got on this coast – but no, no, the Vancouver city police got hold of his test scores somehow at school, and next thing you knew there was a scholarship for him too big for any son of a construction contractor to refuse, with nothing to pay for it except five years’ service on the city police force.
Which, of course, meant they gave him other tests. Which meant they found out about the Cantonese. Which meant they assigned him to Chinatown without so much as batting an eye. Which meant that he got all the smuggling, trading, trafficking crap dropped right into his lap. Not that he wasn’t good at it – he might not have liked the specifics, but it went against the grain to fuck up an investigation just because he wanted a transfer somewhere else. Unfortunately, the better you got, the more information and contacts you accumulated, and the tighter you dug yourself in.
So that meant that on a day when all he wanted was some goddamn quiet time at the office to go over his paperwork, he was stuck instead with trying to drive through crowds of people so thick you could bounce a tank off ‘em, half of ‘em not even locals but gweilo tourists come to see-
Dammit, White tourists. He knew better than that.
“Hey, Zhuang!” yelled Dennis from the other side of the crowd. Wayne winced as half a dozen heads turned. “He says no one’s been in the basement since they made the call!”
“Good.” Because if Wayne had to stand there with the smell of moon cakes wafting around him from the bakery on the other side of the street even one minute more, he was gonna mug somebody for a pack of smokes. Patch or no.
The shopkeeper was a guy Wayne knew mostly through other people. Mr. Xue’s pet shop wasn’t the kind of place he bothered with much. Easy enough, when you didn’t keep pets. Wasn’t room in the apartment, and anyway Wayne’s landlord didn’t allow pets other than goldfish, or maybe canaries. Wayne had gone in there once or twice. The man’s fish tanks were a disgrace. How Xue could get away with charging the kinds of prices he did for animals you could barely see through the cloudy water, Wayne didn’t know. The few fish he could see had their fins clamped to their sides, and they moved like a fat kid with asthma, slow and reluctant. Wayne shook his head as the much shorter Dennis navigated through the overly crowded aisles.
“-says he came down this morning and found his daughter screaming at the top of her lungs,” Dennis was informing him. “She turned on the light at the top of the stairs and got halfway down before she saw-”
It reeked. Fuck, it stank. The man must’ve kept an incontinent rhino in the back of his store. That wouldn’t surprise Wayne a bit, the way the floor stuck to his feet. Besides, the empty birdcages had dust on them, and the few lizards Xue had left in stock were positively geriatric. There’d been a toy store on the other side of town once, had an inventory problem near as bad as this. Turned out the guy was one of the biggest pot dealers in that part of Vancouver. If this was what Xue was passing off as his business, there was no way he could afford his rent on legitimate income.
“-didn’t get close enough to get an ID-”
Wayne prodded at one of the twenty-five kilo bags of dog food as they passed into the store room. It shifted, but in the way kibble always did. A surreptitious shove confirmed it; that bag, at least, was nothing but what it claimed to be. Wayne sniffed, and wished he hadn’t. “I’m surprised he’s actually called us in,” he said absently. “Place like this? He’s gotta be connected if he’s making any money at all.”
“Aaah, it was probably the wife, bet you she doesn’t know a thing. . .”
Wayne nodded grimly and headed down the store room stairs behind of his partner. The basement light did no credit to the name of incandescent; Wayne wondered irrelevantly how long they’d been getting by on just the one bulb. Maybe the habit of stacking crates and boxes as high as the ceiling had broken all the others. There was still the ammoniac reek of urine, here, but it was different somehow. Fresher, maybe. Less – feline. That was it. The smell upstairs was cat piss, though Wayne would’ve sworn there were no cats anywhere in the place now. Down here it was something else.
“Diao nia meh!” Dennis suddenly exclaimed. Wayne froze. “In the corner!”
“I see it, I see it. . .” He drew his gun, edging carefully towards the irregular shape that had caught Dennis’s eye. “I need some light over here, man!”
“Working on it!” Dennis had gone back to the stairs, and was fumbling around with what looked like a switchbox.
Wayne waited, staying back among the crates. Huh. Fujian province, most of them, at least if he remembered his city names correctly. Definitely not an entirely legitimate businessman.
“Got it!” called Dennis, and four equally dusty lights flooded on.
Wayne stepped out, gun at the ready, and froze in his tracks. “Yau mo gau hai cho?” he heard himself blurt.
There was – well – he could make out two human legs, but that was all; the crocodile, the goddamn crocodile, the giant fucking crocodile in the city of Vancouver, had made short work of the rest. Along with the snake. The one as long as the crocodile, as thick as Wayne’s leg, and wrapped around the lizard’s middle. Looked like it had managed to somehow strangle the croc despite being in the middle of a meal of its own – the hindquarters and tail of a rat were poking out of the distinctly deceased snake’s mouth-
“Ah, shit,” breathed Wayne as Dennis crossed the room to stand at his side. “Not another one!”
This is not a properly self-contained story. It would have to be expanded out into either a very long story, or a shortish novel, in order to properly make sense.
cadhla had made some suggestions as to setting, but I think I'm going to say that it takes place in the same universe and time frame as Ira Dayan and Kenshiro Aoi's antics. A few years earlier or later, perhaps, but it's the same general universe.“Wayne! Wayne!”
Detective Zhuang grimaced, chucking the Bic lighter into his desk drawer and slamming it violently shut. “I didn’t even light the damn thing!” he yelled, and even then he wasn’t sure if his partner would hear him over the thunderous drumming from outside.
“Light what?” Apparently, he had. Dennis Hu cocked an eye at the gangly, over-tall detective. “You been playing with fire again?”
“It’s been a bad week. Cut me some slack.”
“You think it’s bad now? It’s gonna get worse. I guarantee it.”
“What do you- Dennis, please don’t tell me-”
Hu grinned. “Afraid so, my friend.” Outside the drumming was getting worse. Two blocks away from the damned Chinese New Year parade and still the street was packed four and five deep. God, there were days when Wayne would’ve given an eyeball to be assigned to any other goddamn precinct in the entire goddamn city of Vancouver.
“Well, shit.”
“You can say that again,” Hu agreed. He held up Wayne’s keys. “Let’s go.”
Stupid fucking stupid Chinese stinking stupid New Year – I swear to God, if I ever get the chance I’m applying for a transfer to a different ethnicity – Wayne drummed his fingers along the edge of the car window, waiting. Dennis was talking to the shopkeeper, waving his arms frantically and yelling at the top of his lungs in what sounded like Hakka. Dialects other than Cantonese had never been Wayne’s strong suit. That was just one more shovel of crap on the pile that was Chinese New Year, so far as he was concerned. All the dialects. All the people.
Dammit, why did these things keep happening to him! He might’ve been wrong, but he’d gotten the very real impression that his grandparents hadn’t actually LIKED China. That was why they’d come to Canada, right? That was why their goddamn children had assimilated, right? That was why his name, his actual, official name, right on his damned birth certificate, was nothing more and nothing less than ‘Zhuang, Wayne’. Zhuang, comma, Wayne. As in, first name Wayne, last name Zhuang, nothing else. No goddamned generational syllables, no references to ancient officials or poets or stretches of countryside he’d never seen and never planned to see. Was it his fault he’d picked up French and Cantonese with equal ease in high school? No. It was not. He’d only wanted to learn the French, but his teachers wouldn’t take no for an answer. He’d planned on moving to Ontario, where they had real, hard-core, American style crime instead of all this people-smuggling, pot-smoking, endangered-species-trading weirdness you got on this coast – but no, no, the Vancouver city police got hold of his test scores somehow at school, and next thing you knew there was a scholarship for him too big for any son of a construction contractor to refuse, with nothing to pay for it except five years’ service on the city police force.
Which, of course, meant they gave him other tests. Which meant they found out about the Cantonese. Which meant they assigned him to Chinatown without so much as batting an eye. Which meant that he got all the smuggling, trading, trafficking crap dropped right into his lap. Not that he wasn’t good at it – he might not have liked the specifics, but it went against the grain to fuck up an investigation just because he wanted a transfer somewhere else. Unfortunately, the better you got, the more information and contacts you accumulated, and the tighter you dug yourself in.
So that meant that on a day when all he wanted was some goddamn quiet time at the office to go over his paperwork, he was stuck instead with trying to drive through crowds of people so thick you could bounce a tank off ‘em, half of ‘em not even locals but gweilo tourists come to see-
Dammit, White tourists. He knew better than that.
“Hey, Zhuang!” yelled Dennis from the other side of the crowd. Wayne winced as half a dozen heads turned. “He says no one’s been in the basement since they made the call!”
“Good.” Because if Wayne had to stand there with the smell of moon cakes wafting around him from the bakery on the other side of the street even one minute more, he was gonna mug somebody for a pack of smokes. Patch or no.
The shopkeeper was a guy Wayne knew mostly through other people. Mr. Xue’s pet shop wasn’t the kind of place he bothered with much. Easy enough, when you didn’t keep pets. Wasn’t room in the apartment, and anyway Wayne’s landlord didn’t allow pets other than goldfish, or maybe canaries. Wayne had gone in there once or twice. The man’s fish tanks were a disgrace. How Xue could get away with charging the kinds of prices he did for animals you could barely see through the cloudy water, Wayne didn’t know. The few fish he could see had their fins clamped to their sides, and they moved like a fat kid with asthma, slow and reluctant. Wayne shook his head as the much shorter Dennis navigated through the overly crowded aisles.
“-says he came down this morning and found his daughter screaming at the top of her lungs,” Dennis was informing him. “She turned on the light at the top of the stairs and got halfway down before she saw-”
It reeked. Fuck, it stank. The man must’ve kept an incontinent rhino in the back of his store. That wouldn’t surprise Wayne a bit, the way the floor stuck to his feet. Besides, the empty birdcages had dust on them, and the few lizards Xue had left in stock were positively geriatric. There’d been a toy store on the other side of town once, had an inventory problem near as bad as this. Turned out the guy was one of the biggest pot dealers in that part of Vancouver. If this was what Xue was passing off as his business, there was no way he could afford his rent on legitimate income.
“-didn’t get close enough to get an ID-”
Wayne prodded at one of the twenty-five kilo bags of dog food as they passed into the store room. It shifted, but in the way kibble always did. A surreptitious shove confirmed it; that bag, at least, was nothing but what it claimed to be. Wayne sniffed, and wished he hadn’t. “I’m surprised he’s actually called us in,” he said absently. “Place like this? He’s gotta be connected if he’s making any money at all.”
“Aaah, it was probably the wife, bet you she doesn’t know a thing. . .”
Wayne nodded grimly and headed down the store room stairs behind of his partner. The basement light did no credit to the name of incandescent; Wayne wondered irrelevantly how long they’d been getting by on just the one bulb. Maybe the habit of stacking crates and boxes as high as the ceiling had broken all the others. There was still the ammoniac reek of urine, here, but it was different somehow. Fresher, maybe. Less – feline. That was it. The smell upstairs was cat piss, though Wayne would’ve sworn there were no cats anywhere in the place now. Down here it was something else.
“Diao nia meh!” Dennis suddenly exclaimed. Wayne froze. “In the corner!”
“I see it, I see it. . .” He drew his gun, edging carefully towards the irregular shape that had caught Dennis’s eye. “I need some light over here, man!”
“Working on it!” Dennis had gone back to the stairs, and was fumbling around with what looked like a switchbox.
Wayne waited, staying back among the crates. Huh. Fujian province, most of them, at least if he remembered his city names correctly. Definitely not an entirely legitimate businessman.
“Got it!” called Dennis, and four equally dusty lights flooded on.
Wayne stepped out, gun at the ready, and froze in his tracks. “Yau mo gau hai cho?” he heard himself blurt.
There was – well – he could make out two human legs, but that was all; the crocodile, the goddamn crocodile, the giant fucking crocodile in the city of Vancouver, had made short work of the rest. Along with the snake. The one as long as the crocodile, as thick as Wayne’s leg, and wrapped around the lizard’s middle. Looked like it had managed to somehow strangle the croc despite being in the middle of a meal of its own – the hindquarters and tail of a rat were poking out of the distinctly deceased snake’s mouth-
“Ah, shit,” breathed Wayne as Dennis crossed the room to stand at his side. “Not another one!”
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no subject
Date: 2003-12-03 09:57 pm (UTC)You KNOW what I'm gonna say.
no subject
Date: 2003-12-04 06:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-12-04 08:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-12-04 08:34 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-12-04 05:45 pm (UTC)*looks innocently oblivious* So? Where's the problem?
no subject
Date: 2003-12-04 08:57 pm (UTC)