Chapter 4

Yichen

8:30 PM

Yichen waved his phone in the air as he yelled at the wall. "You promised me there wouldn't be any trouble here, Slazney. That you could handle it!" Leaning back on his chair, he waved his hands in the air. "A woman was offed in my hotel room! Then her body disappeared. I had to give the police the window washer footage to get them out of here before they found something else to harass me about." He spun around and pounded his hands on the desk, standing up.

"What! You never said he was important! Why didn't you say something before you told me to hire his company?" Yichen smiled as he glanced at his secretary. She held up five fingers.

Five minutes till his man arrived at Bobby's place.

"Slazney, I won't have you screw my family over on this. Tell me what you're up to!" The phone went dark, and Yichen ripped the earbuds from his head and threw them across the room. They bounced off his secretary's chest. She picked them up, wiped the wax off them and put them in the charger.

"Wu! Let me know when they get the Washer. I want him by my side or in the ground." He shivered. "Why is it so cold here? Turn up the heat!" He left the room mumbling to himself

Wu nodded and wrote on her tablet. Her face never moved.

Bobby

8:30 PM

There was no way Bobby could sleep now. He wasn't worried about the police. They were usually inept in any country. Gregory was another matter. That prick would be sending Ivan for him now. Bobby threw a change of clothes, a laptop with a Motley Crue decal, and some Crue CDs into a duffel bag. It was only a matter of time before he was dead.

"Screw you, Ryan," he mumbled. The FBI handler was the worst thing about his stay in America. Always cracking jokes and trying to be funny. If Ryan was going to take a vacation, he should have told him.

Bobby ran out of the trailer and jumped into his truck, suppressing a yawn. He needed a coffee and some cash. Popping a CD into his truck, he turned up the volume, full blast and headed back to the McDonald's in the strip mall. He could use their Wi-Fi to access the internet and hack into the bank. He'd promised Ryan he wouldn't do that anymore, but there was no choice now.

He swerved to avoid the Jaguar coming into the lot and continued to the strip mall. "Drive vetter, you fool!" he said. "Vis is no time to get into vaccident." Whenever he started speaking in Vlad's accent, things were getting bad.

11:30 PM

He backed into the parking space at the Moonbeam Strip Mall and poured some sugar from the little packets into his coffee. The cheap brew stung his nose and would burn going down, but it was effective. Usually, one pack of sugar was enough, but today he needed the extra energy. He'd already played his collection of Crue CDs, and the world they showed him wasn't working anymore. He held up the Baby Metal one Kat had given him as a joke, but wasn't ready to go there just yet.

He'd been driving for the last three hours, trying to kill time. It was closing in on midnight. "Whoever set up the bug with the day change must have learned programming from a monkey."

Cracking his knuckles, he opened his computer and started hacking into the local Wells Fargo next door. The security system there was a joke. Not only did they keep tons of cash on hand, but they also refused to pay their employees enough to secure the firewalls.

Typing, he almost fell on the keys. "This is dangerous. Even a joke can trip you up. Just five minutes," he mumbled and closed his eyes.

His eyes closed, math chipped away at the block in his mind, bringing back memories of a woman. He knew her. He was afraid of her, but happy to see her at the same time. "Who are you?" he mumbled. "Why pink?"

Seconds later, a headlight from an approaching car jolted him awake. Shaking his head, Bobby took a sip of coffee and turned back to the computer. His eye twitched. On the screen was the same code he had seen in the Shujing windows. It was staring back at him, only more complete.

"When did I write this?" He stared at the numbers and commands. "No, it's different." The beauty of the code, its simplicity beckoned, called to him in music and poem. So, unlike the clunky Python or even the outdated C++. "I can see the genius of Nikki Sixx mixed in here. The Shujing code had none of this."

Hitting the backspace button, he erased everything.

"Where did that piece of der'mo come from? I remember parts of it, but I thought I'd destroyed it," Bobby said, panting. A chill went down his spine. "What did that code do to me?" He remembered that the code could rewrite reality and change the natural order of things. "Is it writing itself? Did it plant a Trojan? I blocked it, didn't I?"

He rubbed his eyes, trying to massage out the sleep. He checked his watch. It read 12:03. "Just five minutes." He closed his computer, leaned his seat back and drifted off.

Again, numbers flowed across his vision. He remembered some things from Russia. Pulling the lost Spanish version of Glitter from somewhere.

"WEOWEOWEO!"

The police sirens pierced the night. Bobby shot up, knocking his computer off his lap and stared out the window. It was still nighttime, but fires covered everything. The McDonald's was a hollow shell, and the parking lot had been blasted with craters. There was a stack of skulls under what was left of the arches, and a Mad Max wannabe stalking his truck.

"What the Fuck?" He checked the dashboard clock, and it showed that only three minutes had passed. He rubbed his eyes and stared out the window again. Everything was normal. Two teenagers were heading out of the restaurant with some take-out. The boy still looked like Mad Max but was stuffing his face with a French fry. The usual American diet. He scanned the parking lot, and there were three other cars there. No craters. No fires in the background and no stack of skulls.

However, the dead woman's face filled his mind. She was calling to him, beckoning. He couldn't close his eyes without seeing her.

"The hell?" He picked up his computer and reconnected to the Wi-Fi. Checking the local news for anything to explain away what happened, he found a breaking story about his trailer park. The news panned in for a closer look. Miss Garfinks' house always had the same ugly dwarf outside her door. He hated that thing, but it was distinctive.

And broken. The news reporters were showing his house in the center of a crater. He turned up the volume on the news.

"Reports are coming in about an explosion in the Paradise Trailer Park. Information is scarce, but we see Dean Lifante on the scene. This may have a connection to the missing body case at the Shujing. We will keep you updated as events unfold."

A few firefighters were there, but it didn't look like there was a fire. Bobby put his hand on his head.

"That wasn't a bomb. What the fuck do I do now? I wasn't expecting Ivan to get here this quickly."

Dean Lifante

12:30 AM

"This place is a complete mess. Are you sure this is the right address?" Dean asked the uniform. She was new to the force and hadn't had time to hear all the rumours about him yet. That meant she was still willing to talk. "What's that smell?" He wrinkled his nose at the mix of gas and an overpowering scent of musk invading everything.

"Yes, sir. According to the manager of Squeegee R' Us, this is the address on file for Bobby Miladev. A Russian immigrant. Arrived here a year and a half ago." She looked up. "That's all we have." She closed her notebook and stood back. "As for the smell, I don't know where it's coming from."

"Who the fuck leaked his name to the press?" Dean stared at what was left of the trailer, trying to piece together the destruction, and rubbed the back of his head. He turned back to the rookie, "What's your name?"

"Cammy Ortiz, sir. I just started last week. I transferred from New York." She picked her way across the wreckage of the trailer.

"Well? Any idea where the press got his name, Ortiz?" Dean liked the way she moved, but it was nothing compared to the gracefulness Ming would show. He turned his head and focused on the destruction. There was no reason to spark another investigation into his conduct.

"No, sir, but I'll call the news office."

"Do that." Dean stared at what was left of the trailer and frowned. There was something wrong here. He sniffed the air and sneezed. There was a musk smell, but he couldn't quite pin it down. It was unlike anything he'd smelt before.

The trailer had been destroyed. Whatever happened here was quick and strange. Pieces of the wall were found embedded in the neighbouring trailer, but no other trailer had been touched. There was no fire either, which was good, but it didn't explain how a crater could appear without leaving any evidence. It was as if something set off a concussion blast like in that anime with the shiny star balls and caused the trailer to burst.

"Dammit," he mumbled. Turning to the CSI group, he held out his phone, the record button pressed. "Give me something, Fisher." He wished Ming were here. She was much better at talking to the science types and could follow what they said without a translation program. "Was this a bomb?"

The ranking CSI, Fisher, scowled. After Ming, he was the best there was, but hated being disturbed when he was looking over a crime scene. It went against his personality to speculate. Dean tried to stay out of his way when he was working, but every so often Fischer needed a little poke to remind him that he was part of a team. It was the least Dean could do after the mess he put him through three years ago.

"According to the neighbours, Bobby Miladev arrived back here around eight pm. He went inside, and then they heard his truck start up around eight-thirty. A few other people came by soon after, but didn't stick around. The explosion happened an hour ago, at about ten. There was no warning, just a boom. There were no bodies found in the aftermath," Fisher turned back to the scene. "This was the center." He pointed to the clear patch. "If there was a bomb, we've found no traces of any explosive device or residue."

"Can you give me anything?" Dean asked, "A trailer just doesn't explode like this."

"I'm not a wizard, Detective, and I don't make guesses. All I can tell you is whatever it was, it wasn't a bomb. Anything that survived is over there on the table," Fisher pointed outside the destruction.

Dean sighed and let the man get back to his work. He may hate him, but Fisher knew what he was doing. By this time next week, he should know everything there was to know. Even so, his gut was digging into his spleen. Something was wrong with this place. He rubbed his arm across his nose to get rid of the smell.

He stepped to the forensics table and peered at the material they had bagged. "What did Fischer find?" He asked the tech cataloguing everything. They pointed to the end of the table and went back to their clipboard. Dean frowned and picked up a half-burnt CD. A pair of ugly, thick coke bottle-like safety goggles with shattered lenses, and a tin of chewing tobacco. Turning the tin around, he whistled at the name of Slazney's clinic inscribed outside.

"Again? You're turning up everywhere today, aren't you, Doctor?" He took a picture and sent it to Ming. Fischer was good, but there was no one better at hunting down secrets.

Ming Na Liu

12:30 AM

Ming checked her phone and sent a kissy face emoji back to Dean. It had only been a few hours, and he was finding a fresh lead on the Shujing. After getting chewed out by her editor for missing the press conference, Ming needed something to shut him up. Her fingers twitched just thinking of his smug attitude, imagining them wrapped around his throat. It's not her fault that he rushed a story about what happened to print without checking all the facts first.

"Just because Daddy got you the job doesn't mean you'll keep it."

Ming dialled the number for the cleaning company. A sleepy voice answered the phone.

"Yes?" a yawn rolled out of the speaker in her car dashboard.

"Is this Chester Punk Jr., of Squeegee's R'Us?" Ming asked

"Yeah. It's late. What do you want?"

She couldn't place the accent. "I'm sorry to bother you at this late hour. My name is Ming Na Liu. Is this a good time to talk?"

"No. Tomorrow, during business hours. I'm off now." Chester's voice was clipped, and the tone was rising.

"I understand, but I have some questions about the owner..." She wasn't going to mention Slazney over the phone. The last time she'd done that, her source had disappeared.

"I'll ask my father. Anything else can wait till tomorrow." He hung up.

Getting out of her car, she stood up straight, stretching the kinks out of her shoulders and turned off her recorder. Paper was so much better, but the last time she tried writing her thoughts down while driving, she'd almost hit a tree. "Screw Chester and his nasal voice. I'll ask about borrowing a truck in the morning." She couldn't back down here if she wanted to get the story. "I can feel Slazney nipping at my heels, but I need the proof."

She stepped into the Shujing lobby, ignoring the slot machines and the old ladies playing them. Located outside the main Vegas strip, far enough away from the excitement to stay quiet, the Shujing catered to the older, conservative crowd even as Yichen tried to pivot to the convention circuit. Slots were a part of the background colour and were everywhere. One of the devices went off, sending some ear-splitting shrieks through the lobby and a shower of coins into the woman's lap. She was giggling and holding her purse open to catch all the silver. Ming wondered how much of her pension she'd already put into the machine.

"My name is Ming Na Liu, for the Las Vegas Sun. I'd like to speak to the owner. Please," she said to the two front desk staff as she placed her card on the counter. Her uncle was still the best chance she had at getting in touch with Slazney.

"I'm sorry, but he is unavailable at the moment." They ignored her card and started speaking in Cantonese to each other. She didn't have a suitcase, and it was past check-in time. Reporters weren't usually welcome here, either. They had no reason to help her.

Sighing, she switched to Cantonese. "Can't ignore me now, boy. Get me, my Uncle. I know he's still awake." Tapping her foot and frowning, she crossed her arms to hide the phone, recording everything.

The front desk staff flinched, and a phone rang. He picked it up and nodded.

Ming heard a loud voice behind it.

Replacing the phone, the staff pushed a buzzer. "You can go up, Miss Liu. The owner is waiting for you." He pointed to the side door.

She nodded and went into the back. Unlike the lobby, the hallway showed how fake this place was. The paint was peeling, and the floor was cracked in several places. The hotel was built in the eighties by triad money, as a place to launder their casino winnings and as a refuge from the politics in the Strip itself.

Since then, it'd changed hands several times. Through it all, the name Slazney had been behind it. She had spent years tracking him down since she found his name in her father's medical file after his accident. The shadowy Vegas power player, with his hands in everything. Including chewing tobacco, if Dean's mail was to be believed.

Yichen's office was in the back. Opening the door, she was hit by the change between it and the hallway. Here, he'd decorated in blues and purples: A villain's lair. It was also cooler than the rest of the building. The red and pink motif was so strong in the rest of the hotel that this room was like a cancer just trying to dig its way into the light.

"Ming, how are your parents? I was hoping to stay longer at Don's birthday party earlier, but the story of a murder in my hotel was more pressing," Yichen said as Ming closed the door. His cologne hit her hard. It was a spicy cinnamon smell, but it did nothing to cover up his sweat. He was nervous. Stress made him look older. He was still wearing the same tailored Armani suit from earlier. It looked a little wrinkled. He hated appearing less than perfect.

"Please have a seat." He pointed to a chair with a drink in his hand.

She nodded, scowling. She hated the man. He was her grandmother's brother, so a great-uncle. Uncle Don and Auntie Jinn loved to talk about their famous relative, and he'd often visit her parents when Ming was a child. He was always watching her. She liked the sweets he'd bring and called him Uncle, but as she got older, she started questioning the things he'd do. There was no way someone who smelled like him could be a good person, but she couldn't find the proof. Dean's way just didn't work for her.

"Your face tells me otherwise. For a reporter, you like to wear your heart on your sleeve." He took a sip of his drink and sat down behind his desk. "What can I do for you?" He smiled. "Are you still looking to expose me and drive me out of business? I'm sure your mother would be very disappointed."

"Leave her out of this." She took out her notebook and flipped to a new page. "I'm here for another reason." She paused. "Bobby Miladev. I know he cleaned your windows. What can you tell me about him?"

"Bobby." Yichen raised an eyebrow. "He's a window washer and a good one. Why do you ask?"

"He's a suspect in the murder, as I'm sure you already know. Don't try and play dumb with me, Uncle." She took a deep breath. There was no reason to drive him away; she needed him to answer her questions, and he was family. "What can you tell me about the girl who was murdered in your hotel?"

"What murder?" He spread his hands out. "There is no body, only blood, which your friend in the police took with him." He took another sip of his drink. "As far as I'm concerned, it was a prank played by some bored high school kids to discredit my hotel."

Ming expected this response and went to the next question. "Who's Slazney?" She watched his face closely. There was no reaction, but he paused, ever so slightly, then downed his whole drink.

"Sorry, I don't know anybody by that name. Is he someone I should know?" He got up and poured another drink.

It was time to play the next card. "Detective Dean Lifante tracked down the window washer. His place had been destroyed. Pieces everywhere. Maybe you saw it on the news." She paused for effect. "They found some evidence of Slazney there." She watched his back tense up, but there was less reaction than she expected.

She wrote in her notebook, 'He knew,' and underlined it twice. When she was a child, she'd seen him get angry and whale on a stranger with his cane when they stepped in front of him in line. He was not one to hold his temper in check. Watching his bodyguards drag the man away was when she knew her uncle for what he truly was.

"What does that have to do with me?" he asked, turning back to her. He was gripping the drink in his hand so hard that a crack spread up the glass.

Ming narrowed her eyes and smiled. "When I was researching this place, a man's name kept coming up, but I could never track him down. Slazney. I know you've heard it before. What can you tell me about him?"

He sat down in the chair and took another sip of his drink. "This is the first time I've heard of him. What's he got to do with you?"

Ming flipped to the back page of her notebook. "You remember the accident my father had a few years ago?"

Yichen nodded.

"I was going through some old finance records and found out that a Slazney paid the bill. I wanted to thank him, but I couldn't find him. I thought it might have been you, but there was no proof of a connection. Everywhere I looked, he seemed to be a ghost. The deeper I dug, the more I found that I didn't like." She didn't trust him, but he was still her best chance to find the man. "Mom told me to let it go, but I couldn't. The mystery is too big."

"You always were a curious one." He picked up a phone. "Tell you what, though, for old time's sake, I'll see what I can find: On one condition."

She smiled. His help usually had a cost. However, she could play along for a little bit. "What is the condition?"

"You and your detective friend join me for dinner tomorrow. I've seen the way you look at him, and I wish to approve of anyone seeing my niece." He smiled and started dialling.

"We aren't dating," she blushed. Her dark complexion kept it from being more visible. Ming hated mixing business with her personal life. What she did with Dean was her own business. Still, if it got her closer to Slazney, she could do it. The hard part would be convincing Dean to come. He was still skittish about anything that appeared to be a date. "And I'm not your niece. But we'll be here. What time?"

"Give me some time to make some calls. I will text you tomorrow with a time, but please leave the early evening open over the next few days."

"Okay. But I would like to come here in the morning and clean the windows. Retrace Bobby's steps. Is that okay with you, Uncle?" Ming asked.

"Be my guest. But be careful. I also won't be paying you any money."

Ming nodded, stood up and closed her notebook. There was nothing else she'd get from him tonight. He was too guarded. However, if she watched his men scramble to put out the fire she had just set, maybe she'd find a tidbit of truth in all his lies. "Until tomorrow."

I will find out what you're hiding, Uncle.

Barbie

12:30 AM

Floating in the corner of the old man's office, Barbie waited until the Chinese woman left. The old man was making more phone calls now, but he'd been doing that for the last few hours. He was very angry when his man had missed the Maker. She remembered the tantrum he'd thrown, breaking the tablet in two on the desk.

"Get someone to the pigpen. I need a cleaning done," the old man said. Barbie just sighed. Twenty-first-century lingo was difficult to follow, but this guy was even harder than most.

Barbie spent the last few hours waiting for something, anything, to lead her to the Maker. She had to absorb the heat in the air to maintain her nanobots. It was a temporary measure, but she had no choice. They worked better in the desert, not in this air-conditioned box.

If she stayed with the old man, maybe he'd lead her to the Maker. She'd already spent several hours waiting for him in the hotel room, and nothing. He never came back. When she'd slit her throat, only the nanites in her body had kept her from the big sleep, and they could only keep her like this for another day, two if she conserved their energy. The Maker would have to show up then and read the bad virus.

"Stupid dork. Why won't you go to sleep?" She didn't want to use her last resort and turn herself into this spirit, just them, even if it worked, maybe. Now if only he'd finish writing the code she'd planted in him, Barbie could regain her body and finish her mission.

"What do I do next, Maker?"

Yichen looked around the office for a second. "What was that?" He waited a few minutes, but Barbie didn't respond. He shrugged and returned to his phone calls.

Barbie stuck her tongue out at the man and floated through the door. She'd made up her mind. The Asian woman had a better chance of finding the Maker, and the old man had already tried to kill him once. She needed him alive if she was going to regain her real body. Besides, Slazney seems like a bad man, and the old man was working with him.