Eighty-Two: Scene of the Crash

“Short hair, the rules forbid laying a hand on the public.” Wang Si, who had been watching the show, even remembered to warn her, but at a moment like this, how could Jin Shanshan possibly listen?

Seeing Houshui neatly dodge her straight punch, Jin Shanshan grew even angrier. Her feet darted and crossed, and with a sudden burst she drove a fierce front kick straight at Houshui’s groin.

“Ah! Darling, that’s murder. And you’re a police officer—everyone standing at your school gate is a witness,” Houshui cried out in exaggerated alarm, while both hands rose protectively and he sprang backward, once again evading the kick with ease.

“As expected of a monkey, you’re really quick. Take another kick.” Jin Shanshan, driven nearly mad, shouted as she launched herself into the air and shot a lightning-fast kick at Houshui’s chest. There was nothing playful left in it; even when she sparred with the school’s combat instructor, this would count as a vicious finishing move.

“Shanshan, have you lost your mind? You can’t use that on an ordinary person!” Wang Si and Chen Xiangyu, still watching from afar, finally panicked, but it was already too late to stop her.

Houshui, who had been treating the whole thing like a game, had no choice but to get serious when faced with that chest-level flying kick. He spread his feet and planted himself firmly on the ground, then suddenly flung both arms wide, one high and one low, while his body rotated to the left. In that open, expansive posture, Jin Shanshan’s flying kick grazed past his chest by the barest margin. In the next instant Houshui’s arms snapped shut like iron hoops, catching her airborne body tightly in his embrace, and one hand happened to press against the soft little swell on her chest.

“Mm!”

Under the strain of that violent movement, Houshui felt a searing pain shoot through his shoulder; the freshly stitched gunshot wound had split open again. No need to ask—of course the wound had torn.

Anyone with such experience knows that reopening a scabbed wound hurts even more than the original injury, sometimes by a factor of ten. In that instant, Houshui’s whole body tensed. A dense killing intent and fury filled his face, and his reddened eyes locked on Jin Shanshan in his arms.

“Ah! You damned monkey, where are you grabbing? Let go, mm—!”

Pinned tightly in Houshui’s embrace, Jin Shanshan was both anxious and furious. She writhed and shouted, only to catch sight of Houshui’s eyes all at once. In that instant she froze. That look was exactly like the one their lecturer had used when introducing the ten most notorious serial killers in the country: cold, numb, and steeped in malice, as though at any moment he might move to take another person’s life.

But within a second, that cruel gaze faded. The eyes so close to hers returned to their smile and mischief. Seizing the moment while Jin Shanshan was still dazed, Houshui stretched his neck forward with lightning speed and lightly kissed her on the lips, then set the airborne girl back on her feet and darted away.

“You—you—you—”

Jin Shanshan had never imagined that the first kiss between her and Houshui would happen today, and of all places, right at the school gate, in a setting so utterly unromantic. As the flushed Jin Shanshan pointed a trembling finger at Houshui, who wore a smug grin, a shrill blast from a heavy vehicle’s horn suddenly erupted from the street not far away.

Because it was close by, the horn was easily loud enough to be heard at more than fifty decibels. When Houshui and the others turned to look, they saw an orange-and-ochre dump truck already skidding to a stop on the road. But with its immense weight and terrifying momentum, even though its tires smoked against the pavement, it still continued to slide forward.

Before Houshui and Jin Shanshan could even react, the dump truck smashed into a brown family van that was waiting at the light.

In that instant, Houshui saw it clearly: the dump truck’s front end crushed the van’s rear into a warped mess, shoving the smaller vehicle forward until it slammed into another fourteen-seat minibus.

The brown family van, trapped between two vehicles, had nowhere to escape. The dump truck that had rammed it from behind kept grinding forward, and in the blink of an eye the van’s middle section was twisted into a mass of mangled metal.

Bang—crash, crash, crash. The air was filled with the shattering of windows and the sound of broken glass bouncing across the road. Only after crushing the van’s cab flat and riding up beneath its body did the truck finally exhaust its astonishing momentum and come to a stop.

Staring blankly at the horrific wreck nearby, at the three vehicles twisted together in a deathly knot, Jin Shanshan’s raised finger slowly dropped. Then some student at the police academy gate shouted, “Hurry and help!”

At once, everyone there, Houshui included, rushed over in a panic.

When they reached the scene and looked again, the road around the crash was already slick with gasoline, engine oil, and other fluids. The engines had burst open with a stench of scorched smoke, and with every step they took they seemed to tread on fragments of the van’s shattered body.

One of the students who ran ahead flung himself onto the ground and shouted through the narrow gap in the flattened family van window, “Hey! Can you hear me? We’re here to help!”

There was no answer at all. From within the wreckage came not a scream, not even a groan—only the crackle of severed wiring.

Standing farther back, Houshui saw a small arm reach out through a crack in the van, but it too was covered in blood and lay motionless. He stared at that little arm, estimating that the child inside could not be more than six or seven years old, and he truly did not want to think about the odds of survival in a crash this severe.

“Hey! We’ve called the police! Hang on, help will get you out soon!” The boy on the ground still refused to surrender hope. Even without an answer, he kept shouting and slapping the vehicle’s body to draw the attention of whoever might still be inside.

Useless. After an impact like that, not to mention a person, even a polar bear would have been flattened into paste. Houshui understood it clearly, but he could not say it, nor did he want to expose such a cruel truth.

“Hey, down there! Come up and help—this driver is injured!”

Suddenly, a voice came from the side of the dump truck that had climbed over the van, and someone shouted for assistance.

At once, Houshui and Jin Shanshan, along with several others, rounded the truck and reached the leaning dump truck. There they saw a few boys hurriedly lifting a man in his forties out of the driver’s cab.

At first glance, the driver was covered in blood and looked frighteningly injured. No one could tell how badly he had been hurt. But when Houshui looked closer, he immediately noticed something was off.

By rights, the truck stood much higher than the family van, and since the driver had honked and braked beforehand, any injury should have been centered on the chest, from impact with the steering wheel, causing internal trauma. So why was his face bleeding? And even if the windshield had shattered and cut his face, why had he lost consciousness only after the students arrived? Surely he could not be a victim of both collision injuries and superficial wounds at once.

With a quick, discreet glance at the dump truck’s windshield, Houshui confirmed that the glass had only developed extensive cracks and had not broken completely. A cold smile flickered in his mind.

“You there, what are you staring at? Hurry up and give a hand!”

By then the truck driver had been carried to Houshui’s front. One student, seeing him standing there dazed, could not help but shout.

“Oh. Coming.”

Houshui stepped forward at just the right moment and took hold of one of the driver’s arms, but as he helped carry the man away, he quietly checked the driver’s pulse. It was steady, as though the man were merely asleep.

Perhaps sensing Houshui’s actions, the supposedly unconscious driver opened his eyes a sliver and furtively glanced at him with one eye. But by then Houshui had already shifted his gaze elsewhere, wearing only an expression of concern, exactly like the others helping with the rescue.

At last the driver closed his eyes tightly again, but Houshui was already certain of one thing: this was absolutely, undeniably not a simple traffic accident.

After they set the truck driver down, Houshui looked at him with a cold smile—at his shut eyes, at his posture of a wounded man in a faint. Just as Houshui was seriously considering whether to expose the pretender then and there, another round of shouting came from a distance.

“Hey! This man is trapped by the cars. Everyone, come help!”

Several students who had gone to inspect the fourteen-seat minibus shouted from afar. Houshui was still planning to take a closer look at this Oscar-worthy performance when a student standing beside him grabbed him without further ado and dragged him away, pulling him from the truck driver’s side.

When Houshui reached the minibus, several students had already pried open the twisted door with crowbars. But the driver of the minibus had also been trapped tightly in the cab by the chain collision. His legs were pinned beneath the deformed dashboard, and bright blood was already streaming rapidly down his legs like a small river.

“Stop the bleeding! Find something to stop the bleeding. A few of you, pry the dashboard open with force—only then can we get him out!”

A bespectacled student who seemed to know a thing or two had taken on the role of commander.