The Adventures of
the Jade Dragon
Episode
10
The Jade Dragon’s Defeat
Email:
Lespion@msn.com
Chapter
1 Nails
She appeared out of the darkness briefly
silhouetted against the skyline as she moved across the
rooftop. “At last,”
Carl Ripley muttered. He raised
his rifle and squinted down the barrel only to find that his target had
disappeared.
“Bitch,”
he muttered. “Hold
still.”
He lowered the rifle and peered through the
gloom. He had been waiting for
this chance for more than two weeks, staked out on a rooftop, hoping that
the random wanderings of the heroine would bring her within his
sights. It was damned frustrating
work. Three times he had caught
a brief glimpse of the heroine as she went about terrorizing the criminals
of the waterfront area, but each time she had been too far away or the sighting
had been too brief.
This was the first time she had been close
enough for him to really get a good look at her, but the sighting had lasted
only a split second and then she had disappeared once
more. However, Ripley was nothing
if not a patient man. He had
not earned the reputation as the best contract killer on the west coast by
accident.
He sat unmoving in the darkness of the window
alcove waiting for his prey to show herself
again.
She appeared
again. At least he thought it
was her. There was another shadow
this time just a few feet from the first.
“Two of them,” Ripley
muttered. Which one was the genuine
article? They were dressed almost
identically in tight-fitting dark green outfits that outlined every detail
of their superbly contoured bodies.
“My God,” Ripley murmured
again. “I’m getting
hard just looking at them.”
He could see them clearly
now. They were standing almost
side by side and completely still as if they were listening for
something. They offered him the
perfect opportunity and he took it.
Easily suppressing the thoughts of lust that had briefly consumed
his mind he raised his rifle and sighted on the closest
figure. His finger tightened
on the trigger. “Alright
bitch, I’m going to nail your ass
tonight.”
He pulled the trigger.
The silenced rifle made only the slightest
of sounds.
“Shit,” Ripley
swore. “Where the hell did
she go?”
A sudden sense of foreboding swept over
him. How the hell could he have
missed at that range? And how
had she known to move at the last split second?
Fighting back panic he scanned the dark
rooftops. Where the hell was
she? He kept absolutely still,
sure that he could not possibly have been seen, but torn between the impulse
to flee and the desire to try and finish her
off. However, he couldn’t
finish off what he couldn’t see.
And then something moved about twenty feet
from where he thought she should be.
He brought up the rifle; this time he would not
miss. Incredibly the heroine
stood so that her statuesque body was clearly outlined against the light
from a streetlamp. Her body moved
ever so slightly. Something flashed
before his eyes; there was a split second of intense pain and then everything
went black.
The Jade Dragon stood over the body of the
assassin she had just killed. The
Fire Wheel she had thrown had cut his head almost completely in
half. It was too bad really,
but he should not have tried to kill Huan
Yue. She was particularly sensitive
about her daughter.
She wondered who he was and who had sent
him. It was the third attempt
to kill her in the last two weeks.
That was far too many for
coincidence. Someone was deliberately
targeting her and by bringing Huan Yue along on her nighttime patrols she
was seriously endangering her daughter.
However, the forays into the darkness of
Her daughter came up beside
her. “Who was he,
mummy?”
“No one I know,” Sun Lin replied,
wiping the blood from the Fire Wheel.
She wondered at Huan Yue’s quiet
deportment. The attempted
assassin’s head was a horrific sight and the girl had never seen anything
like it before. “Come,”
she said. “I think it is
time we returned to Master Zhou. We
have done enough this night.”
Bertrand ‘Nails’ Larson bit off
the end of his cigar.
“Another?” he growled.
“Can no one rid me of this fucking
superheroine? That’s five
hit men in six weeks. That God-damned
whore is costing me a fucking fortune.”
“But she’s the Jade Dragon,
boss.”
“I
KNOW
who the fuck she is,” Larson
screamed. “What I want to
know is why no one can kill her.”
The henchman who had spoken up shut his mouth
and moved back a step. It
didn’t pay to anger Nails Larson.
The brutal gangland leader had gotten his name from his habit of spiking
those who angered him or got in his way to the nearest
wall. He had no wish to be the
latest victim. However, he knew
that unless the Jade Dragon was removed no one in Larson’s organization
was safe. In the last six months
the Jade Dragon and her companions had been responsible for the arrest of
dozens of lower ranking members of Larson’s gang and had broken up dozens
of illegal operations. Summoning
up his courage he stepped forward again.
“Boss, perhaps we’re going about this all
wrong.”
“Wrong?” Larson said, leaning back
in his leather chair. He swung
his feet onto the desk, a good sign.
It meant that he was at least willing to
listen.
“We’ve been trying to beat her at
her own game by setting traps and ambushes for
her. She’s too damned smart
for that. She’s been prowling
“You’re right, Craig,” Larson
answered calmly, puffing on his cigar and filling his luxurious office with
smoke. “She ain’t human,
that bitch. But what do you suggest
we do?”
“Well,” Bob Craig swallowed before
answering, “this might seem rather far-fetched, but we’ve got to
catch her on her home ground.”
“Home ground?” Larson asked
impatiently. “What the hell
do you mean by home ground?”
“She’s got to live somewhere,”
Craig continued. “No one
seems to know a thing about her.
She appears after the sun goes down, ruins a few of our operations
and then disappears before dawn.
Where she comes from and where she goes is a complete
mystery.”
“So,” Larson said, removing his
feet from the desk and stubbing out his unfinished cigar, “how the fuck
does that help us?”
“Well, she’s
Chinese. We know at least that
much. So that means she must
live in
Larson’s eyes lit up with
interest. “I think I see
where you are going with this.
Continue.”
“I figure we can track her
down. She must live somewhere
in
“That might be like looking for a needle
in a haystack,” Larson answered, but it’s better than anything
else we’ve tried.
There’s just one thing.
Craig
smiled. “I think I might
know someone who can help.”
John Li looked up at the thug who had just
entered his shop. “Mr. Craig;
I never expected to see you here.
Craig
shrugged. “I didn’t
come alone. I have five men waiting
outside. They’re packing
enough artillery to take out half the
neighbourhood.”
“Still, I’m surprised you
came. I don’t keep my
‘supplies’ here.”
“It’s not your supplies I want,”
Craig replied, sitting down uninvited in the only chair in the small
apothecary’s shop.
“I’m listening,” Li
replied. He was a small man,
but there was something undeniably sinister about him.
“I want you to find the Jade
Dragon.”
Li
laughed. “You must think
I’m completely stupid. I
have no wish to end my life before I’m thirty, and I’m twenty-nine
right now.”
“What would you say to a hundred thousand
dollars?”
“You’re serious,” Li said,
his voice rising in disbelief.
“You actually want me to look for the Jade Dragon in the part
of town where she is most admired?
If anyone found out I’d be dead in a
minute. Even the Chinese crooks
admire her.”
“Two hundred
thousand.”
Li said nothing for a full minute while Craig
waited patiently. Finally the
henchman spoke. “My friends
have orders to come looking for me in five
minutes. Perhaps you’d better
give me your answer.”
“I want a half million in advance,”
Li replied. “And I do it
my way. I don’t want you
or any of your men to be seen in
“Agreed,” said
Craig. “But it’s two
hundred and fifty thousand to start and the rest when you finish.
I don’t want you leaving
the country with the job not done.”
Li
grinned. “Anyone would think
that you didn’t trust me.
It’s a deal. I’ll
start when I get the money.”
Two
months. Even Li had not realized
how many young women between the ages of twenty one and thirty there were
in
As a result all young women who did not have
green eyes; stand at least five feet eight inches tall; and who were not
built like Greek goddesses were quickly
eliminated. Even so, his heroine
prey proved so incredibly elusive that he came to the conclusion that in
spite of qualities so unique that she should have stood out like an albino
giraffe, the Jade Dragon simply never went out in
public. He was beginning to think
that it was just possible she did not live anywhere in
The search was also becoming very
expensive. It had tied up so
many of his men that they could not properly attend to their duties of running
the local protection rackets and numbers
games. If it had not been for
the quarter of a million dollars Nails had advanced him he would have given
up long ago. And then there was
the fact that Nails Larson was about the last man in Metro City Li would
dare to cross. He had no wish
to end his days emulating Jesus Christ.
He looked up as someone knocked at the
door. He was in the back of his
shop, going over the latest list of young women his men had
submitted. Not one of them was
even close. He swore quietly.
This was going to take
forever. “Come in,”
he said finally, looking toward the door.
Willy Chung poked his head
in. That was an interesting thing
about Willy. He didn’t seem
to like coming into Li’s back of the store
office.
“Boss. I think I’ve
got something. You should come
look.”
Li got to his feet at
once. He didn’t even bother
to ask what Chung was talking about.
“Where?” he asked as he pulled on his coat and headed for
the door.
“In the
market. I told the others to
stay away from her. I don’t
think she knows she’s being watched.”
“You better hope not,” Li
muttered. A thug who was spotted
by the Jade Dragon usually had a very short career.
Li pulled his hat over his
eyes. All of his criminal career
he had kept a low profile, but the Jade Dragon seemed to have a way of knowing
much more about the criminal elements of
Metro City than they knew about
her. He didn’t want to take
any chances that he might be recognized.
The two women were standing in the middle
of the market, just as Chung had said.
Although they were modestly dressed in typical oriental trousers and
tunics, and wore wide brimmed hats that obscured their features, their height
alone made them stand out. There
were very few Chinese women of such statuesque
proportions. Both women stood
a head taller than he did.
The market was crowded with
stalls. Motioning Chung and the
rest of his men to keep back he circled around the stalls to where he could
get a good look at them without being
seen.
Green
eyes. They were startling in
their intensity. He quickly looked
away, his gut clenching in fear. If
she had noticed him watching her…
He kept his head down for several seconds,
pretending to study the stall
merchandise. He almost laughed
when he realized that he was looking at a selection of women’s
undergarments. He took a step
backward and turned to check out the stall behind him and then took a quick
peek toward the woman once more. To
his immense relief she wasn’t looking at him, but was examining the
merchandise in the stall next to her.
It gave him a chance to check out the girl standing at her
elbow.
There was no missing the family resemblance
or the startling nearness in age.
Unless Li was mistaken the girl was in her late teens, but that did
not seem possible considering that the woman he thought was the Jade Dragon
appeared to be only in her early
twenties. In all of his research
Li had found nothing to indicate that the Jade Dragon had a sister, but the
girl beside her had the same incredibly beautiful facial features and the
same commanding way of holding her head.
Only her eyes were different, being a startling blue that were as
strange and exotic as the Jade Dragon’s brilliant green
eyes.
Li needed no further
evidence. He faded back into
the market, but kept the two women in
sight. He had found the Jade
Dragon. Now he just needed to
find out where she lived.
Sun Lin picked up an intricately carved piece
of Jade. She had always been
intrigued by the stone for which she was
named. The piece she was holding
was almost translucent and was beautifully carved in the shape of a Chinese
dragon. It seemed very appropriate
somehow. “How much?”
she asked the merchant, speaking in Cantonese.
“Ah,” the stall keeper
replied. “That is a very
rare piece. Ming Dynasty
jade. I was very lucky to come
by it.”
“Oh,” Sun Lin replied, setting down
the statuette. “I had not
realized it was so expensive a piece.
“Forgive me for wasting your
time.” She turned as if
to go.
“Wait,” the merchant
cried. He was a tiny man, barely
four and a half feet tall and probably about sixty years of
age. “You have not even
made an offer.”
Sun Lin shrugged
disinterestedly. “Alright,
five dollars.”
The jade seller looked as if he might have
an epileptic fit. “Five
dollars! You are
mad. The jade alone is worth
fifty.”
Sun Lin seemed to
reconsider. “I’ll double
my offer. Ten
dollars.”
“Am I not making myself
clear? Your offer is
ridiculous.”
“Then name a price,” Sun Lin replied
calmly, “But don’t waste my
time. I have other shopping to
do.”
“It is worth at least
$200. It is an irreplaceable
work of art.”
“I doubt that,” Sun Lin
said. “I expect you carved
it yourself in the back of your shop.”
“You flatter me, my lady,” the little
man exclaimed. “Look at
the intricacies. It is the work
of a master artist.”
Sun Lin smiled and turned to Huan
Yue. “What do you
think? Is it worth twenty
dollars?”
“I suspect you are being taken advantage
of, mother. I expect our friend
here picked up the item for much less than you are
offering.”
The merchant turned to the younger
woman. “I swear to you,
princess. This is a most rare
item. I was lucky to find
it. I could not possibly consider
an offer of less than one hundred and fifty.”
“If it is so valuable then why is it
being offered in a street market?
Surely it should be in a high class shop.”
“Alas, princess,” the little man
returned. “I am a poor
man. This stall is all I can
afford.”
“A poor man with cheap
merchandise. But I feel sorry
for you. Perhaps you could offer
him twenty five dollars, mother.”
“Ah!” the merchant
cried. “What am I to do
against two such beautiful and heartless
women? I will surely be
ruined.”
“Liu Hong,” Sun Lin
smiled. “Surely you are
the greatest liar in the world.”
“I speak the truth when I speak of your
beauty gracious lady. But I cannot
let my admiration overrule my desire to make an honest
living.”
Sun Lin’s smile
widened. She turned her dazzling
eyes fully on the protesting stall
keeper. She had bargained with
Liu on many another occasion and enjoyed the
challenge. “Your plight
overwhelms my common sense. I
will offer thirty dollars.”
Liu looked as if he was about to
faint. “Oh, beauteous
lady. My wife will beat me, but
I can let it go for one hundred and forty.”
“I happen to know that you are widowed,
Liu. I doubt that you are in
much danger of being beaten.”
“My wife will rise from the grave if
I go any lower. I must stand
firm on one-forty.”
Half an hour later Sun Lin and Huan Hue walked
slowly back the way they had come.
Sun Lin cradled the delicate jade statuette in her
arms. “It is very pretty,”
Huan Yue commented.
“More than pretty,” Sun Lin
returned. “I suspect it
is unique. For once Liu may not
have known what he was selling.”
“Then it is Ming Dynasty?” her daughter
asked.
“Oh I doubt
that. I suspect it is much
older. I will have to ask Master
Zhou.”
Yuan Hue
nodded. Together they made their
way back to the home of the Chinese master who Sun Lin regarded as a second
father. A hundred feet behind
them John Li nodded in satisfaction.
It was time to contact Craig.
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