Chapter Twenty-Three
Sally could not be sure what time it was, whether it was day or night, since the room was dark and had no windows. But it did not matter. She just kept maneuvering her chi. Those who hit her xues were on lower levels; so it was not hard for Sally to break through the xues. She only needed time.
“What will we do to her?” A voice came from outside the small room.
“Joseph will come here to take care of her. Maybe, Boss wants her as a hostage.”
The door opened. Sally kept her eyes shut as if she were still unconscious.
“Shall we feed her?”
“Better not. Starve her for two days. Then she wun't have much strength to resist when Joseph comes to take her.”
“They'll remove her from here?”
“Yes. To a safer place.” They closed the door and left. Sally could sense it was daytime, though her eyes were shut. Probably, the Joseph guy would come to take her after midnight. She still had time to break through her xues.
***
“I can't imagine how she could be kidnapped,” said Tricia when they were back home in the evening. Their father came home early, but none knew what to do or where to search for her. Tricia had called Sam with the bad news. Sam had sent out the missing girl's information to all the patrol cars in New Jersey, but nothing turned up. It was twenty-four hours since Sally had left for her date yesterday. All of a sudden the phone rang in the living room. Everyone jumped. Ransom notice? Not likely. After the third ring, Tricia grabbed the receiver.
“May I speak to Sally? This is Henry.”
Tricia let out her long held breath in nervousness. “Hi, Henry. This is her sister, Tricia. Sally never came home since last night. What happened to her when she was with you yesterday?” She scratched at the nape of her neck. Others fixed their gaze on her, hoping to detect something from the expression on her face, which was expressionless.
“Everything was all right when we were in the restaurant, but I got an emergency beep from my company; so I left early. She was still there when I left. What could have happened to her?” His anxiety was apparent and genuine. So he could not be an accomplice, her instinct told her.
“Where did you have dinner?” asked Tricia. Henry gave her the name and address of the restaurant they’d had dinner last night.
Lois and Tricia drove to the restaurant. As soon as they pulled into the parking lot, they noticed that Sally's car still sat there in a space. They went into the restaurant to make inquiries. The woman behind the register counter said that nothing unusual took place yesterday in the restaurant.
“Anything happen outside, like fighting?” asked Lois.
The woman shook her head. “No. If there was a fight in the parking lot, we'd surely know it. Even I would go out to have a look.”
Nevertheless, Sally was missing from the parking lot. That was obvious since her car was still there. They came out. Tricia would drive Sally's car back. When she neared the car, she detected a faint trace of the smell of chloroform left on the hood of Sally's car. “Lois, they used chloroform,” Tricia told Lois who was going to her own car.
“Let's go home first,” said Lois, getting into her car. Since Tricia had no key for Sally's car, she had to pick open the door and put the wires together to start the car. A good detective is a good thief and a good thief can be a good detective if he wants to.
***
By evening Sally had undone the Stop-Motion Xue and the Mute Xue as well. The last problem was the bondage. The rope was thick, not easy to break. There was nothing in the dark room to cut the rope with, but if there was one, her hands were tied to her sides. She could not use her hands. She writhed the fingers of her right hand, wanting to loosen her fingers out of the bonds first. She shrank her thigh muscle a little. Her fingers moved sideways then slipped out between the loops. She worked out her right hand the same way. She could use her hand to do something now, but at that critical moment. footsteps were heard outside the small room. She kept her eyes shut. Those people only knew kungfu. They did not know anything about chloroform: how long the effect could last. If they had acquired some chemical knowledge, they would have known that the girl in their capture had long been past the comatose stage.
“Get her into the trunk of my car,” someone shouted out the order. Sally opened her eyes just a slit and saw this was the tall man they had fought with in New York. He must be the Joseph guy. Two guys picked her up, one holding her arms right under her shoulders, the other her ankles. They carried her out of the dark room, out of the bright big room, down the staircase, through a side door into the garage; a Lincoln Towncar was standing there with an open trunk. They let her down into the trunk and closed it. They didn't even notice that one of her hands was outside the bonds. Sally began to fumble in the trunk. Someone got into the car and started the engines. The car was moving now and after a while, accelerating.
Sally had two choices. One was to free herself. The other was to be taken as a captive to their secret lair so she could know where it was, but if there was someone whose kungfu level was higher than hers, she would be at a great disadvantage and her family would be at a great disadvantage, too, since they would use her to threaten them. She could never escape then and have no way to notify her family. She would be like a poor lamb on the altar waiting at the mercy of her captors, so better to escape first. She fumbled and fumbled and suddenly came across a screwdriver. She wriggled her body so that her freed hand could grasp the screwdriver. She used the sharp end to pry at the rope, filling it with her chi to strengthen its prying force. With one loop of the rope broken, she worked the bonds loose by degrees. She could feel the car at high speed. She estimated that it might be half an hour or so before the car slowed down and stopped at last. Then a garage door creaked open. The car moved in and the engine was killed. She could hear Joseph get out and slam the car door shut. The rope was off her now, lying aside like a dead snake, or more like the skin of a snake cast away. She was ready to spring out. Though she was starved for two days, thanks to the dinner in that restaurant, she had eaten more than enough there and now she still had enough strength to fight. Joseph seemed to go into the house. Two guys came into the garage, talking. They came to fetch her into the house, she thought. When the trunk was opened, she leaped out head first, and hit the two guys on their Mute Xues to make them unable to give any vocal noises, then on their Stop-Motion Xues. The two guys fell on the ground, couldn't even moan. Sally grabbed both of them with both hands and thrust them into the trunk and shut it.
Since she did not know how many people were in the house, she better play safe and escape first. She opened the garage door and slipped out. She memorized the house number and the surroundings, then ran to the corner of the crossroads to look at the sign to commit the name of the street in her mind. At that time, she heard a commotion coming from the house.
Joseph waited in the living room for the two guys to bring Sally in. A long while later, he got suspicious and came to the garage to check. There was no one in the garage. Where were the two guys? They must be disciplined, he thought. Then he opened the trunk and saw the two guys inside, staring at him, unable to speak. He pulled them out one by one and undid their xues. He sent out all six men in the house to chase Sally with guns in hand. His order was to kill her if they could not catch her alive. Sally jumped onto a fire escape on the side of an apartment house, hiding in the shadows and watching them rush by underneath her in different directions. She deliberately took out a gum from her pocket, and stripping it of its paper clothes, shoved it into her mouth. She climbed up on the steps, humming a tune to herself, until she reached the fourth floor. She saw a window opened a little and lifting it a bit wider, she slipped inside, kicking at something under the It was an empty Coke can, which rolled down the room on the bare floor, making some noise. Sally tried to mew, but she was not sure if the tenant in the room kept a cat or not.
“Who's there?” a man's voice asked groggily. Sally crouched down and mewed, just to try to fool the man. “Susan, you can't keep sneaking into my room.” Susan was the cat kept by the next door neighbor. “You made a mess in my room last time. You remember?” He dared not offend the cat because it belonged to the girl next door and he wanted to court her. “If I take her stray cat to her, she'll thank me at least, maybe smile at me.” Thus thinking, he turned on the lamp on the nightstand beside the bed. He was still half-asleep.
It was a bedroom. A man in his thirties opened his eyes wide to look at Sally. Beholding a pretty young girl, the man became fully awake. “Oh, God bless me,” he exclaimed. “My wife just eloped with some guy. God sent you to me.” He tapped the empty half of the bed. “Come and lie down here. I'll treat you nicely, so you won't desert me.” Sally stood up and walked to the bed. She poked at his Sleep Xue so that he fell asleep again. He would wake up after two hours. Sally used the phone on the nightstand and made a call home. It was four o'clock in the morning. After two rings, the phone was picked up. “Hello?” It was Mrs. Lin's voice.
“Hi, Mom. It's me, Sally,” she talked in an undertone.
“Where are you? What happened to you? Are you okay?” Concerned questions bombarded Sally.
“I'm fine now. It's a long story. Can I talk to Lois?” Sally responded with three short sentences.
“Hi, Sally. What do you want?” Lois was already on another line in her bedroom.
“I'm in China Town, Manhattan.” She recognized the street. “Can you and Tricia come? We may have a fight ahead.” She gave Lois the location where they would meet. A pop sound came through the line.
***
Lois and Tricia arrived at the location forty-five minutes later. Sally stepped out from a shaded porch of some building, her face hidden behind a big gum bubble. She got into the backseat and changed into the black catsuit they brought for her. There were three oxygen masks on the backseat, too. They drove to that street and parked their car a block away. The three girls got out, each carrying a mask. Led by Sally, they ran to the house from which Sally had escaped. They put on the masks. Sally and Lois went in by the front door and Tricia went round the house to the back door. All silence and quietude inside, though they could see lights somewhere. The front door wasn't locked. They pushed in. Tricia came in by the back door. No one appeared to accuse them of intrusion. They went through every room and the basement, even searched all the closets. The house must have been abandoned. “That's their old tactic,” Sally said, blowing a bubble again, then sucking it in. “It seems that they are always prepared to move, so they can move quickly without leaving behind any trace. A sly hare has three dens, as a Chinese saying goes.” The girls had learned Chinese since their childhood, taught by their mother at home. In high school, Lois had learned French, Tricia, German, and Sally, Spanish. They were trilingual.
When they got home, it was six thirty in the morning. Mr. and Mrs. Lin were already up. Mrs. Lin was preparing breakfast in the kitchen. Mr. Lin was reading a local newspaper. As the girls came in through the front door, Mrs. Lin stepped out from the kitchen into the living room where they all sat and listened to Sally's adventure last night.
“Next time, if you see a cylinder, prepare for anything and everything. Anything can come from a cylinder. The poisonous needles must have been sprung out from some kind of a cylinder, too,” Mr. Lin warned.
“How could they know that you had dinner in that restaurant?” asked Tricia.
“They must have followed me. From what I heard, it was schemed beforehand to take me as their prisoner and use me as a threat to our family,” said Sally. She spat out the gum into a napkin, ready for some breakfast.
“All of you must be extra careful,” said Mrs. Lin. “And--” A burning smell drifted into the living room from the kitchen. “Oh, my breakfast!” Mrs. Lin rushed back into the kitchen.
***
At nightfall, the three girls took every precaution and made every preparation before they left home. They drove to the warehouse area in Piscataway and parked their car a few blocks away. It was cloudy, but as the banks of the clouds sailed forth, driven by the wind, the nicely curved crescent moon would sometimes peep out from between the clouds, or figuratively speaking, through the cloud windows. It looked like a well-pruned eyebrow of a fashion model. To keep her company and comfort her loneliness, some stars roamed around her high in the sky, twinkling like the eyes of Augus. All was quiet except for the occasional chirping of the crickets somewhere in the grass and bushes. The three girls walked to the warehouse in question. Sally jumped into a thick-leaved tree, facing the overhead doors of the warehouse. She didn't forget to put a gum in her mouth and chewed it in silence. Tricia sprang up onto the roof of the warehouse that Uncle Charles had worked in. Lois soared up onto the roof of the deserted warehouse. Both hid in the shadows. They wore tiny communications equipment like spies would use.
Hour after hour slipped by. Nothing happened. Not even the supposed regular patrols of the security guards. Either no guards were willing to work here, or they refused to patrol and just stayed inside, the girls conjectured. They came down to meet in the street just before daybreak, went to their car and drove back home in crestfallen, downhearted frustration. Sally spat out the gum into the trunk of a tree and it stuck there. They got some sleep in the daytime and went there again at night.
For three nights at a stretch, they waited there in vain, a waste of time and energy, but they didn't want to give up. Success always results from perseverance--and sometimes patience.
It was Sunday night and raining lightly. They stationed themselves at the accustomed posts. The hour hand moved to one o'clock in the morning. Not even a ghost was seen. It seemed a failing night again. Just as disappointment befell them, two black cars with headlights off glided to a halt before the big overhead door of the forlorn warehouse. A guy got out from the backseat of the first car and went to the door. He pushed some button and the door rose noiselessly. He walked in first. The cars followed. The lights inside were on all night and all day. The warehouse had windows as high as the second floor level at the sides. There were catwalks on that level. Someone thrust his head out from a window and looked down at the lane between the warehouses. Not a soul. Tricia watched from the opposite roof with a pair of binoculars. She could see the inside through the windows. Fifteen minutes later, another dark car came and drove into the warehouse since the bay door still hung high up. Two men jumped out from the third car, carrying a black briefcase. Four people stood opposite them. One lifted a briefcase of the same size and color. He opened it to show the new arrivals. Tricia could see the contents in the briefcase, small plastic bags of a white substance. One of the newcomers lifted his briefcase and opened it to show all the cash inside. They exchanged the briefcases. One party checked the merchandise and the other the paper money to see if they were genuine. Then they nodded to each other, a sign of gratification. Why don't they kill each other like in some movies, Tricia thought.
During the trade process, Lois slipped down and stole inside and hid herself behind a stack of plastic crates. She flung out a coin, which landed in the right rear tire of the third car. The tire went flat. But these people were busy with their own dealings. No one noticed it. When they finished their business, the two men got into the third car. As they started to back out, they found something was wrong. They heard police sirens when they got out to change the tire. Sally had called Sam. The other two cars were blocked by the third one; so the other party could not escape, either. A guy rushed to the door and closed it. All the lights inside went out. The police came, surrounded the warehouse and shouted at the men inside with a megaphone. All was quiet and silent inside as if no one was there. The police were wondering if this was a false alarm, a juvenile prank. Sam arrived. Tricia and Sally got down from their hiding positions. The reinforcement came and the police began the attack. Lois leaped out from her hiding place to the door and pushed the open button and then rolled back into the hiding place. Since she wore a black catsuit, no one inside had noticed her movement. These drug dealers were surprised to see the door opening automatically. They crouched behind the cars and fired at the doorway to prevent the police from coming in. The police fired back, but were in no hurry to enter the warehouse. The police were waiting for their ammunition to run out. When the men inside ceased firing, the police began shouting as if they would dart in. The men inside fired again.
All of a sudden, Tricia saw a guy leap out from the warehouse window towards the warehouse across the lane, carrying a black briefcase. He wanted to escape with the money or the merchandise. Tricia ran after him. The guy broke through a window into the other warehouse. Tricia jumped up and followed him through the broken
In the deserted warehouse, as lights filtered in from the open door, Lois could see shadows moving from her hiding place. She glided on the ground towards the third car. Two men hid behind the third car, near the nose. In the gliding process, Lois slung out two coins, which hit both men on their Stop-Motion Xues. Lois knew precisely where the xues were when she could discern the shape of a body. She had practiced this skill in the dark first at lit incenses. The lit incenses stood in some container and Lois was fifty feet away. She should hit the red end of the lit incenses without fail. Then she should move farther, say, a hundred feet away. Then she had practiced at a plastic body marked with all the xues. She had thrown tiny pebble fragments at it from different angles and different distance. When a xue was hit, a chime like “Ding” flowed out from its mouth. It was a specially made equipment model for that purpose.
When she saw the two men sink to the ground, she slid to the second car. The front door was open on this side. A man hid behind it, firing at the open bay door. Lois cast a coin towards him with the same result. She jumped into the air to the first car. The trunk was open. A man was lying on top of the car, using the trunk lid as a shield. Lois hit him on his xue and he rolled from the top to the ground with a thud. Someone fired at her, but she wore the bulletproof catsuit. She landed on the other side of the cars and rolled into a dark corner. She reckoned there were still two men that needed to be disarmed. She looked from her hiding place, but no shadows could be seen. She instructed Sally, whispering into her minuscule mouthpiece, to fire into the warehouse. Then she heard a gun firing back from inside the first car. She rolled towards the first car and could distinguish a shadow in the backseat since the door was open. She lunged at him, striking his xue with her chi. Then she heard a gun firing above her. A guy hid on the catwalk. Lois was now in the car. She rolled out to the wall and stayed there in the dark. She took out her infrared binoculars and surveyed the catwalk and found a man perched there with a gun in hand, facing the doorway. She put away the binoculars and soared to the catwalk to some footholds behind the man's back. When her feet touched some iron bars, she made a little noise on the old frames. The man turned to look. As he saw a shadow behind him, he hesitated. He was not sure if it was his comrade or not. Lois already struck his xue and he crumbled on the catwalk. She jumped down and found the switchboard and turned the lights on.
The police knew from Sally through her communications with Lois that all the bad eggs were subdued inside the warehouse. They dashed in to handcuff them and put them in custody.
Lois learned from Sally between chewing her gum that Tricia chased a guy into the next warehouse. She ran to the lane and flew in through the broken
Tricia got inside and fell on her feet on the ground. The guy was nowhere to be seen. This warehouse was lit up, but there were so many stacks of wooden boxes, Tricia could not check all the aisles between the stacks. She rushed to the front side. There was an Exit door and a guardroom. When she reached there, she saw the rogue holding the guard as hostage. The door of the guardroom was closed. She could see them through the The thug was talking on the phone so loudly that she could hear some broken words through the closed door and “--a car full of gas--no tailing--” He was speaking to the police. He put down the phone and pointed his gun at the guard's head, glaring at Tricia through the windowpanes.
“Where are you, Tricia?” She suddenly heard Lois on the earplug.
“I'm before the guardroom in the front. Don't let the guy see you.”
The phone rang inside the guardroom. “Good. Everyone beyond one hundred feet of the car,” he barked into the phone and slammed down the receiver. He waved the guard to go ahead. The guard opened the door and stepped out. The thug waved Tricia to go before the guard. Tricia obeyed and walked to the exit door, followed by the guard, then by the thug. Before Tricia could push open the exit door, she heard a thud and clatters behind her. She knew the inevitable had happened. She turned around and saw the guy collapsed on the ground, the gun and the briefcase lying by his side. The guard turned around to look, too, surprise on his face. He must be thinking that the guy had a sudden serious heart attack. Lois appeared from behind a stack of wooden boxes. She had used her chi to hit the thug on his xues from a distance. They opened the exit door to let in the police. The man was taken away together with his gun and his briefcase.
***
Next day at breakfast, Lois filled in her father and mother--the latter just returned from the chaperon trip to the school--about the warehouse, the guard killed near it and her suspicion of the connection between Charles's death and the illegal trade in the deserted warehouse.
“I really cannot see why they wanted to kill Uncle Charles at home when they had dealings in that warehouse,” said Sally. At the mention of the Charles’s death, the barely healed wound in their hearts seemed reopened and the long-suppressed sorrow revived. They lost their appetite in deep sighs and red eyes. The girls wiped away some tears in the recollection of a vacation together.
It was more than ten years ago and Alida had not been born yet. The two families rented a yacht and cruised on the sea off the coast of Florida. Mr. Lin was operating the yacht while others were sitting on the front deck for a picnic. It was a shiny day with a halcyon sea. Uncle Charles was playing a guitar and Mrs. Pan, his wife, was singing an Italian song, “Santa Lucia”. The girls clapped their hands to the music. Mrs. Lin was taking the food out of a basket. There were a few yachts sailing on the sea. The gulls were hovering about the sails. The girls threw crumbs into the air and the gulls swooped down and caught them in their beaks. Suddenly a faint cry of “Help!” came from a yacht fifty yards away, but kungfu people have unusual sharp hearing. Uncle Charles put down his guitar and stood up. He flung a can of Coke towards the yacht and leaped high following it. Almost halfway before he would fall into the sea, he reached the can he had slung away before and caught it under his foot. He inhaled deeply like a balloon filled with helium and used the can in midair as a foot supporter and jumped higher, swooping down to the yacht in question. The can touched by his foot lost its kinetic energy and fell directly into the water. The kinetic energy in the can turned into the supporting force for his foot. Charles landed on the railing of the other yacht and jumped down on the deck. The crying came from the cabin below, so he rushed down the companionway into the cabin. He saw a man looking like an Arab beating a girl with a whip.
“Stop!” Charles roared. The man turned to face him. “Who are you? You are trespassing.” He spoke English with a strange accent.
“Why are you beating her? That's against law here,” said Charles.
“I am on the open sea. American law can't reach my yacht. This is my slave. I bought her. So I can do whatever I want with her.” He seemed to have every reason for his behavior.
“A slave? In the late twentieth century?” Charles wondered. “I'm not a representative of American law, but I'll act as a representative of justice. Justice has no boundary and territory.” Then Charles turned to the girl. “Who are you? Are you really his slave?” Charles knew such things still existed in Arab countries.
“I was kidnapped and sold in the slave market and he bought me. But I'm not a born slave. I want to go back to my family,” the girl wept. Charles turned to the man. “Although you are not the one who kidnapped her, kidnapping is a crime everywhere. Will you send her back to her family?” The man looked at Charles, fully aware that he was no match for Charles if he wanted to fight him. So he promised to send the girl home when they were back in their country, but he really had no intention of keeping the promise, he just wanted to get rid of Charles for the moment. Charles knew that such a man who could beat a poor girl was not a trustworthy man; so he jabbed a special xue on him. The man suddenly felt weak and had no strength left even to lift a whip.
“What did you to me?” he cried. “I'm sick now.”
“You are not sick. You will be normal again after a year when you send the girl to her family. Remember that, but if you don't send her home, you'll be always weak,” Charles warned.
“You did some magic on me?” The man looked frightened.
“You could say so.” Charles wanted to keep the man in fear so that he would not break his promise. Then the girl, having stopped weeping, begged Charles not to leave her here with the Arab, but to take her with him. She could call her parents to come to take her home. Charles thought it a better idea and turned to leave the cabin followed by the girl. When he got on the deck he saw that Mr. Lin had pulled their rented yacht alongside the one he was on, so he just jumped over, taking the girl under his arm by her middle. Mr. Lin steered their boat away. When Charles told everyone the story, they were sympathetic to the girl and satisfied with what Charles had done.
***
Lois and Sam were in the interrogation room. The two men in the third car were members of another drug-dealing group. They confessed everything and the other members were arrested. The five men belonged to the Black Panther, which dealt in drugs, too. For safety’s sake, the five men were kept in a secret place still under police custody, but not in the local prison. That's where Lois and Sam went. They set up an interrogation room there. The man who had tried to flee with a briefcase of money was called Tom, the ringleader of the group. The other four men only knew that they were engaged in drug dealings, and no more. So they would question Tom alone. Lois had poked the Null-Kungfu Xue of all the five guys so that they had no more chi inside, that meant they could no longer fight with chi. They lost their kungfu. They were just like ordinary people. If they could still use some karate moves, they were weak, had no more strength than common people.
Before Lois and Sam came here, they had gone to see all the evidence gathered by the police. There was a small cylinder the police got when they searched Tom. At one end it was pointed. When a button on the side was pushed, a poisonous needle spat out. That was the murder weapon for Charles and the other guard. So Tom was the real murderer, but in the whole big Black Panther case, Tom was only a pawn, a hitman. The whole case wouldn't be deemed solved yet with the arrest of Tom. Only two small, attached cases could be deemed as solved. There were still loose ends and a big one to be tied up.
Tom had first wanted to ask their attorney to be present when he was questioned, but he had heard of the story of the lawyer asleep, so he didn't make that demand. What's the use of a sleeping attorney present when he could not defend him?
“Why did you kill people?” asked Lois.
“We didn't want them to report to the police,” Tom answered candidly.
“Were you sure when you killed them that they knew something illegal was going on in that warehouse, so that you must kill them to keep your secret?”
“I'm not sure, but we must play safe. If the killing can assure us of safety, we just do it.”
“Why didn't you kill the first guard on the spot?”
“I tried. I issued several needles, but none worked.” He shook his head, still looking baffled.
“So you followed him home?”
“No. The first time I failed, I just reported to my contact--”
“Who's your contact?” Lois cut in.
Tom hesitated. Lois knew what he was thinking and fearing.
“You are in the same situation with your people whether you tell it to me or not. They will kill you as well, if we don't keep you in a safe place. But if you tell me all you know, you'll be in a position to negotiate with the court.”
Tom thought for a few minutes, then said, “Okay. I tell you. My contact is Joseph. I only report to and accept orders from him.”
“We know him. He'll soon be hauled in,” said Lois.
“Then he told me that I should go to such an address, at such a time, on such a date, and kill the guard. He's really a potential threat to our business, Joseph said.”
Lois fully understood now that they had arranged to have David instigate Master Chang to challenge Uncle Charles to a fight on that night, using Master Chang as a distraction and cover since they also knew his habit. Tom didn't follow Uncle Charles home that night. He simply got there before Uncle Charles came back and hid in that tree, waiting for the right time to issue his lethal needle.
“Where did you get the cylinder with the poisonous needles?”
“Joseph mailed it to me. We never met. I reported to him on the phone, using some jargon.”
“What's his phone number?”
“He called me. I never called him. So dun’t have his number.”
Lois believed that he had told the truth. On their way out, Sam asked that if the first time they hadn't killed Uncle Charles on the spot, how they could have killed him at home.
“Because Uncle Charles was very much afraid to be bitten by mosquitoes. So when he stayed, or walked, outside at night in the mosquito season, he would ooze out his chi all over his body, almost half an inch thick, to protect him from mosquito bites and also from the attack of so tiny a weapon as the needle. That’s why the needle could not penetrate the chi surrounding his body. Only a first-class master can do that. And if a kungfu person can do that, he is a first-class master. But when he fought with another master, he had to use his chi to fight and couldn't ooze it out like that to protect himself at the same time. So the needle could get into his head unawares.”
***
“Bravo, Laura!” Sally applauded as she saw Laura practicing boxing on the hanging sandbag in the basement, which was partitioned into two sections: family room and family gym. Since their grandfather died, they’d had to sell that big house and move here into a much smaller one, but that was fine with everybody. The goal of their lives was not to live in a big house.
“I'm tired, fatigued, exhausted.” Seeing Sally, Laura complained like a spoilt child before its mother. “Alida insists that I should exercise boxing and weight-lifting.”
“That's for the purpose of enhancing your strength. If you've learned all the karate moves, but don't have enough strength, how can you bring a guy down when you hit him? It's real life, not like in a movie in which a person being hit just falls by himself. That's acting.”
“Do you mean that the more sweat I'm letting out now, the less blood I'll shed later when I really fight a bad guy?” She wiped her face, then her neck with a dry towel.
“You are right, absolutely right. By the by, any letter to your parents?”
“Not yet. I didn’t have time to write recently. After practice, I simply have no strength left to stir my fingers, let alone to hold a pen,” she grimaced.
“That's all right. They know you are safe with us,” Sally comforted her.
“You see, here comes my dear little coach.” She faked a nervously frightened expression. “Hi, Alida. Can I drink some water before the exercises? If I don't, I'll have no more sweat coming from the pores to lubricate my skin.”
“Hello, Laura. I must go to school right now for some activities. Sorry, I can't teach you today.”
“I don't know if I should feel sad or glad. Anyway, enjoy yourself, Alida.”
Sally could not help but laugh and patted Laura on the shoulder. Laura pretended to be wounded and collapsed on the floor, adding, “Stop chewing your gum, please, Sally. I am so exhausted that I can't see any muscle movement, not even your cheek muscle.”
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