The two of them were fairly satisfied with Xu Xinran’s tactfulness, and they agreed to meet at Juanshan at ten o’clock tomorrow morning.
By the next day, the two of them arrived at Juanshan a little ahead of time.
Juanshan was still quite some distance away from the downtown area. Consequently, upon arriving here, the land was vast and the population sparse. Behind them stood the mountains, and before them lay the sea. The fishing grounds connected right into the vast ocean, and at a single glance, the sea and the sky merged into one, stretching into ten thousand leagues of green waves.
Standing on the pier, which was highly popular among anglers, Ji Xun welcomed the sea breeze for a short while, looking lost in thought. “I’m thinking about a question.”
“What question?” Huo Ranyin said. He wasn’t standing together with Ji Xun, but was walking back and forth along the road, occasionally lifting his head to check the surveillance cameras distributed around the area.
“Zheng Xuewang said that it takes half an hour to arrive after getting into the vehicle. Driving a straight line from the downtown area to this place takes us more than half an hour. Adding in the time the casino takes to take detours back and forth to confuse the gamblers inside the vehicle, a simple conclusion can be drawn—the actual stronghold of the Laifu Casino is in fact right in this vicinity.”
“But why would the casino arrange its stronghold in this vicinity?” Ji Xun said. “There are few people here. With few people, anything one does becomes prominent, which also means an increased probability of being discovered. Furthermore, it might not even be easy to attract customers, which doesn’t fit a casino’s requirement of choosing a location to hide out in a bustling city.”
“Hide out in a bustling city, indeed,” Huo Ranyin sneered. “Correspondingly, being far away from the downtown area also means that it isn’t easy for minor adjustments to be noticed by others. For example, changing the direction of the cameras distributed around here to create a surveillance blind spot is also very simple.”
“It’s been moved into a surveillance blind spot?” Hearing this, Ji Xun turned around.
“The blind spot is huge.” Huo Ranyin gave a casual example, “Even if a row of elephants were to walk past here, they wouldn’t necessarily be captured on camera.”
“That makes it understandable then.” Ji Xun nodded.
After walking a round back and forth and analyzing the existing situation, it was only a little past nine o’clock, leaving nearly an hour until their agreed meeting time with Xu Xinran.
“Are you tired?” Ji Xun asked Huo Ranyin.
“Not tired. Are you tired? Go sleep in the car for a bit,” Huo Ranyin replied.
However, Ji Xun had already arranged a better resting place. He rented a beach blanket from a bar further ahead that was still open, found a fairly nice spot to spread it out, and waved like a fortune cat to call Huo Ranyin over: “I originally wanted to rent a fishing bucket or something…”
“We’re working,” Huo Ranyin said with a stern face.
“So I only rented this. Soaking up some sun and sleeping for a bit—rest and calcium supplementation, missing out on neither.”
“Is it really necessary to start health preservation from right now?” Huo Ranyin could no longer keep a straight face.
“This is called being prepared beforehand so you don’t panic afterward,” Ji Xun said. “Want to lie down together for a bit?”
Huo Ranyin shook his head, merely sitting down.
Ji Xun comfortably lay down first. After lying down for a short while, he felt that he should have a pillow, so he shifted his head, quietly placing his head onto Huo Ranyin’s thighs. He kept his eyes open, gazing toward the sky.
The sun at nine o’clock in the morning was not yet fierce, but it had already cast thousands of rays of auspicious light toward the ground below. Ji Xun blinked his eyes, and the points of light bloomed into rainbow-like edges within his pupils.
“Huo Ranyin.”
“What is it?”
“Give me your hand.”
He pulled one of Huo Ranyin’s hands over, placing it in front of his own eyes and adjusting the position so that the slender fingertips of this palm rested exactly on the edge of the rainbow he was seeing.
It was just like magic.
Exactly like Huo Ranyin—
In the dark, freezing night, a small, exquisite, gorgeously brilliant, and mind-awakening piece of magic.
Huo Ranyin’s fingers pressed down, obscuring Ji Xun’s eyes and blocking out the sunlight that troubled them.
Taking a quick nap under the sunlight was like time slipping through the fingers, leaving one somewhat oblivious. In short, by the time Ji Xun seemed to suddenly snap back from his deep thoughts, the sound of a car engine in the distance had already been blown to his ears by the sea breeze carrying a faint, salty flavor. He opened his eyes to look ahead; at the end of the road, the blue Jetta was becoming increasingly prominent.
At ten o’clock in the morning, not a minute early and not a minute late, Xu Xinran arrived at the meeting place precisely on time.
The group wasted no words and set off immediately.
Xu Xinran’s car led the way, taking Ji Xun and Huo Ranyin along. Driving up Juanshan with practiced familiarity, his car made countless twists and turns through the roads of Juanshan. In just a short moment, they drove completely from the main road with surveillance into an undeveloped mountain path.
But on this path overgrown with weeds, there were indeed traces of tires repeatedly crushing the ground. Naturally, there was absolutely no surveillance here.
After the car drove along this bumpy mountain road for five or six minutes, Ji Xun caught a faint sound coming from ahead. But the distance was too far, and the noise was small and chaotic, so he couldn’t distinguish it yet. “What is that ahead?”
“A vegetable market,” Huo Ranyin gave the answer.
The sharp-eared criminal police captain had not deciphered the riddle incorrectly. Once the car completely left the bumpy road, the view ahead suddenly opened up, and an open-air vegetable market appeared right before their eyes.
At this point, Ji Xun let out an “oh”: “It’s a small village.”
Just a short distance ahead, inside an open-air vegetable market about the size of a basketball court, the sounds of hawking, the clucking of chickens and ducks, and the sounds of people chatting and laughing converged into the noise Ji Xun had heard from afar just now. Further out were rural dirt roads and one- or two-story flat houses and small buildings. The houses were sparse, and no storefronts could be seen, presenting a backward and dilapidated appearance.
This was a tiny seaside village hidden on the back side of Juanshan.
Right then, the blue Jetta suddenly stopped.
Huo Ranyin’s phone rang. He picked it up, and subsequently, Xu Xinran’s voice resounded within the car cabin.
“This is as far as it goes.”
“What do you mean?”
“Literally…” After a night had passed, Xu Xinran seemed to have calculated the gains and losses clearly. At this moment, he analyzed the pros and cons deliberately, “As the officer can see, ahead is a small village. If outsiders enter, it will be very conspicuous. I’ve been here before and am a familiar face. If I follow you guys inside now, not only will I be unable to help you crack the case, but I will instead drag you down and increase your risk of exposure. So, we might as well part ways here.”
“The specific location of the casino,” Huo Ranyin did not grow angry, but he sharply brought up the most critical question.
“As a law-abiding citizen…” Xu Xinran’s words were cut short by a cold, mocking laugh from Ji Xun.
However, talking over the phone across a bit of distance, without the pressure of a direct confrontation, Xu Xinran appeared much more at ease. He casually picked up his interrupted words on his own: “…I have no reason whatsoever to go checking door-to-door to find out exactly where the casino is. I can only say that I have always smelled a certain odor.”
Evidently, Xu Xinran was holding a card back.
Throughout his call, even if the word “gambling” appeared, it was spoken from the perspective of an onlooker. He never truly associated himself with gambling, acting extremely cautious and wary that the police might trap his words to record them and convict him.
“What odor?”
“The odor of a vegetable market,” Xu Xinran said. “Oh right, the building is a single-story flat house, and the windows are all covered by dark blue, small-flowered curtains. The curtains are nailed dead to the wall.”
Ji Xun and Huo Ranyin exchanged a glance.
That was about enough.
The village was only this small. Xu Xinran saying he could smell the odor of the vegetable market proved that the casino was set up near the market, and he had also described the condition of the curtains—so as long as they drove inside and did a round around this open-air vegetable market, they would surely find the specific location of the casino.
“Just that? Brother, if you don’t actively cooperate with the police now, when the police go through thousands of hardships to eliminate all difficulties, find the casino, and obtain the evidence, you, a gambler with a prior record…”
However, Ji Xun still issued a cold, laughing threat. Toward a fox like Xu Xinran, whether there were results or not, it didn’t hurt to push a couple more times just in case.
“The officer needs to speak with evidence. When have I ever participated in gambling?” Xu Xinran flatly denied it, but he quickly dropped a new lead, “But since you mention it, I remember something…”
There really were results. The two of them were speechless.
“Not saying it just now but saying it now?” Huo Ranyin was dissatisfied.
“It’s not that I deliberately didn’t bring it up, but this one is somewhat different…” Xu Xinran pondered for a moment, “One time… it wasn’t the norm, just one time… I smelled a stench over there.”
“A vegetable market has a stench every day,” Ji Xun said. Even right now, before they had entered the village, they could already smell the foul air drifting over from the vegetable market.
“The vegetable market was closed that day,” Xu Xinran said. “That kind of odor was also different from the foul air of the vegetable market.”
“What odor was it?”
“I think,” Xu Xinran said, “it was the stench of a corpse.”
These abrupt words aroused the vigilance of the two men.
Huo Ranyin spoke up: “The stench of a corpse?”
“Yes. A vegetable market also has the smell of rotten fish, bad shrimp, dead pigs, and dead sheep, but the smell of a vegetable market is mixed. It isn’t like that pure scent of decaying organic matter.”
“When did you smell it?” Ji Xun pressed further. “Do you think the people in the casino beat someone to death and are hiding a corpse?”
“I smelled it the Sunday before last,” Xu Xinran said. “As for whether it was someone from the casino… I don’t think so. Out of professional sensitivity, I paid very close attention to observing the people around me when I smelled that odor. But from top to bottom, everyone was extremely puzzled, and they were even discussing where the smell could be coming from since the vegetable market wasn’t open.”
“Of course,” Xu Xinran said again after a moment, “perhaps it wasn’t necessarily the stench of a human corpse either, but rather the smell after a large animal decayed. It’s all decaying organic matter, so it doesn’t smell all that different.”
The two of them asked a few more questions back and forth. Only after ensuring they had squeezed out every bit of what Xu Xinran knew were they satisfied.
Once the blue car turned around and departed, Ji Xun folded his arms across his chest, his gaze staring straight through the car’s windshield.
Huo Ranyin: “What are you looking at?”
“Looking at the village.” Ji Xun said, “Don’t you find this village looks a bit familiar?”
Huo Ranyin looked forward for a couple of glances and said objectively, “I have never been to this village.”
“It’s not a matter of whether you’ve been here or not, it’s a matter of feeling—” Ji Xun said, “In terms of feeling, I find it very familiar. What about you?”
Huo Ranyin looked ahead. Pairs of eyes, pairs of eyes coming from the market—those selling vegetables, those buying vegetables—seemingly indifferently directed their gazes across the distance between them, even penetrating through the glass and iron plating of the car.
Suddenly.
Splat!
A clump of iron-gray black mud flashed across their retinas, heavily slamming onto the car’s windshield. First, turbid water slid down, followed by scattered spots of mud. Finally, the body of a dead fish and the head of a dead shrimp also gradually slid out from amidst the mud.
Huo Ranyin’s eyes met the grayish-white eyes of the fish and shrimp for a moment before shifting away, moving toward the direction from which the clump of mud had been thrown.
Down by the beach beside the road, a child baked dark by the sun was currently lifting his head to look at them.
His gaze met theirs. He grinned, revealing white teeth, bearing an ill-intentioned smile.
Of course it was familiar, Huo Ranyin thought impassively as he looked at the child nearby and then at the adults in the distance.
Even though he had never been here before, this village resembled both the village where Xi Lei lived and the drug village he had entered back when he was on anti-drug duty.
Presumably, every village harboring a secret, in order to protect its own secret, displayed an extremely similar malice toward outsiders who came to the village.
