Chapter 30 – Strange Fruit

---

Fat Lim Wang met Luciana Mio the previous March during semester break.

 

He was a Senior, a fourth-year accountant preparing for his fifth-year ACA accreditation, a path he had meticulously planned since fifteen.

 

She was a bright-eyed Junior Musical Theatre Major with the world ahead of her, a presence not unknown on the campus, the star child of Dr Cooper’s theatre program.

 

Lim had met Mio through Mr Chin.

He found her sitting outside the Stray Cat Society’s basement door with a cardboard box, shivering in her dancer’s tights in the 49°F cold. He was speechless for a moment when she looked up, amber eyes blazing like jewels, her voice melodic as she asked for help. It took him all three seconds to remind himself that this was a LAPA Junior of seventeen, then he welcomed her into the basement.

 

In the basement, Lim ascertained that Mr Chin had been struck by what appeared to be a bike or car, and that he needed urgent care. The girl refused to leave, so Lim lent her his jacket, and the two of them took Mr Chin to Alhambra Animal Hospital.

 

In the lobby, he asked her what had happened, and she told him how she had found the cat.

Mr Chin wasn’t called “Chin” for no good reason. It was a stray cat, but a very well-fed stray.

 

Her answer was halting, hesitant.

He pushed for it, stating that he was paying Mr Chin’s medical costs and deserved to know why he was incurring a minimum of $250 on her behalf.

 

She told him, her eyes brimming, that some asshole kicked Mr Chin while she was feeding him.

 

Fat Lim Wang had sat very still, very silently, then asked Mio who it was. In his mind, the Five Root Association had already made the man’s life a living hell where death was preferable.

 

Mio had then looked at Lim with the same pitiful eyes as Eppie, and said the magic words to Lim’s internal Golem script.

 

“William Chen.”

 

Lim deflated like a cheap balloon.

 

“It’s okay,” Mio said while wiping tears from her sad eyes. “I’ll find another place to feed Mr Chin. I just hope he’s okay.”

 

They sat in silence for another thirty minutes, then, out of awkwardness and necessity, began to talk about their lives as a distraction from William Chen. Lim found, unhappily in hindsight, that he very much liked the girl. She was pretty, of course, but unlike Valorie Sanders, she was witty and funny, and she loved cats more than her life. She showed him her photos of her with the strays on campus.

He recognised about 80% of them.

When Mr Chin came out, bandaged and drugged up and asleep and costing $650, they were already old friends.

They hung out whenever the work of the Stray Cat Society had them meet at night. His work with the Chen family, his degree, and his teaching position at the Five Root Association did not permit them to meet at regular hours, but their friendship remained steadfast.

Lim had even enjoyed the delusion that, when Mio was old enough, he would risk asking if she was looking for a partner. Pragmatically, his first priority was his family, then his degree, for they were the key to his independence.

 

The latter was central to his modus operandi because William Chen’s demands were almost always borderline criminal, and in California, a CPA cannot hold both a licence and a criminal record. Were William not so outrageously stupid in his low cunning, Lim would have wondered if that had been the young master’s plan; but the man’s pettiness, his sucking up to San-Jei, and his lack of control when it came to women and alcohol, all suggested otherwise.

 

Then, on a moonless evening in early May, Lim walked into the women’s locker room with his martial siblings and saw the aftermath of William’s crime.

 

“Ah-Wang. Take care of this,” William was washing his hands in the sink, his face bruised but satisfied, his lip cut but curling. “Edson, take some pictures. I want to leave her with a reminder.”

 

Edson had vomited in his mouth, there and then.

 

There was blood on the wooden benches bolted to the floor, blood and other bodily fluids. There were floor-to-ceiling mirrors running the entire length of the change room, from which William could witness his crime a hundredfold as he did the deed.

 

“Okay, Chen-ge,” Lim had replied as he briefly pondered murdering the man there and then. But how would he answer the family after that? Would the others stop him? This wasn’t sparring. It took a great deal of effort to actually beat a man to death. Without understanding his martial-siblings’ loyalties, he couldn’t be sure.

 

Mio… poor Mio… he couldn’t look for fear of killing William.

 

“Luis, Jimmu, take Chen-ge somewhere safe. Give him an alibi. Kitty, can you check on the girl? Edson… stop. Just stop.”

 

Edson had handed his phone to William like a man handling a viper.

“You keep it,” William’s bloody smile was both demented and demonic. “I trust you, brother.”

 

“She’s still breathing.” Lim recalled that Kitty’s eyes were swollen with impotent rage. “She’s badly concussed.”

 

“I will… check the rest of the change room.” Lim had told them. His whole body was vibrating. He had to walk away before someone died by his hand. “Let’s leave nothing to chance.”

 

“I am glad you’re all here,” their young master’s gratitude snapped like a stock whip. Lim vividly recalled William’s face flushing with excitement as he gazed upon the girl’s ragdoll body. “Remember, we’re all in this together.”

 

 

Eppie felt a shot of hot lead run down the length of her spine, then up again, burning her brain with a sudden fever.

 

“You know what?” she demanded, taking a step forward even as she eyed the exit.

 

To her surprise and confusion, Lim stepped aside.

 

“Don’t go,” the giant Asian said, placing both hands before him, like a perp surrendering to arrest. “We can help each other.”

Mr Chin made a friendly meow.

But it wasn’t because of Mr Chin that her doubt began to fade.

 

She was just about to scream “BULLSHIT! YOU ASSHOLE—” and run for the door, and then—

 

ARE YOU SHITTING ME? She screamed internally. NOW?

 

“How do I know I can trust you?” Eppie demanded, shifting her weight, her body relaxing. Despite the karmic assurance, she also had her explosive speed. At worst, she can scream very, very loudly.

 

“I took the Birkin Bag,” Lim sent another bolt of electricity running up her spine. “San-jei—Valorie gave it to Simone…”

 

The man’s voice was soft and earnest. Either he was exactly that, or he was a Cooper-tier actor.

 

“… I helped her plant it, then removed it to teach them a lesson, and to save you from unnecessary grief. Imagine if you got caught. You might have a good reputation, but you’re a Ward of the State. No family, no money, who will help you?”

 

A shit load of people will help me. Eppie retorted in silence. “And why would you do that?”

 

“Because I don’t think you’re Euphemia Fontaine.”

Her breath caught in her throat.

Her secret was safe. There was no one who would believe Lim, but she knew it to be true, and her body could not help but revolt. From her trembling fingers to her closing throat, for a moment, she felt as if she was crashing out.

Then her world snapped back to reality, and she stared at Lim with the full force of her accusatory blue eyes.

 

“Why do you say that?” She demanded.

 

The look on Lim’s face was sad and absurd, like a man who’d just been told that the Earth was flat and that the moon landing was shot in Paramount’s Studio 5.

 

“If you were her, you would be in a puddle of tears by now,” Lim shook his head. “If you were Euphemia, you would know that you were there.”

 

“There for what?”

 

The giant exhaled long and hard, his eyes infinitely soft and compassionate. He lowered his hands, then gripped a chair beside him. “You were there in the locker room, Eppie. I found you there in the change room, the day William assaulted Mio.”

The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

 

If the previous bolts had been magma and electricity, the one that struck her now was a force of petrification, transforming her into a marble statue that adorned Medusa’s cave.

Would you like to know? He asked.

 

Eppie found herself suddenly underwater. Everything the young man said sounded like echoes of a chamber five fathoms deep in the depthless dark.

Tell me. She said. Tell me everything.

 

 

Fat Lim Wang told her about Mio.

About how they met.

About Mr Chin in a cardboard box, near-kicked to death by William fucking Chen.

 

He told her about the Five Families, their relationship to the Chen’s.

 

“She sat there, right there,” he pointed at where she sat, a cat herself. He looked at the kennels. “We would clean these together. The cats were far more fond of her than they were of me. She liked it here. There was no competition here. No pressure. She said.”

 

Eppie hugged Mr Chin, who purred.

The kittens hung onto the fur on her legs, meowing.

 

“Then came the January Auditions. Mio won. Valorie lost. Rather than choosing another role, she became Mio’s understudy. I don’t think anyone knew the true meaning behind that choice, but it all became apparent in the first week of May.”

 

The giant’s hands gripped his knees. “You remember nothing?”

 

“Nothing,” Eppie confessed. She waited. The [System] had given her enough confidence not to rush the man. If the bloody [System] was wrong now of all times, she deserved her second death.