Chapter 7: A Message From the Wrong Person

Chapter 7: A Message From the Wrong Person

HEAVENLY DEMON OF THE DEAD GATE

Volume 1: Risen from Suicide

***

A threat is a weak weapon. A question is a sharp one.

Yun Zhou sat on the edge of the mattress at six in the morning, with a lukewarm cup of sugar water in one hand and the notebook open on his knee. He had slept eleven hours, which was the only reason his hands had stopped shaking.

On the page in front of him were three drafts of the same message, each crossed out.

Draft 1: Marlo Chen is stealing from you. Check locker 214 at Eastgate Station.

He’d struck it through with a single hard line.

Too direct. It sounds like someone with an agenda. Gorman will ask himself what the sender wants, and I don’t want him asking that question about me.

Draft 2: I know about your money problems. Pay me or I tell the boss.

Crossed out twice.

Blackmail. Even worse. Blackmail makes you a player, and I’m not ready to be a player. A player gets investigated.

Draft 3: The shortfall isn’t what you think. Look at who handles the envelopes.

He frowned at that one for a long moment, then drew a slow diagonal across it.

Closer. But it still points at a man with a pen and a plan.

He set the pencil down and rubbed his eyes.

Think like the boss.

***

Who was Gorman?

All Yun Zhou knew was the name, printed at the bottom of the debt notice: Gorman Tan, Director, Harapan Baru Cooperative. There was no photo and no personal number, just a corporate email address and a PO box.

But he had been reading people for ninety years, and a name, plus the little that Marlo’s panicked thoughts had leaked, was enough to draw a rough sketch.

Gorman Tan. Runs a loan operation that doubles as an organ pipeline. Doesn’t dirty his hands. Collects money from dozens of stalls through a handful of middlemen. Trusts nobody completely, but can’t watch everyone, so he audits the totals and punishes anything that looks off.

A man like that has a specific kind of paranoia. He isn’t afraid of being robbed by a stranger. He’s afraid of being slowly drained by someone he knows.

So the message shouldn’t come from a stranger.

He read the thought again, and his lips curved.

It should come from someone Gorman has already wronged.

***

He spent twenty minutes rewriting.

Not the content. The voice.

A fruit-stall owner, tired, scared, and angry, would not write in tidy sentences. She would write the way people write when they are nervous and unsure whether they are about to make a mistake. Short. A little clumsy. Missing punctuation. A typo or two, not enough to look fake, just enough to feel human.

He wrote it out on a clean page, slowly, in a rounded and unsure hand, and read it aloud under his breath, hearing it in the voice of the heavyset woman in the floral blouse.

Mr. Gorman I dont want any trouble. I pay my share every month like everyone. But I think some of us are paying twice. Somebody keeps a locker at Eastgate Station, number 214. I saw him go in with an envelope yesterday evening. Maybe its nothing. Please dont say who told you.

He read it a second time, and then a third.

Good.

Every sentence earns its place.

“I pay my share” gave the sender a motive: she is being squeezed, so she has a grievance. “Some of us are paying twice” hinted at the skimming without naming Marlo, so Gorman would draw the conclusion himself, which made it his idea rather than a stranger’s accusation. “Somebody” kept the accusation vague. “Maybe its nothing” was the masterstroke. A person with a plot does not undercut her own claim. A frightened witness does.

And the final line.

“Please dont say who told you.”

He nearly laughed. It was a request that guaranteed Gorman would keep the sender secret, and, more importantly, would wonder who among his stallholders was brave enough, or desperate enough, to send it.

Let him spend a week suspecting fruit vendors. I’ll be somewhere else.

***

The next problem was delivery.

He couldn’t use his own phone. It had his name on the lease, his face on the lock screen, and a hundred traceable fingerprints in the metadata. Any decent investigator could connect it to him in an hour. He needed a burner.

Yun Zhou counted his cash on the folding table. Sixty-one thousand, four hundred. The ramen, the egg, and the gifts of the last two days had eaten into it.

A SIM card costs fifteen. A cheap handset, thirty-five. Together, fifty. Leaves eleven thousand for the next three days.

Tight. But there’s no other way.

He put on the gray jacket, pulled the hood low, and checked himself in the mirror. A tired, bruised boy in a faded coat. The rope scar was hidden under a high collar. His eyes, dull and unfocused, drifted a little to the left as if he had trouble looking at anything directly.

Mask: confused, a bit slow. Not a threat. Not memorable.

He stepped out of the apartment and locked the door with the paperclip.

***

The mobile market was three blocks away, a warren of stalls under a corrugated roof. Rows of phones in glass cases, cables hanging like vines, vendors shouting prices in six dialects. The air smelled of solder and hot plastic.

Yun Zhou walked past the first three booths without slowing.

Not the busy ones. Busy vendors remember faces, because they’re always watching for thieves. Not the empty ones either. An empty stall has time to chat.

He settled on a middle-sized booth near the back, run by a bored teenager with earbuds in both ears and a handheld game propped against a stack of chargers. The kid glanced up, saw a skinny hunter in a faded jacket, and went back to his game.

“Prepaid SIM,” Yun Zhou said quietly. “And a basic phone. Nothing fancy.”

“Name?” the kid asked, not looking up.

“Don’t need to register it, do I?”

The kid snorted. “It’s a SIM, not a mortgage. Fifteen. Phone’s thirty-five. No receipt.”

“Okay.”

He paid. The kid slid the box across the counter without a word.

Yun Zhou didn’t thank him. Thanks leave an impression. He simply nodded, tucked the box into his jacket, and walked away, shoulders slumped, eyes on the pavement.

Behind him, the kid never looked up from his game.

One transaction. Two minutes. Zero memorable details. Perfect.

***

Next came the question of where.

A message sent from his apartment would ping a tower three hundred meters from his front door. A message from Eastgate Station would point straight at the locker. He needed a location that was neither home nor target, and that made sense for the persona of a frightened stallholder.

He took a bus across town, standing in the aisle with his hand on the strap, swaying with the vehicle like any other tired commuter. Forty minutes and three transfers later, he stepped off in a neighborhood he’d never visited, a sprawl of low apartment blocks and open-air markets on the far side of the river.

Anonymous. Crowded. Far enough from both Marlo’s circuit and Eastgate that the signal tells Gorman nothing.

He found a bench under a plane tree and sat down. A woman nearby was haggling over a bunch of scallions. A group of children chased a ball across the pavement. A street preacher was shouting about the end of days.

Yun Zhou took out the new phone and inserted the SIM with careful, deliberate fingers.

The cooperative’s public number is on the notice. Gorman will see it on a dedicated line, the “tip line,” a line that every company like this keeps, because they want to hear if someone is about to disappear owing money.

He typed the message slowly, one letter at a time, matching the rhythm of someone who didn’t text often.

Mr. Gorman I dont want any trouble. I pay my share every month like everyone. But I think some of us are paying twice. Somebody keeps a locker at Eastgate Station, number 214. I saw him go in with an envelope yesterday evening. Maybe its nothing. Please dont say who told you.

He read it once more, checking each word.

One more thing.

He deleted the i in dont and the s at the end of its, then thought better of it and left them. Real people made small errors, and perfect punctuation would have been the one thing out of place.

His thumb hovered over the send button.

The street preacher’s voice rose to a shout. “The day of reckoning is coming! Those who have wronged the innocent shall be brought low!”

Yun Zhou glanced at him, then at the screen.

“Remarkably apt,” he murmured.

He pressed send.

***

The phone buzzed once, a soft delivery receipt.

Sent.

That was all. No flash, no drama, no sense that anything important had happened. A single message, one hundred and nine words, traveling through the air to a man he’d never met.

Yun Zhou stared at the screen for a moment, then calmly popped the back off the handset, removed the SIM card, and snapped it in half between his fingers. He dropped one half into a street drain and the other into a trash can two blocks away. The phone itself went into a third bin outside a convenience store, wrapped in a plastic bag so it wouldn’t rattle.

Total time from sending to disposal: nine minutes.

Gone.

Whoever Gorman Tan is, the only thing he has now is a message, a number he can’t call back, and a locker he can’t ignore.

He walked to the bus stop, took a different route home, and kept his face tilted down the whole way.

***

By late afternoon, back in the apartment, he was nearly out of strength.

It had been a long day, but a good one. He sat on the floor, leaning against the bed frame, eating the last packet of dry ramen with the slow, careful chewing of a man who had learned to count every calorie. The room was warm and dim. The only sound was the leak in the bathroom faucet.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

His mind went through the plan one more time, step by step.

The message reaches Gorman. He reads it. He’s paranoid. He checks the numbers, notices the shortfall he’s been half-aware of for weeks, and asks himself: who’s been handling the envelopes?

He summons Marlo. Marlo panics. He rushes to Eastgate to move or check the money, which confirms the tip.

If he’s smart, he’ll bluff. If he’s stupid, he’ll run. Either way, Gorman gets a reason to look closer.

And I’ll be sitting here, quietly, with a three-day deadline, a bruised neck, and no connection to any of it.

He swallowed the last bite and wiped his hands on his jeans.

Mostly. There’s one weak point.

Marlo knows I’m in debt. Marlo knows I’m desperate. If Gorman starts digging, my name might come up as someone who “had a motive.”

I need to be ready for that.

He picked up the notebook and wrote a single line, then underlined it.

Cover story: I never left the apartment. I was too sick to walk.

Alibi: the old woman in the housecoat. She saw me yesterday, half-dead. She’ll say I looked terrible.

Not perfect. But good enough.

***

At 4:52 p.m., a thought struck him, and his breath caught.

He had not checked something.

The time.

Gorman’s office hours. He had sent the message at 11:20 a.m., when most business owners were at lunch, in meetings, or out of the office. If Gorman hadn’t seen it yet, if it sat unread until evening, the timing might be wasted. Or worse, Marlo might get to it first, since the cooperative’s front desk could have access to the tip line.

Idiot. You rushed the last step.

Yun Zhou stood up, paced the room twice, and forced himself to breathe.

No. Wait.

The tip line is a direct number. Gorman’s own phone, almost certainly. A man with a business like his keeps that channel close. He would see it before lunch ended.

And if he didn’t, then it would just be a delay, not a failure.

Patience.

He sat back down, folded his hands, and closed his eyes.

Patience.

The afternoon light crawled up the wall. The leak in the bathroom dripped on. Outside, the call to evening prayer rose from a distant mosque, and a vendor shouted about fresh tofu.

He waited.

***

At 5:47 p.m., the cracked phone on the table vibrated.

Not the burner. His own phone, the old one, the one with his real name on it.

Yun Zhou opened his eyes.

An unknown number.

The screen glowed, cracked and dim, a single new notification sitting in the center.

He didn’t move for several seconds. His pulse stayed steady, but something cold unrolled in the pit of his stomach.

No one has this number except the cooperative. And the Hunter Association. And...

He reached out and tapped the screen.

Unknown number:

Who is this?

Two words.

Nothing else.

No greeting. No name. No threat. Just two words, delivered to the phone Yun Zhou had not used to send the message, from a number he did not recognize.

He read them again.

Who is this?

I never sent from this phone. I never used this number.

So how...

His thoughts raced, sorted, rejected, and sorted again. The only conclusion that fit was one he did not like.

Either the message went to the wrong place, or someone has been watching me longer than I thought.

Or both.

His grip on the phone tightened. In the quiet apartment, the sound of his own heartbeat was suddenly very loud.

Slowly, deliberately, he set the phone face-down on the table. Then he looked at the door, at the broken lock, at the thin line of light under the frame, and at the shadows beyond.

His face was blank. His eyes were not.

Whoever you are, he thought, calm as ice, you’ve just made a very expensive mistake.

You’ve shown me you exist.

***

To be continued in Chapter 8: “Day Three”