Chapter 616 — Childhood Playmates
The Blossom Guardian · Page 2 of 2
Tense as it had looked, it never carried the true danger of a live operation — only the trust and friendship between brothers. Second, Third, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Little Seven — where are you now? Are you well? Still rushing about the world running missions?
Wei Zhao shook his head. Ever since they walked out of that training camp, his comrades had scattered to the four winds; he had never laid eyes on any of them again.
Of course, besides those three happy stretches, Wei Zhao had plenty of bitter ones as well — though one of them did not really count as bitter. At the very least it was bittersweet, and it too had been a rare stretch of time... It was in those days that he had come to know Yang Huaijun, and Pangolin, and several other comrades-in-arms, and Xiaoning...
And it was precisely because of Xiaoning that this stretch of time had been forcibly wiped from Wei Zhao's memory. It was also why, the first time he met Yang Huaijun, Wei Zhao had chosen to run.
Even now, Wei Zhao did not understand why he had refused Xiaoning so decisively. Was it truly that power of hers, vast enough to blot out the sky, standing at her back? Or was it that he could not give her a settled life?
The Wei Zhao of back then had never imagined that one day he would retire — still less that he would retire so young. He did not know what the old man was thinking, suddenly dropping him into Songshan City for a special mission that, once completed, would keep him fed for a lifetime. It was a one-shot bargain, plain and simple.
............
Qiu Lingshan leafed through the case files spread across her desk. The kidney-harvesting ring seemed to have quieted a great deal of late; ever since their last transit point was smashed, the other side had grown markedly more cautious. But they had by no means stopped — they had simply shifted their targets and their hunting grounds to the villages and towns on the city's outskirts.
In the past week alone, two widowed farmers had been murdered, killed by the identical method, with the locations grown only more erratic. One victim was a villager from Gayazi Village in the east of the city, the other from Shenbu Village in the west — one east, one west, dozens of kilometers apart, with no pattern to be found at all.
Even if officers were sent out to lie in wait, there was no way to blanket every one of the several hundred villages around the whole city with police. Never mind whether there were enough of them to go around — even if there were, the entire bureau could hardly grind to a halt and send every last officer to stake out the kidney gang, could it?
Qiu Lingshan felt herself a poor, useless thing. Since taking up her post she had cracked several major cases and won unanimous praise and recognition from the provincial and municipal leadership, but Qiu Lingshan knew in her heart how it had all really happened, how those cases had truly been broken. She had not the face to say it aloud.
Even when others praised her, Qiu Lingshan felt herself burn with shame. She was not, by nature, a person who liked to lie or boast, so it always sat badly with her — and yet there was no way to explain a word of it.