pertwk Chapter 28 I Want a Porsche Cayenne
Chapter 28 I Want a Porsche Cayenne
Lee Eun maintained the smile on her lips and reached out to push open the bathroom door.
He stopped on the threshold as soon as the door had turned halfway around.
Quiet.
There wasn't a single sound of keyboard typing or chair wheels grinding against the floor tiles in the entire police station lobby.
He glanced around with some confusion.
All the officers stood up and surrounded the stairwell, all facing the same direction.
Li En looked up, following their gaze.
Brock stood on the second-floor platform, gripping the horizontal bars of the iron railing with both hands, his belly pressing against the bottom edge of the railing.
Is this a speech?
Brock's rank in the Manhattan precinct wasn't high; he was senior enough, but he didn't have any administrative power.
It's quite impressive that he can get everyone in the branch office to put down what they're doing and listen to him quietly.
Li En pulled his hands out of his pockets, took two steps forward, leaned his shoulder against the load-bearing column in the center of the hall, and pressed his back against the cold concrete surface.
Brock's gaze swept across the crowd below, and he opened his mouth.
"Listen, the masked man is a criminal."
"Assault, kidnapping, endangering public order..."
It turns out they were mobilizing for the arrest of the masked men.
Li En shifted his weight from his left foot to his right foot.
These days, Brock and Cherry have been going through all the records about the masked man from the past six months in the archives.
We've searched for all the clues we could find, but the surveillance footage is a blurry mess of pixels, and there's no new information from our informants.
Only when conventional methods are blocked will the idea of mobilizing the entire police force be considered.
However, a significant portion of these colleagues' sales came from masked men who had tied them up and delivered them to their door.
If you break down the arrest data on the monthly performance evaluation form, a good portion of it can be attributed to that black headscarf.
Asking someone to arrest those who bring you sales targets is a costly endeavor.
Brock read out the masked man's crimes one by one.
Assaulting police officers, trespassing, illegal detention, endangering public safety...
He paused for a moment when he read the last one, and tapped his fingers twice on the railing.
The dozens of faces below remained completely still.
Brock tightened his grip on the railing, then loosened it.
He raised his right hand, made a fist, and waved it in the air.
"Why do you think masked people wear masks?"
The volume was increased, and several officers who had been looking down raised their heads a few degrees.
"That's because only in this way can you hide yourself and unleash the demons within!"
He turned his head sharply, the veins in his neck bulging out from his collar.
"Cherry! Do you remember the clown incident at the orphanage festival three years ago?"
Cherry stood on the left side of the crowd, her bald head reflecting the light under the fluorescent tube.
The expression on his face that he usually wore while yawning in front of the computer screen vanished instantly.
The masseter muscles on his cheeks bulged and then deflated, his eyes twitched twice, and he hummed through his nose.
"I remember, he was a scumbag."
Brock nodded and turned his neck toward the back of the crowd.
"Hey, Bright! You haven't forgotten the guy with the white mask from five years ago, have you?"
"Fuck, Brock!" Bright roared, the veins on his neck bulging from his collar all the way to his jaw.
He stood in the last row, but his voice carried throughout the entire hall.
Upon hearing the roar, Brock straightened up again.
He gripped the railing with both hands, leaned forward slightly, and lowered his tone.
"Over the years, countless criminals have donned masks and unleashed the malice within them."
"A holiday clown killed a total of thirteen children, two volunteers, and one teacher at an orphanage."
All the slightest sounds in the hall ceased.
"A white-masked man stormed into the community and shot eight people, not to mention the countless hooded robbers and kidnappers."
Brock stopped, took a breath, and turned the volume up to the maximum.
"These are the people who wear masks; every single one of them is a psychopath!"
He roared at the top of his lungs.
There was a two-second silence.
A response erupted from below.
"Yes! If Cherry hadn't happened to witness the clown's second crime, the number of victims would have doubled!"
The officer standing next to Bright took his hand out of his pocket and patted Bright on the shoulder.
"If that guy hadn't been wearing a white mask, it wouldn't have taken half a year to catch him."
Bright didn't say anything.
He clenched his back teeth so tightly that a hard lump bulged in the muscle below his cheekbone, and nodded heavily.
The white mask was the reason he became a policeman.
He never mentioned this matter at the bureau, but the children who grew up on this street all remember the obituaries that were temporarily posted on utility poles in the community five years ago.
The atmosphere heated up.
In Hell's Kitchen, crime is an everyday occurrence.
Car theft, robbery, gang fights—these things happen on Mondays and Fridays, the only difference being that more people might die on Fridays.
Every police officer keeps a mental ledger, and the darkest pages are always occupied by the same type of people—those who wear masks.
Surveillance cameras have limited coverage on the street, and their lens resolution is poor.
Adding a layer of fabric and a layer of plastic to cover the facial features shatters a person's trace into dozens of irreparable fragments.
They repeatedly committed crimes and escaped unscathed.
Everyone present had seen the phrase that Brock just shouted countless times in the files.
Masked criminals are all the same kind of thing.
As the echoes from the ceiling faded completely, Brock unleashed his final punch.
"Moreover, we can get a very generous reward for catching the masked man this time!"
Someone whistled in the hall, and someone slammed their fist on the table.
"Oh! Arrest him!"
When Brock came down from the second floor, the rhythm of his leather shoes on the iron stairs was completely different from before the mobilization meeting.
He walked through the crowd, and the police officers automatically made way for him on both sides, with chairs creaking as they were pushed aside.
Everyone was walking towards their workstations, and their pace had quickened considerably.
Brock walked to the support column and saw Li En leaning against it, looking him up and down.
"Hey rookie, you seem to be in a good mood today. Did something good happen?"
He took half a step forward and patted Li En on the shoulder with his right hand.
"That's right, people have to live, you can't always be so tense."
Brock muttered to himself.
That kid has had that expression on his face ever since he joined the police force.
Sadness, grief, and the desire for revenge were all written between his brows.
When the bureau chief handed Li En over to him, he whispered something in the corridor:
This kid's whole family is in trouble, you better watch out.
He hadn't mentioned this topic to Li En, not even once in the past three months.
But the veteran officers who mentor new recruits all know what's going on.
Some people need time to get through it, some people need things to do, and some people need others to find things for them to do—Li En probably needs all three.
Lee Eun maintained her smile, with her hands in her pockets.
"That bonus, when divided among everyone, isn't considered generous."
"Kid." Brock leaned forward a little.
"That guy's bounty has now risen to 500,000, which means each person can get about 10,000. Isn't that generous enough?"
"What happened?"
Li En moved his back off the pillar.
He remembered clearly that Frank Amick's initial bounty was two hundred thousand.
Two hundred thousand is enough to cause half of the bounty hunters in Hell's Kitchen to lose sleep.
Now that the number has reached 500,000, there must be more than one force adding to the stake.
"Hey, the Razor Gang also gave 200,000, and there's another 100,000 on one of the lines."
Brock lowered his voice so that only the two of them could hear him.
"Once we catch them, we can get them all."
He put his arm around Li En's shoulder and walked out.
"You'll still get them all, aren't you worried they'll back out?" Li En asked.
Brock calmly pushed open the fire door at the end of the corridor.
"If someone else had caught or killed them, they would have reneged on their promise."
"But we are the Manhattan Precinct of the New York Police Department."
"They're not going to try to cheat us out of our money."
Li En sensed a certainty in Brock's tone and didn't press further.
The two arrived at the garage.
Brock opened the car door, got in, inserted the key into the ignition, and twisted his wrist all the way down.
The engine roared, and a plume of blue smoke billowed from the exhaust pipe.
He turned to look at the passenger seat.
Li En was still standing outside the parking space line, with his hands in his pockets, showing no intention of pulling the door handle.
"Hey, newbie, if your stomach hurts, go to the toilet. If you're okay, get in the car. We need to ambush at the port."
Li En stood still, his gaze sweeping over the front bumper of the police car.
There is a dent on the right side of the safety bar, and the paint on it is cracked in several places, revealing the rusted dark brown iron underneath.
"You go first, I'll find a bicycle and ride over."
He paused.
Actually, I have a disease.
"Huh?" Brock slid his hand off the steering wheel and asked, "What illness?"
Li En looked at the police car, which was at least ten years old.
The trigger condition for the vehicle killer is that the vehicle you ride in or drive during the mission will end in an explosion.
He could get a new car if it blew up, but then he glanced at the row of spare police cars parked in the garage.
Every single one is pretty much the same as the one in front of me; there's no point in replacing it.
"I have a disease that makes me die if I ride in a car, except for a Porsche Cayenne."
"roll!"
Rumble.
The engine revved up, and another plume of smoke came out of the exhaust pipe.
The car drove out of the garage ramp, and its taillights flashed briefly at the exit before being swallowed by the daylight.
Li En stood outside the parking space line and watched for a few seconds in the direction where the police car's exhaust fumes dissipated.
Take a step
……