My Doomsday Bodyguard Wants a Raise novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Gate Is On Fire
A flatbed of burning tires rams the east gate, and Gong Ting asks for a raise while it burns; Bai Jin says yes, breaks his own rule to let six scavengers in, and finds a note nailed to the gate stamped with his own red chop.
Gong Ting asked for a raise while the east gate was on fire.
It was the thirty-first time he had asked.
Bai Jin had said yes four times, and he was beginning to feel it in his accounts.
The fire came from a flatbed truck loaded with burning tires, parked nose-first against the gate trucks at the bottom of the ramp.
Black smoke rolled up the front of the Fuyuan Supermarket and every shutter on the east side glowed orange.
"Boss," said Gong Ting. "Raise."
He said it standing in the loading bay with a cutting bar over his shoulder and a pencil behind his ear.
He was not even out of breath.
"There are forty men down there," said Bai Jin. "They're throwing bottles at my building."
"Thirty-one," said Gong Ting.
"I can count, Sergeant. Go and stop them."
"Forty slips a week. Not thirty."
Bai Jin looked at him.
Gong Ting was a head taller than anyone on the wall and twice as wide.
He had been hired eight months ago for twenty slips and a bunk.
He now ran the gate, the wall and twenty-two guards, and he had not smiled once.
"Fine," said Bai Jin. "Forty."
"Say it twice."
"Forty slips a week, I swear it on the chop. Now go!"
Gong Ting nodded once and walked down the ramp into the smoke.
Bai Jin should have gone inside.
There was a rule about that, painted in red on the loading bay wall in letters a hand high.
UNDER FIRE, THE SERGEANT'S WORD.
He had written it himself, the week Gong Ting took the job, and he hated it every time he read it.
He went up to the sniper walk anyway, because it was his gate.
Below him the guards had the hose from the water tank on the burning tires, and the smoke turned white and stinking.
Men in rags ran back and forth beyond the flatbed.
One of them lit a bottle and swung it overhand.
It cleared the gate trucks and burst against the shutter at Bai Jin's shoulder.
Something hit him in the chest and he was against the steel with no air.
Gong Ting had come back up the ramp.
Bai Jin did not know how.
He was pinned flat to the shutter.
One huge hand was clamped over his mouth, and a hard thigh was shoved between his legs to hold him still.
Fire ran down the steel an arm's length away.
"Stay down," said Gong Ting, close to his ear. "That's an order."
Bai Jin tried to say that nobody gave him orders.
The hand over his mouth turned it into a hum.
Gong Ting's whole body was against his, hot through the canvas jacket, and the thigh did not move.
Bai Jin felt something else against his hip, thick and unmistakable.
It was the fight, he decided.
Men got like that in a fight.
He decided it twice.
Then Gong Ting took his hand away, said "Don't move," and was gone down the ramp again.
Bai Jin stayed against the steel and did not move, which was the most humiliating thing that had happened to him all week.
It took ten minutes.
Gong Ting went over the gate trucks and into the cab of the flatbed.
He dragged the driver out by his collar and threw the engine into reverse.
The truck rolled backward down the street with its tires still smoking.
The men in rags ran after it.
After that there was only the sound of the hose and the guards breathing.
Bai Jin let himself down the stairs.
His knees were not working properly, so he held the rail.
At the bottom, a wiry boy of about seventeen was hammering on the side shutter with both fists.
He was one of six, standing in the dark outside the little service door, all of them filthy and all of them shouting.
"Open up! They're coming back! Please!"
"Leave them," said Gong Ting, who had appeared at Bai Jin's elbow with soot to his eyebrows. "Could be bait. We open at first light."
"They're scavengers."
"They could be anyone."
"Sergeant," said Bai Jin.
"Boss."
"Open the shutter."
Gong Ting did not argue.
That was one of the things about him.
He looked at Bai Jin's hands.
They were shaking so badly that Bai Jin needed both of them on the crank.
Gong Ting stepped in and put his own hand over the top.
They wound the shutter up together.
The six came through in a rush, coughing, crying, and the boy fell on the floor and said "Thank you, thank you," into the concrete.
Bai Jin looked at the wet black ground and counted them.
Six.
All of them in.
"Name?" he said to the boy.
"I'm seventeen, I can carry, I can count, I know every roof from here to the river."
"Good," said Bai Jin. "Then count this."
He pointed at the gate.
It was nearly dawn.
A square of pale paper was nailed to the front door of the trucks, just above the burn marks, and it flapped in the draft.
Gong Ting reached it first and tore it off.
It was a Fuyuan receipt, a long thin slip of the paper Bai Jin had spent three years printing his money on.
The message was written in a thick marker.
FROM SATURDAY THE STADIUM MARKET TAKES NO FUYUAN PAPER.
Under it, in red, sat the stamp.
It was Bai Jin's own chop, the carved stone seal he wore on a cord at his neck.
The ink was still wet.
"Boss," said Gong Ting, very quietly. "Is that yours?"
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