Rebirth After Being Abducted – Chapter 39.1
Translated by: Oinkoink
Chapter 39.1 – Injured
This novel is only hosted on Foxaholic, copies found elsewhere are either stolen or plagiarized.
On the stove, the pot of chicken soup was simmering.
She brought out a small stool to keep an eye on the stove while Bobo and Wang Lin worked in the room.
Browsing the handphone with her head down, Su Qin thought of many things. In order to access the internet conveniently, Su Qin changed to a Symbian handphone and installed QQ mobile app, which could browse news, forums, etc.
Li Chuan had gone abroad on business trips recently and would only be back half a month later. Due to the time difference, it was already the next day when Su Qin received his message.
Looking down at the message Li Chuan sent, it was nothing more than asking her to pay attention to her diet, to take note of her rest, and to strike a balance between work and rest.
Su Qin sighed with emotion. This man has shown his utmost solicitude whether in the past or the present lifetime that she felt an indescribable emotion.
She then replied, “Teacher Li, you too, take good care of yourself over there. I will study hard to get good results and when you come back, I’ll be receptive to your scrutiny!”
Once the pot of chicken soup was ready, Su Qin ladled the soup into a large enamel bowl then filled up half a smaller bowl to send over to Grandma Liu’s family next door.
When she came back from delivering the chicken soup, Bobo and her mother had cleared the table for meals.
Su Qin sat down in front of her mother and just took a sip of the chicken soup before she said, “Mom, there’s something I have to tell you.”
“En?” Wang Lin picked a chopstick of mushrooms into her bowl, “What’s it about?”
“The printing factory owner’s nephew helped me to probe and has determined that Li Xiulan has connections with that group of traffickers.” Su Qin took out the photos in an envelope and handed them to her mother, “Do you still remember this man? The one who led the dog over to catch Bobo that day.”
Sweeping a glance at the photo, Wang Lin paused and a layer of gloominess filled her eyes.
She lowered her head to continue taking a mouthful of rice and said, “Eat first. Let’s talk about it after the meal, otherwise we’ll be so angry that we won’t be able to eat and maltreat our health.”
Seeing the photo too, Bobo spoke as she ate, “It’s him! It’s the gang leader at the transfer hub!”
Wang Lin picked a chopstick of mushroom into Bobo’s bowl, “You too eat first. Let’s discuss this after the meal.”
“En.”
Both girls buried their heads to eat silently, quickly drinking up the chicken soup and eating up all the meat.
After the meal, they had a family meeting.
Taking the photo for a long look, Bobo recognized two men and a middle-aged woman.
She pointed at the three people in the photo and said, “This is the transit hub gang leader, who everyone calls him Brother Gang and also the trafficker who Su-su met at the printing factory that day. This tall and thin monkey-faced is Skinny, who is responsible for training their dogs. This middle-aged woman named Wang Zhen is also one of their people.”
“This vicious woman actually approached these traffickers to abduct my daughter for the sake of her son.” Wang Lin could not repress these grievances no matter what. She looked up at Su Qin and said, “Su-su, let’s call the police to get her arrested.”
“It would be too dangerous for the three of us women to call the police so rashly. They are after all criminal gangs with unknown backers. It will be safer to hand these photos, as well as the records of Li Xiulan and Brother Gang’s illicit affairs to Zhang Cheng. As much as possible, we don’t expose ourselves and let’s discuss again if the police really need our involvement.”
Bobo nodded and said, “Su-su has a point.”
Su Qin then added, “Excuse for my conspiracy theory. Those are international human traffickers whose power behind them ought not to be underestimated. Isn’t it often played on TV? This kind of organized gang is generally well-organized and unlikely to have flaws that even the police can’t do anything about?”
“Sister Su-su has a point, otherwise what’s the explanation that they are still in Sangzao Town? Aren’t they afraid of being caught? Yet still blatantly having roadside grilled fish with Li Xiulan, they are really gutsy.”
Hearing Bobo’s narration, Li Xiulan was never at those traffickers’ transit hub and those abducted girls had never seen Li Xiulan either.
Even if she is arrested and taken to the police station, she can still argue that she simply doesn’t know that group of people were human traffickers and she was kept in the dark too, and was also a victim.
Su Qin certainly would not give Li Xiulan such an advantage. She made a copy of those photos and the hotel rooms’ records given by Xiao Shu.
Su Qin got up very early on Sunday and went to buy breakfast for her family before taking a bus to Zhang Cheng’s house.
Today is Zhang Cheng’s off-day and he lives around a newly developed area that is not far from the old city district where Su Qin resides. Keeping in mind that it was always the other party who came to see her, Su Qin took the initiative this time to buy some fruit to go pay him a visit.
She followed the address given by the man and only found the unit he lives in after walking around the neighborhood. Zhang Cheng’s home is on the 4th floor, directly facing the stairs. When Su Qin arrived at his front door and was about to knock on the door, she found the door ajar.
Su Qin soon discovered there were traces of vandalism on Zhang Cheng’s door lock.
As this is an old neighborhood, typical door locks are installed which are not burglar-proof and can be easily tampered with.
Frowned, Su Qin heard noises of struggling inside and immediately became wary as she took a step back. However, the two men inside bumped into each other, crashed and slammed onto the door.
Their bodies blocked the door and caused a ‘bang’ sound.
Frightened, Su Qin took another step back and hurriedly called the police. She deliberately amplified her voice so that the people inside could hear, trying to scare Zhang Cheng’s attacker off.
Su Qin dared not leave at this moment. She took out her handphone and a pocket-knife as she pressed her body against the wall.
An extended pillar where Su Qin stood happened to obscure her, and if the other party came out of the door, she would not be seen immediately within this blind spot. For safety sake, she took out a mask from her pocket to cover her face.
Hearing Su Qin calling the police, Zhang Cheng’s attacker was indeed panicked and wanted to escape through the window, but as he jumped out, he got kicked by Zhang Cheng before he could grab the sewer pipe.
The thug fell off the 4th floor window and landed heavily on the 2nd floor platform, before he passed out.
Seeing someone jump off the building, the neighbors quickly called the police.
Opening the door and walking out, Zhang Cheng caught sight of Su Qin, who was standing in the hallway, and seeing that she was okay, he let out a sigh of relief before asking her to come in.
Clad in a white singlet, the two knives slashed on the man’s abdomen turned his white singlet red and a bloody pungent smell around, and the part he covered was still bleeding.
Su Qin helped him into the house. While waiting for the ambulance and the police to arrive, she helped Zhang Cheng clean up the wound and did a basic staunch treatment. She looked up at the man’s pale face, and asked him, “What happened?”
Even though he was wounded and was in severe pain, Zhang Cheng still looked like a slugger, “Who the hell knows what happened ah. Laozi[1] was doing push-ups in the living room when the man suddenly stabbed Laozi with a knife. If I hadn’t reacted quickly, I would have been stabbed to death without knowing what the other party looked like.”
Zhang Cheng has arrested many criminals and thought he might have just got out of prison and came to seek revenge on him.
In the hospital, Police Officer Zhang Cheng, who was lying in the hospital ward, was bored and posted a message on MySpace, “Laozi was actually attacked by a thug at home. F**k!”
Once this message was posted, all kinds of sympathies immediately appeared on his handphone. Not only his buddies from the police station but also some second-generation-rich[2] friends came to visit him in the afternoon and the ward was packed with people.
After his statement was taken, his rich friends remarked:
“Old Zhang, I have told you long ago that you shouldn’t be a police officer. The salary is low and it’s dangerous too. How’s it? Are you okay?”
“Don’t be a police officer. If you don’t want to go home to assume the family business, your buddy here can arrange a job for you. Since you can’t sit in the office, our company coincidentally lacks a security guard and the nature of the job is similar to that of your police work.”
“Quickly move out of your shoddy neighborhood, where anyone can get in. Can it assure the resident’s safety ah?”
**********
Zhang Cheng is a righteous person and his friends genuinely care about him too. Coming back from buying food outside, Su Qin pushed her way through the crowd and placed the meal on the bedside table.
“Teacher Zhang, I bought you some food. You haven’t eaten all day, are you hungry?” Su Qin uncapped the thermos flask and the soup smell immediately flowed out.
Sensing the aroma, Zhang Cheng spoke to his group of friends in the ward, “Okay, shut up ah. If you guys really care about me, hurry up and leave. I want to eat and sleep. Listening to your nagging, Laozi’s wounds will get worse.”
Su Qin closed the ward door after those idle people had left. While ladling out the soup, Su Qin asked him, “Teacher Zhang, are you working on any cases recently? Who have you offended?”
“Wasn’t I just investigating the human trafficker’s transit hub case? I stayed in Sangzao Town for a few days but didn’t get much results. That stepmother of yours is really too much and only gave me one piece of information after charging me 1,000 yuan.” Zhang Cheng took the soup bowl from Su Qin and asked after taking a sip of the soup, “Oh by the way, why are you looking for me today? Didn’t you say you have something?”
Su Qin’s heart skipped a beat hearing Zhang Cheng’s words. Asking Li Xiulan about the human traffickers? Isn’t this begging meat from the wolf’s mouth?
Su Qin took out the photos of Li Xiulan eating together with the traffickers from her backpack, pointed to three people amongst them and said, “These three are precisely the human traffickers from the transit hub.”
After the police rescued the girls from Sangzao Town, they drew portraits of the criminal suspects according to the girls’ statements, but there was a big disparity between those portraits and the persons themselves. Moreover, they didn’t know those traffickers’ real names or other information, hence it was extremely difficult to arrest them.
Those human traffickers are smart too. Knowing that the police didn’t have their information, they stayed in Sangzao Town, thinking of starting over again when the matter was over.
Staying in Sangzao Town for many days, Zhang Cheng did not arrest a single human trafficker and after seeing what Su Qin had brought over, he then realized the problem.
Introduced by an informant, Zhang Cheng found Li Xiulan who had indeed given him reliable information after he gave her 1,000 yuan. For instance, the information about one of the traffickers which she even gave him a photo.
Zhang Cheng found one human traffickers’ dwelling place and stayed there all night, but no one was there. Just today, he didn’t expect that person to come to his door on his own accord and almost stabbed him to death with a knife.
Originally Zhang Cheng couldn’t figure out what had happened, but now it seemed he might have been tricked by Li Xiulan.
But there was something Su Qin didn’t understand, why did Li Xiulan give information about the human traffickers to the police, wasn’t she on friendly terms with Brother Gang?
Su Qin pondered for a while and asked him, “Teacher Zhang, do you have a photo of that person?”
“Yes.” Zhang Cheng turned on his handphone and searched for the photo to show her.
Su Qin, “You send me the photo and I’ll go back and ask Bobo. She had been locked up there for so long, she should know something.”
“Okay.”
[1] 老子 (Lǎozi) – in this context it’s self-proclaimed for I, used arrogantly or jocularly
[2] 富二代 (Fù èr dài) – children of entrepreneurs who became wealthy under Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms in the 1980s.