Outside, the loading continued.
Several of the men nearest the containers had developed the particular unease that comes from noticing that colleagues who walked in a direction a few minutes ago have not walked back.
The unease had a name, though most of them would not have been able to articulate it clearly.
The name was fear.
A patrol car rolled up to the loading area.
An officer got out, approached, looked into a box, saw the stuffed animals and the powder inside each one, and looked up at the two men nearest him with the expression of a man confirming something he already knew.
"What is this?" he said, watching their nervousness with visible satisfaction.
"Continue."
The men relaxed marginally and kept loading.
The officer walked to the parked car nearby and got in, finding two people waiting for him.
The man on his left appeared to be in his sixties with features that suggested East Asian heritage.
The man in the center, who went by Gunja, was clearly in charge of the operational detail.
"Everything is in order," the officer said.
"Are the bears for the traffickers?"
"Correct," Gunja said, nodding toward the older man.
"The bears go to Mr. Han Jiao's distribution network. The rabbits go to the Kingpin directly."
"What is the difference?"
"Ignorance is a virtue, my friend," Gunja said, and Han Jiao nodded with the agreement of someone who has been operating on this principle for decades.
"It is not in your best interest to know the secrets of the Underworld."
From somewhere near the containers, a sound started.
It was brief and ended quickly, which was in some ways worse than if it had continued, because brevity implied efficiency.
The men near the containers looked at each other.
One of them walked toward the sound to investigate, reached the container door, and was pulled inside.
The scream lasted less than two seconds before it was replaced by a sound that was quieter and considerably less ambiguous.
The lights began going out.
One by one, starting from the farthest point from the car and working inward.
Two men stood near the containers looking up at the structure above them.
One turned to speak to his companion.
His companion was no longer there. Looking up, he saw something in the darkness above that his mind took a moment to process.
"What is that...." he started, and then was not there anymore either.
The screaming, from various points across the facility, continued for a while and then stopped being continuous and became intermittent and then stopped entirely.
In the car, the officer and Gunja looked at each other, made a decision without speaking, and got out.
They found bloodstains.
They found large webbed cocoons on the walls.
They found men whose limbs had been repositioned at angles that limbs are not anatomically designed to occupy.
They turned to go back to the car.
The person who had done all of it was standing directly behind them.
In the car, Mr. Han was losing patience.
He found the weapon he kept under the seat for exactly this category of situation and began loading it.
He knocked on the partition window to get the driver's attention.
No response.
He knocked harder.
Nothing.
The sounds came next.
From the sides of the car.
From the roof.
He got three bullets loaded before a pair of hands came through the open top window, took the car by the frame, and lifted it.
He slid across the seat as the angle changed and hit the door, and then he was airborne briefly before the car was set down against the side of a container.
He looked through the window at a figure covered in what appeared to be the collective blood of approximately everyone he had employed tonight, which was not a small number.
---------------
After dealing with the officer and Gunja, he focused on the car.
The driver had been easy.
Window open, music playing, phone in one hand and a cigarette in the other.
He had not noticed anything until the ability to notice things was no longer available to him.
Peter pulled the car door open and looked at the man inside.
Older.
East Asian features.
The specific expression of someone who has been in dangerous situations before and has always survived them and is now encountering a situation that is producing genuine doubt about whether that streak will continue.
Peter picked him up by the shirt and set him against the container wall.
He looked at him for a moment.
"Where is the rest of the supply?" he said.
"私はあなたにたわごとを教えません!" the man said. "私はあなたが私を殺さないことを知っています,あなたは根性を持っていません!"
"Damn it," Peter said. "Cortana."
"Of course," Cortana said through the mask's audio.
"He said: 'I will not tell you anything. I know you will not kill me. You do not have the guts.'
The last part is presumably based on the fact that you did not kill the subjects on this side of the warehouse."
"Right." He thought for a moment.
"Cortana, scan the full facility. Mark anyone who has committed more than three murders or more than three sexual assaults in red on my display. Anyone below those thresholds gets a different outcome."
"Already done. Red dots active."
He looked at Han.
"So," he said, in the tone of someone who has just updated the terms of a conversation.
"Since you clearly understand me. Tell me where the rest of the supply is."
"彼が私を殺すと言ったら,私はあなたに何も言わない!"
"He says: 'I will tell you nothing even if it means you will kill me,'" Cortana said.
Peter took Han's hand and broke it.
Not violently. Precisely.
The specific application of force to the specific joint that produces the specific result, and then he waited for Han to finish making the sounds that came with it.
"I want my information," he said. "Now."
"殺されたくない!"
"He says he does not want to be killed."
"Then think," Peter said, crouching to Han's eye level, "very carefully about the choice in front of you.
Whatever the Kingpin would do to you for talking. Whatever I am about to do to you for not talking. Decide which one concerns you more right now, tonight, in the next thirty seconds."
Han talked.
He talked about distribution networks, about the supply chain, about the specific locations and the names of the people responsible for human trafficking and the arrangement by which girls who were no longer useful to one part of the operation were cycled into another.
He talked about the Kingpin's direct involvement and the degree to which the operation extended across the borough.
When Han stopped talking, Peter broke his legs, put him to sleep, and stood up.
He worked through the red dots methodically.
The ones without red dots were webbed up, left conscious, positioned where the police would find them easily.
The others became offerings, as he put it internally, to whatever accounting system the universe maintained for people who had made the specific choices they had made.
He took the cash from the criminals who no longer had use for it, called in an anonymous tip to the appropriate channels, and swung.