Chapter 10 Gy Blossoms

The murderer lived on a quiet street. Gardenias were planted on both sides of the street, and the white petals filled the nearby air with fragrance. At that time, he had a house where he and his heart had rested for many years. His entire teenage years passed in a flash. Then, his parents passed away. He got married, had a child, and later divorced, living an ordinary life.

The grapevine in the courtyard was planted together with his wife. After the divorce, he often stared blankly at the grapevine. He would sit and stand in the shade of the tree, waiting for his son, Tony, to come home from school. In the corner of the courtyard, Chinese cabbages huddled together in winter, and watermelons did the same in summer. Time flowed like water, year after year. Whether it was snowing heavily or raining cats and dogs, he had no thought of remarrying.

Most of his life was spent in vehicles. He had driven all kinds of cars: motor tricycles, tractors, long - distance buses, water - sprinkling trucks, large trucks with trailers, excavators, Santana sedans, and taxis...

He had only one occupation: a driver.

His fellow taxi drivers called him Master Jian. Master Jian didn't like chatting much but loved joking. For example, he would pat someone on the right shoulder from behind and then stand on the left. He also had a hobby of buying lottery tickets, but he had never won a big prize.

A driver's life is very dull and boring, so many drivers are talkative. Taxi drivers are well - informed people. When they gather together to chat, they often come up with astonishing remarks that shine with the light of truth. For example, the following conversation:

Driver A: The universe? Bah, it's like a testicle explosion.

Driver B: Exactly.

Driver A: A testicle explosion is like the Big Bang. If a camera could live - broadcast the entire process of the birth of the universe, and we magnify the TV screen countless times, and then multiply it by countless times, first find the solar system, then find the Earth, and finally, we would see our own silly faces.

Taxi drivers also like to talk about current affairs. Different from ordinary citizens, they can often see through the essence of things. For example, a driver and a passenger talked about cross - strait relations like this.

Passenger: There's going to be a war.

Driver: If they want to bomb Taiwan, let them. If they want to deal with the Japanese, let them. Don't you see that emperors, generals, and ministers turn to dust? Goose, goose, goose, feathers floating on green water, a river of ashes flowing eastward. Whether you and I live in the Qing Dynasty, the Ming Dynasty, the Yuan Dynasty, the Song Dynasty, or even the glorious Tang Dynasty, we are all nameless people. We can't change or stop anything.

Master Jian liked driving in the rain. Sometimes, he would park the car in the heavy rain, beside a tree - lined road. He would stay in the car, smoke a cigarette, open a crack in the window to let the smoke out and the moist air in. With the sound of the rain pattering, the music playing on the radio in the car seemed even more pleasant. The windshield wipers made the outline of the city sometimes blurry and sometimes clear.

He urinated in a mineral water bottle and then threw it out of the car. In fact, many taxi drivers do this.

He threw a plastic bag filled with feces out of the window. The feces of his youth fluttered in the wind.

He liked playing pranks, which showed that he wasn't old yet.

Rain is always associated with romance. Master Jian wasn't a romantic person, but sometimes he had some poetic thoughts. For example, he would park the car by the roadside, put on a raincoat, and go to buy a pack of cigarettes. Standing at the crossroads, he would think like this:

If the rain got heavier, if it kept raining heavily, the place where he lived would become a lake. On the lake surface - at the position of his knees - lotus flowers would bloom. He would stand in the water and watch boats pass by his knees.

Master Jian was also humorous sometimes. For example, when out - of - town tourists refused to take a taxi and chose to wait for a bus, Master Jian would say to them, "The chicken is already stewed, but you're still reluctant to add salt?"

A taxi driver is more like a traveler. Watching the busy traffic and the fleeting years, taking others home and then going home himself, repeating this every day - this is his life. Sitting still, yet shuttling through the hustle and bustle of the city. Whether it was a wretched man in a vest who had just finished playing mahjong or a coquettish woman who had eaten spicy hot - pot and sprayed perfume, no matter who they were or what time it was, when someone waved, he would drive over with his car. He could feel that the car was like his body, his skin. He observed every passenger with a sidelong glance. When he met talkative people, he would chat a few words. When he met silent people, he had nothing to say.

Once, at the intersection of People's Hospital, Master Jian picked up a strange passenger, a woman in a hospital gown. Her face was pale, and she looked haggard. Strangely - this woman had no hair. She was a bald woman.

He: Where to?

Woman: Where are there fewer people? Just drive around for a few laps. I don't know. Are there any mountains nearby?

He: No.

Woman: How about a lake? Is there one?

He: There's a river.

Woman: Then go to the riverside. Sigh, I'm afraid of water.

The two stopped talking. The car drove in silence. When it stopped by the river, the woman was about to get out. Master Jian reminded her that she hadn't paid the fare. The woman threw down a medical record and said, "You even want to charge a dying person?"

Master Jian looked at the medical record and didn't ask for the fare anymore. This woman was a leukemia patient. Her hair should have fallen out due to chemotherapy.

Master Jian took a look at the bald woman. She got out of the car, smiling but with tears streaming down her face, and walked towards the river.

Master Jian thought the woman was just out for a stroll. Unexpectedly, a few days later, a female corpse in a hospital gown was fished out of the river. Then he realized - this woman had committed suicide!

This incident gave him a huge shock. From that day on, he kept thinking about a question, so much so that he often got distracted while driving.

This question is actually something that each of us may face:

If you were diagnosed with a terminal illness and couldn't afford the high medical expenses, what would you do?

Quietly wait for death to come?

Perhaps suicide is a way to escape, ending one's life to relieve the family's financial pressure, and making one's pain and the family's grief end with a leap.

A long time passed since this incident, and Master Jian still muttered to himself, "That woman must have had a child... She just wanted to find a place where no one was around and die quietly."

Master Jian remembered the day he divorced his wife. His son, Tony, hid his shoes in the quilt. He and his wife searched for a long time. It was not until after they finished the divorce procedures and he returned home alone from the civil affairs bureau that he found the shoes hidden in the quilt.

At that time, his son, Tony, was only six years old. The son stood at the door, under the grapevine, neither crying nor laughing. He just asked calmly, "Where's mom? Will she come back?"

He didn't say anything. A pang of sadness hit him, and tears welled up.

Father and son depended on each other. He swore to make his child's life better. As Tony grew up, wearing strange clothes and having a peculiar hairstyle, he just felt that he couldn't keep up with the times. However, he could tell that his son wasn't happy.

The rebellion and decadence in a teenager's eyes aren't faked.

There's a detail that has to be mentioned. The day Tony and his friends found the corpse on the water tower, he took a bus home. An old lady with a walking stick got on the bus. There were many people in the bus, and there were no empty seats. Tony - this non - mainstream teenager with a tattoo, earrings, and an afro - stood up and said politely, "Granny, you can sit here."

The people around smiled knowingly, thinking this teenager was very cute.

What happened between the initial heart of planting trees and the final heart of killing?

In the winter of 2006, Master Jian got hemorrhoids. At first, they were only the size of peanuts. He tried to recover by taking medicine. He took Huaijiao pills, Xiaozhiling, took warm - water sitz baths, and applied ointment. Every evening, when others were getting off work, he started working. After taking the medicine, he put the bowl on the icy table in the courtyard, exhaled the cold air, and drove to work.

The chair he sat on was always half a foot off the ground, keeping a balance with the car exhaust.

Many drivers have hemorrhoids, so it wasn't really a big deal. But every time he stepped on the brake or the clutch, he felt a sharp pain.

During the Spring Festival, the hemorrhoids began to deteriorate. The original peanuts had grown into a hideous tumor, as if he was sitting on a tomato. After the surgery, it was the Spring Festival. He endured the pain and made dumplings, waiting alone for his son. That day was New Year's Eve. His son stayed up all night in the Internet cafe and brought a girl back the next morning.

He wasn't angry. He was happy, thinking his son had grown up.

Tony and Lexi started living together. Master Jian implicitly warned his son that getting pregnant was a very troublesome thing.

Tony said, "Don't worry, it won't happen."

Lexi also said in a nonchalant tone, "We're just having fun. We don't want to get married and have kids."

In the summer of 2007, his hemorrhoids flared up again. This time, it was very serious. His stomach hurt severely, and he had rectal bleeding and vomiting blood. The feces he excreted were crescent - shaped instead of round, which indicated that there was a tumor in his intestine. He thought it was internal hemorrhoids, but after a check - up in the hospital, it turned out to be advanced rectal cancer, which had metastasized to the liver and lungs!

The doctor comforted him, "Rectal cancer isn't that scary. Just have a surgery, insert a tube in your body, and create an artificial anus."

Master Jian said, "It has already spread to my liver and lungs. How long can I last?"

The doctor said, "It depends on the effect of chemotherapy. Three to five years should be possible. If you don't get treatment, it's only about three months."

Master Jian said, "How much will it cost approximately?"

The doctor said, "The surgery isn't very expensive, but you need to have more than ten chemotherapy sessions, and there will be follow - up..."

Master Jian said, "How much in total?"

The doctor said a number.

Master Jian could hardly believe his ears. He had had otitis media, and his ears often oozed pus. The doctor said it again loudly. When he heard that number, dark clouds gathered outside the window, and a thunderclap seemed to drill into the pus in his ear. He shivered. The doctor advised him to have the surgery as soon as possible, but he turned around and walked out of the hospital into the rain.

A millionaire may be only one hospital away from bankruptcy, not to mention an ordinary civilian.

What can a small citizen do when diagnosed with a terminal illness?

What can a busy ant do in the face of fate?

Over the years, living a shabby life and carefully managing, Master Jian didn't have much savings. The house at home belonged to his father's unit. He only had the right to live in it, not to sell it.

Having a terminal illness, he could only wait for death!

During that period, he lost weight rapidly, changing from a middle - aged fat man to a thin man. He was like a different person before and after getting sick.

Master Jian's neighbor was a wealthy old man who had just celebrated his sixth birthday.

The old man had a heart transplant. He regarded the day the transplant was successful as his birthday. The old man always kept silent about the heart that gave him a new life. Later, a person in the know said that the old man's heart came from a murderer. Some medical experts believe that the brain isn't the only organ with a memory function. The heart can also store memories. One typical example: An 8 - year - old American girl who received the heart of a 10 - year - old boy who was murdered often had nightmares that someone was going to kill her.

Master Jian asked the old man some questions. What was an artificial anus?

The old man replied, "A feces bag. You hang a feces bag on your body."

Master Jian: "How's the heart you got? Does it work okay?"

The old man: "To be honest, I feel like killing someone!"

Perhaps this sentence gave him an idea. A black bat seemed to fly up from his mind. Anyway, he was going to die. He decided to kill people and leave a sum of money for his son. He parked the taxi in front of the sauna city. The guests who came here to consume were all rich. Pierre had a bulging bag. After killing Pierre with a nail gun, he found that there wasn't much money in the bag. As it was his first crime, he had no experience at all. He dumped the body in a hurry, so he transferred the body from the water tower again.

Every taxi driver, especially night - shift drivers, keeps self - defense weapons like daggers, fire axes, and machetes in the car. Many drivers knew that Master Jian's self - defense weapon was a nail gun. Once the police found the body and traced the murder weapon, it was likely to lead to Master Jian. Out of an anti - reconnaissance idea, after the crime, he transferred the body and buried it in his own courtyard.

What was he thinking when he was walking in the rain, carrying a decaying corpse on his back?

He was thinking about his son. He remembered when his son had an epileptic seizure when he was a child. He carried his son to the hospital. On the way back, the little guy fell asleep. The streetlights were dim, stretching their shadows.

On that rainy night, he carried the corpse down from the water tower and even talked to the dead person, "Buddy, I have no choice. You've gone to enjoy yourself over there, while I'm still suffering here."

He put the corpse in the trunk of the taxi, completely unaware of a teenager hiding in the bushes of the park, watching him with a pair of eyes. That was his son, Tony. When he finished burying the corpse in the courtyard, his son came in and said, his lips trembling, "Dad, I saw everything..."

Master Jian asked his son, "I did all this for you. What would you do if I died?"

Son: "I don't know."

Master Jian: "Can you take care of yourself?"

Son: "I, I don't know..."

Master Jian: "Will you think of dad in the future? Don't think of dad's bad, but think of dad's good."

Son: "I..."

Master Jian: "Let dad bear all the sins. For you, dad is willing to go to hell as long as you're okay."

Son: "Dad..."

Master Jian: "Alas, you'll be alone from now on. You have to be a good person."

The son lowered his head, and tears streamed down.

A father's deep love is always hard to express. He was a murderer, but also a father.

Although the father - son pair usually talked little and had little communication, fatherly love is like a mountain, silent. On the night he buried the corpse, the father and son were silent. They sat at home, not talking. The father smoked cheap cigarettes, his head lowered. The son had a sentence in his heart but never said it out. That sentence was:

"Dad, I'm scared. Dad, I love you."

When dawn came, the father came up with a countermeasure. He knew that the corpse on the water tower had been discovered by Tony's friends, and the police would know about it sooner or later. So he chose to call the police. At that time, Lexi had just returned to Tony's home from the Internet cafe and was about to go to sleep. Master Jian pretended that he had just come back from work and, together with Lexi, sent the feigning - sick Tony to the hospital and then reported the case.

In many cases, the person who reports the case is the murderer. In 2004, there were many fires in Chongqing. The arsonist, Cui Youping, called the police and even put out the fire at the scene. In 2006, on a path behind a warehouse on the ring road in Jinzhou, a person with his legs cut off was found. This person was Zeng Jinqing. He self - harmed and then reported the case in an attempt to defraud insurance money.

Master Jian asked his son to act crazy in the hospital. Then he used the deceased's mobile phone to send text messages about a ghost seeking revenge. He did this just to mislead the police, distract their attention, and make them ignore some real clues, so as to gain time for him to continue robbing and killing.

Tony's illness wasn't faked. How could a child accept that the person carrying a corpse in the park was his father? Moreover, Tony knew that there was a corpse buried under the grapevine in his courtyard and that there would be a second one buried there.

Master Jian said to his son, "Since I've done it, I'll see it through. Big cases or small cases, it's all death anyway."

During the days when he was waiting to kill and rob, he often thought, in a few years, would his son inherit his bad habits of smoking and drinking and then quit? After getting married, would he get divorced again, shattering a good home into broken memories? He thought of his son's girlfriend, Lexi, that young but flirtatious girl. Every morning, she would call him "uncle" and then walk hand in hand with his son into the room to sleep. Sometimes, when his son was not around, she would call other boys in a very intimate way, which made Master Jian extremely disgusted, so he killed Lexi.

He wanted to give his son a brand - new life, a life completely different from and unconnected to the past.

Master Jian killed the accountant from the tobacco bureau with a nail gun in his taxi. The accountant begged bitterly before dying and told him the password of the bank card, but he didn't spare the innocent man. The password was correct, and the accountant didn't deceive him, which made him feel uneasy, and he decided to stop.

That day, he picked up his son from the hospital, bought train tickets, put all the money into a bag, and gave it all to his son.

Son: "Where should I go?"

Father: "Anywhere. You've grown up."

Son: "Will you go with me?"

Father: "Don't worry about me. I'm a dying man... You go, go far away."

Son: "Dad, I..."

Father: "Remember, never come back."

Son: "If there's an afterlife, Dad, I still hope to be your son again!"

The father was restless, feeling that he had forgotten something. He thought blankly for a long time and said, "I forgot to lock the door. I didn't take the house key."

Master Jian asked his son to find a barber shop and get his hair cut first. He would go home to get the key and then send his son to the station. When he went home, the Special Case Team happened to be investigating at his house. He saw four people standing in the courtyard, and one of them was digging something under the grapevine with a shovel. He realized that these four people were the police, so without thinking, he picked up the nail gun and rushed out...

Matt's palm was injured, but the bones and muscles were not seriously damaged, and there was no life - threatening danger.

The nail of the nail gun hit Professor Liang right in the chest. At that time, Amy was so scared that her face turned deathly pale. This shot was enough to be fatal. However, Professor Liang didn't die and wasn't even slightly injured - there was a Bible in his upper pocket, and this Bible saved his life.

Master Jian fled by car, like a lost dog, not knowing where to go. Philip Sofia took a taxi and chased closely, while notifying the police to intercept. In the end, Master Jian's car flew out in an arc in the air, honking the horn all the time, crashing from the bridge to the river beach. Before he died, he smelled the fragrance of gardenias and thought of the face of that suicidal woman, the face with a smile but tears streaming down.

The case was solved. After that, the police didn't find Tony.

That non - mainstream teenager got a new haircut and even put on the new clothes his father bought for him. He carried a bag of money, sat in a taxi, and planned to go home to see his father who had been waiting for a long time. However, he saw the busy police at the door of his house. He realized that something had happened to his father who had gone home to get the key.

The child was reluctant to leave. He took a last look at his home and then resolutely said to the driver, "Let's go, to the train station."

Tears streamed down his face... The gardenias by the roadside were white and fragrant, blooming silently.

Perhaps Tony would need a lifetime to feel his father's deep love.

There's one more thing that must be clearly explained. When the Special Case Team left, the director of the Fourth Street Sub - Bureau held a banquet to see them off. After the banquet, the director of the Fourth Street Sub - Bureau quietly gave the Special Case Team a letter. According to his statement - this was a thank - you letter. Through the envelope, one could feel that there was a bank card inside. The director of the Fourth Street Sub - Bureau said that he didn't run the sauna city and hoped that the Special Case Team wouldn't mention this matter after they went back.

The Special Case Team refused this thank - you letter. On the plane back, the four members of the Special Case Team had the following conversation:

Amy: "This is a blatant bribe!"

Professor Liang: "Most of the pornographic places in a city are sheltered by the local public security department."

Matt said: "Sherlock Holmeses, guess how much money is on that card?"

Philip Sofia: "I think it must be more than the money Master Jian got by killing three people..."