American comic book: I, with my abundant martial virtue, love to do good to others.

Chapter 747 Taken Seriously

The taillights drew a red arc in the night, getting farther and farther away, smaller and smaller, like two falling stars.

Lynn stood up.

He ran.

He ran onto the side road and ran about fifty meters. The taillights of that car were already several hundred meters away, turning the second bend. He raised his gun—he knew the range wasn't enough, and he knew that even if it were, he couldn't shoot at a moving car because he didn't know Wayne's exact location inside, and no one could predict what would happen after a bullet passed through the vehicle.

But he still raised it.

The red taillights in the crosshair grew farther and farther away, smaller and smaller, until they finally disappeared behind a hillside.

Lynn put the gun down.

He stood on an empty county road, bathed in moonlight and the sound of the wind, in some unknown place in Florida, surrounded by palm trees and bushes, with stars overhead and a pale gray-white sky to the east, the direction from which the sun would rise in a few hours.

His phone vibrated.

Carter.

"We stopped that Toyota Sienna. It was empty. There was no one inside. There was a mannequin in the package on the roof."

Lynn closed her eyes.

"Wayne's over here," he said. "He just ran off. Headed west, I couldn't catch him."

There was a three-second silence on the other end of the phone.

"Should we pursue them?"

Lynn opened his eyes and looked in the direction the car had disappeared. The road forked less than a kilometer ahead, one going southwest and the other northwest. He didn't know which way the car had gone. He wasn't even sure if the car was still on the highway or had turned onto some nameless dirt road, heading towards some place he couldn't find on the map.

"We can't catch up," he said.

His voice was flat, so flat it didn't sound like his own.

Carter remained silent for a few more seconds.

"So what do we do now?"

Lynn stood by the roadside, put the safety on his gun, and holstered it. The night wind blew, blowing his hair to one side, revealing his forehead, which appeared white in the moonlight.

"Stop," he said. "Get everyone to stop. Send Wayne's exact description and the features of this new car to every channel. Border crossings, airports, ports, Greyhound stations. Send it to everything you can."

"and then?"

"Then we wait."

He hung up the phone.

Carter's car arrived just before dawn.

Lynn waited by the roadside for nearly forty minutes. The night wind blew in from the east, carrying the damp smell of the swamp mixed with decaying plants. His coat wasn't warm enough, but he didn't shrink back. He stood there, watching the dark bushes at the end of the fork in the road, watching the moonlight slowly fade, watching the eastern sky change from gray to pale purple and then to orange-red.

Carter pulled up in front of him, rolled down the window, and Miles leaned out of the passenger seat. Both men wore the same expression—not frustration, but the blankness of someone who had run the entire game only to be tripped up at the last moment, a feeling they hadn't yet fully processed.

"Get in the car," Carter said.

Lynn opened the door and sat in the back seat. The seat was still warm, and the dents from when he leaned back a few hours earlier were still visible on the backrest.

Miles turned around, the first rays of morning sunlight reflecting off his glasses.

"I've sent it. Wayne's description, the characteristics of the Ford Explorer, every channel I could think of. The federal system, the state police's network of assistance, and even a few journalists I'm in private contact with who work on the Mexican border."

"A reporter?" Carter glanced at Miles in the rearview mirror.

"Sometimes they're faster than official channels."

Lynn didn't speak. He leaned back in his seat, closed his eyes, not to sleep, but to relive every detail of the moment the car turned onto the side road. Taillights. Engine sound. Gravel kicked up by the tires. Wayne's profile with his head down. The way the woman's hand moved as she fed him.

"You saw them giving you the medication?" Carter asked.

"see."

"That means they really need him to live."

"Or he needs to be alive before reaching a certain point." Lynn opened his eyes and looked at a gray stain on the roof, unsure if it was coffee or something else. "After that point, things might change."

The car was quiet for a moment. Carter drove back onto the highway, heading north to the nearest town. Lynn didn't know the town's name, nor did he care. He only had one thing on his mind—the car was heading west, to the Mexican border, but they couldn't possibly stop and check every car along the border. The coastline from Florida to Texas was too long, so long that any law enforcement system would be like a fishing net full of holes.

The town is very small.

A main street, five intersections, a gas station, a Walmart, three fast food restaurants, and a row of identical motels. Carter parked his car in front of the last motel in the row, the tires crunching over the gravel in the open space.

Lynn's legs were a little stiff when he got off the bus. After sitting for nearly twenty hours, standing for forty minutes, and then sitting for half an hour, his knees reminded him in a dull pain that he was no longer the person he was five years ago who could sit in a car for thirty-six hours straight without blinking.

They booked three rooms.

Miles couldn't stand still in the hallway. He leaned against the wall, took off his shoes, and walked barefoot on the thin, damp fabric of the hotel corridor.

On the worn-out carpet, he carried his laptop bag as if it were a bag of potatoes as he walked into the room.

"Call me in two hours," he said, closing the door behind him.

Carter stood in his room doorway, his hand on the doorknob, but he didn't turn it.

"Do you really think assisting in the investigation will be useful?"

Lynn looked at him.

"It will be useful," he said, "but not now. We have to wait for Mexico to react first."

Carter's jaw twitched. Lynn had seen that kind of twitching many times; it was the expression of wanting to say something unpleasant but swallowing it back for the time being because the other person was already very tired.

"You go to sleep first," Lynn said. "I'll knock on the door in two hours."

Carter entered the room. The door closed softly, but the motion-sensor light in the hallway still flickered on briefly.

Lynn's room had a cloying, sweet smell of old carpet and air freshener mixed together. The curtains were beige and thick; when drawn, they blocked most of the light, but not all of it. A few thin lines of light peeked in from the corners, casting parallel streaks of light on the opposite wall.

He didn't take off his shoes.

He sat on the edge of the bed for a while, then lay down, put a pillow behind his head, and stared at the ceiling with his eyes open. There were water stains on the ceiling, rings and circles, like some kind of slowly growing tree rings.

My phone vibrated in my pocket.

Gwen.

Did you succeed in catching up with him?

Lynn looked at those three words, typed "No," then deleted it. She then typed "Lost track," and deleted that too. Finally, she typed "Still chasing" and sent it.

After sending the message, he held his phone to his chest and closed his eyes.

Before falling asleep, a picture flashed through my mind. Victoria's face. Not the face of the woman I saw giving him drugs tonight, but the face of Victoria smiling and asking him in the restaurant, "Would you ever get involved in those kinds of cases?" That smile lingered in my memory for less than half a second before being overshadowed by another image—the taillights of that Ford Explorer growing smaller and smaller in the night, like a red dot turning off.

Two hours later, the person who came to call him was not Lynn.

It was Carter who came to knock on Lynn's door.

When Lynn opened the door, Carter had already changed his clothes. He had somehow gotten a dark gray polo shirt, and the collar was unbuttoned, revealing a section of skin below his collarbone, which looked a bit pale in the light of the corridor.

"Miles isn't up yet?" Lynn asked.

"Get up. Make a phone call from your room."

"Who should I call?"

"An informant in Mexico. He spent a semester in Mexico during his university years, speaks Spanish better than English, and knows some people who travel between the two borders."

When Lynn entered Miles' room, he was sitting cross-legged on the bed, phone between his ear and shoulder, hands on the computer, speaking Spanish at a rapid-fire pace. It wasn't the polite language learned in class, but the kind slang and elision you only really learn on the street.

Lynn stood by and waited.

Miles spoke for about two more minutes, ending with a heavy expectation before hanging up.

"What did he say?" Carter leaned against the doorframe.

Miles rubbed his eyes; his glasses were askew from being pushed aside by his fingers, but he didn't bother to straighten them.

"My friend works as a freelance journalist in Mexico, mainly covering Tamaulipas. He said the situation there has been unusual in the last three months."

"What's wrong?"

"People. There are a lot more people coming from the north. Not migrants on the outskirts, but people from the organized crime side. In the past, drug cartels in Mexico cooperated with street gangs in the United States, but it was usually just money and goods, not a large-scale movement of people. In the last three months, people have been helping to move people from the United States to Mexico. Not just one or two, but in batches."

Lynn's eyes changed.

"Who is it?"

"My friend was hesitant to ask further. But his exact words were—'He's not an ordinary criminal.'"

There was a two-second silence in the room. Carter straightened up from the doorframe, walked to the bedside, and looked down at Miles' computer screen.

"He used the phrase 'not an ordinary criminal,'" Miles repeated. "The same thing you told me on the phone last time."

Lynn stood in the middle of the room, sunlight streaming in through the gaps in the curtains and illuminating the tips of his shoes.

Which city in Tamaulipas does your friend live in?

"I mainly travel between Nuevo Laredo and Reynosa. Both cities are on the Rio Grande, across from Texas."

""

The Rio Grande. The natural border between Mexico and the United States. The river is not wide, in some places it is less than a hundred meters wide. A person who can swim can cross it in ten minutes.

"Would he be willing to help us with ground observation?" Lynn asked.

Miles hesitated for a moment.

"He said he was willing, but on one condition. He didn't want money; he wanted information. Information about what these people were doing in the United States. He said he had been a freelance journalist for almost ten years and had seen too many people sent from the north and then never heard from again. He wanted to know who they were."

Lynn glanced at Carter. Carter nodded slightly.

"Yes," Lynn said, "but we have to wait for the right time. If we tell him too much now, and he gets targeted, he'll be the first to suffer."

Miles nodded and relayed his friend's words as a message.

The phone rang.

It wasn't Lynn's call, nor Miles's, it was Carter's. Carter glanced at the caller ID, walked to the window, and answered. He didn't say much while listening, only occasionally letting out a low "hmm," his voice revealing no emotion.

After hanging up the phone, he stood there for about five seconds without moving.

"Drake," he said, "the official response from Mexico has arrived."

Lynn looked at him.

"How so?"

Carter turned around, his expression unchanged, but the corners of his mouth curved down slightly, as if he had swallowed something not very tasty.

"support."

"Then what."

"And that was it. Verbal support. No manpower, no ground assistance, no intelligence sharing. They said this was a case that occurred within the United States, the victim was a U.S. citizen, and the suspect fled the United States, so Mexico had no obligation to participate in the investigation. But—" He paused, "they expressed understanding of our concerns and were willing to consider providing appropriate facilitation upon receiving a formal diplomatic request."

"A formal diplomatic request," Miles repeated, his tone dripping with sarcasm, "By the time that's approved, Wayne's ashes will be cold."

Lynn didn't say anything.

He walked to the window and pulled the curtains back a little wider, which Miles hadn't quite drawn. Sunlight streamed in, illuminating his face. Across from the motel parking lot was a Mexican restaurant, its exterior painted a bright yellow, the wrought-iron gate rusted, and a delivery van parked in front, two workers unloading baskets of peppers and tomatoes.

"Aren't you angry?" Miles looked at the back of Lynn's head.

"What are you angry about?"

"As for Mexico, they say they support us, but they do nothing in reality. If their territory weren't in such chaos, these people wouldn't think that going there is a good option."

Lynn turned around from the window.

There was no anger, not even disappointment, on his face. His expression was more like the calm you feel when a question you've heard the answer to countless times is asked again, and you're too lazy to even repeat the answer.

“Miles,” he said, “in some parts of Mexico, it’s not just a simple crime problem anymore. Do you know how many murders happen in Mexico every year? More than 30,000 last year. Do you know how many people are missing? Hundreds of thousands. Do you know how many police officers are killed in the line of duty? More than 30 last year. In a country where a police officer being killed doesn’t even make the front page, how many people do you think they’ll mobilize for a case involving an American tycoon?”

Miles opened his mouth, but no words came out.

"I'm not trying to excuse Mexico," Lynn said calmly, without a trace of emotion. "I'm just stating a fact. When the crime rate exceeds a certain threshold, the government's ability to respond collapses. It's not because they don't want to, it's because they can't anymore. Drug cartels in some places have their own courts, their own tax collection systems, their own radio communication systems; they are more efficient than the local police. In places like that, you can't expect official requests for assistance to be taken as seriously as they would be in Virginia."