an explosion of glass. The driver took the full brunt of the incoming barrage of bullets. Torn to shreds, he died instantly. His partner did the only sensible thing. He pushed his door open and jumped out.
But the van kept going.
And people kept shooting at it.
It seemed to take forever, but then came one more mighty crash. Nolan and Twitch were thrown to the roof of the van and then slammed back down again. Dirty water began filling the interior. It immersed the two front seats and stopped. From what Nolan could see, they had come to rest in a small canal.
Now he could hear people yelling—and the gunfire had yet to stop.
That’s when Twitch finally woke up.
“Are we at the hospital yet?” he asked simply.
The back doors of the van suddenly flew open and Nolan saw the faces of two Asian men looking in at them, guns drawn. Nolan was sure they were Shanghai gangsters, goons who would probably finish them off for good.
But after wiping the grit from his eye, Nolan was surprised to see the two men were actually uniformed police officers.
And surprisingly, they weren’t repulsed by his distorted features or his mightily disheveled condition.
In fact, they seemed very concerned.
“You have twisted face,” one cop said to him in broken English. “You cannot talk. You can barely see?”
Nolan could only shrug.
Then the cop looked at Twitch and said, “And you have big mouth and talk like a mental patient?”
Twitch nodded slowly.
Both cops got very excited.
One said: “You are the Shatang nan ren?”
Twitch had to think a moment. “The ‘Sugar Men?’ ” he finally asked.
“Yes … you are them?”
Twitch shouted back: “Yes, we are!”
The cops immediately put away their guns and started laughing.
One said, “Where have you crazy guys been? We’ve been looking for you all night.”
* * *
THEY WERE SOON speeding through the crowded streets of Old Shanghai again.
Nolan was holding on for dear life, the g-forces pressing him against his seat. Even Twitch was nervous, his knuckles turning white—this from a guy with a permanent Hawaiian tan.
The cops were crazier than the opium addicts, crazier than the kidnappers, even crazier than the ambulance-driving body snatchers. They were driving at least 90 mph on the tiny, crowded back streets of the old city, sending hundreds of people diving for cover and leaving a long, oily contrail in their wake.
There was no way Nolan or Twitch could ask the cops to slow down or even ask where they were going, because while one cop was driving like a madman, the other was shouting nonstop into the car’s two-way radio: Shatang nan ren!
The Sugar Men. We have the Sugar Men.
Only one thing was for sure—they weren’t heading for the docks. In fact, at one point, Nolan glimpsed a part of old harbor as they were screaming down one particularly narrow street, and they were heading in the opposite direction.
We’ll never live through this, he kept thinking as the police car went even faster. After all this, we don’t have a chance.
Nolan detected a glimmer of hope, though, when the cop car climbed out of the back streets and onto an elevated highway, pointing them toward the new part of Shanghai. But any thoughts the policemen would suddenly drive more safely up here were quickly dashed. If anything, the man behind the wheel became crazier—topping 110 mph and weaving in and out of heavy traffic like a drunken Indy 500 driver. He even used the car’s heavy front bumper—intended for moving disabled cars off the road—to push cars out of their way.
The wild ride came to a sudden end, and not with them wrapped around a light pole or crushed beneath a tanker truck. The cops took an off-ramp and screeched to a halt in front of the Shanghai version of a Mister Donuts coffee shop.
“Cops? Doughnuts?” Twitch moaned. “What are the chances?”
The cop manning the radio jumped out, ran into the shop, and returned not with doughnuts or coffee, but with a tiny plastic bowl of sugar.
He gave the bowl to Twitch as if it were made of gold.
“You must have this,” he said again in bad English. “You must have this with you.”
Before Twitch could ask why, the police car took off again and resumed its mad dash through the crowded, twisting streets.
Salvation came just three miles later—a distance the cops covered in about two minutes. The police car stopped at the top of a towering hill that overlooked the slums of Shanghai. A huge house teetered on