Shawn wrote to someone, and the someone wrote back, and a meeting was arranged in a public place in the middle of the afternoon.
He was still a street away from it when the noise started. Several men were chasing a girl down the pavement, and the girl, running badly in the wrong shoes, ran straight into him and then got behind him and stayed there.
The men came up swearing and shouting. For some reason the skinny young man in front of her seemed reliable to the girl; people have died of stranger assumptions.
"Please," she said. "Help me."
Shawn had already recognised her. Lena, he thought. How did she end up in a place like this?
The men caught hold of her arms anyway and started in on him, telling him what happened to people who went where they shouldn't. He knew her from school. The best student in her year, a goddess, a light that countless boys had circled without ever landing on.
But our hero did not have high moral values, and he was in no particular hurry to help a person in trouble.
They hit her. They told her what they were going to do with her. They took their time about it. And only then did Shawn finally say, "Let her go."
"Where did this sucker crawl out of?" one of them shouted, and added a few things about Shawn's face, and swung at him.
Shawn moved his head and the fist went past. He must have trained for years to have a reaction like that — or perhaps it is simply that he was the main character, and that is why so much was handed to him. He took the man lightly by the wrists, and the man went down onto the asphalt and stayed there.
Strong negative emotions detected.
He had never heard that voice in his past life. He had no time to be surprised by it either, because there was still a whole group of unpleasant men left standing.
That was when the man he had been corresponding with arrived. Unlike Shawn, he did not stand there weighing it up; he waded straight in, which arguably made him better suited to the role of hero than our selfish and vindictive Shawn. Between the two of them it took no time at all. Within a few minutes every one of the bandits was lying on the asphalt, and neither man had broken a sweat.
"Get lost," Shawn told them grandly.
Negative emotion value has exceeded ten for the first time. Unlocked: expansion of storage space. Function unlocked: collection of negative emotions.
Extremely convenient, for a man like Shawn. Everyone already hated him. Gathering that particular harvest was going to be the easiest work of his life.
"Shawn?" Lena had got her feet under her. "I didn't expect to see you here."
She thanked them both for their help, said she still had things to do, and that it was time for her to run. Then she was gone up the street, and the other man dusted off his hands and finally introduced himself.
"Min," he said. "And you are?"
He was Min. He was the man Shawn had arranged to meet an hour ago in a public place.
"You're the buyer?" Min said. "What a coincidence."
Then he seemed to decide that a coincidence of that size was fate, and shouted, "The heavenly king covers the earthly tiger!"
"Idiot," said Shawn — and collected a small, pleasant trickle of negative emotion for it.
Then he shouted back, "The pagoda pacifies the river demon!" It was a joke. He was lightening the mood.
Min bought it completely. "Ha! What a sense of humour my brother has."
He took Shawn back to his place to do the illegal part properly. He laid the weapon out and turned it so the light caught it, and said that since his brother was clearly a good fighter, he would give him a brotherly discount.
Shawn looked at it. "Is the silencer included as a gift? And the warranty card. And maybe throw in a box of cartridges."
Min bit his tongue. On the black market this thing would be snapped up at double the price without anyone asking a single question, and this man wanted a guarantee and gifts.
"Do you think we're selling household appliances here?" Min shouted. "This is daylight robbery!"
"No," said Shawn.
"No?"
"No." And he simply paid Min's price. "I'll transfer it now."
Min, who had prepared three more arguments, was left holding all of them.
Later that week Shawn was sitting across a table from a girl entirely out of his league, telling her at some length how much he loved her. She listened to him grovel and thought: a man who cringes this much in front of me would hardly dare to deceive me.
Soon she would have occasion to learn the opposite.
Soon after that she was signing the contract, page after page, in a neat looping hand.
The man on the other side of the table watched her sign and thought: the fool thinks she is only a guarantor. By putting her name here she takes the entire debt onto herself. And of course he was already thinking about the uses he would have for her when she could not repay it, because that is what such men think about.
And Shawn sat behind her the whole time and gloated in exactly the same way. Let her sign. Her greed will cover the rest of the debt for me.
For the sake of his safe haven he behaved, in general, precisely like the people he despised.
And at last the house was finished.