Chapter 18

Four days later Roger's mother and father got home from their cruise. Roger let them tell him all about the cruise before he told them about Lei and him getting married. His mother first screamed and laughed and cried at the same time and then hugged Roger around the neck so hard that he was afraid that she was going to cause damage to his neck. Before Roger had a chance to stop her, his mother ran out to Lei's desk and hugged her just as tight. When he finally calmed his mother down, about an hour later, he asked if they would like to go someplace nice for dinner that night so that they could get a chance to talk to Lei. His father agreed to meet Roger and Lei at the restaurant that they often went to and then left.

After they left Roger called Lei into his office, "How about if we take the afternoon off and go home and relax before we go out tonight?"

Lei agreed and then said with a smile, "Just relax or do you have something else in mind?"

Roger grinned and picked up his keys, "Go start the SUV and turn on the air conditioning. I had to park in the sun today and I'm sure that the inside of the car is over one hundred degrees. I'll be down if a few minutes. I want to make sure that Bart has everything for that big job tomorrow."

Lei took the keys from him and gave him a quick kiss and left the office. He signed a few papers that needed to get into the mail and then went to the warehouse to find Bart. On the way he passed one of his oldest employees who was of Chinese decent. Roger spoke to the man in halting Chinese and the man smiled and commented that Roger was speaking Chinese almost as well as he was, although Roger knew that the man was having a hard time understanding him...

As Roger walked through the warehouse he thought about what the man had said. In the past few years he had picked up a lot of the Chinese language from Ben, Lei and the language course that he played as he drove to and from work. Roger could understand what others were saying but he sometimes had trouble speaking because of the dialects.

He saw Bart with a clipboard in his hand checking the materials that had to be on the job tomorrow. Roger waited until he finished counting the parts.

"Everything there?"

Bart nodded, "If anything's missing it will just be nuts and bolts or something minor. If something like that is missing I can have it to them in a matter of..."

Bart was interrupted by what sounded like firecrackers or gunfire and he asked, "Is this a Chinese holiday?"

Roger turned in the direction of the sound, "That sounded like automatic gunfire."

Bart shook his head, "Naw that was just firecrackers."

Just then they both heard sirens getting closer. They stood listening to the sirens until it seemed that the sirens were in the parking lot. They both began to run toward the parking lot. Roger was leading the way and when he reached the door Bart was several steps behind him. Two police cars were stopped in the parking lot and the police were standing in front of the passenger door of Roger's SUV.

Roger ran to the car but the police grabbed him before he could touch the car, "Sir, you can't touch the car. This is a crime scene now. There's nothing you can do for the woman, she's dead. Is this your car?"

Roger nodded and the policeman continued, "Do you know this woman?"

Roger couldn't answer the man so he nodded his head and looked at Lei. Her head was covered in blood and several bullets had gone through the door so Roger knew that she had also had bullets in her body. Her head was lying on a newspaper that was on the steering wheel. The motor of the car was still running.