Chapter 2 — The Scam
The Herdsman of the Wasteland · Page 2 of 2
And so the girl's image rose several notches in Wei Zhao's estimation. Good looks were all very well, but a beautiful girl with a vicious heart was good for nothing. That was Wei Zhao's standard for judging a girl.
"Ahem." Buzz Cut, sitting across from the girl, seemed to catch on to what she was doing. He coughed loudly and shot her a vicious glare. The girl went pale with fright and lowered her head.
Naturally, none of these small details escaped Wei Zhao's eyes. But he had been bored senseless on this journey, and he had left home seething after a quarrel with the old man, with nowhere to vent his temper. Here were a few fools knocking at his door — how could he pass up the chance to toy with them?
Yet though the girl had lowered her head, she kept nudging him with her foot, still trying to warn him. Wei Zhao, however, seemed not to feel it at all, and remained utterly unmoved.
"I've only got forty-nine thousand on me — not that much, I'm afraid," Wei Zhao said, putting on the look of a simple, honest bumpkin.
Across from him, Pockmarked Face and Buzz Cut, hearing that he had forty-nine thousand, shot brilliant beams from their eyes. Even so, they kept their faces puckered like bitter melons. "Only forty-nine thousand? Isn't that a bit short? How much would each of us get?"
"Forty-nine thousand divided by two is twenty-four thousand five hundred..." Buzz Cut said, doing the sum aloud.
"Twenty-four thousand five hundred? That's not bad at all. I'm in. What about you?" Pockmarked Face nodded hastily.
"Fine. Since you agree, I agree too." Buzz Cut nodded. "Hand over the money."
Wei Zhao opened his backpack and took out a small parcel wrapped in newspaper. He peeled back the layers one by one, revealing five neat bundles of cash.
"Forty-nine thousand. That's all there is... count it if you want," Wei Zhao said in his plain, honest way. "Now give me the pull tab."
This money was the living allowance the old man had given Wei Zhao to last him for years to come. But over the past few years, Wei Zhao had earned the old man quite a fortune—take that assassination mission in North Africa, for instance. By international standards, that alone should have brought in at least several hundred thousand as a reward, surely?
And yet, when Wei Zhao was about to leave, the old man had ransacked every drawer and corner, finally scraping together this forty-nine thousand yuan from a battered old bag, insisting it was the family's entire savings and urging him to spend it sparingly.
It left Wei Zhao feeling rather frustrated. Was the old man genuinely broke, or was he just playacting at poverty? Then again, it didn't look like an act—the old man ate exactly what Wei Zhao ate and never seemed to enjoy any kind of luxury. Could it be that he had simply overestimated how much those missions paid?
"Sure, sure," the pockmarked man and the crew-cut man said, and like a pair of hungry wolves, they quickly split the cash in front of them, cleaning it down to the last bill before handing the pull tab to Wei Zhao.
Wei Zhao stowed the pull tab carefully on himself, as if afraid of dropping it, handling it as preciously as though it were a rare treasure.
Seeing the three swindlers get away with it, the girl sitting beside Wei Zhao let out a helpless sigh. Watching the delighted look on his face, like that of someone who had just won a prize, she truly didn't know what to say.
With the money in hand, the three swindlers slipped back into their earlier composure, acting as though they didn't know one another at all, each going about his own business.