Criminal Psychology

The starry sky was bright tonight, a rare clear day at the end of summer.

Many people had gone to bed with their worries, while others considered this just another ordinary day.

Lu Xu, as usual, had a bit of drink while tidying up the tables and chairs at the late-night snack shop. Of course, what he called “as usual” referred to his life in the past month.

After all, he had done some very bad things, and it was only by becoming a tainted witness that he was able to negotiate a plea deal and replace imprisonment with community service. He worked during the day and helped out at the snack shop at night, leading a life of starting anew.

It was almost four in the morning, and the bustling stands were about to close, so there was only one table of customers left in the shop.

However, those customers showed no signs of leaving early. To be honest, even though he had spent most of his time dealing with the wealthy and the powerful, he had also seen plenty of people at the bottom. They would order a plate of peanuts and a portion of smashed cucumber, get a bottle of Red Star Erguotou, and stay in the shop until five in the morning without any remorse.

He wiped most of the tables clean, flipped the chairs over, and swept and mopped the floor, but the two people at that table still hadn’t stopped chatting.

“Lao Zhang, what you’re saying makes sense. We have a distant relative working at the police station. He said there’s a big government action behind all this. Let me tell you…”

Lu Xu really didn’t intend to eavesdrop, but their voices were so loud that every word seemed to be drilling into his ears, unstoppable.

“Lao Pei, you always know so much. You had insider information and didn’t share it. This is not treating your brothers as your own!”

“Hey, this is all inside information that we’re not allowed to talk about. Those four people are actually just ordinary people who offended someone and got thrown in. Otherwise, why was there no sound at all during the live broadcast?”

The middle-aged man raised his small wine cup and, with half-closed eyes, spoke in a mysterious manner.

Lu Xu suddenly froze in place.

The man across the table slapped the table and asked drunkenly, “Brother, are you telling the truth?”

“Absolutely, it’s all true!” As he spoke, he intentionally lowered his voice and pretended to warn, “You mustn’t let this get out. These are life-threatening matters. We might get in trouble if…”

As he was speaking, a dirty rag suddenly fell into the empty cucumber bowl. It didn’t splash any liquids, but the crushed garlic mixed with the dirty rag looked extremely disgusting. The two men turned their heads in unison, angrily looking at the fat man who had been cleaning up the shop.

“I’m sorry, sir, my hand slipped just now.”

The fat man was wearing glasses, and his eyes were bulging, making him look like a greasy toad. Although his eyes seemed kind and humble, he couldn’t hide the shadow of the world that passed through them.

“What are you up to? Picking a fight?” The man slammed down his wine cup. With blood rushing to his head, he stood up and rolled up his sleeves.

At this moment, he heard a pleasant female voice from behind. “Sir, I’m truly sorry. Please, calm down…”

Lu Xu also turned his head along with her. The proprietress, dressed in her nightgown, had just come down from the second floor. She leaned against a pillar with her arms crossed, posing seductively.

Men, faced with such a scene, would undoubtedly have their minds racing.

Sure enough, the men at the table who had been drinking were about to take action. But at this moment, the proprietress said, “My shop isn’t very lucky.”

The two drunken men stopped abruptly.

The proprietress continued, “The last person who drank until five o’clock in my shop was hit by a car on his way home and died.” The woman revealed a chilling, genuine smile. “It was really my bad luck. The family came with a Daoist priest and caused a scene in my shop, saying my shop is unlucky and that it killed their husband. The Daoist opened his heavenly eye and said it was because there were ghosts in my shop, and if a customer stayed past five o’clock, the ghosts would be displeased. It’s already 4:20 now… I… am genuinely concerned for you.”

The two middle-aged men were already quite drunk. The shop was half dark because it was about to close, and outside was pitch black except for the streetlights. At this moment, they were facing a woman who resembled a vixen, the atmosphere was indeed eerie.

Sure enough, the two men looked at each other, sobered up instantly, threw down their cups, and ran out of sight.

Lu Xu watched the proprietress with an ingratiating look, only to hear her say, “The bill will be deducted from your salary.” With that, she began to move gracefully back upstairs to sleep.

Her footsteps seemed to hammer Lu Xu’s heart. He watched her enchanting back, dry-mouthed, wanting to speak but unable to.

At this moment, the woman suddenly turned around and looked down at him from above, asking, “So, what’s going on with you today?”

Lu Xu sat under the lamp, sipping the cheapest rice wine in the store, and began a long and uninteresting narrative.

He never thought of himself as a good person. After all, according to his track record, he could basically be considered total social trash, not much different from those four pieces of garbage now locked in the small dark room waiting to die. But his mood now was complicated and sad, not because of the sorrow of kindred things hurting each other, but because he found fate really strange.

The first time he saw Lin Chen, he was severely beaten because he made a move on him. Later, Lin Chen treated him like a useful dog, leading him to investigate a case. Although it offended many dignitaries in Fengchun, it also gave him a chance to start anew. Now, fate once again linked him with Lin Chen in an unpredictable way, and he probably had to thank Lin Chen again. After all, he became a pile of social trash, all because of Qian Bao.

When Lu Xu got to this point, he looked at the woman across the small square table. It must have been because his story was too uninteresting that the lady boss was drinking on her own and didn’t care about him at all.

He awkwardly picked up the wine cup in front of him and drank it all. The hot and spicy wine slid down his throat in a straight line, giving him the courage to continue the story below.

“Don’t look at me now, being fat and ugly like a toad. In fact, I was terribly poor when I was young.”

“My father died early, and my mother, in order to raise me, messed around with men in the village. I didn’t understand the difficulty of life when I was young, and I just thought she was dirty and stupid.”

“I’m uneducated, and people from families like mine basically have no chance of turning their lives around through education. So after middle school graduation, I took a vocational school exam in a big city. It was my mother who forced me to go there. She thought that since I had relatives in that city, I would be able to graduate and find a good job. The relative was Qian Bao’s father, my distant cousin. My mother slept with him for about a week, and this distant cousin agreed to take care of me.”

As Lu Xu spoke, he felt more and more drunk, and he couldn’t even distinguish between reality and the past.

He said: “It wasn’t until I arrived in Fengchun that I realized that Qian Bao’s father was not really a car mechanic but a car thief. Qian Bao was younger than me and my cousin, but he started school early, so he was already in his first year of high school. Qian Bao wasn’t like his father—he didn’t want to do risky things with low returns, like car theft. Although his car theft skills were better than his father’s in high school, he had big ambitions and always wanted to do ‘finance’.”

He laughed, seemingly mocking but also admiring. “A first-year high school student, knowing how to cooperate with the owner of a video game store, investing in slot machines. I was short and fat at that time, but I had some strength. As his brother, I felt I should take care of my younger brother no matter what, so I helped him watch the venue. He gave me some money. I have been poor since I was young, and that money was astronomical to me. I was so happy that I would do whatever Qian Bao told me. I thought I would live like this for the rest of my life, the best scenario being owning my own small game hall, marrying a wife, until one day…”

When Lu Xu got here, the woman across from him still didn’t move. Her black hair shone lustrously under the light. Lu Xu didn’t know why he became so wordy and messy; it was simply uninteresting. Suddenly, he didn’t want to go on.

Just as he was about to get up, the woman hit the table with her wine cup and called him to continue in a long tone. “Continue, I don’t like to listen to stories halfway through.”

Lu Xu stood still by the table.

He would never forget that day, even though it was nothing compared to what he had done later, but after all, all the first times are unforgettable.

It was a weekend, and as usual, he had to get up earlier than usual to watch the venue for his cousin. However, when he was having breakfast, Qian Bao came in and bought him a delicious beef roll. Although he rejected it, he hadn’t eaten meat for a long time, and he didn’t think about whether there was any conspiracy behind a simple roll. While he was wolfing down the roll while pretending to be reserved, he heard Qian Bao tell him that he didn’t need to go to the game hall.

His beef-swallowing motion slowed down a beat.

Qian Bao said, “There is a new machine coming in today, smuggled goods. Brother, you go and help me carry it, and I’ll give you 50 yuan.”

Even today, he could clearly recall every bit of Qian Bao’s expression and tone change when he was speaking, but these were all meaningless things now.

Of course, he went to the dock later. It was indeed a new slot machine, but there were also other things hidden in the slot machine.

What happened later was a blurry nightmare of life—one that would continue to this day.

The police came, cracked open the slot machine, and found bags of colorful little pills inside. He was familiar with this stuff since Qian Bao often asked him to deliver them. However, it wasn’t until he was interrogated that he realized they were not refreshing mint candies but ecstasy pills.

He tried to turn Qian Bao in, but then he discovered that all along, Qian Bao had been dealing under his name. Even the account for receiving the illicit money was secretly set up in his name. Moreover, since he was the one delivering the goods, both person and material evidence were present, and the police wouldn’t believe any ungrounded accusations.

From the day he got into trouble, he never saw Qian Bao again. His mom did come to the police station to see him, even attempted to seduce the police to save him, which was utterly shameful.

At that time, that was what he thought. Shame, regret, pain, resentment—these intense emotions completely transformed a 17-year-old boy.

He was expelled from school and went to jail.

An elder in jail helped him analyze the situation. It was likely that Qian Bao had received a tip, which was why he had been sent to pick up the goods. In unflattering terms, he was the fish that Qian Bao had baited for the police.

However, all this no longer mattered. He knew he couldn’t go back.

What followed was a cycle of getting out of jail, going back in, getting out again, and going back in. In between, his mom contracted an STD and died. He mixed with the elder he met in jail for many years, struggling step by step to climb up from the gutter. After all, the underworld was a place with strict hierarchies.

Eventually, he became a pimp, having a handful of girls under him. He often abused those boys and girls, doing things similar to what Qian Bao had done to him.

But, he never saw Qian Bao again. He didn’t even know when Qian Bao was arrested and put in jail.

If it weren’t for the live broadcast he saw on TV yesterday, he would have been unable to associate his mischievous cousin, always with a smiling face, with the grim, overweight middle-aged man on the screen.

And now, the wheel of fortune had turned, and he even held a precious vote that could get Qian Bao killed.

When Lu Xu came to this point, somehow, he lowered his head and looked at his own hands. He thought this shouldn’t be difficult at all. Many people waited their entire lives for such a chance to exact revenge. And the only reason he hadn’t voted yet was because he needed to bathe and change clothes—to send Qian Bao to the guillotine with reverence, just as it’s shown on TV.

When he finished speaking, a low and boring voice came from behind.

“Oh…” His boss stood up from the chair, swaying towards the staircase, and as she walked, she said, “Turn left and go three hundred meters out the door, and you’ll find a voting station in the square. Go on.”