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corporates and the gaudy hangers-on who trailed them in
and out of the Lucky Dot. Ko’s fingers dug into the plastic of the wheel
with such powerful, impotent fierceness, it made his eyes tight in his
head. A knot of them slipped and giggled as they moved toward the main
road, at their head a raucous woman in the scarlet kimono of a senior
Paradise executive, dragging a boywhore behind her. Under a
thermoplastic parasol, she led her gaggle of suits right in front of the
Ranger and for a moment Ko imagined the look on her face if he were to
stamp on the gas and ram the lot of them against the flank of the
minibus. He saw it unfold in his head as a colourless manga strip: cut
frames and jagged edges spattered with pools of black ink blood, wheels
spinning on corpses. Screaming. Terrible laughter.
    “That hatred will burn you alive one day.” Feng shifted in the back
seat.
    Ko didn’t bother to look at him. “You have a bloody proverb for every
day of the week, don’t you?”
    “I’m just making an observation.”
    He closed his eyes, and when he opened them he was alone again.
    The night drew in and the transit company programmer came to load the
routes for the light buses. He gave Ko a sideways look from under the
hood of his acid-resistant rain slicker and did his work. The two buses
came to life in blinks of neon running lights and rumbled away to
service the shift workers massing at the Metro stations. Tubed in from
the outlying shanties across the border wall in Shenzhen, Hong Kong’s
population would swell by a third once the day ended as cooks, cleaners
and prostitutes came in to fill the low-rent gaps in the city’s service
infrastructure. By dawn they would all be gone again, pockets lined with
a few more yuan, the messes made by the suits cleaned up so the rich
could do it again the next night. The migrant workforce was visible at
the edges of every street, edited out of the world that people like the
kimono woman moved through.
    The digits on the dashboard display moved with glacier-like slowness
toward closing time, and the higher they climbed the more suits ejected
themselves from the Lucky Dot. In big, splashy steps, a skinny man in a
laser-cut Mirany original lurched over to the Ranger and collided with
it. Ko jerked awake from a clammy doze and cupped his balisong knife in
his hand.
    “C’mon! C’mon!” the drunk called to a group of similarly dressed men. “I
gotta car! Let’s play go-gangers!” He tugged at the door handle, but Ko
locked it. The man frowned, his beer-fogged brain slow on the uptake.
“Hey.” He banged on the window. “Geddout. I want this car. I’m driving.
”
    “Fuck off,” Ko replied, and showed him the length of the blade.
    The guy frowned, unperturbed by the implied threat, and then dug out a
roll of yuan. He waved them around. Paper money was a novelty for a lot
of corporate types who had been raised inside walled executive enclaves,
where wealth only existed as ones and zeros. Hong Kong’s night economy
was still traditional at heart, though, and cash remained a quaint
throwback in many quarters. The suit peeled off hundred-yuan bills and
threw them at the Ranger, one after another. “Gimme the car, street boy.
I can buy you. I can buy anything! I wanna play!” He yelled at his
friends. “I want to be Hazzard Wu!” He slapped the window with the flat
of his hand.
“I promise not to kill you…”
he chortled, repeating
Wu’s signature line from last year’s big hit, the action racer flick,
Spider.
    From the back of the group came a man who was decidedly not a drunk. He
reeked of corp security. With gentle force, he guided the other man
away, pausing only to gather up the wet banknotes and throw Ko a slight
shake of the head. “This way, sir,” he heard him say. “There’s a limo
waiting.”
    “A limo!” shouted the drunken man, and his gaggle of friends repeated
him with noisy, idiotic gusto.
    The lights around the door blinked on again as the lift