Chapter 147 — The Long-Awaited...

Bao Lin honked several times with a sharp "beep-beep," but the Passat ignored him completely—did not so much as twitch. Small wonder: with no traffic officer on this stretch, the man could sit there and no one could do a thing to him. But if he pulled forward to clear the intersection, that would amount to running a red light—so the Passat's driver was hardly about to do anything so foolish.

Bao Lin glanced at the countdown timer on the signal: over three hundred seconds left. There was no overpass on this stretch, so traffic crawled, and the lights were long.

There was nothing for it. Bao Lin edged the car as close to the curb as he could and crept forward, meaning to squeeze through the gap between the Passat and the roadside.

Slow as it was, Bao Lin managed to ease the car through. He had just breathed a sigh of relief when he heard a drawn-out "screech." He whipped his head around—the rear of his car had still scraped against the front of the Passat.

Had he gone straight the whole way, the two cars would never have touched. The trouble was that Bao Lin needed to turn right, and there were still cars coming along the straight lane to his right; he could not swing the wheel too wide. The Jinbei van was long to begin with—do that and he would have been sideways across the middle of the road.

So it was unavoidable: as he turned, the rear of the Jinbei scraped the front of the Passat.

With an accident on his hands, Bao Lin had no choice but to stop the car. He turned to Yang Yanzhou with great apology: "Brother Yang, I'm sorry. I was trying to make up time—didn't think the more I hurried, the more trouble I'd make."

"It's nothing." What else could Yang Ce say? Bao Lin had meant well, after all. He smiled slightly. "Let's deal with the accident first and talk after."

By then the Passat's driver had gotten out and was crouched at the point where the two cars met, inspecting the damage.

"I'll go have a look, then." Bao Lin nodded, a little embarrassed.

"Hey, wait—that Passat driver looks like a middle-school classmate of mine." Zhang Bin studied the man and said, "Let me go down too. If it really is him, this'll be easy to sort out."

With that, Zhang Bin got out of the car together with Bao Lin.

"Do you even know how to drive? How the hell was that supposed to fit through?" Seeing someone climb out of the Jinbei, the Passat's driver stormed over, beside himself with fury. The other man's car was nothing impressive, so his arrogance flared at once; had the fellow been driving a Mercedes, he would doubtless have taken a different tone.

"Yuan Gangyi, is that you?" Zhang Bin walked up and called to the Passat's driver.

Hearing his name, the Passat's driver looked up, puzzled at first, then said, "Oh—you're Zhang Bin."

"Ha, it really is you!" Zhang Bin said, pleased, making small talk. "You didn't come to the last class reunion—I thought you'd left Songjiang."

"Ah, too busy." Yuan Gangyi tossed his hair with the air of a very important man.

"Heh, well, this is lucky—running into an old acquaintance. Since we all know each other, I say let's just call it even." Zhang Bin drove himself, so he naturally knew the traffic rules. "Besides, you're more or less in violation here. If we really wait for the traffic police to come handle it, you'll be the one fined."

"Zhang Bin, that's not right of you to say. Friends are friends, but business is business. You weren't the one driving this car, were you? If you had been, I'd let it go. But the driver isn't you, so you'd better stay out of this." Yuan Gangyi's face suddenly darkened, and he waved Zhang Bin off.

Zhang Bin was left hanging there, caught between advancing and retreating, thoroughly mortified. He had assumed that as middle-school classmates they could just let the matter drop—but Yuan Gangyi had not given him the slightest bit of face.

"Yuan Gangyi, what's that supposed to mean? You think parking your car there leaves you with no responsibility at all?" Zhang Bin was getting angry too.

"Of course my car can park here." Yuan Gangyi, unperturbed, pointed at a permit in the lower-left corner of his windshield. "See for yourself—this is a privileged vehicle."

Zhang Bin glanced at the permit displayed inside Yuan Gangyi's window. It read: "News Gathering—May Stop at Any Time."

Zhang Bin frowned. He had no idea what organization had issued this privilege permit. There were far too many documents of that kind these days: plenty of ordinary vehicles that were not special-purpose at all would lay such a permit beneath the windshield and, presto, become privileged vehicles entitled to certain traffic privileges.

Never mind whether the permit was genuine; even if it were, it did not necessarily entitle him to break the rules at a time like this. It was probably a press-interview vehicle permit, meant to let reporters park conveniently when covering a scene—but Yuan Gangyi had stretched that privilege to limitless proportions.

If Yang Ce had not been watching from the car, Bao Lin would truly have liked to kick this idiot under the wheels. If he wanted a permit like that, he could probably have gotten a whole row of them.

"Just tell me—how much to settle this?" Bao Lin had no patience to haggle with a man like this; he wanted the matter over with as quickly as possible.

"Hey, now here's a straightforward fellow. But since you're Zhang Bin's friend, I won't gouge you—three thousand, just a token." Yuan Gangyi said.

Three thousand—Bao Lin nearly laughed in fury. Even if this were a Mercedes with a bit of paint scraped off, it would not be worth that. A few hundred yuan at a body shop would touch up the paint and be done with it. This was highway robbery.

Zhang Bin's expression shifted too. "Yuan Gangyi, that's about enough. Don't joke around."

"I'll give you five hundred." Bao Lin looked at the size of the scratch and made a quick estimate—five hundred was if anything generous.

"You think you're tossing coins to a beggar?" Yuan Gangyi rolled his eyes and bared his teeth at Bao Lin. "Let me tell you, asking three thousand from you is already out of respect for Zhang Bin. Otherwise you wouldn't even be leaving here today with your skin intact—believe that?"

Even the mildest temper would have had enough by now, and Bao Lin's was fiery to begin with. The only reasons he had been holding back and reasoning with this fellow were, first, that the man was Zhang Bin's middle-school classmate, and second, that Yang Ce had urgent business and he did not want to waste time here.

But there were limits to everything; you cannot go too far. Offering five hundred was already giving him a way out.

"I don't believe it," Bao Lin shot back with a cold laugh. "You won't take five hundred? Fine. Then today I won't give you a single cent, and we'll see what you can do to me."

"You said it. Just you wait." Yuan Gangyi pulled out his phone, dialed a number, said a few words, then hung up. "If you've got the guts, wait ten minutes."

With that, Yuan Gangyi hopped into his car. To keep the Jinbei van from slipping away, he pulled the Passat crosswise in front of it, completely blocking the Jinbei's driver-side door—so that if Bao Lin wanted to drive off, it would take considerable effort. That done, Yuan Gangyi sat back at his ease, switched on the radio, and began listening to music.

"Brother Zhang, let's get back in the car." Bao Lin gave Yuan Gangyi a cold look, then spoke to Zhang Bin.

"Brother Yang, just now—" Once in the car, Bao Lin began explaining matters to Yang Ce.

Yang Ce waved a hand with a smile. "No need to explain. I saw everything clearly from the car. Do what needs doing. Sometimes, if you don't give people like this a rap on the knuckles, they'll never learn to hold back."