The rain in Los Angeles doesn't wash things clean. It just makes the dirt slicker. I ran the seafood place in San Pedro for three years after the service. Three years of cleaning fish that had seen worse things than me, and pretending I hadn't either. My leg still acted up when it rained, which was always, and the doctors couldn't tell me why. I didn't need them to. Buddy was a bulldog I pulled from the shelter. Old, scarred, one ear torn. He slept behind the counter most days, watching the door. He was the only thing in my life that still trusted me. The cop came in at four in the afternoon. Not a customer. Customers didn't wear cheap suits and walk like they owned the sidewalk. "Chen," he said. "Name's Miller. Patrol." I kept cleaning fish. "Yeah?" "There's a guy heading your way. Escaped from San Quentin. Goes by the name of屠夫, though he probably uses a different name now. Armed. Dangerous." I looked up. "Why tell me?" "Because you know how to handle dangerous things." He left after that. I finished cleaning the last fish, locked the door, and waited. The man came at nine. He was big, with a face that had been broken more times than I could count. A Colt .45 hung from his belt. He pushed the door open and stepped inside, water dripping from his coat. "Looking for shelter," he said. His voice was rough, like gravel in a blender. I nodded toward the back room. "Fire's warm. Sit." He sat. I watched him from behind the counter. His eyes were sharp, the eyes of a man who had survived by being smarter and meaner than everyone around him. I had prepared three things. Buddy, the dog, was supposed to be the first line of defense. I had put sleeping pills in his dinner that morning. But when I checked on him an hour ago, he was still awake, still watching the door. The man must have given him something, or maybe the pills hadn't worked. Either way, Buddy was compromised. The second thing was the pit I'd dug in front of the entrance. A man-sized hole, covered with a thin layer of dirt and a piece of cardboard. Anyone stepping on it would fall straight in. But the man walked around it. He had seen it. Or maybe he had just gotten lucky. The third thing was the ammonia I kept under the sink. Strong stuff. Could blind a man if thrown in his face. But by the time I got to it, the man was already sitting by the fish counter, watching me with those cold, dead eyes. "You're not what I expected," he said. "Disappointed?" "I expected someone tougher." I picked up a fish knife and started sharpening it on the stone. The sound was rhythmic, almost soothing. "What do you want?" "Protection money. Your boss owes money to the wrong people." "I don't have a boss." "Then you'll tell him I stopped by." I stopped sharpening the knife. "There is no boss. There's just me, the fish, and the dog." The man stood up. He was taller than I'd realized. Six feet at least, maybe more. He reached for his gun. I threw the ammonia in his face. He screamed, stumbling backward, his hand swiping at his eyes. The gun went off, the bullet ricocheting off the metal counter. I ducked behind it, heart hammering. When I looked up, he was on his knees, clawing at his face. I came around the counter and kicked the gun away. It slid across the wet floor, out of reach. He looked up at me, his eyes streaming, his face red and swollen. "You're dead," he whispered. "So are you," I said. I grabbed the bottle of gas from under the sink and splashed it across his coat. He tried to stand, but his eyes were too blind, his legs too unsteady. I struck a match. The flames caught fast. He screamed again, this time a sound that came from somewhere deeper than pain. I backed away, letting the fire do what words never could. The store went up like a torch. Flames devoured the fish cases, the counters, the shelves. The heat pushed me back toward the door, and I ran, the rain doing nothing to cool the fire in my chest. I stood in the street and watched my life burn. Three years of cleaning fish, of pretending I was somebody different from what I was. All of it gone in ten minutes. The cop came back an hour later, standing in the rain beside me. "Did you kill him?" he asked. I looked at the ashes. "Does it matter?" He didn't answer. We stood there in the rain, two men who had done things we couldn't undo, watching the last of something burn. The rain kept falling. It always does. --- OBJECTIVE TENSOR CODE (OTMES v2): OTMES-v2-YDT-02-D4E8A1-E1015-M3-T067-5C92 E_total: 10.15 | Dominant Mode: M3 (Moral Ambiguity) | θ: 225° (Noir Active) © 2026 - Authored by Z R ZHANG ( EL9507135 -- パスポート番号[ちゅうごく] 중국 여권 번호 Номер паспорта หมายเลขหนังสือเดินทาง Passnummer رقم جواز السفر CHN Passport) The aforementioned Author hereby grants to OXFORD INDUSTRIAL HOLDING GROUP (ASIA PACIFIC) CO., LIMITED (BRN74685111) all economic property rights, including but not limited to the rights of: reproduction, distribution, rental, exhibition, performance, communication to the public via information network, adaptation, compilation, commercial operation, authorization for third-party use, and rights enforcement. Such grant is exclusive and irrevocable. The term of such rights shall be 49 years from the date of publication. To contact author, please email to datatorent@yeah.net Based on the pending patent application document (202610351844.3), creationstamp.com has calculated the tensor feature encoding of this article: OTMES-v2-UNKNOWN