Chapter 4
A few quiet days passed.
Then one night around nine, the husband started pounding on my door again.
This time I opened it with my phone already recording.
He pointed at me and said, “I know those little thugs who beat my son were hired by you.”
I put on my best blank expression. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
He was furious. He kept challenging me to fight him face-to-face like a man.
That was boring.
I just shut the door on him.
Apparently that pushed him to get creative.
Late that night, he dragged a speaker into the hallway and set it right outside his apartment facing mine. Then he started blasting music.
Cheap, loud, brainless stuff. The kind of songs you’d hear at a public square dance or a carnival held in hell.
Neighbors came out to complain, but nobody dared knock on his door.
I could have done something right away.
But timing matters.
He let it run until almost two in the morning.
Then, once he’d finally gone back inside to sleep, I made my move.
I owned a small but powerful subwoofer, and my apartment door had one of those old peepholes that could swing open into a tiny window.
I taped the speaker over the opening, hit play, and let funeral music roar into the hallway.
Not regular funeral music either.
The kind that sounded like a whole nation grieving.
At two in the morning, it was magnificent.
The couple across the hall came storming out immediately and started cursing me for disturbing the peace.
That was rich.
I put on headphones, watched TV, and let the speaker keep working.
The next morning they still hadn’t called the police, which honestly surprised me. It meant they really wanted to beat me at my own game.
Fine.
So I kept going.
I alternated between funeral music and obnoxious dance tracks all day, put the subwoofer on a power strip so it could run nonstop, then got on my motorcycle and went back to my parents’ house to let the whole building suffer in my absence.
Three days later the police finally tracked down my number and ordered me back to shut it off.
When I returned, they were waiting at the door. The husband’s speaker was gone. The officers told me he had been the one to report me for disturbing the peace.
I almost admired the shamelessness.
After all his talk about handling things man to man, he had caved first.
The officers warned me not to pull a stunt like that again. I promised solemnly.
They left.
The family across the hall never came out.
They were hiding.
And that gave me an idea.
The husband owned a flower, bird, and pet shop. I remembered that clearly. I also remembered something from when I was a kid. People who raise songbirds care about one thing almost more than beauty.
The bird’s voice.
A good bird with a clean, pretty song can be worth serious money.
But birds can learn ugly sounds.
Harsh sounds. “Dirty calls.” Cawing, croaking, ugly wild noises that ruin the bird’s value if it picks them up and can’t stop repeating them.
Bird owners hate that more than almost anything.
So I dug out an old Bluetooth speaker, downloaded a collection of the nastiest bird calls I could find, and followed the husband to his shop one morning.
It was bigger than I expected. A full stall in the flower-and-bird market with dozens of expensive birds inside.
I waited outside until noon.
Once he stepped out, leaving only two tired employees behind, I walked in like any other customer, drifted around the shop, found a blind spot between potted plants, and tucked the speaker behind a display.
Then I walked out.
From outside, I connected through Bluetooth and turned the volume all the way up.
Chaos.
Within seconds, the whole place sounded like a swamp full of dying crows.
Bird after bird started mimicking the ugly calls. The employees panicked, trying to find the source, knocking over pots, grabbing cages, covering them, uncovering them, running around like lunatics.
By the time the husband came racing back into the shop, the damage was done.
A dozen birds had already picked it up.
Maybe more.
I watched him from outside as he nearly lost his mind.
Then I put my phone back in my pocket and left.
One trip.
One hidden speaker.
Several tens of thousands of yuan gone.
That night they were pounding on my door again.
The husband was holding my Bluetooth speaker in one hand and his phone in the other. He said he had reviewed footage and knew it was me.
I shrugged. “Then call the police.”
“You cost me tens of thousands!”
“Sounds rough,” I said.
Then I lifted my phone to record and added, “But if you hit me, you’ll lose even more.”
They raged outside for another ten minutes after I shut the door.
All I said through the wood was, “Keep going. I’d love to.”