Chapter 377: Give Him a Surprise—or Rather, a Scare!

Chapter 377: Give Him a Surprise—or Rather, a Scare!

On the way to Donghai, Peng Wei had thought it through carefully. Barging in on Li Ruobing and showing her the photos of Wu Chen and An Menglan was out of the question.

For one thing, the photos weren’t conclusive. For another… if he stirred up trouble between the Li and An families, it would be a disaster.

At the extreme, if exposing Li Ruobing’s boyfriend Wu Chen for cheating with An Menglan turned the two women into enemies and set their families against each other, the first man to die would certainly be Peng Wei himself.

So…

Peng Wei had plenty of ideas. There was a great deal he could do now that he was in Donghai. Perhaps he should look into things first, work out exactly what was going on and what entanglements lay beneath it, and then… squeeze every last drop of profit out of it.

There was no need to rush.

Peng Wei was always cautious.

What he never expected was that within a few hours of arriving in Donghai, he would land a truly crucial scoop. Forget An Menglan. He didn’t even need her photos anymore. The pictures of Wu Chen and that girl outside Laopinxuan would solve the problem on their own.

Still, Peng Wei wanted more.

Ideally, shots from during the meal: Li Ruobing stepping away to the restroom, and Wu Chen getting up to something with that girl while she was gone.

Standing beside the SUV, Peng Wei tipped his head back and surveyed the area.

It didn’t look promising. Across from Laopinxuan stood not a commercial building but a seven-story residential block. He didn’t know the neighborhood, and bribing a resident into lending him their apartment on such short notice would be difficult. If he pushed harder and threw some money at it, it might work. More likely, though, the resident would take him for some kind of criminal and call the police.

Peng Wei had plenty of experience with that sort of thing. He’d been reported before and had to explain himself to the police.

A paparazzo’s line of work was hardly glamorous. Humiliations came with the job.

After studying the area a while longer, he got back into the SUV and turned to the middle-aged man in the driver’s seat. “Old Qian, go take a walk through the restaurant. See which private room their bodyguards are standing outside. Confirm it for me…”

“Will do!” Old Qian said readily. He grabbed a baseball cap, put it on, pushed open the door, and set off toward Laopinxuan on foot.

They were professionals. This kind of thing was second nature.

Peng Wei watched him go in.

Seven or eight minutes later, Old Qian came back out and walked back to the SUV. He opened the door and climbed in.

“Well?” Peng Wei asked.

“Second floor, innermost room on the south side.”

Old Qian didn’t give a room number, only a location. They’d be shooting through a window from outside, so what mattered was knowing which window.

Peng Wei got out again and stood studying the building.

A good while later, he got back in and shut the door.

“Forget it. We’ll wait for them to come out,” he said.

He gave up. There simply wasn’t time. A meal might run two or three hours at the very most, an hour at the least. By the time he’d sorted out access to the building across the street, they might well have finished and left. It wasn’t worth the hassle.

Shooting a target through a window was generally only practical for long-term surveillance of someone’s home.

So came the tedious wait.

Old Qian got out again to buy food.

Peng Wei bent over his camera and scrolled through the photos once more. He knew perfectly well that what he had was already enough. This was practically a killer trump card, evidence so damning it needed nothing else to back it up…

Meanwhile.

In a private room on the second floor of Laopinxuan.

One man and four women were talking and laughing.

Li Ruobing had organized the dinner. She’d invited all of Wu Chen’s other women except one: Wu Yurong. Wu Chen knew exactly what Li Ruobing was thinking.

It wasn’t really exclusion. It was a matter of who was closer and who was farther.

There was no business to discuss. It was simply a get-together, with all the feel of a family gathering. Li Ruobing set the tone, and Su Qingying didn’t compete with her.

She couldn’t be bothered.

What Su Qingying had with Wu Chen had never been a romance in the usual sense. It was something more unusual. She did as he said more readily than anyone.

The dishes arrived.

The wine was opened.

Ring, ring…

Li Ruobing’s phone suddenly rang.

She set down her glass of red wine, picked up the phone, glanced at the screen, and frowned slightly. “What happened?” There was tension in her voice.

The caller was a bodyguard. Not one of those with her now, but one of the men she had sent to watch over Wu Chen’s parents and younger sister in secret.

“Boss, we caught two…” the bodyguard said, sounding a little odd.

Li Ruobing listened for a good while. Her expression shifted again and again, finally settling into something no longer tense, merely puzzled.

“They say… their boss is someone called Peng Wei,” the bodyguard said at last.

“All right. Got it.” Li Ruobing hung up.

“Darling.” She turned to Wu Chen. When he looked at her, she leaned close and murmured in his ear, “Peng Wei sent people out to your hometown. My men spotted them. Two of them. They caught both…”

“They didn’t beat them to death, did they?” Wu Chen asked with a smile, not the least bit surprised.

That was Peng Wei’s style. When he investigated someone, he investigated everything. Right down to their hometown.

“They shouldn’t have. They know where to draw the line. They wouldn’t just…” Li Ruobing said, though her face told a different story.

It was true they wouldn’t kill anyone lightly.

But the bodyguards she’d sent to protect his parents were there to guard against Ding Ruilong. If they caught anyone suspicious lurking nearby, they would certainly beat him half to death to find out who had sent him. And Peng Wei’s men were hardly going to talk easily. So… it wasn’t hard to imagine they had already been beaten half to death.

“Have them brought back to Donghai and handed over to A-Tai,” Wu Chen murmured to her.

“Okay.” Li Ruobing nodded, then gave him a slight frown and a smile. “Peng Wei’s such a nuisance. Want me to…”

“He’s useful. Let’s give him a surprise.” Wu Chen smiled.

“What are you two talking about? Whispering again… You’re ignoring the rest of us!”

A pair of arms suddenly wrapped around Wu Chen’s neck. Mu Qianqian had gotten up and come around behind him to hug him.

Wu Chen had just turned his head and was about to say something when she leaned around from behind and kissed him right on the lips.

Twice in a row.

On an occasion like this, if anyone else had done that, it would have carried a hint of a challenge to Li Ruobing. Mu Qianqian was the exception. She was the youngest. Only she could get away with that kind of mischief.

“Qianqian missed her hubby,” Su Qingying said with a pursed-lip smile, though the way she looked at Wu Chen was just a little too intent.

She had missed him too.

“Hmph. Did not.” Mu Qianqian tipped up her chin with a soft snort, let go of him, and went back to her seat.

The talk and laughter went on.

Ten-odd minutes later.

Ring, ring…

This time it was Wu Chen’s phone.

He picked it up, glanced at it, and answered. “A-Tai.”

“Brother-in-law, we got them. Just one car, two people,” Li Ruotai said.

“Good. Hold on to them,” Wu Chen said.

“Brother-in-law, is something going on? Do you want me to…”

“It’s fine. I’m having dinner with your sister.”

“Oh… okay, then. I’ll hang up.”

The call ended.

“A-Tai?” Li Ruobing asked beside him.

“Peng Wei’s other two men. I had him pick them up,” Wu Chen said softly, tilting his head toward her.

Li Ruobing’s smile turned odd for a moment. “How did you know how many people Peng Wei brought to Donghai?”

“License plates.” Wu Chen smiled.

On the way to the restaurant, not long after he’d noticed Peng Wei tailing him, Wu Chen had called Li Ruotai and given him several plate numbers.

He couldn’t be sure how many people or cars Peng Wei had brought. But Wave Studio only had so many vehicles in regular use, so Wu Chen simply listed them all.

For Li Ruotai, finding one car was no harder than finding several. The traffic system could recognize license plates automatically.

The only plate Wu Chen left out was the one on Peng Wei’s own car.

He wasn’t going to have Peng Wei picked up.

Just as he’d told Li Ruobing: give him a surprise. Or rather, a scare.

Wu Chen was waiting for Peng Wei to come to him.

An hour later.

The private room had grown louder and louder. Everyone had been drinking, and everyone was talking more.

Outside Laopinxuan.

In the SUV parked at the intersection.

Peng Wei clutched his phone, looking thoroughly anxious. Because he had discovered…

he couldn’t get through.

He’d brought six people to Donghai in three cars, two to a team. His own team was tailing Wu Chen. Another had gone to Wu Chen’s hometown, a county town dozens of kilometers outside Donghai, to dig into him. The last was tracing the disappearance of Yang Pinghe and the others, looking for proof of kidnapping.

Just now, Peng Wei had called both teams, one after the other, to check on their progress.

Neither call went through.

He tried all four of them, one by one. Same result. Every phone was switched off.

The odds of four phones dying at the same moment were next to zero.

There was only one possibility. Something had happened to them.

Peng Wei was frantic. A chill even crept over him.

How long had they even been in Donghai?

And just like that…

they were gone?!

He stared darkly at the phone. He’d already pulled up Wu Chen’s number and had been staring at it for a long time. He wanted to call him.

Dial.

Peng Wei pressed the call button and lifted the phone to his ear.