There was water running down the road towards the harbor and it looked as though there was a river in the middle of the city. Nathan Road was a torrent of stinking flood water and still the traffic pushed through. It didn’t seem to matter what happened, Kowloon City never stopped.

Johnny forced his bike through the water and went off the main street into Granville Road. This was where the market was held. Rainwater ran down the gutters but it wasn’t as badly affected as the main street. Cabbages, bits of cardboard, dried fish and various other unidentifiable flotsam and jetsam tumbled down in the torrent. Someone has obviously lost their vegetable baskets and wouldn’t be setting up shop today.

It was quite usual for street hawkers to leave their stalls, packed up in big rattan baskets, in the alleys and doorways around the market. Johnny cringed as a rat brushed against his leg as it struggled to stay above the water. The smell was bad as sewage floated around in the puddles. But he was used to this.

One by one the stall holders appeared as if by magic. They came out of the rain and the water and set up their stalls. Across from Johnny was a dried fish stall which the proprietor set up carefully, wiping his stock with a well used piece of rag to dry it off a little.

The stall with tunics and straw hats appeared but the items for sale were soaked. The proprietor was hanging then up on a high rail in the hope that the sun would dry them and nobody would know the difference.

Before long the sun was out again and it was hot. The sky had that vivid tropical blue look, as though it had never thought of screaming and howling and tipping all that water over the City.

The boy arranged a plank of wood across some bricks and set out his CD’s and DVD’s. Everyone bought these, no matter how poor. He didn’t know anyone who didn’t have a CD player. All the latest titles were announced on the covers and he also had an order book. Johnny Suing boasted that he could get any recording in the world within a few days.

What his customers didn’t know was that he got his supplies from Kow Lan, the leader of one of the most powerful triads in all Hong Kong. Kow supplied the opium for his father too and he knew that he was involved in something far more dangerous than it looked.