After dinner, a cigarette, and some idle chatter, they went back to comparing fingerprints.
A little after seven in the evening, Gao Chao came thumping down from upstairs.
"There's an operation tonight. Everyone except those on duty, change into plainclothes. We move out in ten minutes." Seeing Wang Yan buried beneath a pile of case files, Gao Chao walked over and patted his shoulder. "We're hitting that chess and card room you mentioned last time. Come along too. Take a few people and block the back door for me."
"I was going anyway. I'm not on duty."
"The director told me you've taken an interest in the homicide cases at our station. If you want to see the detailed files later, tell me. We'll find a time to pull the case files from the district bureau."
"I roughly went through them earlier. They're already pretty detailed—all the investigation records from back when the cases happened. That's enough to keep me occupied for a while." Wang Yan stood up and waved a hand. "I'll go change first."
He followed the others to the locker room. The station was spacious, so everyone had a locker. Besides, they often had to change into plainclothes for operations, surveillance, and the like.
Of course, they did not need to change much for tonight's operation. It was dark, and they were making arrests, so everyone simply switched into blue shirts on top and put on their own short-sleeved shirts. These plainclothes were not all that plain, really. Anyone who paid even a little attention to the police could tell what they were from their pants polished shiny with wear and their filthy, battered leather shoes that could never be shined up no matter how much oil was used on them.
Ten minutes meant ten minutes. Some