Hyeonverse: Kissed By Darkness

Salt sea Casanova eyeballed the women: "They're pretty hot, uh?"

"Dibs on Morticia Addams," Chai winked.

"Betty Rubble is my next ex-girlfriend," I added.

"That leaves Foxy Brown." The sailor took a sip and winked at me: "Let's go win ourselves a bet."

"Shivers me timbers, that's the spirit!" I said. "Go get her, Jason of the Argonuts!"

Popeye took a deep breath and a dashing smile blossomed on his lips. Before our very eyes, the slouching loner stood up, morphing into a swaggering tower of confidence that marched toward the women's table.

Fuck me, Chai really did have a nose for talent; we filled three rolls worth of drunken parking lot sex pictures.

Taurus' Navy wife was a paralegal at the NCIS office. I mailed the photos to her assistant's desk the very next day, under the title 'Conduct unbecoming a Naval officer'.

THE NIGHT WE MURDERED LOVE

The affair was in full swing by the time I landed in Macau, two weeks later. Amber was lying on the couch when I walked in.

"My angel returns, at last. What, did you stop on the way for checkers with Captain Murray?"

The place reeked of booze.

"It's Colonel Murray."

"How did the family inheritance talks go, did your Dad leave you anything? Marijuana, maybe? Or stolen equipment from the mining company, perhaps?"

"You're upset," I said.

"No, I'm short, which makes me a pretty good shadow. I know about your phone calls from Chen's electronic store. The drug shipments to the US. Your dealings with Song and Junior, and the weekly meetings with that ladyboy at the park. Are... you two in love?"

"She's a child!"

"So was I when we met," She tossed a little black book at me, almost identical to mine. "Took me a while to crack your code. 'I laugh at the error of the stars'. That's from the Judas Gospel, isn't it?"

Her index finger tapped her temple.

"College of Saint Mary, remember? Graduated at 21 with a 4.0 GPA? I'm kinda smart."

I flipped through the pages. My contacts list and transactions, my whole secret life had been decoded and displayed there in her elegant cursive handwriting.

Pig on a.... she could put me in jail for life.

"You swore you had quit."

I lifted my eyes from the book to find my hand coiled around her neck, tears gliding down her cheeks. My combat training had sprung into life on its own.

"I love you," she smiled. Why was she smiling, was this what love meant? Her face contorted into a pained grin of acceptance. "My angel."

Shock loosened my grasp and she fell on the ningxia rug, coughing. Fuck, this wasn't who I wanted to be. I lit the book on fire, watching the flames lick paper.

"I'm sorry... you'll never believe this, but I did it all for us."

There was a letter on the nightstand, US postage stamps: Amanirenas Peters, Detroit.

"You're still pen pals with Ama? You've been telling her about me?"

"I'm not a rat!"

I skimmed it and found nothing but gossip. Almost at the end, a paragraph read:

"Cormac has quit the military, my brother's coming home. His wife cheated on him."

My plan had worked.

<<<<<>>>>>

In the State of Michigan, it takes you a minimum of two months to divorce; six if you have children. Cormac wasted no time, in seven months he was a free man once more. The wife got primary custody of their daughter and little else, thanks to his shark lawyer.

"That's it? You just give up on us at the first sign of trouble?" The woman's thick Jamaican accent could be heard from outside the Detroit courthouse. "Why didn't you fight for me?"

She chased after Cormac, his lawyer, and Ama through the glass doors.

"We could have gone to counselling. If you really loved me, you would have given me a chance."

They almost bumped when Cormac stopped to thank his lawyer with a handshake and a hug.

"Talisa." My brother faced her: "If you really loved me, you wouldn't have opened your legs to the first Joe Grind who complimented your hair."

"I was lonely!" she exploded. "You left me for months at a time."

"I was serving my country, Talisa. I was building a future for us." His voice lowered into a quiet growl. "I guess you were just serving yourself, uh Talisa?"

Something inside her broke. She stood in tears watching them get into his 1989 Cadillac Deville.

"No-no-no, this can't be over. Cormac? Cormac, please. I'm sorry, I love you! It meant nothing, you have got to give me a chance, please!"

"I'm done giving chances to people who don't deserve it. Done!"

Tires screeched as he floored it, joining the afternoon traffic.

"Rassclaat!" Talisa screamed. "You will never see your pickney again!"

"Come," I whispered to Chai. " There's one last loose end."

He followed me to our rental. "Popeye next?"

"Popeye next."

<<<<<>>>>>

Popeye's family's old farm house was smack dab in the middle of nowhere, nobody would hear his dying pleas.

"Please, I've told you everything," he cried, spitting a canine. "The guy doesn't know, Talisa doesn't know, nobody knows about you."

"Swell. Next time, stay away from married women." I discharged my Beretta Bobcat.

Bam!

"Dip him in the Sodium Hydroxide. I'll be outside listening to some Smokey Robinson."

"Y... yes, boss."

In the living room, ants made a pathway to the leftover food from the candle lit dinner. Two monogrammed champagne flutes completed the table setup. The stylized letters drew my attention, "P" as in Peters. Those were my flutes, the bitch had won them in the divorce and used them to toast with her lover.

I carried them outside, navigating Talisa's bags crowding the porch; she had planned to move in with loverboy.

'Well, not anymore', I smirked, lighting up a Marlboro.

My mood died with the lighter's flame. There was a Ford Fairmont parked beside our wheels. Matching car model, matching rental stickers.

The driver must have switched off the headlights and idled down the dirt road, coming to a silent stop next to us. I drew my Bobcat, put one in the chamber and approached it from behind. No one was inside.

Gravel rustled behind me.

"Amber! " I nearly jumped at the sight of her marble face. Tears had smeared her makeup into a hideous black mask of death. "Jesus Christ, I almost..."

The horror in her eyes, had she seen what we did to Popeye?

"That man... that poor man," she whimpered. "How could you?"

I pointed to the plastic bags around my feet.

"Well, the trick is to not let them bleed on your shoes. These are bespoke Stefano Berner, you know? Hand-welted."

"Ama was right, I fell in love with a monster."

"Love?" I grabbed a tissue and cleaned up her mascara mess. "Babe, did I ever tell you how I got this hair? Dad never amounted to much, his baseball career died with his knee injury and he loved to take out his frustrations on me. Broken teeth, broken ribs, and the insults... oh, the insults! For years I begged Mom to leave him, but she was madly in love. No matter how badly he cheated on her or beat me."

"I... I didn't know..."

"Yeeah, true love is great, I'm a big fan myself. But when it turns into this-" I pointed at all of her. "It's like a drug, it ruins lives. It sure ruined mine. In time, I grew to hate her too, for defending and enabling him. When I was ten, I finally tried to run away. My brother Caspian saw me packing and I made him promise not to tell. Of course, the first thing the little twat did was run to the bodega to get Dad. Not only did I get the beating of a lifetime, but the drunk, cheating scumbag locked me in the basement for days."

"I used to be so terrified of the dark. I must have screamed for hours, until I busted my throat. Nobody ever came. The things I saw in that cold, damp black void... I have never tasted fear quite like that, it was almost palpable. When they finally opened the door a week later, the roots of my hair had gone white. And you wanna know the best part? I'd still be in there to this day, they only got me out because Dad needed the basement to store more stolen crap."

My throat was a bottomless well of pain, had I ever talked this much?

"I... angel, I am so sorry."

"Don't be, I made them all pay that night, in their sleep. Turned on the gas on the stove and ran away without ever looking back. Boom. Yeah, me and true love, we go way back. I can recognize that sick bullshit from a mile away. It's my unique talent. My one superpower."

Her eyes flickered.

"He's in love with you, you know?"

"W... who is?"

"Junior. I saw it in his eyes, on the day he first entered our shop. Did you know he spends his afternoons with his crew at the plaza just so he can catch a glimpse of you?

"I... I didn't."

"All of this, everything I've done since has been to keep his grubby little paws away from you. Do you want him? Just say the word."

"No, I don't want him..."

"Are you sure? Because he's got the same 'true love' mental disease as you, I'll bet he'd walk away from his life of crime in a heartbeat, if you asked him to."

"I don't want Junior, I want you. All I ever wanted was you."

And there it was, the blindness. The same as Mom's, all those years ago. Even in the face of absolute malevolence, even after watching me beat up and murder Popeye. No, I needed to break this cursed spell. Decisively.

"Well, I never wanted you. You were just a tool to get me back with my brother."

"Please don't say that, I lo..."

My Beretta caressed her cheek.

"Fly away back to Merna, Amber. Flap, flap, flap you go."

She stood staring at me and I fired into the night air:

Bam Bam Bam Bam Bam!

"Get the fuck out of my life, Amber!" I shouted, almost passing out from the pain in my throat. Chai rushed out as she sped away in her car, red lights vanishing into the night.

"That was your wife? She saw us kill Popeye?"

I nodded.

"Shit, you want me to...?" His index finger drew an arch across his neck.

My gaze wandered into the starry skies above. Ten years. For ten years I had tried to love her, the only person who was there for me when I needed the most, but I should have known demon hearts are dead. We can't love anyone.

"Don't be daft, the girl will never betray m...ow!"

The cigarette burnt my fingers, a warning from the stars. It fell to the ground and I put it out with my shoe, choosing to ignore them. What do they know? They're all dead and billions of light-years away.

We bathed in the crickets' choir and we played heads-up all night, waiting for Popeye to turn liquid. I made fifty bucks.

People aren't robots, we can't switch off our feelings on a dime. Amber put on a brave face when I got back to Macau, love bombing me with bouts of hysterical bonding for a few weeks. I suspect the poor girl was fighting to save my soul. Eventually, out of the blue she found the self respect Mom never had and filed.

I felt so proud of her!

The divorce was finalized in the Summer of 1996. Amber refused to take one cent of my blood money.

Song agreed to keep her pastry shop out of his protection racket, I had already made him so much money. Papers signed, I moved out of Macau and into Thailand, a decision that must have appeased the stars, because just three months later I got the phone call of my life:

"Cassiel? Ici Hercule, I have a lead on Vicky."

FOOTPRINTS OF A GHOST

Two French legionnaires stood outside my little place, Baby Lee's Tea House of Glee watching the lazy afternoon roll through Soi Yamato.

Another one sat at the table next to ours, enjoying our celebrated coconut soup. Hercule read the hint of gloating on my lips, the face of a successful man.

From this little establishment bearing Baby Lee's name and my capital, I now controlled a small business that shipped four metric tonnes of product a month from the Balkh Province in Afghanistan to Oakland, USA.

His tired smile sunk my mood, Hercule's life had been harsh. The car explosion had left him with a limp and a nervous tic on his hand. It twitched when he opened his Spirou comic mag to reveal Vicky's portrait. It still smelled of fixative varnish.

"You remember my brother Rémi? That giddy little twat?"

"The mkhabez nut, sure." I reclined on my wicker chair.

"I never got over losing him to that car bomb, so I went after the bitch who blew him up." He reclined back on his. "There were a lot of defections when the Soviet Union fell, you could buy Scud missiles in the black market. MiG-29s, uranium... KGB secrets."

"You found out her name!"

"Ouais! I've made a few connections over the years, people who knew people behind the Iron Curtain. Kremlin people." Hercule flipped the page to produce a fax with her KGB profile. A post-it note attached carried the translations.

"Irina Ivanova, 38. She was part of something called the Stervyatnik program, the KGB loaned her to the Bratva. Strange bedfellows."

I smiled; Uncle Sam often made stranger ones.

The fucking Stervyatnik. Pretty sure I'd heard that fairytale before, Russian pussies so tight they could milk military codes off a five-star general.

"You tracked her back home and popped a cap in her pretty little noggin'."

"... Not exactly..."

I glared at him: "You twat."

Hercule took a drag on his Gauloise, fleeing my glare.

"You silly. Old. Twat!"

"I felt sorry for her," he mumbled. "Seeing her life through my scope. She had retired from the clandestine service, married, grown old, and had two fat unruly kids."

"You absolute geezard! You... geez, she's killed your brother, man."

"It's been ten years, I've learned to let it go. Hate is mind poison, tu sais? The bags under her eyes, she probably wakes up every night to the faces of all the people she's killed."

Caspian's putrid lips smirked from the nightmare world.

"That's the bloody French for you." I crossed my arms. "It sums you up perfectly."

"Now what stuck with me on the day of that explosion was you going 'this would never have happened when I had Cormac covering my back!' I had never heard you shout before. And it got me thinking."

Epiphany punched me in the chin.

"What if this Vicky ghost of yours was also one of those Stervyatnik, sent to keep your friend Cormac busy..."

"No."

"... while one of her colleagues killed you?"

"No. Fucking. Way!"

Hercule finished his Gauloise and opened his mag to another fax. The photo on it was nothing but a blot of ink, a teenage girl in braided pigtails. But those austere eyes, those high cheekbones, those thin lips... Geez.

"She's not a redhead, she's blond. Her real name is Valeria Volesky, 36. Born in Pogost, Belarus on September the 6th, 1960 and recruited into the program by the Minsk Institute in 1975."

'I could as easily have been YOUR girl with the flip of a coin.'

The Misha teddy bears, the Moscow Olympics mascot. My dreams had fucking tried to warn me.

No, screw this paper! I had seen her, the way she looked at Cormac, how her voice climbed an octave when she spoke to him. How she secretly rubbed her feet under the table in delight listening to his stories. She loved him.

"Where is she now?"

"In the wind, she killed the son of a party member in Bosnia a few months ago and the Kremlin wants her head."

Outside, shades of pink and orange orange tinted the skies as exhausted seagulls glided home amid melancholic cries.

"What are your plans now?"

"Eh, bien, working with these new Russians hasn't been easy, they're careless. Like they have a death wish. I had a gig that went south, donc I need to get out of Europe for a while."

I could use an extra set of eyes. Chai was spread too thin recruiting, and Baby Lee was helping me expand into Bangkok and Laos.

"These Kremlin people of yours," I said. "They are mine now. You pay them whatever they ask, but any news on her I wanna know."

"Bien sûr."

"Welcome aboard, old man."

"Do they sell French comics here?"

TWO TIME'S THE CHARM

If you were alive back in 1999, you probably read about it.

It started small, with a Belgian sex tourist's throat slit in Penang, Malaysia and his bank account syphoned. Others would follow.

"Sawatdee-kha, boss!" Baby Lee charged into my office, fueled by morbid excitement. "Malaysian police have no clue who killed the pedo."

"Sawatdee-krap," I greeted her back, then sighed: "Sawatdee- crap...."

Chai peeked from behind her: "What's with the frown, boss?"

""Latest recon." I spilled the new photos across the desk. "Cormac's remarried."

"Again?!" They said in unison.

"Can't blame him," I grunted. "Are we ever gonna find Vicky?"

"Have some faith, boss; she's out there." Baby Lee studied the images: "So, how are we gonna explode this marriage?"

"That is so fucked. Up." Chai crashed on the couch. "You two are playing with fire, leave the poor guy alone, geez!"

"It's a love test, sugar! If she really loves him, she won't stray."

"Yeah." He frowned. "I'll go stockpile on Sodium Hydroxide and pliers. I know exactly how this ends."

"How about a bet?" Baby Lee grinned. "Fifty bucks she won't cheat!"

"You already owe me a hundred," I said.

"What do you mean?"

"Macau called, Song didn't make it."

"Oh, boss..."

"You're not coming. I've seen how you dress at funerals."

"Aww, boss!"

<<<<<>>>>>

Song's funeral was a modest ceremony.

As I watched them burn joss paper, I wondered how my ending would be.

Probably something violent and well deserved.

Junior was standing behind me, his mug all busted up. His crime lord career had been brief, the idiot ran his uncle's business into the ground shortly after taking over and had to flee to the US. Avoiding my gaze, he paid his respects and rushed out.

"Did Junior's face try to fuck a 16 wheeler?" I whispered. Song's old friends smirked.

"That's what he gets for wrecking Song's legacy."

"A couple of us are planning to explain to him after the service that Macau's weather doesn't agree with him, do you wanna join in?"

"I wouldn't miss it."

We intercepted Junior shortly after, coming out of Lei's place and we beat the crap outta him. A celebratory glass of baijiu later and I ditched Chai and the guys to revisit Macau.

Nostalgia dragged me to Ponte e Horta Plaza where old memories hit me. I had been loved here, once. I expected to catch a glimpse of Amber's little red head running around inside her little pastry shop, but a souvenir store had taken its place.