Honey is Sweeter than Blood Read online

  Kot flashed to the comer, whipped back the rug, then went rigid with shock as if he had uncovered his mother’s month-old corpse underneath.

  He had not, but there was still a great dark stain that could not be erased. Like the shadow of a ghost, of a life departed.

  Kot’s facial muscles rippled, spasmed. “Why?” he managed.

  “They came here. They told her she had to leave. She told them she wouldn’t…that this was her home. They insisted. They were forceful. She asked them to wait until her son could come for her, at least, but they would not listen. And so she told them to leave her alone while she gathered her belongings. And when they came back…she had …killed herself ”

  Kot now turned to the wall, denying Cheung the opportunity to see tears in his eyes for the first time

  “I was moved out of my flat,” the old woman continued apologetically. “So I moved in here instead. I don’t want to leave this place, either. This is my home…”

  Cheung moved up behind the gangster, gently touched his shoulder. “We should go…”

  Kot whirled, pushed his hand away, and burst through the curtain with such force that he tore it half away.

  Cheung dashed after him. “Kot! Wait! Where are you going?”

  Within moments the gangster had already escaped him in the labyrinth, and Cheung only succeeded in getting himself hopelessly lost. Moments became minutes. Cheung blundered into a corridor clotted with garbage heaped like moldering bodies, impassable, and one of his shoes filled with a gelatinous slime. “Kot!” he bellowed. Two little boys with their arms around each other’s shoulders, dangling their legs from a honeycomb above, tittered down at him.

  And then, some distance ahead, he heard the thunder of gunfire.

  Cheung used the sounds as his compass. There had been three reports, a second of silence, then three more.

  Now he followed a commotion of anxious voices, and he turned an alley to see a knot of teenage boys huddled over something of interest. They scattered like roaches when Cheung appeared, his pistol in hand, and in scattering revealed the bodies of two dead men, slumped against a wall. Though they had been stripped of some of their uniforms, it was obvious they were constables.

  Cheung did not recognize them, not only because of the sheer number of officers in Hong Kong, but because his department covered Hong Kong Island, and these men would be with the Kowloon unit, each division of the RHKP being an entity unto itself. One of the men had been shot in the chest and throat, the blood still flowing heavily out of these wounds, forming pools and channels in the folds of his trousers. The other was missing an eye and his nose gaped like a skull’s from where bullets had crashed into his head. Thinner ribbons of gore trickled from his ears and over his lip. The remaining eye seemed to gaze at the partner whose head rested against his shoulder as if he’d fallen asleep beside his lover.

  “Kot!” Cheung yelled, spinning around. “Damn you! Listen to me!”

  He heard running. Growing nearer. Triad men, coming to see what was happening in their section of the Walled City? Or Kot, heeding his call?

  Cheung pointed his handgun, sweat running down his face. He squeezed the trigger guard back. His hair was plastered to his forehead…

  A policeman with drawn pistol, then another, appeared around the corner. And as they appeared, they opened fire.

  Cheung dropped his gun and began to raise his hands, but even as he did so a bullet plowed into his shoulder. Another pierced an upraised palm…exited through the top of his hand…a crimson flower bloomed on the wall behind him. He fell back against it, blood spreading across his white suit, pierced and half-crucified like some modern, debased saint. He was a fallen angel…fallen into hell. He was Orpheus, and had failed to rescue his Eurydice from the underworld…

  “Don’t!” he cried weakly at the approaching men, still holding out his streaming hand to ward them off. “Don’t! I’m a policeman, too!”

  He was struck across the temple with the butt of a pistol, dropped to his knees. “Liar! “ one of the constables shouted at him. “You killed these two men!”

  “It wasn’t me,” Cheung groaned, his eyesight having become a rippling red haze, as if he were submerged in a deep pool of blood. “It was a Triad man…”

  He felt a hand inside his jacket. His billfold was examined. “Liar! Where is your badge?”

  “Undercover,” Cheung muttered, beginning to lose consciousness.

  “Take him,” one man said to the other.

  “Not me,” Cheung mumbled once more, the red haze becoming a black one. “Kot…Kot…”

  He didn’t know if he were calling out to his lover, or betraying his name.

  * * *

  Cheung filed his reports. He was told he would eventually be called to testify at the trial of the murderer/heroin trafficker Kot Si Fu when he was apprehended. And he would be caught, the policemen swore, so that the brutal killer of their brothers might answer for his crimes.

  And then Cheung retired, with honors, his promising career ended. His shoulder wound had been clean and not serious, but his right hand had been smashed. It was still too early to tell to what extent physical therapy might restore it, but the outlook did not seem promising.

  Cheung had been offered office work. He had declined. It was not so much that he felt such work would represent a sad decline after his former duties. It was that he felt unworthy of wearing a badge at all, unworthy of his service awards, after having fallen in love with the murderer/heroin trafficker Kot Si Fu.

  He lost himself in his apartment, hid there like a wounded animal, for weeks. He had been away from it for quite a while, and after having lived in Kot’s apartment for over a month, this humble flat seemed like something from the Walled City.

  Most nights, he drank himself to sleep.

  This night he had finished off the dregs of a bottle, all he had left until he could will himself to venture out again. His mind was unbearably sober. He lay naked on his belly on the sheets, his hard-on pinned beneath him. For lack of another’s flesh, he took comfort in the feel of his own skin against the hungry organ. He joked bitterly to himself that he should masturbate by fucking the hole through his right hand. There was a downpour outside. The sound made him lonelier even than the straining yearning of his cock, which seemed to reach out from him hopelessly, like an arm with its hand hacked off.

  And then, as if a telepathic beacon had been answered, a knee depressed the bed beside him. Cheung’s eyes opened, and he began to lift his head…but his movement was halted by a gun muzzle that pressed against his scarred temple.

  “I’ve been looking for you,” came a soft, familiar voice.

  “And I was looking for you,” Cheung replied.

  “Your friends still are looking. They have bloodlust in them.”

  “You should leave Hong Kong,” Cheung said.

  “This is my home,” replied Kot Si Fu.

  The bed was depressed further. Cheung felt the other man stretch upon his back, and realized that Kot had disrobed after breaking into the apartment. Their combined weight pressed his erection more deeply into his own belly, as if it ached to tunnel through him if it must in order to reach the subject of its craving.

  Kot did not remove the muzzle of the Model 77B from against the former policeman’s head. His former lover’s head.

  “Are you going to hurt me?” Cheung whispered. He felt Kot’s hard prick nestle in the crevice of his ass. Almost imperceptibly, Kot began rubbing his shaft along that dark channel.

  “I’m a cop killer. A monster. You expect me to kill you, don’t you?”

  Cheung swallowed. “I don’t know what to expect of you.”

  “And I don’t know what to expect of you. I trusted you. But after those two bastards shot you, I heard you. I was still close by. You told them you were one of them, and I felt as if a bullet had been fired into my heart. You told them my name, as well. You betrayed me.”

  “I was doing my job.”

 
“I loved you,” Kot rasped, grinding the cold gun muzzle more firmly against Cheung’s head.

  After a moment, Cheung said, “And I loved you, too.”

  Kot reached his free hand between them, and helped guide the head of his prick to Cheung’s pursed hole. He urged the plump head inside roughly, and Cheung cried out, squirmed under him. Kot held the gun steady, and once he was more fully inside the former policeman’s pinned body, wrapped his other arm around Cheung’s neck. His thrusts continued to be rough, but were not violent. Kot panted in Cheung’s ear, and the bed squeaked rhythmically, and the rainstorm pounded against the windows.

  “You don’t need the gun,” Cheung choked between his own panting. “You don’t need to rape me. I want you to fuck me, Kot.”

  “I’m not sure I believe you, Cheung.”

  “Believe me,” Cheung said, hating himself for the truth. “Believe me.”

  Kot bit Cheung’s shoulder, and then moaned and rubbed his stubbled cheek against it, as if torn between brutality and tenderness. He rotated his hips, churning his cock inside Cheung. He began a series of rapid staccato thrusts before reverting again to longer, deeper, more pummeling lunges.

  Cheung kissed the arm around his neck, ran his tongue along it, as if to demonstrate his sincerity. “I want you, Kot. We can go away together.”

  “Ahh, Cheung, how can I trust you? You aren’t a criminal. You aren’t like me. But even if I could trust you, I won’t leave Hong Kong…I won’t leave my home…but I won’t go to prison, either. I was a boy in the Walled City. I told you. At last I was able to escape that prison. I won’t end my life in another one. I won’t let your friends take me away.”

  Cheung heard the Model 77B slide and click, as Kot depressed the trigger guard and chambered its first round.

  His throat convulsed, tried to seize up. “Kot…please don’t…don’t hurt me…”

  “I wouldn’t hurt you,” Kot panted, more breathless, his thrusts getting closer together, pace quickening as he approached climax. “I told you, Cheung…” he removed the pistol’s muzzle from Cheung’s temple “…I love you.”

  And then there was an explosion, a blast so loud that it blanked Cheung’s mind, robbed his hearing. All at once he felt Kot’s body violently spasm as he shot his load deep inside him…and at the same moment, the pillows of the bed were spattered with a glittering red constellation. Cheung felt a hot wet spatter across his neck and shoulders, like ejaculate.

  For a moment, he believed the gangster had shot him in the back of the head, but that the bullet had deflected off his skull. He had heard of such things happening in suicide attempts.

  And then he realized that Kot was no longer moving. His weight had settled heavily across his back, like that of an exhausted lover, but even more still. Kot’s hard cock remained embedded inside his gut.

  With both terror and revulsion, Cheung realized the truth, and pulled himself out from under his lover. Kot’s erection at last slipped heavily out of Cheung’s ass. Cheung rolled off the bed to the floor, scrambled backwards across the dirty carpet like a crab, ignoring the pain in his bandaged right hand. He felt one of the drops of warm fluid on his neck wind its way down to the small of his back.

  Kot’s face was turned to the wall, and that was preferable. Though the back of his head was shattered like a doll’s, blood pouring over a jagged rim of bone to dye the sheets scarlet, it was better to see this horrific exit wound than his beautiful face in death. Blood soaked into the pillows now, streamed down the side of the bed.

  And tears streamed down Cheung’s cheeks.

  And the last of the rain streamed down the windows as the deluge began to move on.

  Impressions

  “I don’t believe two people lying down could get hit by lightning,” said Andrea, having snicked her tongue before saying it.

  “Well, it’s the highest point around; it’s like a hill,” defended Jen, who had shown them to this place, had told them the old story about it as related to her by her mother. As a child her mother had taken her on walks through Pine Grove Cemetery, and passing this spot had said that two people had been struck by lightning and killed here. It wasn’t until three years ago, when Jen was fifteen, that her mother informed her they’d been copulating at the time.

  “Hill.” Andrea sneered. “There are trees over there.” She pointed with a jut of her chin. “They’re a lot higher than a guy’s bare ass on this little mound.”

  “Maybe they weren’t there, then,” Diane offered meekly. “Jen said this tree wasn’t.” She had her hand on the flank of a massive oak.

  “Oh, so this used to be a desert, huh? I see. When did this happen, 1923? So that tree is only seventy years old and it’s that big around?”

  “That’s long enough, wouldn’t it be? Why not?” Jen said.

  “Come on, it’s as big as a house. That was here in 1923.”

  “My mom says it wasn’t.”

  “Your mom told you that story when you turned fifteen and started feeling funny new urges, my dear child. It’s a suburban legend invented to scare people sexless.”

  “I’d been feeling funny urges since I was thirteen, Andrea, and my mother doesn’t resort to old wives’ tales as a form of birth control; she put me on the pill herself.”

  “See how paranoid she is?”

  Jen groaned. Diane was gaping straight up into the canopy of leaves, the thick branches snaking off into them like black rivers seen from a plane, vanishing into misty jungle. “It’s so thick,” she heard Jen saying, “because the thing is engorged with their passion.”

  “It’s like Apollo and Daphne,” breathed Diane, a restless camouflage of light and shadow stirring on her face.

  “Huh?” Andrea turned slowly.

  Diane had regretted it the moment she’d said it. She liked Andrea, but also found her caustic, perpetual cynicism intimidating. She knew she had to get it out now so she got it out fast and simple. “The old myth about Apollo? How he and Daphne got shot by Cupid’s arrows…one that made Apollo in love with Daphne, and one that made Daphne repelled by love, so that she kept running away from him. Just as she was finally about to be caught she begged the Gods to transform her so she could escape him, and they turned her into a laurel tree.” There, it was out and said, and she waited for Andrea to turn to Jen and sputter into laughter.

  But Andrea could be oddly gentle toward Diane at times, and only chuckled a little and said, “Yeah, the Gods were always doing shit like that. You look at them the wrong way and poof…you’re a zucchini. ‘And that, children, was the birth of the first zucchini.’ ” All three girls laughed. “See? Jen’s mom was trying to scare her into believing that if she had premarital sex on a hill in a graveyard, Zeus would turn her into a giant oak tree.”

  “You want to see their graves now, Andy?” Jen said tolerantly.

  “Sure, sure…lead on.”

  Diane glanced over her shoulder at the tree as they moved down the grassy, shaded mound, an island in a sea of slanting, pitted tombstones stained with dirt and lichens. She had shivered for a few moments back there in that deep shade, the rough bark cool under her soft palm. But she had liked it in the damp shadow. It was a place that called out for her to return, maybe to sit propped against that trunk with a book in her lap. The Age of Fables or Beauties of Mythology by Thomas Bullfinch, it would be. She had her grandmother’s copy printed in 1898.

  It was glaringly summer-hot elsewhere in the cemetery, the grass yellowish and dry like straw, not moist and squeaky green as it had been on the mound, where there had even been soft-fleshed pale mushrooms hiding in the grass.

  The man’s stone was in the middle of the sprawling graveyard. DAVID McKAY, it was inscribed. Born in 1901. Died in 1923. There was no clever poem or epitaph to explain his early demise at twenty-two. “You went out with style, Dave,” Andrea patted the top of the stone, “but that’s what you get for sticking your lightning rod out when a thunderstorm’s brewing.”

  “Talk abo
ut your orgasms,” Jen speculated. “What a way to go.”

  “Yeah…they didn’t smoke cigarettes after-wards, they just smoked.”

  The young woman had no grave of her own, her name chiseled into a looming family monument, a weathered white obelisk. MARIE BARNES…1903-1923. Her ignominious fate was inscribed on the tongues of the town folk, and didn’t need to be immortalized here. Commenting on this, Andrea said, “Hey, at least it’s nice to be remembered for something. Everybody else in here was probably pretty boring.”

  “I think it’s beautiful, in a way,” Diane ventured, a little encouraged by Andrea’s failure to attack before. “Don’t you?”

  “Beautiful? To get burnt to a crisp at twenty? Um, let me think about that for a second. No.”

  “Well, I mean, to die together in a joined moment of love…isn’t that just a little romantic?”

  “Honey, who said they were in love? Joined together in lust, it could have been. If it’s so great why don’t you go make it with somebody in a car on some train tracks? Real romantic.”

  Diane decided to keep her feelings and impressions to herself; that had been more the Andrea she knew and feared. Andrea knew damn well Diane had yet to make it with anybody, in any location. And that the occasion wasn’t imminent, either. She was bookish, dark-haired, mushroom-bodied. Andrea was pretty, blond (artificially, but blond) and a hard, half-anorexic brown.

  “Now do you believe me?” Jen said.

  “Yes, Jen, I believe you, okay? Davey McKay and Marie Barnes really went out with a bang.”

  “Oh God.”

  “Oh Zeus, you mean.”

  * * *

  Jen and Diane returned to the mound the next day…without Andrea along. It had been Diane’s idea to stroll here again.

  It had rained earlier, the air thick, almost too heavy to breathe in. Mosquitoes bobbed in the air. They stopped, of course, at the mound and climbed its slippery side. Diane’s sneakers skidded out from under her and she fell on her hands and knees, smearing them with green juice. A mushroom had become mush under her left palm. Andrea would have been in hysterics. Jen helped Diane to her feet.