Honey is Sweeter than Blood by Jeffrey Thomas

said, baffled.
    “This is not my mother!” Kot entered the room fully, and loomed over the living mummy.  “Old woman, where is my mother?”
    “The woman who lived here before me is dead,” came the frightened creature’s reply.
    Cheung shot a look at Kot, and the expression on the gangster’s face actually made him frightened, as well.  It was seething, volcanic.  “Dead? I don’t believe you!”
    “I am sorry…your mother took her own life, over a month ago.  She…slashed her wrists, and died in this room.” And with that, she pointed toward a corner where there was a ratty scrap of rug across the floor.
    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 firsttime
    “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