Honey is Sweeter than Blood by Jeffrey Thomas Page A

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 filedhis 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