Azucena
I wrote this short story years ago, and it is included in Maligno Unbound, the collection of short fiction I’ve indie-published on Amazon (you can buy that here: https://www.amazon.com/Maligno-Unbound-Alma-Aileen-Anonas-Carpio/dp/1976523079). I first put it up on Facebook’s Notes app, and it was subsequently published in the magazine I worked for as a literary editor — with the permission of my then-EIC, Joel Pablo Salud, when we had a literary inbox dry spell. Since Facebook has disabled that app, I am putting it up here.
The twilight of Boracay’s magic hour is always a beautiful thing to behold, with its purples and oranges, the pinks and grays that paint the sky’s canvas and give way to the throbbing music pulsing on the beach-front, as if in reply to the rise and ebb of the incoming tide. This is the new rhythm of this paradise island and it is broken tonight by the hoarse wail of the island’s one police vehicle, a battered and little-used multicab with a faded PNP insignia on its white doors.
The main road, where the island’s traffic of tricycles, jeepneys and smattering of sedans and cargo vehicles normally flows smoothly, is blocked off near the roadside entrance to D.Mall, the place locals call “Divisoria on the beach” and the more jaded Manileňos have christened “SM with sand and no aircon.”
Several meters into the “mall,” on the side of the main cobblestone path leading past shops selling sun-block, bikinis, sarongs and offering diving gear for rent and some expensive restaurants, is a young, lithe and very dead woman, a mestiza if her light brown curls and Eurasian features are any indication of her ethnicity.
Her cadaver is cordoned off with yellow tape: “Crime Scene: Do not enter.” Her still-warm body is splayed at grotesque angles, her arms and legs all broken and arrayed like the limbs of a swastika, her once-lovely face frozen in a last horrific scream of glossy red lips and perfect white teeth marred only by a drying trickle of blood down to her chin as two junior police officers are taking turns fanning flies away from the corpse’s open, glassine brown eyes ringed with thick, curly, mascaraed lashes.
One of the officers, Police Officer 1 Karlo Santino, turns away to retch into a nearby santan bush, losing his dinner in a spill of sour bile over the bright pink of the small blooms. Santino’s partner utters shocked curses and shouts urgently into a battered old Motorola walkie-talkie, calling for additional personnel at the scene while the body is in situ to disperse the growing crowd of usiseros.
This crime scene will haunt them forever: The woman’s body has deep claw marks on the upper arms. Her throat looks like it had been ripped out and a ragged hole sits where her voicebox should be. She had been ripped open from belly to brisket and the top of her itsy-bitsy, yellow polka-dot bikini lies sundered and spattered with blood and gore, baring two healthy-looking and shapely (albeit dead) breasts over the shattered splinters of what had been her sternum. Her heart is gone and, perhaps, most of her innards, and one of the responding lawmen thinks of grim puns about how a Filipina could lose her heart on Paradise Island.
Shell beads, probably from a necklace or bracelet the victim had been wearing, lie scattered and glistening in the pink-white sand and among the flagstones of the path. So much for island souvenirs, one of the officers-on-case thinks absently.
The crowd of scene oglers swells and ebbs like the tide as incoming police reinforcements and barangay tanods push them back so the mall can be closed that they may gather evidence and begin their investigation in peace. Gasps and screams and know-it-all chatter have been filling the sea air in this area over the last hour and a half since the woman was found thus splayed by a shocked Scandinavian tourist who had been looking for the public loo.
She would have to be moved out of there, to the nearest funeral parlor, for the coroner to tell them what killed her — as if the blood soaking the sand did not speak its truth, or the many, many wounds she bore did not tell the story clearly enough. Most probably, the cause of death would be listed as “cardiac arrest” for want of a better explanation. Yes, the heart stops when one dies, after all.
But the thrum of music from the beachfront bars and discos does not falter. The heart of Boracay continues to beat for the island is not dead. The libations continue to pour, the revelers keep at their partying, the beachfront masseuses, tattoo artists and hawkers still go about their business. The bartenders and baristas stay busy, showing off for the crowds. This is Paradise Island, after all, and paradise does not stop for anyone.
In the dark corners of Boracay, lovers still kiss in their pretzel trysts. Laughter still scents the air with a salty, lusty tang. Night swimmers still stroke their way through the purple waves and break through the whiteness of seafoam. The island is still beautifully clad in the black of night and spangled by party lights and strobes. One horrific homicide cannot put a dent in that.
***
Matthew swims up from the shore, his red-gold hair glinting in the waning light of the full moon and he shakes the seawater off his hairy limbs as a wet dog would shake its coat, making the waterproof pouch at his waist jingle with keys and coin. The light tan he has acquired only limns his skin’s natural pallor in a golden sheen as he watches the moon retreat past the clouds.
Sunrise is coming, he thinks with a smile. So good to be an early riser and all that. And what a breakfast he had. Luscious, juicy, so full of energy, so sweet and hearty. Perfect fuel for the long hours of swimming he likes to put in before exploring this island and those near it. How else is one to maintain such buff musculature but to work off the calories one consumes with a vigorous swim, eh? Here, the sea is warm enough for a good, hard swim and Matthew is happy for it. I could live here forever.
With a loping stride, he makes his way back to his hotel, a posh, five-star beauty of Mactan stone, chrome and glass that sits smack in the middle of the beach facing the Grotto where the image of the Queen of Heaven watches over the sunbathers and swimmers.
Time to shower and change, to rinse off the powdery sand and see what the day holds, Matthew tells himself as he pauses long enough to watch the sun start to break through the sea in a red-gold disc over the center of the horizon, throwing the Grotto into a fleeting penumbra, dousing Mother Mary’s meek face in complete shadow, before bringing her soft smile to light.
“Massage, sir?” The question takes Matthew by surprise, something that makes his hackles rise and draws a growl out of his throat as he turns to see a petite Filipina in a faded blue tank top and a gaily-patterned sarong full of swimming neon fish looking up at him and holding a glass bottle of clear oil in her left hand and a large beach blanket folded over that arm, her gamine face set in a friendly islander’s smile. “For two hundred pesos, I promise you the best massage of your life.”
Her long, straight hair hangs down to her waist, black as night, skimming the full curve of her hips and outlining a handspan waist that tapers upward to a firm, ripe bosom that is probably as brown as the rest of her body and Matthew smiles a wolfish smile. “Aren’t you out a bit early?” Matthew’s question hangs in the air over her head, just at a level with his bare chest, and she shrugs.
“The earlier I get out on the beach, the better. There are a lot of beach masseurs here and I need to earn my keep, sir,” she says coyly, almost flirtatiously, her well-shaped brows rising engagingly as she looks up at him and dark chocolate eyes clash with his light green ones. “Just give me an hour and you will be a new man, I promise.”
A bit too early for lunch, Matthew thinks to himself, but she looks like a tasty morsel. Why the heck not? Just a massage, then, maybe later, well, this is paradise. There is always time for a leisurely meal after a massage. He grins down at her and nods: “Okay, an hour, then. For two hundred pesos. But this better be good or I’ll be sorely disappointed and I may eat you for lunch.” His tone, in clipped Queen’s English, is just as light, as flirtatious as hers is. “But you must tell me your name. I’m Matthew.”
She takes his extended right hand in a firm handshake, her little brown hand looking even smaller in his massive paw. “Hello, Matthew. You may call me Suzy, short for Azucena. Now, let me set the blanket up and I will give you a sunrise massage you will never forget.”
Suzy walks gracefully over the still-cool sand to a level spot and spreads the thick blanket with practiced ease, sets down the oil bottle and whips her sarong off to reveal perfectly browned, lithely-muscled legs bared by short, sheer white shorts. “Let’s start with your back. Please lie face down.”
Matthew snaps out of his intent perusal of Suzy’s legs and complies with a smile. Okay, I know it is bad manners to play with one’s food, but, maybe this time I can have a bit of fun, eh? He stops thinking when she settles down on the backs of his hairy thighs, her firm butt wiggling a bit until she finds her balance astride him. Oh, yes, we will play first, he decides as he breathes in deep and inhales the heady scent of flowers falling from Suzy’s dark hair and an earthy odor he cannot quite place but doesn’t find at all unpleasant.
The oil pools in the small of his pack in a cool puddle that Suzy begins to spread with fingers and palms in light, expanding circles on his back. “My, you are hairy, Matthew, what we like to call ‘balbon’ here. If you had been born Filipino, we’d have said your mother ate balut while she was pregnant with you,” she comments with a whisper of a chuckle as she begins to press and rub on the tight muscles of his neck, shoulders and upper back. “Why, you’re furry enough to make a rug if you lie perfectly still on the floor!”
“Mmmm. Yes, where I come from, the men are rather hairy, although there is absolutely no balut there,” Matthew replies, a laugh in his voice and his eyes half closed with pleasure as the sun brightens the sky. “So, tell me, what does Azucena mean?”
“It is a very fragrant flower,” she answers as she moves her skilled hands down to the middle of his back, kneading and pressing, caressing and soothing. “You know it as the tuberose.” Reality begins to fade for Matthew as Suzy takes her ministrations lower down his back, to the base of his spine, over his tightly muscled buttocks and down his legs.
All he hears is her voice and the crash of sea against shore is a distant thing, irrelevant, really. Her hands, her slick, small hands are making waves of their own on the shore of his skin as the sun warms it and she works his toes and the soles of his feet. She moves up again, to massage his left arm, all the way down to the fingertips, and moves on to the right arm.
“How did you learn to speak English so well?” He asks her sleepily, for the massage is relaxing him so, making him take his guard down, making him forget everything but the soothing motions of her hands on him. “The other islanders use what you call carabao English.”
Suzy smiles and pauses as she sits astride his buttocks, “I went to college in Manila, the University of Santo Tomas, and I hung out with the campus writers and read a lot of American and British authors as part of my course in Literature.” Her voice sounded wistful, as if she were reminiscing about lost treasure. “We had English as the medium of instruction there.”
“Turn over, Matthew. It is time to massage your chest,” Suzy says with an abruptness that tells him she doesn’t want to dig into that particular set of memories anymore as she rises off him. He turns over and looks at her, his light eyes boring into hers as she positions herself to his left and he cradles his nape with interlocked fingers so she can pour oil down his lightly-furred chest, over his pectoral muscles and down into the grooves separating his six-pack of abdominal muscles. “So, if you went to college, why are you giving beach massages for two hundred pesos a pop?”
Suzy cocks her head to the side and purses her plump, red lips, her thick black lashes veiling her almond eyes as she spreads the oil and begins working her magic over his collarbone and chest and the ocean breeze carries her scent to his nose. Matthew closes his eyes and breathes her in — salt, the sweet tang of tuberose, fresh and womanly sweat and that earthy odor he still cannot identify, try as he might, keen as his sense of smell may be.
The world fades away again as he feels her fingers brushing his chest and abdomen like butterflies, then pressing down to demand the submission of his muscles. He makes a sound that is half a groan and wholly a sigh, his butt lifting slightly off the mattress. Her fingers feel so good on me, Matthew thinks with a pleasured gasp. So good on my quadriceps, on my hips. So good on my…
“I had come home because my grandmother died and I had to take on family responsibilities,” Suzy says briskly, matter-of-factly, her tone breaking rudely into his horny mood. “I’m the eldest granddaughter and I had to take care of the things she left behind, to take her place as head of the family. My mother, her daughter, died ahead of her so it fell to me. It’s not so bad, being back home, giving massages. And my good English brings me good business. So, tell me what you do for a living.”
“I’m an ordinary guy by day,” Matthew says as he casts her a glance over his shoulder. “I work in my father’s construction and landscaping company back in the UK. By night, well, I howl at the moon and ravish virgins,” he pauses as he hears her tinkling laughter above him.
“Seriously, I’m a bad boy by night, woof-woof-bite, and all that,” he expostulates with a laugh, which terminates in a groan as she undoes the knots in his quadriceps and he closes his eyes from the pleasure of her hands smoothing down the skin on his legs.
Her hands stop moving and Matthew’s eyes fly open. Suzy is looking at him with undisguised and intense hunger in her eyes, massaging his scantily-clad body with those brown orbs as surely as her hands had been doing just seconds ago. “Two hundred pesos, sir,” she said, a smile bringing out small dimples in her cheeks as she holds out a small hand, palm-up.
Sitting up quickly, as much to get at his waterproof pouch and draw out the money as to hide the tenting of his arousal that he was suddenly aware of, Matthew takes hold of a P500 bill and hands it over to Suzy. “Here. The rest is a tip. That was truly the best massage in the world. At least as far as I’ve had massages.”
She beams up at him, satisfaction showing in her mien, in the way she stands tall and basks in his praise as she reaches for the currency he is holding out to her. Matthew smiles back at Suzy, a predatory gleam in his eye as he catches her hand before she can take the money he proffers. “Can I see you tonight? No massage, just dinner and a walk on the beach.”
She may shy away, Matthew thought, but she can’t hide from me now that I have her scent. It is so much better when they are willing. Outwardly, he puts on his hopeful, puppy-dog face, seeming to beg when he is actually scheming.
“I’d like that. Sunset? Here? Then I can show you my Boracay,” Suzy said, smiling even more widely her teeth bright white against the deep tan of her skin, her dimple deepening. “Yes, that would be perfect,” Matthew answers as she tucks a strand of hair behind her right ear and gathers up her gear. “Till then.” He lopes away to his hotel and she sashays past him, down the beach to disappear in the gathering crowd of sunbathers, her hips swaying like palm fronds in the breeze.
***
“What sort of predatory animal, Officer Santino, can prowl the beach, slip unseen into D.Mall and maul a woman without anyone even seeing it? You tell me that and I’d believe your ‘mauled by a wild animal’ theory! There are no wild animals on Boracay. We’re too far from Kalawit Island for them to swim to our shores, for God’s sake!”
The squat, balding mayor of Boracay is normally a jovial fellow, more given to gales of laughter than angry bluster and PO1 Santino is discomfited by this change in his uncle. He is also shaken by the fact that this angry, bald man who is his uncle is not doting on him now or letting him off the hook at all.
“Sir, that is what the coroner said. He said the victim was attacked by a wild animal, possibly a very big dog…” The mayor interrupts his nephew with a downward slash of his right hand and a blue streak of expletives in at least four Filipino dialects, Spanish and English. “Sir, that is what the evidence shows, including paw-prints in the flower-bed beside the victim. Paw-prints, po, with claw-marks!”
The mayor inhales deeply and holds the bridge of his aquiline nose between thumb and forefinger as he closes his eyes only to open them again and fix his idiot of a nephew with an icy stare: “Then find this goddamned animal and shoot it before it ruins my island!” There are days, the Mayor thinks to himself, when nepotism just does not pay.
***
As dusk draws near, Suzy prepares the outdoor kitchen. The wood stove out back is now stacked with tinder and kindling, a huge talyasi sits atop the stove, gleaming, for it has been freshly scrubbed. The newly-washed concrete patch and tiled countertop where food preparation takes place is drying in the late afternoon sun and she calls her two younger siblings over in Aklanon.
“Allan, did you go to the talipapa and get the herbs we need?” The gangly teenage boy nodded at his sister silently. “Good. Now, you and Jessie-Mae should arrange the knives and chopping board on the counter when it dries, okay? I’ll be going out in a while. When I get back, I want everything ready so we can cook. We have a guest coming over. Please dress well so we can impress him, okay?” The boy nodded, his eyes lit up as he moved to find their little sister.
Suzy hurries out of the back yard and into the hollow-block and concrete house to change into another set of tank-top and shorts — red top and black shorts — and pull on her best flip-flops, original red and black Havaianas bought in Manila. She pauses in front of a cracked mirror and takes a small, old-fashioned flagon with a glass stopper and dip-stick from an ancient-looking red, lacquered Chinese chest on the dresser.
The box had belonged to her grandmother and it passed into her keeping after the old lady had died. “This is where we keep the most precious of things,” her Lola told her as she lay dying on the bed not two feet from the dresser. “Keep it well. Now, kiss me goodbye, Azucena.”
There are a few gold rings in that box, and a small amulet of old carbon steel with Latin markings embossed crudely on it. When removed from the box, the amulet hung by a black leather thong that has grown brittle with age and, perhaps, the salt air.
Tiny, wrinkled things, Suzy’s umbilical cord among them, and a small pile of nail and hair clippings, the leavings of all her known forebears and siblings, lie in that box. She touches these mementoes with reverence before taking the flagon up and looking at it in the waning light: Within swirls a dark liquid, almost black except for flashes of red twinkling in it like flame as the liquid sloshes about. She touches these things in turn as she takes the cracked leather thong off the amulet, which she slips into a small, Velcro-fastened pocket sewn into the wide inside hem of her black shorts.
Suzy removes the stopper from the flagon and touches the dip-stick to the pulse-points at her neck, inside her elbows, in the valley between her brown breasts, anointing herself in the scent of tuberose, her namesake, and in the blessings of her grandmother. Tonight is special and she will find the perfect man. Tonight she will fully own her future and embrace who she truly is.
***
Matthew sits on the sand with his feet dug into little sand slippers as he gathers up the fine white powder and lets its slip through his fingers in little slipstreams of time. The sky is glorious in the sunset, like a Van Gough painting, but with none of the sadness. The warm air plasters his gray t-shirt to his back and the last warmth of day radiates up through his surf shorts and the soles of his black flip-flops.
I could live and die happily in this place, on this island, he muses. I could leave my pack back home and just stay here. The moon is going to be full enough tonight for him to make a meal of that sweet little masseuse — or, maybe, raise a litter of cubs with her.
Ah, yes, dining al fresco is so much more fun in the Philippines for a werewolf, he muses to himself, making a pun on the latest Philippine tourism pitch that brought him here in the first place. That, and the fact that the PNP is not very good at solving murder cases, no matter how gruesome or public they are.
A shadow falls silently over him and he smells her again. He rises and turns to look at her, an almost feral smile on his face as he takes her hand. “Hi, Suzy.” He looks into her eyes and is startled to find her gaze just as intent as his is, just as hungry. “Hi, Matthew.”
Suzy lets Matthew take her hand in his as she smiles. “Where do you want to go? We can go to that Japanese place in D.Mall now that they’ve allowed the place to open up again. A woman was killed there late last night and they had to cordon it off until this afternoon. She was attacked by a big dog or something like that. Now it’s become notorious, a real tourist draw, if you like things like that.”
“And that doesn’t scare you, Suzy?” Matthew is intrigued by this small woman and her lack of fear.
“No. Dogs don’t come near me for some reason,” Suzy says with a small laugh. “It must have something to do with the fact my grandmother used to cook dogmeat when it was still legal to do so and feed it to us. Whatever it is, dogs shy away from me, so I have nothing to fear if it was a dog that killed that girl. Though I doubt that. Besides, you’re big and buff and I do hope you won’t let anyone or anything attack me while we’re out together.”
She looks up at him with womanly guile and teasing in her eyes and he feels his heart beat a bit faster, his blood begins to sing in his veins as she rubs the palm of his right hand with her forefinger.
“Dog meat, huh? Well, I never did like dogs myself, and I’ll keep you safe from everything but me,” he promises her with a teasing smile. “But maybe it isn’t such a good idea to dine at D.Mall, then. Any suggestions?”
“Well,” she looks hesitantly at him and fidgets with her fingers, “it would be safer in my house, if you don’t mind sharing a meal with me and my siblings. I can also cook, though you will have to bear with local cuisine.”
Privacy is a good thing, Matthew smiles at Suzy, and she has siblings. Mmmmm. I hope they’re just as juicy as she looks. “Sure, whyever not? I’d love to see what Filipino home-cooking tastes like, this being my first visit and all. Maybe we can buy something on the way, just so I have something to bring to your table.”
“Just bring yourself,” Suzy says in an earnest voice. “You will be a good addition to our table as you are.”
They walk down the beach past Station 1 and on a little further into the interior of the island until they come to a small concrete bungalow with a neatly-tended front lawn made colorful with potted flowering plants and climbing vines that give off various scents, tuberose among them.
“Allan,” she calls out in her dialect, “Jessie-Mae, I’m home.” A teenage boy and a young girl of about eight years come running out to hug Suzy, their big brown eyes taking in the breadth and height of red-headed Matthew without fear as she introduces them to each other. “Now, is dinner ready? I left the caldereta simmering on the stove and I hope you didn’t let it burn, Allan.”
“It’s ready na, Ate, and Jessie-Mae was the one who cooked the rice and set the table,” Allan announced proudly in perfectly phonetic English. “But we need to add one more place for Kuya Matthew.” With that, the children rushed back into the house.
The four of them sat down to eat and, for the first time, Matthew sat down to dine with Filipinos who do not say grace before meals — they just dug in and launched into lively discussions about the tourists who frequent the island and what the children learned in school over the past week. Such a refreshing change from the other Filipino hosts he’s had, Matthew grins. Less godliness and more earthiness. So very nice.
“That was a fantastic meal, Suzy,” Matthew says to her as they sit on wooden benches in fenced-in back yard drinking San Miguel Beer and shooting the breeze. “I have never tasted anything so well-cooked in my life.”
“Oh, you. You’re just saying that to get into my pants,” Suzy looks at him with very dark, very intent eyes. “All you need to do is ask me, you know. My brother and sister are already in bed, thanks to the many rounds of pusoy dos we played with them.”
Matthew can feel the moment for the chase to end arriving as the moon begins to rise to its zenith, as the hairs begin to crackle on his skin and the change begins in his veins. He comes in close, taking Suzy’s face in his big hands and licks at the corner of her lips. “I guess you’re right. I do want to get into your pants. I want to taste you, to eat you up.”
Their kiss lasts several heartbeats, their tongues sparring like kali warriors until Matthew feels a pinprick puncture the very center of his tongue and pauses, feeling a weakening in his thighs that he attributes to lust.
She leans in closer, pressing herself against him as she withdraws her sucking tongue and now-swollen lips, her voice husky and low. “I want to taste you, too. I want to feel your texture on my tongue. I want to eat you.”
The clouds scudding across the moon casts the entwined couple in shadow and, as they kiss, Matthew’s transformation comes to the surface, with his tail sprouting out long and proud, the fur thickening on arms and legs that are beginning to turn into wolf’s limbs and, as he pulls away, his nose and lips sprout a snout and his ears go up in points as he howls.
The moon comes out and a wide-eyed Suzy looks at Matthew, the wolf. Her surprise is complete as she holds a huge, man-sized wolf in her slim brown arms. Her eyes take in the red-gold fur of his pelt and she takes her hands away from his back with a smile.
“I guess dinner is azucena tonight, huh?” Suzy asks the wolf, who begins to snarl and slaver and lick his chops in anticipation of the meal he has planned, thinking he has her cornered between the countertop and the concrete wall abutting it. The werewolf nods slowly, growling as if he’d won before the battle had truly been joined.
“Okay, azucena it is, then,” she says letting her fingernails grow to their full six-inch length and bringing them forward to plunge them right into Matthew’s throat before he can let loose another howl. “Azucena, Matthew, is also what we call dogmeat stew.”
His green eyes go wide as he realizes her nails have punched through his thick fur and hide. How could that have happened? “Didn’t you notice? I painted my nails silver, Matthew, with a lot of pure silver dust added to the polish.”
Suzy, sweet Suzy, was gone and in her place was this fierce beauty with hungry eyes and a grip on him as strong as his own grip would be if he could get air. “I smelled the wolf on you before you smelled the graveyard earth on me. Now, silver is your weakness, no? I love the internet. It is so informative.”
He is struggling for air, his lungs are screaming for oxygen and his legs are starting to weaken from the lack of it. This makes Suzy laugh, having such a big wolf at her mercy. “Mmmm, Matthew, you will taste so good. Give it up.”
“Oh, and my tongue, my tongue can prick your very soul, Matthew. I will eat you, taste you, and waste nothing, not even your soul. I am an aswang. We also eat souls.” Suzy opens her mouth to show him her black tongue, a withered, prehensile thing with a small, hollow, needle-like tip. “It’s my grandmother’s. I hope you like it.” She opens his mouth wide once more and wraps his wolf-tongue with her grandmother’s aswang tongue, pumping paralytic poison out of the hollow tip now embedded in his uvula.
With all the strength he has left, Matthew jumps for the roof of the house, yanking Suzy up with him. I have to make her let go of me so I can heal, he thinks desperately, clutching at her deceptively fragile wrists.
Suzy laughs, despite the fact that her black tongue is still wrapped around his. She smiles a grotesque, open-mouthed grin as she rolls with him, leaps with him, falls back to earth with him beneath her as her cushion — all the while crushing his throat with her silver nails and inhumanly strong grip. Matthew barely feels the thud of his back against the concrete floor behind the tiled counter.
The last things he senses before his soul is sucked up Suzy’s black tongue are the beautiful harvest moon gliding a yellow path across a black sky, the throb of music washing over the island and Suzy’s slow, deliberate sucking, her satisfied sigh.
Getting up off the werewolf called Matthew, Suzy rearranges her tank-top and shorts and reaches for the gulok on the countertop. She licks her lips as she begins to dress out her kill, careful to preserve as much of the pelt as she can. It would make a lovely rug for the living room, she thinks. Lola would have liked that. She would also have liked Matthew azucena.
***
The Mayor summons his nephew, the policeman, to his office. PO1 Santino is getting used to his uncle’s tirades now, but he still flinches at all the invective getting hurled his way over the latest police SNAFU. It’s not like I’m the police chief, Santino says resentfully to himself. It isn’t my fault.
“There’s been no movement on the case of that woman who was attacked by whatever kind of animal you think attacked her three months ago and then this!” The Mayor is now pointing toward his computer monitor, with a photo on Facebook enlarged to show a missing person poster for one Matthew McNaught, last seen on Boracay island in a gray shirt and black surfing shorts. “How can a big, caucasian man with red hair — RED HAIR! — go missing on an island this small, I ask you?”
PO1 Santino scratches his head and bows before his uncle, his voice barely a whisper. “I don’t know, sir.”
“Well, find out! It is your job to do that, after all and these things make our island look bad,” the Mayor screams at Santino. “And if you stop carrying on with that masseuse Azucena for just a day or two, you might just get results, you son of a dog.”
***
Twilight washes the sand of the Boracay shores a rich lavender as Santino and Suzy walk through the shallows, barefoot. The throb of club music and the chimes of distant laughter surround them like a gentle sea breeze.
“So, what about dinner tonight, Karlo?” Suzy looks at him with barely-banked hunger in her eyes. “Will you let me cook for you? I have some lovely stew at home just waiting for us and my siblings are sleeping over with their cousins.”
“I can’t tonight, Suzy,” Santino says, the sadness in his voice mostly due to the fact that he won’t be getting his special ‘massage’ tonight rather than the prospect of missing a home-cooked meal. “I’ve got to find that missing Brit and then find a way to close the D.Mall mauling case.”
“Well, don’t work too late,” Suzy says with an understanding smile. “If you text me later, I’ll be up and I can always prepare the table for you. You know I want to taste you tonight.”
Santino groans against her lips as she kisses him. “Okay, I’ll do my best to get away from work tonight, I promise.”
With that, Suzy is content and she sashays away from him without a backward glance as she licks her red, red lips.
