Kharzai turned to one of the other college students with a start, “What was that?”
The other student dismissed it, “Probably someone moving furniture, or cleaning up stairs.”
The children had not heard the sound, or ignored it, and kept playing. Several minutes later he saw the headmaster again. The man looked calm. He raised his hands to calm the children.
“Children,” he called out, “children, it’s time for your new friends to go now. Say your good-byes because they will not be returning next week.”
The children let out mournful sounds that broke the hearts of the college students, several of whom promised to return again. The headmaster again reached out to shake Kharzai’s hand. As he stretched it forth Kharzai noticed a round light bluish bruise on the back of his knuckles. Fresh. It hadn’t been there when they first talked less than thirty minutes ago.
“What happened to your hand sir?” he asked with a look of shock on his face.
“Oh, I hit it on a doorknob,” he replied. “It’s nothing really, my light skin bruises quite easily you know.”
Kharzai stole a longer glance at it. The bruise was round, but not full. It was only the outline of something round, a ring of blue. And it was not totally round. In the split second of the extra look, he saw something else his eye quickly focusing on something dark, black, embedded in skin of the headmaster’s knuckle. Less than a centimeter long, but clearly visible against his nearly translucent pale skin.
An eyelash.
The eyelash was not the headmaster’s. His were blond. This was ebony black.
He smiled up at the older man and peered deeply into his eyes. The headmaster stared back for a moment, but turned away. Kharzai found what he sought. Guilt. Deep seated guilt. This man had been, make that was doing, something bad…very bad.
Kharzai’s smile stayed in its place, veiling his thoughts. The students filed out at five PM just before the children were to sit for their evening meal. At four AM the following morning Kharzai stood motionless, silent, in a deep shadow in the alley between the children’s home and the restaurant, the alley the men in the van had pulled out from and given him the evil eye a few days earlier. At four nineteen the same van returned and pulled up to the back door of the children’s home.
Two men got out of the van. One from the passenger seat wore a blue denim jacket and jeans of the same color. A greasy cloth ball cap was pressed over a stream of equally greasy, long brown hair. The second man exited from the back of the van. He was tall, well over six feet and appeared big under the long black leather trenchcoat that flowed around his ankles. He looked like someone out of a cheap action movie. Cheap actors or not, they were both armed. The bulge of weapons pressed against their coats. The van’s driver stayed in his seat. Cigarette smoke floated in thin blue strands from the driver's window.
The pair crossed the alley toward the back of the children’s home. Trenchcoat rapped his knuckles against the brown metal door set into its red brick wall. Ball Cap looked around nervously. Kharzai was invisible to them in the inky blackness of the shadow in which he stood.
The door creaked open and out stepped the headmaster. Although the men spoke in hushed tones their voices echoed in whispery strains against the concrete walls.
“Are they all ready?” said Trenchcoat.
“Yes, of course,” replied the headmaster, “lovely specimens, perfect, beautiful.”
“As long as they are fresh,” said Ball Cap. His voice was weird, like a nineteen thirties movie gangster. Kharzai half expected him to say “see” at the end of his sentences.
“Bring them out,” said Trenchcoat. He motioned for Ball Cap to open the van doors as the headmaster disappeared into the building.
A moment later the headmaster stepped out the door with four children in tow. They were small, no more than six or seven years old, and were bound to one another at the wrists, tied together like slaves being led to market.
The children moved as a group, single file toward the back of the van. Their faces looked odd, unnatural. Their lips were too red, their skin did not reflect light in a natural way. Thick black mascara encircled their dazed eyes.
Kharzai glanced at Ball Cap as he opened the back of the van. The greasy man’s lips spread in a sickening smile. He licked his lips. The front of his jeans stretched with an obscene bulge.
Kharzai stepped out from the shadow and moved silently into the alley. As he passed the restaurant’s dumpster he squatted without breaking stride and scooped up a discarded wine bottle in each hand. Beneath the mass of curly black locks that bounced with each step his eyes glowed with hateful fire. Blood coursed thick and hot through his veins. Its metallic taste pulsed in his tongue.
Trenchcoat slid the Headmaster a thick brown envelope. The pale old man’s greedy fingers snatched it from his hand. Ball Cap looked up from the children. He saw the shadowy figure moving in their direction.
“Hey, move on asshole!”
Kharzai did not respond.
“I said, move on!”
Trenchcoat slid his hand into the folds of long black leather. A glint of stainless steel flickered in light spilled from the lamp over his head onto the body of the semi-automatic pistol.
One of the children, a little girl, looked towards him and snapped out of her daze.
“It’s the Storyman!” she cried out.
The other kids turned to see him too. Their eyes widened with excitement, smiles sprouted across their faces but were quashed by Ball Caps rebuke.
“Shut up you miserable little shits!” the children flinched under his grating voice. “Get in the freakin’ van! NOW!”
Trenchcoat raised his arm. The barrel pistol aimed at Kharzai. Terrified by Ball Cap’s order, the children remained frozen in hopeful expectation of salvation from the shadowy Storyman.
One of the boy's drew in a breath and shouted, “Look out Storyman!”
Ball Cap’s hand flew up, a small black box wrapped in it’s grip. He squeezed the trigger on the box. A loud buzz tore the air and the boy screamed in agony, a high pitched, ear splitting screech that shattered the early morning stillness into little pieces that bounced off the walls and the pavement below. The child lurched like a marionette whose strings had been yanked. He slammed into the ground pulling the others down by their commonly bound wrists. They all tumbled to the pavement eyes wide in terror.
Trenchcoat’s eyes diverted to the tumbling children. Kharzai leaned forward and broke into a headlong sprint. His hand flashed up and let fly one of the bottles. It rocketed through the air with the force of a major league baseball pitch. Trenchcoat turned back and fired his pistol without aiming. The explosion of the shot boomed like an artillery round in the wide brick walled alley.
The bullet crashed into the dumpster by the restaurant door with a loud clang followed by a whirring ricochet. Before he got a second shot off the thick bottom of the glass bottle smashed home into Trenchcoats face. The force of the bottle flattened his nose, blood splattering in every direction at the impact. Trenchcoat screamed in a gurgling throaty rage through his broken nose and swollen lips.
Ball Cap, stunned by the speed at which his bosses face had been rendered a bloody mess, was unable to react in time to avoid Kharzai’s attack. The hairy Persian speared him in the ribs like an NFL sacker, driving him into the back compartment of the van accompanied by the sound of cracking ribs and whooshing air. Ball Cap struggled to grasp for a pistol stashed in the back of his pants as they tussled in the back of the van. He brought it around but Kharzai snatched the pistol from his hand in one swift motion, straddled Ball Cap’s torso and raised the barrel to his face.