Kiss Of Evil

63

The first sensation is one of near-weightlessness. Floating an inch or so off the floor. Light head, light arms, light legs. He feels as if his body is suddenly manufactured of smoke, as if he possesses no footsteps, as if a slight breeze might urge him around his apartment, cornice-high, allowing him to cavort along the ceiling for a while, leaving no trace of his presence, no residue of his passing. Light and ethereal and vaporous and…

Invisible.

That’s the feeling. The dream of every adolescent and post-adolescent boy. To have the ability to become invisible and tread where laws and rules and adults and signs do not allow.

As he looks around the mysterious landscape of his own apartment, the sensation becomes amphetamine-like. He had popped a few white crosses in his first year on night duty, a few orange-triangled Benzedrines to ward off those sleep demons, but had never indulged in LSD or mescaline or psilocybin or any other of the hallucinogens along his crazy path through his twenties. As a cop, of course, he had seen way too much collateral carnage to the hard drugs like cocaine and heroin to consider them anything but a scourge on urban life.

But this…

He can use this. He suddenly understands everything about everything. He suddenly knows exactly what he needs to know about everything he needs to know about.

This is cop fuel.

Behind him, a door slams. He turns, slowly, and sees a note pinned to the inside of his apartment door.

A note to him? On the inside?

He floats toward it. No, not a note. A notebook. A spiral notebook covered with red and blue hearts. It is nailed to the door with a huge spike.

Soon, the blue hearts begin to caper and swirl and, before Paris can place the image, he hears a noise, a soft footfall on the carpeting behind him. He turns to see a slender woman approaching-black hair, pale skin, almond shaped eyes. She wears a short white skirt, a black leather jacket. She seems to be gliding toward him.

Across his living room.

Paris is unable to respond to her presence in any way. Who is she? Where had he seen her before? She is surely from a dark place in his past, a room currently unavailable to his memory.

She continues toward him. Graceful, confident, like a runway model. She has full lips. The blackest eyes.

She stops in front of him.

And that’s when Paris feels the tap on his shoulder. He turns, dream-slow, to see the familiar face of the man standing behind him, to hear the whoosh of an arm breaking the stillness, to feel his head suddenly detonate into a glittery flourish of Technicolor, a painless implosion of red and orange and yellow sprites. He slumps against the wall, reveling in the ascension of the magic mushroom, reeling with remembrance.

And, before he falls unconscious, knows.

The woman is Sarah Weiss.