Free The Rain Killer by Luke Delaney Page A

of the snake. It was my destiny. As I grew older the other children called me the snake
–
out of fear and respect – and when I finally escaped the slums of my home the name of the Snake
struck terror into the hearts of the people who crossed my employers.’
    ‘You mean the Triads?’ Townsend asked.
    ‘Their name is not important,’ Ma smiled.
    ‘We’re getting a bit off the point, aren’t we?’ Coleman intervened.
    Sean ignored him. ‘You ever kill anyone, Mao?’
    ‘These questions are too general,’ Coleman complained again. ‘You should ask about specific victims.’
    ‘Is that why people feared you?’ Sean kept going, ‘because you killed anyone who crossed you? Is that why they called you the Snake?’
    ‘They called me what I was,’ Ma answered.
    ‘But that wasn’t enough, was it,’ Sean pushed him, ‘killing your own kind – other criminals and gangsters? You wanted something else, didn’t you? But why only prostitutes? Normally they’re targeted because they make easy victims, but you were after such a particular type that restricting yourself to only prostitutes made your task all the more difficult. It would have been easier for you if you’d targeted all young Chinese women, regardless of their backgrounds.’ Ma said nothing, his eyes fixed on Sean’s. ‘So the fact they were prostitutes must be important to you. Question is – why? Why only prostitutes?’
    ‘Whores are a plague,’ Ma hissed. ‘Everywhere in the world they infest our streets. The Great Snake
purges them from this world – each one making him stronger and stronger.’
    ‘Making you stronger and stronger?’ Sean accused him. ‘You killed them because doing so made you feel stronger and stronger? Made you feel like a god?’ Ma didn’t answer. ‘But why always prostitutes that looked so similar? If it was just because they were prostitutes then why only ones that were Chinese or reminded you of Chinese women – and all of a similar age and all with straight, long black hair?’
    ‘You know nothing,’ Mao insisted.
    ‘I know you picked these women because they reminded you of someone who was special to you,’ Sean replied. ‘Was it a
lover
? A
wife
? Your …
mother
?’ Ma’s eyes burnt with rage and hate for a fleeting second – long enough for Sean to notice. ‘Your
mother.’
    ‘Don’t talk of her,’ Ma warned him through thin lips. ‘I don’t want to talk about her.’
    ‘Was that how she kept food in your stomach and clothes on your back – by being a prostitute?’
    ‘She never did anything for me,’ Ma almost shouted, rising to his feet and leaning across the table. ‘She betrayed me for her whoring desires.’
    ‘Sit down,’ Sean warned him, ‘or I’ll have you handcuffed to the table for the rest of the interview.’ Everyone waited for a few seconds in silence until Ma slowly sat back down.
    ‘They are nothing,’ Ma told them. ‘They were all whores and they were nothing – until I gave them to the Great Serpent – made them something in death they could never be in life. They willingly sacrificed themselves to the make the beast strong.’
    ‘They weren’t willing,’ Sean argued. ‘You murdered them.’
    ‘I saw the desire in their eyes,’ Ma explained. ‘The want. The same want I saw in her face when I struggled home one day to the empty room I shared with her. I had risked arrest and a beating by going into town to earn what I could begging on the streets of Shanghai, but some other children discovered I had some money. They beat me and took everything. By the time I reached home the rain had turned the dirt streets into streams and rivers, but I couldn’t take shelter inside our home, because I could hear her inside with someone, making their disgusting noises together. So I looked through the hole in the wall that was our window and saw him on top of her. The rain was running in my eyes, but still I could see clearly the desire in hers as she whored herself.