The Innocent (A 'Finder' Fanfiction)

Shadow of Pluto - 30 - Fei Long

Fei Long stared down onto the other until all light had vanished out of the dying man's eyes. There was some gurgling sound in the end, then nothing.

He had been awake for a while, but in the beginning there had been a metallic, deep pain between his eyes. It had felt very much as if someone had stabbed him there with an ice pickle. Therefore, it had taken him sheer ages to finally dare and open his eyes – and he had done so just as little as possible because he had heard the other one near yet could not tell where the man was.

For a while then the room had faltered around the bed, shapes running away like water and floating like curtains. There had not been any colors nor clear perception except for the strange taste he had on his tongue, which very much reminded him of the aggressive smell of spray-paint. Both, the taste of formaldehyde – or whatever it was – and the tumbling of the room, had stopped at some point, and then he had been finally able to glance from one eye, mostly hidden between the cushions. He had seen the man, watched him for a while. He had listened to the transmission of the match from somewhere else on the planet.

Even now, as the guard lay lifeless in a puddle of his piss, the moderator of the match continued talking in a very broad American English. The crowd was cheering in the background.

Fei Long knelt down to search the dead man. It provided him with a fully loaded Glock 27, but the big army jackknife he also discovered was in the current circumstances a bit more to his taste. Mikhail would love it ... he pushed the thought away.

With a swift tug on the belt and a grab at the gown's collar, he got rid of the golden dress. He tossed it over the deceased, who stared up at him as if he wanted to place any blame. Fei Long would never accept it. The person – whoever he had been, wherever he had come from – had chosen a brutal life and had died a brutal death. That was the way the world was.

His own clothes were luckily still here, folded up neatly on a side-table. He put them on, hid the knife in his stocking and made sure once again the gun was loaded.

Then the cheering of the crowd caught his attention again – not that he cared even the slightest bit about team sports.

He walked over to the chef's chair, on which the guard had left the phone. It was still playing, obviously, still showing pictures of a rather bad quality that were relayed here via internet from across half the world.

Fei Long picked the device up. It was an iPhone. He pressed the 'home'-button twice, then hit the screen with his thumb ... the streaming-app had been set to not allow the phone to go into locked mode.

It did not take him longer than half a second to search through the icons and folders for the green phone-app. He switched to manual dialing and put in a rather long phone number which he knew by heart.

The tune of the call making it through the network of Croatia now into the very other direction than the live stream had come from before, was faintly playing for a long moment. Then there was a reply, a very familiar voice, and Fei Long answered.

"Yoh, it's me. I've run into a little problem."