Kiss of the Blue Dragon Read Online Free PDF Page B

another cup of java?”
    His long pause worried me. But finally he nodded. Reluctantly.
     
    With a steaming cup of joe, I joined him in his shed at the end of the long, fenced-in garden. I always called it a shed, but it was much more than that.Mike lived in a cozy twenty-by-fifteen-foot renovated coach house. With a bare wooden floor, it was insulated but not well heated, so we had put in a potbellied stove.
    In accordance with the principles of feng shui, a water pond coated with green lilies and stocked with white and red carp sat serenely outside his door. Inside, colorful painted images of a dragon, a red bird and a tortoise adorned differing walls.
    I glanced around and noticed the place was unusually cluttered—Taoist amulets and talismans scrawled on red and yellow strips of paper were pinned here and there, his bag of I Ching tablets lay in the corner, incense burned before a small statue of the Buddha, and he’d been working at his suitcase-size desk on a purple astrology chart. Fact was, Mike was superstitious, as were most Chinese who’d grown up in the old country.
    “I have very bad luck,” he’d said when I first brought him here five years ago. His wrists had been scarred from being chained after numerous attempts to escape from the work camp. He was skinny and looked like a concentration camp victim. “My father…his grave is in a bad place near Shanghai. Pointing east. We are all cursed, my family, because of this.”
    Not if you’re one of the elite Shaolin monks , I’d thought at the time, which he was. The monks and their kung fu style of martial arts had first come to the attention of Westerners in the 1970s because of a television show. When the Chinese communist government realized they could make money off ofthe monks, the Shaolin Temple north of the Shaoshi Mountain opened to tourists. While Mike had made a name for himself at the Shaolin temple, he had come to America in search of social freedom.
    Whether it was because of bad luck or naiveté, he had arranged his trip through a crafty travel agency sponsored by the Mongolian mafia. Mike unwittingly ended up in a prison work camp operated by the mafia on the outskirts of Chicago. He’d slaved in Illinois’s legalized opium fields for two years before I’d rescued him while taking a tour of the camp, a spontaneous act of mercy on my part.
    After his escape, Mike could have returned to the Shaolin temple, but he’d felt that his imprisonment was such a bad omen that he had brought dishonor to his fellow monks. So he stayed with me, employing his fighting skills on my behalf, teaching me the kung fu style of martial arts. I’d been studying tae kwon do, the Korean style, since I was a kid.
    So while Mike was a fighter, he still had the heart of a monk and often spat out cryptic sayings and insightful diatribes that had vaguely ominous, spiritual overtones.
    “I had a dream,” he said darkly.
    I swallowed. “Oh?”
    “While you slept with that thing , I dreamed your fate.”
    “Look, Mike, I didn’t ask you to do that, and he is not a thing . Bogie is a…a…” My voice trailed away. I rubbed my forehead. I didn’t even know what to call him. Truth was, I should be makinglove with a real man. Maybe Lola was right. I heaved a sigh. “So what happened in the dream?”
    “A blue dragon…she rose out of water and…”
    “Yeah?” I prodded when he frowned down at the astrology chart. “So?”
    “You are so impatient, Baker!” he snapped.
    I was stunned into silence. I’d never heard Mike lose his temper before. I slowly put my cup down on the table. “I’m sorry.”
    He frowned and nodded, not looking at me. “Blue dragon must fight two-headed eagle.”
    I waited, afraid to interrupt.
    “Something has happened, Baker. A storm gathers. Our time together may be at an end.”
    He looked at me as if for the last time. I shivered with foreboding. A sudden wind blew up, rare in the north side of the city. The skies opened and