Aylin's finger tightened on that cold metal of the trigger. "Take your hand out of your jacket!" she roared into the night. "Take it out and raise it in the air!" But Yekta's hand had not gone to that famous leather sheath, but to a massive, red industrial valve hidden in the darkness right behind him. "I wanted to make everything flawless for you, Aylin," Yekta whispered, without taking his eyes off Aylin's barrel for even a second. "But sometimes... nature needs a little chaos." With those thick worker wrists, Yekta turned the red iron valve with all his might in a single, savage move. A deafening, mechanical HSSSSSS sound rose from the massive pressure pipes passing under the nursery. Within seconds, a white, dense, and chemical-laden mass of fog erupted simultaneously from hundreds of high-pressure fumigation and irrigation nozzles hidden around the greenhouses. This erupting industrial fumigation fog spread at such a dense, blinding speed that Aylin was caught completely off guard. She pulled the trigger by reflex. BANG! The muzzle flash from the gun's barrel painted the fog orange for a moment, but the bullet merely hit a rusty iron pole in the dark, ricocheting with sparks. Aylin couldn't fire a second time. When this artificial cloud smelling of toxic, heavy pesticides and fertilizer filled her throat, her breath was cut like a knife. Her eyes started burning as if acid had been poured into them, and she started coughing as if her lungs were being torn apart. She backed away, covering her face with her left arm. Everything around her—the acid tank, the greenhouses, the stars, and even her own hands—had disappeared inside that dense, white, and toxic hell. There was only that deafening hissing sound spraying from the nozzles. Visibility was zero. Izmir's smartest, most invincible inspector was now left blind and deaf inside her own arrogance. "Where are you, bastard!" yelled Aylin, spinning around. Her voice was being shattered by coughing fits. She pointed her barrel blindly left and right, but there was no target. There was only fog. "You all always make the same mistake," whispered a voice. Aylin quickly turned to the right side where the voice came from and raised her gun. But the voice was echoing, waving as if it was coming from all directions in the fog. "You believed too much in the justice in the sky, in those shiny badges, your files," continued that freezing, calm voice. This time it was coming from her front-left diagonal. "You never looked down, at the soil. You were afraid of stepping in the mud. Whereas this was the place where everything started and ended by rotting." Aylin's heart was beating as if it would tear her ribcage apart. Tears were streaming from her burning eyes, the poisonous fog was blurring her mind. "Face me!" she shouted, but her voice was trembling. For the first time, she felt that underneath that invincible police identity, she was a helpless human being afraid of the dark. At that moment, right on the back of her neck, she felt an ice-cold draft of air that made the roots of her hair crawl. Before she had a chance to turn around, that thick, calloused hand gripped Aylin's gun-holding wrist out of the darkness like a snake. Yekta's incredible physical strength pushed Aylin's arm down with millimeter-precise pressure. Aylin struggled, swinging her free elbow backward, but Yekta had slipped to the side like a ghost and pressed Aylin's back against his own chest. Right in the middle of the fog and that blinding whiteness, the hunter had embraced his prey. Aylin felt Yekta's heavy breath smelling of mud and sweat on her neck. The ice-cold, curved, smooth steel of the crescent-bladed pocketknife slowly settled over Aylin's jugular vein. The coldness of the metal froze Aylin's blood. A single move, a single millimeter of pressure would end everything. Aylin closed her eyes, waited for defeat and that inevitable darkness. But the steel didn't cut her skin. It just wandered around her neck with that thin, deadly curve. "Your flawlessness is very fragile, inspector," whispered Yekta, his lips almost touching Aylin's ear. "Right now I could pluck you from your branch like an orchid, and seal that arrogant neck of yours to eternity... But killing you would be as vulgar as throwing a masterpiece into the fire. Your punishment is not death, Aylin." Yekta lightly pressed the cold surface of the pocketknife against Aylin's cheek. "Your punishment is to stay inside this goddamn fog forever. Every time you close your eyes you will search for me in that darkness, but you will never find me. That gardener will always roam in the rooms of your mind." The pressure on Yekta's wrist suddenly disappeared. The coldness of the knife withdrew from Aylin's skin. Aylin's knees buckled, and she collapsed to the ground, onto the wet mud. In coughing fits, in the middle of the poisonous smoke, she lifted her gun with difficulty using both hands and looked around. But inside the fog, there was only her own irregular heartbeat and the feeble, belated wails of police sirens coming from afar. Yekta was gone. He hadn't killed her physically, but he had shattered her mind to pieces and turned that arrogant inspector into a helpless wreck in the mud. At those same minutes, far away from the nursery in a dark back alley, Yekta took off that heavy raincoat with the municipal logo on him and threw it into a dumpster. He touched the cold paper of the "Bodrum Municipality Reassignment Document" in his pocket. That familiar, subtle smile appeared on his lips. Izmir had given him all the flowers it could give. It was now time to go down to his new kingdom, to a southern town that was hotter, more crowded, and had never yet met that half-moon shaped cut.
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