It was pouring in Izmir as if the sky had been torn open. Thunderclaps tore through the desolate silence of the streets.
Yekta ran down the Eşrefpaşa slope, cutting through unlit alleys toward the narrow, winding, labyrinthine streets of the Kemeraltı Bazaar. The pain from the bullet grazing his shoulder was numbed by the cold rain, but his heart, beating beneath his neon vest, was pumping furiously from this heavy blow to his pride. Izmir had become too small for him.
The rhythmic, relentless footsteps from behind wouldn't stop. Aylin wasn't letting him go.
The Kemeraltı Bazaar resembled a dead city at midnight. Those streets where you couldn't drop a pin during the day; had now turned into drawn shutters, dark courtyard inns, and desolate, stone tunnels where rainwater raged like rivers.
Yekta ducked into a narrow, blind alley behind the Kızlarağası Inn. He pressed his back against the wall and held his breath. The rainwater running over the crescent pruning knife in his hand washed away the steel's silvery glint. Aylin's footsteps grew closer. The sound of boots splashing in puddles... Splash... Splash... Splash...
The moment Aylin rounded the corner of the alley, Yekta sprang from the shadows like a coiled spring.
He swung the knife toward Aylin's chest. Aylin instinctively recoiled, but the knife slashed her left arm end to end. Groaning in pain, before Aylin could raise the gun in her right hand, Yekta delivered a crude, savage kick that sent the weapon flying from her grip. The gun fell into the rainwater and slid away toward the storm drain at the end of the alley.
Now they were both unarmed; there was only flesh, bone, and that unbridled rage.
Yekta grabbed Aylin by the throat and slammed her against the iron grates of a closed jewelry shop. "Why won't you give up!" Yekta roared, his voice blending with the thunder. He had completely lost his freezing calmness.
Aylin spat bloody saliva into Yekta's face. "Because you... aren't the god in the fairytale you made up, Yekta," wheezed Aylin, struggling for air. "You're just... a pathetic grunt... afraid of the dark!"
These words struck the narcissistic god in Yekta's mind like a slap. The hubris inside him ignited. He was about to bring the knife down on Aylin's neck when the whistles and flashlight beams of watchmen patrolling Kemeraltı appeared at the top of the street. The report of a gunshot must have dropped onto the radios.
The flashlight beams illuminated Yekta's face and his famous neon vest. Light was the invisible man's greatest enemy.
Yekta threw Aylin against the grates and started running deeper into the streets. Holding her bleeding arm, Aylin got up from the ground and yelled to the watchmen, "Here! Follow me!" signaling them.
Yekta turned onto the narrow, umbrella-covered street (Kestelli Street). The watchmen and Aylin were closing in behind him. Yekta felt cornered. Izmir was no longer a sanctuary, but a prison to him.
He stopped abruptly in the middle of the street. He swiftly stripped off the blood and mud-stained neon yellow worker's vest—his trademark that had rendered him invisible in this city for months. He slipped it over an iron dumpster in the middle of the street, leaving it looking like a running human silhouette in the dark. As for himself, clad only in his black sweater and dark clothes, he slithered down an open sewer drainage manhole in the bazaar, descending like a snake into the underground labyrinths he knew so well.
When Aylin charged into the street, she saw that glowing yellow vest in the dark. "Stop!" she yelled, lunging toward the shadow where the vest was. But when she grabbed and pulled it, she was left holding nothing but an empty, bloody piece of nylon.
As the sky thundered once more, Aylin dropped to her knees in the rain holding that bloody vest. The killer had left his cloak behind and flowed through the veins of Izmir, vanishing completely without a trace.
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