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There is a moment, if you watch the eastern horizon of the ocean, when dusk turns into darkness, and the evening becomes whole and complete. People who aren't looking for it will never notice it. To them, the blue darkens gradually and fades imperceptibly into night, taking them utterly unawares. But if you, like Baofu, never want to get caught unawares, look out as far as you possibly can, out where the sea meets the sky before curving away coyly like a coquettish little ingenue, and there, there at the tenuous tangent of rendezvous, the watchful and the vigilant can see the sun slink away for good as night draws the collar of its trenchcoat over the city.
And it was a good thing, too, that someone like Baofu was watching, waiting, searching out from his brand new office above the bay. This city saw its fair share of strife even without the cosmic forces of creation and chaos clashing everyone into collateral during the battle for everyone's souls. A city this big, a city this central, a city crawling with its own corruption and criminality… a city like Sumaru didn't need any New World Order to tear itself apart. And you didn't need some dragon priestess telling fortunes to tell you that Lady Luck, at least in this town, wasn't going to make anyone you knew her special confidant. Sumaru City was a place for people who made their own luck, people who took their own fate in their hands, people who fought for their own survival with nothing but guts and two fists full of no regrets.
And speaking of fists, Baofu thought as the click of his office door opening wrangled his thoughts back indoors, in walked the owner of the fiercest fists in town. Somehow both the spider and the fly, she stepped into his parlor, slinking in behind him and setting her bags on the sumptuous mahogany desk.
He turned around and fixed her with a sunglassed stare. Red hair, almost as fiery as she was, sat provocatively piled and styled over a face that could make an angel say Be Afraid and mean it. There was the ultimate temptation in that face, and if Satan was real, he couldn't have conceived a more perfect tool to lead man down the road to eternal punishment. Behind his tinted glasses, his eyes raked slowly, agonizingly from her piercing, passionate gaze, down past her sardonic and sultry smile, scintillatingly over the curves of her powerfully fashioned body – and just how powerful that body was, well, no one knew it better than Baofu – and further on to a pair of legs that made you want to drop to your knees and thank whatever god it was who made you that he gave you a heart that knew how to lust.
"Are you doing that thing in your head where you narrate like some guy in a Film Noir?" Ulala asked, a sinister and sensual skepticism plainly written all over that she-demon from her boots to her brows and everywhere in between.
"No," Baofu told her, sparking a cigarette as a pretext to conceal his smile.
"Then why did you just look me up and down like you want to drop to your knees and thank whatever god it was who made you that he gave you a heart that knew how to lust?"
Baofu took in a long drag and breathed his objections out slowly. Sure, he could deny it. But he knew that she saw through him better than even he could see through himself.
"Because it's true," was all he said.
She snorted. "You're such a loser."
He hissed his laughter through teeth and tobacco. "If I'm a loser," he asked her, "then why do you make me feel like I've hit the jackpot?"
"Stop trying to be slick, Sam Spade," she said, but the barest bit of a blush came knocking at her face unasked for anyway. "What have you been doing all day? Surely you haven't been staring out at the ocean all evening, contemplating the dark, evil underbelly of a city that knows how to keep its secrets."
"Meditation is good for your blood pressure," Baofu replied with the placid and even confidence of a practiced liar.
"I'm pretty sure chain smoking two packs a day is bad for your blood pressure."
"That's why I need to meditate," he said. "Besides, someone needs to be here in case we get a case. Can't run an office for finding people if there's no people in the office to do the finding, and I've been the only one available to answer the phone. What have you been doing all day?"
"If you must know–"
"I wouldn't go for must," Baofu interrupted, "but as your business partner, I feel I've got a right to ask your whereabouts from time to time."
"--I could not more clearly have been shopping," she said, motioning her perfect pugilist hands toward the shopping bags on the desk.
"Heh."
Ulala made a sound with her uvula. "Don't give me that misogynistic crap."
"I didn't say anything."
"You were thinking it."
"What?" He asked with a grin like a feline poised to pick the lock on the proverbial prized canary's cage. "You trying to tell me you can read minds now?"
"Yes?" Ulala narrowed her eyes in confusion. "The magic powers we have? The ones that have let us sense each other's intentions since the day we met? I know we've been over this before."
Baofu tapped his tip into the tray. "Touché."
"Anyway," Ulala went on, reaching into the bags to unpack, "I went to that seedy CD store."
"You mean Giga Macho Records?" Baofu asked.
Ulala scrunched her face up. "I hate that name so much."
"What's wrong with Giga Macho?"
"I hate macho guys."
"What?" he asked with indifferent incredulity. "I'm not macho?"
She locked her eyes into his with an expression that Baofu didn't want to describe to himself.
"Wow," Baofu said. "Maybe you just don't understand the finer points. See, being a man means…"
"You sound like Katsuya's little brother." She snipped the cellophane on a CD with the point of a press-on nail. "Next thing I know, you're going to start making motorcycle noises."
"He's not just Katsuya's little brother. He has a name."
Ulala sighed, opening the case and putting the disc into their office's stereo. "It doesn't seem quite right using it yet, you know? I don't feel like I've gotten on a first-name basis with this one."
"That's true," said Baofu. "He does seem like a different man from the one we knew."
"But you," Ulala cooed as she cozied up to his chest, the stereo's subtle sounds sliding to life, a saxophone softly swinging out Sentimental Journey, "you are a man I know like no other."
He dropped his cigarette into the ashtray and wrapped both arms around her waist. "And what do you know about this man?" he asked her in a low, warm, resonant basso.
She leaned her head on his shoulder. "I know you used to be a man named Kaoru Saga. I know you loved someone wonderful. I know you lost her. I know a part of you died that day. And I know you've been through hell."
"I've got to be honest," Baofu muttered. "You took this in a much sadder direction than I expected."
"But," she said, looking up at him, "I know that you've avenged her as best as you possibly could. You've accomplished your goal, and she can rest easy knowing it." She reached up and removed his glasses, staring deep into his eyes. "And you've grown and matured and become an even better kind of man than you ever thought possible."
Baofu truly found himself lost in her spell. "And what kind of man have I become?"
She smiled seductively up at him. "Tonight, you're whatever kind of man I want you to be."
"And what kind of man," he asked, leaning in toward her lips, his voice barely above a whisper, "do you want me to be?"
"I want you," she whispered back, brushing him with every word, "to be the kind of man who dances the dusk away with me."
Then their lips were no longer brushing.
And they danced, and they danced, and they danced all night long. They danced past the dusk and the darkness and the moonlight and the starlight. They danced in that office overlooking the ocean until well past the moment when the dawn turns to daylight, when the morning wraps the city in its gentle, golden embrace and everything becomes as breathing.