“Th-that’s right.”
“I’m sorry. That must have startled you,” said the man with a pleasant smile.
Shijima timidly asked, “Um…I know why I need to wear a disguise, but I’m not sure why you needed…”
“Oh, excuse me. I’m not currently able to walk around in the daylight with my face fully exposed. I owe some money, and I’m being very careful not to get caught by that horrifying debt collector dressed like a bartender. Doing errands for Mr. Yodogiri like this is my collateral, in a sense.”
Shijima figured his counterpart would cut a more intimidating figure, but this fellow was quite ordinary. The disguise was startling, but his reason for it made sense. As someone who got around in Ikebukuro, Shijima understood the danger that Shizuo Heiwajima represented on an instinctual level.
“But the rumor says that the debt collector got arrested.”
“Yeah. Rumor. I don’t believe rumors, and even if I did, maybe they already let him out today… Sorry. I’m kind of cowardly by nature.”
The man used the remote to order a drink, then put the mask back on without another word. Soon the employee arrived with his order, and once the coast was clear again, he took off the mask and put it on the table.
Bemused by all this, Shijima asked, “But…aren’t you ruining the whole idea by showing your face to me? I mean, the beanie and sunglasses don’t do that much if I can basically see your whole face.”
“Ha-ha, it’s cool. I trust you.”
What is he talking about? wondered Shijima, who was not buying the man’s pleasant attitude.
The man noticed the look on his face and laughed. “Oh, sorry. I guess it does sound very fishy when someone you just met seconds earlier says he trusts you. But if there’s one thing I want you to know…it’s that I am not your enemy. Even if Jinnai Yodogiri is.”
“…? What do you mean by that?”
“I’m going to be frank with you. Jinnai Yodogiri was in a car accident last night.”
“?!”
The news caught Shijima like a sucker punch. The flow of his emotions came to a standstill.
The man took advantage of that to say, “According to his secretary, Kujiragi, he won’t be on his feet for another six months. He’s an old man, too. I wouldn’t be surprised if he never recovers.”
“Th-then…”
“Now, hang on. You can’t just assume you’re free. Kujiragi’s got her eyes peeled, and as her errand boy, I’ve got information on you. Either way, you’re Izaya Orihara’s errand boy, aren’t you? I know about him. You’ve made a very nasty enemy. My sympathies.”
“…”
This unwelcome bit of news took Shijima down to the dumps, even as the man maintained his friendly demeanor.
“Hey, hear me out. It’s not like I swore allegiance to Jinnai Yodogiri or anything. Although I will admit that his secretary, Kujiragi? Yeah, she’s a damn fine woman. Wouldn’t mind takin’ it to her one of these days. But that can come later… Anyway, here’s my point. Why don’t you and I work together and make a killing?”
“Huh…?”
“I’m saying, let’s make off with a nice little chunk of Jinnai Yodogiri’s wealth.”
What the…? Is this guy really old Yodogiri’s errand runner?
No, watch out. He might be trying to play me—to see if I’ll betray them. I shouldn’t agree to anything he says unless I know that Yodogiri was really in an accident.
It was all too sudden. This only made Shijima’s suspicions stronger.
“But I guess it would be more like one of his trade routes, rather than his actual estate.”
“…Um, that sounds kinda dangerous.”
“Ha-ha, the one in danger now is Yodogiri. Right? He really screwed up, letting this happen at a time when the Awakusu-kai are after him. In fact…the rumor says that the guy who ran over him is one of Izaya Orihara’s henchmen.”
“…?!”
The sudden revelation threw Shijima for a loop.
Damn! How much of his info do I take at face value? I don’t think I can trust a single thing this guy says.
Shijima decided that his best course of action with the other man, who seemed a decade older than him, was to keep his silence. But the man just nodded to himself, as though he could see right through Shijima, his eyes narrowing behind the sunglasses.
“Oh, I get it. You can’t trust me, can you? Makes sense—you’re hanging off a cliff. Of course you’re wary. You can’t take my word without anything in return.”
“Well, sure,” Shijima mumbled.
“Kyouhei Kadota.”
“?”
“Do you know the name Kyouhei Kadota? Big guy in the Dollars.”
“I heard that he got run over a few days ago…”
When he was looking into the Dollars earlier, Shijima studied up on Kadota, who naturally showed up as one of the more prominent members. But the first he had heard of the accident was last night, when he’d met Mikado Ryuugamine for the first time and learned about it as part of the current rundown of the Dollars’ situation.
“A bunch of different people are going crazy searching for that driver. I wouldn’t be surprised if the guy gets lynched.”
“Yeah…I suppose that makes sense. But why did you bring him up now?” Shijima asked, trying to get a glimpse of the man’s eyes.
But the dark tint of the shades, combined with the overall gloominess of the room, hid his facial details.
The man glanced at the door to make sure it was firmly shut, then spoke at barely more than a whisper.
“What if I told you I know who did it?”
Silence.
Until he could process what the man said and attempt to judge it for himself.
“…Hang on. You…know who did it?”
“Exactly what it sounds like,” said the man. Shijima considered this.
I see. So is he going to let me have the glory for finding the culprit? But where’s the proof that whoever he identifies is actually the one who did it? What if he’s just trying to use me to screw over someone else?
“…Now that’s hard to believe. It’s not just the cops looking for him. Even with all the people in the Dollars working the case, they can’t find the driver. How would you know who it is? Do you have evidence?”
He might be able to hear out the man about the evidence and use that as a hint to discover the perpetrator independently. But what the man cited was far more convincing than he imagined.
“Sure, I’ve got evidence. Here.”
The man pulled out his phone and brought up a photo on the screen. It depicted a young man lying on the street, clearly taken just after a traffic accident.
“Is that…?”
Something about the picture immediately struck Shijima as being wrong. The car lights shining on the victim of the accident…were clearly coming from the direction the photo was taken. Inside the car.
Shijima felt a fresh rush of freezing sweat trickle down his spine. In a very blithe and welcoming way, he’d just been shown something exceedingly dangerous.
Yes, the man seemed pleasant enough, but now he could identify something leering and persistent about that smile. The next moment, Shijima’s fears were proven correct.
“I took that photo from the passenger seat.”
“…”
Shijima couldn’t move his mouth.
Not just his mouth; his fingers and legs were frozen with fear, too.
He’d just assumed that the other man was a simple errand boy for Yodogiri. When he took the mask off his face, he just didn’t look important compared to Izaya Orihara or Yodogiri. He seemed exactly like the kind of guy who had enough good looks to land a woman who would give him money to gamble on pachinko, go into debt, and wind up sealing his own doom.
Which made the admission of such dangerous information land with that much more terror.
You gotta be kidding. This boring, nice-looking guy, who seems so unassuming…?
The
man continued, dragging Shijima and his trembling shoulders farther down into the swamp.
“That’s right. I did that. I told the driver, ‘Run him over.’”
“…Uh…but…”
“And the driver just ran him over. So the driver’s your culprit. And I watched it from two feet away. What greater evidence could you need? Sadly, I have no intention of going to the witness stand, so if you want to sell this information, you’ll have to go to the thugs in the Dollars rather than the police.”
Shijima still couldn’t come up with a word to interject. The man continued by tapping his finger on the table.
“Do you think I’d be charged with a crime in this case? Well, I guess they could make a case for instigating murder, that’s definitely a crime. But they can’t prove I said to run him over, and even if I did, can’t I just claim that I was sleep-talking? Or what would happen if I tried to claim that I meant, ‘Let’s run him over to the pub for a drink’? I guess we’ll never know unless it goes to trial.”
Yodogiri’s errand boy smiled happily and swirled his drink. But Shijima couldn’t even move the hands he kept on his knees, much less take a sip of his own beverage. All he could do was ask, “Why are you telling me this…?”
“I want you to trust me. I’ve got dirt on you, see, so now you have dirt on me, too. We’re fifty-fifty. Don’t you think that makes us much closer and more relatable to each other than Yodogiri or Izaya, who have the scoop on you without any give-and-take?”
He couldn’t reply on the spot.
Who is he? Who in the world is this guy? I’ve never seen him before. He doesn’t look like he’s got anything to do with yakuza. At best, he looks like an employee from a third-rate host club.
The man just seemed so insignificant compared to big players like Izaya and Yodogiri. If Shijima was going to team up with anyone, this man would clearly be the easiest to betray and cut loose.
If they stole Yodogiri’s fortune, and then he cut this guy out of the picture, could he actually have the chance to live for himself again? The temptation was strong but not enough to force Shijima’s hand. Instead, he stalled.
“So…why Kadota? Was it on Yodogiri’s orders?”
“Nah…I don’t have anything against him, and I didn’t get any direct orders from Old Man Yodogiri or anything. It just means someone was gonna be really happy with Kadota out of the picture. But if you want to know on whose request I did it, we need to build up a bit more trust first.”
The man took an ice cube from his drink into his mouth, rolling it around on his tongue as he spoke. “The primary reason is that I wanted to learn if my new pawn was disciplined enough to act on my orders.”
“Pawn?”
“Er, sorry. Just talking to myself. So what’s the deal? Are you in or not?”
Shijima thought in silence. Only when he was certain did he summon his courage to ask, “May I have…a more detailed explanation?”
He couldn’t really sink any lower than he already was. Izaya and Yodogiri knew about his weakness, but he was the only one who had this man’s sensitive information. As long as he could cover his own ass, he might be able to use this as blackmail information for a good long time.
The other guy must really be a lightweight if he was offering a deal that promised so much for so little. If it were Izaya Orihara, any offer that seemed too good to be true would certainly have strings attached. But since this man was after nothing more than money, that seemed much less likely here.
With his mind made up, Shijima reached out and clasped the other man’s hand.
“Fantastic. You’ve made a wise decision, Hiroto Shijima.”
“…Speaking of which, I haven’t heard your name yet.”
“Oh, pardon me. My name is”
Thirty minutes later, after an explanation of their activities and some sharing of information, they parted ways.
Both men sensed that it would be dangerous for them to linger for too long. And Shijima did not seem to put his full trust in the man, either, though the man knew it. He watched Shijima leave the room first—and he sat back and smiled to himself.
“The idiot. That information wasn’t dirt on me in any way, shape, or form.”
The man perilously close to disaster did nothing else inside the karaoke room except smile to himself ceaselessly.
“I mean, Kadota saw both me and the driver, clear as day!”
Tokyo—ruined building
“…Huh?”
Inside the ruined building that Mikado Ryuugamine, Aoba Kuronuma, and the members of the Blue Squares were using as a temporary hideout, a news headline popped out to Mikado as he was scrolling through social media on his phone.
“This can’t be…Celty’s head, can it…?”
The story about a severed head being tossed into a crowd of pedestrians completely knocked Mikado out of his rhythm. Upon hearing the salacious details, the other Blue Squares around him turned their attention to the TV they’d brought into the building.
“Harima?!” Mikado shouted, still scrolling through the Internet for news. They turned back to him again. He had spoken that name on reflex because the uploaded image he saw of the severed head was identical to that of a girl who went to his high school.
But he promptly arrived at a different possibility. In fact, he determined that this one was much more probable.
Upon a closer examination of the image, which seemed to have been taken by a hi-def phone camera, Mikado realized that the head was just too pristine. It looked as if it were alive. None of it was smeared with blood, even around the cut.
“…Isn’t that Miss Harima…?” mumbled Aoba Kuronuma in awe as he examined the picture on a separate computer monitor.
But Mikado just shook his head. “No. I’m pretty sure…that’s Celty.”
“Huh?”
“Harima got plastic surgery. To make her look more like Celty’s head… Er, sorry, it’s a long story. I’ll sum it up for you later.”
Then Mikado went searching for information online that might confirm his hypothesis.
—I saw the head, too. It must be fake. It didn’t even seem dead.
—The person who took the video uploaded the pics, and they said it was actually alive.
—Not on a normal video site?
—If you put up video of a dead body, they’re just gonna ban your entire account, obviously.
—Look at 1:34 on the video. Did you see the eyelids twitch?
—OMG, they do!
—How did you even notice that?
—So is it fake, then?
—What if it was actually alive, though?
—Think it’s the Headless Rider’s head?
—Could be.
Mikado focused not on any threads of people debating who did it or what kind of drugs they were on, but on the reactions of the people who had seen it in person.
Then he decided to download the video for himself. Of the initial links he saw for it, he avoided two for containing viruses and succeeded getting the file on the third.
He let the video play without further delay—and noted that the eyelids indeed seemed to twitch for a brief moment. You heard a lot about rigor mortis; did the eyelids of a dead body also flutter as they hardened? He was curious but decided that there was a much more reliable method to get to the bottom of this than searching for scientific facts.
“…”
Mikado used his phone to call an acquaintance’s number. After a few seconds of ringtone, it switched to an answering machine message.
“Hello, this is Mika. If you’re calling because you’re worried about me, thanks! The head on the news isn’t mine, so rest assured I can hear your message after the beep!”
It seemed to have been just recently recorded, to Mikado’s relief. That, in turn, solidified the answer in his mind.
The head of Celty Sturluson—his savior and the dullahan whom he admired and wished he could be like—had been revealed to the world at large in this moment
, in this way.
It was the instant that common sense and the world of the grotesque crossed paths.
But…Mikado was a bit taken aback.
Not out of curiosity as to why the head was thrown into the middle of the public—but about a change in his own mind after he understood what had happened.
Huh?
Is this…all it is?
I’ve been waiting for this day for what seems like forever…but I don’t feel any excitement.
He’d had such an obsession with the extraordinary, such a desire to witness the moment that the accepted order of the world was completely overwritten, that he couldn’t help but doubt himself when he felt such shockingly little interest in the event when it arrived.
What is it? Am I feeling the lonely feeling you get when that obscure manga or musician you like suddenly gets famous?
No, I don’t think that’s it…
Mikado’s mind worked away as he gazed at the computer screen, his expression steadily clouding over.
…Maybe I’ve just…gotten too used to Celty. Maybe I’m not capable of thinking of her as extraordinary or abnormal anymore.
Then he remembered what Izaya Orihara told him on the night of the first Dollars’ meeting in real life.
“In three days, the abnormal will simply become normal to you,” Izaya had said to him as he left that gathering behind.
While Mikado was getting the feeling that Izaya might have been right about this, he also took the opportunity to re-examine himself. Could it be that what he was seeking was actually just ordinary life?
Did he want to take the excitement of that first night the Dollars came together, the thrill of first meeting Celty, and simply stop time right there? After the abnormal became his new, static normal, he never accepted the possibility of further evolution from there. It was why he was here with the Blue Squares now.
The recognition of this led Mikado toward the stairs to the roof of the abandoned building. He told Aoba and his friends, “I want to think about things for a bit. Can you let me be alone in peace?” and headed up the stairs with his phone in hand.
As he went, Aoba gave him the most absolutely delighted smile imaginable.
Durarara!!, Vol. 11 Page 10
