“I heard they were gonna raise our commission on deals.”
The information each of them possessed was varied and wild-eyed, but the tattoo-stickered men all shared one particular fact: Their job was to go into the abandoned building and kill the man named Akabayashi.
Hardly any of them knew that he was a lieutenant of the Awakusukai. For the most part, they were unaware of the Awakusu-kai at all. But they were drug dealers drawn to a reward for killing a man, so it was possible that even if they did know what the Awakusu-kai was, they would still leap at the offer.
In essence, they were the lowest, most disposable pawns in the drug operation. But here they were, right at the destination of their target.
“Man, the Dollars are so useful,” one of them said, staring at his phone. Earlier this evening, he posted to the Dollars’ message board a picture of Akabayashi attached, saying, “I’m looking for this man. I owe him my life, but I don’t know where to find him! Let me know if you see him, so I can thank him!”
And in the very same evening, they found out that he used this abandoned building as a hideout.
“Just when I figured we’d never find his lair, it turns out he’s doin’ a homeless gig.”
“I dunno, man, I heard he’s crazy tough.”
“Nah, no worries,” said another of the gang. He held up a cylindrical object: a Molotov cocktail. “I brought a couple of these, so we can just burn the building down.”
He seemed gung ho on the idea, and the others laughed and agreed that it was a good plan. Some of them grabbed the bottles with eyes glazed over; they’d clearly been dipping into their product.
“So once he runs outta the building, we just nab him, take him out into the hills, and…end of story.”
“Exactly.”
“Let’s burn it down.”
They all laughed, including the ones who still looked sober. In that sense, from the moment they put on fake tattoos, they were already losing their grip on reality.
The same moment, inside
“…I can’t believe you’d show yourself like this, Akabayashi,” said a stone-faced man, sitting on a toppled oil drum inside the abandoned building. There were nearly a dozen men with him, all clearly members of the underworld.
Standing across from them, dressed as usual with walking stick in hand, was Akabayashi. He maintained his breezy, aloof manner in the face of their open loathing and said, “Well, it’s a summons from the gentlemen who taught me so much, back in the day. I can’t just blow that off.”
“You talk different than you used to. Was that all just an act to fool us back then? Or are you playing coy like this now so you can devour the Awakusu from the inside like you did to us?”
“Actually, you may be surprised to learn that people change and grow. I always assumed that I would be the same person forever after I hit twenty…but the thing is, shocking experiences have a way of changing you,” he announced, rapping the floor with his stick. “Such as being attacked by a slasher on the street or falling in love with a woman at first sight for the first time in your life.”
“Cut the bull—”
“On the other hand, you said you wanted to talk one-on-one, but it looks like you’ve got quite a gathering of familiar faces here. Unless I’m mistaken or hallucinating?” Akabayashi said, cracking his neck as he surveyed the group.
The other man’s expression softened a bit. “That’s right, I’m the only one talking. No guarantees about anything else, though.”
“Ah, I see. I didn’t see any cars around the building, though. Did you all walk here?”
“…?”
The confident smile never left Akabayashi’s face, even in his present danger. The other man cautiously replied, “No…we thought you might get spooked and run. So we parked them a ways off. But I didn’t really think you’d show up. If necessary, we were going to rustle up someone you knew and kidnap them as a hostage.”
“Which is exactly what I showed up to prevent. But it helps that you don’t have cars,” Akabayashi said, scratching his cheek. His grin deepened.
“…?”
“Well, if you had lots of cars around, you might get spooked and run, after all.”
“What the…hell are you talking about?”
“My line of thought was the same as yours. Yeah, we can talk one-on-one, but I’m not so much of a hero that I’d bother to fight you all on my own.”
“?!”
Suspicion flitted across their faces.
Did the Awakusu betray us?
They tensed up, preparing for some sudden sign, but they still needed to find out what Akabayashi was really doing.
“So…you really don’t realize that the Awakusu left you out to dry, do you, Akabayashi?”
“What’s that? You already cleared this up with the boss?” he replied.
Now the other man was truly confused. “The Awakusu-kai will not interfere with you and me in any way. You might have thought you called for backup, but no one’s going to—”
Ktok.
Right in the middle of the man’s menacing speech, Akabayashi cut him off by rapping the bottom of the stick on the floor.
“Ha-ha-ha. When did I say anything about the Awakusu-kai?”
“?!”
“It never occurred to you that I might have connections beyond just the Awakusu?”
“No way…!”
Belatedly, the men reassessed the fact that they had called Akabayashi here to make him pay the price for killing their old boss. A nasty sweat broke out on their backs.
Did he bring in yet another yakuza gang…?
“…You’re bluffing.”
“Think so? Go ahead and look out the window,” Akabayashi taunted.
The man glanced over at one of his companions, signaling that he should look outside. The bald man sucked in his breath and headed for the window. He approached the empty window frame carefully, keeping his weight low as he watched for snipers.
Suddenly, the room was full of the sound of breaking glass.
But the building was incomplete, and there were no panes in the windows. The source of the sound was soon quite apparent.
The man with the shaved head instantly began to scream, his body enveloped in flames.
“Aaauuughh! Gaaaaahhhh!”
Some kind of liquid was spreading on the ground, and a second later, it, too, was ablaze.
They realized it was a Molotov cocktail immediately, but before their bodies could react to that knowledge, more flaming bottles entered through the window, shattering in rhythm.
“Outside! There are people outside!” screamed the bald man, who had succeeded in putting out the flames on his face by rolling on the ground. Just before the first bottle had hit him, he’d seen a crowd of figures surrounding the building.
Some of the men inside rushed farther to the back of the room, while others headed for the window on the opposite side. One of them put his back to the wall, peering through the window from the side—and pulled out a gun.
Without hesitation, he started firing into the crowd outside.
When the very first pop went off, the drug dealers assumed that something inside the building must have exploded. They only realized their mistake when one of them trembled and crumpled to the ground.
“H-hey, what just…?”
“Oh, G-God, my…my leg…”
There was a round hole in the thigh of his jeans, with a red stain spreading outward from it. They only realized it was a bullet wound when the second and third shots rang out.
“Oh, shit! It’s a gun! Holy shit, the guy’s packin’!”
“Kill him!”
Foolish as it was, they were still under the mistaken assumption that they were dealing with a single man. If they were at least professionals used to undertaking an attack of this sort, they might have scouted out the place and made sure to confirm a number inside. But not only were they rank amateurs, they also weren’t even all sober. The gang was in no state to
carry out their mission.
Those few who were in a proper state of mind wisely fled the scene, but most of the agitated men decided instead to charge into the building in search of vengeance.
A small war had just erupted, here in this building far from the center of the city…
And neither side understood who it was they were fighting.
Inside the chaotic, flaming building, the man who had faced off with Akabayashi bellowed, “Akabayashi, you son of a bitch! You set us up!”
The ex-con looked around, but there was no sight of his foe anywhere. As a matter of fact, Akabayashi had slipped out at the moment the bald man first caught flame and drew the attention of all his fellows.
“I knew you killed the boss, Akabayashiii!”
From where he was standing, the man in question murmured, “It wasn’t me.”
He was leaving the building via the back door, as nonchalantly as if nothing was happening. “I just let it happen.”
On the ground at his feet were two men with fake tattoos, who were supposed to be guarding the door. Once he had put a little distance between himself and the building, he saw several police cars drive past.
“Oooh, there they go. Perfect timing—glad I reported it ahead of time,” he said, hiding out of sight as the cars passed. He started down a back alley to get farther from the scene. Inside one of the cars, an officer had the receiver in his hand, probably to report a confirmation of the burning building and gunshots.
Akabayashi headed away, pulling out his phone to check the Dollars’ home page and delete his own post reading, “Oh, I know him. He’s staying at an abandoned building here on the map in this link.”
The post had a picture of the building, too. He deleted it all, shut off his burner phone, and returned it to his pocket.
Then he looked up at the night sky, wearing his usual smirk, and muttered to himself.
“Yeah, the Dollars are useful. But truth is they’re also pretty scary.”
May 6, morning, Awakusu-kai headquarters
“Skirmish breaks out between criminal organization and youth gang! Sixteen injured! Mass arrests in the middle of the night!”
The tabloid front page blared the latest lurid news, behind which an elderly man murmured, “Oh, look at this, Aozaki. Ruri Hijiribe’s going to put out a photo album.”
He was looking at the celebrity news page, totally unrelated to the front-page article, and cackled, “There’ll be a three-thousand-unit limited edition, too. That’ll fetch a good price. Couldn’t ya just buy ’em all up and sell ’em on that hee-bay thing?!”
“I don’t know… I’m not the right guy to ask about that. Check with Shiki or Kazamoto…”
“Ahh. Well, at any rate, tell one of the kids to go and buy three for me.”
“Please, boss, think of your age. You gotta set an example for the young guys,” Aozaki pleaded. He glanced at the front page of the newspaper held open across from him. “So, boss…did you know this would happen?”
He was referring to the outcome of the two incidents involving Akabayashi, of course. All those men fresh out of jail who had gone after him were promptly arrested again. The kids with the fake tats were all rounded up, too, which would certainly set off quite a lot of police and media investigation into the student-run gang.
While neither group was a real enemy to the Awakusu-kai, the incident certainly cleared two potential annoyances out of their hair and had the added bonus of drawing police attention away from them for a time.
Without taking his eyes off the paper, Dougen Awakusu answered, “I had a hunch. A bit of this, a bit of that. I knew that Akabayashi could handle his own matters—and it seems that someone else was watching out for him, too.”
“…Whatever do you mean?”
“I suspect someone tipped him off that he was being targeted. He couldn’t have arranged such an elaborate trap in advance without knowing about it,” Dougen commented, his eye peering over the top of the paper at Aozaki.
“I don’t know who would have done such a thing, sir…but I suspect that since we weren’t going to take action, that person figured words didn’t count.”
“Hah! Never took you for the type to tell jokes. So you wanted to settle your score with Akabayashi yourself, huh?”
“Now you’re the one joking, boss,” Aozaki replied, shaking his head with a grin. “Maybe in the old days, but now that he’s gone soft, there’s no point to killing him.”
“You know, soft can be a good thing, too. Lots of stuff bounces off you when you’re soft…”
The phone on the desk rang. Dougen fumbled the receiver loose, cleared his throat, and put it to his ear. From Aozaki’s position, what sounded like a scream of anguish squeaked through the speaker. Perhaps the brand-new gang that got itself arrested last night was now calling for help.
Dougen maintained the same cold, steady tone of voice he always did when on the phone. “Why, I don’t know what you mean. We said we wouldn’t take action against you, and that was that. If you tried to attack Akabayashi and wound up in a trap, that’s none of my concern.”
They were no fools. They were men of the night, responsible for building the darkness of Ikebukuro.
Dougen ended the call and returned to his newspaper—with a sadistic smile on his lips this time.
“You see, I can’t betray my trading partners…but I can abandon them.”
Five years ago
The man changed after his meeting with the slasher.
He told people that he’d been attacked by the slasher but made up the details: “It was a huge old man, over six feet tall, with white hair.” He was actually just quoting a manga he’d read recently, but no one recognized it, so the others within the group merely laughed and said, “Turns out he’s human after all.”
Because of his injury, he got a temporary reprieve on the Sonoharadou job. He’d started the job, and he would finish it, he said. So he spent his time investigating the business, trying to find a way to save them—to save that beautiful, bewitching slasher…
One day, he learned that the slasher had struck at Sonohara-dou, killing the two parents.
The husband’s head was lopped clean off, while the wife’s stomach was slit in a manner resembling seppuku.
The daughter was still alive but in a state of terrible shock, unable to speak.
When he heard about it, he couldn’t believe it at first.
A terrible sense of loss infused his entire being. It was far worse than the feeling of losing his eye—it felt like his entire life was being ripped away.
But through his grief, he knew.
He knew that the wife, Sayaka Sonohara, had committed suicide.
She was the slasher, after all. Whatever happened, she ended up cutting off the head of the husband she loved, then turned the blade on her own belly.
But why had she done it?
Weren’t her husband and daughter equally precious to her?
It wasn’t the entire family, just her husband, who she killed before committing suicide, leaving only the daughter alive. Whatever could have happened to her body?
He was temporarily broken out of this train of unanswered questions by the sound of his boss’s voice.
“Hey, Akabayashi. No need to worry about Sonohara-dou anymore.”
“…Sir?”
Akabayashi was often tapped to serve as the yakuza boss’s bodyguard, in recognition of his skill. Today, the boss was heading to his favorite lady companion’s house alone, taking only the one guard.
“The people who own Sonohara-dou are both dead, as you know. And now we get the land without having to deal with them. Long live the slasher!”
“…”
“Whoops. I shouldn’t have mentioned that—forgot you lost your eye to him,” the boss said, a distasteful sneer on his face. “But the place would’ve been done for in either case.”
“…?”
“I gave the owner a little taste of medicine, you see.”
/> “…?!”
It was obvious what he meant by “medicine.”
Akabayashi had always hated drugs. As a man to whom strength and violence were everything, the idea of making your own bones more brittle was unfathomable to him. He didn’t have a crusade to stop the gang from doing its drug business; he just didn’t bother to think about it.
The boss cackled with delight and explained, “We already had a contract that gave us the right to seize his land as collateral, but I figured we could squeeze more out of him… So I made him an offer. Take out life insurance on your family and let’s make some money, I said.”
“…!”
“From what I hear, he was always the violent type at home. But once he got hooked on the dope, it got way worse. That stuff must’ve really fucked with his head,” his boss bragged—he’d probably had a few drinks. “They didn’t put this in the papers, but from what I heard, the kid had marks around her neck. The police thought it was the slasher who did it, but I’m betting that at some point, the old man tried to strangle his own daughter! All to raise the money to support his drug habit!”
“…”
“See? Crazy, right? You’re not gonna get the insurance if you kill the brat yourself! But maybe he actually thought he might get away with it? In either case, it’s laughable.”
The yakuza boss might as well have been intoxicated on his own speech. He wasn’t paying any attention to his surroundings.
“The thing is, that kid looked like she’d grow up to be a pretty fine-lookin’ woman herself! I figured I could whip up a convincing little IOU form and collect on the girl—she could make us a fortune! Maybe I could even get first dibs? Then again, she’s only what, twelve? Can’t have much experience yet, gah-ha-ha!”
There were a number of things the boss wasn’t paying attention to—that he failed to pay attention to.
One: the increasingly icy manner of the bodyguard charged with attending to his safety.
Two: the fact that they were in a totally empty back alley.
Durarara!!, Vol. 7 Page 11
