by KJ Charles
He was big and warm and strong. He wrapped his arms around me and just held, and I let myself lean back against him, curling into him, and his warm breath was tickling the hairs on my neck, and right then, I was safe. Right then, it was comfort. In a little while I might wriggle a bit, just to see, but for the moment I would enjoy the feeling of him holding me, relax into his silent strength, let him stand between me and everything that was out there in the dark.
So I shut my eyes and breathed deeply…and then I only went and fell asleep.
Talk about a wasted opportunity.
Chapter Nine
I woke up on a futon in my underwear, and alone.
Hmph.
I was in Taka’s spare bedroom, not the little study, and it was a double futon, and I was right over to one side. My clothes, including the wig, were draped over the back of a chair, and someone had slung my bag into a corner of the room. But nobody was to be seen.
I got up, testing my foot gently. It was pretty sore. I borrowed a dressing gown that hung on the back of the door and hobbled out with the intention of getting a shower, since I hadn’t bathed last night, but the door to the little study was open and I could hear tapping. I detoured in to find Yoshi, face grim and eyes fixed on a monitor.
“Ohayō. How’s it looking?”
“Oh, fine,” said Yoshi savagely, not looking at me.
“Something wrong? Is the film okay?”
“Quality isn’t fantastic, but I ran a filter to enhance the images. We’ve got it all worked out. I’ll show you when Taka’s up.”
“You worked it out? Wow! That’s fantastic!” He just stared at the screen, tapped the keyboard. I blinked at him. “It is good, isn’t it? Yoshi, what’s wrong? Were you up all night?”
He looked round finally, frowning. “Where did you sleep?”
“In the other spare room. You guys were in here, I guess.”
“Are you having sex with him?”
“I beg your pardon?” I stared at him. He glared back. “No, I’m not, as it happens. I fell asleep downstairs. I suppose he put me to bed. Not that it’s any business of yours.”
“Put you— You know he slept in there? Did he touch you?”
“That’s a horrible thing to say, and if this is about a completely unintentional remark—”
He shook his head angrily. “Do you know why he’s helping you?”
“He promised Taka he’d look after me.”
“Kechan, I wish you’d think. Promised Taka, indeed. Look after you—oh, sure!”
“Well, he did,” I insisted, aware as I spoke that it didn’t sound very convincing. “What are you suggesting?”
“He’s got his own reasons,” said Yoshi darkly. “For a start, if he was looking after you, if he actually gave a damn, he wouldn’t be letting you do this. He’d have put you on a plane days ago—”
“Listen, it’s not up to you or him or anyone to let me do things or put me on planes. And I’m getting a bit tired of you ordering me about. If you’ve got anything to say, why don’t you say it, instead of being such a bitch?”
“Okay, fine!” he shouted, slapping his hand on the desk, making me jump. “Why don’t you ask Mr. Wonderful what he knows about the Mitsuyoshi-kai, then? Why don’t you ask him why he isn’t a rikishi any more, huh? Why don’t you ask why he’s really so keen on being back here?”
Something lurched internally, and I covered it with anger. “Well, why don’t you tell me, if you know anything worth saying?”
“Because you wouldn’t believe me. That thug’s got you wrapped around his little finger. You, of all people.”
“He does not, and he isn’t a thug.”
Yoshi’s face was scarlet. “What would you call him then? An overgrown side of beef with a hair-trigger temper who hits people, what would you call him, Buddha?”
“Just fuck off, Yoshi!” I heard myself shriek. “Who are you jealous of, him or me?”
He stared at me in shock, his expression raw with hurt. I put a hand over my mouth, appalled. The words hung in the air.
“I didn’t mean that. I’m sorry. That was an awful thing to say. I’m really sorry.”
His eyes flinched away, and he turned back to the screen. “Yeah, well.”
“Look, I’m sorry. I just—I’ve had to trust him, don’t you see? I can’t just stop.”
“You mean you don’t want to stop. Oh, do what you want. You will anyway.”
He didn’t look around again, and after a moment’s waiting, I left.
I had my shower, a long one, and got dressed, and found Chanko in the LDK, sitting with his back straight and his eyes shut, cross-legged and silent.
“Hey, Butterfly.” He didn’t open his eyes.
“Hey. I’m going to make coffee or whatever Taka’s got. You want some?”
“Thanks. You all right?”
“No, not really,” I said, my voice hitching with residual anger. “I just had a screaming row with Yoshi, actually.”
“Yeah. I heard.”
“You did?” I asked, heart sinking.
“Sure. When you start shouting, you know, what with all the doors open, it’s kind of hard to miss.”
I glanced nervously at him. Eyes shut, face monolithically calm, but a burn of savage red along those bronze cheekbones.
“Yeah, well,” I muttered. “Sorry about the noise.”
“So?”
“So what?”
“So, what are you going to say? Anything you plan to ask?”
“Oh, yeah, of course. Do you take sugar?”
“Nope,” he said, voice very controlled. “Anything else?”
“Milk?”
“Come on, Butterfly, you can do better than that.”
I sighed theatrically, opening the fridge. “You know, if I’d figured you for a conversationalist in the morning, I wouldn’t have let you take me to bed last night.”
That finally got his eyes open. “Let, my ass. You fell asleep all over me, you’d have slept through an earthquake.”
“I know, I do that. Thanks for getting me upstairs. Did you have to carry me?”
“You’re not much of a weight.”
“For you, perhaps.” I handed him a mug of coffee and curled up on a cushion at the table, facing him. “It’s instant. Sorry.”
He gave me a long look. I gave it back. “I’m not going to ask anything,” I said, picking my words carefully. “If there’s something you want me to know, or something I need to know, I guess you’ll tell me. But I’m not going to ask.”
“Why not?”
Because I didn’t want to know, of course.
“Because Taka trusts you,” I said very seriously. “And his judgement is infallible.”
Chanko snorted, his face relaxing for the first time, and I went on before he could say anything else. “They’ve got the files sorted. We’ll look at them when Taka’s up, Yoshi said. I need to go shopping today as well. Clothes, contact lenses, that sort of thing. Change my appearance.”
He gave me a glance, but accepted the change of subject. “Need an escort?”
I certainly wanted one, but that was dumb thinking. They could look out for me if they knew exactly where I was—the Ueno Shinkansen platform or a small town. There was no way they could stake out Tokyo looking for me, or even spot me in a crowd.
Chanko, on the other hand…
“Better not. I’ll keep an eye out.”
“You do that. Take my number.” He tipped his head back, shutting his eyes again. “Butterfly, I probably need to talk to you about…stuff, and you need to listen, but not now, okay? Soon, but not now.”
“Okay. Sure.”
He narrowed his eyes. “Are you on drugs or something? Don’t go getting agreeable on me, babe.”
“I’m not being agreeable,” I protested. “Look, do you think I’m going to like whatever you’re not telling me?”
He looked away. “Nope. No, I don’t guess you are.”
Me either. “We
ll, then. I’m not in a big hurry to hear it.”
“Avoidance ain’t a great long-term strategy,” he remarked.
“You might have noticed, I don’t really think long term.”
“I noticed.”
Taka came in a few minutes later. I’d already got up and busied myself making more coffee, which it looked like he needed. He was wearing only a pair of tighty-whiteys—I averted my eyes—and he looked thin and pallid and, frankly, crappy.
“You’re killing yourself,” I told him, handing him a mug.
“Good morning to you too.”
Yoshi came down after him. He grunted, “Os,” to Taka and gave Chanko his best attempt at a stony glare. Apparently nobody had ever told Yoshi not to bring a knife to a gunfight.
“So what about the security tapes?” I asked, putting a bit of energy in my voice to try and lift the mood. “You guys have worked it out, Yoshi said?”
“And if the Mitsuyoshi-kai haven’t worked it out themselves, they’re morons,” said Yoshi. “But then, I don’t suppose they recruit from the cream of society, do they?”
There was a silence that felt nastier than it should have. I looked round at the faces: Yoshi exhausted and resentful, Taka bloodshot and drawn and furtive-looking, Chanko stone-still, stone-blank.
“Well, let’s all look at it together!” I said with the enthusiasm of a primary school teacher, and wondered if I could poison the coffee.
We wedged into the cluttered study, where the blinds were permanently down. There were two monitors set up, wires and boxes everywhere, bottles of tea and Coke and Calpis balanced on various expensive-looking devices. It smelled like a room two men had been working in all night.
Yoshi and Taka scrabbled for control of the keyboard while Chanko seated himself behind them on the folded futon. I perched on a spare chair next to him and wrapped my hands round my mug for warmth.
“Right,” said Taka, sounding a bit more lively. He’d had two cups of coffee, but mainly he seemed to draw energy from the electronics around him, or the fact of stolen data. “Are you watching closely? First off, this is what it looks like.” He clicked the mouse, and one screen showed a fuzzy black-and-white image of an indeterminate woman in a short, clingy dress, with a small handbag over one shoulder, shot from above.
“Is that Kelly?” I demanded, leaning forward.
“Could be anyone,” Chanko muttered.
“Until we cleaned it up. Yoshi ran a couple of filters, sharpened the images, and…” The picture changed, suddenly clearer and more focused.
“That’s…good,” I said cautiously. “It still only shows the top of her head, though. So?”
“So we first thought we’d see if we could ID her—” Yoshi began.
“Yeah, show it was Kerry, right?” Taka interrupted.
“Kelly,” I enunciated clearly. “Don’t you start.”
“But she was clever. Kept her head down coming in and going out, there’s never enough of her face to prove it’s her.”
“I mean, of course we can triangulate, work out her height—”
“She’s got to be pretty tall, somewhere around five foot ten counting the shoes, if you look at the height of the signs and posters around the door, right? And you’re five five? Well, there’s no way this woman’s wearing five-inch heels, not the way she’s walking,” Taka insisted. “She’d have a lot more wiggle in her walk, right?”
“Right,” I said, reluctantly impressed.
“Still, there’s not much to go on there. So we got busy with the visitors. Here’s Kerry coming in, 6:28 p.m.”
“Ke-lly.”
“The American bitch.” Taka waved a hand dismissively. “And—” he jumped to another bit of film, “—here’s the old man, right? It’s 7:04 now.”
The stooped figure shuffled through, holding a briefcase in one gnarled hand, eagerly proceeding to his own murder. I repressed a shudder.
“Then out we come at 7:32,” Taka said. A female figure, hurrying out, but this time she was wearing a long dark raincoat, hooded and tightly belted. “Twenty-eight minutes to kill him.”
“Where the hell did she get that coat?” muttered Chanko.
“Is it one of those very thin plastic ones you keep in your handbag?” I wondered. “No, it’s surely cloth. And she’s wearing higher heels, too. She had us both wearing a dress everyone would notice and remember; she went in wearing it so that anyone who saw her would just remember a blonde in a pink dress; then when she came out, she made sure she was wearing a mac in a drab colour that nobody would look at. That way she had a good chance the old man’s bodyguards wouldn’t spot her among the other customers, plus if people only noticed her going in, the yaks would look for a blonde in pink in the Primrose Path, and come up with me. Which is what they did.”
“Exactly.” Taka gave me a dancing grin. “Now, in she goes, out she comes, and she’s all alone both times. But—”
Images flickered on the screen, jumping from figure to figure. “This is from the start of the tape. Five o’clock onwards, so the rush is starting. Look at the people coming in. Salaryman and OL, salaryman and tart, tart on her own. Couple—hell, she looks about fourteen, nice. Single man, but Japanese. Western couple. Threesome—lucky bastard, the left-hand girl’s a bit fat, though—”
“Shut up, Taka.”
“Salaryman and jailbait. Oh, hey, two girls together—wooh, Mama!”
“Shut up, Taka.”
“Big black guy and Japanese girl. Salaryman with OL—and now look at this.” The film froze on a lone male. “Big. White. Very short hair, and going bald in that pointy way Minachan said.”
“Widow’s peak, it’s called.” I stared at the distinctive pattern of the dark hair.
“Big bag,” Chanko pointed out.
“He goes in at 5:56. And here, coming out, 7:46. Enough time they don’t look together, heading off in a different direction to her.”
“Still with the bag.”
“But check this.” Yoshi brought up two still images, closeups of the black cloth bag going in and coming out. “See, the first one, now there’s something sticking out here, a sharp point—”
“Might be a heel? Her spare shoes?”
“But otherwise it looks half full of something squashy, nothing rigid inside it. Yes? Now, when he comes out—you can’t see much here, but we ramped up the contrast—”
“Whoa.” Chanko leaned forward. “Is that a briefcase?”
I could see a rectangular shape outlined in the cloth, more or less. “Are we sure it’s not just folds, or distortion from whatever you just did?”
“Unlikely, that shape. Here’s the case in the old man’s hand. Images all right size.”
“We checked all the single males, and all the European men, but this is the only one where we can see a case anywhere,” Yoshi explained. “We’re pretty sure they took the case, not just the contents, because that’s what the family were asking for.”
“Can you work out how tall—” Chanko began.
“Six three, give or take an inch or so.” Taka was smirking at his own foresight. I could live with it.
“Any chance we can pull a usable picture of him off this?”
“Nope. Kept his head down too.”
“Still, it’s a great start. I mean, it’s confirmation, isn’t it?”
Chanko was frowning. “Sure, tells us you were right about the boyfriend. But where’s it take us?”
“Couldn’t we show the yakuza?” I asked.
“Show ’em what? We don’t have a name or an address or even a face.”
“Yeah, well, maybe Chanko-san can find something more?” demanded Yoshi angrily.
I cut in fast. “So what happened next? I mean, they planned this out pretty well—he’s carrying her coat and shoes, so she can leave inconspicuously and his bag looks half-full coming in and out, right? But then it all goes wrong. She leaves around half past, and the bodyguards go in when?”
“Not on the tape. It e
nds at eight.”
I tried to recall what Yukie had told me. “Say Mitsuyoshi-san expected to spend an hour in there, and the goons gave him an extra half hour? I mean, that’s minimum. They surely wouldn’t have gone in much before eight thirty or so. Even then, they have to hassle the clerk, get the room number, find the old man, get him to a doctor, get the CCTV tapes, go to Kelly’s place. They can’t possibly have got to her before nine or nine thirty. So why was she still sitting at home?”
“Because she was waiting for her boyfriend,” said Yoshi. “The question is, where was he?”
“Double cross?” Taka suggested. “Look, we can assume these dumb whiteys aren’t professional killers, right?”
“Taka!”
“And the bitch, whatsername, had agreed a price to screw the old guy, right, Kerry? How much was it?”
“I don’t know. She didn’t need help to talk money.”
“So they plan to smack the old guy on the head so the bitch doesn’t have to go through with it, and take the payoff anyway. Do we think that’s what happened?”
Chanko shrugged. “Can’t see what else they did it for.”
“So he takes the case, and maybe there’s more money than they’d thought, and he gets greedy. Or less, and he doesn’t want to share. Or none, because the old guy decides to stiff the bitch, and they kill him for that. Either way, the boyfriend decides to ditch the tart, let the yakuza say his goodbyes for him.”
I winced. Chanko shook his head.
“No, too risky. What if she talks to the yakuza? Better to knock her on the head in the love hotel and leave her with the old man.”
“Right,” Taka decreed. “It’d be too risky for him to let the yakuza take her alive, he couldn’t know she wouldn’t talk. Therefore, he didn’t mean to abandon her. Something screwed up.”
“Kelly got the arrangements wrong, didn’t realise she was supposed to take a cab to the airport,” I suggested.
“The boyfriend falls under a car,” Taka offered. “Spends the night in hospital.”
“Goes out for a celebratory drink and winds up with his face in the gutter at four in the morning.”
“Hassles a girl and gets picked up by the police.”
