by KJ Charles
“I could kill you,” he said. “That would solve one problem, but the matter of this information would remain. And disposing of your bodies would be tiresome, to say the least. We’d need a truck. I wonder if you have the sense to keep to a deal.”
“Yes,” I said, and if I ever told the truth in my life, it was then.
“You delete all the information, and you go away. Get out of the Mitsuyoshi-kai’s affairs. Send nothing to anyone. Talk to no one. Forget this ever happened. Don’t speak to the police. If your friend wakes up, tell her to get amnesia; don’t take the big bastard anywhere they ask about gunshot wounds; don’t even think about journalists. Cross me, let one word of the information you have leak out, and I will find you and your friends, and I will have you flayed alive and dropped in salt. Understand?”
I swallowed. It felt like I had broken glass in my throat. “Mutual nonaggression pact?”
“Precisely.”
“I have your word? The Mitsuyoshi-kai won’t touch us? Nor your people?”
“You have my word. If I have yours.”
“You have it,” I said. “I promise.”
“Don’t break it,” he said softly. “I don’t like it when people lie to me.”
“I won’t.”
“My name is Park Sang-do. Don’t forget it.”
“I won’t.”
“Forget everything else. Do not fuck with me, or I will hunt you down and you will wish I had killed you now. Do we understand each other? Kim, cut her loose.”
Ii stiffened as the Korean moved. “Park-san—”
“Shut up,” Park said in Japanese. “Or the next body your men dispose of will be your own.”
“The next body is a woman in the bath.” The guilt wrenched at me. I’d actually forgotten her for a moment, poor, silly, kind Yukie, who’d never deserved to suffer pain in life or this indignity in death. “Through there. She was called Ichikawa Yukie. A hostess. Oguya killed her too.”
Park and Song exchanged glances. Then they both looked at Ii.
“We’re going to talk about your management technique later,” said Park. “In detail. Go check it out. Now.”
Ii went. Park shoved him between the shoulder blades as he passed, sending him stumbling over Oguya’s body.
All this time, the third Korean had been sawing with a serrated blade at the plastic straps that bound my wrists. They popped free, and the pent-up blood in my hands started moving again in a fiery tide. I pressed my lips together hard.
“I trust you won’t make me come after you,” Park said.
“With the greatest respect, I’m going to try very hard never to see you again,” I assured him. “Um, Sonja should call our friend—”
He nodded permission, and Sonja grabbed for the mobile. “Hi, Ta-ah-er, it’s Sonja. Yes! Don’t do anything, okay? We’re safe for now, do not take any action at all or send anything to anyone or go anywhere.”
“We’ll call him in ten minutes to confirm that,” I added hastily, and Sonja repeated it.
The last bond, on my left ankle, snapped free. I gave the soldier a courteous “Thank you, Kim-ssi” in Korean, tried to move my stiff, aching leg, hissed at the pain.
“Here,” said Park suddenly, and flipped something at me. It landed in my lap and I flinched, before I saw it was a business card. It carried his name in Korean script and a mobile number.
“If you really want a new line of work, I could use you. Get in touch.”
I managed to say “Thanks.”
“Now get out. And leave the guns here.”
“One last thing.” I knew I had to ask. “The other hostess, an American woman—”
“Do go away,” he said.
Sorry, Kelly.
I could hardly stand. And Chanko could hardly walk. His sweater was sodden with blood, and his face was sweaty and ashen, and I can’t imagine the fortitude that it must have taken for him to stand there all that time, just waiting, not understanding. Trusting me.
Sonja grabbed my arm, offering support. I limped out of there, putting all the weight on my right foot, and Chanko came after us with a slow, heavy tread that was almost a stagger. We left behind the yakuza and the Korean mafia, and when I passed Park, he and I exchanged bows, very slight, and we got the hell out of Yukie’s flat, alive.
We headed for the lift without speaking. It seemed to take hours. It felt like Park had his gun in my back, like Oguya was breathing hotly on my neck, like the lift doors were going to open to reveal half a dozen armed yakuza…
The lift whirred and pinged as we approached. The doors slid open, and Taka and Fish Market Taka stared at us. They were both carrying, God help us, filleting knives.
I made a “shut up” gesture, frantic, as Taka opened his mouth. Sonja shoved me, and I lurched forward into the lift, and the other two pressed in behind. Someone hit the down button, and as the doors slid shut, Chanko’s knees buckled and he slumped forward, squashing me into Fish Market Taka.
“What the hell—?”
“He’s been shot,” I said. “We need a doctor.”
And after that, it all goes a bit fuzzy.
I remember the drive back through Tokyo, me, Taka and Chanko in Oguya’s saloon which Taka had hotwired, Sonja and Fish Market Taka on the motorbike. I remember the smell of vomit, and ripping off the rest of my torn sweater to use as a pad on Chanko’s chest, and the white material soaking up the red. I remember Taka driving like a lunatic with one hand, shouting at the phone he gripped in the other, because after what seemed like hours of babbling in Korean and Japanese and Dutch, I’d somehow become unable to speak anything but English.
I remember that we couldn’t get Chanko out of the saloon at Taka’s place. It had been hard enough getting him in, but he’d passed out now, and he was dead weight. Me and both Takas, Yoshi and Sonja and tiny Minachan, all six of us heaving and dragging, our hands wet with blood and sweat, wrestling his huge form out of the car and up the path, praying nobody was calling the police.
I remember the doctor, a slightly wild-eyed guy with a betraying quiver to his hands, and his furious muttered monotone, and needles, and blood, and a scalpel, and Yoshi pulling me out of the room. He was talking urgently, something about shock and blood loss, then Taka was shouting at me, the words not getting through, and then Minachan was sitting on her heels in front of me and shrieking like a toddler, “Daijōbu! Daijōbu, daijōbu, daijōbu!” until I finally focused on her face.
“He’s fine, fine, he will be fine. Listen to me. The bullets are out, he’s lost some blood, but he’s fine. Snap out of it, Kerry-chan, or I’ll think you’re going soft.”
And I remember starting to cry.
Chapter Seventeen
Oguya’s gun was silenced, which reduced the muzzle velocity of the small-calibre bullets, Taka explained. The angle of the chest shot was awkward—Chanko had been turned to the side—and his baseball jacket was thickly lined. But basically his bulk had saved him. The depth of all that fat and muscle it had had to plough through meant that the bullet had been slow enough for the edge of a rib to deflect it, rather than breaking through and piercing the chest wall. It was a flesh wound. Right above the heart.
He’d suffered shock and blood loss, but the doctor dug out the bullets, cleaned and bandaged the wounds, jabbed him with a lot of antibiotics and gave me a sedative. Then he informed Taka that they were now quits; the big gaijin ought to be in hospital, and it wasn’t his fault if he died; he’d never been here and they hadn’t seen him, and Taka was never, ever to call him again.
I slept through the day and night, and woke up the next morning on a single futon in the spare room. I could hear Chanko breathing quietly on the double mattress, and when I sat up to look at him, the tears started to come again. His chest and shoulder were bandaged and smeared with dried blood, but his colour was close to normal, the cuts on his face were healing, though the bruises were looking spectacular now, and he looked asleep rather than unconscious.
He was
going to be all right. And I really needed a coffee.
Downstairs, everyone was waiting for me. Yoshi got up and put his arms round me, holding awkwardly for a few seconds, and then released me with a rather wobbly smile and said, “Noriko’s stable. They’re still waiting to see what happens, but…she’s stable.”
“Oh, Yoshi,” I said, and, “Ow,” as Taka smacked me affectionately on the arm, right over a bruise, and Sonja grabbed me for a full-on European hug that lifted my feet off the ground.
Minachan was hovering, wearing an unfamiliar expression, which I eventually identified as shame.
“Kerry-chan, I’m really sorry.”
“For what? You sent Chanko after me, didn’t you?”
“But I didn’t do anything,” she wailed. “I hid in the bath.”
“If he’d got you, I’d have told him anything, and we’d both be dead now. You did the right thing. I mean, obviously, you could have come out and attacked him. But I’d still rather have had Chanko do it.”
“That’s blatant sizeism,” Sonja said. “I did tell you, titch. Come on, Kerry, sit down. You want an onigiri?”
I collapsed onto a floor cushion, suddenly ravenous, eating the rice ball in about four bites while Minachan poured coffee. They were all here—Chanko upstairs, Sonja, Yoshi, Minachan and Taka. Noriko was stable. We were all alive.
Except Yukie, of course.
I controlled my wobbling mouth with a swig of coffee. My whole face hurt, and there were still ligature marks on my wrists, but someone had put a dressing on the cigarette burn—Sonja had matching ones on her face—and generally, things could have been worse.
I couldn’t believe they weren’t.
“Oguya.” I looked at the boarded-up back door. “How did he get here?”
Taka looked like he’d snorted wasabi. “Pure rotten luck. After I called, Higuchi got twitchy. He knew a guy in the Mitsuyoshi-kai who gambled with him occasionally, so he called him Friday morning to see if he could find out what was going down. Of course, nobody was going to tell him anything about this whole stupid mess, except it so happens the guy he called was in hospital. In Kanazawa. With broken ribs.”
Soseki. The gambler from Himeji who was now based in Shibuya, conveniently close to Higuchi’s illegal game.
“Shit,” I said. “Well…shit.”
“Soseki had obviously heard from Oguya,” Taka said. “He knew that they were going to get their heads kicked in for starting all this, or at least he was, and that it came down to a gambler named Hearn. I don’t know if the family have got Hearn, or if Soseki already knew him from Higuchi’s game or what, but Soseki must have put it together, got Higuchi to talk, and told Oguya I was the guy to look for. And yes, clearly he did have my address. I know. Sheer bad luck.”
“Did he tell you he’d grassed you up? Where did you get this?”
“Talked to one of his guys who owed me a favour.”
“So what are you going to do about the little shit?” demanded Sonja.
“Hey, it wasn’t personal or anything. Higuchi-san was just looking out for himself. Why should I do anything? I’ll just keep doing business with him and pretend I never heard about this little misunderstanding. I’d hate to cause embarrassment.”
“That’s very fair,” I said. “And next time you’ll cut the product with…?”
“Rat poison.”
Very fair indeed. “How did you two find me?” I asked Sonja.
“We tried everywhere else first,” she assured me. “God, it was awful. The Takas hit the bar, Yoshi bawled out the Mitsuyoshi-kai, nobody knew where the asshole lived, then finally I thought of Yukie’s. No need to thank me,” she added.
I didn’t point out the whole sorry mess had been her fault in the first place. She might have told me the same thing.
“Thank God you thought of it,” I said instead. “That man—”
“Yeah,” said Sonja. “Yukie.”
“Yeah.”
She paused, searching for the right words, and eventually settled for, “What a shitbag.”
Oguya had been closeted with Sonja with a knife and a lit cigarette.
“He cut off my damn hair,” she said. “They did that to collaborators in the war, you know. That sucked. And he stubbed out his fags—well, you know that trick. And he did a few more things, cut off my clothes, and just when he was getting nicely warmed up, another yak came charging in screaming at him, and they threw him out. You know they made me stand there naked when I was talking to you on the phone? Stark naked in a roomful of yakuza.”
“That’s a terrible humiliation for a modest woman,” said Minachan. “So they didn’t know you used to work strip clubs?”
“Piss off, shortarse.”
“He looked like someone had just beaten him up,” I said. “The Mitsuyoshi-kai? Because of our phone call?”
“Must be, because he looked fine when he was working me over. God, I loved it when the big guy stamped on his face, I want a framed picture of that moment. Oh, wipe that look off, Yoshi. If you’d been there you’d have fucking cheered.”
“I hope they kill him,” I said. “Do you think they will? I thought Park sounded pretty pissed off.”
“Kerry, honey, nobody but you has any idea what went on in there,” Sonja reminded me. “I just stood there waiting for someone to shoot me while you went on and on and really pissed off a bunch of yakuza, and flirted with that Korean guy, you hussy, and then we left. What the hell happened?”
So I gave them the story. Minachan and Yoshi were a great audience, gasping and squeaking in all the right places. Taka’s eyes sparkled more and more as I spoke, and he howled with laughter at the password business, but afterwards he was frowning.
“Park Sang-do. Oh, boy. Do you have any idea who that guy is?”
“He’s not Father Christmas, I know that much.”
“I checked him out. He’s the right-hand man of the boss of the parent group of the people who were involved with the Mitsuyoshi-kai.” He had to repeat that twice till everyone got it. “He’s bad news. A troubleshooter, and I mean shoot. You should take the job, Kerry-chan, it’d be brilliant.”
“You really are quite amazingly weird.”
“It took us so damn long to get to the apartment,” he went on wistfully, ignoring me. “I’d have liked to be there.”
Thank you, Tokyo traffic.
“But the information,” Yoshi said. “How could he be so sure you’d delete it? Does he know where you are? Where we are?”
“Maybe,” I said. “I think he knows we won’t cross him—and I won’t. I never want to see that guy again. Plus, he didn’t want more bodies.” I gave an almost-laugh. “Although he did say, if his man had to shoot Chanko, to do it in the head.”
“God.” Yoshi looked sick. “Kechan…”
“I’m okay. But—I was lying through my teeth, and all the time he was so angry with Ii and the Mitsuyoshi-kai because he doesn’t like people lying to him. If he finds out I was lying about that password—”
“I don’t think you should worry about that,” said Taka. “Guess what happened last night?”
“What?”
His razor-blade smile flashed out. “It’s very impressive, actually. Shows great respect for the old ways. Tradition. That sort of thing.”
“What?”
“Mitsuyoshi-san, the other Brother, wrote a suicide note explaining that he had led the family down the wrong path and endangered them with his leadership failings and foolishness. They found him dead, with his guts hanging out of his belly. Classic hara-kiri.”
“Stomach cut,” I said, astonished. “You’re kidding. How old was the guy, two hundred? Who commits suicide like that any more? Didn’t he have any pills?”
“I didn’t say he committed suicide,” Taka pointed out. “I said his stomach was cut open. And he wrote a note which named someone rather unexpected as his successor, instead of Matsui, the temporary waka-gashira he put in place after the other Brother died.”
“Why?” asked Yoshi, frowning.
“Because Park made him, idiot. Use your imagination. ‘Write it or I’ll slice out your guts. Oh, sorry, I meant and.’”
I used my imagination, despite trying not to. “Euw.”
“It’s all over town. The Brothers are dead, a couple more of the old guard have, ahem, retired, and there’s a whole lot of interesting new people popping up like mushrooms out of compost. Park-san’s people are everywhere, taking over. The Mitsuyoshi-kai are screwed. Kerry-chan, are you listening? They’re screwed.”
“Wow,” said Yoshi. “Kechan, you did it. You actually did it.”
“We did it.” I wasn’t too sure what we’d done, but whatever it was, it was a family thing.
“Wow,” Yoshi repeated. “What happens now?”
That was a good question. We had no idea if someone was going to come after us, and if so who, and the atmosphere in Taka’s place was like a siege at first. But we didn’t want to move Chanko, and in fact we were all, I think, shell-shocked. I know I couldn’t have handled another escape, and Minachan and Sonja made it very clear they weren’t going anywhere without backup, preferably armed.
I left them talking about it and went up to sit with Chanko.
I thought he was asleep when I slipped into the darkened room, but after a few moments he rumbled, “Hey, Butterfly.”
“Hiya. You should be sleeping.”
“Yeah, right.”
“Can’t you sleep? Does it hurt? Do you want some pills?”
“Not right now. ’S okay. I’ve had worse.” He frowned. “Did I break a rib or something?”
“No, you got shot in the shoulder and the chest, but nothing’s broken.”
“That’s okay then,” he said with apparent satisfaction. “You going to come over here, babe?”
“Oh, right, I have to get up.” I jumped up from the single futon. “You lazy sod.”
It was kind of hard to find a position, but I managed to curl up to his right and snuggled there, taking comfort in his warmth. “You’re going to be fine,” I told him.
