The Mask: A Vanessa Michael Munroe Novel

by Taylor Stevens

  They entered through the front and time came and went, marked by the progression of music tracks and buses and passengers and traffic signals: a process that was repeated again and again and again, until movement across the street flashed color beyond the doors and then Walker and the lawyer and Bradford stepped into the lowering sun.

  Bradford was haggard and his eyes were dark from lack of sleep, but he tipped his face up to the sky and breathed deeply, then he smiled.

  Munroe’s heart beat hard and her insides churned, urging her to rise and walk, to reach for him, to hold and touch and kiss.

  The hurt welled up, like a fire devouring everything in its path, and although she stepped away from the bus stop and stood alone on the edge of the curb, she never attempted to cross the street.

  Seeing him, she could breathe again, she could hope again, and the emptiness and the solid walls she’d relied on to block out emotion began to bleed from her, melting in thick fat drops from her fingertips to the pavement, only it wasn’t her body that shed but her eyes, and not blood but tears.

  Walker, who’d had her arm looped with Bradford’s, who’d smiled at him with that smile that men couldn’t resist, let go and climbed into the backseat of the lawyer’s car. Bradford stood for a moment, his hand on the car’s roof.

  His eyes scanned the area, because he knew.

  In spite of all evidence to the contrary, in spite of what Munroe had said and done, he knew, and his gaze at last fell on her and their eyes connected.

  He stayed frozen that way, as she remained across the street, and time ground to a halt while traffic continued on between them.

  Bradford put his fingers to his lips and turned them toward her, and she raised a hand with the universal sign for love. They stayed like that for a moment, an hour, a day, until a bus pulled between them and Munroe boarded it. From the window she watched Bradford’s face when the barrier between them passed and he understood that she was gone, watched him stay rooted to the spot with one hand on the roof and his eyes on where she’d stood, until she was out of sight.

  He knew that she would come, just as he knew she’d return.

  And she would return to him again, when she’d finished what she’d set out to do, and then perhaps, when they’d both healed and mended, they could slowly begin anew in the understanding that what they’d shared had never been lost, merely delayed.

  The call came just after midnight, a blinding vibration that lit the room and set Munroe’s phone dancing on the nightstand. On seeing the number, time stood still and, for a brief moment, Munroe refused to move.

  So many ramifications, so many possibilities, so much burden.

  Munroe picked up, gritted her teeth, and braced for the news.

  “Michael,” Tai Okada said, “they are with me in my house.” He choked. “They have my family, my children.”

  Then, on the other end, rustling and tapping marked the phone being passed from one hand to the next. Another voice filled the void, smooth and velvet soft, the type of voice that used whispers as weapons. “You took something of mine,” it said, “and now I have something of yours.”

  “What do you want?” she said.

  “Yourself. Alone. Tonight.”

  Munroe didn’t answer.

  “You will come to me,” he said. “You will not call for help, you will not report to the police. There are precautions made against your reputation. Follow these instructions and perhaps a child across the city will not die, and perhaps the evidence will not point to you.”

  “Let the family go,” she said. “They’ve done nothing to you. Face me honorably and I will meet you man to man.”

  “You will come to me as I have said or by first light they will die.”

  The line went dead. Munroe shut off her phone.

  She reached for the backpack and retrieved the knives, the blades she’d taken from Bradford’s apartment three weeks ago and whose use she’d managed to avoid. On the edge of the bed, she sat, staring at empty space in the dark while she hefted the weight, feeling the metal, one in each hand. The sweet warmth of rapture seeped through her palms, up her arms and into her brain, releasing the promise of reward and redemption.

  Jiro took hostages as if she needed threats to compel her to him, as if she hadn’t already begun building the trail to track him down, as if he hadn’t just saved her the time. But the burden of innocent life weighed on her.

  In the silence, she sat, flicking the blades, while the past three weeks, and the blows she’d taken, and the lives she’d spared for the sake of a greater objective, rose fully formed into the present.

  Pain and loss, and love and hope, chased shadows around the room.

  Munroe stood. Set the knives on the desk and booted up the laptop.

  She was already packed, the room wiped clean. And on the chance that law enforcement had figured out the connection between the Ninja and the facility, the bullet holes in the Mira and the body count around the city, she’d already made preparations to leave the country by sea rather than air.

  But there were things to be said to Bradford before she was free to die.

  Munroe wrote and sent her heart unedited, then pulled on her jacket and strapped on the knives. She unlaced her boots. Pulled a roll of thick tape out of the bag of office supplies and wrapped tape around her socks, creating sleeves on each foot, wrapped around and around, loosely enough to prevent constricting blood flow, layer after layer to create a barrier. When she was finished, she put the boots back on, now nearly too tight to fit. She grabbed several pairs of socks and two black shirts from her backpack and shoved them into pockets, then picked up the helmet and strode down the stairs and into the city lights.

  Tonight, one way or the other, through Jiro’s death or hers, the story had to end. Jiro had called for her, and she was coming.

  Munroe brought the Ninja to life and rolled into the street, descending into the calm of focus, of hyperawareness, while the metal strapped to her shins sang a lullaby of death. She left her phone outside a konbini, ensuring that she couldn’t be contacted again, no way for Jiro to know when she’d come, or if she’d come, and reached the edges of Okada’s neighborhood at just after one.

  Control was only control when the opponent played the game.

  The unknown would make him anxious.

  She stopped where the road branched off the main road, turning up into the tidy array of small homes and postage-stamp yards. Out here, away from the city, light pollution was limited to streetlamps and sporadic traffic signals, to the train station in the distance, and what few cars passed by and it was possible to see a few stars; out here, crickets still had voices and there were trees through which the wind could rustle, and this single entry point was the only vehicle access in or out of the neighborhood.

  You will come to me, he’d said.

  Okada had said they were with him, in his house.

  Presumably it was there that the ambush had been set. Presumably the family hadn’t since been moved. But this road was a choke point and Jiro’s men would lie in wait. The only unknown was where.

  Riding gloves and jacket on, Munroe left the helmet with the Ninja invisible in the shadow of a weed-lined retaining wall at the base of the hill. She walked on, head down, ears attuned to what secrets the night would offer, keeping tight to the stone face separating the road from the earth it had been carved from.

  The incline was steep and Munroe climbed slowly, guarded against a quickening heartbeat and starving lungs that would drown out the pillow talk whispered by the dark.

  Jiro had strength in numbers; her strength lay with the night. She felt before she heard and stopped in the shadows of the switchback, where moonlight danced in illusion and disguised her skin. She heard before she saw, pauses and movements of uncertainty.

  Like cold reading, she played off what the enemy couldn’t know.

  Voice softened in a mimic of the high girlish way many Japanese women spoke, she said, “Is someone there?”r />
  The response came as a quiet groan and then tones of disagreement between two men whose words were lifted away elsewhere. A body dropped down off the upper end of the wall, ahead of where the curve in the road evened out and the fall was less than a meter.

  His full-sleeve tattoos were visible in the moonlight.

  Munroe let out a gasp, loud enough that he would hear. She retreated deeper into the shadows and said, “Please go away, please leave me alone.”

  The pleading emboldened him and he stepped toward her.

  His companion dropped down off the wall behind him, and they sauntered forward, thumbs hooked in pockets. “Why are you out so late?” the first one said. “Where are you going?”

  The darkness gave her knowledge: the thud of their footfalls and the timbre of their voices and the way their bulk sliced down the road without respect to the dangers that lurked because they were used to being the danger.

  She knelt and released the knives.

  “Please don’t hurt me,” she said.

  “Where are you going?” the first man said again.

  “To visit a lover,” the second man said, and he sniggered. “See the way she sneaks around? We would do her a favor to punish her.”

  “Home,” she said, voice shaking. “I live here, just up there.”

  Each sentence brought them closer, nearly to striking distance, but they stopped just beyond her reach.

  “Come into the light,” the second man said.

  Munroe stayed quiet, kept motionless while instinct calculated the distance between them and the fragmented seconds it would take to move from one kill to the next. Cut by cut, the fight played inside her head.

  “I said come!” the man said.

  Munroe didn’t move, didn’t speak.

  He lunged toward her kneeling shadow, as if to grab her by the hair. “Foolish girl,” he said. “We will teach you.”

  Munroe cried out for the benefit of the man behind him and met the movement with a knife to the throat, through the trachea, so he couldn’t yell.

  She squealed again, said, “No, stop,” and pulled him close, shoved hard, up at the base of the ribs, into his liver, and between the ribs, into the lungs, faster than he had time to register.

  Cleaner and quicker would have been the carotids, but then his blood would have painted her, contaminating crime scenes yet to come.

  Munroe let go and his body dropped.

  The shadows were a disguise, not a cloak of invisibility.

  The second man, still half moving toward her with gravity’s pull, turned and bolted up the hill. Munroe chased him, caught him in the shoulder with a blade, and yanked him back. He gasped and fell, and she put a boot to his throat. “Scream and you die,” she said.

  His eyes stared wide.

  Then her foot to his chest, she leaned into him, one knife to his throat, the other to his groin. “Does Jiro have other men on the road?”

  His eyes stayed on her, no subtle search for rescue, no hints to give away the secret hope he might be saved. His head shook: No.

  “At the house up the road?”

  “Yes,” he whispered.

  “Is Jiro there?”

  “Yes.”

  “How many others?”

  He didn’t speak.

  She poked the knife between his legs. He yelped.

  “How many?”

  “Five, six,” he said.

  “Which is it? Five or six?”

  Headlights turned in at the base of the hill. Her eyes flicked up and his hand grabbed for his jacket; she stabbed his hand and he screamed.

  Against her will, the second blade plunged into his throat, cutting off the noise. She followed the cut through and stabbed into his chest: a mercy kill. He stopped moving, stopped breathing, and she kicked him in misplaced anger.

  Munroe dragged his body off the road and waited for the vehicle to pass. She nudged his jacket aside and, with two gloved fingers, pulled the handgun out.

  She released the magazine, counted it full, removed two of the bullets, reloaded, and racked the slide. She pressed the gun into his palm, muzzle pointed toward the gutter. She laid his hand down gently, wrapped his fist around the butt, and then cautiously, millimeter by millimeter, slipped his forefinger behind the trigger guard.

  In two or three hours, rigor mortis would begin; it would start at his head and work its way down, and eventually his hands would clench. If she was lucky, she’d already be dead or gone when it happened. Either way, the weapon report would summon the cavalry.

  The matrix of alley-width roads was clean and quiet, the houses perfect like miniature models on a sculpted platform. Streetlights kept the neighborhood flooded just enough that there were no true spots of darkness. Munroe skirted from shadow to shadow, searching for signs that Jiro had sent roaming patrols, and turned before she reached Okada’s lane.

  She crept the length of the street, continued toward the row of homes opposite Okada’s front door, and waited in the shadow of a small knotted pine while one minute dragged into two and then five and then ten. There was no movement at the Okada house, no extra cars parked nearby, no men visible standing watch, and nothing to indicate that the neighbors were wise to the death that had entered their enclave.

  Munroe rounded into the lane behind and slunk in a slow stop-start from tree to doorstep, until she reached the house that backed up to Okada’s. A bush-lined ornamental fence separated the lick of front yard from the street. Munroe boosted over and knelt, waiting for a reaction.

  The neighborhood continued on in its undisturbed slumber.

  She crept to the side of the house, to a narrow sliver with barely enough room to maneuver to the semblance of a backyard, where every bit of space was taken up with a short pebbled walkway, a miniature koi pond, and a two-person iron-and-glass mosaic table.

  The fence lines delineating neighbors were more politeness than privacy, in the same way the living room windows of one house opened to face the kitchen of another. From there she could see into Okada’s equally small backyard.

  Her eyes scanned the space, separating shadow from shadow, until one of Jiro’s men emerged in outline, seated on the wooden deck, knees bent, with his back to the house. Time bled away as she watched the balcony that ran along the side of Okada’s second floor and eventually an arm stretched out to lean against the railing.

  How many men are at the house?

  Five or six.

  In her head she became the enemy.

  Two men on the road, for ambush.

  Two men outside the house as sentries.

  She would keep her captives on the second floor: harder to reach. She would place one man in the genkan, the most logical entry point, and another on the stairway, the only inside access to the second floor. She would put the third with the captives to keep them scared and quiet, and she as the last man would be free to roam and move about.

  Munroe retreated down the sliver between house and fence. At its mouth she knelt and removed her boots. She pulled the extra pairs of socks on over the sleeves of tape. Not as good for protection as rubber soles, but flexible and silent against pebbles and garden detritus that would otherwise crunch underfoot and enough to keep her from wincing barefoot at every step.

  She tied the shirts around her head as bandannas that covered face and neck: a poor man’s war paint—camouflage used in years past when making it to dawn was far less certain than the next sunrise was now.

  Munroe pressed her palms to the gravel, drew in the texture, and breathed her way to the past, to the musk and mud of the rain forest undergrowth. She drew forth the animal, hunting and hungry, and absorbed the night, the humidity, the heat, and returned to the jungle from whence she’d come.

  And then she rose, soft and silent, and slipped through the shadows, one house north, and from that house over the fence to Okada’s neighbor, and from the neighbor over the decorative iron into the tightly covered carport that she’d entered the night she’d followed Okada
home.

  She rolled into the crawlspace beneath the pier-and-beam home, beyond the scope of the sentry above. Earth, dank and damp, filled her nostrils. Creatures of the dark wiggled beneath her hands, her legs. Munroe pulled herself forward, elbow by elbow, toward the center of the house. She rolled onto her back and closed her eyes, fingertips touching the floor, feeling for vibration, attempting to place bodies in the rooms above her. The floor creaked, right about where the hallway between genkan and stairway would have been.

  Munroe flipped to her stomach and pulled toward the rear of the house, toward the cigarette fragrance that guided her to the kill. The law of the jungle was at home in this perfect polite neighborhood full of polite people in a polite country that laid a veneer over the brutality and bloodshed flowing through their history’s veins; politeness that made it possible for men of force and violence to thrive.

  Elbow to elbow she slipped behind him and inched out into the open corner to where the air was fresh. She edged up against the wall, eyes closed, attuned to the nuance in his movement, waiting until clothing rustles and a soft inhale said he’d raised cigarette to mouth, waited until the hand he’d use for balance was nowhere near the ground.

  She rushed the corner and snatched his throat, crushing his windpipe with one hand, pushing fingers into his eye sockets and pulling his head to the ground with the other. Seated, he had no leverage. By waiting until his hand was busy, she’d bought the advantage.

  His head hit the gravel, her knee pounded into his head. She pinned him down and squeezed his windpipe. His hands fought and tried to break her grip. His legs bucked, trying to push his body up.

  She pressed a knife to his throat.

  He kept clawing, fighting to get leverage, to get out from beneath the weight of her body pressing down on the side of his head.

  She drove the knife hilt into his solar plexus and when he clenched in a shock for air, she slipped off him and pounded his temple even harder. His body trembled. She ground down on his head again. His hands went back to clawing at her thigh, but they weren’t as coordinated. She slipped off the side of his face and slammed him harder with the knife hilt. He went limp.