Kage: The Shadow

by John Donohue

  I nodded. “Speaking of turning up, where’s Micky?”

  Art frowned. “Your brother is out tearing a new asshole in the Hispanic underworld. Shaking the trees and hoping he can flush Martín.”

  “And you?”

  He sighed. “You know how Mick gets, Connor. There’s no stopping him, but it doesn’t mean I gotta be a part of it. One loose cannon is enough…”

  My brother pushed the door open as if on cue, and stood appraising me, his hands on his hips. He glanced at Art, who stared back, his face flat and expressionless. Then Micky walked toward me. “Well, you look a little better,” he said. “What’s the prognosis?”

  I shrugged. “They make sure that the sutures are holding and I can get out of here.” It’s not exactly what the doctor had said, but it was what I was planning.

  “Good,” my brother told me. He looked Art’s way. “I don’t think the uniform they got on the door is destined for great things.”

  Art shrugged, but said nothing. It wasn’t like them. My brother and his partner had elevated banter into a minor art form. The silence between them now was not only unusual, it was heavy, and the atmosphere was like that of a bickering married couple being civil only out of consideration for guests.

  “What is with you two?” I finally asked.

  Micky waved a hand at his partner. “Nothin’. He’s just being a pain.”

  “A pain?” Art said, standing up and moving right into Micky’s face. I’ll tell you what’s a pain.” He jabbed a finger into Micky’s chest. “You, you moron.”

  “Don’t gimme that…” Micky began in a snarl, but Art kept right on going.

  “You’re jumpin’ all over an official investigation. You’re steppin’ on toes left and right and got nothing to show for it. And you want a pain? Wait until ACLU lodges a complaint.”

  My brother shrugged. “At least we won’t have to worry about Internal Affairs.”

  “Internal Affairs,” Art fumed, shaking his head. “You don’t get it. We’re not on the force anymore, Mick. You start pissing people off, they’ll pull our contract.”

  “Hey,” Micky spat back, his eyes narrowed, “Fuck the ACLU. And fuck the contract. Look at him!” He pointed in my direction. “Those three psychos almost got him. One’s still on the loose.”

  “I know,” Art shouted. “But we gotta work this smart.”

  A nurse peeked in the door, her face concerned. Both men stood facing each other like animals, their eyes locked. They never broke contact but simultaneously reached into their pockets. I had seen them flash their shields in situations like this before and the sudden realization washed across both their faces at the same time: they had no shields. It was almost comic, except for the look, bug-eyed and angry, on their faces. The nurse pulled her head back into her shoulders and wisely retreated.

  “Fellas,” I began.

  Their heads swiveled toward me, their eyes bright and hard.

  “Shut…” Micky began.

  “Up,” Art concluded. Then they faced each other again. Art took a breath as if winding up for more argument.

  “You poke me one more time with that finger of yours and I’m gonna bite it off,” Micky told him.

  “Good,” his partner replied. “Maybe you’ll choke on it. Slow you down a bit.” I couldn’t be sure, but I thought I detected a slight smile on Micky’s face. Art sensed something as well, and he pressed his case home. “We’re on the outside now, Mick. We gotta work through channels on this. There’s too much riding to let ourselves get screwed up ‘cause we’re pushin’ too hard in the wrong places…” Micky stepped back and slouched against the wall, looking from me to Art and back again. He sighed.

  “You worry too much about the business,” Micky told his partner.

  “One of us has to,” Art countered.

  “Wuss,” Micky said.

  “Moron,” Art fired back.

  It was the kind verbal ping-pong that could go on all day. So I spoke up, as much to stop the bickering as to get some information.

  “Now that you’re ready to kiss and make up, can either of you tell me whether Berger’s right about Martín coming back for me?”

  Micky squinted up at the ceiling as he thought. “Seems pretty likely to me. I mean, the guy’s a psycho, so he gets off on killing people anyway…”

  “And you nailed his partner,” Art told me.

  “Nice, Art,” Micky commented. “No pun intended?”

  Art ignored him. “You throw the fact in that Soledad was more than just his partner in crime, and I’d say that it’s a pretty good guess that Martín will be coming back for a piece of you.”

  “How crazy is he?” I asked them.

  “Dangerous crazy,” my brother told me. “But not insane. He’s coming to get you for sure. You killed his boyfriend, so it’s personal. But he’s also got a street rep to maintain. You take out one half of the Los Gemenos, there’s gotta be some payback.”

  “Be bad for business otherwise,” Art offered.

  Of course. “So what’s the plan?” I asked them.

  “I get your brother hosed down,” Art started.

  Micky snickered. “You wish,” he said, and continued Art’s train of thought. “Then we hope the PD can identify the John Doe and try to figure out who’s after you and why.”

  “And Martín?” I asked.

  Art waved a hand. “Oh, he’ll show up.”

  “They always do,” Micky concluded and they both nodded sagely.

  12 Shadow

  The air in any modern hospital is dry and clean feeling, scrubbed into an antiseptic wash that is meant to offer comfort. I wasn’t buying it. The Burkes of older generations knew that hospitals were places where danger lurked. Their pale blue eyes were muddled with experience, superstition, and wear, but were keen to sense a threat. The hospital rooms and halls around me were permeated with an atmosphere that was dense with things unseen, yet real: fear, confusion, loneliness, the pain that pushes up through anesthetic like the limbs of a restless sleeper.

  Our hug was awkward—at first I thought that it was because of my wound. But Sarah’s kiss was dry and perfunctory, like a ritual leached of meaning and best finished quickly.

  “Hey,” I said as she sat beside me on the bed. “How are you?” I looked at her carefully. Sarah’s eyes are big and dark, set in a heart-shaped face that was meant to smile. But she looked worn and tired. Her eyes glistened and she looked away as if seeking a distraction from what lay before her.

  “Oh, Burke,” she murmured, and reaching for a tissue on the table next to the bed, she got up to blow her nose.

  I held my hand out, beckoning her closer. “Hey,” I said quietly, “It’s OK. We’re all right.” But she stood there, arms crossed in front of her as if in protection. She was folded in on herself, seeing something I didn’t. My words weren’t reaching her.

  Sarah shook her head as if trying clear it. She looked up at me and smiled sadly. “Are we? Are we all right, Burke?” she demanded. Sarah closed her eyes for minute. “I keep seeing you on the floor this morning. The blood. The bodies…” she took a ragged gasp.

  “Come here,” I urged her, and she slowly sat next to me on the bed and let me hold her. But I could feel the tension trembling in her shoulders. We sat there quietly for a time and I searched in vain for words of comfort. But I couldn’t come up with any. I hoped that somehow the very act of contact would offer solace, but I couldn’t be sure.

  Sarah was part of the collateral damage of all violent acts: the survivors bear wounds as surely as the ones who don’t walk away. I’ve struggled with it and knew something of what she was experiencing. But each person deals with things like this differently. I’m harder. Not tougher, just harder. I don’t know whether Yamashita has made me that way or whether his training just revealed something about me I never knew before. Sarah was a brighter, gentler person. For her to not only be attacked, but ultimately to have to kill someone, was going to press on her like a crushing
weight. It wasn’t that she ultimately wouldn’t be able to stand the pressure, it was that the shadow of that weight would forever change the way she saw the world.

  The world, I realized, had been a brighter place before she met me.

  After a while, she seemed to relax somewhat. “Have you had any sleep?” I murmured. The light outside was fading and the morning’s events seemed impossibly long ago. I could imagine her day after the shooting. The EMT’s and the cops. Making a statement to the uniforms who responded. Answering the same few questions put a hundred different ways by the detectives. After a while, you just want to shut down, to close your eyes and drift away.

  I felt Sarah’s head shake. “No.” She sighed. “There hasn’t been time. I was at the precinct most of the day. Then they took me back home so I could… change.” She shuddered and pushed against me to sit up. “They want me to go away for a few days. Out of town. For right now, they’ve got people watching my apartment.” A note of urgency crept into her voice. “Burke,” she said urgently, “what’s going on?”

  I let out a long sigh. “They think that the guy who escaped may come back,” I began.

  Sarah’s eyes widened in alarm. “Come back?” she echoed. “Why?”

  I shrugged, and I could feel the tug of the bandage on my side. “The police say that two of these guys were lovers. I killed one and the other one escaped. I don’t know why they were after me in the first place, but now the cops think it’s personal…”

  “Oh my God.” She sank back on the bed, unconsciously putting distance between us. “Who were they, Burke? What did they want?”

  I had been turning possible answers over in my head since Berger left. I’d come up with very little I could say with certainty. And I wasn’t about to scare Sarah any more than she was already. “I’m not sure,” I told her, which was true. “I never saw any of these guys before. Maybe after they ID the third man, we’ll get a clue.” Sarah looked at me with a deep, sad skepticism. It was the same look I’d gotten from the detectives from the 68th as well as from Micky and Art. Nobody was buying my statements completely.

  “Look,” I said, wanting to change the subject, “for right now, what’s important is that you get somewhere safe and get some rest. Stay away from my house. Can your sister put you up for a few days?”

  She nodded tiredly. “The police helped me make arrangements.”

  “OK. I’m getting out of here as soon as I can. Micky and Art are working on things. We’ll get to the bottom of this soon.” She nodded hopefully and let me draw her close for a hug. A female detective had been waiting tactfully outside the hospital room. She stuck her head inside the door and I caught her eye and nodded. She led Sarah away.

  “Sarah,” I called, and they paused at the door. “Don’t worry. It will be all right.”

  But all three of us knew that I was lying.

  Dr. Weiss was reluctant to discharge me, despite the fact that the sutures were holding and I hadn’t sprung a leak all night. But Micky and Art worked on him—no doctor likes the idea of a killer rampaging around his hospital—and, after I signed a bunch of release forms and promised to return in a few days, Weiss let me go. The bags under his eyes seemed to have deepened, and he watched me leave with both concern and relief.

  Yamashita had no qualms. “Hospitals are for the sick, Burke,” he told me. He was sitting placidly by my side in the back of Micky’s car.

  “What do you call this?” I asked, gesturing with the arm that Weiss had put in a sling.

  “You are wounded,” my sensei told me sternly. “You have been seen to. Time to stop taking up valuable space and come home where you can heal properly.”

  Art turned halfway around to face us. It was better than watching Micky drive. My brother is hard on cars and anyone around the one that he’s operating. “You’re better out of there for lots of reasons, Connor,” Art said.

  “Places like that leak like sieves,” Micky commented as he gave the wheel a sudden jerk and we lurched across a lane of traffic, followed by the angry blaring of horns. “Probably a million ways Martín could get to you in there.”

  “You really think he’s coming?” I asked him.

  “Word on the street says so,” my brother answered.

  “We’ve got a twenty-four hour guard on your place and Sarah’s,” Art added. “We’ll stash you with Yamashita while we run Martín to ground.” I started to say something, but Yamashita jabbed me lightly in the side with one steel finger, his face immobile. I closed my mouth for the rest of the ride to Red Hook.

  We watched Micky and Art drive off. Then Yamashita shut the metal door to his dojo firmly and we moved toward the weapons rack along one wall of the dojo. We had left our shoes at the door and our bare feet rasped dryly on the hardwood floor. The street sounds were muted, distant echoes from another place. Here, in the cavernous training space, we were in Yamashita’s world.

  He handed me a short wooden training sword known as a shoto. “We will assume that your arm will need some time to heal, Burke. But that is no reason to stop training. The shoto is a much-neglected weapon. We can use this opportunity to focus more intently on its use.”

  I hefted the small sword, the hard wood smooth and solid feeling. It wasn’t a totally unfamiliar weapon: there are a number of training routines in the sword arts that use it. But in Yamashita’s system, we tended to focus on weapons with a bit longer reach that require a two-handed grip to use properly. The shoto could be used to deflect and parry and stab. It was a close-quarters weapon. There seemed to be a lot of them in my life lately.

  He worked me for a time and, as always, the experience was an odd blend of wonderment and terror. I was stiff from the wounds and inactivity. The bandage made me overly conscious about the need to protect my arm. Yamashita knew it and pressed me without mercy, feinting at the wound, forcing me to pivot and twist to avoid him. The handle of the short sword was slick with sweat. The perspiration made my scalp wound burn.

  He came at me with the bokken—a long slashing strike to my head. I moved in and met his blade with mine, redirecting the cut down to my left and away from me. But Yamashita followed the flow and brought his sword back and around and at me again. I had to shift to my left and meet the blow again. Our weapons cracked together. I continued to pivot and forced his sword down to my right, keeping contact with the back of his weapon. I slid my shoto down and then back up to the hand guard of Yamashita’s sword, snapping my weapon up against the hilt and moving in to lock his elbow with my left hand. It was a reflex action, and my arm moved out of the sling before I could stop myself. And to my surprise, it worked. It was awkward moving it, but it worked. I felt the slight tug of the sutures, but that was it.

  Yamashita saw the surprise in my eyes and he smiled slightly. “Soo,” he breathed. “Now we are getting somewhere.” He backed away and bowed slightly. I did the same, wiping the sweat off my face with the back of my arm. Up in the loft section of the building where Yamashita had his living quarters, I heard the phone ring.

  “I’ll get it,” I told him. But he was already on the move.

  “No. I am expecting someone…” he murmured as he shot up the stairs. From my perspective, it hardly looked like he touched the steps: one minute he was moving toward the staircase, the next minute he was up and gone out of sight.

  I couldn’t hear his phone conversation. But in five minutes we were back on the street. Yamashita doesn’t explain much—he leads and it’s simply up to you whether you trust him enough to follow. And every time he does it, you know he’s watching you, weighing your reactions, judging the quality of your fidelity. Beginning students find it unnerving and exasperating. I know I did. But more than a decade with him has changed me in some ways. The stubborn Irish in me still resents the call to obedience. But I’ve learned to narrow my eyes and follow, in part because, while I know he’s watching me, I’ve developed the ability to watch him.

  We walked quickly down the street toward the avenue. The men a
t the auto body shop eyed us warily. We once had a run-in with one of their more excitable employees. To this day, he finds it difficult to walk. Yamashita noticed the stares we got, but didn’t react to them. We reached the corner and he paused. “You wish to know where we are going?” he said.

  Aha! I knew I could wait him out. I shrugged. “That’d be nice,” I told him, but I kept my voice noncommittal.

  He turned his head and looked at me. “I have been thinking about this man, the one who escaped…”

  “Martín,” I supplied.

  Yamashita nodded. “Just so. From speaking with your brother and his partner, my understanding is that both he and his partner were contract workers.”

  “Hit men,” I corrected.

  Yamashita waived a hand, dismissing this as a pointless semantic detail. “The presence of the third man, who is as yet unidentified, suggests to me that their employer was not local.” I started to say something, but he held up a hand. “And yet their… services… are ones that would be certain to call the attention of the police. And once that was done, the authorities would question… who?” His eyes glittered as he waited for my reply.

  I shrugged. “The usual suspects, I suppose.”

  My teacher nodded. “Indeed. The usual suspects. And since these men are Hispanic, I assume that a great deal of attention would be focused on criminals from the Hispanic community.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “I imagine it must be quite annoying, particularly if you had nothing to do with this attack, neh?” He didn’t wait for my response. “The police questioning people. Disturbing your activities.” Yamashita sounded almost wistful. “So if, for instance, the local crime boss could be made to understand that we only seek to locate this Martín and leave his… enterprises… alone, we might be able to secure his help.”

  “It’s a theory,” I admitted.

  As we were talking, a big white Escalade pulled up to the curb. The passenger side door opened and a young guy, wearing wraparound shades, got out, opened the back door, and waited. He never once looked directly at us, instead his visor continuously scanned the perimeter.