He was coughing. I moved in. Pound, pound, pound, searching out a weak spot when I got another piece of neck flesh. I was feeling cocky. Strong as a badger fighting a grizzly bear. Pierce was gonna end this battle on top. Rocky Balboa got nothing on Pummel-boy Pierce.
Then a piece of the hardest wood I’ve ever known clocked the back of my calf just below the knee. The shock bent me forward, tipping me sideways.
Big guy regained balance. He took a shot meant to bust my nose wide open. The angle of my fall sent his meat hook zinging past my right ear.
I launched a hard swing for his right kidney before my knee hit the pavement.
The baton smacked the nape of my neck, tossing me forward like an unstrung marionette. Big guy stepped aside and let me crash.
My brain caught up. Am I ready to die? I didn’t suppose so, but figured it didn’t matter. These goons planned to end me. I closed my eyes.
Big guy rolled me over.
I decided to look him in the eye before he executed me.
But it was another guy, thinner and scarier, I’d glimpsed and forgotten while I was having my moment of kick-ass with Big guy. Thin guy was steel wire with sharp eyebrows and ears longer than his nose. He tucked the bo staff under his arm like a candy cane at an evil elf convention. “Zakennayo!,” he said in the exact words of the club owner who almost busted me sneaking around trying to save Garboski’s ass. “Don’t fuck Yakuza.”
In a final moment of defiance, I dismissed his fatal glare. The sun sat high in the morning sky, spotlighting our intimate exchange in the final act on a Shakespearean stage. It reminded me of Sharon. How this was an apropos penalty for stepping out. I smiled.
Evil Elf Guy didn’t appreciate that. The bo staff caught me behind the ear.
The ringing that followed turned into the bells of angels calling for my soul. I prayed for purgatory and a lighter sentence for my selfish behavior.
Nothing happened for several long seconds. Except those bells got louder until they produced an English movie soundtrack. I cracked one eyelid open.
The truck blocking my way cranked up and took off. Big black Toyota raced around my heap, damn near running over my legs. The bad guys were gone for maybe five seconds when the local cops rolled up and crowded the scene to save my ignorant life.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
MY DREAMS RUMBLED and tumbled. Light bombs blasted me with Japanese voices shouting shock and awe into my torso. Several rang as distinctly as a brass bell. My brain was the clapper. Others thumped with the muted percussion of a rubber hammer against a silicone construction cone. A horse kicked my chest to wake me for several seconds of Nippon chatter. The same horse punted my gourd into a knockout. My dream state transformed the horse into an ambulance and his hooves into Asian strangers wearing pastel blue pajamas. The laughing Asians sported knuckle dusters.
Halogen lamps woke me to the delightful pleasure of different strangers tormenting my wounded parts. I woke again, bouncing across the prairie in the bed of a covered wagon while English-speaking cowhands decked out in modern military garb drummed my chest with nunchaku while sharing laughable tales of soba noodles.
Their humor lulled me into a trance. I slept without interruption through a dream of getting my ass stomped by a colorful Okinawan parade dragon and his best friend, Habu. With mystical precision, Montana sprang up with the reassurance of a bitterroot flower in June to conclude this painful Asian nightmare.
The scuffling sounds of ICU greeted my ears. I peeked. Nanci stood beside the government issue lounge chair required for medical emergencies. She caught her breath and stepped closer. She did not ask what I was doing in Kin Town. Or who I was seeing there.
“Six broken ribs, and a collapsed lung,” uncorked her complaints.
I tried rolling my eyes. “Sat’s all?” Okay. Let me return to that dragon dream. “Vhat am I till do-ding dere?”
“A concussion.” She choked off a wail. “They say you were struck repeatedly in the head.”
“Zounds correct.”
“They told me the Yakuza stomped your chest and bludgeoned you repeatedly.” Her eyes focused on a distant object.
I tracked her gaze. Nothing but the walls of a tiny cubicle.
“What are you doing, Connor? Is your need to escape your children, your wife, the people who love you, so great?” She paused.
I turned to witness a teardrop run the length of her cheek.
“The beating you took didn't nick the liver. Fortunately.” Her wounded gaze searched for remorse. “Or unfortunately. I’m not sure what you expect anymore.”
I reached toward her hand. A blaze of lightening ignited my armpit, triggering a bundle of C4 stored in my brainpan.
“Punctured lung got you two units of blood,” Nansi was harping from a low angle.
“How you get into dat chair?” I growled in the voice of a drowning cat.
She leaned forward and began waa waa like a Charlie Brown adult at Christmas.
I floated to the ceiling, watching in blissful contentment while medical personnel pushed her behind the curtain and peered inside my skull with a pen light. Seeing her dash down the hall in tears from my high perch squeezed my soul so hard it yanked me right back to earth for a proper death.
* * *
Falkney showed up with an expression of internal joy.
“You’re still as ugly no matter how much they beat me,” I replied to his smugness.
He laughed. “You make me happy, Pierce. You’re proof of a god who takes care of my small jobs.”
“A new low, Senior Master Sergeant.”
The reminder of his unfulfilled destiny wrenched his smile into a pout. “I may hate you, Pierce, but you’re on my team. Nobody jacks with the team.” His pause had the choked sound of a tear. He grunted. “We’ll find your justice.”
My forehead wrinkled in pained bewilderment. “Yeah, well… thanks.” The word felt like peanut butter without jelly. “Chief.”
Falkney almost made it out the door on that note of camaraderie. “Whichever way you got your dumbass self into this, Connor, consider is it worth the trouble.” He was gone before my digital bird could catch him.
It made me angry that he was right. The possibility that he made nice to throw me off his scent flashed strong and bright. It made my ribs hurt more. My foggy brain tried to make sense of the notion. No chance. Mush spawns mush. I called for morphine and the pleasant nurse said no, thank you. I passed out.
A perverse but pleasant dream about Sharon startled me awake.
And there she was, smiling a lustrous come hither at me. Her dusty blonde tresses glimmered against the halogen backdrop.
“Hi, cowboy.”
My heart warmed. A smile formed on my lips and electricity tingled below my belly. Mental images of peeling her clothes away coalesced. I closed my eyes to engage the fantasy.
“Hey stranger,” Nansi said.
Her voice popped my eyes open and constricted my chest. A two-inch wide brush painted fire along my rib cage.
“I heard Connor had a bad encounter with a gang?” Sharon asked.
“He sometimes makes bad choices,” Nansi replied.
Sharon’s eyes widened. “Wow, Nanse. You don’t think he went looking for a beat down?”
Nansi squinted at me. “Looking? No. Connor is like a trouble magnet. Right, Husband?” Fire sparkled like diamond cutters around her irises.
“Seems so,” I said. A quick glance proved Sharon was, in fact, in my ICU cube. I had to assume she’d heard her husband discuss my fate. I’d feigned unconsciousness while he mused with his partner on the aberration of my involvement in two, unconnected high level cases. He handed the nurse a card with instructions to call when I woke. I imagined him waltzing in between them any second. As a person of interest in two ongoing investigations, I had no escape. No personal leaves. No TDYs. No boat trips to the outer islands. My head pounded like a kettledrum. The thump of my heart threatened to re-break my ribs.
My eyes opened to find the women gone. I must have passed out fearing Investigator Pasfield would find his wife at the bedside of her lover while chatting about his near death encounter with a Yakuza. Exhaling relief sent a bolt of anodized steel like a rocket from the ceiling through my chest and into the floor.
“Nurse!” I screamed while breaking the call button in my fist.
* * *
By the time the morphine wore off, Technical Sergeant Sledge had kicked in my curtain and taken my nurse hostage. She chattered at him and giggled over his Limey accent before tilting her chin and squeezing her breasts past his overly muscled chest.
“Got a suicide wish, Pierce?” he asked her twenty-something ass.
“You’re as funny as a stick in the mud,” I told the back of his head.
He faced me and let his odd Asian leer morph into a sinister accusation. “Did those gangsters have some idea you were involved in the murder of one of their girls?”
“If you’re trying to bait me, you’ll need a cleaner fly.”
He lightened the tone. “Notice anything specific about your attackers?”
“Big black sedan. Probably like your mother drives.”
He grimaced. “Sergeant Pierce. Sir.” The British twist granted him the vocal pretense a low-paid actor on the BBC. “You don’t maybe understand the pickle you’re in. Several factions of Yakuza operate on the island. Some play rough. Others play dirty.” His arm slithered toward my face. “Some has long arms that reaches into the dark,” he poured out with a thick cockney slur. His grin sent a chilling fire up my wounded side. “Maybe you got lucky and pissed off the nice ones.”
“Get to the point, Inspector Fowler.”
“Oy! A literate wrench monkey.” His eyes glittered. “Be assured, Sir Pierce, I’m no bumbling barrel of charm out to friend you into a confession. No, sir, I’m a different brand of law enforcement.” He stopped short. His powerful body straightened from the incline it had taken.
“And?”
Sledge’s head snapped through the dozen positions of a lost bird.
“Should I ask a nurse to find your pistol, Officer?”
Two seconds passed before his strange Asian stare caught hold of me again. “Oh, right, your partner is okay.”
I winced.
“Gets a daily tour of the island, between Camp Hansen’s brig and the Prefecture interrogation rooms.”
I tried gathering spit from my dry mouth.
“I’ll keep you posted. Don’t go nowhere.” He left with a satisfied guffaw.
I spat a feeble smudge into my water cup and pressed the nurse call.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“A TYPHOON IS coming,” Nansi said, her forehead wrinkled with irritation.
Three days after my release from that prison mislabeled a hospital, I hounded Nansi into a walk outside the base perimeter. We were finishing an argument that held up our takeoff time.
“I found the man’s wallet. I should get to keep the money.” Nansi’s insistence sharpened the intensity of her crystal blue irises.
“It’s twenty bucks for heaven sakes. Besides, we have the same deal whether or not you have a windfall.” Most of the energy for conflict had spilled onto the coral asphalt of Highway 329 near Kin Town.
“It’s my twenty bucks. I helped someone!” Her voice rose with the windup of Mushmouth’s number one engine. “Sharei kin, sharei kin,” she recited with a rhythmic bounce.
Putting on a stern-faced paternal mask, I measured out my scolding. “Nanse, you agreed that I would handle the money. Whether you earn it from time at the NCO Club…” I allocated a heartbeat for recognition of the subtle reference to her out-of-control gambling. “Or get it as a reward for returning somebody’s lost wallet, it’s still money. One of us has to handle it. We decided that was me.”
Her ivory china cheeks grew crimson. “That was before you invited the Yakuza into our living room!”
The power in her voice knocked a sting loose from one of my broken ribs. My face must have shown it.
“You win,” she said, flicking her fingers at me. “I won’t engage a wounded soldier.” She stalked into the kitchen.
I winked at the two sneaky pixies spying from behind the hallway’s corner wall. With a loud groan, I pushed free of the couch. “Let’s get this adventure rocking, guys.”
A drop in barometric pressure threatened to ruin my plan. But Nansi sensed the internal time bomb that had me jittery as a flea without a host.
We strolled the busy sidewalk after a hibachi dinner where I tore two stitches loose missing the chef’s shrimp toss. My children giggled themselves into a fit. I fought back tears. Now, stuffed beyond words, Quentin and I meandered behind Nansi guiding Penelope’s perambulator through a crowd. Okinawan shoppers and American tourists amped by the thrust of a late season typhoon flowed around us like water.
We ambled near the opening to a neon cave to avoid a gaggle of clingy Europeans. Pachinko balls rattled and pinged at a thousand beats a minute.
Quentin tugged against my grip.
“Nanse,” I yelled over the noise.
She jerked the buggy to a halt, corkscrewing with the agility of a medic in a battle zone.
My eyebrows pulled my mouth into an embarrassed oval. I stuttered. “The boy, the boy, Quentin. He wants to see the balls drop.” I gave her my best Harrison Ford.
Her eyes darkened. “The weather doesn’t care about your maddening desire for adventure.”
“This is your thing. I—”
Her pupils contracted down to pins.
“I mean.” My Indiana Jones grin slipped like wax in the desert. “He adores the clatter—”
Quentin broke his grip on my hand and rocketed toward the fascinating plinks and bloops of Asian gambling.
Hanging on had set my ribs afire. “Quentin!” The anguished sound failed to douse his curiosity.
“You let him go!” Nansi tripped a young GI spinning the buggy around. Penelope squealed her delight.
Quentin disappeared inside the parlor opening.
“The boy has discovered Pachinko,” I yelled with a tone of accusation. Racing toward the entrance with one arm holding the other, I bumped two intrigued Anglo-Saxons.
“My God, Connor, don’t lose him!”
“I’m not going to lose him,” I muttered to no one. The throb in my left side screamed at me for insisting on this family outing.
I expected to find him in the archway beyond the atrium, but he wasn’t there. I spun around, searching out shiny distractions that may have detoured his mission. Dashing to the counter, I peered over. He was nowhere in the large outer room.
“Where is he?” Nansi shouted from behind.
A glance told me both my girls’ emotions were coming undone. My heart pounded so hard it hurt my teeth. “He’s right here,” I lied. Bounding into the raucous inner chamber, I searched every row of maniacs tapping their levers toward financial freedom.
The boy was nowhere.
“Shit.” I squeezed down two lines of players to the end and scanned the back wall. Shoving back up the line, I tapped each gambler. “You seen a little blond kid?”
The first five shrugged me off. Number six was a British guy who turned on me. “Push off, wanker,” he barked.
I grabbed his collar and pulled him half off his stool. “I lost my fucking kid.”
His hands extended high and wide. “They don’t allow kids, mate. I’ve not seen a kid.”
My heart threatened to burst. I released him without apology.
Nansi ran into my shins with Penelope’s buggy. “Where is he, Connor?”
Penelope wailed. “Daddy!”
Nansi’s face was sheet white and gaping. She bounced the baby stroller against me. “My God, Connor! You lost him? You lost our precious son?”
I turned to gawk at a machine very similar to the one that stole our life savings from my wife. I had failed to protect her. My routine created her compulsion. Me and Mushmouth flying to exotic
locales while she remained grounded and nursing loneliness. Desperate for validation.
Tiny silver balls danced their way to earth through a maze of spinners, steel pins and bumpers. The mesmerizing noise may have had more to do with the compulsion to play than a potential win.
My fist smashed into its unrelenting metal sidewall. The resulting pain did nothing to help.
Quentin was gone. And it was my fault.
* * *
Patrons lugged their precious tubs of steel balls around our trauma. Averted eyes dismissed Nansi and I clinging to our remaining child. Typhoon winds kicked Penelope’s stroller against the wall like an angry bronco penned for its next ride. Gusts of that anger whipped our feet and clawed at our legs each time the door opened as a desperate pachi puro fled with perfumes or trinkets in search of the kankinjo to make their trade for cash. The unperturbed hopefuls resisted, rotating shooter knobs with a precision governed by a bewitched abandon to the cascade of metal teardrops, ignoring shouts of “nige runda” or “dete ike” from baton wielding police officers.
I wanted to shout at them, too. The cacophony of plings and bings in disharmony with rising and falling pentatonic note patterns had stolen my son. But I remained locked in place, my mind filled with a swirling mixture of trails my boy might have taken and ways to burn the place down.
Two local police officers spoke in low tones with a Security Policeman from the base. The bob of the SP’s goofy head and wide-mouthed grin mocked the locals’ serious Andy Griffith nods. Repetition of syllables revealed their failure to comprehend one another.
Their nonsensical attempt at solving this crime overloaded my torso with barometric pressure from the storm. A scream pushed its way into my throat cavity. I held it against the roof of my mouth, ticking off the disappearing seconds. Somehow, it contained the vacuum within my chest. If I let it go, my body would implode leaving a mass of blood and guts and worthless shit on the floor in my place.
Murder On The East China Sea Page 6