Durarara!!, Vol. 10

by Ryohgo Narita

  Aoba replied to this counter-taunt with his first grin of the conversation.

  “…I wouldn’t do that if I were you, Bro.”

  “What?”

  “He isn’t… The Dollars aren’t the kind of people you can deal with. You’ll only wind up back in prison. Also, my nose is starting to hurt.”

  “…”

  Izumii’s teeth creaked with the force of his jaws, but a moment later, he wore the same wicked smile as before. “You gettin’ the wrong idea? It ain’t that kind of introduction I’m talkin’ about.”

  “Huh?” Aoba grunted, eyebrow raised. Izumii released his face and flicked the bridge of his nose instead. “Ooh!”

  When Aoba looked up again, holding his stinging nose, Izumii had turned his back to his little brother and was walking toward the crosswalk, where the traffic light was red again.

  “I’m one of the Dollars now, too…so I gotta go and pay my respects to the leader, even if he’s younger than me. Ain’t that how it works? It’s more fun to be the palanquin bearers in an organization than the guy sitting in the throne on top.”

  “…”

  “It was thanks to you that I figured that out, Aoba.”

  Izumii walked across the street, completely ignoring the honking of the cars that had to stop or swerve to avoid him.

  If only he’d get run over, Aoba thought, a rather violent idea to have about his own family member. “Well…you’re a bit better than you were before, Bro.”

  But he knew that these words would be drowned out by the honking. Underneath the hand holding his smarting nose, the boy’s mouth opened into a wide smile.

  “I can’t wait until the day I crush you…and the one who’s backing you.”

  That night, Tokyo

  “That’s all, then. See you soon, Kyouhei.”

  “Good night.”

  Kadota said his good-byes to the other contractors and left the construction site, where he worked as a plasterer on a remodeling job. With his work shift over, he headed down the asphalt, which was still warm with the heat of the summer.

  Nothing’s happened since then… Kida sure talked a big game, though.

  As he walked, eyes and feet following the shadow the streetlights cast from his body, Kadota thought back on his meeting with Masaomi Kida in the sushi restaurant a few days earlier.

  “Will you leave the Dollars…and lend your help to my team, the Yellow Scarves?”

  “…”

  Kadota met Masaomi’s plea with silence, sipping his tea. The younger boy never broke his gaze. “Kida.”

  “Yes?”

  “Let me ask you something first. Do you think we’re the kind of people…who would turn our backs on the Dollars and switch allegiance to a different gang with smiles on our faces?”

  “Then let me ask: Do you think I would actually come to people like you to ask for something like that?”

  “…Fair point.” Kadota shrugged, then tried a different tack. “Then setting aside the question of why us, let me just ask: What are you going to do?”

  “I’m thinking of crushing the Dollars real quick,” Masaomi admitted.

  Togusa nearly spat out his tea. “Whoa, whoa, whoa, you make that sound so easy.”

  Yumasaki added, “Yeah, Kida, that doesn’t make sense. That big fight half a year ago with the slasher and stuff sorta got swept under the rug, but I thought it was all agreed that there wasn’t any evidence, and that was that. Horada got arrested, and we destroyed the last illusion of the Blue Squares. Happily ever after.”

  He spoke to the younger boy the same way he did to Kadota—as an equal.

  Kida gripped his knees and said, “I want…to help someone.”

  Kadota thought for a second and hazarded a guess. “Ryuugamine?”

  “…”

  He took the silence for confirmation and continued, “I don’t get it. I can tell he’s pretty deep in the Dollars, and given how close he is with the Headless Rider, I guess it’s clear he occupies a pretty odd position in all of this…but what does that have to do with crushing the Dollars?”

  “How much do you know about the Headless Rider, Kadota?”

  “Huh? Um…a bit.”

  As a matter of fact, Kadota knew that the Headless Rider was living in the apartment of a former acquaintance from high school, and he attended a hot-pot party there once—but he decided that bringing them into this situation wasn’t fair, so he chose not to divulge the details.

  “But I want you to answer my question first,” he said. “If you’re worried about him, you should just tell him to quit the Dollars yourself. Or why not just invite him to the Yellow Scarves rather than us?”

  “…”

  “Listen, I happen to think that kids like him are better off not getting involved with street gangs in the first place. I bet he’d at least hear you out if you told him your concerns.”

  This was all fairly sensible, but Masaomi only dug his fingers harder into his knees. “I…I can’t do that.”

  “What?”

  “I’m sorry. I can’t tell you more than that,” Masaomi stated.

  Surprised, Kadota took another sip of tea and said, “So…do I have this right? You can’t tell me why, but you want to destroy the Dollars. And you want us to join the Yellow Scarves?”

  “That’s accurate.”

  “And do you really think there’s any kind of honor in that?”

  “No, sir, I don’t. So I can’t just beg or force you to join the Yellow Scarves. But at the very least, I hope you’ll leave the Dollars.”

  Kadota decided that the boy was not joking or crazy but making a very serious request. He put on a stern face. “So you came here to tell me to do something you know is wrong?”

  “What I’m about to do is wrong, I admit. But my coming here is with the intention of doing it right.”

  “What?”

  “I owe you so many things, I can’t even begin to count them, Kadota. So if I end up really getting into it with the Dollars, I was hoping that if possible I at least wouldn’t need to mess with you guys.”

  “If possible”…meaning he’s willing to throw down against us if it comes to that, Kadota realized. He could see it in Masaomi’s gaze as much as his words. He closed his eyes and said nothing.

  Then Masaomi added, “Don’t you think the Dollars are acting strange lately?”

  “…”

  “I’m not saying it’s true of all of them, but they’ve been beefing with gangs from Saitama and running purges on others within the group who got carried away and so on. The rumors are bad.”

  These were all things Kadota had felt for himself. But there was still something missing, something that made Masaomi’s accusations fall short of total believability. Choosing to be cautious, he said, “The Dollars’ official colors are transparent. In other words, they can fit in with any other color. On the other hand, if anyone’s pulling some weak bullshit, others in the gang are gonna speak up about it. Probably depends on the details, though.”

  “And what if there was a clear, direct reason why they’re acting strange?”

  “?” Kadota appeared confused.

  Masaomi continued, “What if I told you…that guys wearing shark-tooth bandannas and ski caps are infiltrating the Dollars?”

  “…!”

  Shark-themed bandannas and ski caps—that could mean only one thing to Kadota.

  The Blue Squares.

  That was the blue-repping gang that Kadota had belonged to once. It was an odd group; hardly anyone inside the gang actually saw others wearing those shark bandannas—neither Kadota’s circle nor Horada and his goons.

  “What if I said it seems like what happened to the Yellow Scarves half a year ago is happening to the Dollars this time?”

  “…And you think Ryuugamine’s got something to do with it?”

  “Sorry, I can’t say that for certain yet. But…when I’m able to speak about it later, I promise you I’ll reveal everything I know.”
>
  “…”

  Masaomi was going to great lengths to protect his secrets, the look in his eyes told Kadota. He considered this for a while, and Yumasaki and Togusa were considerate enough not to speak in the meantime.

  “…Give me a few days to think this over. If this is going to involve the rest of these guys, I can’t just take your statements at face value and leap into action. We’ll have to do a little research of our own.”

  Personally, Kadota decided he could trust Masaomi in this situation. However, it was still possible Masaomi was only saying what he believed was true and was being manipulated by someone else with sinister aims. And there was at least one person Kadota could think of who would do something like that.

  “All right. That’s all I wanted to say,” Masaomi said. He thanked them and got to his feet. He turned away from Kadota’s group, then swung back and said, “But if you decide you’re going to be our enemy…”

  “Then what?”

  Masaomi broke the nervous atmosphere with a troubled smile. “Well, I guess I’ll have to find a way to make sure we don’t come face-to-face.”

  The older guys were surprised by the innocence in Masaomi’s face.

  The boy shrugged. “Honestly, I don’t expect I could match you guys in a fair fight.” Then he headed to the counter, said a few words to Denis and Simon, and left the building.

  When he was completely out of sight, Togusa and Yumasaki shared a glance.

  “…What was that about?”

  “I don’t know, but that last part reminded me of him about a year ago. When he was hanging around with Mikado.”

  Kadota muttered to himself, “If he’s really going to crush them, he could’ve just gone ahead and sprung a surprise rather than tell us.” He sighed, only to smirk a moment later. “What a softy.”

  “You haven’t been talking much today, Yumasaki.”

  “Hey, I’m just being considerate in my own way. Plus, without Karisawa, there’s no one to pick up my comments…”

  “Well, that’s unavoidable. I don’t understand half the shit you talk about,” said Togusa, who was holding the conversation with Yumasaki now that Kadota was thinking in silence. It was as though they were trying to confirm that the recent scene had been as strange as it seemed at first.

  “Honestly, I wish you both would study up on the classics, Kadota and Togusa.”

  “Us?! Whoa, wait, you’re saying that’s our fault?!”

  Then a deep voice from the counter cut them off. “You were lucky.”

  “Hmm?” Kadota looked over at Denis, the head chef, who was rinsing off his fish-cutting knife. He eyed the edge of the blade first, then Kadota next.

  “If you’d made things any more uncomfortable in here, I’d have put another mark in that pillar.”

  “P…please, boss, let’s save the threats,” Togusa said with a shrug. But the cold sweat running down his cheeks was a sign that he knew Denis wasn’t making idle threats.

  Denis served a few pieces of nigiri sushi to people at the counter, then added, “Well, maybe the kid spoke that way knowing how I’d react. He’s a tougher customer than I took him for.”

  For a Russian, his Japanese was quite fluent. “One more thing, he paid for your meals. Probably in return for the time you guys paid for his.”

  “Wha…? When did he do that?!”

  “When you moved seats over there. It ended up being a bit short, but I can keep that on his tab,” Denis said. He favored his longtime customers with a very rare grin. “He probably wants to minimize any kind of favors still owed. He’s fixing to be your enemy soon.”

  “…”

  “I don’t know the details, nor do I care to pry…but the kid’s got his mind made up, that’s for sure.”

  Made up his mind, Kadota thought, remembering the conversation at Russia Sushi a few days prior as he walked. And nothing’s happened since then.

  Kadota had tried to track down information on his own, and it did indeed seem that things had been strange in the Dollars recently. Some who’d been using the Dollars’ name to perform stickups were getting attacked now.

  The whole point of the Dollars was that people who had no connection to the street gang lifestyle could take part for fun. If anyone could join, that included scumbags. So it was only natural that some would get involved eventually.

  In the last few months, others had taken it upon themselves to hunt these miscreants, which had become a thriving trade. But it was quite excessive for a simple cleansing process, a fact that Kadota found unnerving. What had put the deepest furrow in Kadota’s brow today was the revelation that the ones undertaking this internal purge were wearing shark-themed blue bandannas and ski caps.

  Up to this point, it’s all been as Kida claimed. But how does it tie in to Ryuugamine? I’ll admit that the last time I saw him, he was acting a bit weird, Kadota thought, remembering how Mikado had approached him with a sparkle in his eyes and claimed that he was the ideal member of the Dollars. Ryuugamine’s fixation on the Dollars is off somehow. And I can’t just claim that it’s this way because he’s got connections to the Headless Rider and Izaya Orihara.

  While Kadota often found himself helping others, he didn’t want to step any further than necessary into their private business. He’d never had a single ounce of curiosity about Mikado Ryuugamine’s personal connections or past. But if he was going to be central to this matter, that would change things a bit.

  At the same time, Kadota recalled another thing he heard six months ago.

  “‘So, Kadota,’ Horada says to me, ‘all that’s left is to cook this Ryuugane guy.’ All I wanna know is, who’s Ryuugane?”

  That had been a fellow Dollars member who infiltrated the Yellow Squares along with him during the war with Horada. They’d been careful to keep their distance from Horada during the operation, to avoid being recognized, but the one person who got closest managed to overhear what Horada was talking about.

  “And when Kida showed up, he said, ‘I’ll use you to get access to the Dollars’ boss, Mi…Mi…Mi-something.’ You got any ideas about who Mi-something might be?”

  At the time, Horada was recruiting people to the factory for the purpose of destroying the boss of the Dollars. Kadota’s group blended in among them, but they never actually found out who the Dollars’ boss was supposed to be.

  But he had a guess.

  He’d always suspected that Mikado Ryuugamine occupied some important position within the Dollars, so hearing these details from his companion made it pretty easy to connect the dots and suspect that Mikado had a part in the founding of the group. He knew Izaya Orihara, too, so Kadota wasn’t naive enough to assume he was simply a high school friend of Masaomi’s who got wrapped up in trouble over his head.

  On the other hand, Kadota always liked the Dollars’ lack of a leader, so he chose not to dig deeper into the matter. He never asked Mikado about any of it.

  After hearing Masaomi Kida’s story, that half-forgotten suspicion came back as a surefire certainty. Ryuugamine’s the boss…although it still doesn’t seem possible to me…

  No matter the circumstantial evidence, Kadota had met and spoken with Mikado Ryuugamine on multiple occasions, and it just wasn’t that easy to accept. If anything, Mikado seemed like the kind of utterly normal person who would never come into contact with the world of gangs and motorcycles in his entire life.

  It was better that the Dollars didn’t have a boss, and it was better that he didn’t know anything about it. That was why, during the war with the motorcycle gang from Saitama, he had answered the question of who the Dollars’ boss was with a firm “No idea.” If asked the same question under present circumstances, he might not be quite so forceful in his answer.

  In order to prevent the Dollars and Yellow Scarves from fighting, he would have to make contact with Mikado, he realized. He tried calling the phone number he’d received from the boy on an earlier occasion but never got through. Yumasaki and Karisawa tried, too, to
no success.

  Oh well. Guess I can try Kishitani and the Headless Rider tomorrow.

  He’d gotten his helpful streak from his parents, and Kadota was making full use of it to solve the problem of Masaomi Kida and Mikado Ryuugamine.

  “Guess I’ll do whatever I can…since it’s not like this doesn’t affect me, either,” he muttered. He sensed car headlights approaching from behind and moved farther to the side of the road.

  Just like always. There was no mistake in his actions.

  Sadly, he was unaware of the irony that was about to befall him.

  For inside the car, the passenger in the front seat commanded…

  “Run him over.”

  It was the exact same thing Kadota had told Togusa to do when they had saved Anri from the slasher so long ago.

  If any part of this was not entirely fate playing some cosmic joke, it was that Kadota was not a culprit like the slasher but just a purely innocent pedestrian.

  The road was very narrow, but the car’s engine blazed.

  When he noticed something was wrong, it was already too late.

  An instant before he could turn around—

  * * *

  Shock.

  Roar.

  And then……darkness.

  Thirty minutes later, Karisawa’s apartment, Tokyo

  “I see. So you haven’t seen Miikyun recently, either, Anri.”

  “No. He said he’d be out of touch while he went back home…”

  There were around five women in Erika Karisawa’s apartment at the moment, busying themselves with sewing and examining very thick magazines with highlighters. They were working on cosplay outfits for a big summer event and checking the participating groups in the guide catalog.

  But while the others were busy, Karisawa was already finished with her preparation. She sat in the corner of the room with Anri Sonohara. A few days ago, she’d asked Anri if she wanted to try cosplaying, and Anri, with little natural defense against peer pressure, gave in and visited her apartment.