by KJ Charles
“Like walking into a door, at normal speed, and it always seems to hurt far too much.”
“Right. Okay, try again, and put some muscle into it this time.”
I tried a few times, getting the hang of it, Chanko repeating instructions. Snap the wrist, aim beyond the target, keep my eyes on the target, not the black metal striking tip.
On the fifth go, I ripped the cushion in half.
“Good,” he said, as I stared at the leaking foam filling. “Now put it in your bag and keep it there, and use it when you need it. I gotta finish lunch.”
Chapter Ten
I put the horrible thing in my bag, sorted out my new identities and hung up my clothes in the spare bedroom, while Chanko produced really good yakisoba noodles. I brought some up to Yoshi and Taka. They were working now, barking incomprehensibly at one another, with hands flying over the keyboards and a lot of bad language.
With nothing useful to do, Chanko and I sat in the LDK, talking tactics. I thought the fallback plan was the first one I’d had: that Minachan, Sonja and I would hit Roppongi. Chanko didn’t agree.
“Dumb idea. Too many gaijin. Not enough time.”
“Well, what’s your backup plan if the airline thing doesn’t lead anywhere?”
“How are the guys getting on with that, anyway?”
I made a face at him. “No idea. I asked, but they just gave me a lot of computer talk I couldn’t understand.”
“Thought you were meant to be good at languages.”
“Yeah, well. It’s all Geek to me.”
“Jesus,” he muttered. “Stop giggling, you should be ashamed of—”
I’d seen Chanko move fast a few times, faster than looked possible for someone of his size and bulk, but this time he left me gasping. As Taka’s shriek cut through the air, he was up and through the living room door while I was still spilling coffee over myself. The whole house actually shook as he pounded up the stairs in three long strides, and I heard the slam of a door flying open and bouncing off the wall.
I ran after him. I didn’t stop to think what I would do if they were in the house, or where they were coming from. I just knew where I felt safest, and it was right behind Chanko.
Currently, that meant just outside the study door, where his back was eloquently expressing irritation.
“Well then, what was the screaming about, you girl?” he demanded.
“Look at this, look at this!” I was sure Taka was bouncing in his chair, though Chanko was blocking my view. “I am the emperor of the net! I am the Information King! Bow down and worship!”
“Shut up, Taka,” said everyone, and I shoved at Chanko to get out of the way and let me see what all the fuss was about.
“We’ve got it,” Yoshi announced with barely suppressed glee.
I sat down abruptly. I’d been so sure it wouldn’t work.
“Kelly? You got Kelly?” Chanko demanded.
“Pin-pon!” said Taka cheerfully, as though he’d got a quiz show question right. “Hollister, Kelly. Economy class, booked last Thursday. No-show for the 2240 flight on Saturday—”
“And seventeen other no-shows on the flight,” said Yoshi. “Isn’t that absurd. I’ve never missed a plane.” The screen in front of him showed the short list, first and last names, and we all clustered around, peering.
“Five Japanese names, we can lose those.”
“Guy might be American Japanese.”
“I’ll bet he’s not,” I said.
“Keep the names and check last?”
Four more were women. That left us with eight males, all of whom had surnames that could be American.
“Now what?” I asked.
“Let’s take a look at the customer information. They might have addresses registered, for air miles and stuff.” Yoshi clicked rapidly through a few screens. “Okay, here we go. This is an address in New Jersey, that’s in America, right? Presumably we’re looking for a man in Japan?”
“Depends how long he’s been here and if he’s changed his details.”
“Umph. Let’s just look at everything.” Not all the passengers had details on the system, which could mean someone else had booked them in, or not.
Taka drummed his fingers irritably. “New York. London. New York. Don’t any of them have addresses in Tokyo? Shit. Let’s check the Japanese.”
One of the Japanese guys had a billing address in the States, but it was for a company. All the rest of them were booked through Japanese businesses. “That’s got to be a no,” said Yoshi. “Surely he wouldn’t be doing this through a company? Or if he was employed?”
Five of the eight non-Japanese men had been booked into business class, but we couldn’t decide if that meant anything. We all glowered at the screen till Yoshi snapped his fingers and started checking when they had flown in. All of the business people had arrived in the last week, mostly in the last few days. We knew Widow’s Peak had been in Tokyo at least three times in the last month, and we all believed he’d been here throughout. None of us could imagine someone wealthy, someone employable, someone who had time apart to think, getting involved in the hothouse Bonnie-and-Clyde scheme Kelly had pulled.
We couldn’t find recent arrival dates for three no-shows: Alexander Kinnear, Gregory Lefkowitz, Michael Hearn. One of them was most likely our man. Unless all of our ideas were wrong, of course.
“He’s living in Tokyo. Is he illegal? Subletting? Or could we find him if you could get into the immigration systems?”
“Dream on,” Taka told me.
“How about flights out?” Chanko asked. “Who’s gone, who’s still here?”
“Give it a try,” said Yoshi, fingers dancing over the keyboard. “Oh, come on, give it up for me…you beauty. Kinnear-san flew out on Sunday morning, he got a standby ticket to New York. Actually, that doesn’t tell us anything, does it? The others could have gone on different carriers.”
“Crap. You’re right. If he’s Kinnear, he’s gone. If not, who knows.”
It looked like a dead end after all. I sat back down, leaning against the wall, feeling the excitement ebb away. I’d hoped so much…
But they were only just starting. Yoshi sat hunched forward with his face set in a scowl of concentration; Taka leaned back, his long, skinny arms dangling; and they both locked themselves into the glowing screens, in a constant rhythm of tapping and cursing, suggestions and arguments, brainwaves that petered out, then mutated into new ideas.
This wasn’t my world. I got out of the fetid atmosphere before my brain fuzzed up completely, and was trying out my new brown contact lenses, turning Japanese with a straight shoulder-length wig, when Minachan rang.
“Moshi-moshi.”
“Hey, how’s it going? You got the film?”
“Yeah. We’ve worked it out. There’s all sorts of stuff happening now, so it was really useful.”
“Yeah, you sound excited,” she said. “What’s up?”
“I don’t know if it’s going to get us anywhere. And if it doesn’t, I don’t know what to do next.”
We talked about the Roppongi plan a bit. She was cautiously pessimistic.
“I mean, sure, if we had time… Look, I’ve got a couple of punters I could talk to, you know? Well-connected people. Couldn’t we try to get protection for Nori-chan that way?”
“We could, I guess, but I don’t want this to lead back to you. We’re all in enough trouble as it is.”
“You got that right,” she said. “Did you see Yukie yesterday?”
“I didn’t see anyone. That was kind of the point. What about her?”
Minachan sighed. “You know that bastard Oguya?”
“Who?”
“Oguya Hiroyuki? That bull-necked goon who was her ex-boyfriend or whatever? She had bruises all up the insides of her legs yesterday. Made me sick.”
“Oh God.”
“Well—this is disgusting. Yukie’s scared of mice, you know? And Jun kind of swept them into the little boxroom last night to
get them out of the way? Well, Oguya shut her in there with them. Sonja heard her screaming, banging on the door. He was leaning against it, she said. Laughing.”
“That’s revolting,” I said blankly. “That’s insane.”
“Sonja went crazy,” Minachan said. “She threw a chair at him. Missed, but he wasn’t very pleased, and I wouldn’t want to make an enemy of that piece of shit. Poor Yukie. She was so scared. She’d wet herself, she was so scared. And he laughed.”
I felt sick with guilt. I hadn’t picked the mice, and I hadn’t remembered she was scared of them if I’d ever known, and I hadn’t locked her in a dark little hole full of them, and the guilt was still twisting and churning inside me.
“Is she okay?” I asked. “Is Sonja?”
“Sonja, sure. If she stays away from him. Yukie, no. Not even slightly. She won’t talk to anyone. I wish she’d just run away, but she won’t.”
“Yeah, running away worked for me,” I said. “She’s got family here.”
Minachan let a breath hiss through her teeth, more eloquent than any obscenity she could have come up with. “I know. Have you heard how Nori-chan is?”
There was a bellow from above. “Kerry, get your ass in here!”
I hurried upstairs, promising Minachan I’d call her back, and ran into the study, where Yoshi was at a computer with Chanko peering over his shoulder. He was leaning on the back of Yoshi’s swivel chair, and Yoshi’s feet were braced against the wall to stop it moving.
“What?”
“Is this her?”
I stared at the screen. Kelly stared back. Young, no more than eighteen or nineteen. The picture couldn’t have been more than five years old, and I wondered what had happened in the intervening time to make her face so hard and closed. She was freshly pretty then, not sexy, with her hair bouncing in bright curls around her head, smiling like a small-town beauty queen, which was what she was, I realised, noticing the sash she wore.
And next to her, a tall young man, a couple of years older, with wide shoulders and a proud, possessive arm round Kelly. A square-jawed, good-looking chap, with a crew cut that didn’t disguise his hairline, already starting to go.
“Ack!” I choked, gesturing at the widow’s peak.
“Sure is,” said Chanko, with immense satisfaction. “And check the caption.”
It was the Hollister family website, it seemed, amateurishly designed and apparently not updated for over four years, according to the dateline. The captions were all jokey and full of exclamation marks. This one read: Mike on leave from the Marines—a girl in every port!!!
“Michael Hearn, come on down,” said Chanko softly.
“Got him.” Taka was rocking in his chair and flexing his long fingers. “And if we only have to work on one name—”
“We’ll take him apart,” agreed Yoshi.
“Great,” I said. “Have we heard about Noriko today? How she is?”
Yoshi put a hand to his mouth. “I haven’t called the hospital,” he muttered, looking stricken. “I got caught up…”
“They’d have called you if there was any change.” I hoped that was true.
“I’m going to ring.”
“Go for it,” Taka said. “I’ll call the guys looking after her, then start on the gaijin. Hearn-san,” he corrected himself as Chanko gave him a look. “Let’s see if he’s still in Tokyo, for a start. It’ll take a while to check the planes, but…” He reached for a phone.
Chanko jerked his head at me, and we went downstairs.
He didn’t say anything at first, just drummed heavy fingers on the worktop. I started to put on some coffee, and finally, almost reluctantly, he spoke.
“Butterfly, looks like we may get this guy. You gotta think about that. What then?”
“Depends on what he does.” I spooned coffee into the filter paper. “I mean, if we can, you know, persuade him to hand over the briefcase, that’s it, isn’t it?”
“No, it’s not. There’s still the old dead guy. The yaks’ll want to know where you got the case. You tell them it was Hearn, they’ll want to find him. You give them Hearn, they’ll kill him.”
“We could give him a head start, a warning—”
“They’ve still got Kelly. Same applies to her.”
“If she’s still alive.” I added two more spoons of coffee, forgot how many I’d already put in, gave up and slapped my hand on the worktop. “Crap. I didn’t think this through, did I? I thought—shit.”
“You thought you could give them Kelly and Hearn.”
“Yeah. I did. Except now that it might actually happen, I’m not sure I can. But what about us? What about Yoshi and Noriko? Who says I have to protect Kelly and her stupid seppo boyfriend at my friends’ expense?”
“Put the spoon down, you’re getting coffee grounds everywhere. Nobody’s telling you to do anything. What’s a seppo?”
“Septic tank. Yank. Rhyming slang. British.”
He looked blank. “Okay.”
I leaned forward, elbows on the worktop, hands propping up my head. “I can’t do this, Chanko. I can’t be all over the place like this. I actually forget about Noriko—we all do—and then I remember. We look like we could find this guy, and then I can’t work out what will happen if we do. One minute something seems important and the next I almost forget, and—I can’t live like this. I need to know what’s happening, not to just be flailing in the dark, not knowing what’s going on around me.”
“Hey.” He came up behind me, and I felt a heavy hand on my shoulder. “Come on. You’re doing great. Jeez, this weekend you were running from the mob with no idea what was going on, now you’re—”
“Brewing coffee,” I interrupted. “I’m doing nothing. Yoshi and Taka can do their computer stuff, and Minachan and Sonja are right in the thick of it, and you can take on the yakuza three to one and win, and I’m just waiting for things to happen and people to tell me stuff—”
“Bullshit. You think I’d be here if it wasn’t for you?”
I twisted round and looked up at his face. He put his hands on the counter, either side of me, leaning down slightly, very close. It could have felt like being trapped. It didn’t.
“You’ve got brown eyes,” he rumbled softly. “I like the blue better.”
“I can change them.”
“Not now.”
My head was craned right back and, infuriatingly, my neck was starting to hurt. “Do you have to be so tall?” I whispered, half giggling.
“I’m not tall. You’re short.” Then, quite suddenly, he scooped me up, and I found myself sitting on the worktop, with his hands still on my waist.
I wanted to touch. I reached out a hand, brushing his thick black hair unnecessarily back from his forehead, ran a finger lightly down the side of his angled face and along his jawbone. He gave a very low groan, and his hands moved upward, then I heard rapid footsteps on the stairs, and the world came flooding back.
I was hopping down from the countertop when Yoshi came in. He looked set-faced, angrily unhappy.
“Yoshi?”
“I called the hospital. No change,” he said. “I mean, I guess that’s good. The bleeding isn’t worse. She isn’t dying yet. Oh, damn it, we shouldn’t have moved her, Kechan, I know we shouldn’t!”
“We had to.”
“I know.” He kicked at the wall. “I want to go and see her.”
“Me too.” I made myself add, “I’ve got her luck.”
“Her omamori? You? What have you got that for?”
“She gave it to me when I started running. I want her to have it back.”
“We’ll go,” said Yoshi, as Taka came down. “Taka, we need to go to the hospital—”
“Forget it.” Taka sounded grim. “My guys said the place is crawling with police, but…they saw some goons too.”
“They’re coming for her. Shit. Oh, shit, we have to go.” Yoshi shoved to get past Taka, who moved into his way and grasped his arm.
“Get off me!”<
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“You’re not going, kid.”
“Noriko’s in danger!” Yoshi screamed at him, tugging at his arm. “We have to go.”
“What are you going to do, Yoshi-san?” Chanko used the polite form, which I’d started to doubt he knew. It took some of the sting out of the words, although not enough. “There’s police there. Taka’s guys. You can’t help her by getting caught.”
“I can’t help her by sitting here either!”
“Yes, you can,” I said. “You can get back up there and find that son of a bitch Hearn, and we can get this bloody bag and make them leave Noriko alone. Okay? Okay, Yoshi?”
“I’ll get someone to call in a threat to her, stir them up a bit,” Taka said. “Come on, kiddo. We’re close now. Another hour, maybe. We’ll get him.”
Yoshi shut his eyes and took a deep breath, then stepped back from Taka. “Sorry,” he mumbled. “I just…sorry.”
“We’ll get the bag and we’ll get her luck back to her,” I called after him as he set off back upstairs, head low. “I promise.”
“What is this luck thing?” Chanko demanded, and I fished it out of my bag to show him.
“Omamori, see? You know, you pay five hundred yen at a temple and get one for exam success or against traffic accidents. Haven’t you got one?” His expression said no. “Well, Noriko’s had this one for years. It’s to bring her good luck.”
“Yeah? You think it works?”
They got Hearn about twenty minutes after that.
It was another kind of social engineering. Yoshi had gone back to the online booking Hearn had made for his and Kelly’s unused escape flight, and plucked out Hearn’s user login and password, as well as noting the guy’s full name. The odds, Taka said, were heavily in favour of Hearn using the same password much of the time, and so they had sat methodically entering michaelhearn, hearnmichael, mikehearn and a bunch of other variations, plus the password, over and over again, into all the American websites from which Hearn might have bought stuff.