by KJ Charles
I wished Chanko were here. In a handful of days, I’d got used to his presence, not precisely comforting, but always there, and always, unquestionably on my side. I didn’t know how I was going to carry on without it.
I would not think about that I don’t care, back in the subway station. He wasn’t going to take some insane risk. He’d said there was going to be a later.
But if he was intent on bringing Sonja back to me…
If Sonja got out of this alive, I was going to kill her.
It was a lovely crisp morning. I looked out of the window at the deep-pink blossom of a plum tree, petals sticking to the twisted black boughs against a cloudless sky, and as I looked I started to understand something that I’d never quite appreciated. The rage for Noriko and Sonja and Minachan, the sick fear for Yoshi and Chanko: they were burning in my gut, but the plum blossom was still perfectly, transiently beautiful. This was why castles built for bloody siege had to have curved roofs and moon-viewing platforms, why a besieging feudal lord would come within bowshot of the castle walls to listen to an accomplished flute player within, and get an arrow in the chest for his pains. Maybe you didn’t really get the plum blossom until you had the war.
I was sitting in the LDK, thinking about it, when the back door exploded open.
It was a maelstrom of noise. Flying glass and splintering wood, and the door thudding back against the wall, and the roaring, thick-necked man charging through it, and my screams. I flung myself up from the floor cushion, losing crucial fractions of a second, hurled myself along the hallway, scrabbled at the front door, still screaming, trying to pull it open, but the fucking chain was on and—
And there was cold metal at my neck.
“Shut up, bitch. Turn round.”
I turned. I couldn’t do anything else.
He had cropped hair, a round head on a meaty neck, and marks all over his face. One eye was swelling, and his thin lips were distended and purple. The beating looked raw and very recent. There was a gun in his hand, and he stroked the muzzle against my face, down the side of my cheek.
“Fucking bitch,” he said softly, and punched me in the breast.
I had no idea how much that would hurt. I was gasping, staggering backwards, bumping painfully into the locked door, and he grabbed me by the throat and forced my head back against the wood, hard.
“Who’s in the house, bitch?”
“Nobody,” I choked, hating the tears of pain that were spilling down my cheeks.
“If you’re lying to me, I’ll cut your tits off.”
“Nobody.”
He jerked at my neck, so I came staggering forward, and grabbed my arm, twisting it up behind my back, then shoved me along, nudging the muzzle of the gun under the hem of my sweater, against my skin.
“Let’s take a look.”
The only rooms on the ground floor were the LDK and the bathroom. He checked the toilet first, glancing inside. Then he pushed back the sliding door to the wet-room and stepped in, dragging me with him.
The bath cover had been slid back to halfway position, showing it was empty of anything but water. The surface was smooth and still.
Oguya—it had to be—glanced briefly around the empty room and shoved me back out, hard, so that I stumbled and he got to pull on my arm. The muscles at my shoulder screamed.
“Upstairs,” he ordered me.
The bedrooms were upstairs. I couldn’t move for a second, and he jammed a knuckle into the small of my back, twisting hard. “Go!”
He changed his tactics when I reached the top of the stairs, grabbing me with his arm round my neck instead, so that I was a human shield in front of him. He had the gun out in his other hand.
“If you don’t come out, I’ll kill her,” he called out, almost singsong.
“There isn’t—” I began, and he grabbed the hair on the back of my head and pulled, viciously.
“Shut up, whore. Move.”
He threw open Taka’s bedroom door first, the two futons still haphazardly out on the floor in a riot of bedding. Then the second bedroom, mine and Chanko’s.
I hadn’t folded the futons away this morning. It hadn’t seemed worth it. But I had straightened the quilt, over the two mattresses together, so the double bed was ready for use.
Oguya made a little noise in his throat. He pressed his face into the back of my neck and licked upward, his hot tongue slithering wetly into my hair and over the side of my face.
“Just wait, bitch,” he said into my ear. “You’ll get yours soon.”
He shoved me round, threw open the last door, to the study, and stared.
“What’s this?”
“Computers.”
“Computers.” Oguya pushed me, hard, releasing my neck and sticking one foot out in front of mine so I stumbled and fell against a pile of Taka’s clutter.
“You move, I’ll hurt you,” he said.
Then he smashed the machines.
It took him a long time, I don’t know how long. He broke the monitor screens, and pulled out the towers and stamped on them till they collapsed into shards of plastic and wire. He kicked and struck at the litter until anyone could see it was unusable, foot crashing down repeatedly, eyes lit with cold rage, and I cowered in the corner, some sharp thing digging into my side, too scared to move.
Finally he turned to me, breathing hard.
“The information,” he said. “Where is it?”
“What?”
“The disc. The copy you made. You think I’m stupid?”
“No,” I whispered. “I can’t see it. It was over there.”
“Find it.” He grabbed me by the shoulder, fingers biting into flesh, pulled me over to the pile of shards and destroyed technology. I scrabbled through, cutting my fingers on sharp edges, feeling a splinter dig under my fingernail, and grabbed the first intact disc I saw.
He glared at the scrawled kanji, which identified the CD as a compilation of chill-out tunes, and raised a fist.
“That’s it!” I shrieked. “We didn’t label it ‘Gang Merger Information’!”
“Show me it’s the right one.”
“How?”
He looked at the useless hardware, and his face twisted with rage.
“You’re lying, I’ll kill you. Get downstairs, cunt.”
He lifted a hand to strike. I ducked under it and screamed, “I’m going downstairs! Don’t hit me!”
He did, of course. But there was no sign of Minachan when I came down.
“Right. Get outside, into the car. Don’t try anything. Anything. Or I’ll make you bleed.”
“Where are you taking me?”
“Shut up.”
I opened the front door, went out like a zombie. I didn’t know what else to do. I had no shoes on, of course, and the ground was wet and icy cold. My feet flinched from the rough surface.
I wished I’d never taken the files, never found Hearn or got the disc, never come back to Tokyo.
He shoved me forward to a grey saloon car that was parked on a side street, jerked open the back door with the hand that wasn’t screwing the gun into my spine, and told me to get in.
I got in. There may be something that quick, clever, strong people can do with a gun in their backs. I wouldn’t know.
He said, “Strap yourself in,” and I fumbled for the seatbelt, vaguely wondering why he wanted to take safety precautions. He moved the gun hand up, so the grey shape was close to my face. I remember the sound of my own breathing, dragging in and out asthmatically, and the image, like a photo: his thick neck and swollen, discoloured lips, the rest of his face cut off from me by the top of the car, a stocky suited body, and, over his shoulder, just a glimpse of blue sky.
Then his hand moved, and something impossibly hard hit my head, and the pain turned my vision black, and that’s all I remember for a while.
When I was able to think straight again, it was no improvement.
The side of my head felt as flaccid as raw squid. My temple was pou
nding, every thump of my pulse sending pain shooting through it, and there was something sticky drying on my cheek. I was lolling sideways so the seatbelt was cutting into my armpit, my arms were awkwardly trapped behind my back, and when I tried to get upright, I discovered that the slicing pain round my wrists was some sharp-edged material tying them tightly together.
Shit.
Oguya was finishing a phone call. He was using polite language, which didn’t sound like it came naturally.
“See you there,” he said finally, and tossed the phone into the passenger seat.
The seatbelt was really hurting. I tried to wriggle upright without the aid of my hands, and the movement sent my brain banging off the side of my skull. The car’s movement wasn’t helping, there was a tight feeling in my stomach, and I was suddenly aware that I was close to throwing up.
Oguya took a corner hard enough that the momentum helped me sway upright. I tensed all my muscles to stay that way. The relief of the pain in my side was almost worth the agony in my wrenched arms.
When the swimming in front of my eyes cleared up, I was looking at the rearview mirror, and he was looking back at me. One of his eyes was surrounded by swelling, reddening flesh. The other was alive with malevolence. We stared at each other for a silent second, and then he returned his cold gaze to the road.
I breathed in and out, as evenly as I could.
He hadn’t got Minachan. She’d call for help, call Chanko—
And tell him what?
I was alone again—alone, and as good as dead. I pressed my lips together and shut my sticky eyes tight, but nothing would stop the tear trickling down the side of my face as the car purred through the Tokyo streets.
The traffic was bad. It always was, but for once I was grateful. Wherever I was going, I didn’t want to get there.
We were on an expressway, but I couldn’t focus properly on the signs, or bear to move to get a better view, so I didn’t realise where we were until he took a turnoff that was signed for Yoyogi Park and the Meiji Shrine, and my sense of direction began to reassert itself. He was heading southwards. To Roppongi? No. To Shibuya.
He was taking me to the Mitsuyoshi-kai headquarters, I thought, and my gut clenched until it was hard to breathe. But he needed to take a right, I noticed dully. If he didn’t take a right, we’d be here all day.
He took a left instead, and I saw signs for the Aoyama Gakuin University buildings on the east side of Shibuya. My frozen brain tried to construct a scenario in which he was taking me there, but the car went past, and down, and through the security gates into the car park below a mansion block of flats, and I felt a whole new wave of cold horror as I realised that, wherever he was taking me, we’d arrived, and as he pulled into a parking space I threw up all over the back seat of the car.
He wasn’t pleased about that, judging from how hard he hit me.
He dragged me up with him, through stairs and a lift and a corridor. My head was ringing with the pain of the two blows. I vaguely wondered if I had concussion. Maybe that was causing the nausea. Maybe it was just fear.
He tied me to a chair. Plastic ties, cutting into my wrists and ankles. I didn’t fight, because he was bigger than me and he had a gun.
He had brought me to a small flat, a single-room place. The walls were a cheery pink, and there were lots of pictures of a smiling, round-faced girl with other smiling faces, family and friends, and a couple of stuffed toys balanced on the stereo. The shelving unit had been pulled off the wall, showering paperbacks and comics and souvenir trinkets over the floor, where a fluffy rug should have been, and wasn’t. The television screen was smashed in the centre, as though someone had kicked it. The futon was shoved in a corner instead of properly put away, and there was a dark stain on the floor and a filthy, cloying smell of shit and urine.
I have never felt such fear.
Oguya grabbed my face, digging his fingers hard into my skin and the joint of jaw and skull. I let out an involuntary whimper, and something lit in his eyes.
“Bitch,” he said.
He let go and lit a cigarette, took a slow drag, then leaned forward and puffed the smoke into my face. It was better than the other smell, until he brought the lit tip forward, towards my eyes. I tried to jerk backwards, but there was nowhere to go. The orange glow was so close I couldn’t focus on it, and I could feel the heat and the smoke hitting my iris, and if I blinked my eyelashes were going to touch the glowing tip…
I made a high-pitched noise in my throat. He leaned in, putting his face very close to mine, breath hot on my neck, and withdrew the cigarette to take another drag.
“You’re going to tell me everything I want to know,” he said, and a sick, watery feeling in my stomach told me he was probably right.
He walked away a few paces and stood regarding me with a cold, assessing eye, like the butchers at Tsukiji fish market, getting ready to take apart a tuna.
“You’re not as pretty as the other one.”
“Which other one?”
I didn’t know why I’d said it, and I wished I hadn’t as soon as I heard my own thick voice.
He gave me a very slow smile. “The American bitch is taller. Better. A natural blonde gaijin, not a mongrel like you. But the little Japanese cutie…she was sweet and tight. I’d have liked to do her again. And again, and again. She squealed like a little pig.”
I felt the blood drain from my face, and then a dizzying wave of fear and fury and helpless rage came rushing through my veins. I couldn’t speak. He was telling me something, what he’d done to Kelly or Noriko, I wasn’t sure which and I didn’t care, because the blood hissing and pounding in my ears was stopping me from hearing.
His mouth kept on moving. I half expected to see something rotten drop out of it—maggots, worms, something as vile as his words. I kept my eyes on his and wrenched fruitlessly at the plastic ties around my wrists. No joy.
Did I talk to him? Argue? Plead? What would buy the most time? I wasn’t under any delusions about holding out if he hurt me really badly, no matter how angry I felt now. And he was going to hurt me, it was written in the wetness of his lips and those glistening eyes with their distended pupils.
Anything I did was just delaying the inevitable. But that was fine with me. Better than the alternative, anyway.
“Whores,” he was saying. “I’m waiting to hear you beg, bitch. You’ll do anything I tell you to do, and you’ll like it. Like you all do.” He reached out a finger, pushed it into my neck, tugged at the roll-neck of my sweater. Then he took a last drag on the fag-end of his cigarette and stubbed it out on my neck.
Yes, it hurt.
Yes, I screamed.
Maybe a bit more than was necessary, though.
I threw my body backwards, hoping the chair would rock noisily, but not enough to destabilise it—I really didn’t want to end up on my back right now. And I screamed like a banshee, like a fox in the night.
Surely to Christ someone in this block would call the police?
He hit me hard round the face, shouting at me to shut up. I took in a lungful of breath to scream again, and swallowed it as he pulled a knife.
“Just tell me what you want to know,” I said breathlessly, filling my voice with hysterical tears. It didn’t take any acting. “Please, Oguya-san, I’ll tell you anything.”
“Yes. You will.” He pulled at my sweater neck again, the cloth grating stickily against the savage pain of the burn, and ran the tip of the knife over the skin of my neck. I couldn’t breathe. His lips were drawn back tight, and his eyes were totally intent. Then he pulled the sweater tight and brought the knife down sharply, ripping though the taut material, leaving it flapping open, exposing my chest.
“Lacy.” He was looking at my bra. “I like lace.”
Not good, not good, not good at all.
He extended the knife, starting to trace a pattern on the top of my breast with the point. I searched for anything to say and came up with the one question I dreaded hearing the
answer to.
“Where is Yukie?”
“What?” He was concentrating on the knife tip. So was I.
“This is Yukie’s flat. Where is she?”
“Yukie.” His face twisted, and he withdrew the blade slightly. “Just another slut like the rest. Squealing and screaming.”
The room stank of body fluids. There was a dark stain on the floor where the rug should have been.
“What happened to Yukie? Where is she?”
“In the bathroom.” His lips cracked and stretched as though someone was manipulating meat. “She’ll be there for a while. Women like spending time in the bathroom, don’t they? She’ll spend all the time she needs in there. But I don’t think she’s going to get any prettier.”
Oh Jesus God.
“I don’t know what you think you’re going to do to me,” I told him hoarsely. “But you took the wrong disc.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“I gave you the wrong one. My friends have the real copy, and they’ll know you have me. You can make me tell you everything, but by the time you’ve done it they’ll be long gone and the information will be out, and your bosses will tear you apart, because it’ll be all your fault. Your only hope is not hurting me. I swear to you, you pervert, if you hurt me, the whole Mitsuyoshi-kai will come down like a house of cards, and they’ll know it’s because of you—”
“I don’t believe you.”
He hit me so hard my teeth sliced into my cheek. I didn’t care.
“Go shit and die, you pig. Everything you do to me, your bosses will do to you. Any information I give you will be out of date already. You kill me, you’ll have lost your only chance to get out of this alive.”
“Shut up.”
He grabbed my hair, dragged my neck back. I felt something crunch. He dropped the knife and dug the fingers of his other hand into my jaw again. Pain shot through my face, and my eyes filled with tears.
“I’ll give you something to cry about, bitch,” he told me, his face inches from mine. My mouth was full of blood, and I sucked it together and spat at him, beyond caring now. He gave a snarl of sheer fury, pushed me away so hard the chair rocked backwards and my head bounced painfully off the wall. I was shouting, couldn’t stop myself, calling him all the foul names I could think of, veering into languages he wouldn’t even know. He wiped blood and saliva from his eyes with one powerful hand, and picked the knife off the floor.