by KJ Charles
Chanko swayed forward slightly, moving into a fighting stance, and Hearn’s arm tightened on my neck. “Don’t move, you fat bastard, or I’ll smack your girlfriend’s teeth down her throat.”
“I’ll tear your arms off before you so much as scratch her.” Chanko almost crooned the words, flexing his big fingers. Hearn drew in a breath, and I felt his muscles tighten.
I did not want to be in the middle of this. “Michael, I don’t understand,” I said gently, reasonably. “What have I done? I really didn’t have anything to do—”
“You should have been there. You, not Kelly, you cow. I could have gotten her back, and now—”
“How could you have got her back?”
“I talked to a yak. The ones you set on me. Give us the bitch, we’ll give Kelly back, he said, and now it’s all fucked up because the guy’s in fucking prison and they’re saying they don’t know anything about Kelly and she’s dead because of you, you—”
“She’s long dead,” said Chanko flatly. “You killed her when you left her in her apartment and went off to play poker.”
“You killed her. It should have been you.”
His arm-grip shifted too fast for me to react, and his hand closed hard round my neck, fingers digging in. I tried to scream, and the entire world impacted.
I genuinely thought that it was an earthquake for a second, but it wasn’t. It was several hundred pounds of sumo wrestler explosively accelerating as they are trained so terrifyingly to do, colliding with me at short range, sending me and Hearn flying backwards.
I couldn’t see or breathe for a few bone-crushing seconds. I lost my footing and took a hard thump in the ribs, and a flying elbow sent me spinning away into a wall. When my vision cleared, I was clutching at a bookcase, sucking in air through collapsed lungs. Hearn had dropped the bat, but I couldn’t move, let alone grab it. He was digging his fingers into Chanko’s bloody, wounded shoulder, his face contorted, and I could see his other hand moving at his waist as they struggled, reaching for—
“Knife!” I croaked with all the breath I had.
Chanko wrenched himself free and jumped back as the vicious blade, an eight-inch hunting knife, hissed through the air, but Hearn didn’t follow up the strike. He turned and lunged at me.
I saw the knife come down and sideways at my face in an avenging arc.
I saw Chanko’s hands close on Hearn’s other arm, outflung for balance.
I saw Chanko swing him around, with a grunt of pain and fury, throwing him away from me, so that he went staggering back, across the room. Towards the open balcony door.
I heard the curtains ripping from their rails. I saw a figure, entangled and shrouded in gauze, stumble backwards, tripping over the dangerously high metal runners of the sliding door, falling out onto the narrow balcony, with its low wall that would only come up to a six-foot-three man’s knees.
And then there wasn’t anything more to see except black night and neon.
For a couple of seconds all I could hear was breathing: my own whooping, Chanko’s rasping. He looked blank. Stunned.
“Christ,” he said finally. “How high—?”
“Ninth floor.”
“I didn’t mean to… Christ.”
“You were protecting me,” I said urgently. “It was an accident.”
A horn blared from ground level. Chanko rubbed a big hand over his slightly sweaty face.
“They’ll be coming to look.”
“It’s fine. We can explain—”
“What about Park?”
That shut me up. Of course I couldn’t explain, not without revealing myself as the missing flatmate, and having to answer questions I didn’t need asked, and worst of all breaking my agreement with Park. What had I to do with it all, and why was Hearn-san trying to kill me in the first place, and what did I mean, I couldn’t be seen to talk to the police…
“Get out of here, Butterfly,” he said wearily. “I’ll deal with it.”
…and how come the gaijin is so much bigger than the man he killed in “self-defence”, and why does he have two gunshot wounds…
We could just walk away together, pretend we were never here. As long as we didn’t meet anyone who’d notice the blood staining the shoulder of Chanko’s light-coloured sweater or remember seeing a six-foot-seven Samoan. As long as none of my neighbours saw me. As long as nothing could possibly link a death at my flat with me, with Chanko, with Noriko…
Maybe I was overreacting through panic. I couldn’t tell. I just knew I wanted out, right now.
“Come on, babe. Get going.”
“Not a chance.” I pulled on my leather gloves and flipped open my phone. “Is your passport at Taka’s?”
Taka’s phone was turned off and I had to call Sonja four times before she answered. I got Chanko to hold a pad over the reopened wound, which seemed about all he was capable of for the moment, and threw a few things into a bag as I rang—a first aid kit, clothes, my eight-man-yen shoes, a picture of Noriko and Yoshi that I’d taken. The only one showing the three of us was gone—Oguya, I guessed.
I was prising open the unobtrusive hatch in the side of the bathroom cabinet where I kept my passport when she finally picked up the phone.
“Sod off, I’m busy.”
“Shut up, Sonja. We’re in trouble.”
“Oh, Jesus,” she said. “Again?”
We slipped down the back stairs to the garbage-collection area, not running into anyone, and left through the back of the building. A siren was approaching as we walked away.
With luck, nobody had seen us; but it wouldn’t take long for an investigator to connect the open windows of the notorious flat to the dead guy on the ground. And after that—who knew, but paranoid scenarios of arrest, of the police, of Park Sang-do, were playing out in my head.
Time to leave the country.
I more or less shoved Chanko along the street to Yoyogi-uehara station and onto a northbound train. We were meeting Taka at Ikebukero, where we’d pick up the bags that Sonja was hastily packing now, and Chanko’s passport. From there we’d get the Narita Express and a flight to wherever Sonja booked us.
“We should be fine,” I said, breaking the long silence as we sat together on a half-empty train. “Plenty of time.”
“Yeah.” Chanko had his hand on his injured shoulder as if it hurt, hiding the bloodstain from our fellow passengers. I was sitting on his right, so I couldn’t reach for his free hand.
“It wasn’t your fault,” I said for the third time.
“Yeah.”
Taka was waiting when we got to the meeting point with two distressingly small bags, considering we were both emigrating. He took a look at Chanko, then just slapped him on the arm, man-style.
“Hey, big guy. Take care.”
Chanko hoisted both bags in his usable hand. “Yeah. Thanks, pal.”
“No problem. Kerry-chan, it’s been real.”
“Hasn’t it. Thanks for—well, thanks. Say goodbye to Yoshi and Minachan for me. And look after Yoshi.”
“He can look after himself.”
“Better than you can. I know. Tell him I’m sorry not to have said goodbye, I’ll call him soon. Thanks, Taka. I owe you.”
“I know.” He glittered at me.
“And don’t mess with Sonja or she’ll cut your balls off.”
“I know that too. Get moving or you’ll miss the express. She’ll call you about the tickets.”
“Thanks. Sayonara, Taka.”
He winked at me. “Mata ne.”
Be seeing you.
“Hong Kong?” asked Chanko, as I clicked off my phone. The airport express train was flying through the darkness, but we were still twenty minutes from Narita. Sonja made a great travel agent.
“Yeah. There’s a flight that we can just make, and it’s a good place to vanish. If you can’t buy anything to fit, you can just get some clothes made while we sort out your visa.”
“Visa?”
“For Vietna
m. You wanted to go, you said? Or if you’d prefer somewhere else, just say. I’ll sort it out.”
“No. No, Vietnam’s cool. Right.” He heaved a deep breath. “Thanks for this, Butterfly. I couldn’t… That kind of threw me.”
“Of course. You saved my life back there, you know. Again.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, don’t sound so enthusiastic.”
“Sorry.” He shook his head. “Okay. So, I’m going to Vietnam. What about you?”
“Um,” I said.
“Staying in Hong Kong, I guess. Look up your family?”
“I wouldn’t know how to start. I thought I’d get some work.”
“Oh yeah? What’re you looking for, another bar? They do hostessing in Hong Kong? There’s got to be plenty of salarymen who need a girl to smile at them. Or, hell, why not go to Seoul, take that job Park offered you.”
I hadn’t heard that note in his voice since the garden at Kanazawa. Then I’d thought it was aggressive. Now I knew it was pretty much the exact opposite.
“I thought I’d get interpreting work, actually.”
“Sure. Good idea.”
“Look for a one-on-one job,” I added. “Sort of a long-term position.”
“Sure.”
God, he was annoying. “Yeah, you know, find some rich, handsome guy to exploit and batten on him like a leech. That would work.”
That at least got him to turn and look at me.
“Or alternatively, I might just find someone going somewhere interesting and see if he needs a translator,” I persisted. “You know. Someone rubbish at languages who doesn’t mind me hanging around. If I can find someone like that.”
After a very long second, I saw the beginnings of a smile.
“Uh-huh. That’s one-on-one work, is it?”
“Yeah. I think it sounds like a good idea. If I can find the right position.”
“That can be tricky.”
“You need a bit of ingenuity,” I agreed. “A bit of persistence. But it can work out.”
He let out a very long sigh. “You think this is a good idea? Long term?”
“I don’t think long term,” I reminded him. “Maybe I might start if people stop trying to kill me. Or for now, we could just see how things turn out.”
“Yeah. I guess. So…somewhere interesting, huh? I don’t suppose you speak Vietnamese, do you, Butterfly?”
“Well, not as such,” I told him. “Not yet. But I’ll learn.”
Epilogue
Oguya Hiroyuki and Soseki Eiji were both transferred to a small, secure hospital unit to recover from their injuries while awaiting trial. Oguya had a broken arm, a ruptured spleen and appalling facial damage; Soseki broken ribs and some internal injuries. Still, they should both have been sufficiently mobile to escape when the unit burned to the ground, since everyone else was evacuated in plenty of time. Reports that the remains of both men were found tightly strapped into hospital beds have been officially denied.
The Korean takeover didn’t happen. With the Brothers dead, the stresses of the new management, and very hostile press and police investigation into Oguya and Soseki’s hobbies, the Mitsuyoshi-kai simply collapsed under the strain. About half of its members joined established Yamaguchi-gumi organisations. The rest have formed a new organisation, under a different name, albeit not one that’s taking on the big syndicates yet. Most of its leaders seem to be first- or second-generation Korean immigrants. None of them are called Mitsuyoshi.
No trace of Kelly Hollister, alive or dead, has been found.
Yoshi found a new job about six weeks after I left, and got promoted within a couple of months. His confidence might have been boosted because by then, at Taka’s thank-you party for his gang of freeters and fighters, he’d met Bobby Kim, the actor who does epilepsy so well. Bobby has just moved in with him. Yoshi still hasn’t told his parents he’s gay.
Sonja is running a music shop in Roppongi, or at least that’s what they tell the tax people. She decided she liked her hair short after all, though it’s still scarlet. She emailed me a photo of her and Taka, who had a buzz cut in solidarity and then dyed his remaining fuzz bleach-blond and blue. It looks like shit.
Noriko came out of her coma after three weeks. She lost some motor function initially, because of the brain damage, but she’s recovering well above expectations and she’s even talking about returning to work next year. It’s not urgent: she got a large compensation payment as a victim of crime, and a larger one from an anonymous donor in Seoul. I can’t work out if that was a graceful gesture, a threat or both.
The doctors were concerned that Noriko had suffered permanent impairment to her short-term memory, but it turns out that’s just the way she is.
Chanko and I are in Hanoi for the moment, but we’re heading for the States to see his sister. We’ve a stop-off on the way, though, because Taka’s called in a favour. Just a small thing that he wants us to do for him.
But that’s another story.
About the Author
KJ Charles is a writer and editor. She lives in London with her husband and children.
Follow KJ on @kj_charles or kjcharleswriter.wordpress.com.
Look for these titles by KJ Charles
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A Charm of Magpies
The Magpie Lord
A Case of Possession
Coming Soon:
Think of England
A lord in danger. A magician in turmoil. A snowball in hell.
The Magpie Lord
© 2013 KJ Charles
A Charm of Magpies, Book 1
Exiled to China for twenty years, Lucien Vaudrey never planned to return to England. But with the mysterious deaths of his father and brother, it seems the new Lord Crane has inherited an earldom. He’s also inherited his family’s enemies. He needs magical assistance, fast. He doesn’t expect it to turn up angry.
Magician Stephen Day has good reason to hate Crane’s family. Unfortunately, it’s his job to deal with supernatural threats. Besides, the earl is unlike any aristocrat he’s ever met, with the tattoos, the attitude…and the way Crane seems determined to get him into bed. That’s definitely unusual.
Soon Stephen is falling hard for the worst possible man, at the worst possible time. But Crane’s dangerous appeal isn’t the only thing rendering Stephen powerless. Evil pervades the house, a web of plots is closing round Crane, and if Stephen can’t find a way through it—they’re both going to die.
Warning: Contains hot m/m sex between a deeply inappropriate earl and a very confused magician, dark plots in a magical version of Victorian England, family values (not the good kind), and a lot of swearing.
Enjoy the following excerpt for The Magpie Lord:
The grey awful misery tangled round his heart and throat, choking him, sickening him with the vileness of his own nature. The shame and self-loathing too deep for repentance, too deep for words. Too deep for anything but the knife and the red flow and the longed-for emptiness of the end…
The voice seemed to come from a long distance away. “My lord? My lord! Oh, Jesus. My lord! You stupid sod!”
A slap, hard, round his face. He registered it through the haze of grey misery, then felt strong hands dragging him onto his feet and out of the room. His wrist hurt. He needed to finish the job.
He lunged clumsily back towards the knife, only to find his arm twisted up behind his back and a hard tug pulling him off balance.
“Out. This way.” He was marched forward, pushed, dragged, the litany of doom pounding in his mind. All he could think of was ending it, making the unbearable guilt and shame stop, removing the foul stain of his soul from the world…
He vaguely noticed the hard grip on the back of his head, just before his face was plunged into icy, greasy water and held there, ruthlessly hard, as he inhaled a lungful of dirty dishwater, and something around his mind snapped.
Lord Crane jerked his head out of the suddenly relaxed grip, came up spluttering but
entirely alert, gasped for air, and kicked backwards viciously, aiming to cripple his attacker with a rake of his foot across the kneecap. The grizzled man in black had already jumped out of the way, though, and was standing back, holding up his hands in a gesture of nonaggression that Crane had no intention of testing.
Crane held himself ready to fight for a second, registered that he had just been half-drowned in the butler’s sink by his manservant, let out a long breath and dropped his shoulders.
“It happened again,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Tsaena.” He shook his head, sending grey water flying from his hair, and blinked the liquid out of his eyes.
Merrick threw him a dishtowel. He caught it in his left hand, sucked in a hiss at the pain as his wrist moved, and mopped his face. He spat in the sink to get the taste of foul water and bitter leaves out of his mouth. “Son of a bitch. It happened again.”
“Yes,” said Merrick, with some restraint. “I know. I found you sawing at your wrist with a fucking table knife, my lord, which was what gave me the clue.”
“Yes, alright.” Crane pulled over a chair with a screech of wood on tile. “Can you…?” He gestured at his left wrist. The shirt cuff was unfastened and rolled back. He didn’t remember doing that. He didn’t remember the other times.
Merrick was already setting out lint and a roll of bandages, as well as a bottle of volatile-smelling spirit.
“I’ll have some if you’re pouring. Ow.”
“I reckon that’s enough killing yourself for one evening.” Merrick dabbed the raw wound with the raw alcohol. “Jesus, this is deep, you’d have done yourself for sure with anything sharper. My lord—”
“I don’t know. I was reading a book, thinking about getting dressed. I didn’t…” He waved his right hand vaguely, and slapped it down on the worn tabletop. “God damn it.”