Masaomi wasn’t trying to clear up his own innocence—he was vouching for Mikado’s.
But Horada’s ugly, crude voice cut him off. “But that don’t matter no more. The slasher’s just an opportunity, ya know? Either way, the Dollars and Yellow Scarves want the other side out of their way. So it works out fine.”
“Doesn’t matter…? What do you think you’re doing? Getting revenge for your head getting busted?”
“I don’t care about that, either. It gave me an excuse, and someday I’ll kill that guy in the gas mask, but the important thing is…we can’t turn back now.”
“Can’t turn back…?” Masaomi caught a clear note of malice in the other man’s words, and he turned on Horada, his pulse racing. “Why…? What did you do?”
“I’ll let you in on one last little secret. The Dollars are done for. And I’ve already finished off Shizuo Heiwajima.”
“Huh…? Finished? What did you do to Shizuo…to that monster?”
“It ain’t your business no more. You just better pray the police believe your side of the story—assuming the police find you before we do. Hah!”
And with that final snort, the other man hung up the phone.
Masaomi hastily tried to call his other longtime companions in the Yellow Scarves, but no one answered. The high school closing ceremony should be long over, and few of them would be diligent enough to attend a school ceremony in the first place.
But every single number that Masaomi dialed was not in use. Either they were powered off, they rang incessantly without answer, or they went to voice mail after the very first ring. The responses were varied, but the uniform absence of anyone to answer was cruel in its unanimity.
Masaomi clutched his useless phone and thought back to two years earlier.
The present situation was very similar to when Saki was abducted.
This wasn’t his girlfriend being kidnapped. But the same kind of guilt racked him, tied his body down to the spot before anything actually happened.
It would be a lie to say that he had no fondness for the Yellow Scarves. But at this point, that meant nothing. If Mikado wound up targeted by the Yellow Scarves, the way he was targeted by the Blue Squares two years ago, and if Anri was taken hostage as a tool to draw Mikado, just like Saki had been…
He would end up losing two of his dearest friends, his “home to return to.”
“The past is lonely. You can’t escape it.”
Izaya’s quote from the past lay heavy on Masaomi’s heart. If the past was going to come back to haunt him like this, maybe he shouldn’t have been running around to start with.
Everything matched up with his situation two years back.
The only difference from back then was that this time Masaomi raced out into the unknown without any hesitation.
Run.
Run, run, run.
Just run.
His goal was clear: He had to settle with the past that had caught up to him.
He urged his nearly cramping legs onward, onward.
The boy only wanted to know what he could do, if he could overcome his past.
He ran to find that out.
On his way toward the ruined factory, Masaomi plunged into a crowd. It was the shopping area known as Sixtieth Floor Street, on the way from Ikebukuro Station to Sunshine City.
Masaomi came to a stop there, standing in the middle of the road to survey the area. It was the place where he had spent the most time hanging out with Mikado and Anri. The same went for Saki and the members of the Yellow Scarves when he was active.
He remembered how he’d showed Mikado around the area the first time his friend had visited Ikebukuro. He looked around to burn the image into his eyes one last time.
With a kind of determination in his heart, he headed for the Yellow Scarves’ hideout, swearing that he would never stop again.
But he was almost immediately stopped by a familiar voice.
“Hey, Kidaaa. What wrong? Your face, very depressing. You hungry again?”
He looked overhead at the source of the voice and saw a black man standing nearly seven feet tall. He was ushering in customers from the crowd with an old-fashioned oilpaper umbrella overhead and his usual smile, but he approached Masaomi in a different way from normal when he noticed the boy’s demeanor.
“Kida no happy. Very strange lately. Say crazy things, like before. Your head sick? I buy you cucumber roll, cheer you up. Kida now, you look like with Izaya.”
Masaomi wanted to brush him off and continue with his pressing business, but then he remembered the previous day’s events and stopped to face Simon.
“Listen, Simon… Thanks for the sushi yesterday. It was crazy good! Five stars? If I had the right, I’d give it all fifty stars and stripes! You can have the entirety of America from me, Simon. That’s how good yesterday’s sushi was—but not just that time. Russia Sushi is awesome every time I eat there.”
Considering what was about to happen, Masaomi might never be able to visit the place again. That meant he would never be able to repay what he owed them for their generosity yesterday. He decided he could at least give them his thanks.
“Give my compliments to the chef. His knife work was incredi…”
“Oh, Kida. You go fight now? You kill someone, get killed? Izaya put you up to something again?” Simon interrupted, as if he read Masaomi’s mind.
“Wh-why would you say that? What are you, a psychic?” Masaomi laughed to hide his surprise, but he did not deny either Izaya’s involvement or the possibility of a fight.
With his usual expression but a more serious tone than before, Simon said, “I hear from Tom. Shizuo shot yesterday. Bang, bang from gun.”
“Huh…?”
“Kill and be killed, very bad. Where I was, when people fight, someone always die. Masaomi, you look like person ready to die. No good. This Ikebukuro. Not my hometown. Much warmer, people give food even to homeless. Not everyone die when sleep in street without vodka. Kids like Masaomi, no need to kill.”
“Simon…”
There was a serious look in Simon’s eyes that Masaomi had never seen before. He realized that he knew nothing about the man’s past. Rumors in town were colorful—they said he was a former Russian mobster or a mercenary. Masaomi had never asked him directly.
But he didn’t think Simon was lying. He must have been through serious troubles before he came to Japan. If he took that story at its word, then Simon had experienced things that no one living in Ikebukuro would ever know for themselves.
And that was exactly why he was giving Masaomi this precise, serious lecture.
But Masaomi still couldn’t stop.
“Sorry… I’m sorry, Simon. I’ve got to go…”
He felt that standing around and listening to Simon would only make his mission harder, so he bowed and raced off.
Simon didn’t chase after the boy. He only watched him go, a complicated, conflicted look on his face. Even after Masaomi had vanished into the crowd, Simon stood in that spot for a while. Eventually, he closed his eyes and shook his head, then resumed soliciting for customers.
He still turned in the direction Masaomi left from time to time, however.
The town just showed him its usual, ordinary nature.
With one minor difference, perhaps.
There was absolutely no sight to be seen of any youngsters wearing yellow scraps.
Chapter 10: That’s Why I’m Here.
Apartment building, Shinjuku
Izaya opened the door and immediately spotted something out of place.
A pair of leather shoes that did not belong to him were left in the entranceway. Namie’s heels were next to them, so it seemed she had welcomed a visitor. But he hadn’t heard a word of it from her, and the shoes were far too big to belong to the girls like Saki or the Goth Lolis that made up his retinue.
His eyes narrowed in suspicion, and he considered just leaving. But that tension was immediately swept aside by a muffled voice
from the center of his apartment.
“Don’t you think that fate is a very convenient word?”
He couldn’t hear the owner of the voice, but it was clearly directed at him.
“A variety of coincidences reframed as if their existence was inevitable… A process both logical and illogical… Which brings me to ask a man like you: Should the concept of fate be considered inevitable…?”
“You know, playing up the word fate doesn’t actually make you sound cooler or smarter, Shingen Kishitani.”
“Oh ho! How did you know it was me? Did you remember my voice?”
Izaya proceeded in the direction of the voice toward the guest room, where he saw a man wearing a white gas mask and, next to him, an exceedingly grumpy Namie.
Shingen, the man in the gas mask, had a pistol in his left hand that he had pressed into Namie’s side. With his right hand, he was busy solving the crossword puzzle that Izaya had left open on his desk.
Izaya was not stunned or frightened by the scene in the least.
“Sure, the mask-muffled voice was one thing…but you’re also the only person I know who speaks in such a bombastic manner.”
“Ahh… I have to say, this crossword magazine does like its obscure answers. This one is a person’s name: ‘artist and herbalist who claimed to heal God’s illnesses through paint.’ That would be…uhh…I don’t remember. Starts with ji, ends with ta. Hmm…pass. Then, there’s this horizontal clue: ‘German artist from Gloerse Island.’ That sounds familiar, but I can’t recall it. Ka…Kar… Do you know that one? Go ahead and answer, and I’ll listen.”
“Would you mind not trying to complete my half-finished puzzle?” Izaya asked, grabbing the magazine away and sitting down on the sofa across from Shingen. “That’s quite a nimble trick there, doing a puzzle with one hand and pointing a gun with your other… But why are you pointing a model gun at Namie?”
“Oh ho… Well spotted.”
“?!”
Namie’s expression shifted wildly. Clearly, she had believed he was training a real gun on her.
“…Liar!”
“Hah! How would a normal civilian like me get a gun here in Japan? The law against owning a gun is much stricter than you imagine! But because Miss Namie did me the courtesy of being fooled, I was safely able to break through your apartment’s security system.”
“Good for you. So long now,” Izaya quipped lightly.
Shingen chuckled through his mask, unfazed in the least. “Please don’t be so cold to your old classmate’s father. I remember how you and my Shinra and little Shizuo used to get into trouble, hanging out together. Given how Shinra grew up to be so twisted, my analysis says that it was because he was trapped between the ultimate bad influences—you and Shizuo. What do you think of that?”
“So you think you have nothing to do with it? Plus, I don’t ‘hang out’ with Shizuo.”
“Ah, that’s right. Shinra always had to be the middle presence in between you two. You got along like cats and dogs.”
“So…to what do I owe the pleasure?” Izaya prompted Shingen flatly, in no mood to reminisce about the past.
Shingen noted his attitude and put the model gun away in the inside pocket of his lab coat. “Well, you should already have an idea, just from my presence here…”
“Where did you put Celty’s head?”
Ruined factory, outskirts of Ikebukuro
The yellow writhed.
Amid the gray factory interior with rusted highlights, the swarm of youths wearing yellow bandannas writhed eerily. The factory building was stuffed with even more members than a typical meeting, and in the center was a small space where well-known officers like Horada and Higa were living large over the rest of the group.
Horada sat on a leather desk chair they’d brought in, staring at the rest of the group like he was their king.
“What should we do with the Dollars’ boss, Mr. Horada?”
“We’ll just crush ’em one by one, starting with Kadota’s group and going up. Get rid of them and Shizuo, and the rest are nothing. We can take our time putting the screws to this Ryuugamine guy.”
Horada laughed crudely, the bandages still wrapped around his head, as he played with the black piece of metal in his hands. It looked like a cheap toy in Horada’s hands, but it was undoubtedly a deadly weapon.
Everyone in the building was unpleasantly aware of the fact that the gleaming black barrel was not that of a model gun, but a real, authentic pistol. Some of them had witnessed it in action yesterday when he shot Shizuo, and most of the others had realized by now that the other day’s convenience store robbery was achieved through Horada’s tool.
The reason that no one had bothered to report on him was that there was no hard proof and that he ran with a very large group, the largest faction within the Yellow Scarves at this point.
The faction would fall apart if Horada was arrested, but that would weaken the Yellow Scarves as a whole. Given that they were about to embark on a war with the Dollars, many assumed that such a loss would be fatal to the group—not to mention the fact that anyone with the conscience to snitch to the police probably wouldn’t have been in a gang like theirs in the first place.
Then again, the rest of the gang wasn’t exactly unanimous in support. When Horada told the group that Masaomi had betrayed them, those who knew Masaomi the longest didn’t believe him—but they were not present now.
Higa’s team had ventured out in the morning to crush them and steal their phones. They got Masaomi’s number that way, which was how Horada gave him the news about their little revolution.
As he hung up on the call, he stared out at the mass of Yellow Scarves under his command, drunk on his newfound power. As the new shogun of the Yellow Scarves, he mocked the gathering. “Is this the Yellow Scarves you all wanna be?”
He brandished his gun for effect and smacked it against the empty drum can next to his chair. The sound was not as impressive as he hoped, and the palm of his hand stung terribly, but Horada hid the pain by giving a speech.
“Listen up! We ain’t just a buncha scrubs like the Dollars! We’re a unified, organized force! So we’re gonna go and crush ’em and get revenge for the crap they’ve been pullin’ with the slasher!”
No one in the Yellow Scarves doubted him when he proclaimed that the Dollars were responsible for the slasher.
“If we take out the Dollars, we’ll be the kings of Tokyo itself, not just Ikebukuro! Can you imagine it?! Everyone in the entire city under our complete control!”
Of course, just being the top gang of delinquent fighters did not make them the equal of higher powers. There were the police, the bosozoku motorcycle gangs, and the yakuza, all of which would come down hard on them if they stood out, but Horada’s dream would not be suppressed.
He played tough on the outside, but on the inside, Horada was terrified.
He only hoped to forget that fear by growing drunk on power.
He knew the stories about Shizuo and thought he understood the danger the man posed. But as long as they could take him down, even if it required ambushing him with a group, they would be infamous. So he went after the man with a hit squad of twenty, which seemed like overkill.
It was not.
Half of Horada’s goons were wiped out in an instant, and he sensed impending and certain death from Shizuo’s approach—so in his fear, he pulled out the gun he intended to use for security and yanked the trigger.
About a year earlier, someone he knew had a plan to smuggle guns out of the Awakusu-kai, and Horada got him drunk enough to pry the weapons’ temporary hiding place out of him. He then snuck a single gun and a case of bullets out and snitched the location to the cops. The guys plotting the scheme went on the run from the Awakusu-kai and police both, and no one was any the wiser that Horada had pinched a single gun for himself.
Just as he had hoped, Horada was able to get up to all kinds of mischief using it as a tool to threaten others. It wasn’t until last
night that he had actually shot someone with it.
The first shot tore a hole in the side of the bartender shirt, surprising him with the force of the recoil. He unconsciously lowered the gun slightly before firing the second shot, and it shattered against the asphalt, but the third one sank into Shizuo’s leg.
Shizuo lost his balance and fell forward onto the street. A man who had just been exhibiting superhuman strength had collapsed onto his face before him.
I killed him.
Certain of that fact, Horada instantly felt cold sweat on every inch of his body. He pried his trembling hand off of the pistol and spun around to survey the situation, only to see that the other unharmed Yellow Scarves were staring at him with shock and fear.
The gazes that had been trained on Shizuo just seconds ago were now on him. That was the point that he first realized there was no going back. The possibility that the gunshots might have attracted attention caused a fresh wave of cold sweat to break out.
Can’t stay here now, he thought to himself.
The man who seemed to be Shizuo’s coworker closed in, saying, “Wait a damn second… You sure you aren’t gettin’ yourself in hot water with that gun?”
“You want someone to blame? How about the guy who gave me the orders and the gun? Masaomi Kida’s your man!” he made up on the spot, then ran from the scene.
The rest of the boys picked up their comrades felled by Shizuo and scampered away. The man with the dreads was tending to Shizuo and wasn’t coming chasing after them.
Just as he was considering going on the run and into hiding, Horada’s phone got a call from an unfamiliar number. He answered, terrified of the possibility that it might be the police or the Awakusu-kai.
Instead, the person on the other end told him about the connection between Masaomi Kida and the boss of the Dollars.
That led him to the current point.
It was a lifeline to Horada when he needed it most. By using information and power together, it was all too easy to seize control of the Yellow Scarves. And if he could swallow up the Dollars next…
Durarara!!, Vol. 3 (Novel) Page 18