by Carrie Asai
Our eyes stung with dust. We watched the helicopter soar out of view. Teddy clenched his fists, breathing in and out. His T-shirt was stained red with blood—some of his own, some of the ninjas’. We didn’t say anything for a long time. Luckily none of the ninjas on the ground stirred. Maybe we had killed some of them.
Teddy reached down and picked up the gun, examining it. “I guess I fired off more bullets than I thought that night in front of your friend’s house,” he said. I shuddered. I didn’t like being so close to a gun, loaded or unloaded. Teddy shoved it in his pocket. “I don’t think L.A.’s such a good idea anymore.”
I thought about my plan B. What would I do now?
Then, in the distance, a figure appeared. It looked like it was riding a motorcycle. When it got closer, I could hear the low, grumbling hum of a bike. The figure looked ominous.
My body tensed, ready for action.
“What’s coming?” I said to Teddy. Teddy didn’t answer.
The motorcycle growled closer. I squinted. The figure looked familiar. A ninja I’d fought before? A Yukemura thug? I looked at Teddy but then thought, Nah, I don’t think he’s tricking me.
The rider looked familiar, though. He got closer and closer, and I couldn’t figure out who it was. Who do I know who has a motorcycle? No one.
“I know that guy,” Teddy said.
The rider was very close now.
“Dude, isn’t that…?” Teddy said. He looked at me, confused.
It was. My heart leaped.
Hiro.
She says she’ll marry me.
I couldn’t believe she didn’t bail out on me. I totally thought that when I was gettin’ a little shut-eye, Heaven would break my heart and sneak away, but she didn’t. Every day I’d wake up and there she’d be, lying on that bed like a princess, and today, this morning of all mornings, she says she’ll marry me.
Boo-ya!
I mean, before it was, like, awesome, bling bling rollin’ my way, that fat wad that was promised me for baggin’ Heaven Kogo. But now…
Getting married is when life starts to mean something. I didn’t realize this when it was first, you know, like, an order. When all that mad ceremonious stuff was happenin’, when there was party after party, when all that was goin’ down, I barely noticed Heaven, I must admit. Yeah, yeah, whatever, her dad’s a gangster and she’s a little bitch princess. I admit it. I’d never tell her this in so many words, but that’s what I thought.
But now, well…everything’s changed.
I wanted to have a ring to give her. I want to give her everything. When I bought her that dress, damn. She looked fine. She was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, and this was after she got the shit kicked out of her the day before, this was after riding in the car for hours, this was after all the stress she’d gone through, everything. And she still looked like a million bucks.
This is just…this is just amazing, is what it is. I feel better than I did after anything I’ve ever pumped into my body, any little snort or joint or whatever.
This is the real vibe.
As we drive, she’s superquiet. Maybe thinking about wife stuff or like what kind of dress she’s gonna get.
Shit—maybe she’s thinking about sex!
Has she had sex?
But then this helicopter lands in the middle of the road, and we’re sitting here, and it’s like Mission Impossible, and I realize I have to keep my promise to her—I have to protect her from anything. I have to…I have to fight these dudes! But what’s really messed up is, I think deep down Heaven’s way tougher than me. She’d probably be better at protecting me than I am at protecting her. She probably wasn’t sitting there in the car thinking about wifely stuff and all that shit. She was probably thinking about something else. Something more dangerous. She probably would never think about wifely shit.
And that’s why I love her. Although I’d never tell her that.
Teddy
11
The motorcycle slowed, kicking up dust. I couldn’t believe my eyes. It really was Hiro. He dismounted and stared at us. He was wearing a black jacket, boots. The motorcycle was a little ragged looking but still sexy.
He looked better than ever. I don’t know how, exactly—I’d only seen him, what, four days ago, but somehow he looked…different. Older. Wiser. I didn’t know.
Hiro looked around, his mouth hanging open. “I—I was coming to Joshua Tree,” he said to me. “I thought you were…” Then he stopped. “What happened?”
My heart lifted. He was coming to get me!
Hiro gaped first at the ninjas strewn around the road (the cars on the highway were swerving around them, bleating out confused beeps. Far away I could hear a siren, which meant we should split soon, otherwise we’d be in even bigger trouble), then at Teddy, looming above me. “Okay,” he said slowly. He looked back at me. “I only got your message this morning. I’m sorry.”
“What, were you out of town?” I asked, as impassively as I could. I thought about Karen fielding that phone call. What had happened?
“No—no.” Hiro looked a little at a loss for words. “I’ll explain. But not right now. What happened? What’s going on? Where are you two headed? Are you in danger, Heaven? Why are you with Teddy?”
Neither of us said anything. Teddy glared at Hiro, but he was still out of breath from the fighting. Teddy’s size and lack of exercise made him a brute strength sort of fighter. But he lost stamina quickly. He still hadn’t recovered, while I was feeling okay. I remembered Teddy’s words in Katie’s apartment: “Let’s not get him involved.” I was sure he wasn’t particularly thrilled that Hiro had shown up.
Finally I sputtered: “So…if you weren’t anywhere…what happened? Why did you only get the message this morning?” My hands were on my hips.
“What message?” Teddy finally barked. He straightened up.
“Karen had been keeping the message from me,” Hiro said sheepishly. “You called a couple of days ago, right?”
“That’s right,” I said. Of course Karen hadn’t been serious when she’d put on that “sweetie pie” voice. She’d been totally going to screw me over!
“She kept the message from me but let it slip this morning during a big fight we were having.” He looked down.
Karen, Hiro, fight? “What were you fighting about?” I asked quietly.
The moment suddenly became very charged. Hiro looked up into my eyes. His expression was one of clarity, understanding. Maybe even a little remorse.
“You,” he said.
My whole body melted, then, in its puddle state, shivered. What did he just say? Was I hallucinating? Had the ninjas killed me in the battle? Was I dead?
“Whoa, whoa,” Teddy said, finally gathering his composure, waving his arms back and forth as if to stop the conversation. “What’s going on here?”
But Hiro and I stared at each other as if we’d slipped into another dimension. Time and sound and speed slowed down. We were in our own little block of ice. Nothing could break our gaze. I stared at him, dumbstruck. Had he said…? He wore a look of…I’m not sure what it was. He looked…amorous. Like they do in the movies.
Surely this was some sort of test.
“She…she said I was obsessed with you,” Hiro said. His voice even sounded trancelike. “She had disconnected the phone. And the one message you left, she never gave it to me. She was jealous. And…well…she had good reason to be, I guess.”
“Excuse me?” Teddy said. “Hello? What’s going on here? What do you want, bro?”
They were breaking up. They had broken up. Oh my God. I’d never imagined this. Never in a million years. I’d thought they’d get married and have children and…and…
This was so unbelievably surreal. Like those pictures of melting clocks. I cleared my throat, continued to stare at Hiro. I felt a hand on my back and jumped. It was Teddy.
“Heaven,” he said in a powerful voice. “We have to get out of here. Those sirens? Those are for us.�
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I nodded, still transfixed. Hiro was still staring at me.
“They might even have backup,” Teddy went on, his voice quavering. He must have sensed something of what was happening between Hiro and me but seemed completely confused as to how to handle it. He tugged on my arm. “We’ve got to go. They probably tracked me from Joshua Tree to here.” He hit himself on the head. “We’re in danger if we stay here for another moment.”
I didn’t move.
Teddy looked over at Hiro, who hadn’t moved, either. He still held on to his bike.
“Look, man, hanging around with us will do you no good,” Teddy said, puffing up his chest. “I don’t know what you’re tryin’ to pull here, like what kind of message you got or whatever…. Who knows, maybe it was from whoever just choppered down and karate-kicked us…. But you’ve got to go. Back to L.A. or wherever you came from. Heaven and I, we gotta split. We can’t go back to L.A. now. We were planning to, but…” Teddy shrugged.
Hiro remained placid and still. “I’m not leaving,” he said. “I’m going with you.”
A million little fireworks went off in my body at once.
Teddy shrugged angrily. He looked at me pleadingly. “What’s his deal?” he sputtered, his voice squeaking a little. “Can you, like, call him off? Send him packing?”
I shook my head ever so slightly. “I don’t think so,” I said.
“I’m coming,” Hiro said, his voice growing a little stronger, not so trancelike. “But we should get out of here. L.A. is dangerous. I’m assuming Vegas is dangerous. Anywhere in California is bad news. Really, we should leave the country. That would be best.”
“What’s all this ‘we’ stuff?” Teddy said.
“We could get passports,” I said feebly.
“Yeah. Easier said than done,” Teddy said. “Two passports maybe, but not three.”
“Nowhere is safe in this country.” Hiro looked at Teddy. “You should know this. You’re in danger and on the run as much as Heaven. More so, really. So can you get us access to passports so that we can go somewhere in Europe?”
“Europe?” I said.
Teddy glowered, kicked at some dust. He paced around in a large circle, walking over to his car, kicking the tire. He let out a long, frustrated grunt. Hiro and I watched him silently. Then his ears pricked up at the approaching sirens. “Fine,” he said, walking back to us. “I guess I can do that. We’ll have to go to Mexico to get them. I know someone…but I don’t think he can swing three.”
“Hiro has to come,” I heard myself saying.
Teddy gaped at me. “He does, does he? Why? I don’t get this!”
“Because…,” I tried to explain.
“I’m her sensei,” Hiro said.
Of course. All this was a samurai test. I knew it. He was my sensei. Of course.
“Ooh, and what does that mean?” Teddy asked in a teasing voice. “Heaven with a sensei. Who is she, Buffy? And am I Angel?”
“Look, we can either stand here and argue like children or we can save ourselves,” Hiro said calmly. “Now, can you get three passports?”
Teddy hesitated, looking back and forth from Hiro to me. My heart was nearly jumping out of my chest. Why did Hiro want to come along so badly? Was he leaving Karen for good? If he left the country and got on our dangerous bandwagon, he’d be leaving his life in L.A…. for me.
Finally, after Hiro had stared Teddy down for a good five minutes, Teddy admitted, “Fine. I think I probably could.”
“I thought you could,” Hiro said.
“But why do you…,” I started, looking at Hiro. Hiro put his hand on his lips, a gesture for me to be quiet.
“We have to move,” Hiro said. “Is that your car?” He gestured to Teddy’s vehicle, turned at an odd angle because of the helicopter landing in the middle of the road. Teddy nodded. Hiro waved his hands. “Let’s go, then.”
“What about your bike?” I said.
Hiro looked at it, then wheeled it over to a deep ditch and pushed it in.
Teddy turned to me when Hiro was out of earshot. “Yo, Heaven, what the hell?” he said angrily. “Why doesn’t he go back to L.A.?”
“Teddy, Hiro is as connected to me as you are. Now, they might be after you for whatever you’ve done wrong, but they’re after me, too. Together we’re a jackpot. I mean, realistically, since Hiro is the person I’ve been closest to in L.A., if I go missing, they might attack him. It’s probably safer for him to come with us.”
There. A logical answer for why Hiro had trekked out here and left his life behind. The more I thought about it, the more it made total sense. Hiro wasn’t looking at me like a sick puppy because he had some kind of feelings for me. He needed to save himself. If that meant sacrificing Karen, then that was what he had to do.
But he’d said…
It must have been a ploy of some sort.
Teddy grumbled. “What do I care if it’s safer for him? I might not even be able to get hold of passports for us. What’ll I do then? We’ll be stuck in Mexico. And it’s mad dangerous there.”
“Teddy, of course you can get passports,” I said. “You even said the other night at dinner that getting fake IDs and passports was one of the easiest things to do if you had the right connections.”
“Yeah, but…” Teddy kicked at the dust again, scowling. “What was this message you left for him? Did I hear that correctly? I didn’t see any calls to L.A. on our bill.”
“It was…it was…I didn’t exactly know what was going to happen, Teddy,” I admitted. “I mean, when we got to Joshua Tree, I didn’t quite trust you, and…I didn’t think Hiro was really going to show up.” I looked at him. Teddy looked hurt.
I felt a little awkward here. We’d become a team. And then Hiro, who was the love of my life—another thing Teddy didn’t know—showed up, saying I’d left him a message, and here he was. But I’d betrayed Teddy. I’d gone behind his back: I’d basically called out for help to get me out of there. I’d mistrusted him. I wasn’t sure how angry this would make him. But I had a feeling that he would know better than to desert us, or worse, to try and hurt us. We were better fighters than Teddy was. And I knew for a fact that his gun didn’t have any bullets in it.
Or did it?
Hiro walked back to the car. “Come on,” he said. “You want to drive?” he asked Teddy.
“It’s my car, isn’t it?” Teddy said gruffly.
“Drive us to a side road and then pull over so you can call around about the passports,” Hiro instructed.
Teddy glared at him. “I can talk and drive at the same time,” he said. “I did live in L.A. It’s really not that hard.”
We piled in the car. I got into the back first, thinking Hiro would want the front with Teddy. But then, to my surprise, Hiro climbed into the backseat beside me.
“Yo, what the hell?” Teddy said angrily, turning his head around to see us in the backseat. “I’m not your chauffeur!”
“Drive!” Hiro said. “I can see the police cars back there.”
“Unbelievable…” Teddy sped off, cursing under his breath.
I sat very straight in the seat, twisting around to see the fallen ninjas disappearing in the distance.
Teddy whipped out his cell phone and started calling around about passports. “Are you sure you want to use that?” I asked. “Isn’t your cell traceable?”
Teddy muttered something I couldn’t understand.
I pulled out my phone with the untraceable number. “Use this,” I said.
Teddy looked back at me. “How long have you had this phone?” he asked. He looked at it.
“It’s the same phone that you called me on when I was in L.A.,” I answered. I had a feeling Teddy was putting two and two together: this was how I’d called Hiro from the hotel without the call coming up on the Joshua Tree checkout bill.
Teddy punched in some numbers and began to talk. “Pablo…yo!…Yeah. Me and my girl want to go to Europe to chill out and shit…maybe hit som
e spas…maybe go to Amsterdam…some clubs…drinkin’…yeah.” Hiro gave me a strange look. I raised my eyebrows as if to say, I don’t know what’s going on. I hoped Teddy wouldn’t mention that I’d told him I’d marry him. Teddy continued. “Yeah, listen, we need to split the crib for a while. No, no, you’ll get yo’ dinero, no problem, man, it’s not that…. So how about hooking us up with some passports…? Yeah, yeah, we’ll come south of the border to get them…. Why do we need them…? Well…little vacation, little R and R, ya know? Break from the ghetto.”
As if Teddy had an idea what a ghetto was. He’d grown up like a prince. Hiro sat next to me, sort of tense. I peeked over at him. He was sneaking a look at me. I smiled slightly.
“Hey,” I said. I giggled. Hiro nodded back, all serious. I quickly looked out the window.
Teddy sped along, driving with one hand. “Listen, yo. I’ll pay you your fifty thousand plus an additional amount for these, we’re talking cash…. C’mon, man…” He looked frustrated. It didn’t sound like Pablo was into the whole thing. I gripped the side of the backseat with my fingers. My heart was racing and being pulled in a million directions. Hiro was here. He’d broken up with Karen.
“I got an idea,” Teddy said into the phone, snapping his fingers. “Fake kidnapping. How does that strike you?”
“Fake kidnapping?” Hiro whispered.
“My family will pay anything,” Teddy continued. “Whatever you ask. Once we get to TJ, that’s when it’ll go down. And then you guys will be livin’ large in Bora Bora or wherever the hell you want to go. My father spares no expense. It’s totally foolproof. A bomb idea, right…? Yeah. Yeah? You will?”
“That doesn’t sound like a good idea,” Hiro said.
“Solid, brotha,” Teddy said before I could answer. “See you in TJ, then. Nice. Niiiiiice. Set it up now. Right. I don’t care. Fine. Okay, later.” He hung up and turned to face us, a sour look falling over his face when he saw us sitting together in the backseat. “Okay, we’re in,” he said. “Three Swiss passports. We’re going to Tijuana to get them. Does that fly with you, kemo sabe?” He looked at Hiro. Hiro nodded. “I know someone else who can help us get across the border quick. I don’t think we’ll want to be in TJ for long.”