Takaashigani

by Justin Hunter

  “You still down there, Duke?” Fred asked, but the smug way the words came let Duke know that he knew very damn well that he had him trapped down there. “You seem like the kind of guy who survives the first round of this sort of thing. You a survivor, Duke?” Duke felt hot beads of sweat run down his face and sting his eyes. He cursed himself for not checking to see if the shotgun had any shells left in it. He knew he wasn’t fooling anyone, so he pumped the shotgun and checked the chamber. One shell remained.

  “I hear you down there,” Fred said. “Got anything left in that gun? I knew I should have filled Marty with a few more slugs before he made it down there. I thought he would have bled out long before he did. I have to give credit where credit is due. He was one tough son of a bitch. I’ll bet I had seven bullets in his belly before he reached that shotgun and started firing away. He almost hit me too.”

  Duke let the man talk. He didn’t answer him. Duke could tell that Fred was nervous because he was talking, which was stalling, which meant that the man didn’t know what to do. Duke would just bide his time and let the man worry. The first sight of his legs down the stairs and Duke would let the shotgun do the talking.

  “I have all day, Duke,” Fred said. “Maybe we could come to a deal. You don’t belong in this town and I don’t think that you have any plans on moving here. You just want this boat on your tow truck and to get the hell down the road. You weren’t looking to get your dick shot off down in some shitty engine room, were you?” Duke waited. He could hear Fred’s breathing, coming deep and raspy. He could hear the creaking boat as it rocked gently in the waves. He could hear the hammering of his heart, which seemed to be threatening to burst through his chest at any moment. Duke thought this would be a hell of a time to have a heart attack.

  “Of course you don’t want to get killed,” Fred said. “I don’t either. I’ve been wanting to get rid of those Bartelle brothers for a long time. I don’t think I have to kill you though. I don’t think you’ll want to be coming back here, will you boy?” There was silence for a few moments and then Fred spoke. “You’re not going to do anything, are you? I guess you’re going to wait for me to do something. That’s fine with me. This isn’t my first rodeo. I can tell you that you’re not going to like it. I’m not coming down there so you can do some desperate, crazy, last resort kill try on me. I’m just going to torch the boat and let you burn down there. You’ll sit there for a minute until the smoke begins to bother you. I’ll be sitting on the other boat and just biding my time. You’ll eventually come running out, probably on fire, and I’ll drop you with a maelstrom of hot lead. It does sound like a lot of fun, but it’s also a lot of fuss. So why don’t you just come on out and let us try and work this out?” Duke grimaced and tightened his grip on the shotgun.

  He weighed his options and didn’t like either of them. Coming out shooting would surely end with his death. He was in a tight spot; pinned down in the engine hold. Relinquishing his weapon and surrendering didn’t sit well with him either. Giving up wasn’t something he liked to do with anything. He could taste the bile rising in the back of his throat at the thought. There was a good chance that Fred would shoot him anyway and he would leave this life like an asshole. He didn’t think he had a whole lot of leverage in regards to people coming in search of him if he suddenly vanished off the face of the earth. Something was up with this town and its people. He didn’t think they would have a whole lot of trouble in getting rid of his tow truck and wiping his existence from ever setting foot into town in the first place.

  Duke sighed and put his shotgun on the ground, half expecting the bullets to come flying around him as he did so. He slid the gun across the floor in the direction of the open hatchway.

  “You see the shotgun?” Duke asked.

  “I see it,” Fred said. “You wouldn’t be hiding any other weapons on you. That would be unsportsmanlike.”

  “Kind of like telling me to surrender or die?”

  “Something like that,” Fred said. Duke cursed softly and took his Bowie knife out of his boot and tossed that over the engine where it clattered next to the shotgun.

  “That’s all there is,” Duke said.

  “Stand up and put your hands behind your head,” Fred said. The lawman edged down the stairs. Duke put his hands behind his head and stood. He was surprised to see that Fred had a semi-automatic assault rifle trained on him. It was pretty heavy artillery. Duke wondered if it was his or if he had taken it off the Bartelle brothers.

  “Going to shoot me?” Duke said.

  “Nope,” Fred said. “I have someplace to take you. Come on around that engine and head on up these stairs. Step around that shotgun and knife. You make me nervous and I would hate for this gun I’m holding to go off and paint this engine room red.” Duke walked, careful to keep his hands behind his head and his eyes away from his relinquished weapons. Fred backed up as Duke came to the foot of the stairs. He carefully walked backwards up the stairs, keeping his gun forward at all times. Duke came up the stairwell after him. The engine hadn’t seen any bloodshed, but the deck sure had. Shiro was at the bow of the ship. He was smoking one of Duke’s cigars and holding a .45 loosely in his hand. Clive was sitting on the floor. His back was against the port side of the boat. His legs and wrists were tied with rope. His face was dour. He ignored Shiro when he offered him a drag off the cigar.

  Blood was splattered in thick runny red masses all over the chipped teal painted boat. Duke didn’t see anyone else on board.

  “This mess used to be the Bartelle brothers?” Duke asked.

  “It was,” Fred said. “You and Clive we could use alive. I told you before that I wanted those assholes gone for a long time. Today was their day to leave. Their bodies won’t last long below the surface. The crabs will make sure of that.”

  “Your friend didn’t know too much about this either,” Duke said to Shiro.

  “Clive was fun to hang around with,” Shiro said, “But the two of you are in the same boat. If you’ll pardon the pun.” Clive spit out a long stream of expletives.

  “So the crabs are real?” Duke said. “Even the giant ones?”

  “My friend,” Fred said, tossing Duke a pair of handcuffs which Duke secured around his own wrists. “You haven’t seen anything yet.” The caves behind the men quaked. Fred and Shiro exchanged a quick, worried look. Shiro went into the Bartelle brothers’ boat and Fred secured a tow line to the teal fishing boat. Shiro turned on the engine and they made their slow way back to the docks.

  Chapter - 18

  The vagrants picked up the bodies, walked them through the woods and put them into two vans they had parked next to the Flannery’s BMW. The men got into the vans with one taking a seat in the BMW after fishing the keys out of Harv’s pocket. They drove off slow, keeping closely together on the road until the front van took an easy right off the shoulder of the small highway, bumping precariously through the ditch and through some dense undergrowth before it bounced through a patch of trees. Beyond that there was a dirt road, well-placed and packed, invisible to anyone else driving by except for those that knew where it was. The driver of the second van looked in his rear-view to see if the BMW made it through the ditch. He smiled as he saw the black car come pummeling through the brush and onto the dirt road. The front bumper of the car was hanging on the ground. Both headlights were smashed, but it still moved. He couldn’t hear the driver of the BMW, obviously, but the way the man was punching the wheel and shaking, he knew the guy was cussing up a storm. It must have been one heck of a bump.

  The vehicles drove easily on the dirt road. A thick tree-line stopped their vision into the woods after just a few feet. None of them were worried about this. The only people that knew they were here would be one of them. It was highly doubtful that any of their number was watching the road anyway. Their numbers had dwindled over the years to just fifty or so and, out of the fifty, only a few children. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to know that soon their people would vanish com
pletely. They came to a small clearing and parked the vans and BMW next to each other. There were a few other vans and cars that seemed to be in good working condition, but there was a long line of rusted and pillaged car carcasses that dotted the small grassy area.

  There was sure to be law enforcement looking for the lost Flannery’s car, but by the time they came out here, the BMW would be long gone. It would be stripped, flattened and sold for scrap down at the town’s metal recycler. As for the property, there would be a party of people sent back to the land to erase any trace of anyone ever being there. They would probably get a couple hundred bucks for the car metal, which would be plenty to get them all good and drunk. If their leader was correct about the future, this might be the last time they could let loose before the end came. Before the crabs came back.

  If a person happened to ask one of the vagrants when it was that they moved into the forest, they would more than likely tell them that they had lived there for over a hundred years, but really none of them knew for certain. It was longer than any of them had been alive enough to remember, so it was anyone’s guess. They did know that they were the first people to inhabit that small coast line. They were fisherman, men and women who went bust looking for land, gold or whatever else drew them to the outer edge of the country. The fishing was good and they made a good life for themselves. More people started settling with and near them. But not too close. They never learned to trust outsiders much. There was one man though, which became a part of their inner circle.

  His name was Enoc. The stories about how he became a part of the vagrant people and how he became to eventually lead them had never been taken down on paper, but have passed down from the old to the young for as long as any of them could remember. Enoc meant a lot of things to them. He provided them with wealth, power and a stronghold on the community and its neighboring towns. Enoc had been dead for a long time and the power and control he wrought died slowly after him. The vagrants were pushed off of their lakefront property into the woods, the people stopped giving them money and they were nearly forgotten by everyone. The only toehold they had which hearkened back to those early days of prosperity was because of him.

  The stories of Enoc all begin the same way. They begin by telling the children that life wasn’t always like they lived it now. The people didn’t always bear the moniker ‘vagrant.’ They didn’t always live in the woods, far from the ocean and away from other people. The people of Enoc’s time were inclined to sleeping between silken sheets and sipping wine from etched glasses. They were smart more than they were strong, but they wielded their intelligence with great strength. Enoc was by far more intelligent that any person of the town, and arguably the whole state of California. It wasn’t by accident that he had taken up residence in that wild coastal town, but by design. Enoc figured out a way to make himself rich. He figured getting himself rich would make those that worked for him rich as well, which was a good argument for those he confided in.

  Enoc had spent a semester abroad during his college years. He spent five months in Tokyo, Japan, teaching conversational English, while he tried to soak up the culture and grab a few easy credits from Tokyo University in the bargain. Enoc was more than disappointed in his stay abroad. The history and culture of the Japanese people rang hollow to him. He had decided recently that his American heritage was false and ethnocentric, to see how such an ancient and proud culture like Japan seem so shallow to the youth was disheartening. Enoc had long believed that most Americans could only see just as far as the nose on their face and nothing behind them. He saw that the Japanese were much the same. He stopped searching from something from the Japanese culture that he couldn’t find and tried to figure out what it truly was. He hit the clubs, spoke to everyone he could and found the pulse of the nation. He wasn’t surprised to find out that it was the same as America’s: money.

  One of the richest men he met was a small, wizened, balding, cherub-looking man named Hirito. Enoc saw the man sitting by himself in a long semi-circle plush bench in the middle of the club. He had a phone to his ear, several drinks in front of him and an ashtray full of stubbed out cigarette butts. Enoc was lubricated well by the alcohol, but careful not to become a total asshole. He slid into the bench and sidled over to Hirito. The man didn’t even seem to notice him, but kept rambling out a bunch of Japanese into the phone. After a few minutes, the man snapped the cell phone shut and put it in his pocket. He lit a cigarette and sat back. It wasn’t until another full minute had passed before he acknowledged Enoc’s existence.

  “When I started my phone conversation this bench was full of my friends,” Hirito said, turning bloodshot eyes on Enoc. Enoc was surprised at the man’s perfect English, but didn’t let it show in his expression. “I finished up the first call and had to answer a second, then a third. The damn thing wouldn’t stop ringing, and who’s to blame it? I don’t stop answering the damn thing. It might as well go on ringing. I seem to like it more than my friends. You could probably tell that already, finding me sitting here by myself. They sure as hell figured it out and took off on me.” Hirito reached out and snatched a glass that sloshed clear liquid over the brim and onto his shirt cuffs. He drained it in one gurgling gulp and put the glass back down hard.

  “I’m trying to learn about Japan,” Enoc said.

  “You’re an American,” Hirito said.

  “Yes.”

  “You already know about Japan.”

  “I’ve only been here a couple months,” Enoc said. “What I thought I would find, I haven’t.”

  “So instead of visiting temples, you’re here scraping the bottom of the barrel at nightclubs? You Americans are so easily disillusioned. It won’t do at all. Two months and you’re sitting here crying into your beer and harassing old men. You have no right to be disillusioned. Culture is whatever a man is into. Men in Japan are interested in the same things as men in America. They want power, women, drugs and money. Of course, not in that order. Money is always and has always been first in the heart of men. No matter what culture you’re in.”

  “I don’t believe that,” Enoc said.

  “Which is why you’re sitting down in this shitty club with that sorry ass look on your face. The only thing that should put that dour of a look on a young man like yourself is that you paid way too much for such a shitty beer.” Hirito slapped Enoc in the shoulder. Enoc smiled.

  “What do you do?”

  “I’m a fisherman,” Hirito said. “Can’t you tell by my dishpan hands?” He held out soft, hairless and breathtakingly beautiful manicured hands.

  “You’re joking.”

  “Crabs,” Hirito said. “Japanese spider crabs. They’re docile as all hell, easy to fish and you slap the word ‘delicacy’ on the menu and the price doubles per pound. I don’t fish for them myself, mind you, but fish them I do.”

  “Lots of money in them?”

  “A shitload,” Hirito said. “It’s fishing season on them too, so now is when my yearly bankroll comes in. It’s why I’m celebrating tonight. Look how happy I am with all my fucking friends.” Hirito gestured wildly around and the empty seats. Hirito beckoned Enoc who slid closer. “Tell you the truth the profits have fallen off lately. Make a little money doing something and then everyone else wants a piece. I remember when I was the only person fishing for spider crabs and now there are a bunch of guys. Their numbers are dropping off and now the fucking conservation department is stepping in and jacking up regulations. Now I can’t fish for the damn things when I want to. I’m not supposed to bother them during their mating times or migration times. Who ever heard of a crab migrating? They don’t even fucking fly.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Fish them until I think of a better way to make money. I go where the money is.”

  “I think I can help you,” Enoc said. A waitress brought a tray of drinks over to the table and looked awkward as she set the tray down in front of the two men.

  “Where did everyone else go?�
� she asked. Even though she spoke Japanese, Enoc figured out what she was saying.

  “They fucked off,” Hirito said. “Like you’re about to do.” She swore at them and left. Enoc laughed. “Not too bad for us. All these drinks.”

  “Do you mind if I take one?” Enoc said.

  “If you’re about to tell me how we can make a bunch of money, you can take the whole damn lot.”

  “I’m a college student.” Enoc said.

  “What do you study?”

  “Bio-chemistry, but most of the work I do is in the field of Bio-engineering.”

  “You feel you have something to offer to the crab industry?”

  “If you wouldn’t mind sparing me a few minutes of your time,” Enoc said. Hirito looked around at the empty seats and shrugged.

  “I don’t seem to be very busy at the moment.”

  “Look,” Enoc began, “I don’t know anything about the crab fishing industry, but I’ve learned a lot about life over these past two months. I’ve learned that there isn’t much meaning in anything spiritual.”

  “So?”

  “I want to make a lot of money.”

  “Speak on.”

  “You’re losing your industry and I think I could bring it back. I’ve been studying and working on growth hormones in animals for the farming industry. Those people use these types of things all the time. Animals are raised on chemicals to make them grow faster, larger or to produce more things like eggs and milk. I think we could do that to the crabs. Maybe we can make them larger, breed faster and draw them away from the environmental regulations.”

  “How?” Hirito drank a glass of cranberry vodka down to nothing, wiped the saliva off his lips and leaned forward.

  “If we could make a crab large, not just by a bit, but make it almost a giant, I could get it to produce mating pheromones all the time. We do it with cows and other animals, I don’t see why we couldn’t do it with a crab. We could control the giant mother crab, draw all the other crabs to her, away from the Japanese government regulations, and fish the hell out of them.”