“Mario? He was the one who let Randy erase the security recording. Unfortunately, sooner or later, the guard would have put the pieces together, and then he would have to tell someone. I could not have that. It had to be done.”
“So does this,” Tom said.
“Yes.” Nakamura’s voice was sad. “This, too, was inevitable from the beginning, I fear. You were fated to come into my orbit, just as you have done. I knew, once you talked about Jeff, about the fake snake bites on Barry, that you were getting too close to the truth, that eventually you would figure things out. I sent the snake to your room. And the yakuza to try to scare you off. I wanted to spare you. I hoped that you might just leave….”
“I don’t scare off.”
“No. I can see that.”
“Maybe you’re the one who should be scared,” Tom said. “Look, one of us is a fake samurai. You’ve never fought a real fight, just pretend, and I’ve spent years on the streets, brawling with all kinds of tough guys. Which of us do you think ought to be nervous?”
“I know all things samurai. In those movies, I was not just acting. I did not come up here to pretend.”
“I didn’t come up here to jaw either.”
“No, of course not. Time is running out. For Stanley, certainly. And it is foolish indeed for me to suppose that you could ever comprehend the samurai way. No gaijin can.”
“What I comprehend is, one of us is going down, and it’s not going to be me,” Tom said in a confident voice.
He fitted the looped saya, the wooden scabbard, over his shoulder, took a step forward, and halted. Better to leave some distance between them. Beyond Nakamura, he could see Stanley. His mouth was taped shut, and his eyes were wide, tears trailing down his cheeks.
Tom took no more than a glance at him, however. He couldn’t afford to let anything distract him now. Rage, fear, all emotions were distracting, they led to sloppy fighting, they left one vulnerable. The samurai put all that aside when he fought. He would too.
He was facing a pro, maybe an aging pro, but a pro nonetheless, and he was fully aware that he himself was a rank amateur. He was fast and he was strong, and he had been in a lot of fights. He was good at tuning in to the other guy, but he had never fought with a sword, and Nakamura had, if only in those movies. And this wasn’t going to be just a couple of guys throwing punches. This was all or nothing.
Kami-hasso, he told himself. Become one with his opponent. He watched Nakamura, eye to eye, till it felt as if he could see right into Nakamura’s brain, detect the impulses as they ran from brain to muscle.
Instinct told him when Nakamura was about to draw, and Tom drew with him, but he was not quite as fast. He was glad now that he hadn’t come any closer. Nakamura could have chopped him down in one swift motion, and the fight would have been over.
Tom had made up his mind in the ride up here that he would be the aggressor. That was the way he fought, and anyway, time was against him. His odds were going to get slimmer as the minutes ticked by. He went into a kind of trance, everything else fading from sight but the man before him.
He lunged forward, but Nakamura slipped like an eel out of the sword’s path and, shouting “Ai,” came back with a fast cut to the side that should have sliced Tom open. Somehow Tom managed to turn that away with his own blade, but so far this wasn’t looking good.
“You are better than I expected,” Nakamura said, and he seemed to relax, but Tom sensed that his relaxing was only a ruse, and when Nakamura suddenly attacked, a straight thrust at Tom’s face, Tom had already leaned away from it. The tip of the sword came a fraction of an inch short of his throat.
From his experience in facing shooters, Tom felt certain that Nakamura, too, was experiencing what was most often described as tunnel vision, focusing so intently on the threat right in front of you that everything outside of that tiny space vanished. At San Francisco PD, they had trained officers to take a quick sidestep, in hope that they might disappear for a few seconds from their enemy’s vision, give them a life or death chance.
Tom moved quickly to the right and attempted one of the classic moves from the old samurai flicks, yokogiri, a sideways cut he had sometimes practiced, like playing air guitar. Nakamura dodged, but not fast enough. The sword nicked his arm.
The sight of his own blood enraged Nakamura. “Damn you,” he shouted, his anger flaring, and he swung his sword in a barely controlled diagonal cut, which would have quartered Tom if it hadn’t just missed him. Before Tom could counter, Nakamura came at him again from the left.
Tom turned inside the thrust, but Nakamura recovered faster than he would have thought possible. Tom roared and made a futile slice at the air, but Nakamura had already pirouetted away from him, and this time Nakamura’s sweeping blade, left to right, cut into Tom’s left arm, deep, almost to the bone. Tom smelled his own blood, and in seconds the wound had begun to hurt, bad. It wouldn’t take long for the cut to weaken him, bleeding the way it was, and once that happened, it was all over but the singing. If he was going to beat this guy, he had to do it soon. Sooner than soon. It had to be now.
With his enemy wounded, however, Nakamura was encouraged. He unleashed a blur of sword strokes, so fast and so hard that it was all Tom could do to fend them off, let alone retaliate. The air rang with the music of steel on steel. Tom backed up a step, and then another, looking for any opening and finding none.
Tom’s defenses had begun to falter, and he was getting rapidly weaker. His cuts with the katana were nothing more now than wild swings. Nakamura sensed his opportunity and went for the kill.
“This,” Nakamura said through clenched teeth, “we call the yakiba. It comes in through the bone of the hip, shatters it, and travels downward. Good bye, gaijin.” He came in under Tom’s ineffective sword, his own blade slicing the air.
Something went wrong, though. The sword cut into Tom’s hip as intended, but instead of amputating everything south of there, as it should have done, it stopped hard, with so violent a torque that Nakamura almost lost his grip on the haft.
He recovered, but not fast enough. With every ounce of the strength he had left in his right arm, Tom brought his own sword up in the classic rising cut he’d seen in every one of the movies, from left to right. It wasn’t a perfect samurai cut, which would have gone clean through the spine, rending the body in two, but it was enough. Nakamura, his eyes wide with astonishment, toppled to the ground.
Tom’s hand went to his hip, where the steel insert had stopped Nakamura’s blade. The cut was clean but shallow. It was bleeding, but not a geyser, meaning he hadn’t lost an artery. He stepped over the fallen Nakamura, tossing his sword aside.
“You have to finish me off,” Nakamura hissed through clenched teeth. “It is the samurai way.”
“Hell, I never said I was a samurai. You want the job done, do it yourself,” Tom said. He went to where Stanley waited, bound to his chair, and carefully pulled the tape from his mouth.
“Baby, you do get yourself into more shit,” he said with a relieved grin.
“Tom, the bomb,” Stanley gasped.
“Oh, that. Hell, we’ve got almost two minutes left before that contraption is set to blow.” He used the blade of the sword to cut the wire free and gave the bomb a wide toss. Three seconds later, it exploded. Rocks and sand debris flew into the air.
“Well, maybe not two whole minutes,” Tom said, dodging a clod of dirt.
He got Stanley free, and they clung to each other tightly for a moment, until Tom said, “Uh, I’m bleeding badly, baby. I think we’d better head down the hill.” While Stanley tore a strip from his shirt and wound it around Tom’s arm, Tom fished his cell phone out of his pocket and dialed Hammond.
“Jesus, you’re still alive?” Hammond answered in a surprised voice. “We heard that explosion, and we thought….”
“No, we’re both still intact. But I’m going to need a medic. I’ve got a couple of good cuts.”
“What did you do?”
“I kicked ass.
”
“What about Nakamura?”
Tom glanced at where Nakamura lay. He’d managed to raise himself up enough to take Tom’s advice. He had finished the job, falling on his own sword. The blood was rapidly forming a pool beneath him, steaming in the cold air.
“He won’t need a medic,” Tom said.
Exclusive Excerpt
A Tom and Stanley Mystery
Does murder follow Tom and Stanley around, or do they follow the murders?
After a hospital stay, Stanley is invited by Father Brighton to convalesce at St. Marywood, an isolated monastery on the ocean cliffs of Big Sur. Upon arrival, Stanley finds Father Brighton dead. The order’s doctor writes it up as a death by natural causes, but those seem to be quite prevalent at the monastery. The recent demise of a young brother who fell from the cliffs is described as an accident, but Stanley’s nose is twitching. Plus the order’s finances have taken a sudden, mysterious turn for the better. Is something rotten at St. Marywood?
Stanley and Tom can’t resist digging around, even if it means testing their tumultuous relationship against a gaggle of handsome, young, virginal, and—they are told—gay men.
Coming Soon to
www.dsppublications.com
Chapter One
Like a shaft of copper gold, the late-afternoon sun pierced the curtained windows. The plum tree that stood outside cast a feathery silhouette across the floor, as delicate and precise as one of those paintings the Chinese do on silk. Someone had turned the air-conditioning off, and with the windows sealed, the atmosphere was hot and humid, making Stanley Korski drowsy. His eyes drifted closed… only to fly wide when the stranger appeared.
Stanley had been thinking about death so frequently of late that it was almost no surprise to look up and see him standing in the doorway of the hospital room—a robed figure with a cowl that half obscured his face until he pushed it back.
Still half-asleep, Stanley said, “Only, aren’t you supposed to be carrying a scythe?”
“A scythe…?” For a second or two, the dark-robed man looked puzzled. Then he grinned, a smile that took years off his otherwise weatherworn face. “Ah, you’ve been contemplating your mortality, I suspect,” he said.
“Yes,” Stanley agreed. “Or the lack thereof. So assuming you’re not the grim reaper, you must be a monk. But why is a monk coming to visit me in the hospital?”
“I’m a friar, actually.”
“Oh, I see. And the difference is…?”
“Monks stay in their monastery. They retreat from the world. As you can see, friars get out and about.”
“Including hospital visits, it seems.”
“Sometimes.” The visitor paused, appearing to consider how best to explain his presence. “You must wonder what I’m doing here?”
“Well, I truly hope it’s not to administer the last rites.”
The friar laughed. “No, have no fears. It’s nothing of that sort.” Again, that slight hesitation. “I’m an old friend of your friend Chris. Chris Rafferty.”
Which seemed, to Stanley, a non sequitur. He screwed up his face, thinking, Chris is so very… well, so very sociable, to put it nicely. His thoughts ground to a sudden stop. Wait, Chris was a friend. One didn’t like even to think critical thoughts about a good friend. “Really? I don’t recall….”
“At one time,” the friar added.
“He never mentioned a friar.” Which was what Stanley had been puzzling over. Even Chris, who could be very “oh, that doesn’t matter” about such things, would hardly have failed to mention a man of the cloth. “I’ve heard about practically everything else over the years, but never anyone in a brown frock.”
“It was a long time ago,” the visitor said. “Before I joined the order.”
“Please tell me he didn’t drive you to it,” Stanley said with a laugh. “He can be a pill at times, no one knows that better than I, but I’ve never heard of anyone so broken up over him they would retreat to a monastery. Or a—well, what do you call your places, anyway?”
“Technically, they are friaries, but to be honest, we usually just refer to ours as a monastery.”
“Hmm. That is confusing, you know,” Stanley said, laughing to take any sting out of his remark.
This time the friar actually laughed with him. “Yes, I’m sure it is. Don’t worry, it’ll all come clear in due time. And as to Chris, no, I can’t blame him for driving me to anything. Though, yes, it was the nature of our relationship that made me turn to the order, in a manner of speaking.”
“Which is a remark surely designed, I think, to make one curious. At least, it did to me. Make me curious, I mean.” Stanley lifted an eyebrow. “I hope you’re going to elucidate.”
“I’m afraid it’s not a very original story. I was a priest, and I was gay, but I wasn’t a happy homosexual.”
“Ah.” Stanley nodded. That he could understand. “Gay does not always mean happy.”
“So very true. And I think, if truth be told, at the time I was more gay than priest. All that guilt.”
“I understand. I suppose we all go through a period of guilt. It’s part of the initiation ritual, I believe.”
“Yes, I think you’re right.” He paused briefly. “At any rate, in my case, it poisoned my relationships—even with Chris, though I did love him greatly. I was older than him. At the time, he was still quite young. And very beautiful.”
“I never knew him when he was in the cradle, but he must have been a beautiful baby,” Stanley said. “I remember a picture—with a bearskin rug—already flaunting himself, and he was no more than an infant.”
The friar’s laugh was easy and fell pleasantly on the ear. “No, he was not quite that young when I knew him, but young. In his teens. His late teens, to be honest, but still, too young for me to consider taking our relationship that next step further, though at the time, I thought he was willing.”
“She always was a hussy.”
The smile again. “I suspect his interest in me had as much to do with father fulfillment as it did with sexual attraction. But he was a lovely young man, and I was not exactly a paragon of virtue. I wanted to do more, I can confess that now, but I felt as well that it would be wrong—wrong for him, certainly.”
“Well, if it’s any consolation, he turned out a slut anyway.”
That earned him another laugh. Stanley decided he liked the laugh—and the man. “He speaks well of you too,” the friar said.
“Which means, if you can say that, then you must have stayed in touch over the years.”
“Does it?”
“If you know him to speak of me. We are longtime friends, but obviously I didn’t meet him until after your time together.”
“You are right, of course. And, yes, we have stayed in touch. Although not perhaps as much in touch as I would have liked….”
Stanley raised an eyebrow, but the father went on with only a slight pause. “But we have over the years exchanged the occasional card, and even a phone call or two.”
“Close but distant, in other words. That’s not as rare as one might suppose.”
“Exactly. So when I had a problem, I called Chris, just to get his advice. And he suggested I come see you.”
“He told you I was in the hospital?”
“No, I went to your office originally, but the girl there told me you were here, in the hospital. So….”
Which was a puzzling remark. So far as Stanley knew, his partner, Tom Danzel, was in the office. And he’d heard Tom called many things since they’d first met—had in fact given him a few choice labels himself—but no one, to the best of his knowledge, had ever called Tom a “girl.” At least not and walked away with a full set of teeth.
His visitor, however, was still speaking. “…not just any problem, mind you, but the sort of thing that couldn’t quite be resolved where I was, that needed outside eyes….”
“What kind of problem?” Stanley asked, his eyes narrowing. He’d straighten out the busin
ess about the office in due time; for now, he was too intrigued by the nature of the friar’s visit. Friars didn’t just pop in for hospital visits, not in his experience—though admittedly his experience with friars had been practically nonexistent. No doubt Chris could tell him more. “What kind of problem are we talking about, exactly?”
The friar had remained standing in the doorway, but now he came the rest of the way into the room and motioned toward the wooden chair next to Stanley’s bed. “May I?”
“Of course, Father…?”
“Brighton.”
“Like the beach.”
“Just so. My mother was English and very fond of the seaside. When she met my father—well, never mind, it’s a long story, and not really relevant to my visit here today.”
He seated himself on the chair, pushing his cowl back from his head. He was older than Stanley had at first realized. On the gray side of sixty, Stanley guessed, though still handsome. The English rose fades early, he found himself thinking, but slowly. Father Brighton’s hair was silver but full—the order, whatever it was, didn’t require tonsure, then—his sensuous mouth making Stanley think he must have been hot indeed when he was younger. Wouldn’t Chris have just had his eye on a studly priest? He was going to have a serious talk with that hussy, lusting after a man of the cloth, and he himself apparently little more than an infant at the time. Once again that image of a naked baby on a bearskin rug popped into his mind.
“Just how long ago was this—I’m not sure what to call it—this flirtation of yours?”
“Oh, quite a long while ago—and I’m not sure flirtation isn’t a bit strong. I had designs. I don’t think Chris shared them especially. And though, as I say, we have remained in touch, it’s been since then a very casual sort of thing. It took a bit of effort, to be honest, even to track him down. It turned out he had moved since I had last written him.”
“Which brings us to your visit here… and your problem….”
“I had in mind saving that for later.”
A Deadly Kind of Love Page 20