by Barry Lancet
A burning sensation rippled through my flesh.
At two yards, Ogi said, “Give it up, Brodie. It’s over.”
I craned my neck to look. Ogi swayed unsteadily, his feet spread wide for balance, the gun pointed at my head. At that distance, an experienced gunman couldn’t miss. Even a thoroughly pummeled one. I crawled forward another couple of inches. Ogi squeezed off a shot that kicked up dust a hair’s breadth from my right shoulder. I stopped my struggle and rolled onto my side and faced him.
Ogi grinned, savoring the moment. “Very slowly, very painfully, you’re going to die, Brodie.”
I was silent.
“There’s going to be more suffering than you could ever imagine.”
Still on my side, I scooted backward in small increments. Even a fractional gain could be valuable.
“I’m going fill you with holes one bullet at a time. Near the joints.”
I thought it a rock at first . . . but it was a handle . . .
Ogi’s misshapen jaw wrenched itself into a sneer. “Intense pain is nearest the joints. Did you know that?” The muzzle of his weapon rose. He aimed it gleefully at my left knee. “When the first bullet tears through you, you’ll—”
Reaching behind me, my fingers came up with Narazaki’s weapon, the gun knocked loose when Luke had shot him. While Ogi gloated, I brought the piece up over my hip and pulled the trigger. With the first shot, an invisible force shoved the Soga leader backward.
“Noooooo!” he wailed.
He swung his weapon around and I fired again. And again.
I kept shooting.
In my mind’s eye, I matched the rounds with the victims: one for Mieko, one for the Nakamuras. One for the linguist, one for Noda’s kin. One for Abers, one for Renna. One for all the victims I’d never met but knew were out there.
With each shot, the kickback electrified my body with a searing pain and I screamed as if I were reliving each victim’s tribulations.
But despite the pain, I fired.
Fired, then heard myself scream.
Ogi’s body jerked spasmodically with the impact of each bullet. The last discharge knocked the Soga chief off his feet. He fell back dead, Renna’s gun still clutched in his lifeless hand.
There would be no resurrection this time. I lay my head on the damp deadfall, my body a throbbing network of torment.
“Daddy?”
Hesitant footsteps signaled Jenny’s emergence from the foliage. Straining, I raised my head. She reached over my hip for the dagger. I brushed her hand away before she could grab it.
“Don’t touch the knife,” I whispered, a worrying numbness spreading through my lower extremities. “The handle is coated with poison, and right now the blade is keeping the blood in. What I need you to do is bring help.”
“I can’t leave you, Daddy. You’re hurting.”
“I need you to get help, Jen.”
“Alone?”
“Yes.”
“It’s too dark.”
I winced. More obstacles. Would it never end? Jenny was afraid for me, afraid to venture out on her own, and afraid to face the darkness. All of her worst nightmares had coalesced in this moment.
My nerves shrieked in agony, and before I could stifle it a moan escaped my lips, escalating my daughter’s panic. Keeping my voice calm and soothing, I said, “You need to find a paramedic as fast as you can, Jen. For that, all you have to do is run to the road about two hundred yards to the right. Ask the first person you come across to call for medical help. Okay?”
“But—”
Sweat beaded my brow. “I need you to go now. It’s important. They are all gone. The only people left are our friends. Ask any one of them to—” I clamped my jaw shut against a sudden surge of pain.
Tears streamed down my daughter’s cheeks. She saw my suffering. She heard the tightness in my voice. And she was immobilized with fear.
“I can’t leave you, Daddy. You’ll die.”
I’ll die if you don’t leave me, I wanted to shout, but couldn’t. Jenny was on the edge. Any further sign of weakness on my part would cause her to shut down. Then she would hover over me protectively, watching with eyes steeped in dread and self-doubt while my life drained away, her guilt over my death in turn crushing her fragile soul without mercy. If I couldn’t convince her to leave my side voluntarily, neither of us would survive.
Desperation clamored in my chest. I searched for something to ignite her confidence.
“Jen, do you love me?”
“Yes, of course.”
“If you love me, go for help. Forget everything else.”
“I love you but—”
“Forget everything else.”
“I can’t.”
“Try.”
Her voice broke. “I can’t.”
I sighed, resigned. “All right. If you can’t, you can’t.”
“Sorry, Daddy.”
What did I expect? She was only six. First, the kidnapping. Next, the terror of captivity. Now, a life-and-death decision. The world was asking too much of my little girl. I shifted into protection mode while I still had the strength.
“I understand, Jenny. And you know what? It’s okay. But I want you to promise me one thing. It’s a best-ever from me, only a promise instead of a riddle.”
“What?”
Before I died, I had to forestall the guilt. Had to give her a reason to live beyond the horrors of her kidnapping and tonight. “No matter what happens, remember that none of this is your fault.”
“It isn’t?”
“Of course not. It’s the world spinning badly. That’s all. If you’re strong enough, you’ll beat it. Because you’re my girl. Because you’re you. Have you got that?”
“Sort of.”
“Don’t worry about the details. It’s a best-ever. Just remember it’s not your fault. When you’re older, you’ll understand.”
“Am I strong enough now?”
“Of course.”
“Why of ‘course’?”
“Because you have your mother’s strength.”
Jenny’s eyes widened. “I do?”
“Yes.”
Chewing her bottom lip, she stared at me for a moment, then something behind her eyes shifted and she trooped over and kicked Ogi in the knee. The leg shook with the lethargic wobble of dead weight and my heartbeat ticked up at my daughter’s show of bravery. She’d make it. Maybe with scars, but she’d make it. I could rest now. I closed my eyes.
“I stomped him, Daddy,” Jenny called.
“Yes, you did,” I said faintly.
My voice cracked. I felt the remaining shreds of my stamina drain away, and for the second time tonight unconsciousness loomed.
Jenny saw me fading. “Daddy?”
I could summon no energy to respond.
“Daddy, can you hear me?”
Willing my eyes to open, I managed a ghost of a smile.
Jenny said, “I’m going to get help now, Daddy. Okay?”
No words would come.
“Okay?” Panic hovered behind her insistence. “Please say ‘okay,’ Daddy.”
With the faintest of voices, I managed to satisfy her demand.
“Wait for me, all right? Promise?”
With my last breath, I did.
Jenny kissed my cheek then sprinted for the road.
Exhausted, I could hold my eyes open no longer. Forgive me, Jenny, for a promise I can’t keep. There was no poison in my system, but it no longer mattered. Garroted and knifed, I had sustained too much blood loss. There could be no doubt: I was dying. But I’d won. Ogi was dead. His son was dead. Soga was dead. Even Mieko’s killer was dead. All of which meant Jenny would live. It was enough.
In the distance, a cheer rose up from the police swarming the manor. I pried my eyes open. Helicopters had arrived en masse and roared overhead with mechanical fury, their spotlights slashing the darkness. Weary and relieved, I allowed my eyes to fall shut one final time—and I smiled. Mopping-up operations h
ad begun. My daughter would find the police or they would find her. That’s all I cared about. At six, Jenny had so much yet to do. I had lived thirty-two long, eventful years. Traveled the world. Pitched camp in Tokyo, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Made lifelong friends in all those places and more. Loved and been loved. I couldn’t ask for more.
A new kind of darkness clouded the edges of my vision, carrying with it a feeling of wellness. The pain lessened, then dissipated. The soothing blackness spread a tingling warmth over me. The last stage before the end.
“Sorry, Jen,” I whispered into the night. “I did the best I could.”
EPILOGUE
I SLUMBERED for eighteen hours, enveloped in feverish hallucinations. Over and over, I saw my daughter running toward me, arms outstretched. The scene played in an eternal loop I never tired of watching. In my drug-induced visions, the world was perfect. Anguish and pain had been airbrushed from my immediate memory. Those I loved suffered no loss, no hurt, no distress, but floated in a pillowy softness that coddled and nurtured and brought only smiles and blissful looks.
But in the darker corners of my mind, reality hovered in all its brutality. Abers shot, Renna poisoned, Jenny traumatized, Narazaki dead. In the fabric of my medicinal dreams, my adopted uncle came alive, smiling and waving and slapping me on the back with his usual camaraderie. What kind of life had he led? What kind of death had taken him? What should I make of the man I once called uncle?
Hours later I clawed my way out of the narcotic sleep. Looking around, I was greeted with an unexpected vision: Renna lay in a bed across the room. His right arm was in a sling and an intravenous feed dripped steadily into the other arm. Renna rolled his head in my direction.
“How’d we get here?” I asked.
“Don’t know.”
“You gonna make it?”
“Looks that way.”
I nodded and drifted down and away. Voices floated around in my head. Apparitions danced above me. Had I talked to Renna or was he another hallucination? Where was Jenny? Where was Noda? Where was I? Had Luke really killed Narazaki or was that another bad dream? Who was dead? Who was alive? Which was I?
Ten hours later I woke a second time.
Renna looked over. “I know,” he said.
“Know what?”
“How we got here. You jinxed us. ‘Till death do us part,’ remember?”
“Do and wish I didn’t.”
Something moved under my covers, and I lifted the blanket. Jenny had snuggled into my side and was sleeping soundly.
—
Lieutenant Jamie McCann showed up next. It was his third visit to our hospital room, but the first one with all of us conscious. He brought Renna and me up to date and asked if the results were good enough to declare victory over the monster that was Soga. Which, of course, was the question of the hour.
Was Soga still out there or had they been defanged?
I didn’t know.
McCann told us that Long Island looked like a war zone. In all, six policemen had died in the assault on the Soga estate. The number of wounded reached a staggering seventeen. Twelve men fell on the first charge, mostly leg injuries, thank God, when a pair of submachine guns operated by remote control strafed the front guard, discharging a spray of ankle-level firepower that dropped nearly the whole of the first advance and accounted for some of the most horrifying screams McCann had ever heard. Who were these Soga guys and what the hell did they think they were doing? he asked more than once.
On Soga’s side, the police bagged the two snipers at the gate, and Renna’s takedown brought the count to three. According to McCann I’d turned into a one-man wrecking crew, taking down Ogi, Casey, Dermott, my daughter’s three captors, and the young trainee left bound and gagged in the shrubbery. Grand total: nine dead, one captured. Considering the expertise of the opposition, a resounding success despite the nine Soga fighters who had escaped. And then there were the civilian casualties: DeMonde out of the San Francisco’s mayor’s office and Narazaki from Brodie Security.
On the following day, when I could speak coherently from my hospital bed, I funneled the results of the Long Island showdown to Tejima and Kozawa in Tokyo. Both the Ministry of Defense bureaucrat and the powerbroker congratulated me but were otherwise distant and uncommunicative. Knowing a muted response meant one or both of them would shift into cover-up mode, I was saddened.
But they were what they were, so I shrugged it off and dialed a third number, where Tommy-gun Tomita listened to my account with just the right level of jubilation. After verifying the facts with McCann and the SFPD, the journalist released another scoop on the front page of the Mainichi Newspaper, and action by reluctant government officials followed directly because, Tommy told me later, the Soga debacle would fester for years in the international arena if the pols and bureaucrats adhered to their usual indolent course, ignoring what they could and sweeping the rest under the rug for the “good of the country’s image” or some other excuse of the day.
For the first time in modern Japanese history, the authorities put a whole village under house arrest. Not since premodern times when daimyo and shogun warrior lords torched entire towns or ordered the death of a whole clan had such a sweeping action been carried out.
A special squad from the Self-Defense Forces surrounded the village. Roads were blocked, mountain passes sealed. Barbed wire was strung across the river. Soga-jujo was bottled up tight.
Three high-ranking officials from the Ministry of Finance were indicted. Then the suicides began. Shingo Yuda, the top man at MOF whom Ogi had fingered as his client for Japantown, headed the roster. There were twelve in all, seven at MOF and five more at the Ministry of International Trade and Industry and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Those led to more indictments. The defense ministry itself did not escape unscathed.
Brodie Security was the hero. The papers raved about our perseverance, and before long we garnered threats from right-wing groups who said we’d sullied the reputation of the hinomaru, the Japanese flag and all it stood for. Recognizing the gravity of their fury, we secured our doors during business hours until the heat died down but otherwise carried on as usual.
For Jenny and me, the most welcome news arrived with Tejima’s last call: guided by a master list they had uncovered in the village, the Ministry of Defense was tracking down the Soga assassins posted outside Japan and offering them a onetime amnesty-and-rehabilitation package, a classic Japanese solution. Even with Ogi dead, I worried about vengeance-seeking assassins stalking us, but the offer of absolution would dissolve the desire for payback.
On American shores action was no less swift. As I looked on, Lieutenant Franklin Thomas Renna received a citation bedside in New York City from the new deputy mayor of San Francisco, who flew to the East Coast with Miriam and the children.
Renna could have gone either way, the doctors informed us, but my action in the field most likely swung the needle into positive territory. By the time Renna boarded a flight home two weeks later, the department’s toughest cop was nearing a full return to health.
My recovery was nearly as tenuous. Blood loss and extreme shock to my central and autonomic nervous systems almost sent my body into a “permanent nosedive,” my doctor said, “like a plane whose engines have stalled.” Leaving the knife in place was the smartest thing I could have done, as it stemmed the outward flow of blood, although the intrusion of the steel shaft had played havoc on my sensory systems. The move also assured that the serrated edge of the weapon could not fulfill its full purpose, which was to rip open the wound upon withdrawal. But what really saved the day, the doctor confided, was the knife’s shallow penetration. Because of the thrashing I meted out to Ogi, the battered Soga leader only managed to thrust the blade in a mere 2.2 inches, “luckily avoiding injury to the vital organs and spinal cord, but puncturing the stomach lining.” They put me on mush for thirty days.
During my convalescence, I recovered not only my health but also the stillness
Mieko worked so hard to draw from the shadows—what she assured me resides in all of us. Over the years, I’d lost it, reclaimed it, then lost it once more. At twenty-one, with my mother’s death, I’d thought I’d lost it completely. But her passing brought Mieko back into my life, along with her sense of knowing. With Mieko’s death it slipped away yet again, only to force its way back into my life on the bloodstained cobblestones of Japantown. In the hospital, reviewing it all, I regained my foothold and the stillness returned to stay. What I locked on to was deep and clear and offered an umbilical connection to something beyond everyday normalcy. I finally understood that it was always with me—I had never lost it, only myself.
Comforted, I closed my eyes and in the darkness behind my eyelids, I could make out a hint of Mieko’s pearl-white smile.
—
Jenny slept in my bed every night for a month after she heard the news about Abers. But slowly she emerged from the shock. She seemed to survive the trauma of her kidnapping mostly unscathed, although I watched her closely. Her minor celebrity status at school helped. But it wasn’t until she finally felt frisky enough to ask the question I’d long hoped to hear that I felt confident she would come out on top.
We were sitting at our kitchen table, sated after consuming extra-large portions of pepper-eggs.
“Daddy, you still haven’t guessed my best-ever.”
“ ‘What kind of bees give milk?’ ”
She squeezed my hand with pleasure. “You remember!”
“Of course. In Tokyo I thought about it a lot, and I thought about you a lot, but mostly I was too busy thinking about your safety and the men who were after us.”
“You did a good job there, you know. The papers said so.”
“You’re reading the papers now?”
“Sort of. I found our names a bunch of times. And Mr. Renna’s too.”
“Hmmm.”
“Because you did such a good job, this one time I’m going to tell you the answer to a best-ever, okay? Only this once. And only if you promise to keep it a secret. Do you promise?”
I raised a hand. “I do.”
“Really a secret?”
“You bet.”