Bullet Train

by Kotaro Isaka

  ‘No, he was in car one for sure. But at some point he got away.’

  ‘At some point? What, when you weren’t paying attention?’ Lemon can feel the corners of his mouth pulling upward. Thinking about his cool-headed and fastidious partner messing up is a distinct pleasure. ‘I mean, it couldn’t have been that hard. You go from here to car one. Glasses Guy is somewhere between those two points, so he’s got nowhere to run. You should have bumped into him somewhere. It’d be harder to miss him than to find him, you know? What happened, Tangerine, did you get stuck in the toilet? Or did you like blink for a really long time and he got away when your eyes were closed?’

  ‘I didn’t go to the toilet, and my blinks are short. But he had help.’ Tangerine curls his lip. Oh shit, he’s really pissed off, Lemon realises with some distress. It’s such a pain when Mr Cool-headed is pissed off.

  ‘Then you should have squeezed his helpers.’

  ‘Apparently he forced them to help. A couple, a guy in drag and an older guy dressed normally.’

  ‘You think that’s true, that he forced them?’

  ‘They seemed pretty clueless to me. I don’t think they were lying.’ He rubs his right knuckles distastefully. Must have roughed ’em up a little.

  ‘So that means Glasses Guy escaped and went the other way.’ Lemon’s eyes go to the front of the train. ‘But I didn’t see anyone go by.’

  ‘Maybe you were holding a long blink.’

  ‘No way. When I was a little kid I won the school-wide staring contest.’

  ‘Glad I didn’t go to your school. Are you sure no one came this way? No one at all?’

  ‘Well, one or two people went by, sure. People move around the train, and there’s the girl with the snack trolley. But nobody who looked like Glasses Guy.’

  ‘You were in your seat facing the front the whole time?’

  ‘Sure. I’m not a kid, it’s not like I had my face glued to the window.’ No sooner are the words out of his mouth than Lemon remembers the wristwatch in his hand. ‘Ohh,’ he sighs. ‘I did bend down to pick this thing up.’

  Tangerine immediately looks suspicious. Lemon holds the watch up.

  ‘The alarm on it was going off. It was on the floor down there,’ he says, pointing to the seat behind him, ‘so I picked it up.’ Tangerine’s gaze hardens, so Lemon hastens to add, ‘That was the only time I wasn’t looking!’

  ‘Then that’s it.’

  ‘That’s what?’

  ‘He must have put it there. Glasses Guy is supposed to be a quick thinker, remember? He must have been planning something.’

  ‘What could he have been planning?’

  ‘He likes to use tools and gadgets. Here, look.’ Tangerine holds up the phone in his hand.

  ‘You get a new phone?’

  ‘He gave it to me. She. The cross-dresser. Said it was from Nanao.’

  ‘What’s he up to? Maybe he’s gonna call crying and ask us to let him off the hook.’ Lemon is only joking, but just as he says it the LCD screen on the phone lights up and it emits a gentle melody.

  ‘Huh. Looks like you were right,’ Tangerine says with a shrug.

  Nanao

  AFTER DODGING TANGERINE IN THE gangway between cars one and two, Nanao has made his way to the entrance of car three. He tries to peek through the window on the door but he trips the sensor and the door slides open. Bad luck again. From his past experience he knows better than to resist the flow of his fortune. Instead he slips into car three. The first row is empty so he sits quietly to remain out of sight.

  Making sure to keep a low profile, he peers between the headrests up the length of the car. There’s Lemon, standing up.

  Awake. Evidently he didn’t drink from the bottle with the sleeping powder in it. That would have made things simpler, but Nanao hadn’t really been counting on it to go down that way. It was just one of the little traps he had scattered around in his haste. No sense getting all worked up when one doesn’t pan out.

  He risks another look.

  Lemon is moving. Probably looking for the watch that’s beeping. ‘Come on, whoever’s that is, answer it already,’ he says. It’s mine, thinks Nanao. My watch that I put there on the floor, for you.

  Since he’s used to his rotten luck, he was expecting the alarm not to go off, or for the battery to run out even though those watches almost never run out of batteries, or maybe someone might pick it up before Lemon had a chance to find it, but somehow none of that happened.

  Nanao gauges the timing.

  The exact moment to stand, the exact moment to move. He worries that Tangerine might appear behind him.

  He lifts his butt off the seat slightly, ready to launch, and pokes his head out over the headrest.

  The alarm is still beeping urgently. Nanao waits, wondering if Lemon will go after it, betting that he will. Sure enough, Lemon stands back up, moves one row behind, and crouches down.

  Now.

  Nanao obeys the command inside his head and launches. He proceeds directly up the aisle, not hesitating in the slightest, moving with controlled haste. While Lemon is busy groping around on the floor Nanao zips right by, holding his breath.

  He exhales once he’s out the door and in the gangway. Can’t stop now. Keep going.

  Through car four, then five. As soon as he exits five he whips out his phone and starts thumbing through the phonebook until he finds the number that he just entered as a new contact, the Wolf’s phone, and dials. In the gangway the train sounds like the roar of a wild river but Nanao presses the phone to his ear so he can hear the line ringing. He leans up against the window as his call is answered.

  ‘Where are you?’ demands the voice on the other line. ‘What’s your game?’

  ‘Please calm down. I’m not your enemy,’ Nanao says firmly. His first priority is to talk Tangerine down from coming after him. ‘I took your bag, but I was only following orders from Minegishi.’

  ‘Minegishi?’ Tangerine sounds suspicious. Nanao can hear Lemon saying something in the background. Probably telling Tangerine that he heard the same thing from Nanao earlier. So they’re back together again.

  ‘I think us fighting each other is exactly what Minegishi wants.’

  ‘Where’s the bag?’

  ‘I’m looking for it too.’

  ‘You expect me to believe that?’

  ‘If I had it I’d have got off the train at Omiya. There’d be absolutely no reason for me to get in touch with you. I’m reaching out to you irregardless of how dangerous it is, because I don’t have any other options.’

  ‘My father told me something before he died.’ Tangerine’s voice is cold and cautious, the exact opposite of Lemon’s easy-going delivery. He sounds like the wary type who carefully weighs each and every decision. ‘He said never trust authors who overuse sentence fragments or conversationalists who use the word irregardless. Want to know what else I think? I think that maybe you weren’t just hired to steal the bag from us, but to take us out, too. You trying to connect with us even though you know it’d be dangerous is because you need to get close enough to kill us. You sound nervous because you still haven’t got the job done.’

  ‘If I’d been hired to take you out, I would have done Lemon when I had the chance before, when he was unconscious.’

  ‘Or maybe you were waiting until you had us both in the same place. You wanted to wrap it up all at once, Lemon and Tangerine together.’

  ‘What exactly are you getting out of being so distrustful?’

  ‘It’s how I’ve stayed alive so far. Now, where are you? Which car?’

  ‘I switched trains,’ Nanao says somewhat desperately. ‘I left the Hayate, I’m on the Komachi now.’ Even though he knows that there’s no gangway between the linked trains.

  ‘That lie wouldn’t even fool a preschooler. You can’t get from the Hayate to the Komachi.’

  ‘Sometimes lies that don’t work on preschoolers work better on adults.’ The shaking of the train ratchets up a not
ch in intensity. Nanao presses the phone hard against his ear and tries to keep himself steady. ‘But listen. What’s your plan? Neither of us has much room to manoeuvre here.’

  ‘Right, it’s like you said, not many options. That’s why we’re going to offer you up to Minegishi. We’ll tell him everything’s your fault.’

  ‘You’re going to blame me for the bag disappearing?’

  ‘And also for the death of his precious son.’

  Nanao is stunned. He thought he’d heard something to that effect when he was spying on their conversation earlier, but now that he knows it’s true it takes a moment to digest the terrifying ramifications.

  ‘I guess I forgot to mention. Minegishi’s son is with us, but he’s dead.’

  ‘What do you mean, dead?’ Nanao recalls seeing the body of the young man next to Tangerine and Lemon. Not breathing, not moving, clearly deceased. So that was Minegishi’s son. Why did he have to be on this train? Why is all of this happening to me? He wants to scream in frustration. ‘That, uh, that isn’t good.’

  ‘No, not good at all.’ Tangerine sounds unconcerned.

  Idiot, Nanao wants to shout. Anyone who lost their child would be driven mad with grief, regardless of what kind of person they were. And if they found out who was responsible, their grief would turn into an inferno of rage. Nanao doesn’t even want to imagine the intensity of the rage inferno when the source is Yoshio Minegishi. Just thinking about it makes him feel the heat, already blackening and crisping his flesh.

  ‘Why did you kill him?’

  At that moment the train lurches sideways. Nanao flexes his leg muscles to keep from tumbling over and tips his body towards the window, pressing his forehead up against it for support. Out of nowhere something wet splats against the outside of the glass right in front of his face. Nanao can’t tell if it’s bird shit or a clump of mud, but it startles him so much that he yelps embarrassingly and jerks backwards, falling hard on his backside.

  There’s my crappy luck again, he sighs. The pain in his tailbone bothers him less than his persistent misfortune.

  He dropped his phone when he fell.

  A man happens to be walking by and stoops over to pick the phone up. It’s the man Nanao met earlier, the exam-prep instructor with the placid but somehow lifeless face. ‘Oh, hey, teach,’ Nanao says without meaning to.

  The man looks at the phone in his hand. He hears a voice coming out of it and instinctively puts it up to his ear.

  Nanao hastily stands up and holds his own hand out, asking for the phone back. ‘Having a hard time staying on your feet again, I see,’ the man says genially, handing over the phone. Then he disappears into the bathroom.

  ‘Hello?’ Nanao says into the phone. ‘I dropped the phone. What were you saying?’

  He hears an annoyed click of the tongue. ‘I said that we didn’t kill Minegishi’s kid. He was just sitting there, and suddenly we noticed he was dead. We thought maybe he died from shock or something. But it wasn’t us, you hear me?’

  ‘I doubt Minegishi would believe you.’ I don’t believe you either, he says to himself.

  ‘That’s why we’re going to say it was you. That’s believable enough, right?’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘It’s better than nothing.’

  Nanao sighs again. He was hoping to join forces with Tangerine and Lemon, but now that he knows they’re planning to pin the death of Minegishi’s son on him on top of the loss of the bag, he’s regretting reaching out to them. He realises it was a dumb idea, like trying to beat a shoplifting rap by asking murderers to help explain the situation to the police. All wrong.

  ‘Hey, you still there?’

  ‘Yeah, I’m just surprised that you two got yourselves in so much trouble.’

  ‘Not us two. This is all on you, Glasses Guy.’ Tangerine doesn’t sound like he’s making a joke. ‘You lost the bag, and you killed Minegishi’s number-one son. So we’re going to kill you. Minegishi will be angry, sure, but the bulk of it will be directed at you. He might even praise us for a job well done.’

  What do I do, what do I do? Nanao’s head is whirring at full speed.

  ‘That won’t be how it goes down. In any case,’ he says, looking through the window at the splattered filth on the glass, now changing shape and spreading out with the speed of the Shinkansen, ‘trying to kill each other on the train isn’t going to end well for anyone. Can we agree on that?’

  Tangerine doesn’t answer.

  Someone is standing behind Nanao. It’s the exam-prep instructor, apparently back from the toilet. He’s gazing steadily at Nanao with an inscrutable expression on his face.

  ‘If you don’t want to work together, let’s at least settle on a temporary ceasefire.’ Nanao speaks softly, conscious of the teacher. ‘I’m stuck on the train like you, there’s nowhere for me to go. Let’s just keep things nice and quiet until we get to Morioka. Once we arrive we can settle this. There’ll still be time to do that.’

  The train bucks sharply.

  ‘Two things,’ Tangerine’s voice says into Nanao’s ear. ‘One, when you say we’ll settle this at Morioka, it sounds like you think you’ll win.’

  ‘What makes you say that? You have the advantage of numbers. Two against one.’

  ‘Irregardless.’

  ‘Hey, you just said irregardless.’

  Nanao can almost hear Tangerine smirk. ‘Two. We can’t wait until Morioka. We have to hand you over at Sendai.’

  ‘Why Sendai?’

  ‘Minegishi’s people will be checking on us at Sendai.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘They want to see if Little Minegishi is all right.’

  ‘Which he isn’t.’

  ‘That’s why we need to get you by the time we arrive at Sendai.’

  ‘But that’s –’ Nanao realises that the exam-prep instructor is still standing right there, as if he’s discovered students up to no good. He doesn’t look like he has any intention of going anywhere. ‘Sorry, do you mind if I hang up for a second? I’ll call you right back.’

  ‘Sure, we’ll just enjoy the scenery while we wait for your call, is that what you want me to say? As soon as you hang up we’re coming after you.’ Tangerine’s voice is cutting, but Nanao also hears Lemon in the background, ‘Hey, that sounds nice, let’s just enjoy the scenery for a while.’

  ‘We’re all on the same train, so there’s no rush. There’s more than thirty minutes until we reach Sendai.’

  ‘We can’t afford to wait that long,’ says Tangerine, but once again Lemon pipes up, ‘Come on, man, forget about it, just hang up.’ Then the line goes dead.

  Dismayed at the unravelling of negotiations, Nanao almost calls back, but then he reflects that Tangerine isn’t the type for rash action. There’s probably no cause to panic. Stay calm, he reassures himself, one thing at a time. He looks up at the instructor. ‘Can I help you?’

  ‘Oh, sorry,’ the man says, seemingly just noticing that he’s been standing there. He bobs his head in apology, a swift and mechanical movement, like a toy that’s just had new batteries put in. ‘When I picked up the phone before I heard the person on the line saying something somewhat disturbing, and it got me thinking. Guess I got lost in my own head.’

  ‘Something disturbing?’

  ‘He was talking about someone who had been killed. Scary stuff.’

  He must have picked up the phone just when they were discussing Minegishi’s son. ‘You don’t look very scared.’

  ‘Who was killed? Where?’

  ‘It was on this train.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘What would you do if it were true? Probably best to go run and tell one of the conductors. Or get on the PA system. You could make an announcement, Will any police officers on board please come forward?’

  ‘I might as well ask,’ he says with a wan smile, barely there, like a line traced by a finger on a watery surface, ‘will any murderers on board please come forward?’

  Nan
ao laughs out loud at the unexpected response. That would be a better idea. ‘Anyway, I’m just kidding. If I knew about a murder on the Shinkansen, I wouldn’t be so calm, would I? I’d probably hide out in the toilet until my stop. Or I’d hide behind the conductor and wait til it was all over. If something violent happened in a closed space like this there’d be quite a scene.’

  All lies, of course. Nanao had already killed the Wolf and had a fight with Lemon, and there was nothing remotely like a scene.

  ‘But before, you did say that you have terrible luck. So it wasn’t that surprising when I picked up your phone and heard someone talking about a murder. Murphy’s Law, right? Any time you travel on the Shinkansen you get wrapped up in some trouble, except when you’re specifically looking for trouble.’ He takes a step closer. There’s a sudden glimmer of threat in his eyes. Eyes like hollows in a tree – like a great tree appeared around the man, invisible except for two hollows in the trunk, right where his eyes are, darkly luminescent. Nanao stares at them, feeling like he’ll be sucked in any moment, absorbed into the melting darkness beyond.

  Overcome with fear, he edges backwards. Those eyes are like an evil omen, but Nanao can’t look away, which only makes him feel more afraid. ‘Are you also,’ he stammers, ‘I mean, are you the sort of person who does, um, dangerous jobs?’

  ‘That’s a funny thing to ask. Of course not.’ The man laughs gently.

  ‘Your seat was at the back of car four. You could have gone to the toilet between four and three. Why exactly did you come all the way up here?’ Nanao eyes the man searchingly.

  ‘I just went the wrong way, that’s all. Came towards the front of the train. By the time I realised it I had come most of the way, so, rather than run back, you know.’

  Nanao murmurs wordlessly, still unconvinced.

  ‘But I have been involved in dangerous situations before.’

  ‘I’m involved in one right now,’ Nanao says reflexively. He can feel the words springing up from his throat unbidden. ‘A very dangerous man’s son has been killed. Not that I saw it happen. No one saw it happen, apparently, but he’s dead.’