Hanzai Japan: Fantastical, Futuristic Stories of Crime From and About Japan (7 page)

She grabbed her phone and took a photo. “Your little demon is cheeky,” she said, laughing. “It reads
Lewd.
”

Luce had stayed late after school to chaperone a dance, so I had the apartment to myself for the night. I thought the knock at the door was the Thai food I ordered, so when I answered it and found Steve, eyes glassy and mouth half-opened, I wasn’t exactly thrilled. “You’re not answering my calls, so I figured I’d just come over,” he said. “Been a while, man, let’s go
out
!”

“I’ve got takeout coming. …” It wasn’t an excuse I’d ever use, but the more I hung out with Luce, the less I wanted to see Steve. We hadn’t even left and I was already dreading the hangover, the inane conversations, the loud screeches of girls over the terrible DJ. I just wanted to eat my pad Thai, catch up on Netflix and wait for Luce to get home.

“Fuck takeout,” he said. “I know what you really want to eat, and I’ve got an idea of where we can find some pretty tasty girls.” He grinned. He had on a fat purple tie and a silver shirt and it didn’t look right. “Come on, we haven’t hung out in ages. I’ll look like a psychopath if I go out alone again.”

“So, I touch it, and you take on my personality?” said the girl with her legs draped over mine. I don’t even remember how we got on the conversation, but I found myself explaining all of it to Steve as we walked to Decker’s. After a couple drinks, he found us some girls and shared the whole story, embellishing it as only Steve could.

I drained my drink and set the empty glass down on the glowing table. “Yep,” I replied, rolling up my sleeve. “Go on, try it out.”

She tapped my arm and I felt a sinister euphoria. I pulled the girl in close and slid my hand between her legs. She let me even though we both knew that I wasn’t what she wanted. “You’re getting the next round, right Steve?” I asked. “And don’t be cheap, come on, we’re worth it. Hey! Waitress! Let’s get some Grey Goose over here!”

The severe blonde on Steve’s lap leaned over and tried next. Nauseous anxiety came in waves. “Excuse me,” I said, edging my way out of the booth. If I didn’t get to a bathroom soon, I was going to ruin everyone’s night. God damn it, why did I even roll up my sleeve? I stumbled into the men’s room and barely made it into the stall before I found my finger down my throat. I hadn’t eaten since lunch so nothing much came out, but I was overwhelmed with shame and an insatiable hunger like I’d never felt. I made a mental note not to let those two wheedle us into late-night sushi or I’d have to take out a bank loan to pay the bill.

I hung around the bathroom until I got human again. By the time I got back to the table, they had already started the vodka and both girls were so hammered they were falling all over Steve’s lap with wet, obnoxious laughter. I just wanted to go home. Maybe Luce would be back and we could hit the karaoke bar down the street while I was just drunk enough to consider a Spice Girls duet. Or stay in and watch TV. Or hop back into bed and go another round like we did the other night. Anything but hanging around here with these two skanks and Steve, who was getting more irritating by the goddamn minute.

Steve grabbed my arm with a hand like fire. He shoved a glass in my hand. “You gotta catch up,” he said, reaching over to jiggle the bulimic blonde’s left tit. “We got big plans for these two.”

“Hey.” Someone shook my shoulder. “Hey, Vance, you all right?”

It took all the energy I had left to peel open my eyes and see the blurry figure of Luce standing over me. It took another half-minute to realize I was slumped against the stove in our kitchen, and a fraction of a moment more for the headache and the nausea and the muscle strain to set in. “Luce …” I mumbled, using all the energy I had left. “Luce, I’m sorry.”

“What happened to you?” she asked.

In between speaking to her and her reply, I had fallen asleep again. I jolted back awake and she pressed a glass of water into my hands. The condensation turned to mud on my palms. I had some strange memory of being in the park. Had we gone there to fuck those girls? Must be. But my dick didn’t have that tingling, post-cum emptiness; I didn’t feel any remnants of orgasmic bliss. My arms hurt. My hands were blistered. And my tattoo felt more like a fresh brand, cracked and singed and still smoking around the edges.

“Think you can stand?” she asked.

I nodded and she made sure to roll down my sleeve before she hauled me to my feet. She draped me over her shoulder and led me to the couch. “You’re a fucking mess,” she said. “But you can clean the apartment in the morning.”

I woke up knowing something bad had happened. It wasn’t just the hangover, crippling as it was. My back hurt. My shirt and pants were caked with dirt. And I had this terrible gnawing in the pit of my stomach that told me I’d done something unforgivable.

Luce made us a pot of coffee and didn’t say much. “All right,” I finally said, half a cup in. “Care to fill me in on last night?”

“You were passed out by the stove when I got in,” she said. “What the hell did you drink? You looked like you got dragged behind a tractor.”

“That’s about what I feel like,” I said. “Only had the usual, probably less than I normally drink when I’m out with Steve. Don’t know why I feel so shitty, though. Maybe the girls spiked it with something.”
The girls.
The gold digger and her bulimic friend. I could see them clearly in the club’s dim light, them and the ice in their empty glasses, the bathroom and my hand on one pilates-skinny thigh … and not much else.

She snorted. “Or maybe you drank from the wrong glass, got whatever Steve slipped them.”

And then it all made some sort of horrible sense. In the back of my mind I heard screams and sobs, girlish pleas to just let them go home. And there was Steve, with his zipper down and his dick out, his fat purple tie swinging from his dirty hands.

Then only one set of tears.

Then silence.

“Shit,” I gasped, rolling up my sleeve. “Shit, oh fuck, Luce, what does my tattoo say?”

She took a picture with her phone and held it up. “It says
Kill.
”

The bodies of the two girls Steve and I drank with—Shanna and Nikki—were found half-buried in Hudson River Park earlier that morning by a woman walking her dogs. Both had been strangled; only Shanna had been raped. Except it wasn’t rape, I wanted to tell the newscaster. That’s why we’d gone to Hudson River Park. She’d given it up willingly, or at least as willingly as a girl drunk out of her fucking skull can. Nikki had offered to suck me off, but I couldn’t get hard enough and she just laughed. I remember telling her to go fuck herself. I remember stumbling onto the path and slumping down on a bench. Then came the screams, the soft dirt under my hands, and then I was home.

“That’s a relief, at least,” said Luce, peering out through the blinds like she was expecting the cops to swarm our building any minute. “If you didn’t come, they won’t be able to trace any DNA.”

“I didn’t kill them,” I insisted.

“Maybe you didn’t, but Steve sure as fuck did, and it sounds like you helped hide their bodies,” she said. “And how the hell are you supposed to go to the police with that?”

“I could tell them I saw him do it,” I said. It was a lie; I only knew he did it because I had Steve’s memory, the thrill he felt when he choked the life out of both of them. I swallowed back sick and sucked in long, slow breaths, but images of more girls kept coming, girls from long before I knew him. A ten-year-old neighbor with butterfly barrettes in her tight black braids left in a wooded ravine. A teenage junkie whose body they never found. The chunky blonde with the credit-card panties the same night I got inked. …

“And if they find your fingerprints in the bruises around Skank A’s neck?” she asked. “I believe you, but shit, Vance, you could be in a lot of fucking trouble. Even if they don’t find your fingerprints, if they get Steve, he’ll flip on you before they can finish reading his rights.”

“You’ll alibi me, right?” I pleaded. “You’ll tell them I was here with you?”

“I can’t,” she said. “I was at the dance, they’ll ask the other teachers, they’ll know I’m lying and that’ll look worse for you.”

“Shit,” I said, putting my head in my hands. “Shit, Luce, what are we going to do?”

She thought about this for a minute. She went to the kitchen and got herself another cup of coffee. I watched her add milk and put the carton back in the fridge, stir in some sugar and carry the cup back into the living room. “We do what has to be done,” she said as nonchalantly as though we were trying to decide where we were getting brunch. “We’re going to get Steve.”