1931 The Grand Punk Railroad: Local (17 page)

“C’mon, gimme a break. You and Ladd are fine as long as you get to kill, but for me, it’s money. I want to make sure we get that money, so get it together, will ya…?”

“Hya-hya-hee-ah-hah! Ha-ha-ha! Ha-ha!”

Having finished off three black suits, these two were taking a breather in Room Three. Either that, or they might have been enjoying the lingering sensations of the kill.

Giving up on calling to his partner, who kept right on laughing, with no help for it, he put his ear close to the door by himself.

“Hya-ha-ha-hee-hya-hya! Hee-oh-ah-haaah!”

He thought he heard a man’s voice, followed by a woman’s cheerful voice…

“Hee-hee! Hee! hee! Hee-hya! Ha-ooh-heh-ooh-ah-hee-hee! Hya!”

“Hey, shut up a minute!”

Without turning around, he barked at his companion, who was laughing like a lunatic.

“Hee-hya-hya! Ha-ooh-ha! Ha
yee.”

Abruptly, the laughter stopped.

He finally calmed down, huh?

Without paying any particular attention to that, the white suit focused his hearing on the voices beyond the door.

The man and woman’s voices were receding. Apparently they were headed for the rear cars.

“Hey, let’s go.”

He had a hand on the doorknob, but his companion didn’t respond.

“Hey
?!”

He turned around and was struck dumb.

His friend wasn’t there.

Although it certainly wasn’t small, the design of the third-class compartment was startlingly bleak, and there were no places where people could hide.

“Hey! Where are you? Where’d you go?”

He looked for his partner, but there was no answer, and he saw nothing.

…Only…the wide-open window really concerned him. He was pretty sure that window hadn’t been open a moment ago.

The window was pointlessly big. A lone person would probably fit through it easily.

“C’mon, now… Don’t tell me he fell out.”

Nervously, the white-suited man started toward the window.

He had to lift his leg high in order to step over the black suits’ corpses, and in that moment…

…“it” appeared in the window.

Splitting the darkness, a deep red shadow touched down in the room.

A very brief time passed, and

—all the figures had vanished—or more precisely, had been
erased
from the room.

Men in white and men in black. Everyone equally.

“Sorry we’re late, Donny. Walking on the roof is pretty hard. At first, we were practically crawling.”

Jacuzzi and the others climbed down from above the connecting platform.

“Aah, Jacuzzi, you okay?”

Jacuzzi answered the brown-skinned giant’s question clearly:

“Yeah, there was nobody up on the roof. No Rail Tracer, either. All we had was moonlight, so we weren’t quite sure, but we didn’t see a red shadow anywhere.”

“Aaah!”

“Eeek! What’s the matter, Isaac?!”

Isaac gave a little scream, and Miria clung to him, anxiously.

“We overlooked something important!”

“Wh-what?”

Looking solemn, Isaac spoke gravely:

“We forgot to buy the souvenir for Ennis…”

Silence. For the space of a breath, Miria looked down. Then she raised her head and spoke:

“Wh-wh-wh-what’ll we do? We
can’t
meet Ennis empty-handed! I’d
hate
it! We
mustn’t
!”

Miria’s eyes were damp, and Isaac immediately consoled her:

“Don’t cry, Miria. I’ve got a good idea.”

“What is it?”

“Let’s buy a souvenir in New York. They say everyone’s happy to get souvenirs from New York, no matter where they live.”

On hearing this, Miria’s face lit up.

“You’re right! Isaac, you’re so smart! That’s wonderful!”

“It is, hmm? Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha…”

As he laughed, they reached the entrance to the second of the three freight cars.

When they’d discovered the pool of blood and the corpse in the first freight room, as you’d expect, they’d panicked, but the moment they’d seen that it wasn’t Jacuzzi, they’d regained their composure.

Isaac had crossed himself, then clapped his hands together, beginning to pray.

Miria had mimicked him, and they’d prayed for the dead in the style of contrasting religions.

They weren’t terribly disturbed when confronted with that horrible corpse. It was as if they were used to seeing them. Even so, they prayed earnestly for the repose of the dead. When they’d finished, Isaac and Miria left the room as though nothing had happened.

After that, they’d enthusiastically engaged in the sort of out-of-place conversation they’d been having a moment ago, and before they knew it, they’d reached the connecting platform.

The entrance to the second freight car’s corridor. When Isaac slowly opened the connector door, he didn’t see anyone inside.

Relaxing, he began to go in, and in that instant—

—the sharp report of a gunshot echoed through the car.

“!”

Immediately, Isaac and Miria ducked, then hastily shut the door to the platform.

“Wh-wh-wh-what was that?”

“S-s-s-scary!”

When they peeked in through the window in the door, they saw people in the center of the corridor, leaving the freight room. There were three of them; they all wore white, and one of them sported a mottled red pattern on his clothes. The mottled man held a smoking rifle in his hands.

As Isaac watched their movements tensely, the three began walking toward them.

“Not good, Miria. Let’s hide.”

“Yes, like the Secret Service!”

The two of them hastily went back to the first freight car, flattened themselves beside the door, and held their breath.

…Held their breath and blabbed away.

“Listen, Miria… Those people must be the ‘dangerous guys’ the big fella mentioned a minute ago.”

“Eeeeek!”

“Don’t worry, Miria. They don’t stand a chance against my trillion guns.”

“Really?”

“Yes. Miria, have I ever stood by and watched you die?”

“No! Not even once! ’Cos, I mean, I’m still alive!”

“You see? And so, well, leave it to me!”

“Okay!”

This time, the two did silence their voices. They focused their attention on the situation beyond the door.

Before long, they heard the sound of a door opening outside. It was probably the door to the second freight car. The distance from there to the door beside Isaac and Miria wasn’t even two yards. Voices—and footsteps—were coming closer.

“Why’d you kill him, Ladd? That would’ve been a pretty good deal.”

“Mm, yeah. But did you see the guy’s eyes? He had this look on his face that said, ‘I’m not gonna get killed.’ He was sure we wouldn’t kill him! He was making a monkey of the great Ladd Russo, see? It was sort of, y’know, frankly, he made me sick, so I shot him up.”

“Yeah, but, c’mon…”

“I don’t like it, though. Even right when I blew his head off, he looked cool as a cucumber… What the hell was that about?”

The voices stopped in front of the door. The door showed no sign of opening.

Then the voices gradually receded, moving upward.

What in the—?

When, after a short while, Isaac peeked through the window in the door, there was absolutely no one in sight.

“There’s nobody there…”

“It’s a locked-room disappearance!”

They opened the door, but there really was nobody there. Only the cutting winter air, which seemed to seep into their bodies.

The cold cooled his head, and Isaac remembered that one of the voices he’d just heard had mentioned a name that bothered him.

“…Making a monkey of the great Ladd Russo…”

“…The great Ladd Russo…”

“…Ladd Russo…”

“Russo…?”

He knew that name.

Isaac and Miria were robbers. Just that morning, they’d stolen a large amount of money from mafia couriers…

“Miria, that money we got today. Which mafia did it belong to again?”

“The Russo Family!”

His bad feeling had been right on the mark.

Then the screws in Isaac’s head guided him to an entirely wrong conclusion.

“I see… That group of white suits must be after us!”

“Eeeeeek! Pursuers!”

Miria shivered so dramatically that it seemed as if she really had to be faking it. Isaac hugged her shoulders tightly, nodding firmly.

“It’s all right. We’ll make a clean getaway. Both from those white suits and from the Rail Tracer!”

“That’s another good reason to find Jacuzzi and the conductor as quickly as possible!”

“Well, it won’t be long now. There’re almost no people past this point…”

Abruptly, Isaac had a thought.

It was true: There were almost no people past this point.

In that case, the one who had fallen victim to Ladd’s rifle was