Kage (23 page)

you tell me whether Berger’s right about Martín coming back

for me?”

Micky squinted up at the ceiling as he thought. “Seems

pretty likely to me. I mean, the guy’s a psycho, so he gets off on

killing people anyway…”

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Kage

“And you nailed his partner,” Art told me.

“Nice, Art,” Micky commented. “No pun intended?”

Art ignored him. “You throw the fact in that Soledad was

more than just his partner in crime, and I’d say that it’s a pretty

good guess that Martín will be coming back for a piece of you.”

“How crazy is he?” I asked them.

“Dangerous crazy,” my brother told me. “But not insane.

He’s coming to get you for sure. You killed his boyfriend, so it’s

personal. But he’s also got a street rep to maintain. You take out

one half of the
Los Gemenos,
there’s gotta be some payback.”

“Be bad for business otherwise,” Art offered.

Of course.
“So what’s the plan?” I asked them.

“I get your brother hosed down,” Art started.

Micky snickered. “You wish,” he said, and continued Art’s

train of thought. “Then we hope the PD can identify the John

Doe and try to figure out who’s after you and why.”

“And Martín?” I asked.

Art waved a hand. “Oh, he’ll show up.”

“They always do,” Micky concluded and they both nodded

sagely.

149

12

Shadow

The air in any modern hospital is dry and clean feeling,

scrubbed into an antiseptic wash that is meant to offer comfort.

I wasn’t buying it. The Burkes of older generations knew that

hospitals were places where danger lurked. Their pale blue eyes

were muddled with experience, superstition, and wear, but were

keen to sense a threat. The hospital rooms and halls around

me were permeated with an atmosphere that was dense with

things unseen, yet real: fear, confusion, loneliness, the pain that

pushes up through anesthetic like the limbs of a restless sleeper.

Our hug was awkward—at first I thought that it was because

of my wound. But Sarah’s kiss was dry and perfunctory, like a

ritual leached of meaning and best finished quickly.

“Hey,” I said as she sat beside me on the bed. “How are

you?” I looked at her carefully. Sarah’s eyes are big and dark, set

in a heart-shaped face that was meant to smile. But she looked

worn and tired. Her eyes glistened and she looked away as if

seeking a distraction from what lay before her.

“Oh, Burke,” she murmured, and reaching for a tissue on

the table next to the bed, she got up to blow her nose.

I held my hand out, beckoning her closer. “Hey,” I said qui-

etly, “It’s OK. We’re all right.” But she stood there, arms crossed

in front of her as if in protection. She was folded in on herself,

seeing something I didn’t. My words weren’t reaching her.

Sarah shook her head as if trying clear it. She looked up

at me and smiled sadly. “Are we? Are we all right, Burke?” she

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Kage

demanded. Sarah closed her eyes for minute. “I keep seeing you

on the floor this morning. The blood. The bodies…” she took

a ragged gasp.

“Come here,” I urged her, and she slowly sat next to me

on the bed and let me hold her. But I could feel the tension

trembling in her shoulders. We sat there quietly for a time and

I searched in vain for words of comfort. But I couldn’t come up

with any. I hoped that somehow the very act of contact would

offer solace, but I couldn’t be sure.

Sarah was part of the collateral damage of all violent acts:

the survivors bear wounds as surely as the ones who don’t walk

away. I’ve struggled with it and knew something of what she

was experiencing. But each person deals with things like this

differently. I’m harder. Not tougher, just harder. I don’t know

whether Yamashita has made me that way or whether his train-

ing just revealed something about me I never knew before.

Sarah was a brighter, gentler person. For her to not only be

attacked, but ultimately to have to kill someone, was going to

press on her like a crushing weight. It wasn’t that she ultimately

wouldn’t be able to stand the pressure, it was that the shadow

of that weight would forever change the way she saw the world.

The world, I realized, had been a brighter place before she

met me.

After a while, she seemed to relax somewhat. “Have you had

any sleep?” I murmured. The light outside was fading and the

morning’s events seemed impossibly long ago. I could imagine

her day after the shooting. The EMT’s and the cops. Making a

statement to the uniforms who responded. Answering the same

few questions put a hundred different ways by the detectives.

After a while, you just want to shut down, to close your eyes

and drift away.

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John Donohue

I felt Sarah’s head shake. “No.” She sighed. “There hasn’t

been time. I was at the precinct most of the day. Then they

took me back home so I could… change.” She shuddered and

pushed against me to sit up. “They want me to go away for

a few days. Out of town. For right now, they’ve got people

watching my apartment.” A note of urgency crept into her

voice. “Burke,” she said urgently, “what’s going on?”

I let out a long sigh. “They think that the guy who escaped

may come back,” I began.

Sarah’s eyes widened in alarm. “Come back?” she echoed.

“Why?”

I shrugged, and I could feel the tug of the bandage on my

side. “The police say that two of these guys were lovers. I killed

one and the other one escaped. I don’t know why they were after

me in the first place, but now the cops think it’s personal…”

“Oh my God.” She sank back on the bed, unconsciously

putting distance between us. “Who were they, Burke? What

did they want?”

I had been turning possible answers over in my head since

Berger left. I’d come up with very little I could say with cer-

tainty. And I wasn’t about to scare Sarah any more than she was

already. “I’m not sure,” I told her, which was true. “I never saw

any of these guys before. Maybe after they ID the third man,

we’ll get a clue.” Sarah looked at me with a deep, sad skepti-

cism. It was the same look I’d gotten from the detectives from

the 68th as well as from Micky and Art. Nobody was buying my

statements completely.

“Look,” I said, wanting to change the subject, “for right

now, what’s important is that you get somewhere safe and get

some rest. Stay away from my house. Can your sister put you

up for a few days?”

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Kage

She nodded tiredly. “The police helped me make

arrangements.”

“OK. I’m getting out of here as soon as I can. Micky and Art

are working on things. We’ll get to the bottom of this soon.”

She nodded hopefully and let me draw her close for a hug. A

female detective had been waiting tactfully outside the hospital

room. She stuck her head inside the door and I caught her eye

and nodded. She led Sarah away.

“Sarah,” I called, and they paused at the door. “Don’t worry.

It will be all right.”

But all three of us knew that I was lying.

Dr. Weiss was reluctant to discharge me, despite the fact

that the sutures were holding and I hadn’t sprung a leak all

night. But Micky and Art worked on him—no doctor likes

the idea of a killer rampaging around his hospital—and, after

I signed a bunch of release forms and promised to return in a

few days, Weiss let me go. The bags under his eyes seemed to

have deepened, and he watched me leave with both concern

and relief.

Yamashita had no qualms. “Hospitals are for the sick,

Burke,” he told me. He was sitting placidly by my side in the

back of Micky’s car.

“What do you call this?” I asked, gesturing with the arm

that Weiss had put in a sling.

“You are wounded,” my
sensei
told me sternly. “You have

been seen to. Time to stop taking up valuable space and come

home where you can heal properly.”

Art turned halfway around to face us. It was better than

watching Micky drive. My brother is hard on cars and anyone

around the one that he’s operating. “You’re better out of there

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John Donohue

for lots of reasons, Connor,” Art said.

“Places like that leak like sieves,” Micky commented as he

gave the wheel a sudden jerk and we lurched across a lane of

traffic, followed by the angry blaring of horns. “Probably a mil-

lion ways Martín could get to you in there.”

“You really think he’s coming?” I asked him.

“Word on the street says so,” my brother answered.

“We’ve got a twenty-four hour guard on your place and

Sarah’s,” Art added. “We’ll stash you with Yamashita while

we run Martín to ground.” I started to say something, but

Yamashita jabbed me lightly in the side with one steel finger,

his face immobile. I closed my mouth for the rest of the ride

to Red Hook.

We watched Micky and Art drive off. Then Yamashita

shut the metal door to his
dojo
firmly and we moved toward

the weapons rack along one wall of the
dojo.
We had left our

shoes at the door and our bare feet rasped dryly on the hard-

wood floor. The street sounds were muted, distant echoes from

another place. Here, in the cavernous training space, we were

in Yamashita’s world.

He handed me a short wooden training sword known as a

shoto.
“We will assume that your arm will need some time to

heal, Burke. But that is no reason to stop training. The
shoto
is a

much-neglected weapon. We can use this opportunity to focus

more intently on its use.”

I hefted the small sword, the hard wood smooth and solid

feeling. It wasn’t a totally unfamiliar weapon: there are a num-

ber of training routines in the sword arts that use it. But in

Yamashita’s system, we tended to focus on weapons with a bit

longer reach that require a two-handed grip to use properly.

The
shoto
could be used to deflect and parry and stab. It was a

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Kage

close-quarters weapon. There seemed to be a lot of them in my

life lately.

He worked me for a time and, as always, the experience

was an odd blend of wonderment and terror. I was stiff from

the wounds and inactivity. The bandage made me overly con-

scious about the need to protect my arm. Yamashita knew it

and pressed me without mercy, feinting at the wound, forcing

me to pivot and twist to avoid him. The handle of the short

sword was slick with sweat. The perspiration made my scalp

wound burn.

He came at me with the
bokken
—a long slashing strike to

my head. I moved in and met his blade with mine, redirecting

the cut down to my left and away from me. But Yamashita

followed the flow and brought his sword back and around

and at me again. I had to shift to my left and meet the blow

again. Our weapons cracked together. I continued to pivot and

forced his sword down to my right, keeping contact with the

back of his weapon. I slid my
shoto
down and then back up to

the hand guard of Yamashita’s sword, snapping my weapon up

against the hilt and moving in to lock his elbow with my left

hand. It was a reflex action, and my arm moved out of the sling

before I could stop myself. And to my surprise, it worked. It

was awkward moving it, but it worked. I felt the slight tug of

the sutures, but that was it.

Yamashita saw the surprise in my eyes and he smiled

slightly. “Soo,” he breathed. “Now we are getting somewhere.”

He backed away and bowed slightly. I did the same, wiping the

sweat off my face with the back of my arm. Up in the loft sec-

tion of the building where Yamashita had his living quarters, I

heard the phone ring.

“I’ll get it,” I told him. But he was already on the move.

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John Donohue

“No. I am expecting someone…” he murmured as he shot

up the stairs. From my perspective, it hardly looked like he

touched the steps: one minute he was moving toward the stair-

case, the next minute he was up and gone out of sight.

I couldn’t hear his phone conversation. But in five minutes

we were back on the street. Yamashita doesn’t explain much—

he leads and it’s simply up to you whether you trust him enough

to follow. And every time he does it, you know he’s watching

you, weighing your reactions, judging the quality of your fidel-

ity. Beginning students find it unnerving and exasperating. I

know I did. But more than a decade with him has changed me

in some ways. The stubborn Irish in me still resents the call to

obedience. But I’ve learned to narrow my eyes and follow, in

part because, while I know he’s watching me, I’ve developed the

ability to watch him.

We walked quickly down the street toward the avenue. The