Non-Stop Till Tokyo (32 page)

“So the Mitsuyoshi-kai is a real family too,” Chanko was saying. “And the Brothers…I heard a lot of stories from the sixties, when they did what the hell they liked. Nasty stuff. They’re pretty old now, but still dangerous. Or the live one is, anyway.”

“Ah. Right. No, I don’t suppose Brother One is going to let it go that someone murdered Brother Two, is he?”

“Nope. Point is, the
kumi-ch
ō
, the top man, Mitsuyoshi Junichiro, he had a few kids, but just the one daughter, his youngest. She married a guy called Oguya, he smacked her around once too often, Mitsuyoshi-san had him beaten for it, he died, and a couple weeks later the daughter killed herself.”

“God. Happy families.”

“So, she left a kid, and the old man took him in and treated him like a prince. Wouldn’t let anyone lay a finger on him, and the kid grew up like you’d expect. Made Tokyo too hot to hold him, so they shipped him out to the Himeji branch; by the time I arrived they’d gotten rid of him too, and you couldn’t find anyone with a good word for him. Guy’s a psycho.”

“And that’s Oguya Hiroyuki.”

“Yeah. Which explains why the family aren’t just throwing the guys who did Noriko to the cops. Not if it’s the precious grandkid.”

“No,” I said thoughtfully. “No. Was the guy who died Junichiro or his brother?”

“No idea. Didn’t you know his first name?”

“I always called him Mitsuyoshi-san. Oh, that’s weird.”

“What?”

“I hung out with a yakuza boss. It didn’t really register at the time, but…I was drinking with a killer. And he seemed like such a sweet old man.” Chanko gave me a look. “Only joking. He was a prick. But he tipped like a king.”

It took until well past four o’clock for the boys to get into the disc, and it seemed a lot longer.

I sat and thought. I thought about a lot of things. Vulnerabilities. Pros and cons. It all came down to what was on the disc, and I worked through various scenarios in my head, as if that did any good at all.

I wanted to call Yukie, warn her, make her run, whatever the cost, but every time I reached for the phone I remembered the yakuza opening the door to the Kanazawa love hotel. I couldn’t be sure that was her, but I couldn’t be sure it wasn’t. I didn’t call.

Chanko moved quietly around me, restoring order to the kitchen, producing coffee for the techies upstairs, barely speaking, casually calm, intensely there.

He also dealt with my foot, which was throbbing rather unpleasantly. Under orders, I soaked it in warm water and something antiseptic, then he carefully dried it and set himself to inspecting the wound.

I had my jeans leg rolled up to the knee to avoid getting the hem wet. He was on one knee in front of me as I sat on a floor cushion, other leg bent, with my calf propped on his thigh as he looked at the foot. One big, warm hand supported my heel and ankle, and suddenly sensation was shooting upward, and this time when I bit my lip it wasn’t because of the pain.

“Looking a bit angry, babe,” he said, applying a new dressing. His bruised features were intent, and he was so close, I could see the white lines of old splits that threaded through his thick eyebrow next to the fresh, dark scabbing. “Couldn’t see any glass still in it but God knows what was on the ground there, and you ain’t given it much chance to heal.”

His thumb brushed over the sole of my foot. I stifled a whimper.

“You okay?”

“Mmm.”

“You need to stay off this more. Should heal up…didn’t look infected.”

Both of his hands were cupping my foot now, both thumbs pressing down the adhesive of the dressing, stroking over the sole so gently, and the blood was pounding through my skin. “Great.” The hitch in my voice couldn’t have been more obvious.

Chanko looked up, and I felt his fingers tighten on my ankle as he met my eyes. His hands stilled for a second, and his hooded eyes darkened. Then he very lightly, very deliberately brushed his other hand up the back of my bare calf, and I breathed in hard.

“Last night,” he said.

“What?”

His fingers slipped under the rolled-up end of my trouser leg, stroking the back of my knee, the sensation making me tremble.

“Figured you were thinking that was a bad idea.”

“Mmm.”

His other hand was sliding over the top of my foot, teasing my toes.

“Figured you wanted me to back off. That right?”

“Well,” I said, my pitch slightly too high. “Um. It’s been a lot to think about.”

He slipped a finger between my big and second toe, spreading them deliberately apart, finger sliding between with shocking explicitness, and I found I was grasping at his sleeve.

“Hey. That’s what you want, I can respect it.”

The hands paused for just a second, and I heard myself moan.

“Except I don’t think that’s what you want.”

His hand slid over my ankle, down the back of my heel, over excruciatingly sensitised skin, and I gasped aloud.

“Is that what you want?”

“No. Yes. What was the question?”

“Nope,” he said, almost to himself. “Doesn’t look like it.”

He brushed one hand past my knee, up my thigh, and down, and up, each movement more possessive, and I know he felt me shaking, but this time he didn’t pull back. Instead he reached out the other hand, tilted my chin up, pushed an unnervingly firm thumb over my lips.

“Chanko…”

“Right at this moment, I cannot recall wanting anything so much in my life.”

“Me either. I’m finding it all a bit confusing right now.”

“If you need me to back off, babe—”

“No.”

“Good.” He ran his thumbnail over the back of my knee again, watching me twist in response. “Because I’m not goddamn superhuman.” He took a deep, controlling breath, slowly moving his hands back down to my foot, and his thumbs resumed the gentle, rhythmic circling even as he said, “This really ain’t the time for this. Not the time or the place.”

“No, it— Oh, shit, someone’s coming down!”

“God damn.” He released my foot with more self-control than I had, and sat back on his heels, breathing deliberately shallow. Taka came in. His face was unusually still and very intent, and he seemed not even to notice what must have been glaringly obvious.

“Can you come on up?” He turned on his heel without waiting for an answer.

I glanced at Chanko, who was getting up with absolutely none of his usual grace.

“We’ll talk later,” he said. “Or whatever. Later.”

Chapter Thirteen

Yoshi was still seated in the study. It was late afternoon now, and his face was lit by the screen’s glow. Taka took the chair next to him without a word. Chanko and I came to stand behind them, glancing at one another.

“Guys?”

“We broke the password,” Taka said, voice flat. “Figured an old fart like that couldn’t remember a random string. Ran some word-based attacks. Banzuiin, that’s what he used, name and birth date.” That figured: Banzuiin
Chōbei
was a proto-yakuza Robin Hood sort of figure. I was pretty impressed. I couldn’t work out why Taka wasn’t impressed with himself.

“So what’s wrong?”

“Just read it,” said Yoshi.

The screen was full of kanji. Chanko muttered, “Someone, give me a break here,” and I leant forward and began to read the text out to him.

After a few paragraphs, my throat kind of dried up. Yoshi took over, then Taka, and the four of us crowded together in the cluttered room, faces illuminated in the blue-white light, as we read through the documents on the disc, one after another, and the evening closed in around us like a clenched fist.

Now we knew what it was all about. And the knowledge brought fear into the house.

We read through the documents saved on the disc, once and again, and as the implications opened up in front of us, Yoshi’s face went greyer and greyer, until he muttered an excuse and fled down to the bathroom. I was torn between the need for long, deep breaths and the irrational urge to inhale as shallowly and quietly as possible, as though
they
were already in the house, and we were hiding. I knew they were out there, hunting us—hunting me. They would find me. They would hurt me. They would do anything to get the disc back—

I went down to the kitchen for a glass of water, so that Chanko wouldn’t see how much my hands were shaking, and as I turned on the tap I looked up and saw a face looking back through the dark window, and I screamed like a witch.

Chanko must have been poised to spring, because he was through the door in a second, while I was still staring dumbly at the broken glass and the water pooled on the floor by the sink.

“Sorry,” I whispered. “My reflection. Sorry.”

Chanko’s hands closed on my shoulders, and he tugged me gently towards him. “It’s okay,” he said over his shoulder. “Kerry’s just a bit jumpy. It’s okay. Put that damn knife away, idiot, before you stab Yoshi-san.”

I let out a breath as Taka’s and Yoshi’s footsteps retreated. “Sorry,” I said again, leaning back against him. “I just feel like…”

“They’re no closer than they were this morning, babe. They don’t know we’ve got the disc or read it. Nothing’s changed.”

“Everything’s changed. We didn’t know how far they’d go to get it back before.”

“Yes, we did. We just didn’t know why. Get a grip, Butterfly, can’t have two of you flaking out on us.”

“I’m not flaking, and nor is Yoshi. It’s just—I’m fine. I just didn’t expect to end up this far in the shit. We are in it, aren’t we?”

“Sure are. Come on, babe, we’ve got some thinking to do.”

That was an understatement.

“We give it to the police,” Yoshi said. “People who investigate yakuza under the
botaih
ō
laws. This is evidence of all sorts of crime—”

“Which will need a lot of investigating before they can make a case.” Taka’s tone was patient, but his fingernails clicked rapidly on the desk. “They can’t swoop in and arrest the entire Mitsuyoshi-kai leadership on this, off a lot of files from nowhere. They’ll have to look into the whole thing, and they’ll need provenance for this disc if anything from it is to stand up in court. What kind of provenance can we give them?”

Chanko was nodding. “The cops won’t get the Mitsuyoshi-kai off our backs in the short term, unless we give them Kerry too, and we already decided we don’t like those odds.”

“No,” Yoshi said. “But maybe I could go to the police on my own, make up a story—”

“No,” Taka and I said together.

We were squashed into the study. Taka’s long limbs were folded up like a jackknife on his swivel chair, and he was swinging himself round and back with a dangling foot. Yoshi and I sat on the folded futon, both hugging our knees to our chests in defensive postures. Chanko was squatting on his heels by the slightly open door, back straight, in a position that I knew he was trained for but which would have had my thighs screaming within minutes. He looked very, very calm, in the way that normally boded extremely ill for someone.

“Get real.” Yoshi sounded shrill. “We can’t do this alone, don’t you see? We don’t stand a chance. There are hundreds of them, four of us, and they’ll kill to get this disc back—”

“Yeah, they will,” said Taka. “Why?”

“What? You know why!”

“Talk to me.”

Yoshi gripped his forehead. “Because it’s evidence against them. On one hand, a massive money-laundering operation, drug and prostitution money flowing through from Korea into Japan. That’s a hundred years of jail time. On the other, what the money is
for
. They’re merging with the bloody Korean mafia, forming a whole new syndicate, undercutting the existing ones—I mean, they’re talking about taking control of the Kabuki-chō cocaine trade! If the big yakuza syndicates find out what the Mitsuyo
shi-kai were planning… Of course they’re going to kill to stop this getting out.”

“Exactly.” Taka was wearing the smile of a fallen angel. “Don’t you see what we have here? Screw the police, have you got any idea what the Mitsuyoshi-kai would do to keep this out of the hands of the other yakuza?”

“Yes. That’s the problem.”

“It’s the opportunity. This is a weapon. It’s leverage.” Taka’s eyes were sparkling blue and red in the light of the screensaver. “You want revenge? We can have it. You want to make them pay? We’ll squeeze them dry. We’ve got them by the balls, don’t you see?”

“I got a really bad feeling about this,” Chanko muttered.

“I suppose we could send it to the Yamaguchi-gumi,” Yoshi said slowly. “Let them deal with the Mitsuyoshi-kai.”

“What happens if we send it to someone who decides they want in on the Mitsuyoshi-kai’s scheme?” I asked. “Look, the disc is lethal to the Mitsuyoshi-kai in the long term—once the police or the other gangs have read the documents, and investigated, and worked out how to act. But it’s dangerous to us in the short term, because they need to get it back before we send it to anyone. So—”

“So why don’t we send copies to everyone?” interrupted Yoshi. “The syndicates, the police, the
botaihō
anti-corruption people. Get them all moving at once.”