Non-Stop Till Tokyo (44 page)

“Where are you thinking?” he asked, as if I’d spelled it all out. “Britain?”

“Can’t. Well, I could, but, you know, the whole Ian thing. I don’t know. Hong Kong, maybe, or Singapore.”

“Uh-huh. Ever been to Vietnam?”

“No.”

“Me either. Always meant to go while I was here. You kind of figure it’s just around the corner from Japan, but—”

“Only if you’re American. It’s a long way.”

“Seoul’s pretty close, though.”

I nodded. Maybe I could go to Seoul.

“You could look up some old friends,” he added. “Hell, you got Park’s number.”

Maybe not Seoul, then.

There was a very high-pitched noise from next door and a series of rhino-like grunts, followed by a wail of “Whoo, Mama!” We exchanged pained glances.

“Screw this,” Chanko said. “Let’s go get your stuff. If I drop dead on the way, it’ll be a blessing.”

I refused again, firmly, but he insisted on getting up, washed and dressed anyway. He’d lost a few pounds over the last couple of days, and he looked a bit shaky, but he was definitely better. His jacket was ruined, of course, and he clicked his tongue with annoyance, examining the holes and the fluffy lining that poked out from them, black with dried blood.

“Can we pick you up another one in Roppongi?” I suggested, helping him get a chunky oatmeal-coloured sweater on over the shoulder bandage.

“Not likely. There’s maybe two stores do stuff for guys my size, and they both suck. My sister sent me this one from the States.”

“Well, you shouldn’t go out without a coat, it’s cold,” I said. A thump from Taka’s bedroom shook the wall, and Chanko gave me a look. “Okay, okay, we’ll go, but we’ll take a cab, and that’s flat.”

It was midafternoon by the time we set off, squeezing into the back seat of a cab. Chanko’s face was looking a lot better now, which was kind of a shame because I had a black eye and half of my face was black or yellow-green and swollen, and the driver looked at the huge thug next to me with disgust.

The light was thickening already. I held Chanko’s hand, or he held mine, and we sat in silence. I didn’t want to go back to the flat. I was sure the police had been over it, and for all I knew, by now the landlord had cleared it out and installed new tenants, but my imagination was showing blood pooling on the floor, Oguya’s face, and Noriko’s. I shuddered.

I didn’t want to go to the flat, and I didn’t want to leave Japan, and once I had my passport, I would, because I had to.

Maybe we could just turn the taxi round right now. Pretend it wasn’t happening. Keep things like they were.

The traffic was heavy, and the neon lights were coming on around us as the car nosed through the streets towards Motoyoyogi, the area where we’d lived, Noriko and I, a thousand years ago. I could smell petrol, and the burned-savoury smoke of a
yakitori
stand, and her perfume.

“I don’t want—” I began.

“It’s okay, babe,” Chanko said softly. “Come on. I’m with you.”

We stopped outside a medium-rise block of flats and paid off the cabbie, who’d clearly found us, or rather Chanko, a compellingly ghastly sight. My code for the front door still worked, and we stepped straight into the waiting lift.

The apartment door was shut, but not secured. Police tape had been stuck over it, and then sliced through, so that it had fluttered down and stuck to the doorframe. It wasn’t locked either. I just pushed, and the door swung open.

I took off my shoes on the
genkan
and headed in, leaving Chanko to follow.

I clicked on the lights. “God.” It was a chaotic mess of clothes and broken furniture, roughly shoved into heaps. The
tatami
matting had been removed. I wasn’t going to think about what had happened here.

It smelled of cigarettes, too, and neither of us had smoked. And it was freezing. The long gauze curtains we’d bought to cover the sliding glass doors that formed two walls of the flat were billowing in the cold wind from outside.

“Weird. Why’s the balcony door open?” I walked towards it, stopping to pick up a lone, expensive stiletto. One of Noriko’s.

“Maybe they were airing—” Chanko began behind me, and broke off with a shout that was something like a scream.

I whipped round. Chanko was doubled over, grabbing his wounded shoulder, and the man who’d come out of the bathroom door behind him had a baseball bat held high in both hands. As I stared in frozen shock, he brought it down again with a meaty thud, hitting the same spot, and Chanko lurched forward. The man raised the bat again.

I threw the shoe with all the force I could manage, right at Michael Hearn’s head.

He smacked it away with the baseball bat, home-run style. It hit the wall, but I was already picking up anything I could, hurling shoes and ornaments and books with wild inaccuracy. Hearn lunged at me, covering his head with his free arm, and Chanko, still doubled over, grabbed at his ankle with his right hand, sending Hearn stumbling forward. I jumped out of the way as he staggered and regained his balance, kicking back at Chanko and raising the bat vindictively.

It would be a blow to the head. I could almost hear the crunch of bone and matter. I leapt forward without thought, gripping Hearn’s wrist, and he turned and grabbed me, one powerful arm round my neck, half lifting me off my feet, and spun us both to face Chanko. I kicked fruitlessly, trying to wrench at the arm that held me, but he just tightened his grip.

Chanko pulled himself upright, with a look of killing rage on his face, skin patched red with pain. They stared at each other, then both of them said “You” with equal animosity.

“What are you doing here?” I demanded, struggling to look up at him. “Let me go. This is my flat. Get out.”

“This is your fault, you bitch.” Hearn was talking to me, but I’d have bet he wasn’t taking his eyes off Chanko, who was gripping his damaged shoulder. There was red oozing between his fingers. “This is all your fault.”

“It’s nobody’s fault but yours, you fucking assclown.”

“Shut up, Chanko,” I snapped, trying to balance on my tiptoes so I could breathe. “Why is it my fault, Michael? You set me up. You brought me into this. I didn’t start it.”

Chanko swayed forward slightly, moving into a fighting stance, and Hearn’s arm tightened on my neck. “Don’t move, you fat bastard, or I’ll smack your girlfriend’s teeth down her throat.”

“I’ll tear your arms off before you so much as scratch her.” Chanko almost crooned the words, flexing his big fingers. Hearn drew in a breath, and I felt his muscles tighten.

I did not want to be in the middle of this. “Michael, I don’t understand,” I said gently, reasonably. “What have I done? I really didn’t have anything to do—”

“You should have been there. You, not Kelly, you cow. I could have gotten her back, and now—”

“How could you have got her back?”

“I talked to a yak. The ones you set on me. Give us the bitch, we’ll give Kelly back, he said, and now it’s all fucked up because the guy’s in fucking prison and they’re saying they don’t know anything about Kelly and she’s dead because of
you
, you—”

“She’s long dead,” said Chanko flatly. “You killed her when you left her in her apartment and went off to play poker.”

“
You
killed her. It should have been you.”

His arm-grip shifted too fast for me to react, and his hand closed hard round my neck, fingers digging in. I tried to scream, and the entire world impacted.

I genuinely thought that it was an earthquake for a second, but it wasn’t. It was several hundred pounds of sumo wrestler explosively accelerating as they are trained so terrifyingly to do, colliding with me at short range, sending me and Hearn flying backwards.

I couldn’t see or breathe for a few bone-crushing seconds. I lost my footing and took a hard thump in the ribs, and a flying elbow sent me spinning away into a wall. When my vision cleared, I was clutching at a bookcase, sucking in air through collapsed lungs. Hearn had dropped the bat, but I couldn’t move, let alone grab it. He was digging his fingers into Chanko’s bloody, wounded shoulder, his face contorted, and I could see his other hand moving at his waist as they struggled, reaching for—

“Knife!” I croaked with all the breath I had.

Chanko wrenched himself free and jumped back as the vicious blade, an eight-inch hunting knife, hissed through the air, but Hearn didn’t follow up the strike. He turned and lunged at me.

I saw the knife come down and sideways at my face in an avenging arc.

I saw Chanko’s hands close on Hearn’s other arm, outflung for balance.

I saw Chanko swing him around, with a grunt of pain and fury, throwing him away from me, so that he went staggering back, across the room. Towards the open balcony door.

I heard the curtains ripping from their rails. I saw a figure, entangled and shrouded in gauze, stumble backwards, tripping over the dangerously high metal runners of the sliding door, falling out onto the narrow balcony, with its low wall that would only come up to a six-foot-three man’s knees.

And then there wasn’t anything more to see except black night and neon.

For a couple of seconds all I could hear was breathing: my own whooping, Chanko’s rasping. He looked blank. Stunned.

“Christ,” he said finally. “How high—?”

“Ninth floor.”

“I didn’t mean to… Christ.”

“You were protecting me,” I said urgently. “It was an accident.”

A horn blared from ground level. Chanko rubbed a big hand over his slightly sweaty face.

“They’ll be coming to look.”

“It’s fine. We can explain—”

“What about Park?”

That shut me up. Of course I couldn’t explain, not without revealing myself as the missing flatmate, and having to answer questions I didn’t need asked, and worst of all breaking my agreement with Park.
What had I to do with it all, and why was Hearn-san trying to kill me in the first place, and what did I mean, I couldn’t be seen to talk to the police…

“Get out of here, Butterfly,” he said wearily. “I’ll deal with it.”

…and how come the gaijin is so much bigger than the man he killed in “self-defence”, and why does he have two gunshot wounds…

We could just walk away together, pretend we were never here. As long as we didn’t meet anyone who’d notice the blood staining the shoulder of Chanko’s light-coloured sweater or remember seeing a six-foot-seven Samoan. As long as none of my neighbours saw me. As long as nothing could possibly link a death at my flat with me, with Chanko, with Noriko…

Maybe I was overreacting through panic. I couldn’t tell. I just knew I wanted out, right now.

“Come on, babe. Get going.”

“Not a chance.” I pulled on my leather gloves and flipped open my phone. “Is your passport at Taka’s?”

Taka’s phone was turned off and I had to call Sonja four times before she answered. I got Chanko to hold a pad over the reopened wound, which seemed about all he was capable of for the moment, and threw a few things into a bag as I rang—a first aid kit, clothes, my eight-
man
-yen shoes, a picture of Noriko and Yoshi that I’d taken. The only one showing the three of us was gone—Oguya, I guessed.

I was prising open the unobtrusive hatch in the side of the bathroom cabinet where I kept my passport when she finally picked up the phone.

“Sod off, I’m busy.”

“Shut up, Sonja. We’re in trouble.”

“Oh, Jesus,” she said. “Again?”

We slipped down the back stairs to the garbage-collection area, not running into anyone, and left through the back of the building. A siren was approaching as we walked away.

With luck, nobody had seen us; but it wouldn’t take long for an investigator to connect the open windows of the notorious flat to the dead guy on the ground. And after that—who knew, but paranoid scenarios of arrest, of the police, of Park Sang-do, were playing out in my head.

Time to leave the country.

I more or less shoved Chanko along the street to Yoyogi-uehara station and onto a northbound train. We were meeting Taka at Ikebukero, where we’d pick up the bags that Sonja was hastily packing now, and Chanko’s passport. From there we’d get the Narita Express and a flight to wherever Sonja booked us.

“We should be fine,” I said, breaking the long silence as we sat together on a half-empty train. “Plenty of time.”

“Yeah.” Chanko had his hand on his injured shoulder as if it hurt, hiding the bloodstain from our fellow passengers. I was sitting on his right, so I couldn’t reach for his free hand.

“It wasn’t your fault,” I said for the third time.

“Yeah.”

Taka was waiting when we got to the meeting point with two distressingly small bags, considering we were both emigrating. He took a look at Chanko, then just slapped him on the arm, man-style.

“Hey, big guy. Take care.”

Chanko hoisted both bags in his usable hand. “Yeah. Thanks, pal.”

“No problem. Kerry-chan, it’s been real.”

“Hasn’t it. Thanks for—well, thanks. Say goodbye to Yoshi and Minachan for me. And look after Yoshi.”