Second Skin (63 page)

They were on the brick path to the front door when they heard the
thwop-thwop-thwop!
of a helicopter’s rotors and, looking up, saw what looked like a military gunship coming in low and fast.

‘Fuck is that?’ the first goon said as his dog began to bark, leaping in the air as if possessed.

Croaker smashed his biomechanical fist into the goon’s side and he crumpled over. The dog whirled almost in midair, its eyes bright, its jaws snapping. Grabbing the plastic snap-guard from his pocket, Croaker jammed it over the dog’s muzzle, then pressed the point of a tiny tranquilizer dart into its neck.

‘Hey –!’ Croaker heard the second goon cry out and, turning, saw the goon, a bloody gash in his temple, going down from a blow from the butt of Paul Chiaramonte’s gun.

Paul looked at Croaker. ‘You know who I am, but who the fuck’re you?’ He had to shout over the growing noise of the chopper.

‘Uncle Lew!’ Francie cried, running into his arms. ‘I knew you’d come find us!’

Paul looked at the two of them with what Croaker sensed was a kind of sadness. At that moment, Paul seemed very much apart from this goonish world, as isolated as an arctic ice floe.

As they huddled in the doorway, Croaker said, ‘I know all about you, buddy.’

‘No, Uncle Lew, you don’t,’ Francie said.

Paul tousled her hair. ‘I fucked up big time, I know. But I made a deal with Francie. I promised t’get her and her mom outta here an’ I aim t’do that.’

Leaves were whipping all over the place and eddies of wind rattled the glass panes of the windows. Croaker glanced from Paul to the lowering copter. ‘You still have some way to go.’ Croaker gestured with his head. ‘How many guards inside?’

‘Two. But that was before I split with the kid. May be more now.’

‘Okay,’ Croaker said, the gun he had taken from the goon upstairs in the main house at the ready. ‘Let’s do it.’

As Paul knocked on the door, he turned to Francie, placed her out of harm’s way. ‘Now just stay there, will you promise me?’

She stared at him, then at the copter out of which men in camouflage outfits were leaping. ‘Uncle Lew, what’s going on?’

‘Just stay here,’ Croaker said as the front door opened and Paul slammed it back on its hinges as hard as he could.

Croaker bulled his way into the hallway, saw a goon coming out of a back bedroom, skidded sideways as the goon aimed and squeezed off a shot that slammed into a cabinet. Croaker, landing on one shoulder, fired three times, and the goon was knocked backward into the doorframe. He went down and stayed down.

Croaker turned in time to see Paul struggling with the goon who had opened the door. The goon used a right cross to deck Paul, and Croaker took up a chair and threw it. The goon ducked right into Paul’s fist. He went down on one knee and Paul chopped him viciously across the neck.

Croaker went through room after room and found them empty. He waved Paul back, then cautiously entered the back bedroom through the open door. The king-size bed was to the right, the door to the room, a dresser and mirror to the left. Straight ahead was a bathroom.

To his right, he saw Margarite kneeling on the bed, her eyes wide and staring, her mouth opened in a soundless scream. At almost the same instant, he saw the dark splotch in the corner of his vision, reflected in the mirror – someone standing hidden behind the open door. As he took a step toward Margarite, he fired back over his left shoulder point-blank at the door. The bullets broke through the hollow-core door and he heard a heavy thump. Stepping around the door, he pulled it toward him, saw the body of a third goon who’d been hiding there. He used the front of his shoe to pull the gun from the goon’s hand, then bent to check his pulse. There wasn’t any.

‘Who –?’

He came around from behind the door, already pulling off his prosthetic nose. ‘It’s me, Margarite. Lew.’

‘Oh, my God!’ She scrambled off the bed and into his arms. ‘Lew.’

He kissed the side of her neck as she clung to him. It had been a long time since he had held her, and he savored the moment.

‘It’s all over,’ he said. ‘You’re safe and so is Francie.’

Tetsuo Akinaga was nowhere to be seen, but Nicholas glimpsed the figure of Jōchi disappearing through the exit door in the left rear of Both Ends Burning.

The exit opened not onto a back alley or the street but onto a lightless and stifling corridor at the end of which was another door slightly ajar. Nicholas moved carefully through the darkness until he reached the door, which was painted metal, a fire door. He pushed it slightly open, peered out into an alley. It was deserted. He wondered whether Jōchi and Akinaga had come this way.

Back in the corridor, he opened his dark eye – and the blackness fell away. He became aware of the square outline in the ceiling, the trapdoor and the cord hanging down from it. Pulling it, he saw a set of steel steps slide down. He went up them, ducking over to make it through the small trapdoor.

He found himself in the back room of a video-game parlor. Making his way past stacked cartons and the hulks of older machines, he opened a door onto rows of machines spewing the complex graphics and elemental noises of ultraviolent computerized confrontations. Hunched over the pixel-dominated screens were mesmerized teenagers – many of them Nihonin in their black leather outfits, tattoos and body piercings, their hair buzz-cut or maned, their eyes heavy with the attitude of menace forged from the excess of empty leisure.

Nicholas scanned the room, which was as large as any pachinko parlor. Strings of neon lights ran around the walls where they met the ceiling, often spelling out the brand names of the game manufacturers in brilliant starburst patterns.

Here was their life in its figurative nutshell: the control of little men on little screens, life and death played out in concentrated bursts of color, light, and sound, all played at amphetamine speed. They had dropped out of their fathers’ highly controlled life and dropped into another, one without any sense of responsibility or decay. Here among the machines that re-created the lives of their combatants over and over without ever missing a beat, they were immortal, suspended in time. With one night identical to the last, the future had been obliterated as effectively as the past.

Nicholas went through the video-game parlor, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, searching for Jōchi. He passed the cashier in her tower of neon and plastic and went up a steep flight of stairs. A jammed, raucous bar decked out as one dazzlingly colored screen from a popular video game led into another room, quieter, almost hushed. Muted shades of charcoal-gray and wood-brown bare walls were hung with huge black-and-white photographs of Jack Kerouac, Alen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, an achingly young Marlon Brando in his role in
The Wild One,
a ferocious Jim Morrison onstage in full leather regalia, clutching a microphone, a softly lit, expertly retouched studio publicity still of Laurence Harvey, a sultry James Dean exuding the scary longueur of the temporarily sated predator, a grainy shot of T. E. Lawrence, his desert-seared teak skin contrasting sharply with the white Arab burnoose he wore.

A number of tiny tables were scattered around the cool, dimly lit room, and on a small platform that hardly deserved the name
stage,
a young man slouched in black boots, knife-blade-narrow trousers, T-shirt, and leather vest. A half-smoked cigarette lounged at a corner of his mouth as he recited what many in the room mistakenly thought of as poetry. Everyone was drinking coffee or an ornate variation thereof. The atmosphere was thick with cigarette smoke, and resuscitated beat attitude.

Nicholas entered a stainless-steel kitchen as long and narrow as a hallway. He squinted through the bright fluorescent lights, ignored the questions put to him by one of the cooks, and made a thorough search. It looked like a dead end, and back in the coffee bar he took a long, penetrating look around.

He saw neither Akinaga nor Jōchi, but he did see someone he knew. He went over, took a spare chair from the back of the room, slid it next to the Nihonin and his pals.

Kawa looked languidly over at him. ‘Hey,’ he said, and gripped Nicholas’s hand in a firm American bikers’ grip. His snow-white hair looked eerie in the half-light.

Nicholas nodded his head toward the minuscule stage. ‘You like this stuff?’

‘It sucks,’ Kawa said, and his table snickered. He shrugged. ‘But, hey, the atmosphere’s right for the moment.’

Nicholas put his head close to Kawa’s. He smelled of cloves and pot. Nicholas wondered whether he was on any other drugs. ‘You see someone – maybe two people – hurrying through here a short time ago?’ He gave them a brief description of Akinaga and Jōchi.

Kawa’s eyes opened wide. ‘Hunt?’ he inquired in his odd kind of shorthand.

When Nicholas nodded, he conferred with his compatriots. The knot broke and he said to Nicholas, ‘Maya might have seen something of the sort, but she wasn’t paying too much attention. The rest of us, no sale.’

Nicholas turned to Maya, a Japanese girl with dyed-blond hair and fever-bright eyes, but Kawa was right, whatever she might have seen lay light-years away behind those stoned eyes.

‘Hey, don’t sweat it.’ Kawa winked at Nicholas. ‘If they
did
come this way, I have an idea where.’

‘Show me.’

Nicholas followed Kawa back into the kitchen. The smell of freshly brewed espresso was a sharp tang, mingling with the released zest of fresh lemons. A
latte
machine was hissing like a nest of vipers. Past the stinking toilet was the space used to stack garbage in neat plastic bags. Beyond that, as Nicholas had already seen, was a blank wall.

But now Nicholas could see that none of the bags were resting against this back wall, and as he watched, Kawa depressed a hidden stud. The plasterboard wall slid back, revealing a small elevator.

Nicholas stared at it for a moment much the way he would at an asp showing its fangs. ‘Where does this go? The street?’

‘No,’ Kawa said. ‘It goes up to a high-rent restaurant.’

Nicholas felt the undercurrent of a premonition. ‘Do you know the name?’

‘Yeah, sure. Pull Marine.’

The restaurant where Honniko and Jōchi worked as part-time maître d’s while toiling in the service of Mick Leonforte. Pull Marine, the nexus point. He looked at Kawa. ‘You think the manager of this place is around?’

‘I saw him a while ago. He was on his way out, but take a minute and I’ll check.’

Kawa disappeared through the steam of
latte
and coffee. In a moment, he had returned with a short, balding man with sharp features and cunning eyes. ‘This is Suta-san,’ he said, and the short man bowed.

Nicholas, returning the bow, whipped out Tanaka Gin’s prosecutor’s credentials before Kawa could introduce him. He saw the Nihonin’s eyes flick over the opened wallet. If he was surprised, he didn’t show it.

‘How may I be of service?’ Suta said.

‘The Prosecutor’s Office is investigating a multiple homicide,’ Nicholas said not untruthfully. ‘The trail has led us back to this building. Can you tell me who owns it?’

Suta rubbed his hands together, happy that it wasn’t he who was somehow under investigation. ‘Firstly, this is a series of buildings – three linked together by a warren of very old subterranean corridors – or so I am told.’ His hands made little washing gestures. Nicholas was prepared for him to say that the buildings were owned by a corporation he would be able to trace back to Tetsuo Akinaga.

‘The history is perhaps interesting,’ Suta continued, ‘though, I suppose, only to a select few. A corporation owned it for many years – perhaps ten. Sterngold Associates. Recently, it was bought by a company named Tenki.’

Nicholas’s mind was reeling. Sterngold had been owned by Rodney Kurtz, the German industrialist whom Mick had ritually murdered. Tenki was Mick’s own company.

‘I imagine Sterngold bought up the three buildings,’ Nicholas said.

Suta shook his head. ‘No, they were already a parcel when Sterngold bought in.’

‘May I ask how you know all this?’

‘Certainly.’ The bald head nodded. ‘My father built up a modest real estate business, which I now run.’ Suta gestured. ‘This club is a hobby for me. My wife died several years ago and I find my life – more pleasant – when it is filled.’

‘So your office did all these transactions?’

Suta nodded.
‘Hai.’

Nicholas’s mind was racing. ‘Who did Sterngold buy the three buildings from?’

Suta shifted from one foot to another as if his feet hurt. ‘I really shouldn’t say.’

This was interesting. ‘Why? There are no secrets from the Prosecutor’s Office.’

‘No, no, nothing like that.’ The hands were washing again. ‘But I hesitate to intrude on an individual’s –’

‘The entire parcel was owned by an individual?’

Suta nodded. ‘Yes, dating back a long time, to before the War in the Pacific. An individual by the name of Okami-san.’

Nicholas felt as if he had been punched in the stomach. Taking a careful breath, he said, ‘Mikio Okami, the Yakuza
oyabun?’

‘No. His sister. Kisoko.’

Dark shards spinning in his mind, wheels within wheels within... ‘You mean it was sold by the family?’

‘No. I was required to inspect the deed prior to the closing. It was in the name of Kisoko Okami.’

Nicholas was lost in thought. What did Rodney Kurtz, Mick Leonforte, and Kisoko Okami have in common? He could not imagine. All of a sudden, reality had been turned ninety degrees, all the disparate pieces upended out of their assigned slots. Nothing was what it had appeared to be five minutes ago. In a moment, Nicholas realized that Suta was watching him expectantly.

Nicholas bowed. ‘You have been extremely helpful, Suta-san,’ he said formally. ‘I will make note of that in my report.’

Again, relief flooded Suta’s face. He could not stop bowing, but at length he left them in the kitchen, standing by the closed door to the elevator.

‘Hunt just got a little more interesting,’ Kawa said, and Nicholas could see a spark of interest briefly illumine Kawa’s icy nihilistic facade.