A Cop's Eyes (21 page)

When Nishikido stood up to announce that Seiji had opened a bar, everyone came to him asking for a card. Handing them out, he felt a foreboding presence at his back. When he turned around, Ohta was staring at Seiji with a faint sneer.

“All right, who's coming to the after-party?” asked Sudo, standing up and taking attendance.

“It's our bad, but we need to go get our daughter, so we'll bow out. Today was fun. We'll come again,” Seiji told everyone and headed out of the room with Kyoko.

“Tsukamoto,” a voice came from behind as they were putting on their shoes. Goose bumps ran down Seiji's back. When he turned around, it was, of course, Ohta standing there.

With a viscous gaze, he put out a hand. “Give me a card, too.”

Seiji was reluctant, but he couldn't resist the guy's ghastly gaze, which seemed to coil around him.

“See you then …” Card in hand, Ohta smiled faintly and waved at them.

“Sei—” Kyoko called for his attention, and Seiji rolled his eyes to
the side. “A penny for your thoughts.”

“Well, it's nothing … I'm just tired,” he answered, but since they had gotten into the taxi, he'd been thinking over his middle school years.

“You didn't need to worry, right?”

“Yeah … it feels like some lump in my chest I had for eleven years just went poof.” He was grateful towards Kyoko for forcing him to attend the reunion.

“Good,” she said, faced the other way, and closed her eyes.

Her face had been so tense before the party, and now she looked exhausted. There was no mistaking that it had been a stressful day for her as well. It was still some time until they got to her parents' home in Nakano. He would let her sleep until then.

Absentmindedly watching the scenery run by outside the car window, he retread the thoughts that had been racing through his head.

Everyone sympathized with you in their hearts
—

He hadn't noticed at all back then, but perhaps everyone who'd been aware of his home environment had felt that way.

It certainly called for sympathy.

From the time Seiji was a child, his father was in and out of jail for theft, assault and battery, and meth use. Even now, his father was in the middle of serving a ninth sentence. During the times his father was in prison, his mother would bring home a new man, and when he was fourteen, she disappeared somewhere.

Seiji was a troubled kid since he was very little. He hurt people around him as though they were to blame for his unhappy home. In elementary school, he was taken to a child consultation center for shoplifting and for taking other kids' pocket money. By middle school, he was an inveterate delinquent who stole and got into fights day after day, a hot potato tossed among the police, juvie, and family courts.

During that time, he thought his fate was completely sealed. In the same way that he could not change his parents, he could never swap out the violent blood coursing through him.

He was convinced that being born to his parents was the root cause of everything.

But he now thought that there were no excuses for many of the things he'd done, whoever his parents were.

The person who convinced him of that was none other than Kyoko.

He'd been in the same school as her since elementary. Raised in an upstanding family, Kyoko did well in school ever since she was a kid and enjoyed the trust of her teachers and classmates. He didn't remember now how he'd come to know her, just that even when he caused problems and was feared by everyone, Kyoko never ceased to be considerate toward him.

He'd had something of a crush on her ever since they were kids, and felt at times that she liked him back.

At the age of sixteen, however, without saying anything to her, he skipped their hometown. He simply couldn't abide living there anymore. From then on, he moved from job to job, occasionally getting his hands dirty with things he shouldn't have, and somehow made a living.

He reunited with Kyoko when he was twenty. By chance, she'd come to the bar he was working at then. She was with her friends, and he at the counter, but when their eyes met, her lips trembled, as though robbed of words, and the next moment she started crying. Then, leaving her friends behind, she ran out of the bar.

Seiji had thought over what those tears meant. Had she been overcome with the joy of being reunited with him? He writhed between the part of him that wanted to believe it and the part that didn't want her to show up again.

Several days later, Kyoko reappeared at the bar.

She asked him why he'd vanished without telling her anything. Seiji, however, could only answer that he'd come to hate their town.

He couldn't possibly tell her the true cause of his antipathy—about the grave sin that he had committed.

After that, she paid him many more visits.

The twenty-year-old Kyoko was pretty enough to be mistaken for someone else. The slight crush Seiji had always had on her grew and grew, but it felt wrong for him to announce his feelings. Unexpectedly, however, Kyoko confessed to him that she had always liked him.

Even as Seiji felt a soaring sense of happiness, his heart ached with pain.

Going out with Kyoko meant living in sight of the cross he'd been burdened with.

Could he bear that suffering? If she weren't at his side, he might be able to live with his eyes averted from his sin. Just as he'd done until then. But another part of him pleaded to him from deep inside.

That this was the fate he deserved.

That enduring the pain of having his heart gouged out as long as he lived was his atonement. Even on the brink of death, he wouldn't be able to turn a blind eye to the sin he'd committed. He might build a happy home with Kyoko and, all the while, continue to suffer in his heart. That had to be his punishment for eluding the police.

With such a resolve, Seiji started dating Kyoko.

Although he did, because of his guilt he couldn't bring himself to touch her. Kyoko, despite having confessed to him, also seemed to be hesitant about something and maintained a distance.

Perhaps, having confessed as an extension of her childhood crush, she wasn't sure if a man like Seiji were right for her after
all.

Once they started dating, he sought to live an honest life like a man reborn. He plunged himself into the bartending work that he had only thought of as a temporary gig and worked hard to become a man Kyoko would approve of.

In the end, it took close to two years for their hearts and bodies to yield and meet.

Although their relationship held and blossomed, Kyoko's parents strongly opposed marriage. Their familiarity with Seiji's home environment and missteps as a teen proved to be a real obstacle. They married nevertheless three years ago, a fact that Kyoko's parents refused to accept for some time, but Nozomi's birth two years ago finally swayed them.

The warm family Seiji had yearned for since childhood surrounded him now. He relished his happiness, but it would forever be entwined with heartache.

“It was your reunion, you should have stayed longer,” reproached Kyoko's mother, Nozomi in her arms.

When Seiji looked at Kyoko, she made a face as though to say,
See?

Kyoko's mother looked regretful as she handed Nozomi over to her daughter.

“Urn … before going to the reunion, we bought some sweet dumplings from the department store so could I set them out as an offering. I heard from Kyoko that Yasuko liked them.”

“Oh, we're always troubling you.”

Kyoko's mother consented, however, and Seiji went into the living room.

He placed the dumplings on a plate Kyoko had brought him and set them as an offering on the family shrine. He sat in the formal position and faced the death portrait. A sweet-looking girl with a smile looked back at him.

Kyoko's little sister, Yasuko, had passed away when she was eight, the victim in a certain decade-old case.

Whenever Seiji saw the portrait, the pain threatened to sunder his heart in two.

He closed his eyes and put his hands together.

I'm sorry
—

He continued to pray for forgiveness from a girl he'd never met.

“Welcome—”

When Seiji turned his eyes to the door and saw the patron, his face almost turned into a grimace.

Ohta was eyeing the bar's interior and approaching the counter.

The eight seats at the counter were mostly filled with regulars. Taking the one empty seat, Ohta sat down, faced Seiji, and smiled faintly.

“Hey … welcome. You came so soon … Thanks,” Seiji said, controlling his discomposure as he put a coaster in front of Ohta. “What would you like?”

“To think you, Tsukamoto, would be polite to me. Back then, you'd just call me ‘dolt' or ‘bastard' or ‘dimwit.' ”

The regulars glanced at Ohta.

“Well, I'm in the hospitality business. I was … also immature back then,” Seiji dodged smoothly.

“I'm fine with anything, just give me something strong,” Ohta ordered in the most ill-tempered manner.

“How about bourbon on the rocks?”

Why in the world would he come here—

Seiji had a bad feeling but poured some ice and bourbon into a glass and set it in front of Ohta.

“A name like ‘Hope' doesn't suit you, but this is a pretty good bar … Maybe I should have you let me work here.”

That would be no joke—a cheerless man like Ohta at the counter would doom the business.

“Speaking of which, Ohta, you haven't been working? You were always smart, there must be plenty of jobs for you,” Seiji countered for the time being with flattery so naked that it got on his own nerves.

“No social rehabilitation for me. All thanks to you …”

The regular next to Ohta looked at him and Seiji.

“Hey, listen up,” Ohta started speaking to the regular in an overfamiliar way. “This guy screwed up my life. In elementary and middle school, he always bullied me in the nastiest way. Because this guy kept stomping on my self-confidence, I'm still scared of talking to people.”

True, Seiji had often beat up Ohta whenever he was in a bad mood. His past self would have done so on the spot now, but with his customers watching, he couldn't do anything at all.

Ohta, apparently not sated, informed his fellow guests of the many wrongdoings that Seiji had perpetrated in his middle school days. The regulars who were forced to listen embarrassedly asked for their checks one by one.

“Enough!” Seiji snapped at him after the last customer had left.

Ohta was grinning, clearly pleased by his host's exasperation. “What, it's the truth, isn't it?”

“If you're going to bring up all that, you're obstructing my business, so don't come back.”

“I'm afraid I can't oblige. I like this bar, so I'll come and have fun every day.”

“Don't.”

“You have no right to say no.” The malice in Ohta's eyes made Seiji recoil a bit. “You said that a lot when we were in school. When you told me to bring money or to strip in the classroom, I'd cry and refuse … and you'd always say that.”

“Look, I'm sorry …” Seiji indeed might have been that horrible towards Ohta back then.

“Hey, you're letting me down apologizing so easily. The fun is only just starting.”

“The fun?”

Ohta took a scrap of paper out of his pocket and tossed it onto the counter. It seemed to be a copy of a newspaper clipping.

Another Girl Attacked
—

Seeing that large, uppercase print was almost enough to stop his heart.

“You remember, don't you? Those cases that happened in our neighborhood,” Ohta said, smiling. “Two innocent girls were attacked one after another with a hammer, and one died.”

“I remember. That was really unpleasant …” answered Seiji, careful not to betray his unease. Feeling agitated, however, he stepped away from Ohta and started hitting at ice with an icepick.

“I was watching.”

At those words, Seiji's hand jerked and the pick hit his own finger. Barely registering the pain, he looked at Ohta.

“When you smacked the girl's head with a hammer.”

Seiji's vision shook as though he were blacking out as he met Ohta's eyes. Leaning on a shelf behind him and narrowly avoiding sinking to the floor, he managed to retort, “I did nothing of the sort.”

“I believe it was the first case. You were wearing a black sweatshirt with your hood on. Initially, you were wandering around the park, but then you hit a girl's head with a hammer and ran away. A thug like you, attacking such a sweet girl.”

He had been seen—to think that Ohta had witnessed him back then.

“I've got proof, too.”

“Proof …”

“This is becoming fun. Maybe I'll have another drink,” Ohta touted his glass.

“Why didn't you report it to the police?” Seiji put ice in the glass with shaking hands, then filled it with bourbon.

“That would have been boring.”

“Boring?”

“Yeah … back then, you were the notorious delinquent. A familiar face at the police and juvie, right? But you were still a minor. Getting arrested back then wouldn't have been that big of a blow given our country's laws, but I wonder about now. These past ten years, I was sincerely hoping you'd win happiness. Otherwise, it wouldn't be fun when you're caught.”

Seiji saw Kyoko and Nozomi in his mind's eye.

“Still, to think you'd get married to Kyoko, of all people … When I heard about it, I was actually stunned. I wonder how she's gonna take it when she finds out,” Ohta rattled on gleefully.

Kyoko's sister, Yasuko, had been killed in an apparent case of random violence that followed. Based on the M.O. and eyewitness accounts, the papers had reported that the same culprit must have struck again. But Seiji hadn't assaulted Yasuko.

“It wasn't me for Kyoko's sister,” Seiji squeezed the words out.