Non-Stop Till Tokyo (13 page)

Yeah, and then they could follow me.

I started imagining what would happen to me if I fell into the Mitsuyoshi-kai’s hands, and made myself stop. I’m not brave, I don’t like pain, and if there are people who would offer themselves up for torture to help their friends, good on them, but I’m not one.

I’m the kind of person who runs away
, I thought, and the words hung in the darkness as I listened to Chanko breathe.

I woke up lying right against him.

I’m not a natural snuggler. You’re more likely to find me curled up on the edge of the bed, facing away, but Chanko was three times my body weight and the bedsprings had taken too much punishment over the years. He was at the bottom of a dip, and I’d rolled down it, and now what the hell was I going to do?

Turning over wasn’t an option. It meant rolling uphill, and since I was lying against his warm, muscular side, the only thing I had to push against was him. Which rather defeated the object of getting out of this position before he woke up…

Except that he was awake. That wasn’t sleep breathing, and anyway nobody that big could sleep on his back without snoring.

Crap. Did I admit I was awake and face the embarrassment of extricating myself? Or keep pretending to be asleep and just lie here against him, warm and safe? That sounded pretty good, actually.

“Morning.” His deep voice rumbled through his chest and vibrated against my cheek.

Ah, the third option. The one where he realised I was awake all by himself.

“Morning,” I mumbled, and scramble-rolled pretty much straight into the shower before it got any more embarrassing.

Once I’d recovered and washed, I swathed myself in towels and surrendered the bathroom to Chanko. The room looked seedy and just as painful on the eyes in the light of day. It was basically a square shape, with the double bed occupying most of it, the en suite bathroom next to the bed about two thirds the length of the room. The small extra space where the bathroom wall stopped was filled by a dressing table where I had put my makeup bag. Chanko had slung his jacket on top of it. Typical man. I started to reach for my bag, and there was a click behind me.

I spun round as the door opened—unlocked, not kicked in—and they were there, standing in the doorway, my nightmares.

Three yakuza. With guns. Pointed at me.

I opened my mouth, began a scream, but choked off the sound as a black muzzle swung higher. The three men were all staring at me, making urgently menacing gestures of silence.

There was a pause in the noise of the shower. “Hey,” Chanko called through the door. “What the hell was that?”

I stared wide-eyed at the men, who had come in and closed the door behind them. Two were moving towards the bathroom, the third was leaning against the door with his gun trained on me. He nodded at me, gesturing with the gun, telling me to answer. Maybe he’d just heard the question in Chanko’s voice, but there was a chance he could understand English. I couldn’t warn him, couldn’t take the risk—but…

I cleared my throat and put on my sweetest, girliest voice. “It’s only Butterfly, Chanko-san,” I fluted.

Did I imagine a very slight pause, or was time stretching out under me? “Now, how many times have I told you to call me Joseph, honey?” There was nothing in the mock-sexy tone to suggest he wasn’t just playing the fool. The yakuza thrust the gun at me again.

“Oh, Joe-
san
,” I said as playfully as I could, stressing the last word. The shower went on again, and two of the gunmen crept forward. Their guns had long barrels screwed on the ends, and I realised that they must be silencers.

Was Chanko just responding to what he thought was me being silly? Had he understood what I’d meant?
San
is “three” as well as “Mr”—same sound, two different words—and my instinctive guess had been that if I said “three”, at least one goon would recognise the English word and realise it was a warning, but that they would disregard the Japanese word they heard fifty times a day.

As did Chanko. Why hadn’t I just said
three
? Why didn’t I just yell and warn him before he opened the door to their guns?

Because they would shoot me.

There was maybe a metre of clearance between the side of the bed and the bathroom door, just enough to get it open. One of the men edged past to stand on the far side, while the second, a peroxide blond with spiky hair, stayed nearer me, so that they flanked the door. The third, a thug with bright tattoos crawling up past his collar round his neck, stayed at the room door, and his gun stayed on me.

If I looked like I felt, I was white as a sheet. The room was chilly and my towels were damp, and I realised I was shaking. I turned pitiful eyes on Tattoo and pointed a wavering finger at Chanko’s jacket, then quickly mimed wrapping myself in it.
Please, Mr. Yakuza, let me put it on?

He stared back. I let my eyes fill with ready tears.
I’m cold and pathetic, Yakuza-san. Please take pity.

He flicked the gun barrel at me in contemptuous permission, and I carefully lifted up the enormous jacket. It was heavy.

Gloriously heavy, and much of the weight in one inner pocket. Chanko might be unreadable in so many ways, but if there’s one thing you can bet the farm on, it’s that men never empty their coat pockets. I shrugged it over my shoulders, being very, very careful not to let the hard metal swing against anything.

The shower was still running and I could hear splashing. Chanko was whistling a jaunty little tune, without a care in the world.
Please please please
, I thought, praying he’d heard, or would notice, or could sense something going on, that he wouldn’t just whistle himself into a trap.

I let my eyes roll and my mouth quiver pathetically, and I wrapped my arms round my torso inside the jacket and slid down onto the carpet, huddled against the table legs, and my hand closed around the butt of the gun. Tattoo wasn’t even looking at me now, and I gently started to free it from the cloth.

Tattoo made some hand gesture at the others, telling the man on the far side to open the bathroom door—it opened outwards, which would put him behind it. The blond lifted his gun.

I couldn’t see the bathroom from my position, but I saw Tattoo’s nod. I heard the rush of air and the increased shower noise as the door swung open, smashing into the guy behind it, and I heard a shockingly loud, wet thwack, and a yell of pain, and a heavy thump-slam, and I screamed in Japanese, “Don’t move!” with Chanko’s gun levelled directly at Tattoo’s stomach.

He stared at me, his arm outstretched and his gun pointing at the bathroom. I stared back, gun gripped in both hands, wrists trembling with the weight, fingers ready to squeeze the trigger, and in that second I realised that I had no idea if I could bring myself to kill someone.

“You’re dead if you move, you bastard,” I shrieked, over a thumping, crunching noise that shook the room. “Drop the gun.
Drop it
.”

Tattoo’s furious eyes were locked on mine. I could pick them out of a lineup in a second, even now, those eyes, their particular shade of mid-brown, their shape and angle. There was nothing but me and Tattoo in the world, the pair of us in a tiny, deadly circle, nothing outside mattering, even when I heard a muted “phut” from a gun, and a crack, and a dreadful, strangled scream.

And then it all happened, incredibly fast and glacially slow. Tattoo’s arm swung towards me. My fingers started to clench. Tattoo’s own grip whitened, and Chanko flung himself forward in a rugby tackle, and his movement brought him between me and the yakuza, so the muzzle of my gun was pointing directly at Chanko’s broad, bare back at the second that I pulled the trigger as hard as I could.

Chapter Six

“Jesus Christ. Jesus fucking Christ.”

“I said I was sorry,” I muttered.

“Sorry,” Chanko said, in the tone of voice usually reserved for words like
mucus
or
Nazi
. “
Sorry
. It’s not about being sorry, it’s about having enough sense to come in out of the goddamn rain!”

“Look, I’ve never even held a gun before, okay?”

“You’ve never read a thriller or seen a movie?”

“Yes, but—”

“And you think I carry around a gun in my coat with the damn safety off?”

“If it hadn’t been on I’d have shot you!” I yelled. “For God’s sake, I’d have thought you’d be pleased!”

“Yeah, yeah, you’d have shot me,” he said dismissively. “Or say that assclown with the tattoos had shot me, and you were facing him with a gun in your hand and no way to use it? You never point a goddamn gun at someone if you don’t mean to fire it!”

“Oh, I meant to,” I assured him.

“With the safety on. He’d have shot you point blank, or shot your damn arm off if he was any good—” He broke off, shaking his head. “You scare me, Butterfly, you really do.”

He wasn’t exactly making me feel safe himself.

Tattoo hadn’t even seen him coming till it was too late. As my trigger clicked uselessly, Chanko had knocked his arm sideways, sending a bullet into the wall, and had then delivered a series of vicious short-range punches that left Tattoo a crumpled heap. I’d forced myself to get up and seen the other two. Peroxide Boy was slumped face down on the bed with a twisted wet towel round his neck and his arm bent at an angle that made me feel like being sick. The third man lay on the floor with blood and plaster in his hair and a head-shaped hole in the plasterboard wall above him—the bathroom tiles on the other side of the wall had actually been cracked. There was a bullet hole in the ceiling on that side of the room. On the whole, it looked like Chanko had picked up my warning all right.

We’d dressed in silence and at speed, Chanko had taken the guns and SIM cards for his collection, and we’d got the hell out of there. The room was on the ground floor, so we went out through the window. I thought about leaving some money for the bolts that Chanko snapped off, but then I remembered someone had given the goons a key card, and decided the hotel could sue me.

I’d had a nasty moment when Chanko left me in a side street while he went to get the car, telling me to run like hell if he wasn’t back in ten minutes. The idea that they knew our car numberplate, that they might be waiting to jump us in the garage…but they weren’t.

Now we were on the road at an unsafe speed, and Chanko was still looking like a volcano with a hangover.

I ventured a glance at him. “Look, I’m sorry about the safety catch, I really am. I know it was stupid of me, but I was scared. And I am sort of glad I didn’t shoot you.”

I saw that register. “Sort of?”

“I’d be happier if you didn’t look like you were about to strangle me and leave the body in the trunk.”

He let out a very long breath. “Ah, hell. I’m not mad at you, Butterfly. You did good. You let me know they were there and how many, you got out of the way, and you kept the third assclown occupied. In fact, you were great, okay? Would have been better if you could use a goddamn gun, but that’s my fault, not yours.”

“How do you work that out?”

“Should have taught you. Should have checked you knew about safeties, given you a gun, even. Should have gotten you the hell out of Kanazawa earlier—”

“Where to? We were there because you got me out of Matsumoto, remember?”

“Yeah, and how’d they know we were in Kanazawa?”

Good question. “Either a blanket search or plain old bad luck, I guess. Every love hotel and bar and restaurant in Chubu alerted, or just one guy recognising our descriptions and passing them back to the family. Considering they’d have done a lot better to visit before we woke up, I’d guess the latter, and it took a while for the message to get through. It was bad luck. You can’t blame yourself for that.”

“Yeah, I can. You forget you told your friend we were in Kanazawa?”

“What?” I put a hand to my mouth. “I didn’t, did I?”

“Yep.”

“Oh, God, I’m sorry. I didn’t even realise—no, but hang on, Yukie wouldn’t do that. She called from another phone to talk safely. She wouldn’t do that to me.”

Chanko didn’t look convinced. “We should have gotten out of town the minute you said where we were. And no love-hotel clerk or sushi-shop guy was gonna recognise you on your own. It’s me that’s easy to spot, goddamn it.” He thumped the dashboard. “No more damn fool mistakes. We get you the hell out of the country, starting now.”

I cocked my head at him. “Chanko, what do you normally do all day?”

“What d’you mean?”

“Well…is this something you do professionally? The damsel-in-distress thing?”

“Nope. Flat-out amateur. Pretty obvious, huh?”

“Afraid so,” I said. “I mean, you’ve only saved my life twice.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t think it counts if I’m the one who put you in danger in the first place.”

“That was the yakuza. Look, now isn’t a great time for you to beat yourself up, okay? Not when there are so many other people to beat up.” I was trying for lightness, but I kept seeing that sickeningly bent elbow, the hole in the wall, the blood exploding from Tattoo’s mouth…

The perfect serenity on Chanko’s face. That was what I couldn’t put out of my mind.

Keep it together, Kerry
. I cleared my throat. “We need to work out what to do. Where we’re going. Lying low isn’t really working, is it?”