Non-Stop Till Tokyo (25 page)

“No, it’s not. There’s still the old dead guy. The yaks’ll want to know where you got the case. You tell them it was Hearn, they’ll want to find him. You give them Hearn, they’ll kill him.”

“We could give him a head start, a warning—”

“They’ve still got Kelly. Same applies to her.”

“If she’s still alive.” I added two more spoons of coffee, forgot how many I’d already put in, gave up and slapped my hand on the worktop. “Crap. I didn’t think this through, did I? I thought—shit.”

“You thought you could give them Kelly and Hearn.”

“Yeah. I did. Except now that it might actually happen, I’m not sure I can. But what about us? What about Yoshi and Noriko? Who says I have to protect Kelly and her stupid seppo boyfriend at my friends’ expense?”

“Put the spoon down, you’re getting coffee grounds everywhere. Nobody’s telling you to do anything. What’s a seppo?”

“Septic tank. Yank. Rhyming slang. British.”

He looked blank. “Okay.”

I leaned forward, elbows on the worktop, hands propping up my head. “I can’t do this, Chanko. I can’t be all over the place like this. I actually forget about Noriko—we all do—and then I remember. We look like we could find this guy, and then I can’t work out what will happen if we do. One minute something seems important and the next I almost forget, and—I can’t live like this. I need to know what’s happening, not to just be flailing in the dark, not knowing what’s going on around me.”

“Hey.” He came up behind me, and I felt a heavy hand on my shoulder. “Come on. You’re doing great. Jeez, this weekend you were running from the mob with no idea what was going on, now you’re—”

“Brewing coffee,” I interrupted. “I’m doing nothing. Yoshi and Taka can do their computer stuff, and Minachan and Sonja are right in the thick of it, and you can take on the yakuza three to one and win, and I’m just waiting for things to happen and people to tell me stuff—”

“Bullshit. You think I’d be here if it wasn’t for you?”

I twisted round and looked up at his face. He put his hands on the counter, either side of me, leaning down slightly, very close. It could have felt like being trapped. It didn’t.

“You’ve got brown eyes,” he rumbled softly. “I like the blue better.”

“I can change them.”

“Not now.”

My head was craned right back and, infuriatingly, my neck was starting to hurt. “Do you have to be so tall?” I whispered, half giggling.

“I’m not tall. You’re short.” Then, quite suddenly, he scooped me up, and I found myself sitting on the worktop, with his hands still on my waist.

I wanted to touch. I reached out a hand, brushing his thick black hair unnecessarily back from his forehead, ran a finger lightly down the side of his angled face and along his jawbone. He gave a very low groan, and his hands moved upward, then I heard rapid footsteps on the stairs, and the world came flooding back.

I was hopping down from the countertop when Yoshi came in. He looked set-faced, angrily unhappy.

“Yoshi?”

“I called the hospital. No change,” he said. “I mean, I guess that’s good. The bleeding isn’t worse. She isn’t dying yet. Oh, damn it, we shouldn’t have moved her, Kechan, I know we shouldn’t!”

“We had to.”

“I know.” He kicked at the wall. “I want to go and see her.”

“Me too.” I made myself add, “I’ve got her luck.”

“Her
omamori
? You? What have you got that for?”

“She gave it to me when I started running. I want her to have it back.”

“We’ll go,” said Yoshi, as Taka came down. “Taka, we need to go to the hospital—”

“Forget it.” Taka sounded grim. “My guys said the place is crawling with police, but…they saw some goons too.”

“They’re coming for her. Shit. Oh, shit, we have to go.” Yoshi shoved to get past Taka, who moved into his way and grasped his arm.

“Get off me!”

“You’re not going, kid.”

“Noriko’s in danger!” Yoshi screamed at him, tugging at his arm. “We have to go.”

“What are you going to do, Yoshi-san?” Chanko used the polite form, which I’d started to doubt he knew. It took some of the sting out of the words, although not enough. “There’s police there. Taka’s guys. You can’t help her by getting caught.”

“I can’t help her by sitting here either!”

“Yes, you can,” I said. “You can get back up there and find that son of a bitch Hearn, and we can get this bloody bag and make them leave Noriko alone. Okay?
Okay
, Yoshi?”

“I’ll get someone to call in a threat to her, stir them up a bit,” Taka said. “Come on, kiddo. We’re close now. Another hour, maybe. We’ll get him.”

Yoshi shut his eyes and took a deep breath, then stepped back from Taka. “Sorry,” he mumbled. “I just…sorry.”

“We’ll get the bag and we’ll get her luck back to her,” I called after him as he set off back upstairs, head low. “I promise.”

“What is this luck thing?” Chanko demanded, and I fished it out of my bag to show him.

“
Omamori
, see? You know, you pay five hundred yen at a temple and get one for exam success or against traffic accidents. Haven’t you got one?” His expression said no. “Well, Noriko’s had this one for years. It’s to bring her good luck.”

“Yeah? You think it works?”

They got Hearn about twenty minutes after that.

It was another kind of social engineering. Yoshi had gone back to the online booking Hearn had made for his and Kelly’s unused escape flight, and plucked out Hearn’s user login and password, as well as noting the guy’s full name. The odds, Taka said, were heavily in favour of Hearn using the same password much of the time, and so they had sat methodically entering
michaelhearn
,
hearnmichael
,
mikehearn
and a bunch of other variations, plus the password, over and over again, into all the American websites from which Hearn might have bought stuff.

They found details from America twice—what looked like a family home plus a military base from a couple of years ago—and Taka had been about to yell for me to get on the phone and start blagging when Yoshi tried an auction site and a Tokyo address came up.

“Can we be sure it’s the right man?” I asked, leaning over Yoshi’s shoulder.

Taka grinned. “We’ll ask him when we visit.”

Hearn had stuff delivered to an address in Setagaya, west of Shibuya. Taka called up the list of things he’d bought and what items he was watching as they came up. It was an uninspiring selection: military history videos and war films, a lot of old Steven Seagal and Chuck Norris movies, and a couple of pieces of something called survivalist literature.

“It’s about how the United Nations and the Catholic Church and the international Jewish conspiracy are going to attack the United States,” Chanko explained. “The United Nations’ll nuke us before the Vatican army invasion. Then all good Americans will take to the woods like guerrillas to defend freedom.”

“The United Nations is going to do that? Really?”

“Jesus, Taka, shut up.”

“It’s got to be him,” I said. “Right name, right area, right interests, and a right arsehole.”

Under instructions, I kitted myself out as a very demure young woman: crisp white blouse, navy skirt, low-heeled shoes, brown eyes. I was going with Taka and Chanko; Yoshi was staying behind.

“Are you going to be okay on your own?” I asked.

“Yeah. I’m not good at this sort of thing. I’ll see what I can do here. You know, look stuff up, maybe get some sleep.” He swallowed. “Be careful, Kechan.”

“I will.”

“Look after her, won’t you?” He directed the words at Taka, but with a nervous reflex bow towards Chanko. “And…well, be careful.”

Hearn lived in a lump of a building, grey concrete and brown tile, one of many high-rise housing blocks that will be concrete graveyards when the overdue Big One finally hits Tokyo. I don’t like to think about earthquakes at all, but I particularly don’t like thinking about them in cheap, shoddy buildings. And this place was grim, unkempt and dangerous-feeling, with bags of unsorted garbage left outside doors, graffiti on the walls, and a few withered plants lying on their sides in broken pots. A lot of the corridor lights were off, probably permanently, and small groups of young men gathered in the streets outside. Under other circumstances, I’d have felt intimidated.

“This is really nasty,” I muttered.

“Illegal sublet, you take what you can get. Guy must be broke.”

The outside door was wood, reinforced with steel plating and wire mesh in the glass pane, and boasted two good locks and a code pad for tenant access. It would have been a serious security measure if it hadn’t been propped open by a toy robot in cracked green and orange plastic.

The lift was more or less working, but we heard the clanking, wheezing machinery, and we saw the flickering light, and we looked at Chanko, and we took the stairs.

Hearn’s address was on the eighth floor, and by the time I’d got up there my foot was starting to hurt again. It felt like the cut had reopened, and I was glad I wasn’t wearing heels. I got my breath back, smoothed my hair and rang the doorbell while the others lurked.

I rang twice, and he didn’t answer, and I was just beckoning to Chanko when I heard footsteps approaching the door and had to frantically wave him away.

Hearn peered through the spyhole and took a chain off before the door opened.

“The fuck you want?” he demanded in American English.

It was the man we were after, no question. That dramatically angled widow’s peak was very clear now since his hair hadn’t been clippered for a couple of weeks. A tall, well-built man, thickly veined muscles bulging out from under a limp grey sleeveless top. I’d have been more impressed if I hadn’t known Chanko, and if his unshaven chin and slight belly hadn’t betrayed the signs of a man going to seed. He had smoker’s breath and smelled like he drank more than he washed, his eyes were bleary, and there was a mean, desperate, sleepless look to him that made me realise the last few days probably hadn’t been much fun for him either. A deep, nasty, half-healed cut ran under his eye and down the side of his face to the corner of his mouth. It didn’t look accidental.

“Said, what the fuck you want?” he growled.

I gave him a mildly terrified, determinedly happy smile and held out the religious magazine I’d bought at a newsstand on the way over, explaining how I wanted to talk to him about Jesus. I used the most basic vocabulary and made it as clear and slow as I could, but he evidently didn’t follow a word. Instead he gave me his opinion of motherfucking slant-eyed door-to-door salesmen and slammed the door.

“You’ll like him,” I told the men. “No Japanese, and paranoid.”

Chanko and Taka took up positions on either side of the door. I rang the doorbell again, and he peered through the spyhole and walked away. I rang for a second time, then a third, and he rattled the chain furiously in his haste to take it off and shout at me properly. He swung the door wide with a fist raised, and I stepped back as Chanko let himself in without waiting for an invitation and Taka followed.

There was a certain amount of scuffling. I shut the door but stayed on the
genkan
area, out of the way of things.

Chanko had Hearn in an armlock from behind, but he was kicking out ferociously. Taka landed a fast kick of his own on the side of the man’s kneecap, moved in the moment of incapacitating pain and grasped both Hearn’s calves, so they had him lifted off the ground and thrashing uselessly. It looked like something they’d practised. Or done before.

Hearn didn’t seem used to losing fights this quickly. He was cursing like a trooper and alternating southern-tinged American English with awful Japanese. “Who the hell are you? Are you from Higuchi?
Doko desu ka
?
Doko desu ka
, goddammit!”

We all looked around. He’d shouted what could have been “Where are you?” or “Where is it?” (or even “Where am I?”, come to that), but there was nobody else in the tiny one-room flat, and he was clearly talking to Taka.

“Quiet,” said Taka. “Ssh.”

“What is this? Get off me, you Jap bastard.
Doko desu ka
?”

“Nobody here, okay? Shut up now.”

“The fuck are you talking about? Speakee English!
Doko
the fuck
desu ka
?”

“
Doko
means ‘where’, assclown, not ‘who’,” said Chanko. “And he told you to shut up.”

“What the—you’re American?
I’m
American! Hey, c’mon, you gotta help me out. I’m
American
.”

“You said. So?”

Hearn gave a bellow and kicked out hard, freeing one foot from Taka’s grip and bringing the heel down on his knuckles. There was a flurry of activity as he thrashed and fought, one foot on the ground for balance, trying to wrench himself free of the armlock.

Chanko was humming “Oh, say can you see”. It seemed to get on Hearn’s nerves.

It ended inevitably with Hearn on his knees and in what looked like an uncomfortable and unbreakable hold. Behind him, Chanko had one arm round the man’s neck, another securing his arms, and was kneeling with one leg weighing down Hearn’s calves, which really had to hurt. Hearn wasn’t showing pain, though. His jaw was set and he had adopted a staring-straight-ahead posture.