After a two-minute walk, Setsura came to the mountain of rubble he remembered from before. The remains of Tohan in East Gokencho. In front of it and to the right was the convenience store. Beneath it, Gento was digging out something of utmost importance to him.
Scanning his surroundings, he felt a draft. The wind was picking up. The dawn was ready to rule the day, but dark clouds were already challenging its supremacy, sweeping across the sky over his head. He could almost hear them roaring above him like a smoking steam engine. Shadows raced along beneath his feet.
He paced away from the convenience store. In the distance, the houses and shops were rolling up their shutters. Setsura stopped in front of the mortuary. The shutters were still down. The dirt excavated from beneath the convenience store had been brought here through the tunnel.
A clanking sound came from behind the shuttered doors and windows. With a painful screech of metal, the shutters began to lift. They were half open when a forty-something woman appeared. The lady from the convenience store. Followed by a middle-aged man. Probably the owner.
The last was a teenage boy. They were all wearing pajamas.
“Welcome, welcome,” the lady said, as if gazing upon a movie idol. “I was so hoping you would come back to visit us. Unfortunately, Hyota-san isn’t in right now. He left a short time ago with a young woman.”
“A young woman?” said Setsura, furrowing his brows.
“That tart of a girl with the sexy body and the big gun.”
“Where’d they go?”
“Well. After throwing us a party, she went off with Hyota-san. She’s one crazy nympho bitch. Sure knows how to go down on a man and take it in the face. A real pro.”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Setsura sighed. “An evil brood.”
“So the word’s gotten around already?” said the man, scratching his bony chest, his left hand tucked into the waistband of his pajama bottoms. “If so, then there’s no way you can leave.”
“Are we gonna kill him?” the teenager asked with glittering eyes.
“Patience, patience,” the mother said, patting him on the head. “This is not the place. Let’s go in the back.”
The boy had already done an about face. “This way,” said the father, pulling his hand out of his waistband. He was holding what looked like a silver fountain pen, except there was a hole where the nib should be. The hole was the size of a .22 caliber bullet, though the lack of rifling suggested it fired a tiny missile.
The three-inch weapon could penetrate the body armor worn by commando police. A built-in laser guidance system made evasion impossible.
Setsura did as he was told without protest, and went around to the back of the house. A section of land had subsided there, revealing a concrete slab. The basement of the building.
“Thanks to this, this dig has been one big pain in the ass.” The father sounded bitter.
“Hey, don’t go flapping your lips in front of him.”
“What’s the problem? He’s going to die here anyway.”
“You didn’t ask Hyota for details?” Setsura said to him.
“About what?”
“Oh, nothing. So, how far has the excavation gone?”
“It’s done already.”
“You’re done?” A hard edge crept into his voice.
“We hauled it out thirty minutes before you arrived. The mortuary owner took it away. Who knows where? At any rate, now we go our separate ways.”
The woman said with a sarcastic smile, “Irreconcilable differences, you know.”
“Then you’d better be on your way, wouldn’t you say? There’s nothing to be gained from picking a fight with me.”
“Oh, we already got paid to get rid of you. Though it’s looking like a lot of money for nothing now.”
“Hyota, eh?” Setsura said, mostly to himself.
The man nodded. “One little nasty son of a bitch you don’t want to mess with.”
“I asked before, but Hyota had nothing more to say?”
“About what?” the woman asked suspiciously.
“No matter,” Setsura softly intoned. “Let’s get it on, then.”
In response to that quiet invitation, the wicked vibe swirling around the three condensed into solid intent.
The teenager took one step forward. “I’ll take care of him.”
The ground crunched beneath his synthetic leather flip-flops. He cocked his foot back behind him. A second later, his right hand slashed upwards. A tearing sound brushed by Setsura’s ear. A black hole opened up in the concrete wall behind him.
The teenager gaped. Flying forward at a hundred and twenty miles per hour, the nail embedded in the heel of the sandal should have hit Setsura right between the eyes.
“Missed,” Setsura said, like the kid was shooting spitballs at him.
“Out of the way! I’ll take care of the bastard!”
The father’s growl was drowned out by a shrill shriek. A blue-white flame trailing behind it, the mini-missile streaked at Setsura.
The nose suddenly pitched up.
✦ ✦ ✦
The kid clucked to himself, and turned around and ran, leaving the woman behind. He probably didn’t feel the red line tracing down his back until after he dodged between the boulders and disappeared from view.
Setsura turned to the man writhing on the ground and the woman standing there still unharmed. “You know what it means to be hoist by your own petard?”
The woman nodded. “Yeah. That bastard Hyota meant you to do us in.”
“I suspect he was hoping for some mutually assured destruction,” Setsura said, glancing down at the spreading pool of gore like it was an inconvenient mud puddle. “It seems he didn’t acquaint you with my particular skills. A pity.”
“No way that bastard’s getting away with this, jerking us around like that.” She glared at the skies, her trembling, upturned eyes reflecting the shimmering blue. “You want to kill me, too? The wound on the kid’s back—the blood’s not going to stop, is it?”
“One way or another.”
“I get it. The blood’s gonna keep flowing. That can’t go on long before you’re dead and gone. Just deserts for raising a hand against the likes of you. But let me even the scales first.”
“Even the scales?”
“Give me this one break so I can pay this Hyota bastard back. If I’m going to die anyway, there’s no sense wasting that death. This guy too, the kid too, we’ve got chemistry, you know. You know the law of the evil broods?”
Setsura nodded. As long as they lived as a family, they would deport themselves as a real and loving family. Thus the parents would revenge the loss of a child, the child revenge the loss of his parents. Pretend parents prowled the streets of Shinjuku dealing justice to the killers of their pretend children.
“That means you are going to find Hyota before the next time we meet.”
“That’s what it means,” the woman said, looking him in the eye. And it meant as well that the next time they met, the one would kill the other without mercy. “This is one I owe you, then,” she said, and turned around and walked away.
Setsura watched her disappear amidst the rubble, complaining of her aches and pains and the bad hand of cards life had dealt her. And then another roll of thunder turned his attention to the heavens and the distant black clouds.
“Dammit, Gento,” Setsura grumbled. “When are you making your next move?”