Graveyard of Memories

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

I spent the night at the hotel and then, as had become our habit, the drowsy morning hours at Sayaka’s. We would wind up in bed within minutes of our arrival and make love for an hour or two, sometimes getting up to eat a small breakfast, sometimes too exhausted and spent to move.

This time, she had pushed me on my back and straddled me, a position I knew she had come to like. Her arms were amazingly strong and she supported herself with one hand on my chest, reaching down with the other to guide me in. She kept her hand there, holding me, feeling through her fingers what her injury denied her from feeling elsewhere. I caressed her face, her breasts, her hips, loving the way she looked like that, moving, swaying, her face partly hidden by her hair. Periodically, she looked down to take in with her eyes what she was feeling through her hand. I loved when she did that, loved how unselfconscious she was about it, how it seemed to fill her with awe and wonder. She looked back at me and rode me harder, more urgently, her mouth open, her breathing hard, confusion and frustration playing out alternately across her face.

“Jun,” she said, and moved faster, almost angrily. She had so much weight on my chest it was getting hard to breathe, and she was grinding herself into me so hard it hurt my pelvis, albeit in a wonderful way. “Jun,” she said again, looking into my eyes, and then again, more loudly, and then her mouth opened in a perfect O and her eyelids fluttered and her voice dissolved into a long, startled cry.

I kept moving with her, confused, surprised, afraid to hope. Was she coming? God, it was so beautiful, she was so beautiful.

It went on for a long time, and then suddenly she was sagging against me, panting. I held her and stroked her hair and whispered her name over and over. She settled against me, her face to my shoulder, and I could feel tears against my skin.

“Are you okay?” I said softly, still stroking her hair, trying to see her face.

She pushed herself up and looked at me, her eyes watery, her cheeks streaked with tears. She shook her head. “That felt so good. I never felt anything like that.”

“Sayaka…did you, do you think you just came?”

She smiled and fresh tears spilled down her cheeks. “I don’t know. It just…it felt so good. Like an explosion. But did I? I didn’t know I could.” She cried harder. “I didn’t know.”

I felt my own eyes fill up, and I pulled her into me, embarrassed she would see. But I was too late. She pushed herself up again and laughed. “Jun,” she said. “My tough guy.”

I laughed, too, but the tears were still coming.

She stroked my cheek. “Why are you crying?”

I cleared my throat and tried to blink away the tears. “I’m not.”

She laughed again. “Liar.”

I wanted so much to tell her I loved her. To just blurt it out. But I was afraid to. I was afraid she’d think it was just a crush, that I was too young for her, that I was being silly.

But I did. God, I loved her.

“I’m just happy,” I said. “You make me happy.”

Sometimes I wonder now whether it would have made any difference if I’d told her right then. Probably not. And I try to convince myself that she knew anyway. But I’ll never really know. I wish I’d told her. Wish it as much as I wish anything. But I didn’t.

I headed out not long after that. I felt bad I couldn’t tell her why beyond that it was work, and it made me feel worse when she didn’t press. I wanted to get this all behind me. But to do it, I couldn’t just walk away, not unless I wanted to spend the rest of my life in rooms at shabby love hotels, constantly looking over my shoulder. If I wanted to win, first I had to double down. Then I could leave behind everything I’d been mixed up in. Dead, buried, and gone. Over time, maybe even forgotten.

I stopped at a discount store and bought a pair of green pants, a green long-sleeve tee shirt, and a green baseball hat. Not exactly top-level camouflage, but enough to confer an advantage. I also picked up some face paint, the kind children use to turn themselves into cats and turtles and God knows what. I left my bag in a coin locker in Ueno Station — keeping only the Hi Power — parked Thanatos, and walked to Yanaka. I used a public restroom on the way. I’d deliberately drunk nothing that morning and I didn’t really need to go, but still I knew it was probably my last safe piss for a while.

I was several hours early, but had to approach carefully in case they might anticipate that. I didn’t think they would — I’d never shown up early to meet McGraw, and he would have noted this laxness on my part, likely assumed he could count on it, and then briefed Mad Dog’s people accordingly. But no sense taking chances.

I came in over the northeast wall rather than through one of the entrances. I doubted they had the manpower to post someone at every gate, but on the other hand I didn’t know what kind of influence Mad Dog might command following his father’s death. Maybe there were dozens of soldiers trying to curry favor with him.

I made my way to the elevated plot by cutting between the grave sites, avoiding the main roads traversing the cemetery. Again, probably unnecessary, but also again no downside to being careful. There were only a few people about, mostly pensioners walking dogs; a few devoted friends or family members laying flowers or lighting incense; mothers with toddlers in the attached children’s park. Nothing rubbed me the wrong way.

Approaching from the north, I avoided the stone steps, instead pulling myself up the side and into the row of bushes there. I waited, watching and listening. Crows cawed; summer insects buzzed; a Yamanote train chimed in the distance. Other than that, it was as quiet as…well, you know.

I opened the little jar of face paint and wiped diagonal streaks across my face, my fingers tracing the lines from combat memory. Then I pocketed the paint, flipped the baseball cap around backward, flattened out on the earth, and waited. It was hot and humid and the mosquitoes were a pain in the ass, and I realized I’d probably been excessive in wondering whether Mad Dog and his people would put themselves through this kind of discomfort. You’d have to be crazy. Or at least accustomed to much worse after humping a sixty-pound ruck in the Southeast Asian boonies. The sick thing was, it was comfortable for me. Yes, I was holding a pistol rather than a CAR-15, and Yanaka smelled like city rather than jungle, but overall it felt familiar, natural, like something I’d been honed for and maybe even was meant for. I felt compact and mean and deadly. And God help the team that was coming here to take me out.

I’d been in place for two hours when I heard footfalls on the stone steps to my right. I kept perfectly still, glancing over without moving my head. A burly, thirty-something, punch-permed Japanese guy in a double-breasted suit with lapels as wide as the wings on a 747 was approaching. A nice little adrenaline flush spread through my gut. Okay, looked like they’d sent the yakuza A-team this time, not a threesome of incompetent chinpira. He walked with a swagger, I noted, and I liked that, liked the over-confidence it suggested. He didn’t even examine his surroundings. He just walked over to the south side, found a relatively sparse spot in the bushes, and pushed the branches aside. He pulled out a radio, keyed it up, and said, “I’m here. Yes, I can see you both.”

So there were three of them. Okay. Was one of them Mad Dog? I got the feeling no. Three would be the bare minimum to cover points of ingress. These guys were the assault team. If Mad Dog was here, it would be as a spectator, maybe at some remove. No way to know except to go through these three, and then see if anyone was still around when I was done.

He squatted, keeping the radio in one hand and holding the branches aside with the other. It didn’t look comfortable. But I supposed he wasn’t expecting to be there long. Well, it would be rude to keep him waiting.

I pulled myself forward on my elbows, the Hi Power at the ready. If he turned, I’d drop him, but if it came to that I had to assume his comrades would hear the gunshot and I would lose the element of surprise. Better to get close and do it quietly. I spent ten minutes creeping out of the bushes and onto the grass. Once the potentially noisy branches were behind me, I was able to move more quickly. I covered the twenty feet from my line of bushes to his in under thirty seconds, keeping to a low crouch. He never heard me, never had a clue, not even when I was directly behind him.

I raised the Hi Power with the butt end protruding past my wrist and hammer-fisted it into the base of his skull like I was trying to bury it there. There was a satisfying crack, and he shuddered and then began to pitch soundlessly forward. I hauled him back by the collar, smashing the butt into his face on the way down. He landed on his back, the grass muffling the sound of the impact. His eyes were unfocused but his mouth was twitching — he wasn’t dead yet. I dragged his head back by his punch-permed hair and something came off in my hand — Christ, it was a toupee. I tossed it aside, sunk my fingers into his eye sockets, pulled his head back, and blasted the butt of the Hi Power into his exposed throat. I felt cartilage breaking and knew he was done.

The radio screeched. Shit. A voice said, “You all right?”

I picked it up and keyed the mic. “Yeah. Just taking a leak.” The reception was sufficiently shitty that I didn’t think he’d notice any difference between my voice and the dead yakuza’s.

“Make it fast. You’re supposed to be watching.”

“Okay.”

I dropped the radio and patted him down. He was unarmed — okay, this one was just the spotter. I propped him up, sat behind him, put my feet against his lower back, and shoved him into the bushes, his pants sliding up his legs as he went. When he was far enough forward so they could see him again, I pulled some branches behind his back to keep him in position. Not exactly lifelike, but the other two were far enough away and there was enough foliage concealing him to make me confident they wouldn’t notice anything was wrong.

I proned out and looked out at Fukumoto’s plot, making sure there was plenty of green concealing my camouflaged face. I could see his two buddies, one at the southwest corner of the wall, the other at the southeast, just as I had figured they would be. They were hanging back under the trees, partly for concealment, I imagined, and partly to get out of the sun. Hanging back like that had certain advantages, but it entailed a critical disadvantage, too: though they had line of sight to the now-dead spotter’s position, they couldn’t see each other.

I picked up the radio and checked the controls. Tempting to take it with me, but I didn’t see any way to mute it short of turning it off entirely. Even if I cranked the squelch, it might not be enough to prevent it from coming on in the face of a strong signal, and if one of the other yakuza decided to get on the radio when I was coming up behind them, it would blow my position. So I turned it off, wiped it down, and left it in the grass alongside its late owner. Then I slid down from the elevated plot the same way I had come in and began circling wide clockwise, using the trees and thick stands of darkened markers for concealment. I didn’t need to move quietly this time, and was able to come up behind the southeast guy’s position in a matter of minutes. I crept soundlessly through the trees, the Hi Power out now, my heart racing. There he was, leaning against a tree trunk, dressed like the first guy, smoking a cigarette. These guys weren’t much on cover for action, but on the other hand I supposed not too many people were going to give an obvious yakuza a hard time for loitering in a cemetery.

Five meters away, I angled out so I could see him in profile. The way he was leaning against the tree, I wasn’t going to have complete blind-spot access to his back the way I had with the first guy. I had just worked out that my best chance would be to rabbit-punch him with the muzzle of the Hi Power when, whether out of dumb luck, or animal instinct, or for no reason at all, he turned and looked right at me.

His mouth dropped open and his hand went for the inside of his jacket. But I already had the Hi Power out, and before he could even grab what he was reaching for it was pointing at his face. I looked in his eyes and shook my head twice, and he got the meaning: Don’t do that, you won’t make it. His hand slowly came out and he started to put both arms in the air.

“Take it out with your left hand,” I said quietly. “Slowly and carefully. Place it on the ground. I’ve got all the slack on this trigger taken up already. One twitch and you die. You don’t want to make me twitch.”

He complied. When the gun was on the ground, he said, “You have no idea who you’re fucking with, do you?”

“Why don’t you tell me?”

He laughed.

Well, he was tough, I’d give him that.

“Face down,” I said. “On the ground.”

He laughed again. “You want to live? Turn and run. And you better run fast. And far.”

“I might do that. But I’ll get a better head start with you face down. Or dead. Which is it going to be?”

Again, he complied.

“Arms above your head,” I said. “All the way. Fingers splayed. And spread your legs.”

I didn’t know it at the time, but the psychology of compliance is interesting. Getting the initial yes is the hard part. Once the subject starts complying, each subsequent step seems like just a minor addition to what’s already been done, and you can get a remarkable amount of cooperation. At this point, he was so obedient we might as well having been playing Simon Says.

Of course, it didn’t hurt that in his yakuza arrogance, he assumed I was just going to hightail it. If he’d known what I’d done to his friend five minutes earlier, I doubted he would have been nearly as sanguine.

Once his arms were above his head and his legs were spread, there was no way he could effectively react to anything I did. Which is why he didn’t have a chance when I stepped up alongside him, raised my leg, and stomped the back of his neck. His arms flapped and his body jerked. He was probably dead already, his spinal cord severed, but I stomped him twice more to be sure. I rolled him over and took his gun — another Hi Power. Standard issue with the Gokumatsu-gumi, apparently. I shoved it in the back of my pants, took a deep breath, and started circling clockwise again.

It took me less than a minute to reach the third guy. I eased up behind him and saw I was just in time — he had the radio out. “Hey, are you there?” he said. “Somebody answer me.”

I stepped out so I was ninety degrees from him, the Hi Power leveled at his head. “Of course they’re not answering,” I said. “They’re dead.”

He jumped and turned toward me, his right arm reflexively going for his jacket but stopping when he saw the muzzle of the Hi Power.

Son of a bitch. It was Pig Eyes. The guy who’d tried to strangle me at the Kodokan, who had almost lost a testicle for his troubles.

“You want to live or you want to die?” I said.

He spat. “Put down the gun. We’ll see how it goes then.”

“Sure, I’ll put it down. Right after I shoot you in the face with it. Like you said, we’ll see how it goes.”

His arms drifted upward, his nostrils flaring with anger.

“Now slowly take out your gun with your left hand. And slowly put it on the ground.”

He did.

“Now turn and put your palms on that tree, spread your legs, and lean forward so the tree is taking all your weight.

He did so, but not to my satisfaction.

“No, that’s not enough. Spread your feet further. And move them farther back from the tree.”

He did.

When I was satisfied he could do nothing defensive without spending at least a full second getting his legs under him and his hands off the tree, I approached and picked up his gun. Another Hi Power. I jammed it in my waistband, my pants getting tight under the belt with the bulk of the two pistols. “Who sent you?”

He glanced behind so he could see me. “What do you mean?”

“Don’t look at me. Look at the tree. I mean, who do you work for? Who wants me dead?”

He didn’t answer.

“Your friends are dead. That could be bad news for you, or good. Bad because I can easily make you dead, too. Good because, if I don’t, there’s no one to contradict your story about what happened here. You could tell them I surprised the guy at the other end of this wall, you chased me, I jumped on a motorcycle and fled. Yeah, maybe you’d have to cut off a pinkie digit to show how contrite you were, but you could tell them your honor would never be fully restored until you had tracked me down and killed me. They’d let you live. I won’t. Now, who wants me dead?”

There was a pause while he did the math. He said, “Mad Dog.”

“Why?”

“You killed his cousin.”

“What about his father? Who killed his father?”

“We don’t know. But we’ll find out.”

Interesting. It sounded like either Mad Dog didn’t know it was me, or he didn’t want people to know he knew.

“Where is he?”

“I don’t know.”

“I don’t believe you. You know him well. He came with you to the Kodokan. So he could watch. Is he here?”

“I don’t know.”

“Bullshit.”

“I’m telling the truth.”

“After you killed me here, how were you supposed to report to him?”

“We’re supposed to call him.”

“What number?”

“I don’t have it here. It’s written down.”

I knew he was lying, but I had no way to make him tell the truth. I could try scaring him, beating him. And eventually he’d cough up a number or an address, and I’d call or go there, and find out he’d given up his favorite bento delivery service, or his dry cleaner, or masseuse, or whatever.

No. This was a dead end. I stepped in close and raised the Hi Power to hammer-fist his head the way I had the first guy.

But I’d miscalculated. Pig Eyes understood I had no reason to let him live. I’d killed the other two; why would I let him go? He’d know I wouldn’t, and he’d know I’d do it from close, not wanting to risk attracting attention with the sound of a gunshot. And while the average person will deploy a dozen forms of denial to avoid accepting the truth of his imminent demise, this wasn’t an average person. He was a tough career criminal, smart enough to be in some sort of leadership position. An expert judoka. And during the time I’d spent fruitlessly questioning him, I’d given him precious moments to build his resolve and his readiness.

So the instant I stepped in to finish him, he did the only thing he could. He snapped his arms out and let gravity take over. If I’d been thinking properly, I would have jumped back and just shot him, the hell with the noise. But I’d already committed to the hammer-fist, so I followed him down with the butt of the gun, catching him with a weak blow that lost whatever energy it might otherwise have had because his body was moving through space ahead of it. The side of his head smacked into the tree, he twisted, threw a leg past my knees, and scissored, taking my legs out. I went down on my back, getting the wind knocked out of me, the two guns cutting painfully into my spine. He was on the gun and straddling my torso amazingly fast, gripping the barrel in both hands, twisting the muzzle away from him. My finger wasn’t in the trigger guard — good because if it had been, the way he was twisting the gun would have snapped it off; bad because it meant I couldn’t shoot him. But my hands and wrists were strong from hundreds of hours of gripping the heavy cotton judōgi. No matter how frantically he tugged and twisted, he couldn’t get the gun away from me. But nor could I get it from him. He changed tactics and smashed my hand into the ground, once, twice, again. I felt the impact up my arm and knew I was going to lose the gun. I reached behind my back with my left hand, felt the grip of one of the other pistols, pulled it free with a yell. He let go with one hand and grabbed the second gun in it just as I thumbed the safety down. Now we were both holding two guns, each of my hands around the grips, his hands around the barrels. His judo technique might have been better than mine, but one hand against one hand, I was stronger. I slid my finger into the trigger guard of the pistol in my right hand and, staring into his eyes, started turning the muzzle implacably toward his head. His pig eyes were bulging and his teeth were clenched, but his shaking arms weren’t enough to stop me. At the last instant, he tried to leap back, but too late. I put a round into the side of his face. Brain matter and skull fragments blew out the opposite side, and he slumped to the ground next to me.

I scrambled out from under him, scared about the noise of the shot. My hand felt numb from the way he had pounded it against the ground. Did I have blood on me? I couldn’t have avoided it entirely, though from what I had seen I thought most of it had exited to my side. I glanced around. I saw no one in the immediate vicinity, and maybe whatever visitors were in the area, saying their prayers and laying their wreaths, would listen for a moment, and then tell themselves it must have been something else. It didn’t matter. I had to get the hell away. I thumbed the safety up on the unfired gun and shoved it back into my pants, held the other under my tee shirt, and started walking fast on shaking legs.

I’d gone maybe twenty feet when I heard a car to my left. I turned just in time to see a black sedan screech to a halt on the access road I was crossing. The driver was pure yakuza — scarred face, punch perm, dark glasses. And in the backseat—

Mad Dog.

I brought out the Hi Power and took aim with a two-handed grip. The driver floored it. There was the sound of burning rubber and wheels spraying pebbles and then he was rocketing straight at me. I pressed the trigger. I’d been aiming at the driver, but the shot went through the windshield dead center — that numbness in my hand was screwing up my aim. I tried to recalibrate and then he was on me. I dove out of the way, breaking into a judo roll and yelling involuntarily as the two pistols bit into my back. I didn’t care — I was just glad the damn things hadn’t seen fit to fire and shoot my ass off.

I came to my feet and had just enough time to fire once more. It hit the trunk, and then the car went around the corner and was gone. If I was lucky, the bullet went through the backseat and drilled Mad Dog. But I didn’t think so — it had hit too far to the other side. And I didn’t think the first shot had hit him, either.

I made my way quickly back toward where I’d originally come in, the baseball cap pulled low, wiping the face paint off with spit and a handkerchief. I kept my head down and stayed on the narrow dirt paths between plots, avoiding the main roads and pedestrian arteries. I couldn’t avoid passing a few people, but between the cap and my averted face, I wasn’t unduly concerned about anyone identifying me for the police.

So Mad Dog had been here — as a spectator, naturally, not a player, the same as at the Kodokan. They’d heard the shot and thought someone had dropped me. Maybe they’d radioed and hadn’t gotten an answer. Regardless, they’d come racing around so Mad Dog could see his trophy, recently stuffed and mounted.

Well, slight miscalculation, asshole.

I kept moving, my back singing where the pistols had bitten into it. Yanaka Cemetery was large enough to have its own kōban, police box, and though I imagined the officers there were more accustomed to helping the newly bereaved locate the plots of loved ones and instructing hanami revelers to clean up the garbage disgorged by their picnics, I didn’t want a confrontation. I didn’t want anything at all to get in the way of my finishing Mad Dog. And that lying piece of shit, McGraw. I thought again of what he’d said. This is a business relationship. You provide some benefit, and you represent a cost.

You got that right, I thought. I do represent a cost. And I’m going to cost you everything.