John Rain 08: Graveyard of Memories (34 page)

If she’s still there
.

I tried to push the thought away. I couldn’t.

I parked Thanatos a quarter mile from the hotel and pulled out the Hi Power, folding a discarded page of newspaper over it for concealment.

Slowly. Slowly, goddamn it. Where would you set up if you were on the other end of this? That’s where you need to look
.

I moved as carefully as I could. The streetwalkers were still out. I couldn’t know which one had given me up. I wanted to kill them all.

Outside the hotel’s privacy wall, I paused and dropped the newspaper, the Hi Power at high-ready, breathing quietly,
listening
. Nothing. Just the normal sounds of nocturnal Uguisudani: a few cars in the distance, a barking dog, music from a pub. I popped my head past the side of the wall and back. Nothing. I eased around and pulled up to the side of the entrance door, my heart pounding like a war drum.

One. Two. Three
.

I burst inside, the Hi Power out, sweeping the room, moving, getting off the X the way I’d learned in the jungle. The reception area was deserted and morgue-silent. Sayaka was behind the desk, looking at me.

I swept the room one last time, then moved up alongside the window, the Hi Power still in hand. “Are you all right?” I said.

She looked both angry and afraid. “What the hell is going on?”

“I don’t want to explain here. We need to go. Right now.”

“Two men were here an hour ago. They said, ‘Tell your friend to get in touch. If he doesn’t, we’ll come back.’”

I was so relieved I could have cried. She was all right. They hadn’t hurt her. They hadn’t taken her. I supposed they figured,
Why bother? She’s in a wheelchair, she’s not going anywhere
. And she worked the night shift in a crappy love hotel—it was obvious she had no money and no means of flight. They could get to her anytime they wanted. If they wanted to motivate me, it was better to maintain the threat than it would be to fulfill it. To point the gun rather than pull the trigger.

This time. Next time, I couldn’t say.

“I’m just glad you’re okay. But we need to go.”

“You know what else they said? ‘The good news is, you won’t feel it when we dump you from that wheelchair and fuck you on the floor. The bad news is, you won’t be able to run away.’”

I thought of the
chinpira
in Ueno. They were trying to bait me again, get me reactive, make me lose my temper, make me lose control. I wouldn’t let them.

But that didn’t mean they weren’t going to pay.

“Sayaka, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I never thought—”

“You never thought what?”

“That any of this would affect you. I thought I could keep it all separate. But they tracked me here. They want to get to me through you.”

“I knew it was something like this. Your ‘jam.’ I knew it.”

I wanted to scream. I wanted to kill someone, kill all of them. I fought to keep a lid on it. “I’m sorry. I was so stupid. I’m sorry.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I can’t even think about that now. First I need to get you safe.”

“Where? Where am I going to be safe?”

“I don’t know, a hotel—”

“I’m in a hotel.”

“A different hotel. Where they wouldn’t know where to find you.”

“Look at me, Jun. I’m pretty easy to describe. Pretty easy to find. Where are you going to hide me?”

I had no answer to that. I was so desperate to protect her, and I didn’t know how. I’d thought because I could keep it all separate in my mind, I could keep it all separate in the external world, too. Stupid. Fatally fucking stupid.

“We’ll get you out of town,” I said, flailing. “Even out of the country. And then—”

“With what? Do you know what that nice apartment with its bath costs me every month? What I have left over, I spend on English lessons. I barely have anything saved.”

I reached into my pocket and pulled out the money from Miyamoto’s job. I put it on the counter under the window. “Here. This is ten thousand dollars. It’ll get you to America. It’s what you want, isn’t it? To get out of this shithole and go to America? Well, here it is.”

She looked at the money. “I don’t want this.”

“I don’t care if you don’t want it, you need it!”

“Where did it come from?”

“Do you really care where it came from? Would you rather take this money and make yourself safe, or get gang-raped and killed by a bunch of fucking yakuza?”

She looked at me balefully for a moment. But she took the money. Thank God.

“I’m going to call them,” I said. “They’re not going to do anything before I do that. You’ll be able to get away. They’re not expecting you to leave the country. They don’t think you can.”

“What are they going to make you do?”

“They’re going to insist I meet them somewhere.”

“Why? So they can kill you?”

“That’ll be the idea.”

“Then you can’t do it.”

And all at once, I realized how I could. It was a long shot, it was insane…but it also had the smooth, ineluctable symmetry of fate.

“I have to,” I said, and felt an enormous weight settle onto me. It was the weight of conscience, of history, of kismet. It was the weight of everything I’d done, all the choices I’d made, all my foolish hopes and ongoing rationalizations. It was the weight of a man who’d dreamt he might be a butterfly, and knew in his soul upon waking that he was no butterfly dreaming he was a man. This was my life. My reality. My sad, doomed destiny.

“Have to what?” she said. “Meet them? That’s insane. Don’t do that. Tell me you won’t do that.”

I shook my head. I wanted to tell her everything. To make her understand. More than anything, to tell her I loved her.

“What?” she said again. “Why won’t you tell me? Wait, I’ll come out, we can talk.”

She spun the wheelchair around. But without that glass between us, I knew my resolve would crumble.

“I have to,” I said again, and was gone before she’d even made it to the door.

chapter
thirty-three

I
rode west, practicing the disguised voice I’d used with Miyamoto, making sure I had it down because unlike Miyamoto, McGraw was used to me in English. I found a payphone and called him. It was late, but they put me through. “You left me a message,” I said.

There was a pause. “That’s right. I appreciate you getting back to me. I understand you’re a problem solver. And you come highly recommended.”

“Who recommended me?

“A fellow named Miyamoto. And some other mutual friends of ours.”

“What kind of problem do you need solved?”

“I’d prefer if we could discuss it in person.”

“I don’t meet people in person. Not unless they’re the problem I was hired to solve.”

He laughed—a little nervously, I thought. “Well, let’s just see if we can establish the general parameters. First, I have to ask this. If the problem you were hired to solve were…an acquaintance of yours, would you still be interested?”

“That would depend on the price.”

“Well, that’s a sensible answer. It’s good to hear. And what would be the price if the problem were named…John Rain?”

I paused as though surprised. “That’s a bit more than an acquaintance you’re talking about. An old friend, in fact.”

“Is that a problem of principle, or price?”

“The price would be fifty thousand U.S.”

“Fifty thousand? That’s five times what you charged Miyamoto.”

“Miyamoto’s problem was a stranger. For this one, I’ll need extra. For my conscience.”

McGraw laughed. “Tell you what. Twenty-five. For your conscience.”

“The fifty is nonnegotiable. If you want it done, I’ll get it done. But the price is fifty thousand.”

There was a pause. “All right. Agreed. Payment upon delivery.”

“No. Half upon delivery. The other half up front.”

“I can’t do that. I don’t know you. I’m not going to leave twenty-five thousand dollars someplace and then have you tell me it wasn’t there.”

“We would face the same difficulty upon completion.”

“Upon completion, at least I’ll have completion. Before that, all I have is risk.”

I paused as though torn between the promise of the big payday, on the one hand, and bending my rules, on the other.

“All right,” I said. “But you know what the collateral will be in the event of default.”

“Yes, I do.”

I thought of Mad Dog. Was I going to have to worry about someone else at the ambush beyond my alter ego?

“One other matter,” I said. “Have you hired anyone else for this?”

“What? No, why would I do that?”

“I wouldn’t know your reasons. Redundancy, perhaps. A plan B. That’s not what matters. What matters is, you need to know my rules. When you hire me, it’s an exclusive. I won’t tolerate someone else tripping up the smooth running of my operation. That is also nonnegotiable, and also subject to collection of collateral upon default.”

“I understand. You don’t have to worry, there’s no one else. Hell, how many people do you think I could staff this with, anyway, at fifty grand a pop?”

“Again, I wouldn’t know.”

“Well, I’ll tell you, then. You’re it, and that’s it. Now, how soon can you do this?”

“Impossible to say right now. It depends on too many factors.”

“I might have something that could fix him in time and place for you. Would that be worth a discount?”

“No.”

“Yeah, I didn’t think so. All right, I’ll give it to you anyway. I need this done.”

“How will you get it to me?”

“Check in with me again tomorrow. With a little luck, I’ll have something then.”

“Regardless, we have a contract?”

“If you can guarantee success within a week, we do.”

“I can’t guarantee it. But I can tell you it’s likely. With good information from you, very likely.”

“Well, if you want the money, get it done. And hopefully I’ll have more intel for you tomorrow.”

I hung up. I should have felt relieved, excited, triumphant.

Instead, all I could feel was that weight. I wondered if I would ever get used to it.

chapter
thirty-four

I
picked up my bag from the locker at Tokyo Station, tossed the gun I’d used to kill the driver into the Sumida River, then spent the night at a love hotel in Shinjuku, wanting to be far away from the scene of the latest crime. I made sure there were no streetwalkers in the neighborhood, and parked Thanatos far away. I barely slept. I couldn’t stop thinking about Sayaka. She didn’t know the first thing about protecting herself, not from something like this, and even if she did, what could she have done? Yes, I was pretty sure they would bide their time with her, waiting to see whether the threat they’d established would be sufficient to get me to walk right into whatever ambush they had in store. But still, I couldn’t know any of that. I couldn’t be certain. So I was gambling, gambling with Sayaka’s life. But I didn’t know what else I could do. I told myself again and again that this was the least worst option. And tried not to imagine anything beyond that.

I went out early the next morning, and took a walk around Shinobazu Pond in Ueno Park. The pond, with a circumference of about two kilometers, had three sections, one of which—called the Lotus Pond for reasons impossible to miss upon even a casual glance—was in the summer almost completely covered with giant lotus plants. Here and there, in those areas where the lotuses were less thick, ducks and other migratory birds swam and fed, and enormous, listless carp glided along, nudging at the mud, searching for whatever carp subsist on. I was glad to see the area was fairly empty in the early morning hours—on summer evenings, it could be crowded. There were a few dog walkers; some pensioners doing Tai Chi; an apparent nature photographer with a camera on a tripod. I examined the area carefully, trying to imagine everything, anticipate everything. If I could make it work, I decided, this was the spot.

When I was satisfied with my preparations, I went to a payphone and called McGraw, this time as myself. I told him I’d gotten his message.

“I’m glad you called,” he said. “Look, you know me. You know my values. Maybe they’re not good values, but they’re consistent. And like I’ve been telling you, for me, this is business. I made a bad business call, and now I’m trying to make it right.”

“Business? That’s what you call threatening a girl in a wheelchair?”

“What are you talking about?”

Was he playing dumb? Or had that been Mad Dog, acting on his own? No way to know, at least for now. I decided to drop it. “What do you want?”

“Look, I know you’re pissed and that’s understandable. But if you act on that, you’ll be doing something dangerous, probably suicidal. I’m not threatening you, just telling you the facts. Whereas, if you can set that temper aside and look at the situation dispassionately, you’ll see that what I’m offering you has a huge upside. More flexibility than what you’ve been doing, and ten times the money, maybe more. We each have something the other could use. I don’t understand why you would just walk away from that.”

I noticed he wasn’t calling me son anymore. Yeah, well, now he was trying to flatter and lull me, not keep me in my place. He might not have thought I was ineducable, but he must have still thought I was dumb.

“What are you proposing?” I said, playing along.

“Just meet me. I’ll tell you all about the program, and how you fit into it. You name the place. I’d suggest someplace public, where we’ll both feel comfortable, but other than that, your call.”

Sure, something public. As though that would make a difference. As though the assassin you think you just hired to take me out would find a few patrons in a restaurant a meaningful impediment
.

What McGraw didn’t realize was that I
wanted
something public. But for my reasons, not his.

“How about Shinobazu Pond?”

“Sure, that would be fine. Where specifically?”

“You know the Benten Shrine, on Benten Island? Right in the center.”

“Of course I do.”

“I’ll meet you there tomorrow morning. Eight o’clock.”