Deliverance (Book 1)

Job Seven: Breaking Out

The smell of the scene was rank. Araki was a vegetarian, in the name of ethics; he struggled with it, and the smell of meat was something he often found problematic, but usually because it was good. Not like this. This was not good at all. This was rank. There was no better word for it; charred flesh, melted plastics and petrol residue. And a hint of cordite.

The techs were scraping the remains of a 9mm Glock from the NSX's footwell, where its ammo had cooked off and its plastic frame had melted in the fire. But the steel of firearms had to be tough stuff; the barrel might have enough rifling left to match to the round they dug out of the biker's face, and probably the firing pin could be matched to the shell casing. Or casings, now; Kyoto had finally come through. It had been the patrolwoman from the village police box, royally pissed off by the two cars thundering by and being unable to do anything about it. He had talked to her on the phone, and when she heard about the shooting, she had started walking the route of the chase on her day off, scouring the verges for brass.

And against all expectations, she'd found a 9mm Para shell casing and sent it in. It matched the one from beside the bay; so the BMW driver had the same gun as was used for the biker's execution. If the charred and shattered man they'd scraped out of the NSX cockpit had been the BMW driver, it was case closed, according to his boss. The NSX itself was a familiar sight to him, or at least had been before the horrible damage it had suffered. Atsushi's car. Another target he'd been stalking for a long time. Once they did the autopsy, the old damage to his hip would identify him. As for the biker, it was a plausible fit. He was, or in all likelihood better to say had been, a nasty piece of work, and he could easily be linked to Hirokawa, given his record.

But Araki knew there was more coming. The Hirabayashi-gumi were moving in force on Inayoshi-kai's businesses, things were stretched thin, and the whole thing was going to get worse before it got better. If this was spilling over onto the delivery drivers, then there was some angle involving them in the wider war. This wreck wasn't what he had felt coming. It was a squall, not the main storm. That was going to be coming into view any moment. He felt it in his bones.

– – – –

Tsuba walked until dawn. He was drifting along on a tide of pain. He just followed the road.

His wrist was not that painful any more, but that was mostly because the rest of him was doing its best to catch up, the general beating he'd received from the crash fading in as the adrenalin of having his life hanging in the balance faded out. Plus, if he tried to do anything with his left hand, it reintroduced him to the taste of fresh agony all over again. He'd tried to find a way to protect it but hadn't been able to find anything except to hold the wrist carefully with his other hand, and it ended up looking like he was trying to stop his left hand from strangling him with his right hand.

He stopped at a junction, leaning on the crash barrier. There was frost on the scrubby vegetation around him, just a touch, but he was hot.

The cops had been around. He had hidden from them several times, lying huddled beside the road in muddy fields and behind barriers. It couldn't be denied, he'd considered giving himself up to them. But that would ruin him. Everything he'd done, everything he'd built, would be gone, because he couldn't cope with a bit of pain. So he gritted his teeth and coped, until he got a reasonable distance away.

He was now many kilometres from the crash. Probably safe to get some treatment. However, he had only a few hundred yen in his pocket; most of his stuff had been in the car, and that was history. He'd seen the reflected flash as it exploded, and turned in time for the thump of the detonation to reach him. There were, he thought, faint screams too, but with the night he'd had, he wasn't sure of anything any more. He had imagined himself talking to the cast of Final Fantasy VII as he walked. As he walked further, they started to talk back.