Cold-Blooded: A DC Universe Fanfiction (#Wattys2015)

Chapter 37. Slade: Okinawa

Okinawa. The southernmost prefecture of Japan, made up of hundreds of islands, most tiny, was home to thirty-two US military bases on Okinawa Island alone. 

Ordinarily Slade would not have taken a hit on a member of the US armed forces, but the name of the colonel in question was familiar from the news and internet. It was an all too common story these days. A sexual assault charge, arrest, trial, conviction—and then a higher-up intervened. The colonel was too valuable to serve time for what he had done. The conviction was overturned, the colonel reassigned, the young woman left to suffer all the consequences, both within the military and in the eyes of the world, without even the consolation of knowing the man was locked up.

He remembered her face. She wasn't pretty and slender, she wasn't blonde and white, any of the things that usually evoked sympathy from the general public. The vicious ranting on the internet, jokes made about how she was so ugly she ought to be grateful, death threats—and this was against the victim, whose account of the incident was proven true beyond a reasonable doubt!

She took her own life.

Slade didn't know who was paying for the hit, and he didn't care. This one he would have been willing to do for free, if he happened across the man somewhere and didn't have to go out of his way.

So, since he was incognito on this vacation, he put in the glass eye he had but rarely used, applied temporary hair dye—dark brown for his hair, rust red for beard and moustache—that was the masterful touch, the convincing touch, because while the combination was rather common, it looked fake, and who would disguise themselves to look deliberately fake? People would remember the beard, and not so much the man who wore it. A blurry blue tattoo of an eagle on his forearm and the name of the colonel's original unit, as temporary as the hair dye, a change of clothes, and a set of fake ID completed the transformation.

A couple of hours later the colonel—who was now being shunned in the backlash after the woman's suicide—was three-quarters soused and pouring out his woes to Slade as he helped the man down an alley that wasn't going to take them back to base.

He said the young woman's name in the colonel's ear right before he snapped the man's neck. Leaving the body where it was, he unhurriedly went his way. It was the last of the jobs he'd agreed to before they left; he hadn't yet said yes to the North Korean assignment, but he would have to make up his mind soon.

Six and a half weeks had gone by since they had yakiniku with Yukie's sister and her husband. Amazingly, everything was still all right. Better than all right, truth be told, although all three of them had gone beyond where being on their best behavior could take them and were their regular selves with each other. Oh, there were moments, such as when Rose went off for the afternoon with the two girls she had met that day at the shrine, and came back with a defiant expression on her face and her hair dyed blue in gradient shades, still white on top, but shading through frost and dusk to midnight.

She looked both surprised and disappointed that he only laughed—because if that was the worst she got up to, they were well ahead of the game—and Yukie said she thought it was both beautiful and practical, because Rose would now attract less attention as simply another Harajuku participant.

Then Yukie, after the second time she went off for lunch with her sister, came back to tell them it had been an ambush by the rest of her family—father, mother, brother, and sister-in-law—not because they missed her and wanted a reunion, but because they disapproved of her being involved with him—not because he was a notorious assassin and a mercenary, which they didn't seem to know about, but because he was an American. As inducement, they offered up as a marriage prospect a middle-aged widower trying to raise two young sons on his own. A dentist, too—not just a dentist, but one of the top twenty in Tokyo! They had shown him her picture, and he was very anxious to meet her.