New Title 1 (4 page)

Truth be told, I
enjoy
killing Slants, except for Japs, who do their best to emulate us by drinking Coke, wearing blue jeans, shaking their narrow yellow asses to Elvis and Bob Dylan—they’re making a genuine
effort
. Amazing, isn’t it, how a couple Atom bombs can vaporize 4,000 years of stagnant history and tradition?

The fictitious hitman as portrayed in movies and television is just that: a fiction. Guys wearing black leather trenchcoats or flash satin suits, calling attention to themselves with bowler hats or handlebar moustaches, killing with metal teeth or samurai swords or poisoned hatpins?—all bullshit.

Here’s the lowdown:

Rule #1
: You’ve got to be invisible. It’s about being gray, about hiding in the sunlight. You have to be nondescript. Every aspect of your appearance must repulse attention. You shower, shave, brush your teeth every day. You don’t wear cologne or if you do only a hint, you wear off-the-rack suits that render your profession a speculative question—maybe you’re a lawyer, maybe a banker, maybe a plumber who spends his toilet-snaking profits on decent threads. If you wear a tie make it dark and cheap, nothing with little golfers or Disney characters. No jewelry, but you want a decent watch, Seiko or Casio. You drive a domestic car between five and eight years old, rust- and dent-free. You do this and, somewhere between here and there, you might just become invisible. Part of the scenery. The last person anyone would peg as a cold-blooded killer.

Rule #2
: K.I.S.S.—Keep It Simple, Shithead. Hitmen swiss-cheesing their marks with helicopter chainguns, slicing people to ribbons with razor-tipped nunchuks or sending them into convulsions with blowdarts steeped in poison-toad venom? Only in Hollywood. Anything a real professional needs can be found at the nearest Home Depot: box-cutters, screwdrivers, leather punches, hacksaws. You want to use anonymous weapons, items that can be bought anywhere. If you leave a golden butterfly knife with your initials engraved in the hilt or—God forbid—a
calling card
at the hit scene, you’re fucking with Rule #1.

Rule #3
: the simplest rule. No wife, no friends, no kids, nothing you can’t abandon in the time it takes to pack a duffel bag.

These are the rules of my game.

Kazuhito Kawanami is head of the Shinju Yakuza. He’s older than Abe Lincoln’s bedpan, but you don’t get old in his business unless you stay sharp and
this
particular cat is sharper than a bagful of razor blades. His security team’s the equivalent of the ’76 Steelers “Steel Curtain” defense: a posse of TEC-9-toting killers trained in urban warfare, dudes who could flatline the 5th Precinct in the time it takes to tie your shoelaces.

They’ve got one small problem, though.

I’m better.

Here’s how it’ll shake down:

I am going to ride the elevator down to an underground parking garage where my 1980 Dodge is parked. I will drive down Sussex street and merge with the TransCanada highway, heading north until I reach the outskirts of a town called Naniamo. I will stop at
Stow Away
, a long-term storage facility, storage unit #878. Inside the rental unit are stacks of boxes whose contents are written on the cardboard in green Magic Marker. Inside a box labeled LP’S/MAGAZINES/BOWLING BALL are several dozen jazz records in their original dust jackets, every Playboy spanning the years 1960-67, and a gray bowling ball bag.

Here’s the thing: I don’t bowl.

Returning, halfway between Naniamo and Vancouver, I will pull off at a Dunkin Donuts, where I’ll order a medium black coffee and a honey-glazed. I will take the bag into the restroom and, in the handicapped stall, will remove and load a pair of 9mm Llama pistols with hollowpoint Mausers before screwing on Nambu silencers. I will strap a box-cutter, a Phillips-head screwdriver, four extra clips, and a pound of C-4 explosive underneath my suitcoat, adjusting for comfort and mobility. I will call my wheelman, Fred Jackson, and tell him to be waiting on the third level of the Princess Gardens underground parking lot, zone E-8, in an hour.

Back in the city, I will park at the Finch Avenue subway station. If the weather has improved I will don a pair of tinted mirrorshades and ride the subway four stops, Finch to Wellesley. Exiting at Wellesley, I will navigate a series of underground tunnels until I reach an escalator that will take me into the lobby of the Princess Gardens hotel.

I will cross the brass-and-marble lobby, not hurrying, and enter the elevator. I will pull on a pair of powdered surgical gloves and press the button for the twentieth floor, one below the penthouse. As it rises, I will dislodge a ceiling panel, unlatch the maintenance trapdoor, and hoist myself onto the car’s roof. I will replace the panel and wait for the elevator to stop before climbing a maintenance ladder to the penthouse ventilation shaft. Unhinging the grate, I will crawl into the shaft. I will hear voices speaking in Japanese. I will crawl down the shaft until I am directly above those voices, until I can peer through a vent and see their owners’ shiny silk suits and yellow skin.

This is what I will do. This is what I did.

And here I am.

Kawanami reclines on a leather sofa with a tumbler of scotch. He’s talking to someone via speakerphone. To his left sit a pair of bodyguards decked to the nines in French-cut suits and black wingtips, TEC-9’s resting on their laps. Intricate tattoos project above their collars and shirt sleeves. I idly wonder how their skin might look drying on the limbs of a breadfruit tree, yard upon yard of skin inked with intricate designs, dragons and koi and samurai warriors and suddenly the ventilation shaft is very cramped, I feel claustrophobic, flashback to…

…
deep in the guts of Phuoc-Long province, walking in darkness through a grove of banana trees. Our boots crush the rotting fruit underfoot, filling the air with their sickly sweetness. Eakins, a Cherry we were escorting to Song-Be, trudged along on a path of flattened elephant grass while the rest of us, keen to VC booby traps, kept to the fringe. Eakins, a beach-bum with a bleached-out brushcut, was singing something by the Beach Boys: “We got this board and we call it a Woody; it ain’t too cherry, it’s an oldie but a goody…”

Then the ground opened up and swallowed Eakins to the armpits. He was screaming, arms flailing, digging up chunks of loose earth and mashed banana. His body thrashed like he was being fed feet-first through a wood-chipper.

I humped twenty feet up the trail, found the tunnel, dove in head-first. I didn’t know Eakins and was fairly certain I wouldn’t like him if I did. Didn’t matter. He was a Marine and I was going to save him if I could, die if I had to. We were all like that back then, operating at a level above duty or patriotism or friendship: I will die for you and you will die for me. There is a terrible, reckless kind of strength in such a simple code of conduct.

Anytime. Anywhere. Anyhow. I will die for you.

In the tunnel, wet earth pressed against me. Ahead were noises like slabs of raw meat colliding. I triggered the LPO-50’s pilot light, producing a narrow finger of flame.

“Jesus Christ…”

A pair of Gooks crouched in the blackness clutching long, sharp knives. Eakins’ legs, what was left of them, kicked wildly. All the flesh and most of the muscle, with the exception of his booted feet, was hacked away. The bones of his shins and knees collided wetly, clicking and clacking. His belly was slashed open and his guts had tumbled out. Long bluish ropes of intestine glistened like wet cables and the Gooks hacked at them with gore-streaked blades and the smell of blood was so strong that suddenly the tunnel was the size of a gopher burrow.

The Gooks turned to me and their faces reflected perfect, undiluted hatred and that’s when one of them shoved a blade up into Eakins, digging and twisting until something thick and clumped and rank-smelling spewed out of the ragged hole, splattering their snarling upturned faces.

Pulling the flame-thrower’s trigger felt like an absolution. The LPO-50 spread a carpet of fire that filled the tunnel with the smell of burning butane and burning flesh. The heat blistered my face and singed my eyebrows to ash but I kept the trigger down. And all the while I’m thinking,
“
Please someone shoot Eakins, shoot him in the fucking head, end his misery because
…”

…Kawanami’s off the telephone. He rises and walks to the window. His bodyguards follow. They’re all facing away from me.

Rock and roll.

The Llamas kick in my hands as slugs tear through the ventilation shaft, leaving a network of dime-sized holes. Through the vent I see a bullet punch through a bodyguard’s neck, just below his hairline. The slug bores through his throat, leaving a fist-sized exit hole where his collarbones meet. He drops to his knees, hands raised to the wound. He appears to be praying.

The other bodyguard takes one slug through the knee and another turns his elbow into red mashed potato. He folds like a pup tent onto the cream carpet, spraying the TEC-9, punching holes through the far wall. I drill a bullet through the left lens of his sunglasses. His head snaps back like it’s been nailed to the floor, pulped eyeball oozing around the mirrored plastic.

I smash at the vent with the pistol butts until it swings open and pour myself through to land feet-first on the carpet. Ten seconds have gone by.

Kawanami stands beside the window, drink in hand. He is trembling, but whether this is fear or the palsy of his age I cannot tell. He knows my presence means his life can now be measured with a stopwatch.

“I’m going to kill you, now.”

The old man nods. He does not beg, or offer to double whatever I’m being paid. He just nods and sips his drink, eyes never leaving mine. I can only hope, when my time comes, I check out with similar dignity.

The silenced Llamas make a dull mechanic hiss—
snick-snick, snick-snick
—as I double-tap the triggers. Hollowpoints tear through Kawanami, blowing the back of his blazer out. There are only pinpricks of blood on his chest but I’m certain his back now resembles a surrealist painting, bullets leaving massive exit holes. The window spiderwebs and then shatters. His body is thrown backwards, feet propelled from his shoes—I notice a hole in his argyle sock through which one big toe pokes—and his neck is severed clean through on the jags of window-glass. His head plummets twenty-one stories to the sidewalk.

I’m heading to the elevator when I notice a TEC-9 laid across the sofa’s armrest. It can’t be Kawanami’s so that means…

Ssshhht
is the sound of my suitcoat splitting as a blade slashes diagonally across my back, shoulderblade-to-hipbone. I barrel-roll to my left instinctively, adrenaline redlined, and catch a glimpse of my attacker. Another cookie-cutter bodyguard wearing shades and a suit, but this one’s got a ten-inch Barlow knife and as I face him he lunges at me.

I feint right and the knife slices into the meat of my right bicep, sawing through skin and sinew. I spin on the ball of my foot, rolling off my attacker’s momentum, coming through with an elbow that forces his jaw bone into his neck, jamming it into the big cluster of nerves there. He goes down and I cross behind the sofa, pulling the screwdriver and box-cutter from inside my suitcoat.

“Listen,” I say to the guy. “Your boss is dead. You lose, I win. What’s the use you dying now?”

The dude just snarls at me.

You try to toss these fucking mongrels a bone…

He comes around the sofa, chopping at me with the thick blade. I draw back far enough to avoid a fatal wound but the tip passes through my shirt below my nipples and blood pisses through the slit. I bring the box-cutter around in a hard arc, slashing at his unprotected face, creating a half-moon gash starting at his hairline and terminating somewhere below the jawbone.

He screams and his hand goes up to grab at his face, his hand’s trying to press the fatty flap of skin that was so recently his cheek back in place. The box-cutter slips from my right hand as I jerk my left up into the gap between his outstretched arm and chest, screwdriver aimed at a spot beneath his chin. I know this is going to end ugly, ugly and senseless, but these things usually do.

The screwdriver punches through his throat—
thack!—
and blood sprays down in twin brownish geysers, staining his suit. This is accompanied by a horrible hissing noise as his jugular pumps blood around the screwdriver’s molded plastic handle. He opens his mouth and through red-streaked teeth I glimpse the screwdriver’s tip. He’s making this noise, this horrid
gurgling
, and it fills me with a desperate sort of pity so I yank the screwdriver out of his throat and bury it in his left ear. He squawks, eyes blinking, and face-plants on the carpet.