Popular Hits of the Showa Era (19 page)

Nobue
and Ishihara were so taken aback by the magnitude of the explosion that they briefly stopped laughing, but the Sugioka-look-alike pilot, who barely managed to steady the helicopter after it was rocked by the blast, wet his pants in panic and outrage. His lips turned bone-white, and his thoughts were all mashed up—
Who
are
these two guys? What just happened? What’ll they say when I get back to the office? To think I put up with that asshole sergeant in the SDF just so I could get a chopper license!
—and he began to weep. When Nobue said, “Drop us somewhere in the mountains, where no one’s around,” he nodded and said, “
Hai,
” in a pathetic voice before veering off at full speed toward Chichibu.

He set the helicopter down at a rest area on a snowy, deserted road in the Chichibu Mountains. Nobue and Ishihara said, “See ya!” and started walking away, but the pilot called out, “Wait a minute!” and came running after them. “I can’t go back to my office! I mean, I’m pretty sure it’d mean the death penalty, right?”

The three of them stood side by side pissing in the restroom trough, and then drank cans of steaming hot coffee, fresh from the vending machine.

“Don’t worry,” Nobue said. “Something that big, it’ll take ’em at least a week before they get around to trying to figure out who did it. There’s no motive, and the address I wrote down at your office puts me in Niigata, so they’ll probably figure it was done by right-wing Russians or something. Kinda chilly up here,” he added, and took the lead in marching down the mountain.

“Who are you guys?” the pilot asked with a mixture of fear and respect playing in his features as he followed them down.

“Nobody knows,” said Ishihara. “We’ve been ignored all our lives, so nobody knows who we are.”

Nobue wondered if the woman with the unbelievable body in the apartment across the way had died, and decided she probably had.
I wish ones like that, at least, could have lived
, he thought, and felt, just for a moment, a twinge of guilt.

Ishihara began humming “Until We Meet Again.” He could feel his entire body sizzling with energy as he did so. Nobue joined in, but the pilot was apparently too young to remember the song.
We’ll have to teach it to him
, Ishihara thought.
Four of us may have died, but now we’re already finding new blood, and there are any number of replacements out there. In two or three months maybe we’ll even be able to hold another Karaoke Blast.

He felt really good and started laughing that familiar laugh of his.