An excerpt from The Hero Business
© 1992 Mark Seymour

The Hero Business

It was only a few hours after the oyabun cleared Customs before they contacted me. Well, not them, of course. They had kobun to do menial tasks like trying to take me on the street in broad daylight. Omori had been right, those assholes were getting out of line. Three of them came out of an alley as I was heading back to my hotel after calling Kandinsky from up the corner. That was their first mistake; if they'd waited until later, when I went out to dinner, they'd have been indistinguishable from thousands of other Japanese tourists. If they'd bothered to dress like tourists, of course. Anyone wearing a suit in the depths of old-town Honolulu was a rarity, and a raft of young Japanese in those dark suits, all with punch-perm'd hair, was even rarer.

Their second mistake was trying to take me alive. They wanted the money the easy way, without giving her up, and that meant convincing me to give it to them. Which meant I had to be alive, at least for a while. Unfortunately for them, I knew that. Their third mistake, the fatal one, was planning to do the job quietly. If they'd just grabbed me out of a crowd on Kuhio or Kalakaua, stuffing me into a car and speeding away, it might have made a paragraph in some Honolulu PD report, if anyone even took the time out of a busy vacation to mention it to the police. As it was, they'd end up being a couple of folders in the big pile of UNSOLVED files downtown.

The one leading the pack tried to do it like in the movies, pulling a shiny chrome .38 out of his waistband and waving it in my face. Maybe he thought that'd scare me to the point where I'd put up my hands and go along quietly. That wasn't very likely, as I often get upset when people point guns at me. Unfortunately for him I'd dropped my hand through the open zipper on my trusty waist pouch onto the butt of the already-cocked Colt the second I heard their footsteps. When I pulled the trigger the 240-grain slug took him by surprise, high up in the chest. It made only a small dark hole in his white shirt, but the kobun behind him was sprayed crimson and the dead man folded into a pile of bad origami on the street.

The ugly one, with a missing fingertip to prove he was a fuckup even by yakuza standards, had fumbled a little automatic out of his flopping shoulder holster by then and insisted on pointing it at me. Shaking so hard he probably didn't notice that I'd cleared the revolver before the first guy had even hit the ground, he left me no choice; my two shots were so close together they were only one long echo off the buildings. The first one hit him too high, in the shoulder, but I leaned into the recoil and the other one took him dead center before he even started to spin from the impact and he ended up splayed across the peeling back wall of the Chinese herbalist shop across the narrow street.

The third kobun, just a kid really, was still trying to wipe the remnants of the first one out of his eyes when he looked up, startled, into the barrel of the Anaconda. His body locked up rigid, his hands raised shoulder-high, but there were too many martial arts moves that started just that way for me to be happy with his seemingly defenseless posture. While he was still mesmerized by the gun I took his feet out from under him with a fast roundhouse sweep; he went down hard and I quickly knelt beside him, the wide muzzle of the Colt prodding one blood-obscured eye socket. His other eye stared up at me, wide and terrified.

"You speak English?" He nodded rapidly. I leaned on the gun. "Say it."

He swallowed hard. When I'd been where he was my mouth had been as dry as his. "Yes, I speak English."

"Good." I smiled. "They say my Japanese sounds like I'm Korean."

He couldn't be sure whether or not I was making a joke, so he only half-smiled. "I learned English in high school."

In the distance I heard a split-second wheep, as a patrol car used a burst from its siren to clear a way through traffic. Someone, it seemed, might have cared enough to report a shooting. "That's nice." I leaned close, almost nose to nose, while he tried to press the back of his head into the asphalt. "I don't have much time, so listen carefully, okay?" He nodded, careful not to disturb the gun barrel pressing on his eyelid. "You tell the oyabun this: if they want their money they will bring the woman, the gaijin woman, to me. Alive. Unhurt." The knuckles of my other hand jammed suddenly into his belly and he flinched. "I will call and tell them where and when. No tricks, or the money will be gone forever. Wakatta?" Korean-sounding or not, I needed to be certain that he understood.

His head bobbed again. "Hai, wakarimashita." He understood well enough.

"Okay." I stood up quickly and stepped away, the sights on the Anaconda never leaving his chest. "Go." I waved my free hand down the street. "Run!" He rolled over and started to get to his feet. "Hey, kobun!" He froze when I yelled and only half-turned, afraid to look. I smiled, and he relaxed just a bit. "Next time..." I nodded at the two slumped on the street. "Next time I'll kill you, too."

 

In the movies they always bribe the desk clerk to move them to a new room. If he'll take a bribe from me, why not a much bigger one from the bad guys? So I bribed one of the cleaning women, instead, and she let me move my stuff into the vacant room next to mine, then brought all its keys up to me from behind the front desk. It's amazing what a hundred dollar bill will get you from someone who makes, what, maybe four-fifty an hour. She even gave me extra towels, and they came in handy. I usually felt better after a soak in hot water even when I'm not shooting people, but this bloodbath was starting to get to me. I made quite a mess taking a shower for an hour or so.

I knew that no one but their mothers would lament the passing of those two lying in the alley, but I'd been so positive that I'd given all that shit up. It's not like I haven't had the practice. Hell, I wasn't eighteen before I saw my first dead body, and the government had paid me to deal with way too many of them in the more than twenty years since. Not that Marines were supposed to be concerned much with the aftermath of death; the Corps felt that shit was for the other guy to worry about. By the time I got to the Border Patrol, however, they'd gotten smart enough to pay people to talk to me about the process, and the shrinks'd become concerned that, having seen a few deaths too many, it might have affected me in some way. They're probably right, but what I've learned, finally, is that there's no real way to integrate into your life the hard, cold, nasty fact that you've just made someone else dead. Someone, however much of a slimeball he may have been and however much he may have deserved to die, who had parents, a girlfriend, a dog. Someone who liked milkshakes, or nuoc mam, or tabbouleh, or a good burrito pollo. Someone who wanted to have children, get old, die in bed. To be responsible for all that, gone in an instant, that way lies madness. So you just take them and their foreshortened lives and put them in a room in the back of your head, one marked Gee, I'm sorry, and close the door. That room's getting pretty full for me.

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