“I’ve abducted Shinobu Yoimachi, and told her production company they have to donate the thirty million yen ransom money to the International Red Cross. Put this on your afternoon gossip show and the seven o’clock news. I’ll make a public announcement at three this afternoon.”
The person on the other end was evidently a professional, trained to deal with whatever message came through in the same businesslike way. “An abduction, right?” he said perfectly coolly, repeating to check facts. “Shinobu Yoimachi, you say?” “Thirty million yen.” “Three pm.” Well the message seemed to have got through, at least.
This was Kita’s plan. If he made the abduction public through the media, it would at any rate mean that those gangster businessmen wouldn’t so easily be able to shut Shinobu up. On the other hand, of course, it would make the abductor’s escape extremely difficult. For a start, the victim was a star known and loved in living rooms throughout the nation. If she was seized from the living room screens and seen walking about in the street, a patrol car would be onto her right away. Their only hope was to hole up somewhere where no one would see them. Kita had the vague idea of moving on to Niigata. He didn’t have any particular hiding place in mind, but he’d been there two years earlier, so he had a sense of the place. All he needed was not to get caught before Friday. On Friday he’d free Shinobu and let her loose on the media reporters. Then she could stand there live in front of the cameras and spill the beans about how she’d had to keep the wicked doings of the Congressmen a secret to save her own skin. This would then provide a chance for this star on the way out to leave her old identity behind and reinvent herself as the much-lauded heroine who pitted herself against social evils.
“Right, I’ll get our getaway money out of the bank and then we’re off to Niigata.” They left the restaurant, Kita’s arm around her shoulder, and called in at the bank.
“I need to buy some clothes and disguise myself,” Shinobu announced. Kita’s bank balance should by now hold the money he was owed for selling his organs. But when he slipped his cash card into the machine, he was confronted with something unexpected. The machine refused to accept his card. Even if the organ money wasn’t there, he should still have five hundred thousand left in his account.
“How much have you got, Shinobu?”
“About five thousand I think.”
“Any credit card? Any cash card?”
“All I’ve brought is the Bible. I left everything in the car. What’s the problem? Isn’t there any money?”
Kita had the gut feeling that this was the doing of Heita Yashiro. He knew Kita’s bank account number, so he could fix things so the cash card was invalid. He didn’t want Kita getting away, that was it. Yashiro had dealings with those gangster businessmen, and he’d probably already sent someone to finish Kita off. After all, he’d boasted that he could arrange things with an assassin for five hundred thousand yen, hadn’t he?
A professional would consider a mere five hundred thousand an insult. In fact, Yashiro was driving a hard deal.
“You haven’t notched up a real murder yet, so this is all you’re worth. It includes expenses, by the way.”
Yashiro didn’t have a high opinion of the guy. He tossed him an envelope with a down payment of two hundred fifty thousand. The man tucked it away in the pocket of his dark blue suit, and launched into a complaint about the paradoxical ways of the world.
“In this profession, no sooner do you get a name for doing the job than you’re finished.” It wasn’t worth the game, he declared. He’d probably end up spending his retirement quietly awaiting execution. And if he made a hash of things, he’d die on the job.
“You just do it for a bit of extra on the side, though. I wouldn’t normally even bother asking an assassin who’d never killed anyone, you know.”
“Every assassin’s had a first assignment. Every job’s got to start somewhere. But I’ve spent years studying the art, and gaining knowledge and skill.”
“So all you’re lacking is experience, eh? That’s too bad. Oh well, you can have all the pride you want, just so long as you’re cheap.”
There was a few seconds silence while the contract killer simply stood gaping, then he closed his eyes and started to laugh. Yashiro laughed with him, watching him carefully as he did so. Finally the killer sighed and grew quiet. He drew a deep breath through his nose, and declared shrilly, “This money’s way too little, whatever you say. Too little to buy my skills, too little to buy the other guy’s life.”
“Don’t you worry about the other guy. Kita’s life is already paid for. And things are fixed so he pays you your reward as well.”
The killer looked unhappy. “Does this guy want to get himself killed or something?”
“Well he wants to die, let’s put it that way. This Friday, actually. Don’t ask me why.”
“You don’t need a reason to kill yourself,” said the killer. Still, he didn’t quite get it. Why should he have to kill a guy who’d do the job himself? He could throw in the job he’d undertaken and save the fellow, but it wasn’t the task of an assassin to save someone who wanted to kill himself.
“So my client’s going to get me to do something pointless, eh?”
“Just forget about the client, OK?” Yashiro said softly, his voice low and threatening. “It’s not just a matter of killing him. You seem to have a wide repertoire in the field. That’s why I’m employing you. Well in Kita’s case I want an accident, right? He mustn’t be allowed to kill himself, and he mustn’t die in anything crime-related. You got set it up so it’s clearly an accident, get it? And an accident that leaves his corneas and organs intact. Can you do that?”
A smile hovered on the killer’s face as he replied, “If the guy cooperates, I can extract his organs and deliver them, sure, but it’ll cost more.”
“Oh yeah, that reminds me, didn’t you work in a hospital or something? Surgery, wasn’t it?”
“That’s right. I still do.”
“So your regular occupation’s saving lives, and on the side you’re in the business of taking them, eh? I guess it comes down to a way of balancing things out for yourself.”
The killer seemed dazed and remained silent for a moment, then he recovered with a laugh. “It’s all the same in the end,” he said.
Yashiro had been introduced to this killer through a gangster associate he played golf with. Apparently a younger member of the gang hadn’t had the guts to lop off the tip of his little finger for a misdemeanour as the rules required, so he’d gone along to the hospital and asked the surgeon if there was a way he could get the job done with anaesthetic so it wouldn’t hurt. The surgeon was only too happy to oblige, and promptly did the job that day in his lunch hour. He popped the severed piece of finger into a plastic bag in a saline salt solution, and handed it over to the young gangster like a goldfish in a bag, and even gave him a prescription for painkillers. The gangster froze the piece of finger and took it along and proffered to his boss together with his apology, and there he assumed the matter would end. But word got out that he’d actually had a surgeon do the job for him, and he was ordered to go off and do it all over again. Back he went to the surgeon with his bit of finger, and asked to have it put back on again. The surgeon didn’t so much as blink. He set to and performed a swift and meticulous operation, and there was the fingertip, beautifully reunited with its finger.
But the boss ordered the young gangster to sever his finger again while the stitches were still in the wound. When the man turned up at the surgery for the third time to get his finger stub attended to, the surgeon exploded. He demanded to know the name and address of the boss who’d put him to all this trouble for nothing, then he went right round there personally and gave him a piece of his mind.