Hello, boys! I’m BAAAAAAACK!!!
Mystery Seven: Hisao and Kenji VS. The Predator!
Part One: Prey
A year had passed since I, Hisao Nakai, and my best friend, Kenji Setou, had embarked on quite possibly the dumbest bunch of adventures we had ever undertaken, not counting are insane college escapades, most of which I’d prefer to forget anyway. Somehow, we had survived, and managed to make the world a better place through our actions. Now, seeking to leave our work for posterity, Kenji, myself, and my wife Hanako had managed to leave a record of our activities. Said record was in the form of adventure genre fiction, and the first book in the series was due out in a few months. My wife and my best friend are writers, and having them work on it seemed a simple idea. Fortunately, my wife thought it was entirely fiction, and, considering some of the stuff Kenji and I did, I don’t blame her a bit.
I know that sounds incredibly insane, but this is Kenji we’re talking about. Besides wanting his deeds known to the world, he wanted to make sure the wider world was prepared if the Secret Societies we had helped defeat ever came back. Plausible deniability never hurt, either. It did run the risk of earning the ire of the organized criminals that had started to supplant the Societies in the resultant power vacuum, but they were an occupational hazard for Kenji at this point, anyway. My name was kept out of Kenji’s stuff, and things had been quiet enough that I wasn’t too worried about anything happening –silly me. I still made sure I had a Tesla pistol handy when I left the office, though, and I knew Kenji always had his trusty Nambu pistol concealed somewhere on him when he left home.
Book and paranoia aside, I was ready to move on with my life. After being shot at, sliced at, illegally entering several foreign countries, and getting shot at some more, I wanted to live a quiet life with my friends, my job, my wife, and my three kids. Unfortunately, life is rarely kind to those who want a quiet life. Just ask Ciaphas Cain –HERO OF THE IMPERIUM.
Two days a week I spent several hours in the spacious office of Kenji’s private detective agency. Our earlier adventures aside, being a private investigator is actually pretty boring. So most of the time we spent together in the office was used either eating pizza and drinking whiskey, or looking over papers and files for Kenji when he needed an extra pair of eyes. I also drove him around when he needed a ride. Kenji’s office had several cabinets and bookshelves around it, all of them well organized and neat, thanks to Kenji’s fiancé, Miya. The office itself was spacious and well lit, which was a blessing a curse thanks to the atrocious mustard yellow walls. Kenji liked the color, for whatever reason, so I was stuck with it.
This particular day, Kenji was sitting in one of the three brown leather rolling chairs of his office, behind his large, dark wooden desk. He had short black hair, large, round, thick glasses, and a brown suit exactly like the one I wore. A red and gold scarf was wrapped around his neck as he stared at the small portable radio placed on the desk. I was sitting across the desk from him, also gazing at the radio. Besides the radio, a laptop and two cans of soda were the only things on the desk. The office’s vents were spewing cold air, the reason being explained by the radio’s latest weather report:
“And the heat wave scorching most of Japan continues, with record breaking temperatures expected for the next several days, if not the next week. Moving on to the news, another man was found brutally murdered in his apartment last night. The police are unwilling to disclose his name at this time, but the man was found in the bedroom of his very lavish apartment, several body guards killed around him. The man himself was disemboweled, and his skull and spine were not at the scene.”
Kenji grunted and turned off the radio, “that’s the third one this week.”
I nodded, though I doubted my legally blind partner could see, “yeah. Are you sure all the victims were former Yakuza members?”
Kenji nodded, his face firm, “so far, definitely. All of them paid a blood debt to get out, and some of them had very high profile murders on their records before they quit.”
Kenji’s network of informants and contacts was both expansive and frightening. The less I knew about it, the safer my family was.
Speaking of family and organized crime, “at least Jigoro Hakamichi is safe.”
Kenji’s face looked grim as the light glinted off his glasses, “for now, at least.”
As if summoned by his pessimism, the wooden and glass door to the office, closed to keep the cold air in, and locked up like a vault to assuage Kenji’s paranoia, was shoved open so hard it slammed loudly into the wall protector and re-shut itself with a hard thud. The door was opened again more carefully, the business sign and the open sign clattering lightly as the door eased open. Striding in forcefully and quickly, Shizune Hakamichi and her partner, Shiina “Misha” Mikado, marched into the office and stopped in front of me.
My former classmates looked similar to each other, with long hair and expensive skirted suits. Shizune had long black hair in a ponytail and black half-rimmed glasses. Misha had long bubblegum pink hair down her back, and her suit was brown, whereas Shizune’s was black and a bit shorter. The two were posed the same, though, with their hands on their hips and their eyes glaring at us.
Kenji leaned forward over the desk to look at them, his eyes widening when he recognized who it was; even after over a decade, Kenji and Shizune couldn’t stand each other.
“Welcome to Setou and Nakai Private Investigative Services, how can we help you?” I rattled off.
Shizune immediately frowned and started moving her hands, using sign language to communicate with a world designed for people with functioning eardrums. Misha looked at the signing and quickly started translating what she was saying, her perky voice a stark contrast to the obviously irate pair.
“Shicchan demands~ your help with her father! After the help you gave us last time, she knows you are the only ones that can save him this time!”
Kenji groaned angrily and stood up, pointing a finger at Shizune, “Listen here, Miss Hakamichi. You were once my client. That does not give you the right to barge into my office and make demands of me!”
“Please help us! Again~!” Misha pleaded. I’m pretty sure that was her, not Shizune. Judging by the fact that Shizune had grabbed Kenji by the collar and was shaking him, that was probably a safe bet.
“Shizune, calm down!” I snapped –in futility, of course- while Misha worked to pry Shizune off my partner. When she finally broke off her assault, I placed a firm hand on Kenji’s shoulder to calm him. He slowly sat back down, glaring at the former Student Council President through his thick glasses. She, in turn, glared at him over her half-frames. The two were more alike than either would ever admit: stubborn, proud, and assertive; probably why they disliked each other so much.
I stood up and offered my chair to Misha, who quickly sat down after forcing Shizune into the chair next to her. Shizune still looked on the verge of assaulting my partner, but she started signing furiously again instead.
“Shizune knows about her father’s past, and she’s worried that he’s the next target of the latest~ string of murders!” Misha translated.
I sighed- I knew helping the former Yakuza member would come back to bite us. I knew that a year ago, too, but I had hoped the fallout would’ve settled by now.
“And what makes you think that?” Kenji asked. Now that he had been directed to focus on a possible case, he could at least pretend to be professional.
“The murdered men were killed in the order they left the Yakuza,” Misha stated, “and her father is the next on that list.”
Kenji raised an eyebrow, “and you’re sure of this?”
Shizune nodded, “our business contacts are very thorough,” Misha replied.
“I know the feeling,” I muttered, “what would you want us to do? Talk to the police, or his company. They have more hired guns then a Mexican drug cartel.”
“They are most of the hired guns for Mexican drug cartels,” Kenji quipped.
I could tell Misha hadn’t translated that, because Shizune wasn’t throttling Kenji. Misha instead gave me a mildly patronizing look.
“Hicchan, you know we can’t do that~! The police would ask about his past, and his company would just get slaughtered. It doesn’t matter how many men are between this murderer and his target, they all die! The only one’s that don’t are family members and cleaning staff.”
That got my attention. The details of the murders had been pretty vague. It was obvious a psychopathic serial killer was on the loose, but the police were trying very hard to prevent mass panic at the same time they tried to keep the populace informed and cautious. My scientific curiosity was starting to get to me, but I had to keep it quashed, lest I end up parachuting into Thailand again, or something else equally absurd.
“So what do you want us to do?” Kenji asked.
“Find out who is committing these murders and stop them!” Misha shouted, slamming her fist on the desk for emphasis, “violently. Er… Shicchan said she wants their head on a stake, but I don’t think she means that~.”
“Hold on,” I said, “as much as we understand how you feel- and trust me, we do- we can’t get involved in this. The law is very, very clear on what private investigators can and cannot meddle with, and this is definitely something we cannot.”
Like that stopped us before. Still, this was some serious shit going on, and I wanted to avoid it as much as I could. Unfortunately, Shizune stopped signing to stare at me, her large, alluring blue eyes watery as they pleaded to me for help. My oldest daughter had that same damn look when she wanted a cookie before dinner. It didn’t help that Shizune had reconciled with her cousin Lilly and I saw her twice a month for tea, either. Nor the thought that she was quite capable of decapitating me with her family katana should she desire to.
I sighed heavily and looked at Kenji, who frowned, rolled his eyes, and pointed a finger damningly at Misha as he surrendered to the inevitable.
“We want the same fee you gave us when we rescued him two years ago,” he declared.
The two women nodded immediately once that was translated, “done.”
Kenji nodded, “alright, looks like we’re in business.”
“Are you sure about this?” I asked as he pulled out some paperwork from a desk drawer.
Kenji placed the forms and a black pen on the desk, then leaned towards me to whisper, “I have never been less sure about anything in my entire life, but there’s no way in hell I’m letting that murderer get a hold of a former client.”
He never admitted it, but I think his future marriage was making him a bit emotional, and he was actually taking the job because he didn’t want Shizune to go through the pain of losing her father, especially in such a brutal fashion. Considering the fates that had befallen my wife’s parents, I saw the line of thought. Or he was doing it for the enormous payoff; two briefcases full of large denomination notes was a great motivator.
After filling out some paperwork for tax reasons, and getting a rough guestimate on how much time we had before Mr. Hakamichi’s head would be untimely separated from his body -about two days, based on the previous murders- the two women left. As if trying to get the last word, Shizune slammed the door shut behind her with enough force to shake the walls.
“Such a demure young woman,” I quipped.
“Don’t know how you can stand her, man,” Kenji grunted.
I shrugged. She was a good person with a big heart, she just had a big attitude to go with it. At the moment, though, we had more pressing problems then my extended family by association–Hallmark didn’t exactly have a card for “wife’s best friend’s cousin.”
I sat and leaned back in my chair and twirled a bit to face Kenji in his chair, “how do you propose to find this murderer in two days and stop them, when the police haven’t been able to? Not to mention the fact we have no leads, no clues, and no time.”
Kenji sighed, grinned, and shook his head, “man, do you really have such little faith in me? After all we’ve been through?”
Kenji reached for the laptop and turned the screen to face me. I leaned in a bit to read the page eon the monitor. It was an article on a similar series of murders in Los Angeles, California, back in 1975, which also took place during a heat wave.
“Well, as interesting as that is, it doesn’t really help,” I said, “unless you know that cop.”
Kenji shook his head, “no, but I think I know someone who can help.”
He usually did, “who? You’re not going to bug Claudia again, are you?”
“Do you know anyone else we can call when weird shit goes down?” Kenji asked, rubbing his spleen for emphasis, “besides, my spleen hasn’t been this bad since that fiasco with the Freemasons, and on top of that we have a time limit.”
I shrugged and assented, “fair enough. What time is it in South Dakota?”
“We’ll find out,” Kenji said, setting the laptop in front of his chair. He started typing away and angling the small webcam clipped to the side for a few minutes. By the time I had moved my chair over to sit next to him, the tired face of a now familiar, normally perky redhead was looking at us.
“Do you two have any idea what time it is?” she grumbled, reaching for a mug of coffee for emphasis. My knowledge of English had never been great, but over the last year I had been working to improve it. It was a pain in the ass, but at least I could read sci-fi books untranslated now-
War of the Worlds didn’t translate well into Japanese.
“Not really,” I said, earning a tired smile from her once she was done drinking.
“So what do you need this time, more grenades?” she asked.
“Maybe,” I said, and looked at Kenji to start us off- talking to Claudia would take both of our language skills, and Kenji had a knack for language I sometimes envied.
Once we were done explaining, Claudia wasn’t smiling, but she was awake. She was also typing away rapidly on her keyboard while glancing slightly down to where she had moved our window.
“Believe it or not, I know someone who can help,” she stated, her voice coming off as robotic and monotone- she had switched on a translator program for expediency, “he used to be head of a Department of Defense research company. Now he’s Director of research and development at a company that specializes in advanced military weaponry that has technology suitable for civilian applications.”
“I really hope he doesn’t have to put that all on his business card,” I muttered to Kenji.
“Good, he’s online,” Claudia said, “I’m gonna see if he can go to Japan with some of his goodies to help you two.”
I glanced at Kenji; that did not bode well.
“I’m not sure that’s necessary,” I said, “we were just hoping you had some information, and maybe a few more Tesla toys.”
Claudia shook her head, “you need something a helluva lot bigger. And you’ll need some armor, and you’ll need somewhere to hide this guy as bait so you can light an area up without attracting attention,” Claudia blinked, “I can’t help you with that, but you might wanna remember that. Thank God, he said he can help. He’ll be in Japan in… thirteen hours, and he’ll call you when he’s set up.”
“Set up?” I asked. This was getting complicated, but then again, if Claudia was freaked out, we probably should’ve been, too.
“We might not have that kind of time,” Kenji said, “two days is a maximum here; we might have less.”
“Unless he can teleport to us, we don’t have a choice,” I remarked.
Claudia smirked at that, “he would if he could. Alright, he also says he has some information for you.”
“Why is he being so helpful?” Kenji asked, his paranoia likely getting to him.
Claudia smiled, “because I asked him to. And he probably wants to field test whatever gear he’s gonna give you guys to try. Oh, and he’s really looking forward to your book when it’s released in the fall.”
“Well, I guess that makes sense,” I said, “by the way, what’s his name?”
“Doctor Douglas Fargo.”
+++
Next Chapter
I brazenly and unabashedly submit this as evidence that I am working to redirect the series. Whether or not it is sufficient, I leave up to you.
