April 27 Kimihiko Kimizuka
That day, as usual, I'd gotten dragged into a car chase. "Whoa…!"
It might have been "the usual" for me, but no matter how used to something your brain is, it doesn't necessarily mean your body can keep up.
It was a scene straight out of an action movie: The sports car's windshield was already smashed, and I was clinging to the grab handle as the car whipped around, jostling me back and forth in the passenger seat.
"Ha-ha! Other cars are stopping to watch. Am I in the zone or what?"
Even in this situation, there was one guy who refused to remember where we were. He was next to me, behind the steering wheel, laughing as we pulled ahead of our pursuers.
"They're stunned because we're driving the wrong way!"
He was ignoring traffic lights and violating the speed limit. We hadn't hit any actual people, but our car was flying down a major street; the only phrase for what we were doing was "reckless endangerment."
"The wrong way? In the country I'm from, cars drive on the right." "This is Japan! Would you get that through your head alr—"
Just then, our car whipped around a hundred and eighty degrees. "—! I almost bit my tongue!"
"Ha-ha! You did, huh?! You should grab yourself a spare for next time."
"And you should quit running your mouth off, Danny!" I shot a resentful look at the man in the driver's seat.
The man's name was Danny Bryant.
He was my guarantor, the one who'd showed up abruptly one day a few years back and claimed to be my relative.
He'd pulled me out of the children's home and brought me to his apartment, but he took off on his own all the time. He was an enigmatic wanderer who'd come back once or twice a month with all these weird souvenirs. The only things I knew about him were that he was originally from America, and that he was around forty.
According to Danny, he was a "jack of all trades." He'd take on any job, from finding a neighbor's lost cat to a cold murder case the police had given up on. I didn't know how much of this was true, but he said his policy was to dash over to anywhere that wanted him and do whatever they needed. As a result, he had places all over Japan—or actually, all over the world—and he had me live at one of them.
I had no idea why Danny had approached me, but I'd used him to get by, earning a living by helping out with the jobs he brought in from time to time.
I did have one big gripe about him, though. In summer, he'd take me to a deserted island and give a flowery spiel about the secrets of survival, and in winter, we'd climb a snow-covered mountain and he'd drum into me the powerlessness of humans. Every time he did this stuff, he'd talk about his personal philosophy, but frankly, it never made much of an impression on me. Danny Bryant was a sketchy guy with a penchant for carelessness.
"Damn, they sure are stubborn." Glancing at our pursuers in the rearview mirror, Danny pulled out a lighter and lit a cigarette. "They were sitting on a fortune. All we did was help ourselves to a little of it, and the whole office is chasing after us." Danny sighed. "Are they bored, or do they just really like money?"
"That's not a line thieves should be saying."
"Ha-ha! I was hired to redistribute wealth, that's all."
All these shiny black cars were chasing us because Danny had stolen money from them. …Not that he'd done it for personal gain. These guys were loan sharks, and some of their victims had hired Danny to steal back the money they'd been scammed out of. If you were to put a positive spin on it, you could have called him a modern-day Robin Hood, I guess. But…
"Wasn't there a slightly smoother way to take the money back? Like quietly cracking their safe, maybe?"
Our actual approach had been to have me visit the loan sharks' office,
pretending to be a client. As the sharks were taking the money out of the safe, Danny had thrown up a smoke screen, charged in, and robbed them.
"The safe was opened. That's good enough, isn't it? What matters is what actually happened and the outcome," Danny said, laughing it off. "Most of the time, the key to resolving problems isn't something you've personally got."
"You leave all the important stuff to somebody else, huh." "Ha-ha. I just believe in people, that's all."
…There he goes again, wrapping things up in random ways.
And the "outcome" had been this hour-long car chase. Danny was always getting on somebody's bad side and chased like this, while I usually got dragged into the mess.
"If somebody's chasing you, it means you're somebody worth chasing." Danny grinned proudly for no apparent reason, stroking his beard with his fingers.
"Nope. Your sayings are shallower than a mud puddle."
"Ha-ha! Well, they're just words. If there was a saying with the fathomless depths of a swamp, letting it tie you down would be a whole lot dumber. Don't trust what people say," he said bluntly.
As always, the guy had a pat response for everything.
"You really never smile, kid," Danny griped, still looking ahead with his hands on the wheel. "Have you ever grinned for real, even once?"
"Leave me alone. This is just how I look."
"Ha! You're sure you're not just imagining that?" Cutting the wheel, he veered off the broad avenue onto a side street. "Nobody knows what their genuine self is like. The real you might actually be a friendly, smiley kid."
Who knows? The dark humor in my favorite gangster movie leaves me in stitches every time I see it, but that's about it.
"As long as you're yanking me around and dragging me into trouble, you're only ever going to see smiles of pain."
"Ha-ha. For an apprentice, you sure aren't cute!" "Who's your apprentice, and when did that happen?" "Hm? Oh, right. Are you my son, then?"
"That's even less likely. Are you telling me my name's actually Kimihiko Bryant Kimizuka?"
I was born with black hair and Japanese features, and I looked nothing like this sketchy guy. Why had he even said he was a relative?
"True, we're not related by blood, but I'm your father figure. …Uh, actually,
maybe 'teacher' sounds cooler." Danny smiled cheerfully.
Okay, the happy-go-lucky thing is great, but are we going to be able to lose those guys?
"Don't worry. You've got me on your team now." He grinned, trying to reassure me.
Should I tell him That's why I'm worried: because you're here?
"Listen up, kid." Without waiting for my retort, Danny spoke calmly, one hand on the wheel. "You're bound to run into all sorts of enemies in life: gangsters and spies, sickening criminals, and great evils you can't even begin to imagine."
"Enemies? What kind of life am I going to have?"
"Hey, you're young, and it's already like this. Action movies are only the beginning."
Yeah, that doesn't bode well. I gave my usual forced smile.
Getting pulled into an incident like this one right before my birthday seemed pretty unnecessary.
"Still, don't worry," Danny repeated. "You'll get dragged into all manner of trouble, run into all kinds of enemies, and come up against all sorts of danger, but whenever it happens, someone's guaranteed to show up and go through it with you. That's what's been decided."
After that, we managed to get ourselves out of that problem. Now our car was parked beside a certain house.
"So this is the client's place…?" I looked at the house through the passenger- side window. It seemed old.
Part of the money Danny had retrieved from the loan sharks had been paid in by the family that lived here. They'd lost three million yen to illegal interest. The cash we'd stolen from the moneylenders' office was in an attaché case in the back seat.
Of course, no matter how you tried to whitewash it, this money game was a crime. If we got caught, we were finished. At the very least, we couldn't let anybody find out about the connection between Danny and the client. Danny always said he was the only one whose job description included getting caught by the yakuza and the cops. …Although, according to him, neither had ever caught him yet.
"I wish you'd quit using me as a body double," I grumbled quietly.
Enemies who'd been after Danny had gone after me when I was alone several
times before. Worried that this might end up being one of those occasions, I looked at the driver's seat.
—However.
"Shh." Danny looked more serious than I'd ever seen him.
When I hastily strained my ears, I heard something in the distance. It was coming from that house. A woman's shrill, angry voice, and the sound of dishes shattering. Then a child crying.
"Domestic trouble, huh?"
I understood right away. This sort of thing happened when families were poverty stricken. The facility where I'd lived had taken in kids from homes like that pretty frequently.
"It's daytime, but they've shut those thick curtains. There must be something in there that they don't want people seeing." Next to me, Danny analyzed the family's situation. "They haven't been taking care of their yard, either. That's proof they don't have that kind of time or emotional energy. When the parents are in that state, guess who they take it out on."
He didn't have to say more than that.
I started to ask him what we were going to do, but then I broke off.
Next to me, his profile was suffused with anger. "Kids can't choose their parents." Danny was glaring at something, or someone, that wasn't there. "Parents are all kids have. And yet…" He tightened his grip on the steering wheel.
Those words sounded simple, but when I really thought about them, they were true. Parents were active members of society, so they had a world outside their home and connections to other people. Children only had their parents. All they could do as they grew up was follow behind and watch. All kids… All we could count on were our parents.
"And yet I—" Danny was gazing into the distance. Every so often, every once in a while, he would do that. I'd never asked him why.
"What should we do? Should we call the police?"
Right now, there was nothing for it but to do what we had to do.
I took out my phone. Would this go faster if I called my usual police station? "No, a visit from the cops would just be a temporary fix. What actually solves
problems is always this."
Danny seemed to have calmed down a little, or maybe he'd given up. Rubbing his fingers together in the gesture for "money," he gave a world-weary smile.
And then… "What do you think? Do I look like a lawyer?" Stroking his whiskers, Danny checked his reflection in the rearview mirror. Apparently, he was planning to pass himself off as one when he gave them the money.
"If you're trying to look like the manager of a law office that's always in the red, I think you can probably skate by." If he wanted to look like a decent lawyer, he'd need to shine his shoes and buy a new suit, to start with.
"Is it really okay to give them this money, though? What if the loan sharks track us here?"
These people were already having trouble at home. What would happen to them then? I had a bad feeling, and I didn't think it was just paranoia.
"No need to worry about that. I'll have a guard here for a while." Danny pointed at a young man in a dark suit who was just walking past the house. "Passerby A, who walks in front of this house every hour. That's their job, this time around."
Giving me an explanation that didn't make much sense, Danny grabbed the attaché case from the back seat. "Besides, clearing up the trouble that's right under our noses comes first." He reached for the door handle. "Kids have a future, and their lives take priority every time." Turning halfway back, he gave me a smile. It looked as if he wanted to say something.
"What about me, then?"
I'm a kid, and the loan sharks might hunt me down because of this, you know?
"Ha-ha! Call it proof that I trust you. You won't die that easy." With that optimistic declaration, Danny headed to work.
Yeah. Thanks to that, he always lets me do whatever I want.