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  There had always been a veil of secrecy surrounding Daiki Fukai. There was none more curious than Sanko Byobugaura as he crept close to the body, glancing at the blank eyes of the lifeless assassin. It was hard not to be curious about Daiki because he led the charge of the Inato crime family against their enemies in the south. His exploits in Fukuoka brought him and the Inato to infamy. What was supposed to be a truce ended with the massacres of both Fukuoka’s Kamo and Yukie crime families.

  As Sanko looked at Daiki’s cold dead body, he broke out into a sweat knowing the wrath of the Inato family would fall upon him if he didn’t get the killer.

  “Get me the fucking footage of what went on here!” Sanko ordered. He made a call on his DoCoMo cellphone. “I need you at the Night Nurses immediately. We have a murder.”

  “What? Who?”

  “Just get here!”

  ****

  David was five minutes away from his home when he got the call from Sanko. When he heard what was going on, he hit the sirens and headed for the Night Nurses club.

  Thirty minutes later, David walked in and went straight to Sanko whose eyes were still on Daiki’s dead body.

  “What happened?” David asked.

  “Something insidious,” Hayashi Ohba, David’s elder partner, replied shaking his head.

  “You could have fooled me,” said David as he stood over Daiki’s dead body. “Looks like the sick bastard got what he deserved.”

  “What did you say?” responded Sanko.

  “Nothing! I’m just wondering who could have done this.”

  “Me and you both, Hamada,” said Hayashi as he observed the strange marks and ligatures on Daiki’s body. It had been marks he had seen before at a different time and place.

  “It doesn’t matter who did it,” said Sanko as he walked back into the V.I.P. “A war unlike anything you’ve ever seen before is about to break out. The Inato is going to want retribution for this and you can best believe blood’s going to be spilled.”

  When Sanko turned around, Kento Karahawa was standing before him. Kento didn’t say a word, as he walked passed David and Hayashi.

  “Who did this?” asked Kento.

  “We don’t know,” said Chief Sanko. “We need to take a look at the security cameras to find out for sure. I trust, Mr. Karahawa, you’re going to let us do our job on this and not take this into your own hands?”

  “Can I have a moment?” Kento asked.

  Sanko lifted up his hands and ordered for David, Hayashi and the forensics team to clear the room.

  The moment they left, Kento walked towards Daiki and fell down on his knees and began wailing.

  “I promise you, brother. I’ll make them pay for this. I swear on my life.”

  He took out a knife and slit his hand. Then, he cut Daiki’s cold dead hand and gripped it tightly.

  Kento had been more than Daiki’s underboss. Due to their closeness in age, they were practically brothers. Kento couldn’t count the number of times the younger, brasher Daiki had saved his life. Seeing Daiki like this hurt Kento in ways no one could have ever imagined.

  This was the first time in his life he ever cried.

  With his eyes full of tears, Kento took off Daiki’s ring, knowing he would have wanted him to have it. It was the Inato’s supreme Gashira Hosa’s most prized possession; the blood stained diamond pinky ring of Itsama Hatashi, a Yokohama drug kingpin whom Daiki killed when he was nothing more than a common thug. When Daiki was about to kill someone, he would put the ring up to his nostrils and inhale Itsama’s dried blood off the diamonds as a reminder to himself that he could kill kings.

  Kento put on the ring and put it to his nostrils, inhaling the dried blood of the fallen kingpin.

  Inebriated from blood lust, Kento grabbed the AR-15 from the back of the club and walked right out of Night Nurses and headed towards Yokohama.

  Someone had to pay and at this rate, Kento Karahawa didn’t care who paid the price. And he knew just the person that he could make a statement with.

  Weeks earlier, Daiki had gotten into a verbal altercation with Hideyoshi Ioka, one of the Fukushima’s triggermen, over Ioka’s wife Iyaka. Somehow, pictures surfaced of Daiki urinating on Iyaka as she was naked on his bed. When he found out about it, Ioka told Daiki he’d kill him. Daiki responded as he did with every threat: he chucked for a brief second, then took a bullet out his pocket and tossed it at Ioka saying, “Good luck catching the next one!”

  Kento made a call on his DoCoMo phone to Sanko. “I need the whereabouts of piece of shit that threatened Daiki a couple of weeks ago.”

  “How soon?”

  “I need it yesterday,” said Kento.

  “Does Mr. Inato know what you are about to do?”

  “All I need is information, Sanko!”

  Sanko was as dirty as a cop as they came. He was a police chief that played both sides of the field and sold his services and information to the highest bidder. For years, Sanko had been gathering information on all of the underbosses of each crime family just in case someone from one of the families decided they were too powerful. Sanko knew everything, which made him even more dangerous than the yakuza families he worked for. He knew when each boss ate, when they took a shit, who they were fucking, and what school their kids went to.

  Everything!

  “Look I need to make sure that what you’re about to do is not going to come back on me.”

  “You have my word!”

  Kento waited for a few seconds in his car as his driver turned on some music. A thought came over his head the minute the music played: Daiki had left his CD inside the disc changer and it played a rap song that Kento jammed to in one of their rides together.

  Within two minutes, Kento received another call from Sanko.

  “He’s around the Minato Mirai 21, at the movie theatres in Sakuragichō. Listen, if anyone—”

  Kento immediately clicked off his phone and gave his driver instructions as he and his other men who followed in all black identical Maybachs headed toward Yokohama. After Kento was done loading his AR-15, he put the pinky ring up to his nostrils and let his ears relax as within seconds, “War Ready” by Rick Ross blared from the speakers. Kento looked up in the sky, admiring the irony in the moment and smiled, feeling Daiki was with him.

  It was one of Daiki’s favorite songs.

  Suddenly the Maybach’s stopped across the street from the movie theatres in Sakuragichō. Kento had just enough time to take a snort of coke and drink three shots of sake, before Hideyoshi came walking out. At the sight of Hideyoshi Ioka, the tires screeched and peeled off. From a distance, the resonance of incessant gunfire sounded off as if they were drums.

  Before Hideyoshi’s security could get him to cover, Kento and his men fired off 300 rounds between all three guns. Hideyoshi’s men fired back, but the cars were bullet proof.

  When the smoke cleared, Hideyoshi Ioka stood unscathed. He ran over to his pregnant wife Iyaka, whose body was riddled with bullets and tried to console her.

  “Baby, it’s going to be okay! Just hold on.”

  It was too late! By the time the ambulance got to her, Mrs. Ioka was already gone; both her and the baby. Ioka had to stand there as the paramedics tried to resuscitate her to no avail. One of his men came to him as their lieutenant glared at his wife’s dead body.

  “Did you see who it was?”

  Hideyoshi only saw and recognized one face behind the hail of gunfire, as his men dragged him to the ground.

  “Kento!” said Hideyoshi Ioka as he balled up his fist.

  Hideyoshi followed the ambulance all the way to a hospital in Yokohama, bearing inner mixed feelings on what to do and how he was going to do it.

  The peace he had in Yokohama had been disrupted. For years since the peace, there were no gangland yakuza hits and if they were, they were undercover in the dead of night among those involved in the yakuza life.

  That ended upon the death of Iyaka Ioka and the 300 rounds in Yoko
hama’s broad nightlight.

  ****

  Within an hour, Detectives David Hamada and Hayashi Ohba came to the scene of the crime in the Minato Mirai 21 in Yokohama, where a crowd had gathered as police were picking up shells from the barrage of bullets fired on the streets. David couldn’t help but show a disgusted face towards everyone that came across him.

  He could remember going on dates with his wife Myoko in Sakuragichō, taking the giant Ferris wheel that became one of their many symbols of peace and prosperity in the second largest city in Japan and in one of the most prominent prefectures on Honshu: Kanagawa. Yokohama was the last place he ever thought would not only have yakuza in the area, but have one of their disputes turned into a wild shooting gallery attracting attention.

  “The doctors said that the only casualty in all of this is Iyaka Ioka,” Hayashi asked.

  “Hideyoshi Ioka’s wife?” David asked.

  “She was seven months pregnant with his first child, too!”

  “Pregnant?”

  “I know. Terrible! Someone like her dying for…this!”

  David walked away from his partner and went back to the police car. Instead of stopping him, Hayashi just let him continue forward.

  The secret was out. Another yakuza war was rearing its ugly head once again...

  ****

  Kento Karahawa waited for a few days before the smoke cleared. However, when he went back home and turned to the news, Japanese reporters were already spreading the news of the gangland hit. Worse, it even showed his face, the last thing he wanted people to see.

  Taking a snort of cocaine, he blocked it out of his mind to wonder if he made the right move. Or even better, did Hideyoshi Ioka have anything to do with Daiki’s death at all?

  Staying out of sight was going to be hard. Brazen as ever, he went out and back to Shinjuku the next night to the scene of the crime: the Night Nurses club. Daiki’s body was cleared out and thanks to some negotiation between him and the cops, he was able to keep the club open for a little while to sustain some livelihood, but only the bar area. Upon entering the doors, no one bothered him, knowing his ruthless reputation.

  Kento went straight for the bartender and grabbed his shirt collar. “Bring all the footage you have of the night Daiki Fukai was killed.”

  “They’re…they’re in the back.”

  “You have somewhere I can look at it in private?”

  The bartender nodded.

  “Make sure no one disturbs me until I’m done, understand?”

  The bartender, his look one of fear, nodded. Kento, along with a couple of hitters, proceeded to the back of the club. The bartender did what he was told and gave him DVDs from that night. Kento rushed out of the shack, his bodyguards in tow and put the two DVDs inside the DVD drives of two small televisions and pushed the play buttons.

  For those few minutes, Kento’s fiery eyes were glued to the screen as he watched everyone who entered the club and those who worked there. He observed the strippers, patrons, the bartender and the DJ changing music tracks. So far, it was a usual night at Night Nurses.

  Then, his eyes caught sight of one familiar face as he entered the club. A face Kento knew too well.

  “David Hamada?” he whispered.

  “That’s the cop that was here earlier,” said Ryu Korashi, one of Kento’s bodyguards, standing behind him.

  Kento remembered Hamada from a case Daiki was arrested for involving the rape and murder of a young girl; a case solved with misplaced evidence and a flawed judicial trial. What he remembered the most about that day was Daiki whispering in David’s ear. He didn’t know what was said, but he could see David was furious with Daiki’s words.

  He continued watching and saw one of the strippers taking him to the V.I.P Room.

  Kento turned to the other television to find Daiki Fukai entering the club with three men, obviously drunk and hyped. One of the men pointed at the V.I.P., making Kento turn to see the stripper talking and kissing David. From there, Daiki grabbed a stripper and took her to the V.I.P room, and settled near David and his stripper of choice.

  Then, he could see David take out a gun and point it right at Daiki’s head. Kento watched with rage as David left and then Neige stood up and casually followed.

  Kento paused the video quickly and pointed to the stripper dancing with David.

  “Who is she?” Kento asked.

  “That’s Neige,” said Ichiro Sato, another Inato hitman.

  “Is she working tonight?”

  Ichiro shook his head. “Nah, she’s off tonight.”

  “How convenient!” said Kento. “Go find the bitch and see what she knows.”

  “And if she doesn’t know anything?”

  “Just intimidate her so she continues to understand,” responded Kento.

  Ichiro nodded with a devilish smirk, knowing that Kento had given him permission to use whatever means he needed to extract information from Neige. This suited Ichiro fine since he wanted to fuck Neige ever since he laid eyes on her.

  Once Ichiro left the room, Kento pressed play and resumed the video watching every minute of Daiki’s final moments. Then, he saw her.

  “Who the fuck is that?” Kento asked as he rewound the video and looked at Chion.

  Chion looked at Kento and shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know, sir! I’ve never seen her before.”

  “Does she work here?”

  Chion shrugged his shoulders again. “I don’t know.”

  Kento grabbed Chion by the back of his neck and slammed his head down on the desk. “Then what the fuck do you know?”

  Kento took out his gun and put it to the back of Chion’s head. Then, Kento viewed the television and saw the unknown woman on top of Daiki and her eyes had rolled back smiling as if she knew someone would be watching. It was obvious none of them had ever seen Illicit before.

  “Find that bitch and bring her to me,” Kento ordered. “Do you understand?”

  Chion nodded.

  “What do you want us to do about Hamada?” Ryu asked.

  “I’ll handle him personally,” Kento responded.

  Necessary Evil (必要悪)

  “Who is it?” yelled Neige as she walked to the door in her T-shirt and panties.

  “Ichiro!”

  Without thinking, Neige opened the door and let Ichiro Sato inside her apartment.

  “Ichiro, what’s going on?”

  Ichiro looked around in his usual way whenever he was in another person’s home. He observed every object near and around her. He was slightly distracted due to Neige’s figure and the fact she had on barely any clothes.

  “We saw the video from the V.I.P.,” said Ichiro. “You want to tell me what the fuck you were doing there with that cop?”

  Neige froze as she walked toward her kitchen. “Ichiro, I can explain.”

  “I’m listening!”

  Neige stood still, knowing Ichiro wasn’t one to mess with. “I didn’t know he was a cop. I just thought he was one of the regulars at the club.”

  “What the fuck do you take me for? I saw how you were kissing and dry-humping the guy. Do you hump on all the regulars like that?”

  Fear filled Neige’s eyes as she looked at Ichiro. “I swear I don’t know anything.”

  Ichiro’s eyes sized up Neige’s legs and the curves leading up her thighs as she stood before him.

  “You know since the first time I saw you, I wanted to fuck you.” Ichiro said as he closed in on her. When he was close enough he lifted her shirt. “I would sit there and watch you dance and then would go to the bathroom and jerk off, imagining I was fucking you.”

  “Ichiro, please, don’t hurt me, I’ll do whatever you want,” she said as she stroked the side of Ichiro’s face and began to kiss his chest.

  She slowly ran her hands down to his crouch and began groping him. As she ripped opened his shirt and began kissing on his abdomen, he stood there watching his fantasy become a reality. She quickly undid his pants and grabbed
his penis.

  There was no hesitation on her part as she let her natural instincts take over. He tried as best to stand as she put his penis in her mouth and began sucking and deep-throated him.