Authors: John Donohue
“Guy like this is gonna be able to put a hit on you whether
he’s in jail or out,” Micky said.
“Which means?”
“You know what it means,” my brother said quietly. He
spoke slowly, tapping the scarred planks of the table for empha-
sis. “Bait gets set. Big man arrives. You take him out.”
I had known where they were going, of course. But part of
me hoped that they had an alternative. This was crossing a line
for al of us. I wanted to find another solution. We al did. But
life is what you get, not what you wish for.
I sighed. “So we go down there?”
“Wel , technical y, no… you go down there,” Art said with a
half smile. “The two of us are stil under something of a cloud.”
“They’re not gonna let us anywhere near the border anytime
soon,” Micky explained.
“You’re going to send me alone?”
“Who better?” Art shrugged. “You’re already up to your eye-
bal s in this thing.”
I stared at Micky. “You two just finished tel ing me I was in
over my head!”
He smiled tightly. “Yeah. But at least now you know it.
Besides, we can pul some strings and get you some backup.”
Art took a letter-size manila envelope out of his jacket and
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slid it over to me. “Four thousand in cash. It’s al we could come
up with. Plus a plane ticket to Tucson.”
“You got a few good days,” Micky instructed. “You get down
there and find who’s after you…”
“How’m I gonna do that?” I protested.
“We know a guy out there. Former INS inspector named
Steve Daley. He owes me. He’l meet you at the plane.”
“Keep a low profile, Connor,” Art said. “Stay off the grid.
No credit cards, nothing that wil leave a trace.”He looked at his
watch. “Clock’s ticking. TM-7 wil be back. They’l be looking
for you, so you gotta move quick.”
They let me think about it. I heard the faint tinkle of ice
in a glass, the murmur of distant conversation near the bar. I
thought of Sarah and the things I could lose if I went. Then I
thought of what I might lose if I didn’t.
“OK,” I sighed.
They nodded, but neither man seemed particularly happy.
“Listen up,” Art said quietly. “There’s no tel ing who’s watch-
ing you or watching us at this point in time. We’re gonna walk
out of here and drive away. There’s an overnight bag for you up
front with the cashier. Don’t go back to Yamashita’s. Take the
bag and use the subway to get to JFK. Get on a plane to Tucson.
Get this done…”
“One more thing,” my brother interjected. He handed me a
black cel phone. “Take this.”
“I have a phone, Mick.”
“I’ve seen your phone. It’s a piece of shit. Take this, Keep it
charged up and on at al times. If I find out anything, if I can
do anything, I wil .” But his voice was terse and devoid of any
comfort. I’m not even sure that he believed what he was saying.
I took the phone and sat there while he and his partner
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stumped away, grim, unhappy, and vaguely guilty.
“This is what happens,” Yamashita told me with deep dis-
pleasure. I had gone back to see him before leaving, of course.
There’s something deep in the Burke DNA that makes us con-
genital y incapable of obeying orders.
We were seated on the floor in the
dojo.
It was dim and silent,
a vast clean expanse of space. I could hear my heart thudding as
I tried to explain.
“I don’t know any other way out of this,” I told him.
His eyes were hol ow slits in a rigid mask. My
sensei
doesn’t
leak much energy, but when he does, you can feel it. It washed
over me, a tide of anger and disapproval. I had spent more than
a decade with this man, accepting his guidance, working for his
respect. Now I felt as if every move I made was both inevitable
and unacceptable to him.
I bowed slightly. “
Moushiwake arimasen
.” It’s the most for-
mal way to say that you’re sorry to a superior. But Yamashita
wasn’t buying it; he didn’t even blink in acknowledgement.
“Contrition is beside the point,” he said tightly. “Do you
know what you are doing?”
“I do,” I began.
“
Bakka
!” he cut me off. Idiot. “You have no idea!” His
rebuke stung: I rocked back on my heels. I opened my mouth
to continue, but he made a chopping motion with his hand to
silence me.
“This is their world, Burke, not ours. It is without rules. It…
compromises your honor.”
“I didn’t mean for any of this to happen, Sensei.”
He looked to one side as if seeking patience in another loca-
tion. “Please. You are like a child. What you meant to do and
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Kage
what has been done are two different things. It was why I warned
you against getting too involved.”
I swal owed. I thought of Sarah and her dreams. I knew that
something had to be done, even if Yamashita objected.
“But I am involved” I told him.
Yamashita sighed. “You are. As are others. And now, you will
place yourself in danger…”
“It’s what you have trained me to do.” It was an almost
involuntary comment, but I flinched; the relationship between
a teacher and pupil in the martial arts isn’t one that encourages
a free exchange of opinion.
Yamashita’s nostrils flared. “I have spent years training you.
And now—to run the risk of throwing it al away…” His voice
trailed off and we both sat in silence, stunned at the rare admis-
sion of concern.
We both knew about the danger I faced. The warriors of old
Japan knew that every confrontation was more than likely to
end in disaster. The dispiriting rule of the
samurai
: a superior
opponent wil certainly kil you; an equal y matched opponent
wil probably kil you even if you manage to kil him as wel ;
only someone vastly inferior in skil wil permit you to emerge
unscathed.
“It’s something I have to do,” I said quietly.
Yamashita fidgeted slightly. “I know,” he answered, his tone
bitter. “But these are thugs… they are animals…”
“I have to stop them,” I added. “For Sarah.”
My teacher squinted at me. “There is
on
here, Burke, I know.
On,
the tug of human relationships. “But what of
giri
, your
duty to the
dojo
?” He licked his lips as if the next question took
some effort. “What of your duty to me?”
And I saw him with new eyes: an old battered man, sitting
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there in the dimness, wondering what the future was for his
school and his pupils. His anger was for the possibility of a leg-
acy squandered as much as it was generated by concern for me.
“Sensei,” I began, “you know what you mean to me…”
“And yet there is this rebel ious streak,” he said coldly. “The
dojo
is your world, Burke. Not this other place…”
“How can you say that? You worked for the
Kunaicho
!”
In years past, Yamashita had been deeply involved with the
more clandestine activities of the Japanese Imperial Household
Agency. The details were fuzzy and he didn’t like to talk about
it much.
His bul et head nodded slightly and he sipped at the air.
“Yes. And at the time, I thought I was doing what was right…
but it brought only pain. You know some of this, Burke.”
Yamashita was gazing at the floor, avoiding eye contact or
perhaps lost in painful memories from his past.
“And yet you did it,” I prompted gently. “Because you
thought it was the right thing.”
“It brought only pain,” he repeated, as if to himself.
“Sensei…”
Yamashita waived me to silence. “Go. You wil do what you
wil do.” He rose to his feet and, since we were alone, he did not
mask the pain involved in the movement. “I had hoped…” he
said, but paused as if something was caught in his throat. “I had
hoped that as a teacher I could save my pupil from the same
mistakes I had made—that I would find someone wise enough
to heed me.” He looked up and his voice was old and raspy. “It
was not to be.”
Before he turned away, I saw his eyes: glittering with regret
and dismissal.
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18
Into the West
The junkie’s skin was brown from the sun, but looked as if
it had a faint covering of ash on it. His eyes were red-rimmed
and furtive. There was a restless animal prowling inside his
head, simultaneously wary, distracted, and frightened.
I watched Steve Daley work him. It wasn’t the questions he
asked so much as the way they were delivered that made him
effective: words that emerged like random gunshots from unex-
pected quarters, elliptical, phrased differently each time. His
voice disoriented his victim and its tone demanded a response.
Daley lightly pinched the back of the junkie’s stringy neck
between the thumb and fingers of his hand as they talked. The
touch transferred an oscillating current: alternately avuncular
and menacing, a soothing touch or the prelude to a shake that
could rattle what was left of the junkie’s brains around his skull
like a stone in a gourd.
This was the last in a succession of informants he’d inter-
rogated. It was always the same. And it wasn’t pretty to watch;
this type of interrogation is about breaking people down. There
wasn’t much left of a junkie like this one; the questioning felt
needlessly cruel, one of a final series of humiliations that would
dot the dizzy downward spiral of his life. Daley was oblivious
to this, or perhaps he was just jaded. He ground at this lat-
est junkie informant mercilessly, testing and probing for lies or
inconsistencies, flaws in the answers. In the end, Daley wrung
the junkie out. You would have thought that there was nothing
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left in that jumble of ashy skin and nerve but a consciousness
that winked on and off like some distant, failing light, powered
only by the need for its next fix.
“They all know things,” Daley confided to me. We were
back in his car, letting the air conditioner wash the heat away
from our bodies. He was tall and lanky, with long graying
hair pushed behind his ears and a goatee that, along with the
Hawaiian shirt and cowboy boots, completed an odd image:
Jimmy Buffet channeling Buffalo Bill Cody. “But they all lie.”
“So what’s the point?”
“You see what they lie about—then you start comparing
stories. And then you start drilling.” Daley slipped his sun-
glasses on and pulled the car out into traffic. His hands were
freckled and the muscles on his forearms were long and ropy.
Daley had been baked by the desert into a taut machine; most
of the softness in him had been desiccated and worn until it
had simply blown away. What was left was wiry and functional
and supremely competent: sinew, bone, and the bright eye of
a predator.
He had met me at the airport, standing at the end of the
chute where arriving passengers were funneled like cattle away
from the gate area. At the screening complex, the serious peo-
ple from the TSA were warily searching carry-on luggage, alive
to the possibility of exploding toothpaste tubes. Daley stood
slightly apart from the other drivers, men in dark suits who
held small whiteboards with the names of their fares written on
them. Daley slouched in isolation and held up a ragged piece of
cardboard with the single word “Burke” scrawled on it in bad
handwriting. As I got closer, I noticed that he had used the top
from a discarded pizza box.
I stopped in front of him. “I’m Burke.”
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Kage
Daley had obviously spoken to my brother: he knew what
I was up to and regarded me with weary skepticism He didn’t
say hello and didn’t offer to shake hands, just jerked his head
to indicate the direction we needed to go. He spoke quietly as
we moved. “I can provide you with some support and informa-
tion, Burke. I owe your brother that much. I can help you set
this thing up, but it may take some time. And it may get dicey.
I can’t guarantee how it’s going to work out.”
“I got it,” I said.
Daley looked at me with those washed out eyes. “You’re
trouble, man. I can sense that. Know this: things start to fall
apart, I’m out of there. End of the day, it’s your problem, not
mine. We clear?”
I nodded.
Great help, Mick.
“I need to see about setting up
some contacts. The Westmann Resort…”
He cut me off. “Forget it. Your man Xochi has gone to
ground.”
“Whaddaya mean?” My basic plan was to get to Xochi and
tell him that I was willing to trade the Westmann manuscript
to whoever was trying to have me killed if they would just stop.
You’d think that the long flight would have provided me with
enough time to develop a plan of more elegance, or at least a
part two.
I stopped in consternation, however, wondering what my