Chapter Thirteen: 

Robert stared at the girl with wild eyes. 

It had happened. It was done. 

He had done it. 

He thought he was about to have a heart attack. 

His wrist ached from the shock of hitting the man… Bills… From hitting Bills over the head with his two-hundred dollar bottle of Old Rip Van Winkle. 

He was just glad that the bottle hadn’t broken. 

A detached part of him wanted another drink, while the smarter part of him knew there would have been no way to hide the noise if it had smashed. 

Robert let out a shaky breath and closed his eyes for a second. Then he looked from the girl to the man on the floor and felt some surprised, albeit momentary, relief that the blow had actually managed to knock the guy out. His mind was a mess of competing sounds. Different ideas screamed for his attention but the one that won out was that they needed to run. 

Quinn looked like she was on the verge of fainting but when he pulled her towards the door she followed meekly enough. Her eyes were trained on the unconscious man sprawled out on the kitchen floor – lingering like the rope that tied a boat to a pier. Upstairs, Hammett called out angrily, and Robert could hear him stomping his way through the other rooms overhead. He was remarkably glad that the apartment was so unnecessarily large. 

Then they were out the front door. Robert scanned the lift foyer for something to block the entrance like a hero would have done in a movie but there was nothing there. He pressed the button for the elevator and held his breath – his eyes locked on the door to his apartment. 

How long would it take Hammett to chase them out of the room? 

His mind raced – spinning around and around as he tried will a solution into existence. Robert turned and knocked on his neighbour’s door, but no one answered. Both of the lifts must have been on the bottom floor, slowly making their way up to them – dumb and mechanical, and completely unable to understand the urgency in the way he had pushed the call button. 

Quinn was leaning heavily against the wall and she had a hand pressed up against her forehead. She was white in the face and her eyes wouldn’t meet his. She looked like she was going to be sick. Robert searched her face, afraid of what he might find. 

Did she know? Did she understand what he had done?

With a kind of serendipity the door to the lift sounded at the same moment that Robert’s neighbour, Mrs. Hotori, opened her door. Without any real thought he rushed into the elevator and pressed the button for the ground floor before grabbing the girl and dragging her into Hotori’s apartment. He apologised profusely but quietly as he pushed the older woman out of the way and closed her door as gently as he could manage. He pinned the woman with his eyes, pressing a finger to his lips, and waited for her expression to register what he meant. One glance at Quinn was enough to give him inspiration.

“Mrs. Hotori, my friend is unwell… Could she please use your bathroom?”

He remained by the door as the little Japanese woman – the picture of pride and hospitality – gave a little nod and escorted Quinn to the bathroom from where he could hear her begin to throw up. Robert turned and peered through the peephole into the hallway. Hammett burst from his apartment, one fist bunched around a thick black pistol, the other clutching a phone. The balding man stared as the roof of the lift retreated out of his sight before swearing loudly and mashing the call button repeatedly. He was a big guy, taller than Robert, younger as well, and considerably more muscular. He wore a pair of faded denim jeans and a black polo shirt and the walk from Shibuya had left obvious sweat marks beneath his arms. His feet were clad in what looked like steel-capped boots and they made resounding thumps on the carpet as he thumbed a number on his telephone and began to pace. 

“Hey, the guy fucking bludgeoned Bills. He’s out cold – What? No. I couldn’t find her… Ye– Yeah, I get it, I get it. I know the camera put her in the building– I’m telling you, she wasn’t there! Bills, fuck. N– No, he’s out– Hit him with a fucking bottle and ran. I’m waiting for the lif– Yeah, he’s in the lift… If she’s here she must be…” The man paused for a second before turning and looking pointedly at Mrs. Hotori’s door. “Maybe…” He strode towards the door menacingly and Robert quickly pulled his eye from the peephole as the other man tried to look through. 

Hammett knocked on the door and Robert ground his teeth together hoping that Mrs. Hotori would not call out that she was on her way. The woman rounded the corner into the hall and Robert raised both his hands in a motion that told her to stop. He then shook his head with emphasis and put a finger to his lips once again, begging the woman for silence. She stared at him blankly for several seconds and then, as though reaching some resolute decision, she bowed slightly before returning to Quinn who was still retching in the bathroom. Robert heard Hammett’s receding voice exclaim that the elevator had arrived and that he’d pick them up on the street without much trouble. 

He waited a few more seconds – long seconds that felt weighty and important in his efforts to somehow redeem himself – before looking through the peephole again.

The door slammed into his forehead, knocking him onto the floor and sending rivets of pain through his nose. He kicked his feet into the hard wood as the big man tried to enter the apartment jamming Hammett’s head and left shoulder between the door and the frame. The man let out a yelp of pain and dropped the gun on the floor but he quickly recovered enough to use his body to leverage the door wider.

Mrs. Hotori’s voice filled the hall with Japanese expletives that rained on the two men as they struggled on either side of her doorway. Robert clutched his face with one hand and braced the other against the wall, kicking the door repeatedly until Hammett retreated back into the hallway. In the adrenaline rush of the moment he hooked the gun under the heel of his foot and dragged it away from the entrance. 

The hand on his face was slick and warm. 

Mrs. Hotori was yelling at him but her Japanese was so fast that he couldn’t follow it while trying to think of a way to stop Hammett. 

As Robert scrambled into a crouch, Hammett ploughed through the door shoulder first and crashed into him, falling hard onto the floor at Mrs. Hotori’s feet. The two men struggled to right themselves in a flurry of flailing arms and legs with Hammett eventually kicking Robert in the head and clambering to his feet. In a daze Robert watched the other man – Takami’s man, the enemy – shove Mrs. Hotori out of his way as he hobbled down the hall towards a distraught, fragile – dying – Quinn. 

Robert’s face felt like liquid under his hands and he gave up on it with a frustrated movement that left a handprint on the wall and brought him to his feet. He swayed as the floor moved beneath him, then he picked up the gun and stumbled after the other man, his head a dense fog populated with one thought: get to Quinn. 

He was dripping but he couldn’t worry about that. 

His hand stuck to the wall beside him with each step, but it was unimportant.

“So, here you are! Stop crying and get up. You’re coming with me.” Hammett’s voice seemed like it was a long way off – a hidden danger that lurked somewhere out of Robert’s distorted field of vision. Quinn screamed hysterically and called for Robert but there was a loud clap and her voice disappeared in the aftershock as the man told her, in no uncertain terms, that the artist was as good as dead.

Robert found the two of them in the bathroom. Quinn was on the floor with her knees folded under her like a foal not quite ready to walk. Hammett stood over her like some immense statue, his back facing the entryway, his hands balled into fists, his attention focused down on the quivering girl. Forgetting the gun, Robert launched himself at the huge figure, throwing his weight at the man’s lower spine and pitching them both into the bathtub with a sickening crack of bones against porcelain. He struggled to free himself from the tangle and dropped the gun in the process, but Hammett didn’t try to stop him. 

Hammett groaned once before falling silent. 

The man’s neck was on an angle that made Robert intensely uncomfortable. 

The artist checked the thug’s pulse and knelt beside the tub to catch his breath. There was a heartbeat. He was alive. Robert was panting and he could feel the throb of blood in his veins. When he looked down he could watch as each pump of his tired heart pushed a fresh glob of blood from his nose into the gathering pool on the tiled floor. He stared for a few seconds, his awareness flatlining while he tried to organise his thoughts into some kind of coherency. Quinn’s hands were shaking when he finally lifted his head to look at her and he could see a large red mark beginning to surface across her right cheek-bone. 

“Are you alright?” he said in a nasal wheeze. He still felt like he was about to be sick and each time he looked at Hammett he felt less certain about the man’s long-term prognosis. 

The girl looked at him through petrified eyes that grew wider as they seemed to register the facets of his face in a series of darting movements. He felt a thick droplet build on his chin and fall to the floor in an eruption of scarlet. Robert became acutely aware of the iron-taste of blood in his mouth – a harsh flavour that made him think about some indistinct memory of his youth. 

Quinn grabbed the roll of toilet-paper and tore off a handful of sheets to wipe the excess muck from his face. She then jammed a wad under his aching nose. 

“There’s no time, Quinn… We have to go.” It felt like he was sending the messages from his brain via Antarctica to his body.

“Did you have Misaki taken? Is that why the Yakuza want you?” Her eyes bore into him.

“What?” His face hurt with the automatic movement that accompanied his expression of horror.

“Did you ask those men to take me? For money?” She looked frail and broken – the skeleton of a fossilised leaf.

“God, no! Quinn! No. I– They took Misaki because I–” He felt like there was an immense clock ticking somewhere and that he absolutely had to get her moving. “They came to me for you… I wasn’t going to do it, Quinn! But they took Misaki and… They’ve still got her… Look, we have to move! I need to get you away from here before more of them show up.” He extended his hand to her but she hesitated, her eyes still searching his face for sincerity. “Please, Quinn.”

Her long thin fingers slid into his palm – a tentative gesture, and he noticed that two of her nails had been chipped. He scrambled upwards before pulling her to her feet through the pain of his jarred wrist. He swayed a little on his feet and gripped the nearby sink for balance, covering his vertical uncertainty by using the moment to quickly rinse his blood-covered hands and face. 

With each step his legs shook – whether from tiredness, or adrenaline, or some mixture of the two, he didn’t know. Mrs. Hotori was in the hall still, her hands over her head. Robert apologised again to her and asked her to call the police before the man in her bathtub woke up. He told her that another man was in his apartment but by then she was repeating in Japanese for him to leave, her hand gesturing at the door. 

As they waited for the elevator, Robert examined Quinn’s eye and cheek. Hammett had hit her pretty hard – hard enough that Robert thought she was bound to get a black eye within a few hours. Once inside the lift and dropping towards the lobby, he thought of a hundred things that he should have done before fleeing the apartments. In the heat of the moment he had forgotten to check either of the men’s wallets, or phones. Without searching them he had no way to work out who Shin Takami really was or who he was really working for. 

Until he had that information he had no way to even begin looking for Misaki.