My Yakuza

night in advance, okay?”
“Sure mister.”
The clerk gave Shiro towels and a room key and was told to take room five-thirty-four. An ancient elevator creaked away as it pulled itself up to the fifth floor where the gates opened and Shiro exited. As he walked down the hallway, his senses were assaulted by stale cigarette smoke and very cheap booze. The hallway carpet was well worn, stained and hadn’t been replaced in twenty years or more. Paint was chipped away along the baseboards and a cockroach ran across the hallway before Shiro stepped on it.
He found his room and turned the key, not knowing what to expect from the dive he was checking into for a day or so. He entered into a dimly lit room that had light showing through the curtains, which enabled him to see the bed, dresser, TV, and a solitary chair. He closed and locked the door and threw his bag onto the bed. He flipped on the light in the bathroom and found it to be clean, except for rust stains that showed the path of the water as it dripped from the tub faucet.
Shiro put the towels down on the tank and looked into the mirror. His normally good-looking, healthy features were now drawn and dark. He was afraid, very afraid. He longed for his real life. The stress, injuries to his chest and lack of decent sleep were beginning to show.
These might be the least of my worries, he realised, throwing some water on his face. He dried off and went back to the bed where he sat down. He looked at his watch and saw that he had eight hours until he was to meet Kono at the bar. He took the wooden chair and wedged it under the door handle, giving an added measure of security to the room. He removed his clothes, pulled back the cover on the bed and lay down to get a couple of hours worth of sleep. Before falling asleep, Shiro reached into the bag and withdrew the handgun, placing it on the small nightstand.
His fitful dreams were filled with images of Keizo and the feeling of soft brushes on his skin.
* * * *
Kono didn’t tell the Loo about the phone call. Not yet. He longed to talk to somebody and paced his office, thinking about his problems. Shit. No wonder he’d been feeling like things were off. The goddamn Yaks had been following him. He sat at his desk, the latest copy of The Wave, Far Rockaway’s local paper, placed in front of him. Somebody had red-circled an item on the front page. He shook his immediate thought from his mind and read the article. The headline read…Appeals Court: Shut Down Adult Homes.
The article read, “A federal appeals court has ruled that New York State must comply with a lower court decision to begin immediately transferring thousands of people with mental illness out of large, institutional group homes and into their own homes and apartments, a ruling that may well impact Rockaway…”
Oh, great. That’s just what Rockaway needs. A bunch of liberated crazy people mainlined into an already fragile situation. Kono picked up his jacket and left the office, eyeing the wall clock. He still had time until the meeting. The tension settled in his neck and shoulders as he retrieved his civilian vehicle. He liked his old Corolla. It wasn’t much and that was the point. You didn’t want to look as if you had anything fancy in Rockaway, like hub cabs and window wipers that worked.
He pointed the car towards Manhattan and slipped some old-school swing into the CD player. It had a removable front face that he usually forgot to detach, not that it mattered. The rest of his car looked like a piece of shit. He figured the neighbourhood hooligans felt sorry for the one bit of good news about his car. Bill Tapia’s Tropical Swing filtered out of the unreliable speakers. For once they were in sync. He tried to relax as he approached the city he missed…and Gen. The idea that Genjiro, Gen for short, might not be at his dojo occurred to him only as he wrestled with the Greenwich Village traffic.
Kono called Gen who sounded sleepy.
“I must be dreaming,” Gen said. “I was having a nice, wet dream about you.”
Damn.
“Put on your clothes…I’m coming to visit.”
“And I need clothes for this?”
Kono took a deep breath. Hell, no. “Yes.”
He ended the call and angled his car into the nearest space he could find. He had half an hour on the metre and no quarters. Fuck it. He needed to talk. He cashed a buck at Katz’s Deli, which sported a sign in the window, Send a salami to your boy in the Army! He popped more change into the metre. Two hours. He wouldn’t be that long. He scanned the street but couldn’t see anybody watching him. Nobody pretended to read the paper…nobody kept sweeping the same spot. He rounded the corner, covering two blocks fast before doubling back to East Houston and buzzing Gen’s door from the street.
Gen let him in. Kono took the stairs up to the dojo two at a time. Gen greeted him at the top. Damn. Even wearing tracksuit pants and a clean white tee, the guy was smoking hot.
The two men hugged and for a moment, Kono wrestled with the idea of taking his occasional lover to the floor and fucking him on the spot. Gen was the hottest, toughest guy he knew.
Street sounds were muted by Japanese screens against the windows. As usual, in Gen’s presence, Kono felt a sense of disorientation. His senses swooned as he gazed past the Aikido dojo’s workspace to Gen’s room.
“Are you alone?” he asked, feeling a wild stab of jealousy.
“Not anymore,” Gen said over his shoulder. There were few places to sit in Gen’s quarters. He didn’t entertain unless he was training somebody or fucking them.
Hired by the New York Police Department