Simon said, “We have friends very close to your home. She will be picked up and moved to the airport where you will meet her within the hour. We will stay with you till you meet her there. Then you will board an airplane and be received upon your arrival at your destination. You and your family will be safe.”
Kenji shook his head and muttered to himself, “I will always trust the knife in front of me before I trust the one at my back.” He nodded and looked up at his two interrogators, “I know of a man and building where the people you may be looking for will be. His name is Rin and the building is 35674, east of the docks on Pico Avenue towards the south side.”
Simon smiled and nodded to Sophia. She cut the bonds that held Kenji’s hand together.
Kenji got slowly to his feet from the chair. Sophia moved to his side as the man sort of stumbled forward. Sophia moved to grab his arm and brace him from the fall. Kenji moved at almost vampire speeds, taking the knife from Sophia’s loose grip and shoved it, hilt deep, into his side. Sophia went ashen white, seeing the deep red-black blood ooze from the fresh wound.
Simon swallowed as he watched with eyes wide, “Why?” Simon muttered “We could have protected you?”
The Japanese man sputtered as he stood weakly in front of the two of them, “I already told you, I’m dead already. Keep my family safe, my son deserves to live.” As he gasped in pain his legs finally gave out and he was sent sprawling to the ground. The loss of blood already too much to keep him upright.
Simon and Sophia both stood and watched the man bleed out. There was nothing to be done. Kenji was gone. Simon felt a twinge of guilt as he thought that not only was this a complete and utter waste of life, but also a waste of blood. He couldn’t deny his nature, even when he wanted to.
Simon pulled his phone out of his pocket and thumbed a phone number.
“Hi, Simon, what do you need?” Noemi responded in French.
“I need you to travel to this address and pick up a pregnant woman by the name of Mikayo. She won’t want to leave and she may, for some reason, think that you are there to kidnap her,” Simon replied in Russian.
“Am I kidnapping her?” she asked.
“Yes, but if you don’t, then she may well end up in the company of people that she will like far less than you and may be dead before sunrise, if you don’t get there first.” There was the silence of understanding from the other end. “She falls under our protection,” he placed an almost unheard emphasis on that word. “We’ll be waiting for you.” He quickly gave her the address and hung up the phone.
He knew that she had understood exactly what he meant by ‘our protection’ and was confident that in an hour he would be sending Kenji’s wife to a much safer place than Los Angeles was going to be.
Simon and Sophia left Kenji’s body where it lay. House Himura or the authorities would discover him soon enough. It looked like a mob hit. This was why Simon chose this warehouse. There was nothing there to incriminate him, or his team. And if the death of this man caused a little bit more paranoia and chaos for the local vampire Houses, then all the better.
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Sophia drove, and both sat in utter silence. Simon didn’t even bother forcing his dead body to breathe. A man had died. That wasn’t the issue though, what ate at Simon was that he couldn’t be sure if Kenji was a good man or not. Sacrificing himself for his family pointed that way, and if so, he was just another good man who died because of him. No matter what he seemed to do, that score just kept piling up and he hadn’t even begun to make a dent on his debt to those people.
When they arrived at the airport Noemi met them in the terminal with the very pregnant Mikayo. The meeting was solemn and silent. Mikayo didn’t need to be told when she saw the two strangers approach them, that her husband wasn’t coming to join her. Simon had very few words for the widow, she barely responded anyway. He gave her a small piece of paper and an envelope. The envelope had twenty thousand dollars in it and the piece of paper within explained that the woman’s destination would be Italy and she would be staying in a small estate with their friends.
Simon saw her to their terminal and watched as she got on the plane. Once everyone had boarded, he walked through the airplane carefully scanning every passenger, looking for signs of assassins, or thugs. When he was satisfied there was no danger to Mikayo he walked off the plane and had a small conversation with airport security. Apparently, he had delayed the flights takeoff by five minutes. He apologized and said that he was going to miss his son, who was traveling to Europe with his mother. The two security guards smiled and said they understood and escorted him back out to the main passenger terminal. Three minutes later the plane was off the ground, taking Mikayo and her unborn son to the safe haven of Italy.
Two hours after that Simon and Sophia found themselves driving down Pico Avenue looking for this building 35674.
It was getting late and the sun would be rising in less than two hours. They drove down the road and then near the end of the row they saw the faded numbers on the side of a well built, but aging, warehouse. Sophia drove calmly past the building as Simon took a few pictures and looked around the building as best he could.
It was separated from the other warehouses by a good ten meters. The sides of the building were slick aluminum siding. The top of the building was flat, probably reinforced from the inside. It was pretty big though, not nearly the biggest warehouse on the street, not by a long shot. But it wasn’t the smallest either. Those two facts alone made it promising that Kenji had pointed them in the right direction.
Sophia turned the car around, and not seeing any way to drive along the other side of the building, she contented herself to drive back the way they had come. Simon took a few more pictures and studied the barb wired fence that wrapped itself around the warehouse. It was an altogether typical building in a series of typical buildings. Just like the Yakuza to hide in plain sight.
As Sophia headed back to their warehouse in the Industrial district, he found himself going back to what Kenji had said about House Himura, ‘that name means nothing to me.’ If that was true, either House Himura was content to let the higher officers of the Yakuza deal with them or it had lost some ground to the rival criminal gang. If the latter was true then maybe House Dukart had much bigger problems than just the occasional missing thousand dollars here and there. If the Yakuza could intimidate a vampire House, there could be a very real war that would need to be fought. And with all the other upstart gangs around, House Dukart might find itself on the losing side.
That was the worst-case scenario however and he was content to go over what they had gathered from their reconnaissance mission and study the photographs he had taken. Tomorrow or the day after Rin and whoever else might be in there would receive a little visit, one they probably wouldn’t like very much. But then again, that’s what made this job fun, most of the time. His thoughts drifted back the dead man they had left behind as Sophia parked the car. He made his way up to the loft and started studying the photographs and some by Google Earth, as he and Sophia started putting together their plan.