Read Online Hanzai Japan: Fantastical, Futuristic Stories of Crime From and About Japan by Unknown - Free Book Online

bathroom and my hand on one pilates-skinny thigh … and not much else.
    She snorted. “Or maybe you drank from the wrong glass, got whatever Steve slipped them.”
    And then it all made some sort of horrible sense. In the back of my mind I heard screams and sobs, girlish pleas to just let them go home. And there was Steve, with his zipper down and his dick out, his fat purple tie swinging from his dirty hands.
    Then only one set of tears.
    Then silence.
    “Shit,” I gasped, rolling up my sleeve. “Shit, oh fuck, Luce, what does my tattoo say?”
    She took a picture with her phone and held it up. “It says Kill. ”

    The bodies of the two girls Steve and I drank with—Shanna and Nikki—were found half-buried in Hudson River Park earlier that morning by a woman walking her dogs. Both had been strangled; only Shanna had been raped. Except it wasn’t rape, I wanted to tell the newscaster. That’s why we’d gone to Hudson River Park. She’d given it up willingly, or at least as willingly as a girl drunk out of her fucking skull can. Nikki had offered to suck me off, but I couldn’t get hard enough and she just laughed. I remember telling her to go fuck herself. I remember stumbling onto the path and slumping down on a bench. Then came the screams, the soft dirt under my hands, and then I was home.
    “That’s a relief, at least,” said Luce, peering out through the blinds like she was expecting the cops to swarm our building any minute. “If you didn’t come, they won’t be able to trace any DNA.”
    “I didn’t kill them,” I insisted.
    “Maybe you didn’t, but Steve sure as fuck did, and it sounds like you helped hide their bodies,” she said. “And how the hell are you supposed to go to the police with that?”
    “I could tell them I saw him do it,” I said. It was a lie; I only knew he did it because I had Steve’s memory, the thrill he felt when he choked the life out of both of them. I swallowed back sick and sucked in long, slow breaths, but images of more girls kept coming, girls from long before I knew him. A ten-year-old neighbor with butterfly barrettes in her tight black braids left in a wooded ravine. A teenage junkie whose body they never found. The chunky blonde with the credit-card panties the same night I got inked. …
    “And if they find your fingerprints in the bruises around Skank A’s neck?” she asked. “I believe you, but shit, Vance, you could be in a lot of fucking trouble. Even if they don’t find your fingerprints, if they get Steve, he’ll flip on you before they can finish reading his rights.”
    “You’ll alibi me, right?” I pleaded. “You’ll tell them I was here with you?”
    “I can’t,” she said. “I was at the dance, they’ll ask the other teachers, they’ll know I’m lying and that’ll look worse for you.”
    “Shit,” I said, putting my head in my hands. “Shit, Luce, what are we going to do?”
    She thought about this for a minute. She went to the kitchen and got herself another cup of coffee. I watched her add milk and put the carton back in the fridge, stir in some sugar and carry the cup back into the living room. “We do what has to be done,” she said as nonchalantly as though we were trying to decide where we were getting brunch. “We’re going to get Steve.”

    I’d never seen Steve so shit-faced. Whatever roofie Luce had slipped into his sake bomb hit hard and fast, reducing him to a slobbering mess, dribbling rice everywhere, falling out of our booth and telling the too-polite waitress twice that he wanted to make babies with her. Luce had wanted to keep him all but stone sober, make it hurt, make it count, but Steve and I had been friends a long time. He’d never done wrong by me, just by everyone else. I owed him one last night on the town, followed by a quick, quiet death.
    Luce and I practically carried Steve out of the Tokyo Tavern. We’d scouted an alley a couple blocks down, behind a nightclub where the steady