Durarara!!, Vol. 3 (Novel) (21 page)

“Oh, is that so? And you don’t find yourself jealous of someone leading such a peaceful, carefree life?”

“I told you, this has nothing to do with…”

He was only able to start the sentence. Suddenly, Masaomi’s apprehension was palpable.

Izaya didn’t miss it. He sank his fangs in deep.

“What if it does?”

“Huh?”

“So Mikado’s doing well, then! While his friend agonizes, the very source of that pain is living his life to the fullest.”

“Wait a second… What are you talking about, Izaya?”

Masaomi was asking for confirmation, but his intuition was already building an answer from inside his mind. He asked Izaya the question anyway. He was hoping that his answer would be wrong. But on the inside, he was screaming.

Don’t say it.

Please, don’t say a thing.

Izaya already saw every little subtle emotion in Masaomi’s face. And in full faithfulness to everything that made him Izaya Orihara, he stomped all over Masaomi’s wish.

“You know what I mean.”

Cruelly enough, Izaya wore the very same smile he had on back when he was spilling all of the Blue Squares’ secrets.

“The boss of the Dollars is your very, very best friend…Mikado Ryuugamine.”

“But maybe…you’re the only one who actually thinks you’re best friends.”

For an instant, Masaomi was completely silent.

Behind the shelf of files, Namie found herself at a standstill, too, neglecting her work.

Mikado…Ryuugamine…

Her shoulders had twitched when she heard the name spill out of Izaya’s mouth.

There were three people that she loathed with all her being.

One was Celty Sturluson, the Headless Rider.

One was Mika Harima, the parasite that plagued her brother.

And the last was the founder of the Dollars, the man who had taken everything from her: Mikado Ryuugamine.

She knew everything about the connection between the Yellow Scarves and Dollars, but not that their founders were close acquaintances.

Namie shut her eyes for several long seconds—then got back to work.

She performed her duties briskly and efficiently.

All in complete silence—as she struggled to suppress the emotions raging within her.

Several hours later, Ikebukuro

Ikebukuro was a place where just moving a block over to a different street could completely change the vibe of the town. The act of stepping down an unfamiliar alley from an otherwise familiar street was more akin to riding the train and getting off in an adjacent city. Just a short distance away from the shopping district could be a long stretch of apartments and homes, a compressed assortment of wildly varied spaces that made it a good representation of Tokyo as a whole.

“Goddammit. This rain never quits.”

In a back alleyway that was on the particularly desolate and eerie side out of that incredible variety, Tom grumbled up at the sky, his trademark dreads and glasses making him recognizable from a distance.

“Well, next one’s the last for the day. Let’s collect and get this over with.”

Standing next to Tom was Shizuo in his bartender outfit. He was calm and cool, completely unlike how he’d been when he fought with Simon the day before.

“Yeah, let’s wrap this up,” Tom replied with the minimum of effort, understanding what could go wrong if he tried to play up his seniority too much.

They walked through the dim alleyway without umbrellas. The worst part about this particular collection location was that it was too cramped to get a car in there, so they had to walk.

“He should be living in this apartment building up ahead. Age
twenty, already sank two hundred thousand yen into the call girl club. And he’s only been signed up for a week! How much time does that guy spend on the phone?” Tom grumbled as he trudged onward.

He stopped suddenly, noticing something wrong in the area.

There was a silhouette ahead in the narrow alley.

Several, in fact.

They appeared to be much younger boys, but they all wore yellow in one way or another. It was obvious that they were Yellow Scarves, but that gang wasn’t the type to hang out in a lonely back alley.

Sensing something was off, Shizuo and Tom turned around—and sure enough, there were another dozen youths closing in on them from the other end of the alley.

“Huh? Are we in trouble?” Tom mumbled, but there wasn’t a hint of concern on his face.

They stood in the center of the alley and watched as the youths gradually approached—at which point they realized that some within the group didn’t really fit the label of “youth” anymore.

Most notable of all of them was a large man with bandages on his head. He must have suffered quite an injury, because there were rusty red bloodstains on part of the bandage.

“Who the hell are you?” Shizuo growled in irritation when the group was about fifteen feet away. The bandaged man grinned, a snarl over gritted teeth. He hurled a mocking retort at Shizuo.

“You’re Shizuo, huh? I hear you really did my bro wrong, yeah? Mr. Big-Shot Shizuo Heiwajima!” It was a barely coherent, thinly veiled excuse to pick a fight.

“Oh yeah…?” A blood vessel pulsed on Shizuo’s temple.

“I don’t care if they call you the ‘fighting puppet’ or whatever… The Yellow Scarves have decided you need to be eliminated for good. If you don’t wanna die, start beggin’ on your hands and knees and hand over all the cash in that bag.”

“Oh yeah?!” His eyes narrowed behind his sunglasses, a deep furrow running between his eyebrows. Tom noticed Shizuo’s manner and automatically took a step to the side.

Despite Shizuo’s obvious irritation, one particularly foolhardy boy strode up and brandished a police baton, threatening, “We know you’re goin’ around collectin’ cash for the call girl line. So what’s it
gonna be? Just so you know, you knocked out my tooth a while back. So maybe you should start by beggin’ for—”

For an instant, the boy saw a small pink blob approaching him from the lower right. Somehow, the man in the bartender outfit was right in front of him.

Huh?

The shock lasted a moment.

The pain must have come after that, but the boy only felt it after he woke up.

His mind sank like a stone as he was knocked out by a blow like an upward hammer, but contrary to the downing of his wits, his unconscious body flew upward. The breath whistled out of his lips, a number of small white shards among the expelled air.

The other boys saw their companion, baton still clenched in his hand, fly in an arc through the air.

One second later, the boy with the flattened face landed right next to the bandaged man with a sound like a bag of garbage hitting the ground.

“How about I break the rest of ’em, so the hole doesn’t stick out anymore?” Shizuo grunted through clenched teeth, rolling his head back and forth to crack his neck.

Just one hit.

But the exact hit that was the most simple and most effective at changing the atmosphere of the scene entirely.

Every last one of the gang of youths, nearly twenty in all, held his breath.

One of their companions had just been knocked out, but not a single one of them moved. At first, because they didn’t understand what had happened. After understanding, because they were too afraid.

“So? What’s it gonna be?” Shizuo asked without a single drop of sweat or extra breath.

The question was an honest one, not a challenge, but none of the boys were able to answer it. Shizuo strode toward the bandaged man, apparently angered that no one was responding.

The bandaged man immediately twitched into motion, calling out a loud order to his friends to hide his trembling.

“Don’t pussy out on this guy! We don’t gotta fight him one-on-one; jump him all at once!”

The other boys immediately jumped into action…but Shizuo was already on the move.

He trotted over to the nearest youths before he could be surrounded on all sides and gave them each a fist in turn.

“Gakh!” “Yeeb!”
“Wait…I—
Humf!
”

With a series of rhythmic thuds—
whump, whump, whump
—the boys slammed against the walls of the narrow alleyway. Those who raised their arms to block got the painfully unpleasant sensation of their limbs being twisted out of place; those who landed a punch first felt the bones in their hands scream; and those who fled felt him grab the back of their collars and toss them up into the air, only to fall to the ground with a tremendous crash.

They might as well have been fighting a bulldozer.

The young man with the bandages on his head and the younger boys, who had been confident with the superiority of numbers, were now in a state of panic.

Shizuo Heiwajima was the very personification of terror. In the face of his monstrous, otherworldly strength, the bandaged man rocketed from a state of cockiness to the pits of fear.

And that shift caused him to undo a switch.

The young man grabbed something without thinking, a tool he had only planned to flash momentarily for extracting money easier, never to use in earnest.

Instead…

“That’s bad news. Real bad,” Tom grumbled to himself as he watched Shizuo rage, distractedly kicking an approaching boy in the groin. “I wonder if the cops will accept this as self-defense? Bad news if someone dies, right?”

Better get going before we get into real trouble
, he thought, turning back in the direction of the main street.

pop         pop             pop

The sounds were oddly dry, given all of the rain.

“Huh?”

They were unfamiliar sounds to his ear—but that was how he could instantly identify them.

This seems bad.

A different kind of “bad” sensation from before ran up Tom’s back, and he spun around in a hurry.

“Shizuo…?”

When he turned, he saw the illogical presence of smoke in the rain, shrouding a black object in the bandaged man’s hands.

And collapsed in a massive puddle, the prone figure of Shizuo.

The red liquid seeping from Shizuo’s body spread into the puddle with an eerie marbling effect.

The rain continued its merciless fall—cruelly emphasizing the desperation of the scene.