Belka, Why Don't You Bark - By Hideo Furukawa Page 0,6

yes. But he was also a step ahead of them. He saw where things were going.

Another series of gunshots. One bullet shattered the BMW’s windshield and lodged itself in the driver’s forehead; another buried itself in the hip of the man who tumbled out of the car’s back seat as it hit a tree. Soon after, a third bullet entered his head.

Silence.

Only one man moving. A pistol in each hand. The BMW’s headlights were still burning, and their faint light revealed his face. His profile. His hair was pure white. White the way an old man’s hair is white, when it has lost its color. Two weeks ago, he had been holed up deep in the forest. Living in a hunter’s shack like a hermit. The guns in his gloved hands weren’t hunting rifles, though. They were army weapons: 9mm machine pistols.

The old man strode over to the body.

The body of the last man he killed. The body of the owner of the mansion. He worked the shirt down over the corpse’s shoulders, exposing its chest. He inspected each shoulder. The large cross tattooed on the left, the skull on the right.

The locations of the designs showed that he was indeed a Russian mafia kingpin, that he had been acknowledged as a leader by his fellows.

He was a boss. The tattoos proved that. Not in one of the new organizations, however. He belonged to the old mafia; he was a product of the Soviet system.

Having found the proof he wanted, the old man let slip a smile. A smile so subtle his face remained all but expressionless. “Nighty-night, Vor,” he murmured.

The old man wasted no time. A minute later, he was inside. Not a light in the entire building. Two buff corpses sprawled in the parlor, shot dead in the middle of a card game; on the sofa behind them, the body of a carefully made-up young woman in a flashy dress. These bodies had been there for an hour or so.

Another body in the hall.

The old man stepped into the half-hidden security room behind the parlor.

A young man was waiting inside. Alive. Terrified. Drenched in sweat. Drops fell periodically from his face, his neck. He was sitting on a chair, his posture oddly strained, straight as a rod.

“If you are hot, why not take off your sweater?” the old man said.

“I can’t move,” the young man replied.

“Sure you can, just take it off,” the old man repeated.

Desperation in his eyes, the young man nodded and stiffly, tensely, stripped the sweater off. Underneath the sweater he had on a paratrooper shirt with horizontal blue stripes.

The wall behind the young man was completely taken up by ten television monitors. Images from the security cameras were projected on their screens. Or not. Some were blank. From where he sat, the young man could operate the recorder, and he had a microphone that let him respond to communications from outside.

“You give them the all-clear, like I said?” the old man said.

“I did exactly as you told me to,” the young man said. “Everything.”

“Good job,” the old man replied. “You did well.”

“Don’t kill me!” the young man pleaded. He was perched oddly on his chair. Sort of. There was an object between his butt and the seat, like a little pillow. It was a hand grenade. The pin had been pulled. The young man’s butt was holding the safety lever down. If he shifted his body the slightest bit, if the grenade happened to slip out from under him, it would explode.

The old man turned to the monitors. He spent a few moments checking the screens, or their blankness. The young man was still sweating. The old man was right beside him, but the young man couldn’t turn to face him. There was a sound by the recorder, like duct tape coming off.

“Look at all this crap,” the old man muttered. “With all this, you would think…”

With all this, you would think…what? the young man wondered, terrified.

“…you could do better.” The old man answered the boy’s unspoken question, his tone crisp. “Amateurs. That is what you are. A bunch of amateurs.”

A sound the young man had heard once before: a pin being drawn.

It came again, then a third time.

Huh? he thought.

The old man left the security room. On his way out he turned and fired a 9mm bullet into the young man’s head, just like that. The young man jerked backwards, then fell, causing the grenade he was sitting on to explode. A second