Chapter nine: A call for help.
Demetrius Jacob Cole was awakened by the phone beside his bed. It rang incessantly, shattering the pleasant dream he was having.
"Who the hell would be callin' at this hour?" He asked his wife, Lauren, as he glanced at the clock. It was five o'clock in the morning in Jamaica, and Demetrius, or Dee Jay as he was known to his friends, was feeling very tired. He had been up most of the night, dealing with the weekly bills and other costs associated with running a bar in Montego Bay.
"I have no idea, honey," Lauren said, her voice muffled by the pillow she held over her head. "Why don't you answer it and find out?"
"Yeah," Dee Jay swung his feet out over the edge of the bed and picked the phone up. "You better have a damn good reason for waking a brother up at this hour," he said into the receiver as he walked out onto the deck of his modest beach house.
"Dee Jay, it's Ryu," the emotionless voice on the other end said.
"Oh, great, real great, I'd love to chat some more but it's five in the freakin' morning." Dee Jay sat on the railing and looked out over the tranquil waters. There wasn't a cloud in the sky and the stars were fading fast with the approach of daylight. In another hour, it would be another bright, sunny day. A day Dee Jay would have enjoyed spending on the beach with Lauren, at least until the bar opened up at eight o'clock in the evening.
"You had better have a real good reason for callin', man." Dee Jay watched his wife through the glass doors. She was getting up, resigned to the fact that there wouldn't be anymore sleep that morning. He admired her firm backside as she went into the bathroom. Yeah, Ryu had better have a damn good reason for calling this morning.
"Some guys just tried to kill me," Ryu said bluntly, his voice never changing a hair.
"Whoa, shit, you serious?" Dee Jay woke up a little more. It wasn't every day a friend told you someone had tried to kill him. Actually, he wasn't sure if Ryu was a friend. They had met in the street fighter circuit, Dee Jay having been bested by the young, extremely adept Ryu, and somehow they had started hanging out after that. Ryu had even helped him earn the money he needed to open the bar. But a couple years back, they'd just stopped talking, and Dee Jay hadn't seen Ryu since.
"Yeah, I'm serious."
"But you're okay, right?" Dee Jay stood up and watched a small wave come in, sliding smoothly up the beach.
There was a long pause. "Yeah, I'm fine," Ryu sounded a little tense for a moment, which Dee Jay found hard to believe. Very rarely had he seen the other man display any kind of emotion, for any reason.
"Well, I'm flattered you thought of me and all, but I don't see how I can help you." Dee Jay said honestly, feeling somewhat at a loss.
"One of the guys I killed had a Marine tattoo on his arm, I was wondering if you wouldn't mind coming over and checking it out for me." Ryu knew Dee Jay had been in the Marines for a while, until a piece of shrapnel caught his leg and he was discharged. He forced himself through years of physical therapy, even taking to street fighting, just to get himself back to his full potential. During his last street fight, which had been against Ryu, his leg had given out again, nearly crippling him and ending his fighting career. Actually, this hadn't been a bad thing, since it was not long after this that he had met Lauren and got the idea of running a bar in Jamaica.
"You got their bodies?" Dee Jay said incredulously.
"Yeah, now you coming or not?" Ryu sounded annoyed.
"I don't know," Dee Jay said with a frown. "Where're you at, man?"
"Canada."
"You want me to fly out to Canada?" Dee Jay almost shouted into the phone. "You know I've got a bar to run, right?"
"I wouldn't ask if I wasn't desperate." Ryu's voice was as cold as ever. "I want to get to the bottom of this mess," he said. "And any help you could give me would put me one step closer to finding out who wants me dead."
Dee Jay paused, thinking. It was a hard decision. On the one hand, screw Ryu; he hadn't called or even sent a letter in years, now he expected to make Dee Jay fly to Canada just to identify a corpse? Hell no. But then…if it wasn't for Ryu, Dee Jay might not have this bar, or this nice house, or much of anything. He owed Ryu something, but was this going too far?
"Fine," he sighed into the phone. "I'll take the first flight out."
"Thanks," Ryu said, hanging up without another word.
"Oh man Dee Jay, what've you got yourself into now?" He went back inside with another sigh. "Lauren isn't going to like this…"
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Dee Jay's rented truck made it up the winding dirt road. Ryu had called an hour after his first conversation, telling him to fly to Ontario and he gave him a phone number to call once he arrived. His plane landed at noon and Dee Jay phoned Ryu, getting his directions to the other man's house. Man, was he glad he rented a truck, 'cause anything else would have a hell of a time getting through his road.
Ruts bounced him along, making for a titanic struggle over the wheel, as Dee Jay tried his best to keep away from the sides of the road and the woods that encroached from all sides. Yeah, why wasn't he surprised Ryu would choose to live in some place so far off that map he almost expected a dinosaur to lumber over and take a bite out of his truck.
There it is, Dee Jay thought triumphantly as he saw the small Japanese style home in the clearing ahead. In no time, Dee Jay was pulling to a stop in front of the house and stepping out of the vehicle.
Ryu came around the corner of the house, wearing a tee-shirt with the sleeves removed, a red headband, and some old jeans.
"About time you got here," he said, smiling faintly. "I was worried you'd got lost."
"Man," Dee Jay exclaimed disgustedly, "I was drivin' about twenty miles an hour 'cause of that goat path you call a road, so excuse me if I took a little longer than you expected."
Ryu nodded. "It's good to see you again, Dee Jay."
"Yeah, well I wish I could say the same about you, Ryu. What happened? You never call, you never write, hell I ain't seen you in what, almost three years?" Dee Jay shook the other man's hand firmly.
"I'm sorry," Ryu said soberly. "I had some things to work out."
"Yeah, killing assassins and shit from what I hear. So where's the body?"
"Out back, follow me." Ryu led Dee Jay around the house and to a small Japanese garden, with a little fishpond at one end and several stone and wood benches placed about seemingly at random. There were also six bodies dressed in black lying on the ground. Ryu went to one of them.
"See?" He said, opening the man's jacket and revealing the tattoo to Dee Jay. "These guys shot up my home and tried to put a few rounds in me last night. I was searching them to see if I could find any clues when I saw this."
"Son of a bitch," De Jay said, a shocked expression on his face. "I know these two," he pointed to two similar looking bodies. "That's Andy and Carl, they're these two brothers I knew back when I served Uncle Sam."
"Are you saying the U.S government is behind this?" Ryu said fairly disbelieving.
"No," Dee Jay said quickly. "These guys and I worked for a Special Forces group codenamed Shadow Vipers. We were tactical assassins, sent in to neutralize small groups of enemy combatants in Afghanistan and Iraq, or take out individual targets carefully, quietly, and so that nothing could be traced back to the U.S. These two guys were killed in Afghanistan by a mortar."
"Were you there?" Ryu asked.
Dee Jay shook his head. "Nah, that was after the group was disbanded due to political pressure in Washington; guess an army of secret killers doesn't cut well with the big boys in the oval office. The President shut us down and we went back to our normal deployments. I was in Iraq when I got the news about Andy and Carl."
Ryu nodded but didn't say anything. "Would it be too much to hope that you recognize any of the others?"
"My God," Dee Jay turned and walked over to the older man with white hair Ryu had tried to interrogate. "That's Major Tobias Havers, and I know for a fact that he's dead. I saw him get blown up by an I.E.D in Baghdad. Ryu, what the hell is going on?"
"I don't know," Ryu said, his cold eyes staring down at the supposedly deceased soldiers. "But these guys were very much alive when they tried to kill me."
Now however, they were really dead. And one answer had lead to many, many more questions.
To be continued…
Well, not too painful to read I hope. I will say that my goldfish-like memory doesn't recall whether Dee Jay was actually in the animated movie or not, but he was in the game and he is in my story. I'd also like to say that I won't be submitting another chapter on Sunday, but will submit two on Monday to make up for this. Hey, it's Easter, I need a break once in a while. Though judging from my currently awful writing I suppose you assumed I was already on some sort of break.
J. Nelson, 4–6–2007.
