Fandom: Naruto
Pairing: SasuSaku
Summary: "So, we have your wife. You get her back for two billion yen. Cash." The caller's confident Sasuke will find a way to get the money. If he loves his wife enough. Sasuke does. He has sixty hours to prove it, and he'll pay a lot more than two billion yen.
Disclaimer: Naruto © Masashi Kishimoto. The Husband © Dean Koontz.
Courage is grace under pressure
– Ernest Hemmingway
Call #6: The Message
Sorry, teme, but that Hyuuga is batshit insane. He's like a fully macking triple overhead corduroy to the horizon.
"One of the uniformed officers on scene eventually got a closer look at the body and recognised it," Neji said.
Sasuke didn't reply.
"He said he arrested the guy on a drug-possession after stopping him for a traffic violation about three years ago," Shikamaru continued. "Uzumaki-san says that both of you went to high school with him."
"Who was he?"
"Abumi Zaku. Does the name ring a bell?" Neji asked.
It did.
"I didn't just go to school with him," Sasuke said. "After high school, I lived with my folks for a year before moving out. I couldn't afford my own apartment, so we split the rent. That wasn't Zaku dead on the sidewalk."
"I'm afraid it was," Shikamaru confirmed.
Neji opened the white envelope he had brought with him and withdrew an eight-by-ten colour photo from it and handed it to Sasuke.
"In addition to the identification by an officer and a print match, I have Uzumaki-san's positive ID based on this."
Sasuke looked at the photograph. Zaku's head was turned to the left to conceal the worst of his wounds. His features had been subtly deformed by the temple entrance, transit, and post-temple exit of the high-velocity shot. His right eye was open wide in a startled stare.
"It could be Zaku," Sasuke said.
"It is."
"At the scene, I only saw one side of his face; the right side, with the exit wound."
"And you probably didn't look too close," Neji finished.
"No. I didn't want to look too close."
Sasuke couldn't take his eyes off the photo. He sensed that it was prophetic. One day, there would be a photograph like this of his face. They would show it to his parents.
Is this your son, Uchiha-san-tachii?
"I haven't seen Zaku in almost nine years."
"You roomed with him when you were what, eighteen?"
"Eighteen, nineteen. I only stayed with him for a year."
"Why didn't you ever stay in touch?" Shikamaru asked.
While Sasuke had been riveted by the photograph and Shikamaru had thrown him casual questions, Neji had been watching him intently. The lieutenant's stare had the sharp promise of a nail-gun.
"We had… different ideas about things," Sasuke said.
"It's not like you two were married," Shikamaru said. "You were just roommates. You didn't have to want the same things."
"We did want some of the same things, but we just had different ideas about how we got them," Sasuke clarified.
"Abumi wanted to get everything the easy way," Shikamaru guessed.
"I knew he was going to get into trouble sooner or later, and I didn't want any part of it."
"Well, we haven't learnt much about him yet, but we know he was renting a house in Otogakure for seven hundred thousand yen a month."
"A month?"
"Nice house it was. But so far, it looks like he didn't have a job."
"Zaku didn't believe in jobs. He thought work was strictly for Daylighters." Seeing Neji and Shikamaru's blank looks, Sasuke explained, "It's lingo for people who don't spend their every waking moment in nightclubs. For those who don't live for the raves."
"Was there a time when you lived for 'the raves', Uchiha-san?" Shikamaru asked.
"Towards the end of high school and for a while after. But it wasn't enough."
"What was lacking?"
"The satisfaction of work. Stability. Family."
"You've got all that now. Life is perfect, eh?"
"It's good."
"But not perfect? What's it lacking?" Shikamaru asked.
Sasuke didn't know. He'd thought about that from time to time, but he had no answer. So he settled on, "Nothing. We'd like to have kids. Maybe that's all."
"I have two kids," Shikamaru said. "One boy and one girl. The boy's nine. The girl's twelve and exactly like her mother — this isn't a good thing, by the way. Kids change your life."
"I'm looking forward to it."
Sasuke realised that he was responding to the detectives less guardedly than he had previously. He reminded himself that he was no match for the two geniuses in front of him.
"Aside from the drug-possession charge," Neji said, going back on topic, "Abumi stayed clean all these years. But you do recognise him now, right?"
"Yes," Sasuke confirmed.
"You didn't recognise him as he was walking across the street?" Neji asked.
"I wasn't really paying attention to him."
"And he was on the phone, distracted," Shikamaru told Neji. "Uzumaki-san said he was on the phone when the shot was fired."
"That's right," Sasuke agreed.
Neji paused and observed Sasuke for a few seconds before saying, "You know, Uzumaki-san strikes me as being incapable of guile. If he lies, I expect his nose might light up."
Sasuke wasn't sure if he meant to infer that he himself, by contrast to Naruto, was enigmatic and unreliable or not, so he kept quiet.
"Who were you on the phone with?"
"Sakura. My wife."
"Calling to let you know she had a migraine?"
Sasuke nodded.
Glancing at the house behind them, Neji said, "I hope she's feeling better."
"So the guy who's shot turns out to be your old roommate," said Shikamaru, after a pause. "Now do you see why that's so weird to us?"
"It is weird," Sasuke agreed. "It freaks me out a little."
"Well, sometimes coincidences are just coincidences." Neji rose from his chair and moved towards the porch steps, Shikamaru getting up and following him.
Relieved, Sasuke got up from his chair too.
Pausing beside the steps, Neji asked, "Are you sure there's nothing else we need to know?"
If you told him anything, Uchiha, you'd be a widower right now.
Sasuke shook his head.
"I'm sure," he said.
"We're not your enemies, Uchiha-san," Shikamaru said.
"I never thought you were," Sasuke lied.
"Everyone thinks we are."
"I'd like to think I don't have any enemies."
"Everyone has enemies," Neji said. "Even a saint has enemies."
"Why would a saint have enemies?"
"Sometimes, the wicked hate the good just because they are good," Shikamaru said, before turning away and walking towards the front gate.
The answer machine stood on a corner desk. The only message was from Naruto:
"Sorry, teme. I should've called as soon as he left here. But that Lieutenant Hyuuga is batshit insane, man. He's like a fully macking triple overhead corduroy to the horizon, yo. He scares you off ramen and makes you want to sit quiet in a club and just watch all the hot chicks go by doing nothing. It's like a silent horror flick."
Sasuke deleted the message and sat down on his sofa. He didn't even bother checking bank account, mortgage statements; he knew he didn't have anywhere near enough the amount the kidnappers asked for.
Until now, Sasuke had not thought of himself as a failure. His self-image had been that of a young man responsibly trying to build a life for himself and his wife.
He was only twenty seven. No one could be a failure at twenty seven.
Bitterness overcame him for which he had no target except himself. This was not good. Bitterness could turn into self-pity, and if he surrendered to that, he would make a failure of himself. And Sakura would die.
Even if the house had been without a mortgage, even if they had half a billion yen in cash and were wildly successful for people their age, he would not have had the funds to ransom her.
That truth brought him to the realisation that money would not be what saved Sakura. He would be what saved her if she could be saved; his perseverance, his wits, his courage and his love.
Sasuke stared at the low ceiling, which was the floor of the loft that overhung two-thirds of the garage. Windows in the higher space faced the house, providing an excellent vantage point.
Someone had known when Sasuke had come home earlier, had known precisely when he had entered the kitchen. The phone had rung, with Sakura on the line, moments after he had found the broken dishes and the blood.
If an observer knew where Sakura could be found, it would nevertheless be reckless for Sasuke to go after him. These people clearly had much experience of violence and they were ruthless. A mechanic wouldn't be a match for any of them.
A board creaked overhead.
On the wall opposite was a rack that held tools. Sasuke chose a combination lug wrench and pry bar.
Sasuke was aware that a kind of madness, bred of desperation, had come over him. With the long-handled lug wrench clutched in his right hand, he moved to the back of the garage where steep open stairs in the north corner led in a single straight flight to the loft.
Why Abumi Zaku had stolen Kiba's dog and why he, of all people, had been shot dead as an example to Sasuke were mysteries to which no solutions were at hand. Intuition told him, however, that the kidnappers had known Sasuke would be linked with him and that this link would make the police suspicious of him. They were weaving a web of circumstantial evidence that, were they to kill Sakura, would force Sasuke to trial for her murder and would elicit the death penalty from any jury.
Raising the lug wrench higher, Sasuke eased along towards the front of the loft. He found that the entire length of the passage was deserted.
One the floor, however, against the end of a row of boxes, stood some equipment that should not have been there. It included a receiver and a recorder, but he couldn't identify the other three items. They were plugged into a board of expansion receptacle, which was itself plugged into a nearby wall outlet. Indicator lights and LED readouts revealed the equipment to be engaged.
They had been maintaining surveillance of the house. The rooms and phones were probably bugged.
Having seen no one in the loft, Sasuke assumed that the equipment was not being monitored. Perhaps they could even access it and download it from a distance.
Simultaneously with that thought, the array of indicator lights changed patterns, and at least one of the LED displays began to keep a running count. He then heard Detective Nara Shikamaru's voice.
"Nice house you got here. I love old neighbourhoods like these."
Not just the rooms of the house, but the front porch, too, had been bugged. They were professional, all right, and Sasuke knew that he had been outmaneuvered only an instant before he felt the muzzle of a handgun against the back of his neck.
A/N:
For once, I have basically nothing to say D:
SHINO.
