Baccano! - Volume 12 - Chapter Pr3

Prologue 3—The Stowaways Have No Plan

He chased us.

No, that’s wrong; he didn’t come after us.

Before we knew it, he was just there.

Until he showed up, we were invincible. We could ditch the fuzz with no trouble at all, and people said the little family that ran this area was so tiny a good wind would blow ’em away.

Dad and Mom, Grandpa and Grandma, and even my great-grandma with the eye patch told us not to mess with the Martillos, but what did they know about me and my guys?

I figured the adults were all preaching at me, telling me to keep my nose clean. Even if one of the Martillos did show up, I’d just pin it on them and let the cops get ’em.

But—

—I never saw this coming. I never even imagined it.

When we lifted the bag from that dumb-looking Japanese guy and then found that fancy camera inside, we were flying high.

But—

—we’d snatched stuff lots of times before this. Every time, it went off without a hitch. So we weren’t scared of nothin’.

But—

—in our minds, we were invincible. After all, no one had ever even shown up.

But—

But—

But, but, but, but, but, but, but!

But he showed—he showed up.

He—they—showed up in front of us… Just showed up…

And now I’m running.

I don’t get this at all.

We found out what or who he was right away. He said his name was Ronny or something, but that had nothing to do with anything.

We’d locked our hideout from the inside, and suddenly he was in there with us.

I don’t mean he was hiding inside the whole time or anything.

He really just appeared out of nowhere!

We were just having a good time, hashing out where we should sell the camera and what we should do with the money, but—

—the next thing we knew, he was standing in the middle of our room and talking to us.

“I suppose I should say it’s a pleasure to meet you…although I’ve known about you for some time.”

“Wh-what the hell—what are you?!” I yelled, and he narrowed his sharp, demony-looking eyes.

“Hmm…? My name is Ronny. Well, not that it matters. What matters is the fact that you stole a certain item from a tourist in our territory, one second in importance only to his life. And the fact that, unfortunately for you, that tourist asked for our assistance.”

No, he doesn’t just look like a demon. He is a demon; he’s gotta be.

I can just tell; this guy’s bad news.

No, not just bad news, he’s scary. Scarier than anything I’ve ever seen.

And so…and so, I snatched up my knife and squared off against him.

“Hmm. If a child is going to engage in mischief, he should be more childish about his choice. This isn’t even a crisis; you weren’t driven to this by starvation… Well, never mind.”

And the next moment, the knife was in his hand.

Before I knew it, I’d practically closed my hand on air; the weight of the knife had disappeared, and now he had it.

We ran.

“Everybody scatter!” I yelled to all the guys in the room, then booked out of there with the camera bag.

I jumped out the window onto the balcony, then down from the second floor into the bushes.

My legs hurt, but I sucked it up and kept running. If he caught me, I was toast. I had the feeling I was already toast, but I couldn’t afford to give that much thought.

Maybe I should have.

One of my buddies had said, “We should have just apologized and given him the camera,” and I think he was probably right. Actually, I know he was. I was forced to see it, too.

When I turned a corner in the alley, the guy was somehow there—

And when I whirled around to run for it, he was over there, too—

He was everywhere, everywhere—

He was just plain there.

Then he grabbed my arm and—

“Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaugh! …Mmrph… Gah!”

The boy had bolted up, screaming, and several hands darted in to cover his mouth.

“Bobby, you idiot! What’re you shouting for all of a sudden?!” a tall boy hissed at him, cringing.

“I thought you’d been real quiet for a while now. You were asleep?” asked a fat boy.

A small black kid whispered in a calm voice, “I suspect you were having a nightmare about the camera fiasco the other day. After all, if I remember right, you spent the whole next day trapped in an oil drum somewhere. It’s no wonder that particular trauma reared its head in another enclosed space like this.”

“Ghk…ghk-ghk…” Breaking out in a full-body cold sweat, the kid they’d called Bobby remembered where he was. “Y-yeah…,” he whispered back quietly. “Sorry, guys. N-nobody heard that, right?”

“Yeah, fortunately, there’s nobody around here right now. It feels like the ship’s going to be setting sail real soon.”

In the darkness, four boys were lying down, huddled close together inside a lifeboat on a certain luxury cruise ship.

It was a rigid boat with a roof, stored inside the ship. The boys had built a false floor inside it and were now hiding beneath it.

Strict checks were performed on board the ship to guard against stowaways. When the boys had heard the lifeboats were being switched out, they’d sneaked into the docks, and after an epic adventure—

—they’d now spent more than twenty-four hours inside the cramped space that they’d engineered.

“Man… They’d better really be on this boat!”

“They are. The DD newspaper’s information network is solid. Although I had to pay them with one of my cutting-edge computers.”

“You can afford it; you’ve got seven of ’em! Don’t be such a scrooge!”

“Agh… B-but what’s the point of finding them? This is somebody else, right? Not that Ronny guy?”

Their objective was a purely personal desire for revenge.

“I’m gonna stick it to the Martillos.”

One of the boys under Bobby’s leadership really should have stopped him as soon as he declared his intent, even if it meant putting his life on the line.

The other three were regretting their silence now, but at this point, there was no turning back.

They had a reputation as a group of young, local hoodlums, and half a month ago, they’d finally drawn the attention of the gang in charge of the turf where they “worked.”

The Martillo Family.

He had a feeling they were something called the Camorra, not the mafia, but right now, stuff like that didn’t matter.

In order to erase the terror and humiliation he’d been subjected to, Bobby was hell-bent on retaliating against them, no matter what it took. “I ain’t scared” was all he had to say at the possibility of dying, like a kid walking into a haunted house, and so he’d chosen to make an enemy out of a criminal syndicate.

Since they’d stolen from tourists again and again, the vast organization of the police was already their enemy. He’d bluffed that there was nothing to be afraid of at this point, but—

“At least if you get caught by the cops, I don’t think they kill you…,” the fat kid murmured.

“Don’t be such a wuss!” Bobby retorted angrily in a quiet voice. “It’ll be fine; once we take their money, we’ll just stay on the ship the rest of the way to Japan and disappear! I hear that country’s super-soft on crime, so we’ll make a clean getaway for sure!”

As their leader filled them in on this extremely naïve plan, the fat boy and the small kid both raised some objections.

“I heard their arrest rate for dangerous criminals is over half…”

“They say it was over ninety percent at one point. In any case, I believe I’m the only one here who knows Japanese; with prospects like that, do you really think sneaking into the country illegally is going to go well? It’s not as simple as stowing away.”

Even the tall kid chimed in with them to lodge a complaint, whispering, “And I mean…you think we’ll even get that far? Yeah, the Martillo executive who’s supposed to be boarding today does look kinda weak, but… He’s still an executive, right?”

A Martillo Family executive was going to be traveling on this ship.

Bobby and his gang had already put together a plan for stowing away, half just for fun, and to them, the report had seemed like fate. Of course, just because they assumed so didn’t mean it was.

He was a wussy-looking, baby-faced executive who wore glasses.

They’d heard the rumors, but when they actually saw him from a distance, the guy didn’t even seem to be five years older than they were— And right then, to Bobby’s group, victory over the Martillo Family started to seem plausible.

That sharp-eyed man was one thing, but even they could probably hold their own against a wimpy executive like this. And so that childish impulsiveness and equally childlike energy—

—had brought them here, to this tiny, insufferable hiding place.

“If he was by himself, I wouldn’t have come up with this plan!” As he spoke, Bobby’s voice grew calmer. “He’s got his family with him. A puny lady and some little kid, maybe ten.”

“They’re his family?”

“Yeah, probably. I bet the lady’s his big sis, and the kid’s his brother. He’s going to Japan with his siblings.”

“Huh…”

As they were talking, a thud echoed in their ears.

It was the sound of someone landing on the false floor they’d made.

The color drained out of the boys’ faces.

The black kid just sighed wearily. His expression seemed to say, Game over, hmm?

Even so, they all kept their mouths shut, and as they strained their ears, listening to the sounds from up above—

They heard a voice.

Just one voice.

“A hiding place… I have to hide…somewhere…”

It was a girl’s voice, and she sounded young.

Huh?

While they were wondering what was going on…

“H-huh? The floor here looks loose…,” she said, and after a crunching, ripping sound, light poured down over the boys.

Startled, they looked up at the exposed opening in the floor, and—

A Caucasian girl with blond hair stood there, frozen and startled.

She was about the same age as Bobby and the others, maybe a little younger. She glanced around with concern—

Then, as if she’d spotted something, she hurriedly burrowed into the space with Bobby’s group.

“Wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-wha…?!”

“I’m sorry! Please let me hide here, too!”

A cute girl had abruptly slipped inside, closed the open floor, then wedged herself in beside him.

Red-faced and totally at the mercy of an emotion he had no idea how to describe, Bobby snapped at the girl.

“Wh-what the hell?! Who are you?!”

In response, the girl smiled and gave him her name.

“I’m Carnea.”

“As you can see…I’m a stowaway!”