Leticia Jones was angry with herself. They’d had a room for two days, under Mr. and Mrs. Gary Young, and it wasn’t like she hadn’t noticed the only other non-Japanese guests in the Sun Hotel. Yet she hadn’t figured it out. Age, maybe, or the distraction of Milo Fucking Weaver. What a piece of work he was. Sweeping in a decade after their last good-byes, as if she’d been in Wakkanai just waiting for him. No, not for him. The developer. That’s who she’d been waiting for, and now she had a tail.
She had seen them down at the harbor before Milo arrived at the hotel, one of those couples that was not a couple, and her senses had begun to tingle. Brown guy, five-ten, late forties, walking shoulder to shoulder with a younger white woman with thick eyebrows who spoke quietly to the man who was clearly not her man at all. But Leticia had also been followed back in Tokyo by Milo’s ham-fisted librarian, and she’d assumed these were more of the same. Then Milo stumbled out of town, and in the evening when Leticia headed down to the harbor to wait for the ferry from Korsakov, she spotted the white woman fooling with a rental bicycle.
Why were they still here? Why hadn’t Milo taken them with him when he left? Did he really think he could continue to keep tabs on her?
The answer only occurred to her the next morning at the docks, when the brown guy appeared again, meandering past the lines of fishing boats, talking on his phone, and she kicked herself for not realizing it earlier: They weren’t Milo’s people.
That tingle returned, the one that had kept her alive more times than she wanted to remember. It told her the time had come to move on.
She had everything she needed—the three IDs she switched between, money, credit cards—but unless she went back to the hotel she was going to lose the robe she’d picked up in Tokyo, which was a damned shame. She’d never found one as soft, and probably never would again.
She walked inland, through the industrial wasteland, and predictably the man—Mr. Young—followed for a while before realizing where she was going, at which point he hurriedly made a new call. But he stayed with her, crossing the road to pass the bright orange Yumeshokukankita Market and around it to reach the big, airy station, where she bought a train ticket to Asahikawa. Her Japanese was good enough to earn praise from the old woman behind the counter, who explained that she had just missed the 10:21, but there were two more leaving at 12:55 and 5:40. Then, when Leticia followed her purchase with a ticket for the bus to Sapporo, which wouldn’t leave until 6:30 the next morning, the old woman asked which trip she was going to take.
“I just can’t decide,” Leticia told her. “What do you think?”
“Sapporo,” she advised. “Definitely Sapporo.”
“Thanks.”
Tickets in hand, she went out and flagged a white taxi, noticing Mr. Young now getting into a little Mazda with the not-his white woman at the wheel. “Airport,” she told her driver. As he headed east, she glanced back to find the Mazda keeping a safe distance. She used her phone to buy an All Nippon Airways ticket for the 1:15 flight to Tokyo.
It took less than twenty minutes to reach the little airport, which only ran three flights a day, and when the driver let her out she could see the Mazda coming around the curve behind them. Beyond the road lay the expansive parking lot and then an open field of green parkland heading inland for half a mile until it reached a line of roadside trees at the park’s entrance. Inside the airport, she headed straight for the bathroom, where she closed herself in a stall and checked her watch.
The Tokyo flight didn’t leave for another hour, the train to Asahikawa in forty-five minutes. The bus ticket to Sapporo was backup, in case everything fell apart. And if she didn’t time this just right, it would.
She waited twenty minutes. Though she took the opportunity to pee, the rest of her time was spent listening to Japanese women come and go, gossiping and whispering to one another about troublesome men and children, and work, which was also troublesome. At one point someone entered silently, then left again without doing anything. It might have been Mrs. Young; she didn’t check.
At exactly twelve thirty, she flushed the toilet and left the stall, washed her hands quickly, and left the bathroom. She spotted the man right away, on a chair near All Nippon’s Festa shop. He saw her, then averted his gaze clumsily to find his friend, waiting at the top of the stairs to the second floor. Leticia didn’t bother showing them anything. She just went back outside and walked to the first taxi in the queue and hopped in. “Train station,” she said in Japanese.
As they started to pull away, she turned to see the man and woman bolting at full speed out of the airport, across the street, and to the big parking lot, where they’d been forced to leave their Mazda. She leaned close to the driver’s seat and, in her kindest voice, said, “I’d like to try something, if you don’t mind.”
“Try what?” he asked, eyeballing her in the rearview.
“You know that park over there?” she asked, pointing across the open field.
“It’s for the kids,” he said as he turned onto the main road. “Horses, goats, rabbits.”
“Sounds great. I’d like you to drive me to the entrance to the park, let me out, but keep driving to the train station. Can you do that?”
“Why? Am I picking someone up?”
“No. But you’ll earn another five thousand yen.”
An extra forty dollars was enough to brighten him up. “What do I do when I get to the station?”
“That’s up to you, but I need you to go all the way there. Can I trust you?”
“You obviously don’t know me.”
“What does that mean?”
“I’m a Jehovah’s Witness. There’s no one you can trust more than me.”
“I’m very lucky to have found you, then,” she said, and started counting out thousand-yen bills, placing them on the armrest. “But it has to be fast. I jump out and you keep going.”
“Do you want to tell me why?” he asked.
“I’d rather not.”
“No trouble, though?”
She shook her head and gave him a brilliant smile. “No trouble at all.”
By the time they followed the road’s curve to reach the entrance to the park, they were hidden by trees, and when she jumped out and sent him on his way she quickly dropped into the overgrown grass. She lay flat, waiting, and after three cars passed she warily raised her head and started to jog back, heading across the field.
She guessed that by the time she reached the airport the taxi was only halfway to the train station. She showed her e-ticket and went to the small lounge to wait for her Tokyo flight. It was all about timing: Her shadows couldn’t get from the station to the airport in less than fifteen minutes. By the time they figured out what was going on and made it here, she would be in the air.