Vayos Con Dios

Two days later, he was in Mexico City.
Fumes. Traffic. Men sweeping the streets with brooms.
Ice cream pushcarts. Taco pushcarts.
Billboards. Women.
Donkey carts. Plush cars. Buses.
Hooting and roaring.

Sweat at the back of his shirt.
His scalp tingling.
His nostrils full of charcoal smoke, exhaust.
The stench of seared meat.

As soon as he hit Mexico city, he went to a dealership and sold the Jeep for a pittance.
Then he bought a small, battered blue tin can of a car.
He paid the cash down on it, paid extra to have it held on the lot for him.
The Jeep screamed “American.”
The blue tin can– driving it he might pass for French, or even German.
He’d go deeper south in that. Deeper into his cover.

He’d kept a safe deposit box under one of his false names in a Georgetown bank.
A .44 pistol. An envelope full of US currency.
One hundred gold krugerands in a money belt.
Two passports.

The name on his current working passport: Cole James.
He’d bought it in French Guyana.
The Agency didn’t know.
The name on the other: Frank Younger.

*

He slept the first night in a fleabag hotel.
Had to avoid the luxury places.
At night he walked and walked around the great Plaza.
He went into a blazingly bright bar and ordered tequila, almonds, grilled shrimp.

He devoured it. Ravenous.

*

He took apart the pistol and cleaned and greased it on a newspaper spread over the coverlet of the hotel bed.
In the next room, a woman was panting and screaming.
He thought about it. Probably the fat whore he’d seen earlier, posed at the entranceway in the flashing neon.

He’d bought a bottle of Centenario. He took swigs from the neck.
Wiped his mouth with his hand.

Looked at himself in the faded and streaked mirror.
Ageing. Haggard from lack of sleep. Unshaven.

What now?
He didn’t know.

*

In the morning he walked around again.
He went into a cybercafe.
He sat at a computer.
It felt dangerous.

He didn’t open the browser. He finally just got up and walked out.

At a street stall, he bought a small Olivetti typewriter.
He carried it back with him to the hotel — a small black suitcase.
He didn’t have any real paper. He rolled a sheet of cigarette paper into the carriage.
He typed — click click click — Government by Shadows: The Group of 22.

*

At night he went out again.
Thirsty.
In a bar, he drank tequila.
He ate pork tacos from a banana leaf at a street stall.

As he made his way back to the hotel, having memorized every step, two rooster-sauntering men followed him.
They were wearing: shiny shoes, pleated trousers, colorful shirts, gold necklaces.
Both Mexicans.One had a greased ponytail.

He pondered it. They were take-off artists.
Ordinary criminals, looking for tourists.
He was only surprised they’d tagged him as American.

His blue jeans and white shirt — he could have been any nationality.

Or maybe they were going after Europeans, now, too?

He waited for them at a traffic blaring corner.
They parted slightly as they approached.
The one that wasn’t poneytailed had a goatee. And a gold tooth.

At a glance: no pistolas.
But the ponytailed one brought something out of his pocket.

Flick.

*

Greased Ponytail waves his switchblade lazily in the blue eyed man’s face.
Goatee takes hold of his shirt. Purses his lips to speak Mexican —

The blue eyed man grasps and twists Goatee’s shirt-holding hand palm upward and turns it so he lets go of the fabric and staggers, a wild Texas two-step.
Hits him twice in the throat, edge-of-hand blows.

It’s so quick that Greased Ponytail has time only to blink, once, before the blue eyed man snatches the toothpick from his lips and hits him viciously in the solar plexus.
Doubling over, Greased Ponytail retches and spills beer-shrimp-chilis-corn onto the sidewalk.

He, the blue eyed man, now takes control of the knife arm at the elbow joint, knocks the knife loose. It clangs, skitters, even as Goatee sinks to the sidewalk and lies gasping in the fetal posture, holding his neck.

The blue eyed man crouches. Picks up the knife. Shuts it. Sticks it in his pocket.
Puts the non-chewed end of the toothpick in his mouth.

Stands, slowly.

Looks at Greased Ponytail, who is still doubled over, wobbling and gasping for air.
At Goatee, who is jerking with agony and, like his amigo, wholly engrossed in the non-threatening task of trying to breathe.

Walks away.

Vayos con dios.

Hola, Mexico

He was driving. South.
Deep in Mexico.
In eternity.
In sheer, violent blue endlessness.

Heading for those mountains, rising like shoulders of rain out of the parched, broken, cactus dotted, windswept desert.

Battering wind, dusty, cool, shattering insects on the windshield.
He’s got the windows rolled down. So he can taste the dry air.
Taste the smashing wind.

His elbow roasting in the sun glare, where it rests on the window.

Sometimes he puts his hand out, opens the fingers. To feel the wind.
To feel the violent, surrealistic, shattered, unborn reality of Mexico.
He tries to snatch it. But the wind always escapes.

He shuts his eyes.
Sees the road, the white line unfurling.
Mountains distorted by heat.
Sweat stinging his face.

Empty road, mirage wavering asphalt.
Lakes appearing. Castles.

He licks his lips.
Turns on the radio.
It’s a Bible thumping preacher, out of Texas.
Shrieking Gospel into the blurred airwaves.

He can see the man vividly in his mind’s eye, dark-suited with a face like a hatchet, shouting in his roadside pinewood chapel.
Shouting into a big steel-gilled microphone.
He, the blue eyed man — gaunt-faced, handsome, with thinning hair, in a blue denim shirt, jeans and steeltoed cowboy boots — makes a face.
He switches the station.

A long crackle of radiowaves.
Then the blare of horns.
A mariachi song. Okay.
He turns it up, until the harsh clangs of the guitar make the air tremble.
He listens. Falls into a trance.

When the song ends, his head jolts.
But he hasn’t fallen asleep.
He’s still driving the Jeep. Straight and fast.

But now dusk is climbing the mountains.
They’re turning a fantastic rose-hue.
And in the distance, a little town, already lost deep in a well of shadow.

He’ll stop. He’ll eat at a Mexican cantina.
He’ll fill the jeep with gas.
Maybe get a cerveza or two, some shots of tequila. Why not.

As he slows down to forty, the blue eyed man bends.
Reaches under the seat.
Pulls out the gun.

Holding the steering wheel one handed, he flicks open the cylinder.
At a glance, he sees it’s fully loaded.
Gleaming copper cased bullets.
He lays the pistol on the hot leather passenger seat, where it bounces slightly.

The wind-roar subsides. The rattle of windshield glass slows to a soft ticking.
He realizes the windshield is so filthy it’s tinging everything brown and dull.
He’ll get it washed in the town. And now he sees the first color splashed billboards.

Ads for Las Cervezas Mas Fina.
Houses, more like shacks.
Chickens walking around a fenced yard.
Dogs, their tongues lolling out, lying in the shade of an adobe wall.

He pulls into the first service station that appears in the brown dust of his bouncing vision.
He brakes the Jeep, sweeps up the pistol, and in a smooth movement, as he steps out onto the overheated asphalt, sticks the barrel into his belted sweat-cold jeans waistband at the front  and pulls the tails of his shirt out to cover the grip

Hola, Mexico.

AKIKO’S FURY

Deadly “Akiko” retires from killing to restore a Zen temple on a remote island off Japan. But violent people won’t let her alone.

THE LONELINESS OF THE BLUE-EYED ASSASSIN (originally titled AKIKO’S FURY) is the first in a planned series of crime thrillers dealing with the life of a half-Japanese half-American young woman who also happens to be a highly paid assassin code-named Akiko.

Born in Okinawa to a heroin-addicted American ex-Marine and a Japanese bar girl, the blue-eyed, black-haired Molly Vance grew up in San Francisco until age nine, when her father died mysteriously. She was then brought to Tokyo and raised by her father’s friend, a yakuza gangster.

As a teenager, she was trained in martial arts by the head of an ancient cult of tattooed female assassins called the Habu Kurage, or Medusas. Following her adopted father’s death in a yakuza war, Molly went on a bloody rampage, destroying the entire rival yakuza clan.

Still later, after more intensive training by the head of the Medusas, she began working worldwide for a shadowy group known only as the Organization, and quickly gained renown as the deadliest woman alive.

But, after glimpsing an underlying pattern and suddenly realizing the Organization’s motives behind the “hits” she is assigned, Akiko risks it all to help one of her targets escape.

She then disappears from view, going to live in an abandoned mountain temple on a remote island off the coast of Japan.

Both the Organization and the Medusas are now determined to find Akiko — and kill her. Even worse, they have found a way to get to Molly through people in her past. To save their lives and her own, she must unleash all her fury.

***

In this novel Molly Vance, living under a false name, is busy restoring the ruined Zen temple as a way of purging her dark karma. At the same time she is falling in love with the remote island’s only policeman, a young man named Jiro Takagi, whom she begins to train in the sword.

One day she gets a letter from her adopted father’s former mistress. The woman’s teenaged daughter was kidnapped by Chinese gangsters on a trip to San Francisco and is being forced to work as a prostitute in a sleazy massage parlor.

Akiko travels to San Francisco to get the girl back and soon finds herself fighting for her life against a hired kung fu master. Though Akiko survives almost unscathed, retrieves the girl and returns to her island, the head of the Medusas has now gotten word of her whereabouts, and sends assassins.

After Takagi is badly hurt trying to save her life, Akiko realizes that she cannot run away any longer — that she must face her former teacher in a combat to the death.

“Akiko” is like a female Jason Bourne, James Bond, or Nicolai Hel (the reluctant assassin hero of Trevanian’s SHIBUMI). Each novel in the series is fast paced, cleanly written, and structured as cleanly as a Simenon mystery or an Ian Fleming Bond novel.

Though Akiko is the central character we get immersed in many other characters, places and situations, so each novel has its own mood and “feel,” and stands on its own.

This opening novel gives us Akiko’s painful backstory, shows her fighting like a fury to save her friends, and at the end launches her on a completely unexpected path.

***

A damaged but appealing protagonist whom I hope everybody will want to cheer on as she fights impossible odds using only her finely honed skills and wits, plenty of sharp martial arts action reminiscent of samurai and yakuza movies (including Tarantino’s KILL BILL 1 and 2 and just about anything by Takashi Mike), exotic settings, and strong, evocative, sensual writing. That’s about it.

Enjoy reading!

Akiko. Tokyo. Deep night.

Many readers have noted my “unconventional” approach to dialogue and sometimes also to indentation and punctuation.

In stark truth, I used to be much more “correct” about how I put together a piece of fiction. So correct, and so hyper-aware of real and imagined flaws, that I instantly destroyed just about everything I wrote.

Then, one fine day in 1992 or so, I read a generous excerpt from Cormac McCarthy’s ALL THE PRETTY HORSES in Esquire. (This was at a time when big magazines were still publishing interesting stuff.)

At that instant, a light bulb flashed on over my head, as I began to see the possibilities open for sheer writing. I began to see that there is no necessary contradiction between action and poetry.

The great spaghetti Westerns, Hong Kong gangster and Japanese yakuza crime movies, for example, are lyrical as well as gritty and bloody.

Akiko Royale

The inspiration to begin writing the “Akiko” series came to Okamoto through reading Ian Fleming’s first James Bond novel, CASINO ROYALE. “What sort of human being would I want to write a series of crime/thriller novels about? Who could keep me so deeply fascinated that I would want to write the adventures of an entire lifetime?”

And there, popping up out of nowhere, was the image of a beautiful but melancholy, starkly blue-eyed half-Japanese half-Caucasian woman boarding a ferry to take her to a remote island on the Sea of Japan. The story of “Akiko” arose from that moment and unfolded itself in terse stages. It was the birth of lonely ex-assassin Molly Vance.

_____

The ferry that sets out for Kamijima from the main island is a small and rickety and paint-peeling launch with a clanging engine, a single smokestack, and room for about thirty passengers. It runs once every two days. It does not carry automobiles, though some of the tourists bring aboard bicycles or motorscooters.

On that morning in June a pale young woman, wearing a white linen suit and sunglasses and thin leather sandals, her lips coated with red lipstick of a shade so dark it was almost black, boarded the ferry with two heavy black calfskin leather luggage bags; she hauled them across the wobbling gangplank by herself, one in each hand, over the gibbering objections and complaints of the little brown ferryman who tried in vain to take hold the straps and wrest the bags away from her. She carried them without any seeming effort and once onboard she slumped on a bench, in a space that mysteriously cleared for her, the heavy bags at her feet, and without any fuss lit a cigarette and smoked it staring at the Sea of Japan.

Blue-green water boiled white behind the engine and with much clanking and a muffled roar as a boy in shorts and an oil smudged t shirt tossed the heavy frayed bow and stern ropes back onto the deck and a puff of black smoke and the stink of diesel the boat shuddered deeply and turned in the water and pointed its prow toward the low and distant outline of Kamijima then began to slide and jolt away from shore. The woman flicked her cigarette overboard and crossed her arms over her chest, as if already feeling the cold. She rubbed her shoulders.

She seemed to enjoy being out on the water, away from the heat and clamor of the city, and as the dark hair flew over her face in the salt-laced wind she was  taking in everything, alert with all her senses, exuberant even.

One might have thought she was coming to life again . . .

Mexican Killing Ballads

MEXICAN KILLING BALLADS by Okamoto is available as a shocking and beautifully crafted little e-book from Amazon/Kindle.

How can you decide if you want to read this dark, gory, poetic and rather crazy little book of stories and micro-stories?

Do you like violence and mayhem told in a morose, sensitive, melancholy and lyrical way?

This despairing little book contains a “planed-down-to-bareness” story that is one of my own personal favorites of all I’ve written over the years: “The Coffin Maker’s Son.”

Allan Guthrie was my agent for a few years and tried valiantly to sell my novels OSAI’S RAZOR and THE LONELINESS OF THE BLUE-EYED ASSASSIN.

He’s also a fine crime writer, given to terse descriptions of gritty and dark Grand Guignol violence. As in his novel: SLAMMER.

Allan Guthrie is rather adamant that no character in a noir novel should be sympathetic.  He himself pulls this off brilliantly, somewhat like James M. Cain but with buckets rather than squibs of blood.

My own feelings are somewhat different. If I can’t sympathize with its protagonist, a book usually doesn’t cut very deep. Avoiding empathy, one risks writing what amount to mere manifestos of gore and academic exercises in mayhem.

I want to put you there and make you feel the action in a hair-raising way. This includes the risk of falling in love with a character who might be ill-fated, even doomed.

THE BLUE EYED DEATH IN OKINAWA

THE BLUE EYED DEATH IN OKINAWA just got a five star review on Amazon UK.

A razor sharp 11,000 word hardboiled crime story featuring the deadly but melancholy woman assassin Molly Vance, code named “Akiko.” It contains some extreme violence and erotic descriptions so is not suitable for younger readers.

Crime noir/thriller/suspense afficionados are slowly discovering my work online via my e-books.

My writing tries to answer the following urgent questions:

Can hard, dark gritty crime writing also be lyrical?

Can an action novel be written like an epic poem, full of sound and light and color?

Can suspense novels be used to communicate the real vitality and splendor of Zen?

Jacket Copy

In Okamoto’s crime novel THE LONELINESS OF THE BLUE-EYED ASSASSIN (previously titled AKIKO’S FURY), a deadly half-Japanese half-American woman ex-assassin tries to atone for her dark past by rebuilding a Zen temple on a remote island. But violent people won’t let her alone.

Orphaned at nine, the blue-eyed and black-haired Molly Vance is brought up in Tokyo by a taciturn yakuza gangster and trained thoroughly in the martial arts by the head of an ancient cult of woman assassins who all wear the tattoo of a Habu Kurage (the poisonous stinging Medusa jellyfish). At 18, she avenges her adoptive father’s death in a bloody rampage that destroys an entire rival yakuza clan. She then becomes a feared international assassin working for an ultra-mysterious criminal group known only as “the Organization.” But upon realizing the true motives behind the killings she is assigned, the beautiful and deadly”Akiko” quits the business and retires under a false identity to a remote island in the Sea of Japan, where she begins singlehandedly rebuilding a Zen temple to expunge her dark karma. Now the Organization has found a way to get at Molly through people in her past. To save their lives and her own, she will have to unleash all her fury.

Here is the first (of many, I hope) reviews of this novel: