Bungo Stray Dogs - Volume 3 Chapter 3 Part 5

Chapter 1 Part 5

“Guh…”
Fukuzawa turned around. Two bloody holes were carved in the secretary’s chest in the next room over. Blood gushed out of the wounds, dyeing his chest crimson. The assassin had shot the secretary—with his hands tied behind his back.
The secretary looked at Fukuzawa one last time, his expression twisted in agony, before drawing his last breath and collapsing. The hit man’s shots were unbelievably accurate. Despite not being able to see and having his hands tied, he was able to precisely hit his target. To top it all off, he paid no attention to Fukuzawa in spite of the fact that they were in the middle of battle.
“There is only retaliation—revenge against those who betray you.”
Fukuzawa faced the assassin, then slammed him against the floor. He kicked the gun into the corner of the room.

“You bastard…!”
He ripped off the sack covering the assassin’s face. He was young, with short hair that had a reddish tinge to it. The boy’s dark-brown eyes were frighteningly vacant, void of even a fragment of emotion. The young assassin didn’t say a word; he stared back at Fukuzawa.
Fukuzawa suddenly recalled a rumor he had heard about a young redheaded hit man who wielded two pistols and coldly killed his targets while never showing any emotion. His skill with a gun was supernatural, and he could fire from any position and still not miss. It was as if he could see the future. He was a living nightmare for people like Fukuzawa whose job was to protect others.
That young assassin’s name was something like…Oda.
Fukuzawa grabbed the assassin’s collar, then wrapped his other arm around the boy’s neck and put him in a rear naked choke, restricting the blood flow to his brain via the carotid arteries. If this kid was that assassin, then leaving him conscious in this room was no different from letting a cat play on the control panel to a nuclear bomb. The boy looked back at Fukuzawa with lifeless eyes—not the way one would expect a boy to look at the person choking them unconscious. Before long, the assassin quickly passed out without even showing any signs of resistance. He probably wasn’t interested in anything other than shooting the secretary. Only after making sure the assassin was unconscious could Fukuzawa finally let out a deep breath.
“So that’s the hit man?”
Fukuzawa turned around toward the voice coming from the other room. “Call an ambulance. And the police,” he ordered.
“Wouldn’t the police be enough? I mean, the secretary’s already dead.
More importantly, I’m out of a job now, so could you help me out?”
Fukuzawa’s head was spinning. What was wrong with this kid? What just happened?
“Call an ambulance first!” Fukuzawa stood up and began to walk away. “Hey, don’t just leave me here. What happened to taking me out to eat?
You said it like I could go wherever I wanted and eat whatever as much as I wanted. That’s what you meant, right? You meant we could talk about my situation while we eat, right? Right?”
Fukuzawa somehow managed to keep his legs from giving out from underneath him. “You—”
The young man with cropped hair beamed, radiating innocence and mirth.

“The name’s Ranpo Edogawa. Don’t you forget it!”
Fukuzawa felt as if he were watching a nightmare play out before his eyes. The boy, who introduced himself as Ranpo Edogawa, was eating red bean porridge on his dime. And it wasn’t just one or two bowls, either.
They’d stopped at an old-fashioned café relatively close to where the murder took place. There were a few other customers present, and they kept glancing in Fukuzawa and Ranpo’s direction. Fukuzawa had to fight against the impulse to go around the shop explaining that this kid just followed him here for some reason. Ranpo had already finished his eighth bowl and was currently digging into his ninth. Fukuzawa was sitting in suspense, but not because he was worried about how much money he had left. He had enough. The problem was—
“Hey!” Fukuzawa just couldn’t hold it in any longer. “Why aren’t you eating the mochi?”
—in each finished bowl of Ranpo’s porridge sat several white mochi, entirely untouched. He was eating only the red beans.
“Because they’re not sweet.”
Not sweet? It’s red bean porridge. The stuff is more mochi than red bean.
If he were simply looking for a sugar rush, then he could have gotten sweet bean jelly, mashed sweet potatoes, or even a sweet bun. “Hear that? Those are the wails of the mochi you left behind” is what Fukuzawa wanted to say, but he held his tongue. There was nothing more meaningless than wagging one’s finger at another’s food preferences. It was hard to watch, but it wasn’t as if Ranpo were committing any crimes. He didn’t want things to get worse by saying anything, either. Just imagining Ranpo peeling off the bread of the sweet bun and eating only the red bean paste inside made him shudder. If Fukuzawa criticized him for being wasteful, the boy would call him a cranky old guy, he was sure.
When the police finally arrived at the crime scene, Fukuzawa and Ranpo explained the situation. It was a rather complicated statement, and having no interest in talking, Ranpo tried to casually leave. Nevertheless, Fukuzawa somehow convinced him to stay and explain what happened in the president’s office. Fukuzawa and Ranpo would have been put in a bizarre position if they made one wrong move, but they ended up being let go almost immediately after telling their side of the story. One of the officers happened to know of Fukuzawa due to his being a well-known martial artist, which fortunately helped them receive the police officers’ complete trust. One condition was that they would still have to come to the station to tell their story again, though.
When the police checked the scene of the crime, they discovered a plastic mold of the assassin’s fingerprints in the secretary’s overcoat pocket. When another squad searched the secretary’s house, they apparently found an instrument used for duplicating fingerprints from samples and another mold in the shape of the assassin’s fingerprints on both hands. All the evidence backed up Ranpo’s claim.
Fukuzawa’s client was finally able to rest in peace thanks to Ranpo, which is why Fukuzawa was indebted to him. In other words, he owed him one. Fukuzawa, though, still couldn’t comprehend how things ended up like this. He mulled it over. Subjectively speaking, all this boy did was disrupt things, but he was objectively solving the case through reasoning. It was an utterly brilliant deduction. He was able to pick out the real criminal after getting only a quick glance of the scene of the crime and people involved. Even then, Fukuzawa still wasn’t able to understand Ranpo’s actions, or put more precisely, he still couldn’t make sense of what had occurred.
What in the world…happened back there? “Hey, kid.” Fukuzawa spoke up. “Mmph?”
Ranpo looked back at him with a mouth stuffed with red beans. “Drink your tea,” Fukuzawa wanted to respond, but he held back once again. Ranpo would probably just claim that it wasn’t sweet enough, just like the mochi. Not having tea with sweets was beyond Fukuzawa’s comprehension, but since he believed that it would be rude to talk ill of others’ preferences, he merely said “Okay” and moved on.
Fukuzawa was more interested in what had happened in the office, but he stopped himself from asking “What was that back there?” because he knew he wouldn’t get an answer from the boy like that.
Instead, Fukuzawa reworded his question. “When did you realize the secretary was behind it?”
“From the very beginning,” Ranpo replied, clumsily chasing after the red beans in his porridge with chopsticks. “He was wearing a coat, right? You don’t need a long overcoat to organize documents. In fact, your sleeves would get in the way.”
Fukuzawa nodded. The tool used to create fake fingerprints of the assassin was in the overcoat pocket. He must have needed the large coat pocket to hide something as bulky as that tool.
“Do these sorts of things happen to you often?”
“Sometimes,” Ranpo replied while swallowing down some red beans. “At the workplace, on the side of the street… I used to always stick my nose into stuff that bothered me, but people would just treat me like a nuisance or think I’m weird. After a while, I got tired of it. Sigh. Good grief. The adult world makes my skin crawl.”
Ranpo shook his head and frowned in disgust. “Do you dislike the adult world?”
“I hate it. It makes absolutely no sense.”
Fukuzawa felt there was something off about Ranpo’s truly appalled expression. It was odd that it “made absolutely no sense” to this boy. Fukuzawa felt the urge to point out that there were also many wonderful things in the world, but he yet again kept it to himself. He didn’t feel as if he had the right to tell such fairy tales.
“Fukuzawa, you dare betray us?”
“Was our oath to the welfare of the nation nothing more than a lie, Fukuzawa? Did your words have no meaning?”
Fukuzawa gave up the sword that day, but he could feel its weight against his hip. He wasn’t going to make excuses saying that it was morally just, but…
Suddenly, he noticed that Ranpo was staring at him. It was as if his clear, deep eyes were peeking into Fukuzawa’s head—as if he had access to the memories hidden in the depths of his brain. Fukuzawa averted his gaze, then said the first thing that came to mind.
“You said you came for an interview earlier. What about school?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” Ranpo answered, annoyed. “I was attending the police academy and living in the dorm until they kicked me out less than a year ago.”
“They kicked you out?”
“The rules were a pain in the ass. Don’t leave the dorm after curfew, no buying sweets, wear these clothes, follow these rules. And the classes bored me to death. Dealing with other people is such a hassle, too. I ended up getting into an argument with the warden and exposed all his past exploits with women, so he kicked me out.” That would certainly do it.
“I’ve been moving from place to place since then. When I was working and living at a military post, I told everyone about the chief’s embezzlement, so I got expelled. When I did errands at a construction site, I got sick of the corporate hierarchy and ran away. When I was working in postal delivery, I found an unnecessary letter and threw it away before checking what was inside, so they fired me. But who would even want a useless letter? Nobody. That’s who.”
Ranpo made it sound as if it were an accepted fact while Fukuzawa inwardly groaned. Living at a military post, working at a construction site, and delivering mail… They really did sound like jobs this kid wouldn’t be able to handle.
“The city really is a mystery to me.”
The city—why did he leave his hometown? “What about your parents back home?”
“They’re dead.” A faint hue of sorrow flashed across Ranpo’s face. “Died in an accident. I don’t have any siblings or relatives, either, so I came to Yokohama. My dad told me to go to the Yokohama Police Academy’s principal for help if anything ever happened to him. They apparently knew each other, and my dad was kind of well-known for a police officer. But, well, I got kicked out of the academy pretty quickly.”
“What was your father’s name?”
When Ranpo told Fukuzawa, he was slightly taken aback. It was a name even Fukuzawa knew. There wasn’t a soul who worked in his business who didn’t.
The man was a legendary detective. The “Headless Officer” case, the “Moonlight Phantom,” the “Cow Head Incident”—he helped solve several difficult cases that shook the nation. His powers of deduction and observation were so extraordinary that people called him the Clairvoyant. He was highly respected and praised.
There were rumors that he retired and moved to the countryside, but… he passed away?
“He probably wasn’t amazing enough to be known to the public or anything, though. He could never beat my mom when it came to solving mysteries or reasoning, so she always got the upper hand on him when they argued back home.”