Case Closed Fan Fiction ❯ When Pandora's Box Is Opened ❯ Poison ( Chapter 58 )

Chapter Fifty-Eight

Poison

Heiji stared a little gloomily at the sky as he and Kazuha walked along the streets of Osaka. The sky was thick with grey clouds, and a snowstorm seemed imminent. The roads were fairly quiet, almost no-one else around- most people were getting indoors as the temperature dropped rapidly.

“I'm gonna check out plane tickets ta Tokyo fer Sunday,” he commented. “Gonna see how the kiddo an' Hakuba an' the rest of `em are doin'...”

“When did you an' Hakuba become so friendly?” Kazuha said in surprise.

“Since we realized that we're both tryin' ta pull pals outta the same deep shit,” Heiji didn't say. Instead he just said “eh, the guy's tolerable when ya get used to `im.”

“Mind if I come with? I wanna see Ran-chan,” Kazuha asked.

“Sure, no prob,” Heiji said. “I'll ask fer two tickets...”

“Great!” Kazuha said. “Ahh!” She had jumped a little from excitement at the impending trip, and her hairpin had fallen out.

“Hey, it's the one I gave ya,” Heiji said, picking it up and handing it to her. She blushed a little.

“Yeah,” she admitted. “I like it. It's so pretty... the sakura kinda reminds me of Kyoto...”

“Yeah?” Heiji said. “The sakura viewin' there really is somethin'...”

That reminds me...” Kazuha said thoughtfully. “You saw her there, didn't ya? Your first love?” she sounded a little hesitant.

“Oh yeah,” Heiji remembered. “Did I ever tell ya that story?”

“Not really,” she admitted. “I just read it in that interview... what happened, exactly? What'd she look like?”

Heiji was suddenly tongue-tied. It should be easy, right? After all, that day was still crystal clear in his memory. It'd be easy to give Kazuha the details, and it wouldn't take her long to realize that it was her...

But somehow, the thought of telling Kazuha that she had been his first love made Heiji nervous enough to sweat in the freezing street. Still, there didn't seem to be anybody else around...

“Well...” he began, then stopped. Something was nagging at the back of his brain, and a second later he realized why. There was someone else on the otherwise empty street. And whoever it was had just pressed a gun into his shoulderblades.

“All right, lovebirds,” said a cold, gravelly voice, “don't move a muscle.”

{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{ }{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{} {}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}

“Toyama-keibu! Otaki yelled, running down the road to the cordoned-off house where the man in question had been investigating a murder last night.

“Otaki? What's the problem?” he asked.

“You were closer than Hattori-keibu...” he panted. “Look... our bugs in Saku's place were jammed, but one of the Techs found a way to bypass the white noise, then he turned the volume right up on what was left, and... look, where's Hei-chan?”

“He and Kazuha will be getting out of school right now...” Toyama said, then stopped as a fear suddenly gripped him. “Otaki, what was on the tape?”

“We heard an unfamiliar voice, probably the executive that he was meeting,” Otaki said. “He asked “Who is it?” and the response was...” he gulped, face paling. “ Saku said “Chief's son, Hattori Heiji, Eighteen. Dark-skinned. Been hanging around the police station since he was born, practically. That's how he did it- he has influence over cops, knows what cops he can trust, protected by his father's influence... he's been seen snooping around places that we neutralized after that Kid debacle...” It's the people that Hei-chan was investigating... They know.”

“Dammit!” Toyama tried to dial his daughter's mobile, but a couple of rings in he got a “number cannot be reached” message. Heiji's phone didn't ring at all. Toyama felt a powerful fear, for the idiot boy that was his best friend's son and his daughter's best friend and for his daughter, who would have walked home with him, who would be involved if anyone was coming after him, if anything happened to him...

“Hattori-kun,” he said a minute later, having dialled the chief in the feverent hope that they were at his house and both of their phone batteries had run out, “Do you know where Heiji-kun and Kazuha are?”

“They'll be walking home from school about now... I know that Heiji isn't home yet...”

“According to Otaki, a couple of techs got past the white noise on our bugs in Saku's apartment,” Toyama said. “There was a short information exchange before the executive... Gin... shot Saku.”

“Information?”

“Heiji-kun,” Toyama said. “They know it was him. They know he caught the infiltrators. They are after him, Hattori-kun, and neither he nor Kazuha are picking up their phones...”

“Dammit! I'll put out an alert, find out if anyone's seen them, mention that it's in connection with the flushout. We know there's none left now, thanks to those documents. I'll head out to the forest to the north soon...”

“The forest?”

“It's elementary. If he knows who Heiji is, he knows who I am. Obvious murders of the children of important police officers warrant unnecessary trouble. But there's a snowstorm coming, if they just knocked out Heiji... and probably Kazuha, if she's with him... and left him in the forest...”

“Shit... I'll head out too.” He hung up, glaring at Otaki.

“Tell me you have a car with you,” he said.

“Moving out now,” Otaki said, leading the way.

{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{ }{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{} {}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}

“Alright, lovebirds,” a cold, gravelly voice said. “Don't move a muscle.”

Heiji froze, not because he'd been told to, but simply because it was his natural reaction to the unfortunately familiar sensation of the barrel of a gun pressing into his back.

“Wha-?” Kazuha said, starting to turn around. Heiji reached out his arm to stop her. It wasn't quite the guns that made him do it, but it was more down to the fact that, in a corner of his brain, some alarm bells were ringing. His detective instincts were screaming like a siren, and what they were screaming was: “Armed, murdering bastard in the immediate vicinity!”

Kazuha's phone rang. “Hand it over,” the cold voice demanded. Heiji caught Kazuha's eye and nodded slightly. She pulled it out, but a hand in a black glove grabbed it, switching it off and sticking it back in her pocket. He repeated the same process with Heiji's phone.

“I see,” he thought. “When we're found, it'll just be that we switched off our phones, no sinister play... that's what they're thinking...”

“Now, we're going to take a little walk,” the cold voice said pleasantly, or at least what was probably its idea of pleasantly, “and discuss the consequences of curiosity.”

“Specifically,” said a second, deeper voice, “the consequences for nosy teens who get too curious about electrics. And antiques. And pharmaceuticals.” Heiji felt the gun in his back nudge him slightly, pushing him on. He took a step forwards. Kazuha didn't move.

“Move it, girl,” the cold voice hissed. Kazuha still didn't move.

“Heiji...” she said, and he could hear the fear in her voice. Her eyes were wide, her face pale. Her arm was trembling under him hand. This girl could break a man's arm like a chopstick, but perhaps she felt it too; the very certain knowledge that if she tried that now, she'd be dead before she touched either of them. For the first time, Heiji felt terrified. He'd had to stick his nose in it, he wasn't cautious enough, and now Kazuha was getting dragged along for the ride...

He dropped his hand down her arm to grasp her hand. Giving it a gentle squeeze, he forced himself to smile. “C'mon, Kazuha,” he said, “It's all right. I guess these guys really need ta talk ta me. Come on. It's OK.”

Kazuha didn't get any colour back in her face, but he saw her eyes change as she steeled herself and nodded. As she gripped his hand back, he could feel her fighting the trembling, although it didn't stop.

“C'mon, kids,” the deep voice sneered, “You'll have time to cuddle later. All the time in the world.” Heiji felt another prod in his spine from the gun. Together, they began to walk.

They kept to residential backstreets, following the directions of the voices attached to the guns. There was no-one around to notice them at all as they headed towards the edges of Osaka, where the houses slowly merged into forests. Everyone was getting out of the way before the fat black clouds overhead dropped their payload.

Light snowflakes began drifting down as they started crossing a bridge. Ten feet below, a snow-swollen river was rushing by, cold but moving too fast to freeze. Heiji didn't bother trying to remember what it was called- instead, he began summoning up measurements, particularly depth. He started estimating how deep it would be, this swollen, particularly in the centre.

“You sure about that? Perfect,” the deep voice said. It took a second for Heiji to register that this comment wasn't directed at him- they had slowed to allow one of the guns to talk into a cellphone. “No, I didn't. What? What does she thinks she's... Fine. No, of course not. Kids randomly turning up with bullets in the brain is enough trouble when they're not cops' kids, for Kami's sake. Now, if a couple of teenagers turn up in a forest after a blizzard, dead, frozen, no obvious marks...”

Heiji heard Kazuha inhale sharply. “The cops'll test for poison anyway,” he commented. “Knew it,” he thought, estimating where the centre of the river was. “They weren't gonna shoot us unless they had to, otherwise they woulda done it back in the street... Makes this a bit easier to risk...”

“Lucky for us this stuff's untraceable, eh?” the deep voice chuckled. “By the way, Aniki... seems she's here. And she says that the cops just flared up over something, although since another in what seems to be a string of serial murders was found, she thinks that it might be over the murderer... still, there's a dragnet that we need to watch for...”

“What does she think she's... Hey now,” the cold voice said as Heiji's pace slowed marginally, “don't try anything funny, kid. You're not the first nosy kids we've silenced...”

Heiji squeezed Kazuha's hand tighter. “Sorry, don't plan on joining the club,” he said, throwing his body backwards, smashing into the hand holding the gun, knocking it loose from the hand that gripped it. Turning to see his attackers for the first time, he saw a tall, powerfully built man in dark glasses- likely the owner of the deeper voice- cursing and shoving his cellphone into his pocket while raising his gun. Using the inertia of his leap backwards, he threw Kazuha forwards and over the handrail. She screamed as he let go of her hand, dropping her into the river. A second later, a bullet grazed the air where her head had been.

“Shit! Damn you, kid!”

As soon as his hands were free, Heiji had tried to grab the gun that the cold-voiced man- now revealed to have very long, silvery-blond hair and eyes that set the alarms in Heiji's brain ringing again- had dropped, but the man had quick reflexes; he already had half a grip on the gun with his left hand, and wasn't letting go. Over his shoulder, Heiji saw the deep-voiced man firing repeatedly into the river. Heiji vaguely remembered something from physics about refraction of light affecting how well you could aim at something underwater. He prayed that it was a significant effect. The blond used Heiji's moment of distraction to throw a powerful knee into Heiji's ribs, followed by a slightly less powerful foot into somewhere that was nevertheless arguably more painful.

No doubt about it; the guy was a self-evident bastard.

Reflexively, Heiji left go of the gun. To his shock, so did the blond. As Heiji inhaled sharply through his mouth, trying to refill his lungs, the bastard's right hand was over his throat and the now-gunless left hand was over his mouth, shoving something down his throat. Heiji automatically swallowed something small and smooth.

A pill.

Poison.

Instantly, Heiji felt a burning pain rip through him. He howled as he fell away from the men. He vaguely saw the blond stooping to pick up his gun, and the one in the glasses turning to face him. Had he hit Kazuha, or had she been swept away...? He pulled himself upright on the handrail, but as another wave of pain submerged him, pure fire pouring into his bones, he toppled over, into the river.

Even the near-frozen water wasn't cold enough to stop the pain. He was hot. He was burning...

Several small, fast somethings hit the water around him, but his mind was too consumed by the fire to notice, not even when they stopped. Cold water filled his lungs when he breathed, so why were they still full of fire?

He reached out desperately, thrashing in the water, trying anything to subdue the pain, even a little. His hand struck against a rock and he grabbed in, pulling himself upwards and onto a banking of frozen earth. The cold air struck his soaking skin and hair, freezing him, and it wasn't enough. The fire just got hotter. Dammit, he was dying...

He tried to crawl forwards, into the trees, desperate to find someone, anyone. Someone had to know how to make it stop. But movement was growing harder as his sodden clothes continued to grow heavier, and his bones were melting, and he couldn't support himself...

{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{ }{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{} {}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}

“I see you two are doing all right after your near-death experience,” Yumi chuckled, clapping her hands onto Miwako and Takagi's shoulders. Miwako jumped in surprise, stepping back from the coffee maker where she'd just been preparing a fresh pot.

“You can get a cup first,” she said, waving to Shiratori, who had been hovering at the head of the little clique of officers that always formed around fresh coffee. “Did you hear about the autopsy on my car, Yumi?”

“It's not as bad as you thought,” Yumi said, lowering her voice. “There was still visible evidence of tampering. But it was still bad enough to warrant claiming a new car on expenses.”

“Tampering,” Takagi muttered. “I guess we are onto something-”

“Shiratori-keibu!”

Miwako and Takagi both whipped around to see a couple of officers catching Shiratori as he collapsed, eyes bulging, clutching at his throat and croaking in pain. Color was rapidly leeching from his skin.

“Call an ambulance, Takagi-kun!” Miwako yelled, kneeling down next to Shiratori as his eyes rolled up into his head. “CPR, now!”

“He just wiped a spilled drop and licked his finger,” one cop said, picking up a dropped cup of coffee. “Kami above... what's in this?”

“Somebody send it down to forensics!” another man yelled. “And Sato-san... I'm sorry, but you'll have to stay here. You were the last person to touch the coffee maker and all...”

“I know,” Miwako whispered, pounding on Shiratori's chest, keeping his heart beating. She and Takagi shared a look as he yelled for an ambulance.

This wasn't meant for him.

It was meant for us.

{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{ }{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{} {}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}

{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{ }{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{} {}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}

New full-length trailer AMV! Check it out: http:// www . youtube.com/ watch?v=ZgkAx33CzLo (remove the spaces)

Now... he knows, A Midsummer Night's Dream. Now he knows.

I don't imagine anyone's going to like this chapter much, Desperatembrace... Yeah, he had time to compose himself, and as he said, it actually makes a lot of sense relative to some of the stuff that goes on in his world... The heist may have to wait...

Mhh? That's all you have to say about it, FaithlessGirl?

The future, Yuki Taiki!... is not looking very long for Heiji...

You can't kill Shinichi if you try, KageNoNeko. Gin should know XD

Even the bad guys have their reasons, Mel72000, even if they generally are totally evil, self-serving ones. But once in a while... Nope, Ai's mother was called Elena. She was American or British (can't remember which), not Japanese. Hanako is... somebody's mother.

You're still fine, FHP2208 ^_^ It probably does help Shinichi to know who he is... Yeah, she's strange, but there's a method to the madness, I promise ^_-

Ah, so you realized that spoiler, Kairi922? ^_- the video's full of `em, if you can make sense of them... XD MUAHAHAHAHA! *ahem* I got the idea staring at the drinks list when we went to a restaurant for my grandma's birthday. I just wandered down the list... “tequila, he was the big guy, Martini, that one's not been used, Gin and tonic, he's a bastard, Schnapps, not been used either... I quite like that one, actually...” XD I'd watch those comments about being killed by a guy named Schnapps, though...

Glad you know what you want to do with your life, Marie Ravenclaw. I'm still pretty much making it up as I go along XD Kir! *wants chapter 702* Kami, I hope she doesn't die...

I just think about how I want him to come and what I want him to steal and poeticize it, JapaneseAnimeFreak16... TBH, I'm always worried that it's not as good as the notes in the manga. Nahh, Heiji doesn't really have a calm and sensible side...XD I hope you enjoy Cedar Point!

Like I said, Sharishima... I just poeticize what I want him to do. (I also just realized that my spellchecker hasn't put a red line under “poeticize”. So it's actually a word? O_o) XDXD Ahhh, if you can make a reference to Magic Max, there's a moment in the upcoming heist that you will LOVE... XD The anime's not caught up with the manga yet. You really should read it on Onemanga or DCTP. There's so much happening right now... KIIIIIIIIR!

Yukiko knows, Yoshimi Kurosaki... and now, so does Shinichi! ^_^

That sucks, HaibaraDaiFan! :O I couldn't get anything through the link either T_T stupid attackers... at least you're getting somewhere with Little Secrets. Can't wait! ^_^

It sort of happened, Pretztailfan95... It part 1, you could say. I think Shinichi was in too much of a bad way for her to get pissed off at him...

I'm a perfectionist, Hybrid Speed. I tend to niggle over the details myself XD

You're close, Kayla Edogawa, but there's one important detail that nobody's gotten right yet... Florida? Cool! I hope you enjoy yourself. I haven't been there since I was little. (Disneyland! :D)

I do not claim to own any of the characters in Meitantei Conan. They are the intellectual property of Aoyama Gosho. All characters, couples and locations, if Canon, will be faithful to the manga, so if you're into fics with weird pairings like Shinichi and Heiji, the back button is at the top there. The fic may not make sense if you have not read up to chapter 698, which you can do at a site called (read between the lines) O/n/e/ma/n/g/a, but I advise you to buy the official Tankoban novels (up to volume 30 are out in English at the time of writing) so that Aoyama-sensei can afford to continue gracing us with his imagination. Now, I hope you enjoy the fic! (If you don't, please see my previous comments re the back button).