The Second Destination
At James’s confession, Colt rose to his feet with tears welling in his eyes.
“Oh, James.”
“Whoa, whoa.”
Colt’s feelings were easy enough to understand, but...
“Could you not come any closer? I don’t exactly want skin-to-skin contact with you.”
He said it because Colt had started moving in as if to hug him.
“…Tch.”
“Anyway!”
There was a reason this conversation had started, so it had to be brought to a close.
“There’s nothing in Texas except my adoptive parents’ graves. I’ll go there someday, but not now.”
“Then who are you looking for...?”
“I was adopted in South Korea, if you remember. So once the trip to England is over, I’m planning to go there. That’ll be my second destination.”
“Ah, so that’s it?”
Colt spoke as if he knew the place well.
“You know Korea?”
“Foreign tourists in Las Vegas used to come watch our shows all the time.”
“…And that’s all you know?”
“Pretty much.”
That was about the extent of James’s own knowledge, too. The Koreans who came to see the show were curious about where an Asian magician had come from, and once they learned he was from Korea, they’d cheer even louder.
That was all I knew, too.
He had no memory of forming any separate ties with them.
“Not much help, then.”
What James knew about Korea was nothing more than a blur of old memories. After being adopted into the United States, he had never bothered to learn more. If he had grown up without incident and become an adult, maybe he would have gone looking for his roots, but after the gunshot incident, he hadn’t had room in his head for anything like that.
The Korean customers he met while performing as a magician, from the stage and from the audience, were the full extent of his connection to the country.
“I’ve got one more thing!”
James asked in a tone that made it clear he expected nothing at all.
“…What is it?”
“Sometimes with Asian women, I... at least...”
As expected, it was a connection that would be of no help whatsoever.
“Forget it!”
“Jimmy, you don’t know how useful this face is?”
“Hm...”
He couldn’t deny that Colt’s handsome face was the kind that worked anywhere.
“I don’t see how that helps me find my biological parents.”
But Colt’s looks didn’t seem likely to do much for an Asian country’s bureaucracy.
“Hey, man. People are the same everywhere. If I ask nicely with this face, anybody’ll help out.”
“Well... I guess that’s true.”
In fact, if you went to a restaurant with Colt, the same money would buy you a lot more food. Of course, that came with the waitress’s subtle flirting during the meal, but even so, Colt was definitely useful.
“I’m going with you, too.”
“…Going where?”
“Europe & South Korea.”
“You want to follow me around?”
“Then what am I supposed to do here by myself?”
“Uh...”
“I’m not going to work, but I can’t exactly host the show without you either...”
“……”
There probably wasn’t anyone who wanted to go back to doing that tedious work after getting their hands on a pile of cash.
“Besides, I figure there’ll be plenty of interesting things if I travel with the world’s only magician.”
“Heh. Then let me ask you one thing, Colt.”
By then, James was already halfway to giving his permission.
“Ask away.”
He lowered his voice and asked, “How exactly do you plan to get rid of the cash in the trailer and leave?”
“Just put it in a bank...”
That was far too naive.
Idiot...
“How exactly are you planning to explain where it came from?”
“Where it came from? Explain it to who? It’s my money.”
James shook his head as if the idea was hopeless.
“The moment Colt deposits it in a bank, the Internal Revenue Service will come calling. And they’ll start asking where that huge pile of cash came from in the first place.”
“……”
“You know why drug dealers like cash? Because the IRS is always watching bank deposits and withdrawals. Everybody’s under surveillance.”
“…So what do we do?”
James recalled the closing section of the plan he had made before robbing the casino and explained.
“What else? If you want to launder money, you start a suitable business. You report profits whether you actually made them or not, pay your taxes on time, and only then can you use that money legitimately.”
It would take at least ten years to launder more than twenty million dollars, and that was the bare minimum. The actual timetable James had set for laundering the money stretched well beyond twenty years.
Just how much can some ordinary schmuck really make from running a business...?
Even if the business did fairly well, it would still take a long time to earn tens of millions of dollars.
“Then couldn’t you just report a huge profit and get it cleaned up faster?”
“Overreport profits just to launder money faster? The IRS would still come knocking. Every industry has average revenue and profit margins. If you blow past those, you end up on their radar. They don’t miss things.”
Colt couldn’t deposit the money in a bank, and he couldn’t speed up laundering by inflating profits, either.
“Damn...”
“You going to throw all that money away and come after me?”
Throwing away the money was the last way to keep chasing James.
“How could I possibly throw that away?”
“Heh.”
Colt grabbed his head and thought hard, then suddenly lifted his head.
Wait. Then isn’t James in the same boat?
He wasn’t the only one holding a huge pile of cash. James had even more of it than he did.
“Hey... seems like I’m not the only one who has something to worry about. You’re the one who has to leave, too.”
“Heh heh. Took you long enough?”
James had been waiting to see when Colt would realize it.
“So you’ve got a way? Of course you do!”
“I do have a way, but I can’t tell yet whether Colt will agree to it.”
“What is it?”
“This isn’t a good place for that conversation. Let’s go upstairs.”
Hotel guests and staff were moving around the pool area around them.
“Call it.”
“C-call, Colt!”
“……”
***
After James got dressed and went back up to the hotel room, Colt kept urging him on.
“All right, spill it already. How are you planning to launder the money?”
“First things first, the method doesn’t change. Starting a cash-heavy business and reporting profits to launder the money is still the only real option.”
Even if he won the Powerball, the winnings themselves could be explained, but a vast pile of cash still had no way to prove its source. In the end, it had to be brought into the light through a business if he wanted to buy a house and a car legally, under the tax system.
“What? There wasn’t another way?”
“It’s more a matter of timing.”
James planned to finish the journey to find his teacher’s inheritance and the journey to find his own roots, then launder the money at his leisure.
“...After the trips, then? So how do I handle that money in the meantime? I can’t just leave it with someone.”
From the start, Colt had been worried about the trailer parked in the hotel lot. Only after hearing James say he had handled it magically did he finally start to relax.
“I’ve got a method for that. Wait here.”
James drew a line with his finger, and a thread of mana visible only to him traced itself into the air.
The line begins from a point, and beyond space...
What James was drawing was a path of mana that was and was not a line. As the curves and straight lines twisted together, the mana finally met itself and joined. Because he had fashioned it from a single strand of mana, when it was unraveled and spread out, it was ultimately nothing more than a circle wound into itself. That created a surface. A new gate had been formed.
The surface forms a new dimension...
Another line appeared. The source of the new surface had revealed itself. After that, complex planes began to intertwine and carve out a three-dimensional magic circle.
Connecting to my space...
At last, James’s will reached the magic circle and activated it.
Hooooooong.
As his intent fused with the three-dimensional magic circle, the mana took on an entirely different quality, and the result began to show itself even to Colt’s eyes.
Inventory gate, open.
Shaaaak.
Then a sinister black opening appeared. It was magic Colt was seeing for the first time.
“!”
“My personal storage room, coming right up.”
“S-storage room?”
“A portable magic warehouse.”
This storage space had not been created by James. It had been recorded in Master Mersia’s book, and he was merely opening the door and using it.
She said it was for someone who could learn magic by reading, which means it’s mine in the end!
His teacher had been a mage of a far higher level, capable of creating a magic warehouse, but James had not yet reached that point. Still, opening the door was easy enough, and that meant he could use the storage his master had left behind.
James had known the magic warehouse existed and once thought it would have been nice if his teacher Mersia had left her inheritance inside it, but after learning the circle and opening the door for the first time, he understood something else.
I had no idea the first person to open it would automatically become its owner.
[From this point on, I shall discuss the inventory utilized through magic. ...]
The contents about the inventory were quite long, but the important point was that the magic warehouse recognized its owner the moment the door was opened. If his teacher had opened it here to place something inside, it would have become hers, and no one else would have been able to open it afterward.
For the same reason, his teacher had chosen a huge monument that could survive intact into the future and hidden her inheritance within it so she could pass it on safely to her descendants.
“A portable magic warehouse?”
“I can open and close it anytime, anywhere.”
But drawing and activating an inventory-only magic circle in midair required considerable concentration even from James. It wasn’t magic permitted to an intermediate mage in the first place.
Swish.
“Guh! Your hand disappeared!”
James reached into the black space and casually pulled out the book from his teacher that had made him who he was today.
“It’s just gone into another space for a moment.”
“Ooooh.”
“If I leave it here, I won’t have to worry even when I go overseas. Nobody can steal from a place like this.”
“Ooooooh!”
“The only problem is that I’m the only one who can open and close it.”
“…Wait. Then what about me?”
“Obviously impossible.”
“……”
That was why Colt’s approval was necessary. The money split between them, sixty-forty, belonged to each of them. But if James, as the owner of the magic warehouse, decided to be difficult and refused to hand it over, Colt would have no way to get his money back.
“So I put my money in your pocket? In a pocket I can’t take a single cent out of without your permission?”
“Exactly. That’s why the timing is the only difference. Later, I hand it all back to Colt and then start laundering it.”
James waved his hand through the air and shut the door of the magic warehouse.
“Why would I agree to that?”
“…If you didn’t want it, I wasn’t planning to force you.”
James had only explained the method.
It’s Colt’s decision, not mine.
Still, James could feel the disappointment rising in his own chest at Colt’s refusal.
“……”
...Did I want to travel with Colt?
He supposed it was because, after becoming an adult, he had come to rely on Colt emotionally much more than he had before.
There aren’t many people in this world you can trust.
It wasn’t just trust. Colt also looked at him without prejudice, even though he had the face of an Asian man. Colt’s gaze hadn’t changed even after learning that James was a magician. That was why he could trust him more.
He does do dumb things sometimes, though...
James hid the disappointment rising in his heart and started to stand.
“Then our conversation ends her...”
“What’s all this about needing permission in the first place?”
“Huh?”
“Where else in the world are you going to find a guy as sharp about money as you?”
That’s true.
James sat back down and listened as Colt went on.
“If you’d been planning to run off with my money, I wouldn’t have had a thing I could do about it.”
It was the plain truth. But James had never had any intention of doing that in the first place.
Why would I need Colt’s money that badly?
In truth, part of why he had planned and carried through with this whole thing was his determination to focus on higher magic, but there was also the desire to do something for Colt, who had been a support at his side all this time. Someone with that kind of feeling wouldn’t betray Colt over a few extra dollars.
“So if James is willing to keep it somewhere it can’t be stolen, I’d say I’m the one who should be asking you for a favor.”
“Mm-hm. That was the most reasonable conclusion I’ve heard from Colt in a while.”
“You thought I was really going to say no?”
“……”
“Can I be offended now?”
“…Sorry.”
It was a short, blunt apology, but Colt broke into a broad grin.
“Hah. Every time you apologize, it feels new.”
“…Don’t get used to it. That’s the end of my apologies.”
“Heh heh heh.”
“I’m going to the parking lot to secure the money first.”
James sprang to his feet.
“What am I supposed to do?”
“…Look into flights. I’m thinking of going to Stonehenge.”
“Two tickets, first class. Call it.”
“Heh.”
Maybe because he had finally laid all the old stories bare, James felt a little closer to Colt now.
If I’d had a brother...
He thought he would have been a brother like Colt.
“Since we’re going anyway, maybe I’ll set it for tomorrow...”
James was on his way out when Colt’s voice reached him, and he hurried back inside to shout, “Have you lost your mind? What’s the rush!”
“…You hadn’t left yet?”
“If nobody’s dragging you off, set it with plenty of time!”
“…Tch, call it.”
It was probably because the newspaper he had read today had made him feel restless.
“Honestly. You’re scared of everything...”
“Aren’t you?”
“Being unafraid is a basic requirement for a magician.”
He hadn’t understood it before, but now he did. What Master Mersia had called “one who walks between life and death” meant a state of detachment from life, and that in turn referred to someone alive who had no fear of death. That was why James could state so firmly that fearlessness was a basic requirement for a magician.
“Then I guess I’m going to have a hard time.”
“…Impossible.”
Cancel the brother thing. There’s no way my brother would be such a coward.
“Anyway, book the flight for two weeks from now.”
“…Call it.”