Excerpt: Curry Dogs

“Well, what’ve you two been up to?”

“Oh, us?” Jin turned towards Katsu’s direction in case he might have any idea but all he gave to her was the same blank look she was giving him. “Not much,” she answered with a slight frown of her lips and a shrug of her shoulders as she looked back to the cheerful chef. “We just met, actually. I mean...aside from that time.”

“Guess you both clicked, eh?”

“That’s right,” Jin nodded with a glance to her friend who nodded the same. “Annnd...we decided we liked you a lot that we went and promoted you to our friends!” she smiled widely at him. “I mean...Curry Dogs.”

“Get them while they’re hot,” Katsu added as a slogan of sorts.

“Oh,” the owner burst out in laughter, once more. In an abrupt punctuation to his cheer, however, he bent his back to gaze more closely at his customers who both watched this with a blink of their eyes. “I’m gonna be honest with you when I tell you that I don’t know what promoting this place can do to get you in trouble.”

“Trouble?” Katsu arched his brows.

The owner nodded at him. “There’s a bounty for your heads.”

“A bounty.”

He nodded, again. “Three and half a million for each of you. That’s seven combined. Worse, it says ‘dead or alive’.”

Katsu’s eyes grew, “Dead?”

“Hold on now,” touching the owner by his arm so that he turned to her, Jin asked him, “Where’d you get all this?”

“I hear it from my customers.” the owner whispered on. “First they tell me they’re lookin’ for a Kitten and a Joe and I tell ‘em I don’t know who that is until they showed me your picture and what do you know, it’s you!”

“Did you tell them anything?”

“Told ‘em you ate here once but that was years ago.”

Jin and Katsu looked at each other for a second. Then turning back to the owner, they both shook their head with the gunsmith saying, “No.”

“It can’t be us,” Katsu nodded.

Their conversation was cut short when the doors to the pub exploded and voices gasped and cried in shock. By the entrance was a good number of outlaws, hats and red scarves and everything, who glared at everyone who looked their way and held their guns high with both their hands.

As soon as their eyes met the travelers’, Katsu and Jin gaped.

“There they are!”

“Get them!!”

“Bounty hunters,” Jin had almost been unable to say when bullets started tearing to their direction and she dropped to her side to lie on her bench, rolling to fall on the floor and meeting Katsu who was already knotting his black sash around his eyes. Their friend the owner had also dropped to join them in hiding with the rest of the pub screaming and yelling in terror.

If there was one thing good about it, it was how the subsequent chaos had disabled the other hunter from moving in for the kill.

“Not you?” the owner yelled at the round-eyed Jin who held the God’s Hand with her right. “Then why are they looking for you?!”

“We’re famous! Everyone wants a piece of us,” Jin cringed at the sound of a bullet striking the window frame to her side. Pointing to the space over the cowering owner’s shoulder, she said, “Can you hand that thing to me?”

“What’s this?” the owner sounded frantic as he handed her her rifle.

“It’s a secret,” she said. The sound of a blade slipping out of its sheath caught her ears from the right and she turned to see Katsu kneeling in the bigger space under the table, the sword at his right. This was cause for the owner’s fright and yelp.