by Tim Maleeny
The donut shop occupied the ground floor of an office building, unremarkable except for the European style of the architecture. While most buildings in Tokyo were glass and steel, this was only ten stories tall and built almost entirely of stone, complete with gargoyles lining the edge of the roof. Kano had never paid much attention, and tonight was no exception. He always had a few drinks before he took off, since this club was the last stop on his collection run.
Kano liked making the rounds, squeezing the local businesses for protection money, then taking a piss on their floors after having free drinks in their bars. He got off on the looks of hatred and fear when they saw him coming-they knew who his uncle was, and they knew they couldn’t do shit. Some nights he’d slap someone around just to make a point, then watch them shit their pants when he pulled out a gun.
It made him hard just thinking about it.
Kano adjusted himself and turned his collar up, stepping off the curb into the waiting town car. Since he never looked up, Kano never noticed that one of the gargoyles was moving.
Sally shook the rain from her eyes as she crouched on the roof, a single step between her and ten stories down. Dressed entirely in black with a hood obscuring her face she was a silhouette against a murky night sky.
She stared at the empty street where the town car had been moments ago, her knuckles white as she gripped the edge of the roof in silent fury. Slowly she rocked back and forth as if she were about to jump, counting out the minutes. She watched as the bartender locked the place up and turned east to walk home.
It was raining even harder now, the sounds of traffic and sirens from a few blocks away drowned by the staccato thunder of the storm. When she was sure the car was out of earshot and the street was again empty, Sally stood and bellowed in rage-her voice a guttural cry of agony that echoed off the surrounding buildings. Had someone been watching, it would have looked as if a gargoyle had come to life-a demon from the underworld come to take its revenge.
Sally tore off her hood and let the rain wash over her, stepping back from the edge of the roof. Every night she fantasized about soaring across the night sky and tearing his heart out, and every night she forced herself to remain perched on the roof. Then she looked into the chasm and thought about jumping, thinking that would be easier than enduring the agony of waiting.
She had been in Tokyo for almost three weeks. The day she arrived, a young man not much older than Sally met her at the harbor, giving her some yen, keys, and an address printed on a slip of paper. Then he turned and ran away, as if terribly late for another appointment.
It had never occurred to Sally that he might be afraid of her.
At the apartment there were three fake IDs and a closet full of clothes suitable for any occasion. On a small desk she found more photographs and a map, along with a list of known haunts and addresses that Kano frequented.
Kano. Even saying his name made Sally want to retch. She was fluent enough in Japanese to know that the name meant masculine power.
We’ll see, she thought, clenching and unclenching her fists.
Kano was a thug, plain and simple. Sally had followed him as he visited local businesses and bars, sometimes stopping at a tall glass building that Sally soon identified as a drop-off point for yakuza muscle. Although the busy office building was filled with smartly dressed men and women, Sally also noticed rough-looking men like Kano coming and going. Most did a poor job hiding full-body tattoos under ill-fitting suits.
Sally was certain when she saw Kano stop outside and light a cigarette. As he cupped his left hand to shelter the flame, Sally saw that he was missing his little finger. Over the next few days she noticed several men with maimed hands running four fingers through their hair, holding a briefcase, or opening the door.
The yakuza believed mistakes should have consequences, and most members made at least one mistake on their way up. The offending clan member was required to sever his own finger, wrap it in a white cloth, and present it to his master. Always portrayed as a stoic ritual in books and movies, Sally had heard that many cried and screamed in agony, sometimes being held while their yakuza brothers did the cutting.
Sally smiled grimly as she thought of the ceremony, taking solace in the thought that Kano had already suffered once during his miserable life.
But I bet he knew his parents.
Each day in Tokyo peeled a layer of doubt from her heart.
On the sixth day, she followed Kano to a park, a small patch of green bordered by cherry trees with a stream running through it. A small wooden bridge arched over the water, allowing visitors to admire the koi swimming back and forth in their outdoor aquarium. It was a glimpse of nature, squeezed into a square plot of land and landscaped for observation, placed carefully in the heart of the financial district.
There were maybe a dozen people scattered around the park, including a few sitting on benches and several young professionals striding purposefully across the park on their way to their next appointment. Kano walked directly to the footbridge to stand alongside another man his age, at which point both men deliberately faced the water and assumed postures of men idly watching fish. Sally knew that Tokyo was just like Hong Kong, where no one did anything idly.
Straightening the pleats of her Japanese schoolgirl skirt, Sally casually removed the camera from her purse and started taking pictures of the park.
The other man looked Chinese. He had longish hair and hunched shoulders that jerked up and down while he talked. The two men clearly knew each other by sight, but their postures were slightly confrontational. Sally couldn’t hear what they were saying, but she had been trained to study body language since she was ten.
He belongs to a Triad.
The thought struck Sally as if it had always been there and just came to light. Why else would Master Xan know or care about someone meeting with a yakuza? The man moved aggressively, his gestures abrupt and impatient, so like the mannerisms of men Sally had followed before. She knew, just looking at him, what he did for a living.
He’s a gangster.
Sally walked lazily through the park, a young girl more interested in her new camera than getting to school on time. By the time the men finished their meeting, she had several pictures of the fish and the trees, and almost half a roll of the bridge and the men standing on it.
That night Sally started frequenting the club that was Kano’s last stop. In a short black dress with her hair down, she looked almost as old as her forged ID said she was. The bouncer didn’t care-a few choice words convinced him Sally was an underage prostitute working the neighborhood, willing to give him a cut of any tricks she picked up in the bar.
The world beyond the soundproofed doors was an assault on her senses. Neon and strobe lights sliced through air heavy with sweat and smoke. Sally felt like she was underwater, and it took a few minutes to adjust her breathing. A square bar ringed with blue neon sat along the inside wall, a tiny island of calm in the vast club, but even there the bass from the speakers rattled glasses and pounded against Sally’s chest like a sledgehammer. That first night she sat in a dark corner of the bar and listened while men and women shouted for drinks until they were hoarse.
Sally knew how she looked in her dress. She could feel the eyes of the men boldly crawl across her body as she turned her back, then dart away in cowardice as soon as she turned to face them. It took all her will to keep her features soft and her smile warm.
Kano usually arrived maybe an hour before closing time and then hung around until the club was empty. Her first night in the club, Sally left before he arrived-flirting a little with the bartender before saying goodnight. When she had walked a block north, turned right, and then doubled back to the building across the street, she changed her dress for the black cotton pants, shirt, and hood she had squeezed into her purse.
The next night she stayed in the shadows, watching.
It was well after midnight when Kano strode across the club like he owned it, heading straight f
or the bar. The bartender looked nervous as Kano slid next to a well-dressed young man and his date, nonchalantly putting his hand on the woman’s ass. Before the man could react, Kano shoved him backward over the barstool. The woman yelled something, but the pounding music drowned her out. Nearby patrons barely glanced over, either not hearing the commotion and thinking some drunk just fell off his stool or not wanting to get involved.
Kano grabbed the woman’s wrist as she threw her drink in his face, realizing too late that the hand clutching her only had four fingers. Her eyes went wide with fear as Kano punched her full in the nose, then strode away, laughing, toward the men’s room.
The whole incident had lasted maybe ten seconds.
The couple had fled by the time Kano returned to smile at the bartender as if nothing had happened. Pulling up a stool, he threw back a shot, slamming the empty glass onto the bar and gesturing for another.
Submerged in the darkness at the back of the club, Sally watched, uncertain if the deafening roar came from the pounding bass or the blood rushing through her ears. Her eyes were red from smoke and staring, and her hands were cold as the grave.
But as the white noise of music and rage devoured her, Sally devised a plan.
Chapter Twenty-six
San Francisco, present day
Cape pulled alongside the curb directly across from the park, only a block from the house where Sloth lived. Linda was waiting at the door when he arrived, her hair moving despite the lack of wind.
“Thanks for meeting me here,” said Cape.
Linda gave him a noncommittal smile. “Learn anything new?”
“I think someone wants me dead.”
“That’s new?” asked Linda. “I’ll bet plenty of people want you dead-ex-girlfriends, their ex-husbands or fiances from before you came along, their therapists, who are probably sick of hearing about you-”
Cape cut her off. “I think someone is trying to kill me-note the use of the present tense.”
“Oh,” said Linda, her hair shifting in apology. “That’s different. I guess that means you’re making progress, huh?” She smiled encouragingly and turned to enter the house.
“You find anything?”
Linda’s hair nodded but she didn’t turn around. “I think so.”
Cape followed her through the short foyer, wondering if any of her other friends thought of her hair as a separate person, a fuzzy third wheel that wouldn’t leave you alone.
Sloth had designed his home around his affliction. Born with a rare neurological disorder, the Sloth didn’t get his nickname from how he looked, but for how he moved. Far slower than the world’s slowest mammal, it could take him an hour to cross the room, minutes to finish a single sentence. Until he came into contact with his first computer, the Sloth was trapped inside a frozen body that could only move at a glacial pace.
A large living room dominated the first floor, an open kitchen off to the side separated from the living area by a short counter. In the living room sat small islands of furniture, each arranged by function, none more than three feet apart. A television, DVD player, and amplifier sat off to the left, surrounded by a set of chairs and a small couch. Filing cabinets and a desk sat a few feet away, clustered together in a pattern that seemed quite deliberate but entirely unconventional, as if someone wanted to decorate their house with the furniture equivalent of crop circles.
In the center of the room were the computers. Box-shaped servers lined the carpeted floor beneath a wide desk shaped like a crescent moon, above which were mounted four plasma screens. Sloth sat behind the desk, his face bathed in iridescent light.
Computers had revealed Sloth’s curse to be a mixed blessing. While his body steadfastly refused to speed up, his brain was faster than a laptop on steroids. He saw patterns in data invisible to cryptographers, heard music in equations that spoke only to mathematicians. The screens in front of him flowed like rivers-numbers and bit streams scrolling downward at a dizzying rate, Sloth’s hands shifting spasmodically across the top of the desk. A liquid crystal square was directly below his fingers, a touch-sensitive screen he designed himself. A butterfly landing on the desk could activate it, and the Sloth could play it like a piano. As Cape watched, words and symbols appeared and disappeared from the surface of the desk like stray thoughts, a holographic code only understood by the pale, stoic man behind the desk.
“Hello, old friend,” said Cape warmly.
Sloth’s watery eyes blinked slowly behind his glasses and his mouth twitched, an expression that would have looked pained on anyone else but was somehow full of affection. A lurch of his right hand and the second screen from the left went blank. As Cape watched, words appeared in large black type on the glowing surface.
WANT TO KNOW WHAT WAS ON THE SHIP?
Cape nodded and sat down next to the Sloth, while Linda, always cautious about anything emitting too much electricity, paced back and forth behind them. The room was lit by halogen lights set directly above each cluster of furniture, except the computers. The screens cast a bluish pall over Cape’s face, the words appearing as if conjured from the depths of a crystal ball.
BLUE JEANS.
Cape glanced at the inscrutable Sloth, then gave a quizzical look over his shoulder at Linda.
“That’s it?” he said. “Blue jeans?”
Linda nodded. Her hair shrugged.
“No drugs?” asked Cape. “No heroin?”
“Nope,” said Linda.
“No guns?”
Linda shook her head.
“Uranium?”
“Uh-uh.”
“Plutonium?”
“None of that,” replied Linda. “But there were several dozen refugees onboard-in case you forgot.”
Cape frowned. “No, I didn’t forget. But Mitch Yeung told me it was fairly common for refugee ships to be smuggling operations of another kind. Since they’ve already taken the risk of getting searched, why not double the profits?”
“Does that matter?” asked Linda.
Cape shrugged. “Not necessarily.”
Linda nudged him. “But…?”
“But if there was heroin onboard,” said Cape, “then it would be easier to tie the ship to Freddie Wang, since he controls the smack trade in the Bay Area.”
“Why so anxious to tie the ship to Freddie?” asked Linda.
Cape told them about his visit to Freddie Wang’s restaurant and the bomb he’d found beneath his car. When he told about his stop at the grocery store, Linda’s eyes went wide and her hair became agitated and seemed ready to leave without her. The corner of Sloth’s mouth twitched repeatedly as if he were laughing.
“There’s a corpse in your car?” asked Linda, as if she hadn’t heard correctly.
“It’s OK,” said Cape. “I told you-I bought ice.”
“Isn’t that against the law?”
“No,” replied Cape. “Ice is perfectly legal in the state of California. It’s one of the few things that is anymore, unless you want to count medicinal marijuana.”
“That’s not what I meant,” snapped Linda. “And you know it.”
Cape held up his hands and shrugged.
Linda crossed her arms. “I have no interest in getting arrested as an accessory to…to…to whatever it’s called when you drive around with a corpse in your car.”
“It seemed like a good idea at the time,” Cape said simply.
“What are you going to do with him?” demanded Linda. “I mean, with it?”
“I haven’t decided,” said Cape matter-of-factly.
Linda made a noise that sounded like harumph.
Cape smiled hopefully. “Can we talk about the ship?”
Linda didn’t answer right away, but she turned her frown toward the plasma screen, which Cape took as a conditional “yes.”
“Where was it registered?”
The words materialized on the screen, each new phrase causing the previous one to disappear.
REGISTERED IN HONG KONG…PICKE
D UP CARGO IN FUZHOU.
“Who is it registered to?” asked Cape.
KOWLOON IMPORTS.
Linda cut in. “But Sloth thinks that’s a dummy corporation.”
Cape looked at the Sloth while asking Linda the question. “How come?”
“He hacked their network and checked their balance sheet, then compared it with other Hong Kong shipping companies, including two that work the same trans-Pacific routes.”
“And?”
The screen on the right resolved into four quadrants, each filled with a series of columns and numbers. At the top of each square was a company name. Kowloon Imports was written in the lower right quadrant. The amount of detail on the screen made it difficult to read, and Cape didn’t know where to look. As he watched, a blue rectangle flashed across the screen, stopping at certain figures in each quadrant before jumping back to the top and beginning a new course through the data.
“The cash flow doesn’t line up with actual dates in port,” explained Linda. “We checked the records from the harbor masters in Fuzhou, Hong Kong, and San Francisco.”
Cape knew the answer to his next question but asked it anyway. “You have access to that kind of data? I thought only the feds could plug into those records.”
Linda smiled sheepishly as the Sloth’s mouth twitched.
Cape shook his head. “And you’re giving me shit for driving around with a dead guy in my trunk,” he said. “Talk about a double standard.”
“That’s not the point,” said Linda defensively.
“What is the point?” asked Cape.
THE COMPANY GETS PAID FOR
SHIPMENTS THAT AREN’T MADE.
“By whom?” asked Cape.
Linda answered before any words appeared. “We don’t know yet,” she said simply. “The money trail is complicated, but you’d think the companies expecting shipments would notice.”