Pacific Burn

by Barry Lancet

  “Good.”

  “He also raised a killer question.”

  “I take it your phrasing is not accidental.”

  “Not a chance. We all agree everyone in the family should lie low. What the sheriff asked me was if there were any more Nobukis floating around. I said I’d ask the oracle.”

  “Afraid the oracle’s got some bad news for you, then,” I said. “Ken Nobuki’s daughter is in the US. I just don’t know where.”

  “Find out.”

  “The call’s already in.”

  “Let’s hope it’s not too late.”

  CHAPTER 13

  As soon as we’d arrived at the hospital, I’d sent an email about the shooting to Naomi, Ken’s daughter, a Japanese reporter of some acclaim. Earlier today Ken had mentioned that Naomi was in the States—on the East Coast—and I was hoping to get to her before she saw the shooting on the news. I’d known Naomi nearly as long as I’d known her father. We’d dined together in Tokyo and San Francisco, and I’d introduced her to American sources for some of her stories.

  Now my phone was buzzing with a call from her.

  “Hi, Naomi,” I said.

  “Brodie, are you at the hospital?” she asked in Japanese.

  “Yes.”

  “Thank heavens. Is Dad okay? I can’t get anything out of the nurses there.”

  That was Naomi’s journalistic instincts. She’d tried on her own first before asking for assistance, even though her English was limited to a collection of serviceable phrases. Naomi was only slightly less vulnerable than Shu had been that first morning under the eucalyptus tree.

  “He’s in the operating theater as we speak.”

  “Have you heard from a doctor yet?”

  “Yes, but only in the vaguest terms. He said there might be some brain swelling.”

  “I don’t know what that means but it sounds awful.”

  A sort of coded message came over the hospital PA system with Dr. Samuels’s name attached. Two nurses abandoned their posts and rushed through the emergency doors.

  Another bad sign.

  “Will you call me as soon as you have an update?” Naomi asked, vulnerability seeping through her usually impenetrable journalistic veneer.

  “Of course. How is your mother taking it?”

  “I haven’t spoken to her yet. With the time difference, I didn’t want to wake her. And I just got off a plane. I called you first.”

  A chill crawled up the back of my neck. “Naomi, wait—you’ve been traveling? Where are you now?”

  Renna was deep in conversation with a detective buddy but had one ear attuned to my conversation. Now he had both.

  “I flew to Washington this morning. Why?”

  My voice took on a forceful edge. “Listen, you need to stay put. Somewhere indoors we can control. If you have a flight out, cancel it.”

  Naomi stammered, “W–w–hy would you say that?”

  I grew confused in turn. She was smarter than this.

  Tentatively, I said, “Well, considering all that has happened . . .”

  “All? You mean there’s more?”

  “You haven’t heard?”

  “Tad and I have been at a retreat in upstate New York until this morning.”

  Right. Ken had mentioned that Naomi and her husband were together on the East Coast. I was momentarily relieved to know she wasn’t alone.

  “And you guys are in DC now?”

  “Yes. I mean, no, it’s just me. Tad’s about to board a plane back to Japan. It was a bear to get him to come out here at all. What about—”

  “Give me the name of your hotel.”

  She did and I said, “When you get there, stay in your room. Lock yourself in and under no circumstances go out or even open the door.”

  “You’re scaring me, Brodie. What’s going on?”

  As gently as I could, I broke the news about her brother’s death, then about the trip her mother had made to pick up Shu in Napa.

  A piercing shriek blasted down the line. “My brother too? This can’t be happening.”

  I tried to calm Naomi while she explained, through her sobs, that the retreat she and her husband had been on forbade access to phones and Wi-Fi. Attendees had to commit to being fully unplugged. Seeking to prolong his peace, her husband had extended his offline time until he returned to his law firm in Tokyo the following day.

  I let her cry her way through the first round of shock, pain, and denial. All of which would strike deeper notes once she hung up, but my immediate goal was to secure her safety.

  I said, “Listen, we’ll get through this together, okay? I’ll handle as much as I can.”

  “I’m sorry, Brodie. I can’t—”

  “I understand this is difficult, so just listen, okay? I’ll have someone from my office in Tokyo contact your mother and your husband after he lands. That will take care of your immediate family for the moment. You can ring her later, when you’re up to it. More important is your situation. I need you to do exactly as I say.”

  My words were intended to act as a verbal slap in the face.

  “Brodie, now you’re really scaring me.”

  “Sorry. But this is important. You have to follow my instructions to the letter.”

  I told her that under no circumstances could she tell anyone else where she was. She could not send any emails after we hung up. Nor make any calls. Once we finished, she needed to disable her phone—meaning power it down and remove the battery but keep both on her person. The fact that she hadn’t contacted anyone in the last week might be the only thing keeping her alive.

  Next, as soon as we hung up I would be sending some men to protect her. They’d be there inside of thirty minutes with a password that could only have come from me. Under no circumstances was she to open her door to anyone else. She must remain in her room. If the drapes were open, she should close them and stay away from the windows. I needed her alert, with none of her senses impaired. That meant no headphones or television or shower or bath until my men arrived.

  They would be on their way in minutes. If the unthinkable happened and someone tried to force his or her way in, she was to lock herself in the bathroom, reconnect her phone, and call me. Doors in the better hotels were stout and would hold off any initial attempts.

  “Okay, but—”

  “Before I answer any questions, I need you to repeat my instructions.”

  Reporter that she was, she did so without missing a point. Then a timid note of optimism crept into her voice. “Brodie, don’t you think you’re being just a bit too paranoid?”

  “Yesterday, maybe. Today, nowhere near enough.”

  CHAPTER 14

  WHEN my father left me half of Brodie Security in Tokyo, I’d also inherited a list of affiliates I could reach out to at any time of the day or night.

  Which is what I did as soon as I hung up—I raced to set up protection for Naomi.

  Not trusting my own phone, I culled the name of our DC affiliate from my address book, bought a disposable cell at a convenience store on the next block, then hailed a taxi.

  I told the driver to head west toward the ocean and tell me when we’d traveled a mile. I made him turn several times. No cars followed. When the cabbie called out the mile mark, I rang DC and put Naomi under twenty-four-hour guard until further notice. The password to entry was the name of the gallery where her father held his first exhibition.

  I knew it, and she would too.

  I told the taxi driver to take me to the hospital.

  He caught my eye in his rearview mirror. “We’ve been going in the wrong direction.”

  “No,” I said. “We haven’t.”

  * * *

  Once again I was getting sucked into the machine. Into the world of crime and violence that had been my father’s line of work, not mine.

  He’d arrived in Japan to head up an MP command post on an American base in the greater Tokyo area, where he met my mother, a volunteer in the Red Cross, but an art
curator by trade.

  Brodie Security was the third of my father’s postmilitary efforts, following a short stint in the LAPD and the first incarnation of Brodie Security in Los Angeles, which opened and closed without fanfare. Falling back on the resilience of his connections in Japan, my father resurrected the agency in Tokyo, in the process establishing the first Western-style PI/security firm in the Japanese capital.

  Then I came along, born in Japan to American parents—both Caucasian, as my fair skin, black hair, and blue eyes testified. My parents enrolled me in the local public school, where I learned the culture, the language, and the mindset of the Japanese. At the age of six, my father signed me up for judo and karate under the tutelage of two Tokyo masters in his inner circle. At twelve, I’d started working at Brodie Security after school and soon found myself enthralled with the gritty tales of the in-house operatives—stories involving con games, blackmail, robberies, assaults, kidnappings, and even murder. Culprits ran the gambit from errant spouses, slippery executives, and crafty government officials to local street punks, grifters, hardened criminals, yakuza, and a dozen other types of lowlife. I accompanied operatives on so-called no-risk outings, though once or twice I’d found myself in unexpectedly dicey situations.

  At his death fourteen months ago, my father shifted half of Brodie Security to me. My friends considered it a windfall. But they couldn’t have been more wrong. The firm came with strings of the highest order. First, I knew many of the employees, so I couldn’t in good conscience unload the place and pocket the cash, as most of those around me advised.

  Second, the agency was the only thing my father left me. We’d been estranged since my parents’ divorce, when I was seventeen. The separation flung my mother and me back to a toxic Los Angeles neighborhood, where I shut down the curiosity of the local gang with a few swift martial arts moves. After the third episode, they left me alone, making my daily passage through the neighborhood at least marginally safer.

  I also shut down all communication with my father and we never spoke again. In the intervening years, I kept up my martial arts; added some street-fighting moves learned during local skirmishes; discovered that, like my mother, I had an eye for art; took some college courses at a local community college in LA; struggled to find a way forward after my mom died far too young of intestinal cancer around my twenty-first birthday; moved to San Francisco for a fresh start; spent a few rough years on the scrappy side of the Mission District; stumbled into an apprenticeship with a local antiques dealer; married at twenty-five to Mieko, a Japanese woman I’d met in LA when we were both teenagers; had a daughter, Jenny; opened my own place out on Lombard Street; then lost Mieko. Three years later, my father died and punted half of Brodie Security in my direction. That was my first thirty-two years in a nutshell.

  For now, I carry the weight despite the risk. Despite the wear and tear my father’s occupation entails. Despite the tension bubbling up at home with my daughter whenever she senses danger.

  I can handle the work most times, as some of my father’s DNA seems to have trickled down, but my first love is still art. The searching, the acquiring, the coddling, the placing of pieces in good homes. Artistic activities nurture. A new find inspires. And along the way, a spiritual appetite is sated—until the next hunt begins. Sarah Navin’s commission for the Oribe tea bowl is one such instance; it is the kind of quest I live for, even when it comes with an abrasive husband attached.

  Detective work sits at the other end of the spectrum. It draws me down different trails. Darker trails. In the danger that bubbles up around a case, art holds out a promise that there is still something right with the world when all else looks so wrong.

  And given what happened next, I would need that promise more than ever.

  CHAPTER 15

  AFTER disabling the convenience store phone, I rejoined Renna and filled him in on Naomi’s whereabouts.

  He shook his head. “Got to wonder about this family’s luck. But you did the right thing. She’s a sitting duck out there. Did she give you anything useful?”

  “Saw to her safety first. I’ll get back to her with questions after she’s calmed down.”

  Renna only grunted. Dr. Samuels pushed through the swing doors leading to the back rooms. Once more, the nurses’ station jumped to attention at the handsome doctor’s approach.

  He glanced around. “The mayor still here?”

  “No,” I said.

  The surgeon tried unsuccessfully to hide his disappointment. Blood spatter stained his smock.

  Renna stepped forward. “What have you got for us, Doc?”

  With some reluctance, Samuels refocused on us. “Your friend is out of surgery. It was as we feared. The brain was badly bruised. The brain swelling will cause an increase in the intracranial pressure.”

  “Which means you need to relieve pressure in the brain. But how?” I asked.

  “We have to give the brain someplace to go. The only way to do that and prevent more brain damage is to perform a large craniectomy, which means removing a large portion of the skull. We’re dealing with massive cerebral edema.”

  I stared at the doctor. “You removed part of his skull?”

  “Yes.”

  “How much?”

  “Wait,” Renna said, looking like he wanted to draw his gun and shoot Samuels. “What is a cerebral endema?”

  “Excess fluid in the brain.”

  “Okay, Doc, onward. How much of our guy’s skull did you cut away?”

  The doctor cleared his throat. “We removed the bone from above his left eye back to his ear on the left side.” If he does well, we can replace the bone in several months.”

  Poor Ken. What had I gotten my friend into?

  “When can I talk to him?” I asked.

  “Not for at least a week.” Samuels grew defensive. “We have given him medication to decrease the pressure and keep him in a deep coma.”

  This was a nightmare. “What happens after a week?”

  “If and when the pressures normalize, we slowly decrease the medications and see if he wakes up.”

  Shooting his hand sideways to silence me, Renna posed the next question. “What do you mean, see if he wakes up?” There was an intimidating growl behind his words.

  “We are unable to determine the degree of brain impairment while he is on the medication. We hope for the best.”

  “So there’s no guarantee . . . ?” I began.

  “I’m afraid not. We don’t even know if he will wake up. We’ve done the best we can for now. We support him and wait for the swelling to go down.”

  I’d never felt more helpless in my life. There was not a single thing I could do to help my friend. And his whole family could be under attack.

  With apprehensive eyes locked on Renna, Samuels produced one last surprise. “Mr. Nobuki regained consciousness before we put him under for the operation and left a message for you, Mr. Brodie.”

  Surprise flooded through me. “Really? What did he say?”

  “His English was broken, but essentially he said, ‘Ask Brodie to find my daughter and keep her safe.’ Does that mean anything to you? Can you do that?”

  “Yes to both questions,” I said, exchanging a look with Renna.

  Looked like I was heading to DC.

  DAY 3

  TUESDAY

  DEEPER WATERS

  CHAPTER 16

  WASHINGTON, DC

  THE red-eye flight to Washington’s Reagan National Airport was long and easy and I slept the whole way, dreaming of my daughter. We’d spent the last few hours before my departure together.

  “I’m sorry I have to go away so much,” I’d said, prepping her for my back-to-back trips, first to DC, then to Tokyo, with only a sliver of time in the Bay Area in between.

  “It’s okay, Daddy. Just remember, my birthday is only two weeks away.”

  My girl was turning seven.

  “How could I forget?”

  “You’ll be home?” she sai
d, her eyes wide and watching and yearning. Jenny had big eyes and long black hair, usually braided, but today we’d pulled it back in a ponytail.

  “I’ll be back in plenty of time.”

  “You know what I want for my birthday, right?”

  “Jenny, I don’t think a year’s supply of gelato is a reasonable request.”

  “But Daddy—”

  “You’ll blow up like a balloon.”

  “I will not. I play soccer every day. We run so much even the mascot dog stopped chasing us. I want gelato, Daddy.”

  “As the guardian of your health, I’m registering an official protest.”

  “Daddy, it’s my birthday.”

  “We’ll, see, okay?”

  She pouted.

  I said, “I promise it will be a great birthday. I’ve got a lot of surprises planned.”

  Jenny settled down after that. I hugged her, kissed her forehead, then carried my giggling six-year-old upstairs on my shoulders to her friend’s apartment, where she would spend the night.

  That was a good moment. And the last one I would have on the home and the work fronts for a long time to come.

  * * *

  After grabbing my duffel bag from the overhead bin, I shuffled forward to the front of the aircraft with the rest of the deboarding passengers, then stepped out onto the enclosed jetway that would take us the last thirty yards to the terminal.

  A suited man stood immediately outside the vessel door to my left. Another suit was planted to the right. Sunglasses masked their eyes. Neutral expressions masked their intentions. Their presence, however, was brassy in-your-face Big Government making a statement.

  They expected to be noticed.

  Which made me wonder. Were there VIPs on the flight to escort? A rowdy they planned to interrogate? A criminal in transport they needed to cart away?