“You want me to go after the runner?” Bowen asked. There was no hurry. The fat guy was running slow enough Bowen could have stopped for a cheeseburger and still caught him before he got out of sight.
“Do not bother.” Hase sighed. “I know him. I am much more interested in what is upstairs.”
Hase ordered the second man, a young yakuza soldier named Kono, to sit on the curb. Amazingly, he complied, hanging his head between his knees, waiting obediently to be carted off to jail.
There was another body in the apartment, another yakuza soldier, according to Hase. This one displayed a cracked skull, apparently caused by a sudden collision with the bloody bowling pin that lay on the floor beside the body.
Three distinct pools of blood stained the wooden floor. One next to the dead man’s ear, another beside a pillow with the stuffing blown out of it, and third, just inside the door. Either there had been a third body or someone had survived.
Bowen looked around the apartment — a neatly folded towel next to a pile of crumpled laundry, a blanket and sheet in perfect order amid a chaos of bedclothes, a set of dishes sorted and stacked beside the sink full of crusted bowls and pots — all but screamed the obsessive-compulsive behavior of an Air Force Academy cadet.
“He was here all right,” Bowen said. “We find the woman, we’ll find Quinn.”
Detective Hase looked up from his cell phone. “I concur,” he said. “Crime scene investigators will be here any moment. Ayako-san has a certain client who, I believe, will tell us where to find her.”
CHAPTER 55
Shimoyama Takako sensed his presence as she approached her front door. She was dressed traditionally as she always was in a lavender kimono with a foam green belt and a darker green coat. The neighbors in her upscale suburban neighborhood believed she dressed this way because she taught flower arrangement or the tea ceremony. They could never know it was because her employer — the man she loved and so desperately wanted to please — required it.
She knew she should turn and run. But what good would that do? He would only catch her and she would look a mess. One did not run from Oda any more than a bee flew away from honey. Though he was surely there to chastise her — or even worse — Takako’s heart swelled at the fact that he waited for her inside. She longed for his presence, the sight and smell of him close to her. Even if he was angry, he was there, in her home, and that was something.
She closed the door behind her and set her keys in a red lacquer tray on the stained pine shelf to the right of the entryway. A pair of black shoes, his shoes, sat neatly below the shelf, toes facing outward as if ready for a quick exit. She touched them, feeling the warmth of his body lingering in the rich leather. He hadn’t been here long.
A flight of stairs, deeply stained to match the exposed ceiling beams, rose up in front of her toward the second floor — where she kept her pistol.
Her toilet was to her immediate right, but the door was open. One look told her he wasn’t there. Her bedroom lay to the left. It was too much to hope that he waited for her there, ready to forgive her imperfections.
The ceiling creaked as someone walked on the floor above.
“I am up here, my darling.” Oda’s voice rolled down the stairs like a gentle breeze.
Shimoyama kicked off her shoes. She padded quickly up the stairs, holding up the hem of her kimono with both hands. Her socks were startlingly white and split at the toe — traditional, as Oda liked everything to be.
She stopped cold when she reached the top.
Oda stood at the far corner of the room, naked but for a twisted white loincloth. A long sword, her father’s, hung loosely in his right hand. The black sheath lay on the floor, discarded as he surely intended to discard her.
Shimoyama knew there could be only one reason he’d removed his clothes. He didn’t want to soil them with her blood.
Diffuse light sifted in from the paper window shade behind him, framing the garish red of the two long-nosed mountain demons tattooed on either side of his hairless chest. Riots of black and green swirled on the sinewed muscles of his thighs and arms. Ink melded with dark wood and shadow, giving the impression that he sprang from the walls of the house.
“You look lovely as ever.” Oda turned the blade back and forth as he spoke so it caught the scant light from the stairwell.
“Thank you,” she said. “It is good to see you, Oda-san.”
“Is it?”
Shimoyama’s eyes flashed around her room. She could not just let him kill her. He would lose what little respect he had for her if she merely gave up. Perhaps, if she put up a good fight, he would remember their past, the tender moments they’d shared together, and show some mercy.
Her Beretta pistol was still on the low table, where she’d left it. She licked her lips. Her mouth had gone dry and it was difficult to swallow. Perhaps this was a test. Perhaps he did not intend to kill her after all. Oda would never leave a weapon like that in the open if he intended to cut her down. He was too good at what he did.
He spoke, drawing her from thoughts of possible salvation. “I suppose you know why I am here.”
She bowed her head. She and Oda had killed many men while fighting side by side, stripped of their clothing in order to escape the bloody consequences of using a sword for such intimate work.
“Because Quinn is still alive.”
“Because he is in Japan.”
“We will find him.”
Oda all but exploded in a furious scream. He stomped forward, planting his leading foot as he struck downward with the katana.
Shimoyama rolled out of instinct. She felt the whisper of wind as the blade hissed past her face. The foam green obi fell away, cut neatly into two pieces on the tatami floor, leaving her kimono hanging open to reveal her white undergarment. He was toying with her. She had seen him use the same cut to cleave a man from shoulder to hip.
The Beretta was still two meters away.
“I want him dead today!” Spittle flew from Oda’s lips. He had never been able to control himself for long with Shimoyama, not when she was young and beautiful, and certainly not now that she was old. “I want him dead before nightfall. Within the hour.”
“I understand.” Shimoyama took a step backward, angling closer to the table — and the pistol.
“I am quite certain that you do not understand,” Oda snapped. “If you truly knew what it means for this American agent to be here in Japan you would have followed through and killed him before.”
“I will see to—”
“I fully expected you would see to it before he left the United States.”
“I understand.” There was little more she could say.
“There will be no atonement for you if he discovers our project. Do you understand that?”
“I do.” Shimoyama’s lips trembled. “I have no excuse—”
“Shut up,” Oda said, his voice dropped to a whisper. “Foolish, foolish woman. I will handle this myself. But that leaves me the problem of what I should do with you…” He turned the sword back and forth, admiring it in the light. “Do you know how many men your father killed with this sword?”
“I do not,” she said, turning her head slightly and stepping back again. Three feet from the table, she rolled again, coming up with the pistol in both hands. She pointed it directly at Oda.