Streaming Dawn are true, then that little tanto is far more powerful than the Bear Cub’s great odachi.
Let the legends be true, Nene prayed silently, and give my husband his hundred years. Give me a path to the Bear Cub, and cloud his sight enough that he will not see the trap I mean to lay for him.
BOOK THREE
HEISEI ERA, THE YEAR 22
(2010 CE)
11
The man known as Sour Plum reached into his black leather jacket and pulled out his cell. He could have drawn the serrated Spyderco combat knife he kept in the same pocket, but as Mariko saw it, the phone was more dangerous than the knife.
She had a bright pink cast on her right forearm, a jagged line of stitches in her scalp, and bruises covering half of her face. The two bodyguards flanking her would make her look a lot worse if Sour Plum heard the wrong words come out of that phone. Thus far they’d been perfect gentlemen—or as gentlemanly as a black marketeer’s heavies were ever likely to be. They hadn’t broken her arm. In fact, no one had; the cast was a fake. They weren’t the ones who bashed her face in, either. Those bruises were two days old, still lingering after the woman in the diaphanous white dress walloped Mariko right in the face during their foot chase through Tokyo Station. Mariko had lost track of the woman then and hadn’t found her since.
She knew it was a million-to-one shot, but she had hoped to find the woman in a fancy second-story shot bar called the Sour Plum. The place was named for its owner, a big round man whose name in his Narcotics dossier was Lee Jin Bao. Since Japanese people couldn’t pronounce the name Lee, he’d acquired the nickname Plum, the meaning of the kanji character for Lee. The Sour part was easy enough to understand: he wore a permanent Robert De Niro frown and he had a reputation for knifing people at the slightest provocation. Sour Plum was Chinese in a country that had no love for the Chinese, but being an enterprising sort, he’d used that fact to establish a niche for himself in the criminal ecosystem. Since no yakuza family would have him, he was the ultimate neutral party, the Switzerland of the Tokyo underworld. When rivals and enemies had no choice but to do business together, they met at the Plum.
As such, he was long overdue for a covert sting operation—or so Mariko had argued, anyway. It wasn’t exactly a lie, but it certainly wasn’t the whole truth. Sour Plum was on Narcotics Division’s radar, but what Mariko really wanted was free rein to question him about his criminal associates. She was hoping a certain scantily clad, fleet-footed, shoulder-bag-swinging hellcat was on the list.
So that morning she’d talked her new shift sergeant into making a play. She went right out and arrested a midlevel dealer named Yuki Kisho who carried out most of his deals at the Plum. Yuki didn’t always pay attention to the subtle details of the trade—nuances like not pissing off your girlfriend if she knows you sell meth for a living. Scorned girlfriends made for terrific covert informants, and in Yuki’s case, he’d pissed off both his girlfriend and his mistress. Mariko’s ex-partner, Han, already had contracts with both of Yuki’s ladyloves; from there it was only a matter of waiting for the right time to burn down their cheating boyfriend.
Not long ago, Mariko and Han would have brought him down together. But that was before Han got himself busted back to general patrol. Since fate had a wicked sense of irony, it was his misconduct that freed him up to pursue Joko Daishi. Mariko should have been working the same case, but instead she was stuck in Narcotics working penny-ante buy-busts. Given the choice between being ladylike and doing her damn job, Captain Kusama wanted Mariko to be a lady.
She wondered what Kusama would think of her now, working her first undercover job instead of sitting behind a desk with her pinky sticking out as she sipped her tea.
“Still ringing,” Sour Plum told her.
“He’ll pick up,” Mariko said. “For you he’ll pick up.”
“He better.”
Mariko winced at that. She could hardly tell him the truth: that she was only pretending to be Yuki’s girlfriend, and that maybe Yuki hadn’t answered the call because she’d tossed him into an interrogation room that got crappy reception.
Sour Plum narrowed his eyes at her, looking her up