and down. Mariko wasn’t sure if he was interested in her figure or in the plaster cast on her right forearm. Could he tell it was a fake? If so, then things were about to go south.
The only thing more conspicuous than her cast would have been the four-fingered hand it concealed. Losing that finger in a sword fight made her a media sensation for a week. She’d made the news again by fatally shooting a man on a populated subway platform. Captain Kusama had allowed the public to believe that Akahata Daisuke was unarmed when she shot him, and that made Mariko the most infamous cop in Tokyo. She was utterly useless for undercover work.
Until someone tried to bash her brains in with an iron mask. Now everyone would focus on the bruises, not the face that bore them. Truth to tell, she hardly looked like Oshiro Mariko anymore. The real giveaway was her missing trigger finger, which the cast concealed completely. The cast also went nicely with the bruises, and together they anchored Mariko’s cover story—a story Lee was soon to confirm if Yuki would just pick up his goddamn phone.
“Don’t make sense,” Sour Plum said, his gaze roving from her cast to her tits. “What’s a nice piece of ass like you want with a dumbshit like him?”
“Maybe I don’t want anything from him anymore. Maybe you’ve got what I need.” She pulled a thin stack of folded, sweat-slicked 10,000-yen bills from her bra. “Just sell me enough to pay off this yakuza asshole. Then maybe you and me can talk about what we want to do later.”
“You got money. Why not pay him yourself?”
“Says he wants product, not cash.”
Sour Plum took her money, held it up to his nose, and sniffed it like he was sniffing her panties. “Double,” he said.
“Huh?”
He leered at her and smelled the money again. “You’ll pay me double, ’cause most days you’d pay me in pussy. But I don’t hit no woman, and I don’t want nobody saying I do, neither. So double, or else walk your skinny ass out of here.”
“Done.” A thrill of adrenaline ran through Mariko’s veins like bubbling champagne. Her first undercover job, and it was going off without a hitch.
And then Yuki answered his phone.
“It’s me,” Lee said. Mariko wanted to snatch the phone and toss it down the stairs. She already had Lee where she wanted him. There was nothing Yuki could say to make matters better, and ten thousand things he could say to make everything go right to hell.
“Shut up and listen,” said the man called Sour Plum. “You tell some skinny bitch to come around here?”
Mariko hoped Yuki said, Yes and not, Yes, but she’s a cop.
“How I’m supposed to know you ain’t setting me up?” Lee grimaced as he listened. “Hey, you got yakuzas on your ass, that’s your problem, not mine—and the next time you get in deep with one of those fuckers, you tell ’em to kick your ass instead of your woman’s, you chickenshit. Now tell me where you’re at.”
Mariko’s stomach fluttered like a bird trapped in a mason jar. Please, she thought, please don’t tell him.
“I don’t like surprises,” Lee said. “You pull this crap again, you gonna look like your girlfriend.”
He clicked off the phone, and when he returned it to his jacket pocket Mariko got another glimpse of the Spyderco. “Says he didn’t rough you up. Says a yakuza did it.”
“That’s what I’ve been telling you,” Mariko said.
“I know. I’m saying your bullshit matches his bullshit. So maybe it ain’t bullshit.”
“Then we have a deal?”
“We got a deal.”
He took the money, Mariko left with a little baggie of meth, and half a minute later she took point on the raid. It went as smoothly as could be expected, given the tight quarters and the sheer mass of cops trying to make their way up the narrow staircase. Sour Plum’s bodyguards let her by, thinking she was trying to flee from the police. That trapped Mariko upstairs with Lee Jin Bao while his heavies dealt with the rest of the squad.
Mariko had been entertaining a pet theory that a plaster cast could do lots of things a sword could do. Lee put that theory to the test. He was twice her size and damn quick with his knife. She parried the first slash with her cast, then snapped a kote-uchi strike to the wrist. His knife hit the floor. When he started throwing punches, she let