The first time Han saw her new stun gun, he joked that she’d traded a Cheetah for a Pikachu. He wasn’t far wrong: two and a half million volts of whup-ass packed into a little black box the size of a pack of cigarettes. Unfortunately, once Sakakibara overheard the joke, she was stuck carrying “the Pikachu” forever after. Somehow, somewhere along the way, someone had managed to stick shiny prismatic Pikachu stickers all over it when Mariko wasn’t looking. She suspected Han.
On closer inspection, the invisible door wasn’t quite invisible. Mariko still couldn’t find hinges or handles, but she could see the tiny seam running the perimeter of the door. It looked like the wall panel had been painted over but the paint had cracked. Mariko guessed it was supposed to look like that.
Not surprisingly, pushing and prodding did nothing. She tried the front door instead, which was perfectly ordinary: a heavy pane of plate glass seated in a steel frame, with a little plastic box to slide a key card through to unlock the door. Mariko wondered what would happen if she zapped the lock with her Pikachu, and whether two and a half million volts would act as a master key or fuse the lock shut permanently.
In the end she didn’t need to find out. The door opened at her touch. Weird, she thought. Tokyo wasn’t exactly a den of thieves—the city saw as many burglaries in a year as New York saw in a day—but still, leaving the front door unlocked was asking for trouble. The whole thing felt wrong. In fact, it felt like she was being set up, just as Han suspected. But she went inside anyway.
On the outside the strip club was two stories of nothing but brightly colored signage. Inside it was just the opposite: a dark and cavernous expanse, lit only by the green glow of the emergency exit lights far off in the corners. The stink of stale cigarette smoke suffused the furniture, the carpeting, the very paint on the walls. A stage dominated the floor space, of course, dotted with stripper poles and surrounded by chairs. There was a bar in one corner, a flight of stairs in the other. The stairs led to a room overlooking the whole first floor and walled in by floor-to-ceiling one-way mirrors. The VIP lounge, Mariko guessed, but she didn’t bother checking. The only detail she cared about was the secret door.
There was no trace of it. If it had led to this room, it would have opened up right under the stairs, but instead Mariko saw only a blank wall.
“No,” she said to herself. She wouldn’t allow the trail to go cold. Not here, not after she’d come so far.
It stood to reason that the door wouldn’t open into this room. Secret doors were for secret places, not the decidedly un-secret main floor of a strip joint. So where did it go, then? There had to be a hidden space inside the wall. But how could she get to it?
She couldn’t. Not from here. The whole point of that hidden space was to stay sequestered from the public areas of the club. So if there was no access on this floor, the only place left for it to go was up or down.
Let’s try down, Mariko thought. She went cautiously to the bar, taking care not to stumble in the dark in this unfamiliar space. Behind the bar she spotted exactly what she’d hoped to find: a door to a staircase, which in turn led down to the stockroom. The door wasn’t locked but the stockroom was. A good, hard kick ripped the hasp right out of the wood.
That was the moment she really wished she had her sidearm. Any bad guys on the other side of that door now knew exactly where she was. Unless they stepped within arm’s reach, the Pikachu would be useless.
Mariko moved through the doorway fast and low, eager to find cover just in case bullets started flying her way. She needn’t have bothered; the storeroom was empty.
Flickering fluorescent tubes automatically sputtered to life, triggered by the opening door. Mariko saw walls of heavy-duty shelving, stocked to the ceiling with cases of booze, boxes of napkins, giant bags of arare. No women in white, nor anyone else to tackle Mariko or put a slug in her.
A refrigerator’s compressor purred contentedly, causing Mariko to look for the source. She found it quickly enough: a