“Hi, Endo-san. You always walk around town with a baseball bat?”
He shot her a double take at the mention of his name. She was glad to put him on his heels already, because that stunned look he was giving her was the same look she’d given her phone not half an hour ago.
He tried to play it off. “Hey, as far as you know, I’m just going to the batting cages.”
“Uh-huh. Let’s go see your boss.”
He ushered her to a stately BMW sedan—white, she noted. She also noticed that the driver’s seat was all the way back, and that if she’d been sitting in it, she’d need it all the way forward to be able to reach the pedals. It was the sort of detail Mariko collected routinely, apropos of nothing, but it was worth remembering his reach advantage if it came to blows. His bat would be longer than average too, and heavier to boot. She hadn’t forgotten his baseball as a potential weapon, either.
He drove her to the Shinjuku Park Tower, a posh downtown icon that Mariko knew primarily as the sort of place her sister, Saori, would love to have her wedding in, if only the Oshiros were billionaires. (Or, as Saori would have been quick to point out, if she snagged a billionaire of her own.) When it was first designed, its three majestic white towers might have been likened to steps on the stairway to heaven, but today the first thing anyone would think of was three bars of cellular reception. At fifty-two stories, it was the tenth-tallest building in Japan, a distinction Mariko had always found utterly depressing. She remembered her grade school field trip to Chicago, and the jaw-dropping view from the observation deck of the Sears Tower. She also remembered her disappointment when she learned how tiny Japanese skyscrapers were in comparison. “They don’t have typhoons in Chicago,” she remembered her father saying. “No earthquakes, either.”
Diminutive or not, Shinjuku high-rises were among the most expensive real estate on the planet. When Endo parked in the Park Tower’s underground garage, Mariko felt underdressed just stepping out of the car.
It said something about Mariko’s lifestyle that this wasn’t the first time she’d been in a dimly lit parking garage with a known violent offender. Last time it was Kamaguchi Hanzo’s enforcer, a bodybuilder named Bullet, leading her to an elevator not so different from the one Endo was approaching now. The difference was that last time the department knew where she was going—they even had a rolling tail on her—and Kamaguchi had every reason not to kill her. This time she was on her own.
As the elevator doors closed in front of her, Mariko tried to convince herself that Endo had no reason to hurt her. It didn’t work. Endo was a lot nicer than Bullet, but Mariko’s mind was too good at imagining possibilities, stories, worst-case scenarios. Cute, yes, but maybe he had a penchant for throwing women off tall buildings. She’d seen weirder MOs in her career.
They emerged on the fiftieth floor, in a corridor of warm lighting and deep, soft carpet. A long, slender, marble-topped table faced the elevators, home to an ikebana arrangement whose flowers were real, not plastic. Apart from the elevator the hallway was perfectly silent.
“I have to search you now,” Endo said.
“You’ll be gentlemanly about it, won’t you?”
“Yeah.”
“Mind if I smoke?”
“Knock yourself out.”
She set her purse on the table next to the flowers and stood with her arms outstretched. He did as he promised and didn’t grope her. He was even polite enough to let her fish her cigarette case and lighter out of her purse before he searched it, which was exactly why she put the thought of being gentlemanly in his head in the first place.
He found the knife, the pepper spray, and the Cheetah. “No badge? No gun?”
“I’m off duty.”
“Well, we’re just going to leave your whole arsenal right here, okay?”
“Come on, my wallet’s in there—”
“We’ll send someone for it.”
“Seriously? My phone, all my pictures—”
“Come on.”
He steered her toward the end of the hall, where a floor-to-ceiling window opened onto a view of the city that rivaled Captain Kusama’s. To the southeast she saw the sprawling forest surrounding the Meiji Shrine, highlighted here and there with the first hints of autumn gold. Everywhere else she saw urban sprawl. Even from this remove she could see her city was unusually quiet. The triathlete in her noted that it was a perfect day