for biking; traffic was as light as she’d ever seen it. The cop in her saw the same evidence but reached a different conclusion: people were scared.
Just as they reached the last room, the door began to open. Mariko kicked it as hard as she could.
It flew away from her, hitting something almost instantly—something hard enough and heavy enough to bounce the door back toward her. A forehead, she guessed.
She didn’t wait to find out. Endo had just enough time to look down at the Pikachu before Mariko jammed it in his armpit and squeezed the trigger. His teeth clamped shut. The tendons stood out in his neck like the cables of a suspension bridge. Mariko kept up the pressure, driving him toward the window. His whole body went stiff as a board, and finally he teetered backward over his heels.
The door opened behind her. Mariko was already in motion, Endo’s bat in her hand. She turned to see a woman with a bleeding forehead coming straight at her. Mariko jabbed the Pikachu at her. The woman parried it expertly, knocking it to the floor. Mariko didn’t care. She brought the bat around low and fast. It caught the woman in the shin with a meaty thunk.
The woman cried out but she didn’t drop. Mariko got a good two-handed grip on the bat. The woman reached for a hip holster. Mariko timed a kote strike perfectly, smashing the pistol the instant it was visible. She probably broke some finger bones too, but she didn’t hang around long enough to find out. She faked a chop to the temple, forcing the woman to duck and cover. That was all Mariko needed. She stepped inside the hotel room, slammed the door, and locked every lock it had.
She stood with her back pressed to the door, facing a small foyer. She’d never seen a feature like this in a hotel room before. Then again, she’d never paid the kind of money it took to stay in a luxury suite. A pair of cube-shaped chairs faced her from the corners of the foyer, upholstered in suede. To her right was a wall with a mirror, shoe rack, and coat hooks. To her left, an open doorway into the next room. Through the doorway she saw a shadow approaching.
She moved at once, but the man casting the shadow was too quick. He stood in the doorway, backlit. Mariko could see he had something in his right hand—a pistol, maybe. He held it the way Humphrey Bogart would hold it, parallel to the floor, his elbow tight against his ribs. He turned it toward Mariko.
She slapped it out of his hand. Whatever it was, it hit the carpet with a crystalline clink.
“Now that,” the man said, “was an eighteen-year single malt.”
He was a distinguished-looking gentleman, and if he found Mariko’s baseball bat threatening he showed no sign of it. He wore wire-rimmed glasses, a charcoal gray suit from an expensive foreign clothier, and a most disdainful look, which he cast not at Mariko but at the wet spot on the carpet. “I’m quite sure it did not spend all those years in the cask so that carpet fibers could drink it up. Really, Detective Oshiro, you must be more careful.”
“Uh, right . . .”
He looked up at her and blinked like a mole in the sun. He might have been Mariko’s height once, but age had bent his back. As soon as she registered that observation, she realized his age was difficult to guess. The crow’s-feet touching the corners of his eyes suggested mid-fifties, but judging by his liver spots he must have spent a hundred years in the sun. He was tan where he was not splotchy, with a high forehead and delicate hands. They were better suited for playing piano than assassinating wayward cops.
Behind her, Mariko heard a hollow sliding noise at the door, then the high-pitched grinding of an electric motor retracting the deadbolt. Either Endo or his lady friend had a key card—probably Endo, judging by the sheer mass that crashed into the door soon after. Mariko watched the door leap forward, only to slam to a halt when it reached the end of its chain. Endo dropped his shoulder into it again, and again the door only moved a few centimeters before it stopped dead.
“Oh, do keep it down,” the ageless gentleman snapped. He could just as well have been fussing at a couple of pesky pigeons. “Need I remind you