Linnear 02 - The Miko (73 page)

“They didn’t then, but they must’ve known about my relationship with Angela because they found me a week after I flew down to Key West. In the meantime, they’d done their homework. They knew where I was that night; they knew I’d seen it all. Minck’s men are professionals.”

“So I’ve come to learn,” Croaker said distantly. He put both hands on the wheel. So the truth was close… but not close enough. His inner laugh was ironic and bitter. The truth was nothing so clearcut as black and white. Tomkin hadn’t killed Angela; he had only set her up. He didn’t order it, didn’t execute that order. He merely went along with it, stood by, a wall away, while it was happening. Guilty as charged, your honor. The voice echoed hollowly in Croaker’s mind. But what was the charge? Not murder in the second degree; not even manslaughter. Instead, Tomkin had been an accessory to murder. It had not been he who had put pressure on the Commissioner to sweep the Didion murder under the police blotter. That had come all the way from Washington, D.C. From Minck himself.

Cloak-and-dagger Minck, Croaker thought bitterly. How many murders could he be held accountable for? Angela Didion’s was just one in a long line. He felt deflated and saddened by the vast gray areas of the world, within one of which he now found himself. It was a bog without form or substance, where direction became hazy before fading out altogether. Where to go now that Angela Didion’s murderer was beyond him? For he knew without doubt that he could never touch Minck on this charge or any other. He was defeated.

Sunshine hit them like a fist on the Manhattan side of the tunnel, bouncing off the hood like a starblaze. Croaker headed right, toward Thirty-fourth Street, where he turned left for several long blocks, then right after the light changed, heading downtown on Second Avenue. The city beckoned them with grimy fingers.

Anger bubbled inside him, turned without his knowing on Alix. Women’s motivations were so opaque to him. He wished to God she had told him all this days beforealthough what he would have done differently he did not know. They still had to make the trip out of there. Damn it, damn it, damn it!

She touched his arm and he glanced at her. “I’m sorry for what I said before. I know none of this’s your fault.” She ran tanned fingers through her hair. “I couldn’t stand it down there anymore; it was like prisonworse in some ways. At least in prison I imagine you know where you stand. In Key West, surrounded by those two, I didn’t know what to expect next. Would Minck continue to come? Would his feelings fade? Would one of them kill me then?

“It began to feel like there was a balloon inside my head and each day it was being filled with more air. Soon there’d be more balloon than brain and then I wouldn’t be able to think at all.” She gave a little strangled laugh. “Silly, isn’t it?”

“No,” Croaker said softly, “it isn’t.” It was remarkable how she could defuse his rage so utterly. She had only to touch him, to turn those eyes on him, to whisper softly, and all the blackness curled like ash inside him.

She gave a little sigh, as if it had been extremely important that he corroborate her feelings. “I wanted to tell you all of it right away, Lew. It’s important that you believe that.”

“I do.”

Her head was turned sideways toward him. “Not just say it.”

“I don’t say anything idly, Alix.”

She seemed to accept that. “I was in shock; you were such a oh, I don’t knowa bolt out of the blue.”

“A knight in shining armor.”

It was a joke, but she did not take it that way. “Oh, yes. I wanted to believe that very much. But I was afraid to. It was almost like you were too good to be true. I had been involved with this for so longall this knowledge inside my head like a time bomb with a hair trigger.

“I felt like I had when I was younger, and, you know, I was the prettiest girl in my class by faroh, don’t think me big-headed; you only needed a mirror to see it. Boys buzzing around me like bees. At first I reveled in it. What girl wouldn’t?

“But then, as I got to know them, as I went through them one by one, as brief boyfriends, just dating and doing, you know, kid things, I’d always get to a point when I’d suddenly realize why they wanted to date me. They weren’t interested in talking, in getting to know me. They loved being seen with me and, after a time, trying to slip a hand underneath my dress. They were hard all the time; it was the only thing they thought of.

“For a while it made me hate my beauty. It was as if I had thick ankles or a long nose or was flatchested.”

She put her hand on him. “It was the same with you, Lew. Why were you there, I asked myself? What was it you really wanted from me?” She laughed again. “It even occurred to me that Minck had sent you to test me; but I soon realized that was really crazyyou killed both his men.”

“Do you care about him?” It wasn’t an idle question; in the future it might become a key bit of knowledge for Croaker to have, like an extra shield or a mace held behind his back. Because he had already come to a decision. There was only one thing left for him to do after all.

“How can I answer that?” Alix said as they pulled up outside an apartment house in the Twenties. “The affair has been taking place in limbo or outer space. I don’t have any signposts to use as reference points.” She turned away. “I wouldn’t’ve gone to bed with him if I hadn’t felt… something. I’m not at all like Angela was. Yet I haven’t a clue what it was I felt. It’s almost as if by having sex with himby establishing a link that was physical as well as, oh, what should I call it, psychic, I suppose?” She shrugged.

“Not emotional?”

“It’s possible, but I don’t think so. I have some small perspective on it now. I think I felt that by establishing this link with mywell he was my jailor, really, wasn’t heI’d somehow be less of a prisoner.”

“But it didn’t work out that way.”

The curl of a smile. “Do you really think it could have?”

“No.”

“Of course not. It was stupid of me, really. I never should have trusted someone like that in the first place. But my God, Lew, 1 was so desperate. It was just crushing me inside. I felt”

Alix screamed as the explosive bullet burst through the side window, tore off three-quarters of the top of the sedan. Croaker had already been moving, pulling her toward him, covering her upper torso and head with his bulk.

At the same time his gun was drawn. But another shot rocked the car on its shocks, a great fist reaching out from the void, exploding layers of chrome, steel, aluminum, and plastic. Safety glass webbed and pebbled, fluttering down over them as gently as doves’ wings.

Croaker could smell smoke. There was no rear door left on his side, not much top over their heads, either. He leaned forward, making Alix squeal with the pressure, and jerked down the handle of the door on her side. Pushed with the flat of his free hand, rolled her out onto the sidewalk like a sack of potatoes.

He turned off the ignition but the third shot had already hit the car, ripping through metal into the gas tank. There was a dull thud like a dropped bowling ball. Flames licked up, and a curl of oily smoke made him cough.

Croaker turned toward the direction from which the shots were being fired. But he had no vantage point, could move very little, and the smoke was becoming denser. He heard sirens rising and falling, loudening. Coming this way.

He got out the same way Alix had and, taking her hand, began to run. He ignored the entrance to Matty the Mouth’s building as if it had no significance for him.

They hurled down Second Avenue, passing a Police Emergency Squad wagon, a fire truck, and a pair of blue-and-whites, all heading the wrong way up Second. Horns blared, traffic snarled. People stood and stared, then began to drift toward the scene. Within moments a good-sized crowd had formed.

Watching the flow of people, Tanya Vladimova cursed herself for firing prematurely. But she had not known how long they were stopped for. Further, just ten minutes ago her beeper had gone off; it was time for the drop into Japan. She had not been ready for that, not when she was so close to her quarry.

Circumstances had conspired against her; they had manipulated her rather than the other way around. Now, as she dismantled the Attlov-Sonigen .385, stowing it in a compartment beneath the carpeting of her car, she resigned herself. Even had she not been on a time allotment she would not have been able to go after Alix Logan and Lewis Croaker. Her link-up with ARRTS had digested the fingerprints she had lifted in Raleigh, had spat out his name: Too many people, too many cops. More coming, more sirens. Detectives’ unmarked cars spreading the traffic like Moses heading out across the Red Sea.

Tanya turned her ignition and got out of there, heading uptown, through the Midtown Tunnel, out to the Long Island Expressway and Kennedy Airport.

She cleared her mind of what she had not been able to accomplish here. She accelerated into the left lane. Not more than a mile later she was slowed by traffic that seemed to build up out of thin air. She began to go over what she had to do next and in what order she must do it.

There was a pinpoint of light. It was extremely annoying because it kept pricking into his brain in an odd kind of cadence. Dum-tee-dum-tee-dum-dum.

Otherwise he was surrounded by the milky luminescence of getsumei no michi. It should have been wholly opalescent and peaceful. It would have been except for the pinpoint of light. Dum-tee-dum-tee-dum-dum.

He tried to think of nothing. That, at least, should have been easy. He could not. In vain he reached out for the Void, but each time he sought a clear path to it the pinpoint of light stood directly in his way. He tried to push it aside; he could not. He tried kiai; this, too, had no effect. He had no strength left within him because the white pinpoint kept pricking his brain as if with electric shocks. He could not think, could not concentrate, could not center himself. If only he had his katana; if only he could remember where he had left Iss-hogai.

Dum-tee-dum-tee-dum-DUM.

“Iss-hogai,” Nicholas murmured, strapped and sweating on Protorov’s wheel.

“What the hell is that?” Protorov wanted to know. “Koten?”

“It means, ‘For life,’” the sumo said sullenly. “It sounds to me like a name of a samurai’s katana.” He was not happy. This process was tiresome. He wanted to be left alone with Nicholas Linnear. Five minutes would do nicely, he thought. “Although what a ninja would be doing with a samurai sword is beyond me.”

“It’s his sword?” Protorov asked, missing nothing. “Russilov, did you confiscate such a weapon from him?”

“No, sir.”

“Did you see such a thing?”

“No, sir.”

Protorov directed himself back to his client. “Nicholas,” he

asked in an entirely different tone of voice, “where is your katana? Where is Iss-hogai?”

DUM-TEE-DUM-TEE-DUM-DUM.

The pinpoint would not let him go; pincers inside his brain. “RoRotenburo.”

“That’s not good,” Koten said. “A samurai sword is its master’s signature. We don’t want anyone picking it up and asking questions about it.”

Protorov nodded as if he had already thought of that. “Go and get it, Koten,” he said.

“If you bring it back here, there’s a chance he’ll be able to get his hands on it,” the sumo warned.

“That won’t matter at all.” Protorov considered options. “Tell me, is he right-or left-handed?”

Koten moved closer to Nicholas, observing the layers of callus along the bottom edge of either hand. “Right, I would say.”

“Break the first three fingers of that hand.”

Koten was overjoyed to do.it. Almost lovingly he reached out and grasped the index finger of Nicholas’ right hand. He undid the strap, then snapped the digit sideways. Nicholas groaned; his body shook. Sweat rolled off him like water scrolling from a swimmer.

Twice more Koten unstrapped a finger and went to work on it. Twice more Nicholas groaned and jerked. He was drenched. His head hung, chin on heaving chest. The doctor stepped in and checked his pulse, his blood pressure.

“Now go and do as I’ve ordered,” Protorov said to Koten. “You will save us the possibility of embarrassment and he will only be able to look at his weapon longingly.”

When Koten was gone, Protorov dug out the papers his spy had stolen from the Tenshin Shoden Katori ryu. He stared at Nicholas’ right hand hanging by the straps at two fingers and wrist. Already the broken digits were swollen like sausages, the flesh was darkening.

“How will the pain affect him?” he asked the doctor.

“It should rouse him a bit.”

“Will it interfere with cerebration at all?”

“With him, I would say no, definitely not.”

Protorov nodded and, reaching out, took a handful of Nicholas’ wet hair. He picked up the head, slapping at the cheeks until the eyelids fluttered open. Then he shoved the first page of coded text in front of the bleary-eyed face.

“Focus,” he commanded in a soft voice. “Something here for you to read, Nicholas. Something you’ll enjoy.”

Nicholas frowned. Deep down he felt a terrible aching, a trident, its tines coated with poison, lancing into him. It seemed very far away, however, as if, even, it might be part of a dream or an hallucination.

It seemed important to focus so he tried to do so. He seemed to be swimming through viscous gas. He could not fathom how he was breathing the stuff because it was obvious that he could not move through it. He flailed and stayed still. Or was it that he only thought he was flailing.

Black and white, breaking up, coalescing, only to dissolve once more.

“Focus,” came the command from the bright pinpoint which seemed directly inside his brain. So he thought he would do that. Focus.

Characters swimming by him like schools of fish, like a forest’s underbrush, like tongues of fire, like the hissing rain. It was pouring. Pouring letters.

Not letters. Ideograms.

He read. And came face to face with that which he had sought for so long. Tenchi.

“Three years ago… Hare Maru lost at sea in violent typhoon … over fifty lives lost… sailors and civilians… greatest marine disaster in twenty-five years…. Therefore underwater salvage operations begun immediately the weather cleared at spot of last radio message: Nemuro Straits.”