Tokyo Heist (6 page)

A
s soon as I burst into Jet City Comics, Jerry approaches with a Big Gulp in one hand, a box cutter in the other. “Well, look who’s here. Thanks for showing up.”

“Sorry.” I toss my backpack on the floor behind the counter. “I’m staying at my dad’s in Fremont, and I have to take two buses to get here.”

“Lots to do today. The Yoops came in.” Jerry nods at a massive stack of UPS boxes, then hands me the box cutter. “I need these babies on the racks, and subscriptions pulled, pronto.”

I cringe as he picks up a notepad by the cash register. It’s filled with characters I copied from the
Death Note
manga series yesterday. I forgot to throw them away. “I found your doodles. Obviously, you have way too much time on your hands,” Jerry says. “Now get busy.” He flings the notepad down and retreats to his office, belching loudly.

Doodles!
Ugh! Jerry is such a
baka
! And I guess this isn’t the best time to give notice.

I restock the small box of manga first, setting aside
Vampire Sleuths
43 for myself. I’m just starting in on the Marvel and DC boxes and stealing a sip of coffee, when the door opens.

In walks Edge. Smiling, flashing his adorable dimples, he hands me a Venti Starbucks. “I figured you had a long commute this morning. Thought you might need fuel.”

“Thanks. I did. And I do.” I take the coffee from him, and our fingers brush for one split second. My eyes turn into hearts like in a romance manga.

Edge is not movie-star cute. Maybe the space between his front teeth and his slightly chubby waistline have kept him from being a total girl magnet. But those are two things I happen to love about him. And the way his hair falls into his eyes. Oh, and his clothes. Today he wears a crisp white button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. A 1940s waistcoat, brown twill pants, and spectator shoes. How could Mardi even think of trying to change him? “Did you walk all the way here with this coffee?” I ask, suddenly conscious of staring at him.

“My mom dropped me off. We hit a drive-through Starbucks on the way. I mean, we didn’t hit it, literally, but we drove through. Through the drive-through part. Where the cars go.” He looks down. Guess he’s pretty nervous about revealing his rendezvous with Mardi. “Oh. It looks like you’re already fueling up,” he adds, noticing the 7-Eleven cup in my other hand.

“It’s okay. I’ll drink them both. I had a really long night.”

“Yeah? Me too.”

“Oh?” I take a sip from each cup and set them both down. Then I continue my
X-Men
restock. “I left you some messages,” I say cautiously.

“I know. I’m sorry I didn’t call you back. I was at, um, at Mardi Cooper’s.”

I shove a stack of
X-Men
into a rack so hard I crease a cover. Jerry will kill me.

“Turns out she’s going to the same film camp. She has a music video she made for some friends. That’s the demo she’s bringing to camp. But she’s having trouble with her editing software. We had to reinstall everything and start over. I didn’t get home till midnight. I figured it was too late to call you back.”

Now I feel stupid for assuming the worst. Edge was just being his helpful self.

“She shot her video at Sheridan Beach,” he goes on. “She’s got the band out on a dock. Dry ice. Superimposed ghosts on waverunners. Pretty spiffy stuff. She’s got some talent.”

“Ghosts on waverunners. Wow.” Frowning, I grab a stack of
Superman
s.

“You okay?” Edge asks.

“It’s nothing. I just . . . hate . . . Superman,” I mutter.

“How can you hate Superman? He can leap tall buildings in a single bound.”

“Because. Look at this. Superman, and all his spinoff titles, take up three whole rows on this rack. All these male superheroes, actually, take up three-quarters of the racks in the stores. Now look at the manga. Just that one small bookshelf over there. I keep telling Jerry we should order more titles. But he’s clueless. He thinks manga’s just for girls, and that we won’t sell enough here.” I’m babbling, but I can’t stop. I can talk about comics on and on, but I just can’t talk about the one thing that really matters.

“Once
Kimono Girl
is published,” Edge says, “your boss will realize the error of his ways. And he’ll have to stock it.”

“Yeah. Right. Like I’m going to publish it and fill a shelf in this store.”

“Who said anything about a shelf? I’m talking
wall
, Violet. Picture it.” Edge makes a sweeping gesture. “A wall of shelves full of
Kimono Girl
episodes. Floor to ceiling.”

For a moment, I can picture it. I manage a smile. “I guess then Jerry would be on his hands and knees, begging me to do signings.” And Edge would be standing there, his arm slung around me, staving off the reporters and throngs of fans.

“You seem kind of far away today,” Edge says. “What’s up?”

“I’m just tired.”

“You’re not mad at me?”

“Why would I be mad at you?”

“I know you’re not the president of the Mardi Cooper fan club.”

“Oh. That.” I shrug. “Ancient history. Anyway, it’s nice of you to help her out.”

“That’s a relief to hear. Because, um, I’m sort of taking her to the Hitchcock film festival.” He scrapes at a piece of tape stuck to the glass countertop.

“What?” A thought bubble explodes above my head. Asterisks, number signs, ampersands, and exclamation points shoot off in every direction.

“Yeah, at the Egyptian. Tomorrow night. Can you believe she’s never seen a single Hitchcock movie? She’s going to get laughed out of film camp.”
Scrape, scrape, scrape.

“That’s a shocker.” I practically dive into the nearest box and take my time rummaging for a stack of
Spawn
so Edge won’t see my face.

What would it take to get noticed by Edge? By my dad? By anyone? Everyone but me has a Special Thing they can do. Edge has his films. Mardi has her school spirit, and now, apparently, killer music videos with waverunning ghosts. Reika rocks the school literary rag with her poetry. My parents have careers that are taking off. What do I do? Doodle in a sketchbook, knowing I’ll never be brave enough to share
Kimono Girl
with the world.

I need a Big Thing, to make my dad and Edge and everyone else finally notice me. Suddenly, it’s not enough to find a lead or two on the van Gogh case. I want to find that art.

And Edge and I could solve this mystery together, just like Kyo and Mika.

“I thought the band’s song was kind of depressing, you know?” Edge is saying. “But Mardi convinced me it’s actually atmospheric, kind of mysterious.”

“Speaking of mysterious, here’s a mystery. A real one.” I set down the comics, and I tell him everything that went down last night.

“Zounds!” he exclaims when I’m done. “And you’re really going to Japan next week?”

“No joke.” I take out my sketchbook and show Edge the characters I was working on last night—the Scarf, Sockeye, the Cormorant. I explain how their real-life counterparts might be suspects. “But Skye Connolly is the prime suspect in my mind.”

Edge studies my pictures. “Yeah, maybe she used your dad to get a job with the Yamadas and get access to their private collection. Now she has the art. She doesn’t need your dad. So she ditches him and plans her getaway. Which she’ll finance with her ‘cash windfall.’”

“Exactly!” I smile. I love how talking to Edge always feels like building something.

Edge is looking at my sketches. “These are really good, by the way.”

“Thanks.” I smile wider. “So. Where do we start looking for clues?”

“We?” Edge puts down my sketchbook. “You said the FBI was on the case.”

“They are. But does that mean we can’t look for the drawings or tail a suspect?”

“We don’t have police badges. We can’t get search warrants. We can’t wiretap phones. We can’t analyze forensic evidence. Hell’s bells, we can’t even drive!”

“That’s all TV and movie stuff. There are other ways to look for stolen art. Plus, it’s not against the law to look for lost objects if you’re a concerned citizen.”

“I guess not.” Edge looks doubtful.

“Did I mention the Yamadas are offering a one hundred thousand–dollar reward?”

“Crikey. That’s a lot of dough.”

“It is.” Edge’s family, like mine, does not exactly have a lot of extra money lying around; he’s going to camp on scholarship. “Think of the film equipment you could buy.”

He tips his head. He seems to be thinking.

“And if we recovered the van Gogh drawings, drawings that most of the world hasn’t seen, it would be a really big deal for the art world. It’s important.”

Edge is looking at me intently now. “Okay. I’m in. You have to get to that meeting at the Yamadas’ house this Sunday, with your dad. View the crime scene. Ask questions. And we need to get on Skye’s trail. See if she’s up to anything suspicious. Where did you say she worked?”

“Some art conservation firm in Belltown. I’ll look it up.”

On the computer, only one link comes up for
art conservation
in this small downtown neighborhood. Moore and Leavey Fine Art Conservation, on First Avenue and Virginia.

Edge jots the address on a sticky note.

Jerry opens his office door with a bang. He stands in the doorway, Big Gulp in hand. “This guy again?” He glares at Edge. “Violet, didn’t I talk to you just last week about your friends hanging out here? If they’re not buying, they have to go.” He waves at Edge. “Bye-bye.”

“There aren’t any customers here. I’m getting the restock done.”

“Are you working or are you wasting time gabbing?” Jerry demands.

I look past him, at the racks. At Superman. At all the other heroes flying on covers, punching through barriers, slashing at bad guys with swords or ray guns, with waves of energy. With webs. I think of Kimono Girl, and how I want her to be really tough.

“Actually, neither.” I set down the box cutter. “I’m quitting.”

8

I
’m not sure how much we accomplished by following Skye around downtown Seattle all afternoon, but least Edge didn’t talk about Mardi. And it was
fun
.

As Edge sits down at his computer later that same day and uploads the video from his camera, I sit in a chair beside him and reluctantly slide the blonde wig off my head. I’m almost sorry our stakeout is over. I loved feeling like somebody else.

While Edge connects the video camera to the computer and starts the upload, I comb out the tangled wig with my fingers and mentally replay our day.

After I walked out of Jet City Comics, Edge and I hopped a bus downtown. We camped out at a Tully’s Coffee across the street from Moore and Leavey Conservation. Near lunchtime, Skye came into the Tully’s and ordered a drink. She was carrying a large black portfolio case tucked under one arm, with a brown portfolio peeking out from the top. “Mitsue said the drawings were in a portfolio!” I whispered. “And that brown one in there looks old, doesn’t it?”

Edge whipped out his camcorder, and we were on her tail fast. We followed Skye down Pine Street and into Pike Place Market, pretending we were tourists in case she happened to turn and notice us with a camera.

She stopped in a seating area to eat a sandwich wrap and to call someone on her cell. Then we followed her several blocks to First and University, and into the Seattle Art Museum. We pooled our money and bought two student-rate tickets. We checked all the galleries and exhibit halls, but we’d lost her. Then Edge spotted her going down the escalator to the lobby . . .
without the big black portfolio case.
Then she hurried back to her office.

“I burned you a DVD.” Edge hands me a jewel case. “Let’s see if we got anything.”

Clip by clip, we go through the footage on his computer and relive our stakeout. We grin at each other when we discover the audio feed picked up her phone conversation.

“Do you think they’ll offer that much?” Skye says with a mouthful of sandwich. “Anything less, it’s just not worth all the work that I . . . Okay, then, wish me luck!”

In the next scene, Skye passes the magazine stand on First and Pike. I lean forward. I notice two Japanese men in blue raincoats. One man is thin, the other stocky. They duck behind a magazine rack when she passes, then emerge and follow her down First Avenue.

“Edge, these guys were near Margo’s gallery last night. For two hours.”

“At your dad’s show?”

“No. They just stood in the rain by their car. A green Prius. I saw them during the reception, near an alley, and I saw them across from the gallery when my dad and I were leaving. I don’t think it’s a coincidence we got them on film today. Let’s go back to the beginning.”

We review all the footage. This time, I keep an eye out for the men. Sure enough, a green Prius drives down Pine Street as Skye heads to the Market. It passes Skye slowly, then parks on Pine. Two men in blue raincoats get out. In the Market, I glimpse the men again as Skye goes to buy her sandwich; they’re at a booth of Native American tribal art, inspecting a mask of a raven. Then we forward to the museum. The men show up again in the museum lobby. There we can see them more clearly as they linger by the escalator. The tall, stocky man has ears that stick out, and it looks like his nose has been broken. The short, thin guy has an angry rash on his cheeks, either a flaming case of acne or scars from God knows what.

“You think they were following us?” Edge asks.

“No. I think they were following Skye. Hey, what’s weird about the short guy’s hand?”

Edge hits some buttons on the keyboard and zooms in close. I clap my hands to my mouth. Now we can see that the shorter man, holding a coffee cup, is missing most of his pinky finger on his left hand. Only a stub remains. I get chills.

As Skye heads out of the museum, the men follow. But outside the door they go left when she goes right, veering toward the
Hammering Man
sculpture and disappearing by the sculpture’s enormous iron foot. They do not appear again.

Edge drums his fingers on the desk. “This is big, V. Really big.”