Chapter 2

Greg was there, waiting, outside the front door, under the overhang and out of the rain, rain that was falling from a leaden sky like dead bullets, smoking one of his goddam Gitanes. He’d watched too many of those old noir movies. The fedora he wore, along with the goddamn pinstripe suit and tie, really laid it on too thick. Thought he was Jules Maigret or Arsène Lupin, or some hotshot like that Bogart dude played in those old movies.

Raincoat was new though.

“What brand?” I asked, eyeing it, taking the Gitane he flicked out of the pack for me, leaning into the lighter. We knew each other.

“Burberry,” he said.

“What the fuck’s that?” Dude looked even more like Bogart than he had last time I saw him. Right down to the height. He was only a couple of inches taller than me. Made up for it in attitude. You met Greg, he could be right in the middle of a dozen bruisers, but one look and you knew who was the boss.

“English. They make ‘em for women too. You should get yourself one. That black leather and those cargo pants and Doc Martens you always wear make you look like a carpet munching lezzie. You need to look the part, Mal. You know, sophisticated private investigator.”

He grinned. Yeah, well, of course he knew. Wasn’t like I pretended to be what I wasn’t, never had, and neither did he.

“Fuck that,” I said, yawning. One coffee hadn’t done it. “Cut to the chase. We’ve both had a long day.” I knew he had. I’d dumped those girls on him and his team earlier. “What’s the scoop?”

“Jap girl’s gone missing,” he said, losing his grin. Inhaling. “High school student, fourteen, just. Had her birthday a week or two ago for fuck’s sake. Parents are from Japan. They moved here a month ago. Her dad’s some high-powered exec for some huge fucking Jap tech company with connections. Never heard of ‘em, but the Jap consulate called up the line as well, high up, and their Consul’s in there with them right now. He was here before me, and the Commissioner called me just now too.”

Political? Fuck! Those were the worst. Might have to do some real work.

“Girl?” I asked, inhaling myself, and fuck, those Gitanes were awful.

Jap girl? As soon as he said that, I already knew where this was going. I mean, Greg wouldn’t have called me if it hadn’t already gone there. We’d been doing this for a while, him and me. There were distinctions. Young girl. Tween. Teenager. Young woman. We didn’t usually go further than Tweens and Teenagers. A lot depended on what they looked like and how old they were. Older they were, the more likely they’d just done a runner. The younger they were, well, let’s not go there quite yet.

All sorts of reasons girls ran. Get away from a bad situation at home, abuse, incest, that kinda thing, but Greg knew all that, and he’d called me up, and he’d have made his own assessment. He was usually right. He’d been doing this way longer than me. He’d taught me everything I knew, back when I was a rookie cop on his team.

“Yeah, well, she’s fourteen, just. Teenager. She’s not a kid. She really is a looker, Mal. Went missing from her high school today. Private school for ex-pat Japs on Assisi Square, no fucking security, let the girls out into the park across the street for recess, the stupid bastards, and she never came back. I mean, fuck, there’s stupid, and then there’s fucking stupid. Things’ve changed around here the last few years. Used to be an okay neighborhood, but it’s gone downhill fast. You know the story.”

I nodded, inhaling again. Yeah, I knew the story. Knew it too fuckin’ well.

Jesus, I’d never wanted to smoke, disgusting fucking habit, but here I was, and those fucking Gitanes were awful. But yeah, Greg was right. Fuckin’ stupid. I mean, that school, I knew the one he meant. It’d been a real nice area, once upon a time, like, ten, maybe twenty years ago, but the way things were around here, what with the crime and the homeless crazies stumbling around, letting girls like those ones, with no idea how to look after themselves ‘n no street smarts, out into a park was fucking stupid.

I mean, it wasn’t just the crazies. The fucking needles. Shit and piss everywhere, the streets smelt like urinals back of a back alley dive, and as for crime? Jesus, you didn’t want to think about carrying a handbag and you needed eyes in the back of your head in case some whacked out nutjob tried to sucker punch you, and they didn’t care who you were.

Some poor old Chinese lady, she’d been attacked just down the road, and not just pushed around or knocked down. She’d had the shit kicked out of her when she was down. DOA. Honestly, I’d grown up near here, but fuck, driving through the streets to get here, I’d barely recognized the area. Looked like some third world hellhole.

One day, I was gonna move outta here, maybe live on a boat down in Florida or something, but right now the money was here. Was it ever! Made more over the last year than I’d ever imagined when I’d gotten into this. Who said crime didn’t pay? I was making more than I’d ever dreamed I’d make. Mind you, the hours sucked, and so did the job, ‘n there were a few bodies behind me here and there too, but whatever. Nobody’d ever find them. They’d gone to the cats and dogs just about right away. Raoul’s business was growing.

Whatever. The money was fucking good.

“Fucking stupid,” Greg said, and he did sound fucked off. “Already talked to them about that but Jesus, you can’t fix dumb. Anyhow, the girl’s a real little looker, sent you a few images. Don’t think she ran away, but nobody saw what happened. She upped and vanished during recess. Never came back.”

“Checked CCTV?”

“Yeah, we checked the school’s, at least they have that. We got her crossing the road to the park with all the other girls, but nothing after that, she went off camera, never came back. None of the other girls noticed where she went. Haven’t finished yet, but we won’t get any CCTV footage from any of the other buildings until tomorrow. If they even have any.”

“What’s Miss Tokyo’s name?” I asked, blowing a smoke ring. Oh yeah! Perfect! I was getting better at doing those. Those Gitanes were still crap though.

“Fumiko Suematsu,” he said. “Don’t you ever read your fucking messages, Mal? Sent you some images of her as well, links to her social media pages, quick bio. It’s all there.

“Hey, I drove right over as soon as you called,” I said, pulling out my mobile. “I don’t text and drive,” I added virtuously. Truth be told, I’d been wiped. It’d been about all I could handle to drink my coffee and zombie-drive.

Greg snickered.

I checked out the messages, along with that first image he’d forwarded me, and yeah, she was a real looker. Fucking gorgeous actually. Face you couldn’t tear your eyes away from. Kinda looked a lot like me when I was her age, and yeah, well, that was, let’s just say it was more than ten years ago and leave my fucking age out of it. Me, I didn’t have that baby-faced innocence anymore, but guys still looked. Not just guys, but whatever. Fumiko Suematsu had it in spades, for all she was only fourteen. That “it” the drew guys like a magnet.

Skimmed through the rest. Family photos. Social media? Quite a few selfies, the usual teenage crap that fourteen year old teenage girls posted. Mix of English and Japanese. Seemed like she was pretty fluent in English. Some social media posts. Glanced through and it was all the usual teenage girl shit. A few bikini shots. Tiny little bikinis too. Real tiny. Yeah, Miss Tokyo looked red hot in those bikini shots, ‘n she sure knew how to pose. Kinda surprised her parents let her wear anything like that, but hey, Japanese. They’re weird sometimes. Nice legs. Cute little butt on her. Even looked real good in that school uniform she wore.

No surprises there.

The ones that went missing like this, they usually did look real good. That was generally why they went missing in the first place. No point in lifting a girl that looked like a dog, after all, and Miss Tokyo sure wasn’t a dog. Far from it, and that uniform made that obvious. Any girl that could look as hot as she did in a school uniform’s hot.

One of those kinky Jap school uniforms you see in porn movies, ‘n I’d actually been real surprised when I found out they really did wear uniforms like that in those Japanese schools. Weird. White shirt, blazer, real short little plaid skirt, as in real short, and white knee socks. Yeah, you saw them all the time in Jap porn movies. Or on bait. Didn’t see them that much on actual schoolgirls though, not here, anyhow. Those fucking uniforms fucked me off every time I fucking saw them. I’d had to wear one now and then, back when I’d been bait, and I’d known what I’d looked like when I had.

I’d looked like Fumiko Suematsu back then.

Or maybe she looked like I had. Lotta older guys loved that look. Guess how I knew that? Fucking perverts. Not that I’d ever minded them looking back when I was Miss Tokyo’s age. They could look all they liked as long as they kept their hands to themselves. Kind of wondered if Miss Tokyo thought like I had. That skirt was way short, those poses were, well, they were poses, showing herself off, and her bikinis were tiny. Tinier than anything I’d ever worn back when I was her age, and I wasn’t exactly shy back then. But then again, teenage fashion and Japan. Things were different there. Maybe she’d known, and maybe like a lot of girls, she just enjoyed being looked at. The way she posed though, she knew what she was doing and she was enjoying herself, but maybe that was just me.

Maybe she had no fucking clue and she just wore her skirt real short because it was the fashion, and she’d worn tiny bikinis because all her friends did. I’d pushed it when I was younger than her, without any idea of the risks I was taking. I’d done quite a few things that’d been a bit stupid or risky when I was her age, and younger for that matter. Fourteen? You think there’s nothing out there that’ll harm you, or if there is, you think you’re street smart. You think you can avoid it.

You’re wrong, and I knew that now.

Hadn’t known that then, but I’d been lucky.

Guess Fumiko Suematsu hadn’t been quite so lucky.

“You thinking what I’m thinking, Mal?” Greg leaned back against the garage wall, blowing a cloud of cigarette smoke out into the rain.

We both watched as the downpour washed that smoke away in an instant. Kinda like what happens to a teenage girl’s life really, when something real bad happens, the bad shit goes down, and her luck runs out like water down a stormwater drain.

“Any reason at all that she’d run?” Be harder to track her down, but I’d almost feel better about it if she had. Coz I knew the alternatives.

“Not that I can see. Family moved here from Japan a month ago. Seems to have fitted in at her school, made a few friends already. Talked to them this afternoon, and she seemed fine to them. Happy. Settling in here. No bitching or any of that shit as far as I can tell, but they’re all so fucking polite. Nothing wrong with the parents as far as I can tell, either. Hard to tell, they’re Japs, not American-Japanese. Bit of an accent, and their English is so-so. They seem totally normal though, nothing weird about them.”

“Yeah, well,” I said, flatly, slowly, sucking in that smoke, puffing out another smoke ring, watching it dissolve in the rain, and that fucking rain wasn’t easing off at all. “Not bad boobs on her and she’s fourteen, doesn’t look like a total kid, so whoever it was, likely it wasn’t a pedo, which means I’m thinking what you’re thinking, Greg. When’d she go missing again?”

“Today. Recess, sometime between midday and one. The school called the parents around two, after they’d searched the building and the park themselves. They didn’t call us until later, after the parents got there, not that it’d have made any difference if they had. Took them another hour to contact us. She’d been gone four hours by the time we got there.”

“She’d be wherever they’d planned to take her well before then. Anyone see anything?”

“Nope, and that park’s busy. Lots of girls, lotta people taking lunch there as well. Quite a few unhoused citizens and a few of the crazies and zombies hanging out there too, but somebody woulda called if they saw a girl being dragged off. Even here. We checked out the fucking tents too, just on the off chance. Nothing. Nada.”