I grabbed a cross grip on the lapels of his jacket and slammed in
The choke wasn’t perfect. I had more windpipe than carotid, and he fought for a long time, his groping getting more desperate. But there was nothing he could do. I kept the grip even after he had stopped struggling, rotating my head to see if anyone was coming. Nobody.
When I was sure that we were well past the point where he could be playing dead, I released the grip and kicked out from under him. Christ, he was heavy. I slid away from him and stood up, my back screaming from the cane, my breath heaving in and out in ragged gasps.
I knew from long experience that he wasn’t dead. People black out from strangles in the
This guy was going to have to find someone else to jump-start his battery. I would have liked to have questioned him, but this was no Benny.
I squatted down, one hand on the ground to steady myself, and went through his pockets. Found a cell phone in the breast pocket of his jacket. Quickly went through his other pockets. Found the pepper spray. Other than that I came up empty.
I stood up, pulses of pain shooting through my back, and started walking toward my apartment. Two schoolgirls in their blue sailor uniforms were passing just as I emerged from the alley and turned left onto my street. Their mouths dropped when they saw me, but I ignored them. Why were they staring like that? I reached up with my hand, felt the wetness on my cheek. Shit, I was bleeding. He’d scratched the hell out of my face.
I walked to my building as quickly as I could, wincing as I went up the two flights of steps. I let myself in, then wet a washcloth at the bathroom sink and wiped some of the blood off my face. The image staring back at me from the mirror looked bad, and it was going to be awhile before it started to look better.
The apartment around me felt strange. It had always been a haven, an anonymous safe house. Now it had been exposed, by Holtzer and the Agency — two ghosts from a past I thought I’d left behind. I needed to know why they were after me. Professional? Personal? With Holtzer, probably both.
I grabbed the things I needed and shoved them into a bag, then headed for the door, turning once to glance around before leaving. Everything looked the same as always; there was no sign of the people who’d been here. I wondered when I would see the place again.
Outside I headed in the direction of Sugamo. From there I could catch the Yamanote line back to Shibuya, back to Midori. Maybe the cell phones would provide some clues.
13
BY THE TIME I reached the hotel, the pain in my back had become a dull throbbing. My left eye was swollen — he’d gotten a finger in there at one point — and my head ached, probably from when he’d tried to tear loose one of my ears.
I shuffled past the old woman at the front desk, flashing my keys as I went by so she’d know I was already registered. She glanced up and then went back to her reading. I tried to give her only my right profile, which was in better shape than the left. She didn’t seem to notice my face.
I knocked on the door so Midori would know I was coming and then let myself in with the key.
She was sitting on the bed, and jumped when she saw my swollen eye and the scratches on my face. “What happened?” she gasped, and despite the pain the concern in her voice warmed me.
“Someone was waiting for me at my apartment,” I said, locking the door behind me. I let my coat fall off my back and eased myself onto the couch. “It looks like we’re both pretty popular lately.”
She came over and knelt down next to me, her eyes searching my face. “Your eye looks bad. Let me get you some ice from the freezer.”
I watched her walk away from me. She was wearing jeans and a navy sweatshirt that she must have picked up while I was out, and with her hair tied back I had a nice view of the proportions of her shoulders and waist, the curve of her hips. The next thing I knew I was wanting her so much I could almost have forgotten the pain in my back. There was nothing I could do about it. As any soldier who’s really been through it can tell you, extreme horniness is a reaction to combat. One second you’re fighting for your life, and then when it’s over you’ve got a hard-on the size of Manhattan. I don’t know why it happens, but it does.
She came back with some ice in a towel and I shifted on the couch, embarrassed. Electric pain jolted through my back but it didn’t make a dent in my predicament. She knelt down again and held the ice against my eye, smoothing my hair back at the same time. Better if she’d just dumped the cubes in my lap.
She eased me back on the couch and I grimaced, intensely aware of how near she was. “Does that hurt?” she asked, her touch instantly becoming tentative.
“No, it’s okay. The guy who cut up my face hit me in the back with a cane. It’ll be okay.”
Midori held the ice against my eye, her free hand warm on the side of my head, while I sat stiffly, afraid to move and embarrassed at my reaction, and the moment spun slowly out.
At one point she shifted the ice, and I reached to take it from her, but she continued to hold it and my hand wound up covering hers. The back of her hand was warm against my palm, the ice cold on my fingertips. “That feels good,” I told her. She didn’t ask whether I meant the ice or her hand. I wasn’t sure myself.
“You were gone for a long time,” she said after a while. “I didn’t know what to do. I was going to call you, but then I was starting to think, maybe you and those men in my apartment set this up, like good cop, bad cop, to get me to trust you.”
“I would have thought the same. I can imagine how this must all seem to you.”
“It was starting to seem pretty unreal, actually. Until I saw you again.”
I looked at the towel, now speckled red where it had been pressed against my face. “Nothing like a little blood to make things seem real.”
“It’s true. The thing I kept coming back to was how hard you kicked that man at my apartment — I saw blood
