Nothing happened.
He gave it a few more seconds. Feeling silly, Taylor returned to the steps and from that distance studied the yellow plastic bag. Now that it had his full attention, he realized that whatever the plastic bag contained was not square or even shaped like a phone book. It was round. Like an old-fashioned bomb. Like a cartoon bomb.
As hard as it was to believe, it looked to Taylor like someone had booby-trapped his front door.
Chapter Five
Will’s phone rang as he was negotiating the intricacies of the 405/101 interchange. He reached inside his sports coat, extracted his cell, noted the photo of a sunburned Taylor on a chartered fishing trip, and flipped the cell open, hastily refocusing on the freeway traffic merging in front of him.
“Hey,” said the two-year-old photo of Taylor.
“Hey.” Will opened his mouth to ask how Taylor’s first day back had gone; it had been in the back of his mind all day. But Taylor interrupted; there was a note in his voice that Will couldn’t quite pinpoint. “Are you still in San Diego?”
He was now sure something was up. Taylor was perfectly calm, but it was his on-the-job voice. “No. I’m stuck on the 101. Why? What’s up? Where are you?”
“I’m at the Red Dragon.”
“You’re where?” Will glanced at the dashboard lights. Tea-smoked duck at ten o’clock at night? It seemed unlikely.
“I’m having something translated.”
Weirder and weirder. “Like what?”
“Like the note that was left on my windshield this morning. Apparently it’s connected to the bomb on my front door.”
“What?” Will narrowly missed plowing into the BMW that swerved into his lane without signaling — and apparently without looking.
“Yeah. Someone hung a shaku ball in a plastic bag on my front door.”
“What the hell is a shaku ball?”
“You want the short answer or the long answer?”
“Short.”
“Hanabi. Japanese fireworks.”
“That’s too short.”
“That pretty much covers it, though. They’re these big spherical balls. They call them flowers of fire.”
Will cut through the “flowers of fire” crap. “Someone tried to kill you?” he demanded.
“Doubtful. I might have lost a hand or my eyesight, but I wouldn’t have been killed.”
“That’s comforting. For the record, I like your hands. I like your eyes. I’d prefer nothing happened to them.”
“Me too. Anyway, it was just wishful thinking on someone’s part, because the fuse was fucked-up. Even if I hadn’t noticed the bomb in time, it wouldn’t have gone off.”
Will turned on his signal and started inching over traffic lanes, whether his fellow motorists liked it or not, moving into the far lane bound for Ventura. “Did you get LAPD and the bomb-disposal unit over there?”
“Yeah, they’re on it, but essentially this amounts to someone leaving a bag of dud fireworks on my porch.”
“Bullshit!”
“Cool it, Will,” Taylor warned.
Will cooled it. “What did the note on your windshield say?” That much he had already figured out. A note in Japanese writing turned up on Taylor’s vehicle the same day someone tried to booby-trap his front door with fires of flower or whatever the hell it was? Taylor had made someone very angry, and Will thought he knew who.
“Mama-san says it’s a death threat.”
“Say again,” Will ordered tersely.
“It might be a threat. It reads ‘Old poison slays as swiftly as new.’”
“Stay right there,” Will said. “I’m coming to meet you.”
“No.”
“The hell I’m not.”
“For chrissake, Will.” Taylor sounded exasperated. “First of all, they’re trying to close for the night here. Secondly, there’s no reason I can’t go home. Nobody broke in. There isn’t even any property damage, let alone damage to me.”
“That place is as secure as a cardboard box. I’ll meet you at my place.”
“Oh for God’s sake.” Taylor sighed. “All right, Mom. Whatever. I’ll meet you at your house.”
* * * * *
“Just for the sake of argument, let’s consider the punks from the Red Dragon parking lot,” Will said, pouring a short glass of bourbon. He held the bottle of bourbon up in offer. Taylor shook his head. He was sticking to iced water tonight.
They were sitting in the comfortable den of Will’s Woodland Hills ranch-style home. It was a small room — the entire house was small, though more than big enough for one guy who was never there anyway. The walls were oak paneled, and the furniture was upholstered in funky blue and black plaid. There were a couple of rifles over the fireplace and a couple of marksman trophies on the mantel below.
Riley was snoring softly on Taylor’s feet. A rare honor. He said, “Nah. Why would they leave me a note in Japanese? How would they leave me a note in Japanese? It’s gotta tie in to the cobra in the wine bottle.”
“You said you had no idea who sent the cobra in the rice wine.”
“I don’t.”
Will gave him a skeptical look before proceeding with his own line of reasoning. “They would leave you a note in Japanese to throw suspicion off themselves. If they left you a note in Spanish — assuming the morons can even write — it would lead directly back to them. As for how: one of them could have a Japanese girlfriend. Who knows?”
“Why not leave me a note in English? That would be easier. Plus, there would be more chance of me understanding the threat.”
“They wanted you to know it was about what happened in the parking lot of the Red Dragon.”
Taylor said reasonably, “Then that cancels out what you said about them not wanting me to know it was them.”
Will’s easy smile took him aback. “Good, then we can eliminate that bullshit before you ever think about using it as a smoke screen. Who, besides the cholos in the Red Dragon parking lot, have you had a run-in with?”
Sometimes Will really did annoy the hell out him. Irritably, Taylor shook his head.
“Not good enough.”
Taylor gave him a narrow look. “Maybe not, but it’s the truth.”
“What about Japan?”
Taylor tensed. “What about it?”
“Someone sends you a cobra in
