Victor Gischler - Suicide Squeeze

“Sorry.”

“What’s your name? What are you doing here?”

Conner hesitated only a second. He told the officer James had hired him to repossess the boat, but he didn’t say anything about Folger or the scene with the Japanese killers. The cop wrote Conner’s name and address on the notepad.

A young girl burst into the shop. She looked panicked. Conner recognized her as the girl who worked the register for James. “What’s going on?” She rushed toward the young cop. “Oh, my God! Is Mr. James okay? Has something happened?”

“Crap.” The cop moved to intercept the girl. She started crying and shaking, grabbing hold of the cop’s arm.

Conner slipped back into James’s office. He was careful not to touch anything. The office looked like it had been searched recklessly. One drawer of the filing cabinet stood open. Conner craned his neck, looked without touching. The drawer was marked F-J. An empty space in the front of the drawer. The Folger file. It was missing. James’s murder had something to do with Teddy Folger and the boat.

Shit.

He looked over his shoulder. The young cop looked distressed, the girl sobbing on his shoulder.

Conner realized he was being a bit selfish, but he couldn’t help thinking he obviously wasn’t going to get paid for repossessing the Jenny . All that work. He’d been beaten up, even shot at. To come away empty-handed…

He flipped open James’s humidor, grabbed a fistful of cigars, and shut it again. He stuffed the cigars into his pocket, left the office, walked past the cop and the still-weeping girl.

“Can I go now?”

“Uh… sure.” The cop waved the notepad at him. “We have your information. A detective might come see you. If we have any more questions.”

“Fine,” said Conner, who couldn’t think of a single question he wanted to answer.

He was known as Toshi X, the Kyoto Destroyer. His job description included cruelty and death, punishment and pain. He was as hard and thin as a blade, long Elvis sideburns, alert eyes that blazed with eager violence. He loved his job, and his job was to make everyone sorry.

And his growing contempt for Billy Moto was becoming harder to conceal.

Toshi had been happy to receive Cousin Ahira’s phone call. In Toshi’s opinion, it had been a mistake for Ahira to retire from the Yakuza, but now his cousin was showing signs of his former self. Ahira had become soft and weak playing at businessman. Toshi despised weakness. He despised Moto.

“It goes without saying that the incident at the river was bungled badly,” Moto said. “If I’d been there, Mr. Kurisaka might have his card now. Your rogue tactics are inappropriate and inefficient.” Moto paced the hotel suite as he talked.

Toshi wasn’t listening. Instead, he mused how he would go about killing Moto. He imagined Moto’s pencil neck in his tight grip, a short, sharp jerk, the sound of snapping bone. This made Toshi smile.

“Is something funny?” Moto asked.

“Not at all,” Toshi said. “Do go on.” He reclined easily in the overstuffed chair. His Yakuza sidekick Itchi sat on the sofa across the room. Itchi had ruined his black suit in the river and now wore shorts and a T-shirt purchased at a local gift shop while the suit was at the cleaners. The T-shirt was bright blue and bore the slogan My friends went to Pensacola, Florida, and all I got was this lousy T-shirt. For some reason, Toshi thought the garment hilarious.

“Mr. Kurisaka will want a progress report soon, and I’m not optimistic about his reaction,” Moto said.

“And who is to blame?” Toshi asked. “It is your tentative, milk-water approach that has failed to yield results. You mince about, ask subtle questions, consult with the insurance woman. For what?”

“We need information.”

“We are wasting time,” Toshi said.

Moto’s face reddened. The man’s barely controlled rage amused Toshi. Perhaps he could provoke Moto into a physical confrontation. He welcomed an excuse to spill Moto’s blood, damage his smug self-assurance. Toshi was an impatient man and loathed waiting for Moto to finesse the situation. Toshi failed to understand why his cousin found Moto useful. In the old days, Kurisaka would not have tolerated such weakness. Toshi decided to make it his business to show his cousin the light.

Toshi’s methods were more direct. More satisfying. Find someone and squeeze them until they talked. But whom to squeeze? Toshi hated to admit it, but Moto was right about one thing. They needed information.

Toshi stood, signaled Itchi to do the same. “We’ll leave you to wait by the phone. Who knows? Perhaps the Becker woman will call with useful information after all, but it has been three days. I warn you. I will not sit idle for much longer. Mr. Kurisaka wants the DiMaggio card. If you can’t get it for him your way, then I’ll get it mine.”

Toshi and Itchi left the hotel suite, Moto steaming and frustrated behind them.

Something was going on.

Joellen Becker had a sixth sense, an instinct. It had failed her often, got her kicked out of the NSA in fact, but it was a pick-at-a-scab feeling that just wouldn’t go away.

She’d chased down leads, tried to ferret out where Folger was hiding himself. She’d narrowed the possibilities, but Folger wasn’t holed up with his ex-wife. His house was empty and up for sale. She’d broken in through the back door, searched. Nothing and nobody. Several other leads also turned out to be a bust.

Joellen had discovered Folger owned a sailboat, one big enough to live on full-time, but when she’d found the slip at the marina the boat wasn’t there. She got ahold of the boat’s registration number and performed an Internet search to see if the boat triggered any red flags in the Coast Guard database. Nothing. With the registration she was able to follow the trail to Derrick James. James didn’t have a lot of useful information, but he had coughed up a name.

Conner Samson.

The name wasn’t much to go on. Samson was a repo man James had hired to take back the boat. A nobody. But that hit-’n’-miss instinct said she needed to find the guy and talk to him. Samson was a loose end floating around out there, and Joellen wanted to tie it up and move on.

She looked at her watch. She was due to call Moto but decided to put it off. She didn’t want to admit she’d been temporarily stymied. He’d just have to keep for a while.

Joellen poured herself another white wine, paced circles around her house the way she did when mulling jumbled ideas that refused to gel. Through the living room, into the bedroom, back through to the kitchen. She noticed, not for the first time, how spartan her apartment was. No pictures on the wall, furniture uninteresting and functional. She had never allowed herself to feel anywhere was permanent. Had never been fully satisfied anywhere. No reason to stay where she was; no reason to go somewhere new.

After Father’s death and her resignation from the NSA, she had run out of family and had been run out of her career.

She was thirty-six years old, and her own life didn’t interest her. The insurance company was a waste of her time and talents. Now she had a goal. Something worthy of her, something that would make life interesting again.

She hoped.

Conner awoke, blinked, remembered he was unhappy and hungover and tried to go back to sleep. Sleep told him to fuck off. He rolled out of bed, groaned. His apartment smelled like throw up and cigars.

He shuffled into the bathroom, saw the puddle of vomit. He’d missed the toilet by a good foot. He’d clean it up later when his head stopped pounding. His toe nudged the empty vodka bottle. Memory crept back slowly. He’d been up all night trying to forget the two thousand dollars he owed Rocky Big.