Eight Million Gods-eARC (3 page)

The problem was that the novel had to meet certain standards. Because her first book was being marketed as a romantic thriller, she needed a heroine and a hero who meet, fall in love, and survive to the end. So far, all her possible romantic leads had been killed—except the one that mysteriously vanished in mid-sentence. But she suspected that he was dead, too.

“Don’t worry, we’ll work through it,” Miriam said. “Do what you do best, and I’ll fill in any missing pieces. Team Banzai go!”

Which was why Miriam was her best friend. She had always protected Nikki and gave her hope when life went to hell.

“Thanks,” Nikki said.

“Okay, so we need a new romantic hero. A stud muffin for your little dormouse artist.”

“She’s not a dormouse, she’s just emotionally scarred. George would have completely freaked her out. Him and his school girls in bondage fetish.”

The
shoji
door slid open again and two more
salarymen
in dark suits ducked into the shop. These two were tall and sturdy looking.

“
Irasshaimase,
” the waitress and the cook called, welcoming the new customers.

The men scanned the shop, said something to each other as they noticed Miriam with her pink ponytails, and then focused on Nikki. There was something decidedly unfriendly about their faces.

One slipped off his shoes and headed for them like a very polite avenging angel.

“Miriam.” Nikki indicated the man.

“Tanaka
desu
.” He introduced himself as Mr. Tanaka. Make that Detective Tanaka as he produced a police badge and flashed it. He continued taking.

“What’s he saying?” Nikki turned to Miriam for a translation.

“Oh my God, Nikki,” Miriam gasped. “He’s arresting you for murder.”

3

In the Kitchen,
With a Blender

Nikki liked pens. She took some comfort knowing that most writers did. Only her obsession for ink-based writing instruments was on the same level as a wino’s fixation on wine. The only things she had ever stolen in her life were pens, usually cheap ones off people’s desks. The only new pen had been a six hundred dollar Cartier Diabolo fountain pen with an 18K gold nib. (One couldn’t really blame her; her mother had dragged her down Rodeo Drive in some vain attempt to make Nikki presentable during an election campaign and triggered a writing fit in Neiman Marcus. She had locked herself in a bathroom stall and wrote out a vivisection on a fistfull of paper towels.)

What “worked” best for her hypergraphia were cheap retractable ballpoint pens supplied by oxygen companies and such to hospital staff to promote their products. It was her special brew in a brown paper bag. She could hold the compulsion off sometimes by just gripping one tight and clicking it repeatedly.

Since arriving in Osaka, she’d fallen in love with Zebra Surari emulsion ink pens with 0.5mm points in five colors. She bought them like some people bought cigarettes. She had a dozen in her backpack, mostly black, her favorite weapon, but at least one of the other four colors. She paired them with the B6-sized Campus notebook sold at FamilyMart. Compared to what she bought in the United States, the slim notebooks were stunningly cheap, yet superior in paper quality. God, the Japanese understood writing by hand.

Handcuffed in the back of the tiny police squad car, she really wished she could think of anything except pens. And how much she
needed
one in her hand. With paper. And both were within her backpack beside her.

Maybe if she used her teeth . . .

Then again, perhaps thinking about pens was better than thinking about the mess she was in. This wasn’t the United States. The police could and would hold a suspect as long as they wanted. There was one case where they arrested a man and held him for questioning for three days. He was suspected of nothing more than groping women on the train. When his parents reported him missing to the very police station that was holding him, they weren’t told that he was just down the hall. In the end, the police realized that they had the wrong man and released him without apology despite media outcry.

And they suspected her of murder!

She bit down on a whimper as the need to write grew a little more desperate. She closed her eyes, took deep cleansing breaths, and tried to focus only on her happy place. Pristine white sand. Water so blue that it defied description.

The car pulled to a stop and they were at the Osaka Prefectural Police Headquarters next to the sprawling gardens of the Osaka Castle.

God, she would kill for a pen.

The police department looked much like its American counterpart—desks crowded with computers, office supplies, and paper files threatening to overrun everything. Luckily they stopped her by a desk with pens in a coffee mug. She eased around so the cup was behind her and in reach of her handcuffed hands.

“
Watashi no nihongo wa heta desu,
” she said while running her fingers blindly over the pens. It meant—hopefully—that her Japanese was bad. “
Wakarimasen.
” Which meant “I don’t understand.” She found a retractable pen. She gripped it tightly, and carefully, silently, clicked it. She took a deep breath and relaxed as she breathed it out. “Please. Does anyone speak English?”

The policemen were talking to each other, ignoring her. She silently clicked the pen a few more times, trying to decide what to do. If this were the American police, she would ask for a lawyer and refuse to talk to the police until someone showed up, probably from the public defender’s office. All the anecdotal evidence, though, seemed to suggest that Japanese citizens didn’t automatically have the right to an attorney. If she asked for someone from the American consulate, would they call the embassy for her? Did she want someone?

No. And definitely not. She clicked the pen again.

Detective Tanaka took her by the arm and led her to an interrogation room. At least that’s what it looked like: a tiny room with just a steel table and four chairs. She didn’t wait for him to point at one of the chairs. She slid in one without being told.

The detective put her backpack on the table and settled into the chair across from her. Silently, they eyed each other. It reminded her of meeting a new psychiatrist. The quiet weighing in of battle spirit before the subtle and non-so-subtle word games started.

He was tall, solidly built for a Japanese man, and good-looking. Brown hair and brown eyes went without saying, although his haircut wasn’t the drama excess she was used to in J-pop idols and male nightclub hosts. He seemed fairly young to be a detective. Was he one of those guys that got ahead merely because he acted the arrogant alpha male? No, he didn’t have the self-centered air that they had. He was searching her face, his dark eyebrows arched in mild confusion. Maybe he was the rare type of man that was as intelligent as he was good-looking. Maybe he did criminal profiling and he was realizing that she really didn’t fit the type that killed men with blenders. If she could keep from scribbling madly on the walls, she might even be able to convince him of that.

“I don’t speak Japanese.” She said it slowly but not loudly. Loudly only annoyed people. “Please. English.
Kudasai.”

“
Chotto matte kudasi.
” He stood up and took out a key ring. She realized that he was going to take off her handcuffs. She managed to slip her stolen pen up her sleeve and tucked it into her watchband before he reached her side.

“Arigato go—go—goazimasu.” She purposely stumbled with the “thank you very much.”

As she rubbed her wrists, he took his seat again. Okay, not being handcuffed was good, maybe. It meant Tanka didn’t consider her dangerous. If she lost control of her hypergraphia however, her hands would be free to disobey.

They had taken her wallet and passport at the restaurant. He took them out now and studied her passport and tourist visa papers. He sounded out her name. “Nikki Delany.”

Nikki nodded. “
Hai
.”

He produced latex gloves out of his coat pocket and pulled them on. Oh, joy. He was treating her backpack as evidence. He cautiously unzipped the bag as if suspecting she had poisonous snakes inside. She winced as she remembered the contents: a extremely graphic
yaoi
manga, a package of fireworks, more pens than god, a fresh notebook, and one very large knife. In the USA everything but the pen and paper would get her into trouble. At least in Japan, they’d only be concerned with the knife.

He pulled out the sealed plastic package of the fireworks she’d bought at 7-11 that morning. As she’d expected, he put it to the side with only a slight look of confusion.

A paper fan she forgot she collected followed. It was one of the traditional non-folding fans called an
uchiwa
. She had recently started to decorate the walls of her apartment with them because they were given out free. This one had a beautiful woodblock print of a sparrow sitting on a flowering tree on one side and an advertisement on the back, although she couldn’t tell for what. It stated “lead the value” in English and then
kanji
underneath identifying the company. She had asked the man handing it out for a translation. He’d misunderstood and demonstrated fanning himself. It triggered one of the many cultural shocks of the morning.

Detective Tanaka laid the fan aside and took out the
yaoi
manga. She liked the series because it explained the world of manga production, but the cover made clear that the plot followed the romance of two men. She was laboring over translating a page a day in an attempt to learn Japanese on her own. Tanaka’s confused look grew deeper.

He took out the notebook she had bought that morning. He flipped through it, noting all the pages were blank, and put it down. Her hands were moving toward it before she stopped herself. Tanaka eyed her hands and then the notebook.

Jerking her hands back would be bad. Considering how twitchy her fingers felt, picking up the notebook would be very bad. She froze. Her Japanese utterly failed her. “Good paper. Very good paper.”

Finally he hit the cleaver-like
nakiri
with the gleaming black blade.

She had done endless research on knives in her quest to learn how to cook Japanese style. She knew for example that the nakiri of Osaka were called
kamagata nakiri
and had a rounded corner instead of the Tokyo rectangular shape. She had not a clue how to say “cut vegetables.”

“
Daikon
.” She named one Japanese vegetable she knew, the large radish root and mimed cutting one up. “Chop, chop, chop.” How did you say cook? “
Shabu shabu
.” Technically it was a dish, but the name came from the sound of the food being cooked. She was fairly sure you chopped up vegetables for it.

“Ah.” He made a little noise of understanding but was careful to put the knife onto the chair beside him, out of her reach.

The door opened and the little tiny
salaryman
from the restaurant paused in the doorway, clutching a folder to his chest.

“You!” Nikki pointed at him, and he nearly jumped back out of the room. “You speak English!”

Tanaka snickered. “Yes. He speaks English. This is Aki Yoshida.”

She didn’t know if she was more pissed or relieved. She settled on relieved because pissed usually caused problems. “This is a mistake. I write novels. Like this.” She tapped the manga. She really hoped that Yoshida didn’t pair Miriam’s taunt at the restaurant with cover art of a half-naked, big-eyed
uke
staring up at his leering
seme
. “I’m here in Japan researching locations for a novel I’m writing. That’s what we were talking about in the restaurant. One of my characters had been murdered. I wrote about killing . . .”

Tanaka was in full confusion. She had outstripped his understanding of English. She tucked her hands under the table, reached up her sleeve to her stolen pen and clicked it.
Breath deep.
Click.
White sands.
Click.
Blue ocean.
Click.

“I didn’t kill anyone.” She stuck to plain and simple.

Yoshida nervously eyed the knife on the chair on the police side of the table. Tanaka said something to him and pointed to the fourth chair. The little policeman edged closer to Nikki, grabbed the chair, and dragged it quickly away from her side.

“I’m a forensic scientist,” Yoshida said. “I studied at California State University.”

So he should understand English very well, but he didn’t look any less scared.

“I write novels,” she tried again, slower. “I was talking about my book. My characters are not real people.”

Yoshida opened the folder that he was carrying and pushed a picture toward her. It was a blond man, fairly good-looking if one overlooked the fact that he was obviously very dead.

“Do you know this man?” Tanaka asked.

“No.”
They had a dead body! They had a real dead body!
Clickclickclickclickclick.

“He is American,” Tanaka said. “His name is Gregory Winston.”

“I don’t know him!” Okay, that was eerily close to her character George Wilson’s name. She fought the urge to reach for her notebook. Now was not the time to break down. “Crazy” was too close to “homicidal” in most people’s dictionary.

“He had an apartment in Umeda,” Tanaka said.

Just like George Wilson.

“I don’t know him,” Nikki said. How do you prove that you don’t know someone –especially after they’re dead? “Really, I’ve only been in Japan for two months. I barely know anyone.”

“Did you meet him in the United States? Maybe you were lovers?”

“No! I’ve never seen that man before in my life!” She was going to lose it soon.

Tanaka motioned to Yoshida, and the little police officer took out another photograph and put it beside the picture of the dead man. It was a Blendtec blender covered in blood, still set on puree.

She upset her chair, tripped over it, and came up against the wall before she realized that she had recoiled as fast as she could from the photograph. Her mouth was open and something loud and not very sane sounding was struggling to push its way out. She slapped her hand back over her mouth to keep it in.