Eight Million Gods-eARC Read Online Free PDF Page A

the top of Hep Five. Honest to God. I made it all up.”
    Shit, she was babbling. She needed to shut up. “I was eating ramen for lunch and thought ‘George Wilson will be killed by a blender’ and started to write it. I don’t know why a blender. I didn’t even know anything about blenders. That’s just how the muse works.” Stop talking. “I had to look them up on the Internet. They’re really a stupid murder weapons. Their cords are only this long, you always put on the jar before you put on the blades, and I don’t know if you even buy them in Japan.” Stop talking! Just stop! “I spent all yesterday doing research on them. I ended up on youtube.com watching the Blend Tec ‘will it blend’ videos. They put weird shit in blenders and reduce them down to scrap. You know—marbles and cell phones. It felt right; it was the kind of blender George would own.”
    She slapped her hands over her mouth. Obviously she had lost Tanaka long ago and Yoshida was frowning with concentration to understand what she was said. She wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing.
    Yoshida started to talk in Japanese to Tanaka. Maybe translating. Maybe suggesting that they put her in a mental hospital. She really wished she understood Japanese better. She closed her eyes and thought of tropical beaches—someplace that spoke English—with no blenders.
    Cigarette smoke made her open her eyes. Tanaka had taken out a pack of Lucky Strikes and lit one. He was listening to Yoshida, but he was watching her with puzzled eyes. He held out the pack as an offering. Nikki shook her head. He took a portable ashtray, known as a keitai haizara , out of his pocket and sat it beside him.
    “Where were you last night?” Tanaka asked when Yoshida finished. “With people? They can say you were with them?”
    Could she talk without babbling? She slid her hand off her mouth and tried to stay focused on not babbling and sounding guilty as hell. Her hands fluttered around, looking for the pen she’d been holding. “Saturdays I do chores. I cleaned my apartment, did laundry, and wrote.” The pen wasn’t in her pockets or up her sleeve. She scanned the floor and spotted it beside her overturned chair. She edged over and scooped up the pen as she righted her chair. She pushed the chair toward the table while keeping to a sane, safe subject. “There’s a FamilyMart across the street. I went to it three—no—four times. Nakamura was working yesterday; she wants to be a JAL flight attendant so she likes to practice her English with me. First time I bought panda blood flavored cookies . . .”
    “Nani?” Tanaka exclaimed.
    Yoshida shrugged.
    “Panda blood flavored?” Tanaka asked.
    Nikki sat down, keeping her right hand holding the pen hidden in her lap. She put her left out on the table to distract the policemen. “I don’t know what they’re called.” Nikki quietly clicked the ballpoint and tried not to think about the huge gaps of time she spent in her apartment alone yesterday. “The bag has picture of a panda on the front. The cookies were squishy, and they have some kind of red filling. I thought it would be cherry or raspberry or something, but it was something icky that I’ve never had before. I didn’t like them. I posted about them on my blog, and someone commented that they were panda blood flavored.”
    Yoshida condensed her ranting down to four words.
    “You went three more times?” Tanaka asked.
    “Second time I bought the ramen for lunch and got yen coins for the washing machines in the lobby of my apartment building. I went home and ate and wrote.” The visits had been hours apart. She had been alone, lost in her writing. Click. Click. Click. “I posted the scene, started my laundry, and then went back to FamilyMart.”
    By then, she was in the fact-checking phase of writing, trying to fill in all the details that the muse had left out. In the scene, it had just been “the blender” and the action had been