Stalking the Angel Read Online Free PDF

the guy with the missing finger came around the tables like he was going to show me the door. When he reached to take my arm I pushed his hand away. He stopped smiling and threw a pretty fast backfist. I pushed the fist past me and hit him in the neck with my left hand. He made the sound a drunk in a cheap restaurant makes with a piece of meat caught in his throat and went down. The guy with the bad eye was coming around the tables when an older man came out from behind the bamboo steamers and spoke sharply and the guy with the bad eye stopped.
    Nobu Ishida was in his early fifties with short gray hair and hard black eyes and a paunch for a belly. Even with the paunch, the other guys seemed to straighten up and pay attention. Those who could stand.
    He looked at me the way you look at a disappearing menu, then shook his head. The guy on the floorwas making small coughing noises but Nobu Ishida didn’t look at him and neither did anyone else. Ishida was carrying my card. “What are you, crazy? You know I could have you arrested for this?” Nobu Ishida didn’t have an accent, either.
    I gave him a little shrug. “Go ahead.”
    He said, “What do you want?”
    I told him about the Hagakure.
    Nobu Ishida listened without moving and then he tried to give me good-natured confusion. “I don’t get it. Why come to me?”
    The guy with the missing finger stopped making noises and pushed himself up to his knees. He was holding his throat. I said, “You’re interested in samurai artifacts. The Hagakure was stolen. You’ve purchased stolen artworks in the past. You see how this works?”
    The good-natured confusion went away. Ishida’s mouth tightened and something dark washed his face. Telltale signs of guilt. “Who says I’ve bought stolen art?”
    “Akira Kurosawa gave me a call.”
    Ishida stared at me a very long time. “Oh, we’ve got a funny one here, Eddie.”
    Eddie said, “I don’t like him.” Eddie.
    I said, “I think you might have the Hagakure. If you don’t, I think you might know the people who stole it or who have it.”
    Ishida gave me the stare a little more, thinking, and then the tension went out of his face and his shoulders relaxed and he smiled. This time the smile was real, as if in all the thinking he had seen something and what he had seen had been funny as hell. He glanced at Eddie and then at the other two guys andthen back at me. “You got no idea how stupid you are,” he said.
    “People hint.”
    He laughed and Eddie laughed, too. Eddie crossed his arms and made the huge trapezius muscles swell like a couple of demented air bladders. You could see that the tattoos climbed over his elbows and up his biceps. Pretty soon, everybody was laughing but me and the guy on the floor.
    Ishida held up my card and looked at it, then crumpled it up and tossed it toward an open crate of little plastic pagodas. He said, “Your problem is, you don’t look like a private detective.”
    “What’s a private detective look like?”
    “Like Mickey Spillane. You see those Lite beer commercials? Mickey Spillane looks tough.”
    I hooked a glance at the guy with the crushed neck. “Ask him.”
    Nobu Ishida nodded, but it didn’t seem to matter much. The smile went away and the serious eyes came back. Hard. “Don’t come down here anymore, boy. You don’t know what you’re messing with down here.”
    I said, “What about the Hagakure?”
    Nobu Ishida gave me what I guess was supposed to be an enigmatic look, then he turned and melted away behind the bamboo steamers.
    I looked at Eddie. “Is the interview over?”
    Eddie made the tattoos disappear, then sat down behind the tables again and stared at me. The guy with the bad eye sat down beside him, put his feet up, and laced his hands behind his head. The guy with the missing finger pulled one foot beneath himself, then the other, then shoved himself up into sort of a hunchedcrouch. If I stood around much longer, they’d probably send me out for