Lady Joker, Volume 1 Kaoru Takamura (ereader ebook .TXT) 📖

budge from his spot, yet during the couple of minutes he continued to stand there, needles of anxiety and irritation that his competitors would beat him to a story continued to prickle him. At six minutes after midnight, one of those needles suddenly sunk in deep when his pager went off.

The number that showed on the LCD belonged to the kisha club at MPD. The other newspaper reporters immediately shouted out, “Did something happen?” and “What do you know?”

“I have no idea,” Kubo replied, which wasn’t a lie, and he began trotting away from the alley at last. For the fifty meters he had to run to the side street off Meguro-dori where his hired car was parked, his ample belly swayed beneath his jacket, and the strained buttons of his dress shirt threatened to pop off.

When he dialed the number from the car phone, Chief Sugano answered immediately and asked in his perpetually aggressive tone, “Can you get to Sanno Ni-chome?”

It was still unclear what exactly might have happened in Sanno, but just hearing that something was going on made his heart leap before his mind could catch up.

“Head for Sanno Ni-chome, please,” he told the driver, and as he quickly opened a map, he felt himself already anticipating what had yet to take shape. A new incident had occurred, and every time his point of focus shifted the illusion swelled in his heart that a new horizon might unfold before him, that he might break away and discover a place that was—at the very least—different from the one in which he found himself scrambling around now.

The car passed through the intersection in Kakinokizaka and headed toward Kanpachi, and it took about twelve or thirteen minutes to cover the distance to Sanno Ni-chome, but it wasn’t until they crossed the tracks of the Tokyu Ikegami Line that the deputy chief reporter finally made first contact. “Apparently there’s an unmarked police car in the backyard of Omori Police Department. Try circling around the Sanno neighborhood.”

From what he said, Kubo’s partner on the First Investigation beat, Yuichi Kuriyama, had scoped out the precinct already and reported back, but they still did not know the scene of the incident.

As soon as Kubo heard about the unmarked police car, his vision of a new horizon was supplanted by ambitions of an exclusive story, which lit a fire under him. Stuck in traffic at the Magome intersection, he glared first at the hands on his wristwatch, which showed seventeen minutes after midnight, then at the chain of red tail lights on the cars in front of him, and was just wondering which alley in Sanno he should go down when the second call came in.

“Get to Hinode Beer’s main office in Kita-Shinagawa now! The president of Hinode has been kidnapped!” blared the voice over the phone.

It wasn’t that his mind immediately reacted to the name of the company Hinode Beer and the news that its president had been kidnapped; he just automatically absorbed the instructions he was given. He was to report directly to Hinode’s main office and observe the comings and goings of employees. If possible, he was to get the first comment from an employee or executive. There was no time—the news embargo would soon take effect.

If this really were a kidnapping, the upside of not being able to report whatever they uncovered was that at least they would not be scooped by a rival paper—an inappropriate sense of relief at this briefly crossed his mind in the next moment. Before he knew it, the ambition to snag an exclusive was replaced by speculation about how they would gain an advantage over their competitors once the embargo was lifted, but this too only lasted a second—as soon as Kubo had informed the driver of their new destination, he suddenly came to his senses and leaned forward in his seat. The black shadows of trees in the Sanno hills streamed past his car window. As he watched them go by, in his mind three or four question marks lined up after the intangible word—kidnapping???

12:35 a.m. During the third phone call he learned the simple yet implausible fact that the president of Hinode had been abducted from his own home, and when Kubo’s car arrived in front of the building of Hinode’s main office in Kita-Shinagawa, he found the street along Yatsuyama-dori completely empty. At first Kubo was surprised that there was no sign of any other newspaper or TV reporters and, realizing that he was first on the scene, his heart skipped a beat. He looked up at the luxurious forty-story high-rise and tried once again to imprint upon his mind that the master of this tower had been kidnapped—it remained a fuzzy reality to him.

There was only a smattering of lights on on the bottom three-quarters of the building—the rest was pitch dark. The remaining top floors were shrouded in a low-hanging mist, and the red beacons that must have been on each of the four corners of the roof flashed blurrily in the mist. When his gaze returned to the ground, he saw that the entrance to the building, which was set back twenty meters from the sidewalk, was also dark, with no signs of people there, either.

On the signpost facing the sidewalk, gleaming gold lettering and arrows pointed the way to Hinode Opera Hall, Hinode Contemporary Art Museum, and Hinode Sky Beer Restaurant, but the entrance for the general public that could be seen just beyond was shuttered, and a fence barricaded the walkway leading up to it. The entrance to the underground parking lot was on the west side, but this too was shuttered at the bottom of the slope leading down to it.

Trotting back to Yatsuyama-dori where his hired car was parked, Kubo called the kisha club and asked them to try calling Hinode’s night-time number. He spoke with the overnight reporter covering Second Investigation, who told Kubo that they had already tried calling Hinode’s main office as