The honey-dipped duck was wonderful.

Four hours and twenty minutes later the Volvo was gone and the first of the early evening dinner crowd were starting to show up. The lot had emptied after lunch and another attendant had come on duty, an older man who looked at me once and didn't seem to care if I stayed or left or homesteaded. No one had gone into Ishida's shop or come out or touched the little CLOSED sign. Maybe nobody would, ever again.

At ten minutes after five the cop who had made me in the yakitori grill walked past carrying a large white paper bag and a six-pack of diet Coke. The Grateful Dead tee shirt was gone. Now it was ZZ Top. I got out of the car and watched him saunter down Ki Street and turn into a doorway next to the yakitori grill. I waited to see if he would come out and when he didn't I did a little sauntering myself and took a look. He and a cop I hadn't seen before were across from Ishida's in a State Farm Insurance office above the yakitori grill. Those sneaky devils. Who watches the watchers?

I walked back along Ki, crossed over at the little side street, and turned up the alley behind Ishida's shop. It looked the way it looked when I drove past six hours earlier. Empty. I went up to the loading dock doors and didn't like the lock and went over to the people door and took out the wires I keep in my wallet and opened it. If the cops had had the rear of the place staked out there would be trouble, but all the cops were on the street side eating cheeseburgers.

I let myself in, eased the door shut behind me, and waited for my eyes to adjust. I was in a dim, high-ceilinged freight room. Dirty light came through the little window beside the door and a skylight twenty feet up, but that was it. Boxes and crates were stacked ten feet up the wall. Some were wooden but most were cardboard, and most had Styrofoam packaging pellets or shredded Japanese newspapers spilling out. There was a metal stair against one wall that went up to a steel-grate catwalk and loft. There were more boxes and crates up there and a little office. If the Hagakure were here it should only take about six years to find it.

I went through a hall at the head of the freight room and past shelves of bamboo steamers and into the showroom. The two desks were still there but the Hagakure hadn't been left sitting on them. No one had left a note suggesting a safe place to store the manuscript or a photograph of the new owner with his prize collectible. There were memo pads and paper clips and a little purple stapler and assorted pens and pencils and a Panasonic pencil sharpener and an old issue of Batman with the back cover gone. I was hoping for a clue but I would have settled for Ishida's home phone and address. Nada.

I went into the brighter light near the front of the shop, put my hands in my pockets, and wondered what to do. From the edge of the shadows you could see into the insurance office above the yakitori grill. The cop I didn't know was sitting a few feet back from the window with his feet up, drinking a diet Coke out of a can with a straw.

I went back into the freight room. Ishida had come from the back. Maybe the little office on the catwalk was where he worked. Maybe there would be a little desk with pictures of the kids and a note to bring home some sushi and a Rolodex or some personal correspondence that would tell me where he lived.

I climbed the steel stair and went along the narrow catwalk and opened the white door with the pebbled glass panel in it and smelled the blood and the cold meat and the death. It's the smell that comes only from a great quantity of blood and human waste. It can sting your nose and throat like a bad smog. It's a smell so strong and so alive that it has a taste and the taste is like when you were a kid and found a nickel in the winter and the metal was cold and you put it in your mouth to see what it would be like and your mother screamed that you would die from the germs and so you spit it out but the cold taste and the fear of the germs stayed.

The little office was heavy with shadow. I took out my handkerchief and found the light switch and snapped it on. The guy with the missing finger who'd been out front my first time around was curled atop a gray metal file cabinet. His head and his right arm were hanging over the edge. His neck was limp, the front and side of it purple as if he had been hit there very hard. Someone had cleared Nobu Ishida's desk of papers and ledgers and pencil can and phone. They had put all that on his swivel chair along with his clothes and then pushed the chair out of the way and tied Ishida spread-eagled on his desk, naked, arms and legs bound to the desk legs with brown electrical cord. They had used a knife on him. There were cuts on his arms and his legs and his torso and his face and his genitals. Some of the cuts were very deep. His bladder and his bowels had let go. The blood had crusted into delicate red-brown rivers along his arms and legs and had pooled on the desk and then dripped heavily onto the floor to mix with other things. The pool on the floor had spread almost to the door and looked slick and tacky. A gray stuffed Godzilla had been jammed in his mouth to smother the screams.

I stepped around the blood to the chair and looked through the things that had been on the desk. Ishida's wallet was still in his right back pants pocket. I took it out, opened it, copied down his home address, then put the wallet back the way I'd found it. I used my handkerchief to pick up the phone and called Lou Poitras. He said, "What now?"

"I'm at Ishida's place of business. He's dead."

There was a pause. "Did you kill him?"

"No." I watched the pool of blood.

"Don't leave the scene. Don't touch anything. Don't let anyone else in. I'm on my way. There'll be other cops but I'll get there first."

He hung up. I put the phone down and stepped around the blood back onto the catwalk and pulled the door closed. I worked up spit and swallowed and took several deep breaths. I expanded my lungs from the diaphragm and expelled the air in stages from the lower lobes to the mid-lobes to the upper lobes. I tried everything I could think of but I couldn't get rid of the taste or the smell. I never could. Like every encounter with death, it had become a part of me.

Chapter 10

I went downstairs and sat at one of the two tables in the deepening darkness until Lou Poitras pulled up out front in a light green Dodge. A black-and-white pulled up behind him and the plain white van the crime scene guys use pulled up behind the van. Cops on parade.

I went to the front door and opened it. Across the street, the ATF cops were on their feet in the big window, ZZ Top screaming into the phone, the other one pulling on a jacket. I gave them a little wave.

Poitras said, "Knock off that shit and come in here."

If Lou Poitras wasn't a cop he could rent himself out as Mighty Joe Young. He spends about an hour and a half every morning six days a week pumping iron in a little weight room in his back yard in Northridge, trying to see how big he can get. He's good at it. I'd once seen him punch through a Cadillac's windshield and pull a big man out over the steering wheel.

He shouldered past me. "Where?"

"In the back. Up the stairs."

One of the uniforms was a black guy with a bullet head and a thick neck and hands four sizes too big for him. His name tag read LEONARD. His partner was a blond kid with a skimpy Larry Bird mustache and hard eyes. Leonard mumbled something and the blond kid took the crime scene guys into the back after Poitras.

"You don't want to see?" I said.

Leonard said, "I seen enough."

I went back to the two tables and sat. Leonard found the lights, turned them on, then went back up front. He leaned against a floor-to-ceiling case of toy robots with his arms crossed, and stared out into the street. You do this job long enough, you know what's going to be back there even without going back there.