Ice Storm - Anne Stuart [44]
Her small duffel was long gone, as well as anything he’d brought with him. She unfastened her seat belt and pulled the enveloping cloth over her head before climbing out. “I still have unfinished business,” she said.
And she left it up to him to decide whether she was talking about the current mission or killing him. When in fact, it was both.
Hiromasa Shinoda was covered with sweat, dressed only in a traditional fundoshi, the strip of cloth that had served Japanese men as underwear for millennia. His was made of bright red fabric covered with tiny little Hello Kitty icons in combat gear, something that would have given his old-fashioned grandfather a heart attack. But his grandfather wasn’t speaking to him. Reno was banished to this gray, gloomy place, and while there were as many women as he wanted, he was already getting tired of it all.
That son of a bitch Taka would approve, he thought, going through the prescribed moves.
Reno’s English was becoming impressive, honed by language CDs and the assiduous study of American gangster movies. He’d started watching old Yakuza and Samurai movies dubbed in English, just to amuse himself, but he was tired of being cooped up in the city, tired of not being able to drive, tired of inaction. He had Dragon Ash on the stereo, turned up loud to annoy the man downstairs, but so far Peter Madsen had failed to rise to the bait.
Reno spun around, his long hair whipping his body, his reflexes perfectly honed. He was a weapon, waiting, and all he could do was work out in the sparsely furnished living room of the old apartment.
Not that it had come sparsely furnished; he’d shoved the chairs and sofa into the back bedroom, leaving only the wide-screen TV and stereo equipment, the coffee table and a few mats to sit on. He’d left the bed that filled up the main bedroom—he’d gotten to like the luxury of sleeping on softness rather than a thin futon. But he’d stomach even that if he could get back to Tokyo.
Not in the foreseeable future, his family had told him. The police were going to take awhile to forget his last escapade, and his grandfather’s second-in-command had given him the choice of losing two fingers or getting out of the country.
Reno was very fond of his fingers. He could deliver—and subsequently receive—a great deal of pleasure via them, and he wasn’t about to give them up lightly. He probably wouldn’t have true Yakuza credibility until he lost at least part of one, but he didn’t particularly care. When it came right down to it he could scare the shit out of most people, anyway.
Not the man downstairs. Not his cousin Taka, with his American wife and her gorgeous baby sister with the beautiful mouth who…
Not his grandfather. Reno was banished from Tokyo until they said he could come home. In the meantime he was going to raise all the hell London could handle, and more.
He stopped, breathing deeply, pulled his long hair out of the high ponytail and then stripped off the fundoshi, heading for the shower. Yes, he was sick of English women. But he might find an American, someone tall, and he could close his eyes and listen to her voice and pretend….
His eyes flew open. He didn’t need to pretend anything. He needed to get laid, he needed to hit something, and he needed to get the hell out of London.
And he wondered how long this exile was going to last.
11
Isobel fastened the seat belt around the voluminous cloth of her burka as Killian tucked Mahmoud’s unconscious body into the leather seat opposite her. The boy was so small he could almost curl up in it, and she watched as Killian adjusted the seat belt, then covered him with a blanket. Her nemesis knew she was studying him through the screened eyepiece of the blue garment, but he ignored her.
There had been two men waiting for them, strangers. One the pilot, one the money man. She’d caught enough of