When he tipped his chin, the back doors of the white sedan swung open, and the men inside began to extricate the woman. She was tall, not fat but thick and muscular. The men were having a hard time moving her.
They dropped her on the cobblestones. She rebounded from the impact, only to collapse flat on her stomach.
“You alive?” asked the tall man in the black suit.
The man in the loud shirt kicked the woman in the shins.
She let out a sandy groan. Propped up on all fours, like a crocodile, she looked at them. Long hair, pasty with blood, stuck to her cheeks. More dark blood dribbled from her nostrils. The skin by her right eye was a bluish mound.
“We got ourselves a real dog, huh.”
The man in the black suit let out a nasal laugh, cueing his men to do the same.
“Go on, get her up.”
Loud Shirt nodded and tugged the woman’s left arm, trying to lift her. And she let him, tottering to her feet, but then . . .
“Blouaugh!”
It was the voice of a man-sized toad being kicked into the air. Loud Shirt went twirling and fell flat on the cobblestones.
The men were furious. Loud Shirt was wheezing, unable to catch his breath. His eyes rolled back into his head. He was out.
The woman, unperturbed, assumed position. Fingers spread, arms outstretched, she glared at the men and loosened her jaws, showing them her bloody teeth.
One of the white shirts, who understood her smile as a gesture of defiance, scowled and made a run at her.
Whoosh.
A sound like a blade slicing through the air came through her teeth. Crouching low, she ducked her head and charged. The man went up, headbutted in the stomach with the brute force of a wild boar. The first part of him to hit the hard ground was his shoulder, which dislocated with a dull pop. He let out a woozy scream.
There was a moment of confusion. Then the men closed in.
Whoosh.
A man jumped at her from the right and got punched in his Adam’s apple. Silenced, breathless, he fell on his ass and kicked the air. A man lunging at her from the left got a swift kick in the kneecap from her steel-toed safety shoe. Through the chaos of the melee, you could clearly hear the sounds of tearing joints and muscle. A man thunked her in the cheek. She staggered, one foot floating in the air, but caught herself and put her guard up like a boxer.
Whoosh.
Blocking the next punch with her forearm, she planted her steel toe between his legs. Ouch. Growl. A crowd of white shirts was assembling in front of the garages. Faces hot with rage and panic; eyes dazed like they were dreaming. Not able to accept what was happening in front of them, unable to believe it.
Faced with all this rage and consternation, the woman showed her teeth and smiled. She was covered in their blood. She laughed out loud and doled out punch after punch, kick after kick.
Behind the bellowing jeers, she heard a barking dog. A mass of black and brown burst through the crowd of white. It was a Doberman, enormous, wearing a thick black leather collar. The dog sprinted toward the woman, who caught all ninety pounds of dog weight in the chest and was knocked onto her back. The men moved in and held her down. Snarling like the dog. Tearing at her clothes.
“Hey, don’t kill her. She’s a present for Pops. Easy, now.”
The man in the black suit looked amused. It was the end of sunset.
IN THE MIDDLE of the gravel walkway to the main house, the woman lay prone on the ground, pinned down by a quartet of men holding forked spears, men not without injuries of their own. Scowling bitterly, they looked down at the woman’s body. Her hair and clothes were even messier than before, only now, she wasn’t struggling, but breathing softly, face down to the gravel. Her shoes had been pulled off, and the black bra visible through her torn yellow shirt made her look like a wounded tiger. In the stillness of the evening, you could hear koi fish slapping in the ornamental pond.
“Yanagi, what’s that you got, a woman?”
It was a man’s voice, torched from drinking. He was seated on a leather sofa on the engawa deck edging the building, dressed in a striped yukata. In his mid-sixties. Corpulent. Bald head. Bull neck and sloping shoulders.
“Would appear so. Figured she would be a good fit for that job you had in mind.”
The man in the black suit—Yanagi—pulled a distressed orange leather wallet from the woman’s pocket. Inside, he found her license.
“Yoriko Shindo . . . twenty-two. She’s a dosanko1 from the north country.”
“What’s her story?”
“There was a fight outside the office, so I sent a couple of guys to check, and they found this bucking bronco out there raising hell. She’s a rare breed. Figured we had to snatch her up.”
This last comment made the big man cackle. Hellishly colorful tattoos peeked from his parted collar.
“Snatch her up, huh.”
“Yeah. To make her play nice, we had to crank her head a couple times with a big bottle of beer. Not sure about her story, but as far as fighting is concerned, she holds her own. Hell, she just fought ten of our best men. It’s too bad she’s a woman, or I’d recommend we add her to the ranks.”
“You sure that she’s a woman? These days, it’s not unheard of for these female types to have a dick between their legs.”
“We’ll certainly look into that as well.”
The men exchanged rowdy laughter.
The woman—Yoriko Shindo—listened to them from the gravel, turning her head toward the man sitting on the leather sofa. Not glaring at him, or with pleading in her eyes, but simply watching.
