Juri turned her face down with a pout at my question. I clutched my head.
“What did you say?”
“This is Juri, but I called forgetting you were in America.”
“And then?”
“That’s it. I hung up immediately.”
I sat back down on the sofa. I frowned and stretched hard. “Why now…”
“We didn’t talk. And until now I’d completely forgotten it.”
“Listen, the time and date you leave a message gets recorded. When that Yuki girl gets home from America, it’s a matter of time before she finds out about the kidnapping. She might look into it in detail—since it was her friend who was kidnapped. And when she hears that message on top of that? Wouldn’t she wonder why you could make such a call when you were kidnapped?”
“I think it’ll be okay. She’s fairly easygoing, so I don’t think she’d notice the time discrepancy.”
I rocked my head back and forth even as she spoke. “I want to play this game perfectly. You think it’s okay—do you think I can go on with nothing but vague words like that to support me?”
“Then what should we do?” Juri asked angrily.
I massaged my eyes from over my eyelids with my index finger and thumb. I was starting to feel a bit nauseous, too. “What else? We abort. This is as far as the game goes.”
“But—”
“There’s nothing we can do. If, by some chance, Yuki notices the time discrepancy and tells someone, what do you think will happen? The helpful someone she talks to might tell the police. The police would suspect that the kidnapping had been faked and demand an explanation from you. If that happens, that’s it.”
“I won’t ever talk. I won’t talk even if I die,” Juri declared. Then she pressed her lips into a straight line as though to convey her resolution.
“Being interrogated by the police is no walk in the park. Well, it’s not like I would know, but a little missy’s stubbornness would be a joke to them.”
Perhaps objecting to the “little missy” bit, Juri made a sour face. But I was in no state to mind her mood, either. I drained my beer dry and crumpled the empty can.
If we were aborting, then the sooner I sent her home, the better. But I couldn’t just return Juri. We’d sent the ransom letter. The police had to be on the case already. My only resort would be the story that she’d talked me into playing along with her. The question was how to get her to consent to the prank narrative.
“Hey, I have a proposal,” the girl offered.
“Before I listen to yours, I have a proposal myself.”
“If it’s a proposal to quit, then I won’t listen.”
I looked up at the ceiling and, like an actor in a movie, put my hands up as if surrendering.
“I was thinking of going there to erase it,” Juri said, ignoring my gesture.
“Erase it? Erase what?”
“The answering machine message. If I erase that, then there’s no problem, right?”
“How will you erase it? It’s someone else’s phone.”
“She told me I could go to her room whenever I like while she’s in America. She told me where she hides her key, too.”
“Where does she live?”
“Yokosuka.”
“Yokosuka? Why does it have to be so far away…”
“It’s just a little over an hour if you go by car. We can just go there really quick and get home really fast.”
“You make it sound easy. If a shady couple entered an absent resident’s room, the superintendent and neighbors would definitely wonder what’s going on.”
“We won’t be so clumsy as to be noticed. But it’s better if you don’t come. Because it’s a women-only condo. You could just chill at Yokosuka harbor and gaze at the passing ships.”
“Ridiculous.” I snorted, and then remembered the time I’d visited Yokosuka.
Unexpectedly, an idea came to me.
Chapter 8
Living in the metropolis, you don’t really need a car. I rarely drove mine even on dates. I didn’t care to abstain from drinking during the meal or for traffic jam-laced drives. What’s more, my car was an MR-S. You needed to fold up the top and feel the breeze for it to shine.
In order to make a stealth round trip to Yokosuka, we couldn’t take a taxi. I had Juri get in the passenger seat and left the condo’s parking lot. Naturally, I left the hood up. Although the air was pretty clean outside of Tokyo, I had no intention of opening the hood this evening.
“Do you like these cars?” Juri asked right after we started driving.
“What do you mean?”
“A two-person sports car.”
“Is that bad?”
“It’s not that it’s bad.”
“It’s because I have no need for three or more people to ride in it. I’m not interested in driving with men at all, and one woman at a time suits me fine.”
“Where do you put your stuff?”
“There’s enough room in the space behind your seat to put a Kelly bag.”
“But sometimes you need to move a lot of stuff, don’t you?”
“I bought this car because I wanted a mobile space. I didn’t want a truck.”
Juri didn’t say anything to that. She may have shrugged her shoulders, but I wasn’t looking at her.
“Can I listen to a CD?” she asked.
“If you like.”
Just as I thought, she was narrow-minded about the music that played. “What is this? I’ve never heard it.”
“A jazz pianist performing a Bach arrangement.”
“Huh.” She clearly seemed dissatisfied but didn’t try to turn off the stereo.
The MR-S had no clutch. I grasped the gleaming silver lever, changed gears, and accelerated.
Just as Juri had said, about an hour after going on the Metropolitan Expressway from Hakozaki, we were getting off the Yokohama-Yokosuka Road. Past the Yokosuka Interchange, we continued onto the Honcho Yamanaka Road. A few minutes later, we were in front of Shioiri station.
“Go into that restaurant’s parking lot.”
Following Juri’s directions, I parked the MR-S.
“Wait here. I’ll go over there alone.”
“Is it close?”
“It might be a short walk. But getting too close to the condo in such a flashy car is dangerous.”
It was exactly as she said. I saw her off, giving her my cellphone number and telling her to call me if something happened. She crossed the wide highway and disappeared down a narrow side street.
Drinking some terrible coffee at the restaurant, I thought about how to proceed. Juri leaving a message with her friend had been a miscalculation. However, as long as we could safely erase it, there would be no problems in continuing the plan.
The biggest challenge was how to collect the cash. Three hundred million yen would be pretty bulky and heavy. In order to move it, we’d naturally need a car. But it was easy to track down a car. In the first place, going on the run with the cash was just too primitive.
If I had them change the three hundred million yen into something else with that value, I could turn it into money after getting it. For instance, I had the option of having them prepare three hundred million yen in diamonds. That way, moving it would be easy. It would be bad if someone became suspicious when I redeemed them, so I would probably need to limit each one to being worth less than one million yen. With each diamond at one million yen, that would be three hundred of them—
I shook my head. One or two, I could probably exchange, but three hundred was impossible. I could sell two at a time at different shops, but I would still have to visit a hundred fifty. Shops like that networked, so rumors of a suspicious man selling diamonds of unknown origin would probably spread quickly. I could see the detectives waiting to ambush me as I went to the fifth store.