Chapter 3: “The Girl with the Gyarados Tattoo”
The note that had been slipped under my apartment door said to stand by the statue in the park at noon. There was no signature, but I went anyway. If Saffron’s finest couldn’t get a lock on the owner of that jawbone I blew off the night before, then that meant I only had one other lead in Bridgett’s case—Desire. D. If Bridgett was killed because of dope it meant Team Rocket was involved to some capacity, but that operation wasn’t one where you go knocking around on doors and asking questions. First, I had to be sure. And that meant doing what the note said and standing by the statue at noon.
I sat on the base of the monument, in its shadow, on the side of the statue overlooking the pond, because I figured in the marsh on the other side of the pond to be the least likely spot for a sniper to have posted himself. The statue was a bronze likeness of a gengar ghost and its owner, Sabrina, Saffron’s old gym leader. She’d supposedly killed herself some years ago not too long after they passed the Spassek Act that criminalized pokémon battling and shut down all the gyms. Some say she was haunted by the ghosts of the pokémon she’d killed in the arena, and that’s what drove her over the edge. But I knew the truth. A bit of information I’d stumbled upon in an unrelated investigation revealed that she had a majority share in the stock holdings of the Silph Company, which, like so many other companies that depended on the trafficking and battling of living creatures, filed for bankruptcy thanks to dear old John Spassek and his neoliberal agenda. She didn’t dance with a straight edge because of guilt or karma or the hauntings of dead pokémon. Her grief stemmed from money. The truth is never as noble as the fiction.
A hand touched my shoulder and broke me from my reverie. I recognized her smell – the smell of an ocean at dawn – and loosened the grip on my pistol, removed my hand from my pocket, and stood.
“I wanted to call,” she said. “But I thought this would be safer. In case…”
“Misty,” I said.
She threw her arms around me and I wrapped my arms around the small of her back. I’d not seen her in fifteen years but I’d thought of her almost every day since, twice as often when I had liquor in me. We embraced for what felt like an hour before she finally pulled away from me.
“I’m sorry to meet you like this,” she said, looking away. She reached in her bag for a pack of Luckies. I went for my lighter.
“You’re late,” I said.
“I was watching you,” she said. “I had to make sure you didn’t have a tail.”
“I would know if I had a tail.”
“You didn’t notice me.”
I frowned.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “I need to talk to you. I just needed to make sure you were really alone.”
I held up my hands and backed away. “Hold on a second. The last time I saw you, I was ten years old and dumber than the weedle in a pidgeot’s stomach. You want to talk now, but you never even said goodbye after the Indigo Plateau.”
“I never say goodbye, Ash,” she said. She put the unlit cigarette in her mouth. “Not to anyone.”
“After all we’d been through,” I said, lighting her cigarette, “you could’ve made an exception. Now what is it you wanted to talk about, Misty?”
She looked around. “Can we go to your place?”
“Is this about your bike?”
She blew smoke toward the statue. “No,” she said. “It’s not about my bike. But now that you mention it…”
Misty sat across from me at my small kitchen table as we ate lunch in the afternoon sunlight. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. Her hair was dyed crimson with black bangs that dropped below her chin and swayed as she chewed. I hardly touched my sandwich watching the subtle movements of her cerulean eyes.
The quiet extended too long. I had to say something. “You remember the first pokémon I caught?”
She shook her head.
“It was a caterpie,” I said. “You made fun of it, called it weak. But you were so scared of it. Whenever it came near you, you kind of made the same face you’re making now. Misty, what is it? Why’d you come here all the way from Cerulean City?”
She pushed her plate away and I caught a slant of the thick lines on her wrists. I grabbed her hand and looked to her face for understanding, but she pulled her arm away and hid it under the table.
She said, “Things weren’t so hot after I went home. But we don’t keep regrets, right?”
A few things I could’ve said I didn’t. I stood up and grabbed both our dishes, took them to the sink. She followed and stood beside me as I dumped the waste into the disposal. She wrapped her arm around my waist and rested her head on my shoulder and I felt her warm breath on my neck.
“I’m so tired,” she said. “I just… Things aren’t working out at home. I had nowhere else to go and…”
“Brock is dead,” I said.
“What?”
“Someone killed him last night,” I said. Her hold on my waist loosened. “I’m trying to figure out who killed her and why but things won’t be very safe around here until I do, which is the only reason I’m telling you no. You can’t stay here, Misty, for your own good. Not until I take down whoever started all this racket.”
“Nowhere is safe then,” she said. She moved to the end of the counter near the doorway. I watched her, examining her figure as she examined my PPK. “I’m dead already.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked, turning off the sink.
She took the gun in her hands and aimed it at the refrigerator. “It’s loaded,” I warned.
“Someone tried to kill me four days ago,” she admitted. “It’s why I came here, to see you. I don’t want to die, Ash. I used to think it was a good idea, putting an end to it all, like that might be easier, but I don’t feel like that anymore.” She set down the pistol and looked to me for a response.
“What happened?”
“I was coming home from work at the gym,” she explained, “and I felt someone following behind me so I turned into an alley that connected to the next street to see if she’d come through with me. She did.”
“It was a dame?” I asked, raising an eyebrow.
“Couldn’t tell for sure but for the way she was moving,” she said. “She was dressed like a fucking ninja. Are ninjas even fashionable anymore?”
“Misty,” I said. “It was a ninja that killed Bridgett and tried to off me last night. I put a bullet through her mug and splattered her teeth all over the alley but even if she’s dead we can’t assume she was the only one. You know the fucking thing about ninjas. If there’s one there’s a dozen.”
“Who did we piss off this time, Ash?”
“Can’t assume there’s a connection, yet,” I said. “Maybe ninjas have been walking around Kanto all this time—we just never saw them until now. What happened in the alley, Misty?”
“I turned around to face her, and then she said, ‘Time to die, Misty.’ I unloaded a gallon of mace into her eyes before she could pull out whatever she was reaching for, and then I ran all the way to the police station. They kept me in lock up for a couple days.” She paused. “She knew my name, Ash. She knew where I worked and probably where I live. It wasn’t some random encounter on the field. I never felt so scared in my life.”
I bit my lip. I thought, maybe Bridgett didn’t die over D after all. Maybe it was something personal, but that meant Misty and I were next on the line of nails waiting to be hammered. I ran through the list of people our trio had ever crossed in the past and the mental inventory was thicker than a lawyer’s book of sins.
“Think out loud, Ash,” she said. “This concerns me, too.”
“Bridgett was knee-high in something deep before she got botched,” I said. “I bet you heard about the new pill that’s flooded the market, that Desire bullshit that scrambles your brains and sends you to Venus. Bridgett had dipped her hand in the jar and I thought her death maybe meant she’d dipped too deep. But now I’m not so sure. If this is about the three of us then I need to glance this from a new angle.”
“You mean we,” she said. “We’re in this together, Ash, you and me. Just like old times, right?” She moved toward me and I could’ve taken her right there on the kitchen tiles. Restraint, I told myself. Misty isn’t some calloused broad to bang, pay and forget the next morning. One of the few women I’d ever respected in my line of work, Misty had class and a shiv-like mind with several overlapping shades of sex. I wrapped her up with my mitts and held her close as we stood quiet in the kitchen. Just like old times, I thought, except now we weren’t kids anymore.
After standing in that air of repose for something like a long nuclear winter, I lead Misty back to my office and sat her on the couch. I paced the room, something I do when I think ahead, but I could hardly wrap my noodle around a course of action with a dame like Misty in my midst. Bridgett’s burial was tomorrow and anyone who cared enough to attend would surely have something to say about her. Something else dug at my brain like a toddler with a spoon and then I remembered the assassin’s icy blue eyes. What was it about her?
“This place ain’t safe,” I said. “Anyone can find where I live by turning open the yellow book. I know a spot downtown, a halfway-fancy hotel called the Marianas. The owner owes me a favor.” Misty nodded as I spoke and she looked ready to follow me through the depths of the oceans. I said, “We’ll lay low until Bridgett’s funeral and hopefully Gary will have a lock on the killer’s name by then. We’ll start there.”
She stood and took my hand. “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll get us a room with two beds.”
“Don’t bother,” she said. “One is enough for both of us. Always has been. You just never had the guts to ask.”
Hope Memorial Cemetery was a labyrinth of cherry blossoms and marble monoliths located on the outskirts of town. Bridgett’s corpse was cremated and interned at noon. Her family didn’t attend the services, but a couple of retired gym leaders from neighboring cities came to show their respect. I ditched Misty at the funeral home with Gary and his wife Lucy to visit the pet cemetery nestled at the far end behind an overgrown grove.
I wiped the dust and blossoms off the small metal plaque with his name on it. A millipede crawled across the edge and I flicked it onto the grass.
After staring at the plaque for a few minutes I reached into my jacket pocket and removed the Silph scope, a small ectoscope I’d yoinked from Team Rocket many long years ago. Ever since my second wife threw it out the window along with all my clothes and the DVD player, it had stopped working, but I brought it with me every time I visited the cemetery, hoping it would somehow provide me a link with the pokémon hell. This time, I set it on the plaque and left it. I told myself I wouldn’t visit the grave anymore, that I’d stop chasing ghosts.
No one at the funeral had had anything to say about Bridgett I wasn’t already wise to. Gary told me that they couldn’t use the DNA from the assassin’s leftovers. It’d been compromised with bleach — we really were dealing with a pro — and with what few teeth they’d found in the alley, they couldn’t reconstruct enough of a jaw for dental records. Not only had Eevee died for nothing but my case was going nowhere.
A little hand touched my shoulder. Misty. I pushed away from the tiny pokémon grave and stood to face her. She wore a simple black dress two sizes too big that Gary’s wife had loaned her for the occasion.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “When I heard about his cancer, I wanted to visit you, but I didn’t know what I would say. We hadn’t spoken for so long.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. She looked worried. I asked, “What is it?”
“There’s someone here for you,” she said. “He’s waiting at the funeral home. I thought I’d warn you. Maybe we should just bail.”
“Do I need to guess who it is?”
“It’s Giovanni.”
I frowned. If Team Rocket was a spider’s web of crime and corruption that subsumed and dwarfed even the Triads and the Hoenn Mafia, that made the Yakuza look like an afterschool special, then Giovanni was the big fat black widow sitting at the top. Everyone knew that Team Rocket produced and flooded the streets with D, but Giovanni’s name alone preceded him like a hollow-point bullet and no one would touch him for fear of waking up in the gut of a gyarados. The Saffron P.D. could only chisel away at the edges of his legacy and wait for him to die of old age, which many predicted wasn’t too far off due to his failing health.
“I was afraid he’d have something to say,” I said. “Maybe we can use this to our advantage. Go back to the hotel, Misty. If I’m not back before nightfall, disappear.”
My water-flower pressed her lips against mine hard. Memories of the night before, of Misty sprawled across the sweat-soaked bed sheets bare as nature intended, and later of her standing in front of the hotel room’s window wrapped in only a pink sheet, the promises of repeat performances, would be motivation enough for me not to get killed. She left, and I took the long scenic route back to the funeral home, my heater itching under my jacket.
Everyone had left. The parking lot was bare except for a long black limousine and a couple of black Escalades. A big black man in a tux and sunglasses stood outside the front door and whispered into his collar as I approached. He opened the door for me and I nodded. He pointed down the hall toward visiting room A. Walking down the velvety hall, I reached into my jacket and a man leaped from behind a corner with a hot rod ahead of him. I froze.
“What you got?”
“I was getting my smokes,” I said.
“Give me your guns,” he ordered. “Both of them.”
I got out my smokes first, patted one out of the pack and grabbed it with my lips. “Get them yourself,” I said, lighting it, then cracking my knuckles. “I like a challenge.”
A voice came from the visiting room. Giovanni’s. He said, “Let him through. Mr. Ketchum won’t do anything stupid, Mr. Esteban. He is much too wise for his young age.”
“Excuse me, Mr. Este-baaaahn,” I said, bumping into his shoulder as I entered the room. Giovanni stood at the end before an empty, opened oak casket. Even as an old man, Giovanni looked as sharp as a dagger and ready to give anything in his way the fatal prick. He wore a purple pinstripe suit that probably cost more than a downtown apartment. Mr. Esteban stood by the door, arms crossed. I approached Giovanni.
“You still play little league soccer?” I asked.
Mr. Esteban said, “I’d cut the wisecracks if I was you.”
Giovanni smiled. Hidden behind that smile, I knew, was a man who’d kill his grandmother for peeping in his sock drawer. He wore a necklace outside his suit, with a miniature Poké ball for a pendant that caught my eye. “Ash,” he said, “long time, no see. You don’t visit me anymore.”
“You’ve always had my number,” I said.
“Do you know what this is about?” He fiddled with the Poké ball at the end of his necklace, and nodded for me to sit. I sat on the front pew, looking up at him, cautious of the dimwit behind me.
“Enlighten me,” I said, taking a drag on my cigarette.
He dragged his long crooked finger along the silky lining of the empty casket. “I came here to pay my respects to your fallen friend,” he said. “In his time, Brock was a fine gym leader and a decent trainer. I even considered employing him, once, but his ambitions were much too small for Team Rocket. That, however, is a story for another time. Ash, I wish to offer you a way out of this mess.”
“Who said I was in a mess?”
“I just said you were in a fucking mess,” he snapped. The anger faded as quickly as it’d appeared. I heard Mr. Esteban shuffling behind me. “We are not playing a game anymore, Mr. Ketchum. This is real. This is business. And in business, people get hurt. I respect you for what you once were and despise what you have become — a stinking hollow shell of your former self, who blows all his hard-earned cash betting the wrong way in underground duels. Do you not understand that, with a simple nod of my head, Mr. Esteban could choke you to death where you sit?” I looked behind me. Mr. Esteban stood with his hands in his pockets, probably thumbing piano wire.
Giovanni continued, “I have a scenario for you. I pay you fifty-thousand dollars to forget that any of this happened. Afterwards, you hear out a proposition of mine, a proposition that would both make us business partners and allow you to relive the glory of your youth before the Spassek Act ruined us all. What do you say, Mr. Ketchum?”
His proposition put me in a bad way. If I hated something more than being told what to do, it was the idea of being bought off by a dirty trick like Giovanni.
“Giovanni,” I said, “I wouldn’t partner with you for all the pokémon in the world.”
Giovanni closed the lid of the casket quietly. He looked to me, and then to Mr. Esteban, and said, “I hope you understand that this decision will put a damper on our relationship. However, I respect your loyalty to your friend.” He nodded to Mr. Esteban, then touched me on the shoulder before leaving me alone in the room with his bodyguard. Esteban pulled something out of his pocket. My hand shot to my neck as adrenaline surged up my spine, but then I stopped. The man held something over my shoulder — not piano wire, but rather a folded piece of paper. He dropped it on my lap, said, “A mutual friend wanted me to give that to you,” and then was gone.
I unfolded the paper and read the sloppy cursive aloud: “Prepare for trouble. Make it double.”
is not an exit 
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