Cajun Justice(76)

He pulled out a matchbox. “Natural wood is better than butane.” He struck the match. “Healthier, too.”

She half laughed. “There’s a lot of things healthier than smoking, I suppose.”

“Yeah,” Cain said. “Like doing the right thing. Where’s Bonnie?”

“I don’t know. I swear.”

“You gotta know something! You’re smart, and you’re observant. You haven’t survived in this business without being street-smart.”

“They lured my friend Elena over here for a modeling job.” Sabrina took a long drag and slowly exhaled it toward the night sky. “Then they took her passport.”

“Who? The same people who kidnapped Bonnie?”

“They threatened to tell the police that she was prostituting and selling drugs in Japan.”

“Bonnie? Or your friend Elena?”

“Elena. She was so scared. She had no identity. And then one day she disappeared. I’m afraid that is what has happened to Bonnie.”

“Why would they do that to Bonnie? She’s never hurt anyone.”

“You shamed them. Saving face is everything here. You challenged them and fought three yakuza members in front of many prominent Japanese businessmen. They were always going to get their revenge.”

“Why didn’t they come after me, then? Why did they go after Bonnie? She wasn’t involved.”

“They’ll kill you, but they’ll use Bonnie. I’ve heard they will sell women to make money for their organization. You should have caught the next flight to America after the fight in the Angel Cloud.”

“There’s no way in hell I’m going back to America without my sister. Who were those men I fought?”

“I don’t know. I had never seen them before.”

“You sure?”

“Like I said, I’ve never seen them.”

“One of them was named Watanabe,” he said. “Does that ring a bell?”

She blew the smoke from her cigarette into the air. “I meet five guys a week who are named Watanabe.”

“You don’t know anything about them?” Cain repeated, feeling as though he was back at the Secret Service, interrogating suspects.

“I don’t know who they are, but I saw them leave that night in a Nissan Skyline.”

Cain scoffed. “There’s gotta be hundreds of those in Tokyo—probably thousands.”

“This one is easy to see. It’s orange and very loud. Like a race car.”

“Oh, that’s good intel,” he said. As he looked at her pretty face and striking blue eyes, he realized it could have just as easily been Sabrina who was kidnapped. “If you’re so afraid of them, why are you helping me?”

“I like Bonnie. She isn’t like us. She doesn’t need the money. She just enjoys meeting different people. She’s always very nice to us. She called me and asked if I would meet her at Starbucks the Saturday before I went on shift. I agreed, but she never showed up.”

“What happened?”

“I don’t know.” Sabrina began to tear up. “She seemed fine when I talked to her.”

“What else did she say?”

“She just said that she’d enjoyed working with me and the other girls, but that she had to quit. She said it wasn’t safe for her to go back, especially after I had told her that the man with the bloody face had taken her purse that night.”

Cain’s heart sank.

“I wasn’t sure, but I thought Bonnie would be okay because—”

“Because why?” Cain interrupted.

“Because Bonnie was protected by the manager. She was American. She didn’t know about how they treated the Russian girls.”

“But you’re not Russian,” Cain said.

“Romanian, Ukrainian, Hungarian—they call us all Russians.”

Cain handed Sabrina a piece of paper. “This is my number. Please call me if you ever see them back at the Angel Cloud. I can protect you.”

She scoffed. “You can’t protect me from them.”

“I can protect you. There was a time when I made my living protecting presidents and kings.”

She took the paper and shoved it in her purse. She thanked him in her native Romanian: “Multumesc.”

“Cu pl?cere,” he replied. He turned around and started walking away.

Before he disappeared into the darkness, Sabrina made one last quick request. “Please find her. Make those bastards pay—for Bonnie, and for Elena.”

He looked back only briefly. “You can bet your life on it.”





Chapter 58



Cain hailed a taxi. He wanted to return to Bonnie’s apartment. Was there anything I missed? He kept asking himself this question and replaying her voicemail message. I shouldn’t have gone to that retreat, just as I shouldn’t have gone to Thailand.

As Cain sat in the back of the taxi, he peered out the window. The high-rise buildings towered into the sky, some disappearing into the cloud cover. Bonnie could be anywhere, he worried. How am I going to find her in Japan when I couldn’t even find Claire and Christopher in Krabi? He lowered his head into his hand. He felt the onset of a migraine. He rubbed his temples to ease the pressure.