The door to the office closed behind the client, and the Kuwabara Detective Agency set immediately to work. The secretary Hanae sat down at her desk and began compiling the paperwork for a new case file. The assistant detective Kumitada went to the filing cabinets and pulled out several maps for the area of the Spring Day Café, each in a different scale. Lastly, the detective Yukiko… started pacing around the outside of the room’s Persian carpet, with one hand under her delicate chin and a thoughtful expression on her face.
“So, any thoughts on how to proceed with this one?” Kumitada asked several minutes later, returning to the couch with his arms full of rolled up maps.
“Hmm?” Yukiko asked, as though surprised there were someone else in the room. “Oh right, the new cat case,” she replied, smiled broadly. Had anyone else responded that way, Kumitada would have thought they were pulling his leg. But by now he had gotten to know the ditzy detective well enough to realize that her innocent smile was genuine.
“Kumitada and I could do a stake-out,” Hanae suggested from her desk. She made the same suggestion every time a new case was opened, and Kumitada shivered as he pictured himself struggling to focus on watching a mark while the aggressive raven-haired beauty tried to seduce him physically inside the very tiny car she drove. Still, just once he’d like to take a car, or public transportation, or just walk to a location of interest. Anything at all beat another ride on…
“Kumitada and I will ride over to the café on Minnie and scope the place out,” Yukiko announced, causing both the secretary and the assistant detective’s faces to fall simultaneously.
It was too early to concede defeat though. “Suzume-san was able to walk here during her lunch shift. It can’t be that far; we can save some gas money if we just go by foot,” said Kumitada, praying Yukiko would listen to reason, or at least pick up on the desperation in his voice. Maybe just once he’d get lucky and not have to ride that abomination designed by torture masters of the underworld.
“Hmm?” Yukiko asked. If the sweet blonde girl had a catch phrase, it would be that one sound accompanied by a confused tilt of the head and a thoughtful finger on her cheek. “That’s no good. What if we have to chase the perpetrator through traffic?”
A sweat drop formed on Kumitada’s brow. “You mean… the cat.” One of these days he would learn to stop getting his hopes up. The pain of having them fall to earth from the equivalent of a twenty story drop was not getting easier to bear, regardless of the many, many times they made the journey.
Yukiko nodded once forcefully. “Right! Let’s hit the hay!” she declared.
‘Bricks,’ Kumitada thought, but was too resigned to do anything but catch the amused sparkle in Hanae’s eye before heading outside.
Parked as always just outside the office on the street was Minnie, a spiteful little contraption that barely qualified to be called a motorbike. The overly pink beast ran like a sumo wrestler in a marathon. In his relatively short time working for the agency, Kumitada had been forced to repair half a dozen different engine parts just to keep it barely operational. Twice during repairs he had tried to convince Yukiko that Minnie’s best days were behind her and that it was time to move on, but the look of utter heartbreak on the detective’s face sent him back both times to raise the machine from the dead.
“Ah, how’s Minnie today?” Yukiko asked cheerfully as she exited the office and walked over.
“Oh, same old, same old,” Kumitada said, unable to come up with a less honest reply than that. “She’s topped off, not that we’ll need much gas where we’re going.”
As much cause as Minnie gave the assistant detective to hate it, yet unmentioned was the number one reason Kumitada hated riding the bike. It wasn’t the motion sickness that always seemed to grip his stomach each time the pair took off through the streets, though that was a factor as well. No, the primary reason for his fear was simple: Kumitada didn’t have a license to drive motorized bikes.
A few minutes later the pair was approaching their location: the Spring Day Café. While the girl in the pink helmet matching her bike looked pleased as punch to be on the case, the queasy looking boy sitting behind her was holding on cautiously and praying for the torment to end. It was a very fine line to walk, to hold onto the busty yet smaller detective firmly enough to keep from falling off the rear of the miniature motorcycle, and at the same time make certain the location he chose on his employer’s body for his hold was… let’s just say appropriate. Between hitting the pavement at 20 mph and accidently grabbing a handful of breast, the assistant detective generally tried to err on the side of the hospital visit.
Mercifully, Yukiko brought the bike to a stop half a block from the café. It was a small establishment, with a few outdoor patio tables and a large green and white striped canopy jutting out over them. “This looks like the place… odd though, where are all of the people?” Hopping off the vehicle, she hurried past the patio to read a sign posted on the door of the interior restaurant. “’Closed for rrrenovations! Come see us laterrr! Nyah!’ That’s odd… I wonder why Miss Toshimaru didn’t mention they’d be closed.”
“I’m not sure that they were,” Kumitada admitted, getting a sinking feeling in his stomach that had nothing to do with the motorbike ride. “She was on her lunch break when she visited and I don’t see any sign of the staff through the windows.” He leaned forward to take a longer look, yet saw nothing but a dark, empty, yet clean dining room. “I wonder where they all disappeared to-ah!”
The cause of his alarm was the fact that as he pulled back from the glass, he realized his employer was missing as well. His worry was short-lived, as he turned around he spotted the blonde girl already halfway up a large, branching tree that stood opposite the café in a small monument lawn across the street.
“I found the tree the cat was watching Miss Toshimaru from!” Yukiko called from across the street.
‘How in blazes had she gotten up there so quickly?’ Kumitada wondered in the few moments it took him to dodge traffic to cross the street himself. By the time he reached the other side, the girl was pacing a large tree branch as though it were the rug in their office.
“The client complained that the cat never moved… so where is it?” he asked.
“Don’t know, but here’s some evidence!” she called back, then bent over to pick up a clump of orange and white fur that was stuck to the tree. Her eyes widened and Kumitada’s heart stopped as she momentarily lost her balance in the act, but in the end she managed to secure her prize safely.
“For crying out loud, be careful up there!” Kumitada shouted. His boss’s ditziness was cute and, he’d have to admit, endearing at times, but all too often moments like this made him wish she were just a little more level-headed. “So what now? Both the client and the cat are missing, and we have no idea where either went.”
“No, but maybe he does,” Yukiko said, pointing at something behind the assistant detective. Back on the same side of the street as the Spring Day Cafe he saw what she was pointing at. Just a few doors down from the restaurant on a fire escape sat a thin grey cat. It had been sitting upright, watching the florist across from it dispassionately, but the moment Kumitada spotted it the cat’s attention turned towards him, and it started walking in the opposite direction.
“Kumitada, after that cat!”
Tue Sep 04 17:32:49 2012
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