Chapter One

The streets were narrower than Mikan Yukihara's memory. Front yards were a stoop flush to cement. Later, after the day's high heat, some ladies would set up chairs on their porch to have some tea.

The station house was a dung-colored square with clear windows. The neglect continued inside with scarred chairs, slow-turning ceiling fans, files stacked high and carelessly.

Mikan moved to the front desk. "I want to file a missing person's report," she told the woman behind the brown desk.

The woman didn't lookup. "Child or adult?"

"Adult."

"Mentally challenged?"

"No," Mikan told the woman's crown in need of a touch-up.

"Physically disabled? In need of medication?"

"No."

"Possible victim of foul play?"

"Bingo." Mikan had never perfected that art of making friends.

The woman's head snapped up. Her mascara had already begun to melt. "Fukutan," she yelled, her eyes shish-kebabbing Mikan. "Possible missing." She jerked her head toward the back, her sprayed bouffant solid. "Third desk on the right."

Mikan was almost to the waiting Fukutan with the keen, beady gaze when she heard her name being said as a question. She yanked her head around to find herself chest to rib cage with Natsume Hyuuga. He was bigger than she liked to remember and solid as the brick walls she'd been running into her whole life. He sported the messy crew cut hairstyle popular among cops and athletes. The planes on his face were steeper, the lines of his mouth as hard as when she had first pressed her own to it.

She reined herself while he checked out her twenty-two hundred rabbits haircut, the designer clothes, the air of success and confidence she'd struggled for since she was ten. Only she knew the third-rate brokerage firm where she'd worked had gone to bust. Her stock portfolio was in the crapper along with her ex-customers. Her personal financial strategy of making no more than the 'monthly minimum required' was a hint as to why she should never have stepped onto Central Town in the first place.

But she forgot all that as her gaze fell to where it should have, and she caught the badge low on her old lover's belt loops.

"Son of a bitch," she said to life in general, more specifically to the unwelcome hum in her limbs gaining power.

Natsume's stoic face lit up, and his lips cracked with a one-sided smirk. "Can take the girl out of the neighborhood but can't take the neighborhood out of the girl?"

Before she had a chance to redeem herself with a more tasteful response, the man who'd taken her virginity on a studio couch with bad springs turned to his fellow officer. "I've got this one." With the same power he'd used to claim her maidenhood. Mikan was led to a cubicle with oak walls.

"Have a seat." He indicated the chair by the desk. She thought of bad springs.

She tried for an elegant lift of her head. "Are you sure this is ethical for you to handle this report, considering our past?" Much better than her initial discharge.

He propped one muscled hip on the desk's corner and smiled down at her.

His eyes alone could make a woman say yes.

She tightened her mouth, tightened her limbs. "Don't try and weasel out of it by telling me you don't remember."

"I remember."

His tone, even more than his honesty, told her the man he'd become. She shot him a smile. After all, she had been eager as he. The last virgin on the block had held no honor in her neighborhood. Nor any pleasure for a curious teenager whose closest run-in with titillation had been when she confused which orifice between her legs should be plugged with a tampon.

"Natsume Hyuuga. A cop. Damn." She plopped down in the chair. A spring impaled her.

He cocked his head, gave her another good, long once-over. "Stockbroker?" he said as if it were a guess.

Her eyes narrowed. "You're good, but you're not that good."

He chuckled, the sound hitting her square in the gut. "You've got a ripped up stock order ticket stuck on a wad of gum on the bottom of your shoe."

So much for aplomb. He was right. She stunk of the neighborhood.

"My mother might have mentioned it, too."

He could have gotten away without telling her that and impressed her big time. He hadn't.

"More than once," he added in a way that said his mother had harangued him daily.

Mikan suddenly adored Mrs. Hyuuga. "How is your mother?"

"Moved to Okinawa two years ago with a guy with Elvis's hair."

Flashback:

Knocks on the door of the red rowhouse with the brown roof at 2:00 a.m., Mikan and her step-sister on the stoop in their pajamas. The door would open to Mrs. Hyuuga. Sometimes Mikan's mother had still been bleeding, always starting to swell. Once there'd been cracked ribs…

End of flashback

He studied her, the pain of his own past no less than her own. "She was right. You did okay, Mikan, for a skinny, flat-chested runt from the neighborhood."

"I wasn't too skinny for you one night." But already, her voice was softening. Even if he had broken her heart, she'd happily handed it to him. And Natsume's mother had been a good friend to Yuka Serio and her two girls. Not that Mrs. Hyuuga had ever been able to convince Mikan's mother to leave her second husband. Mrs. Hyuuga's own marriage had ended after her thirteen-year-old son had tried to protect her from her drunken husband. It'd taken twelve years and Natsume's two-week hospital stay. So Mrs. Hyuuga understood what didn't seem understandable. She opened her door to Mikan, her step-sister, and her mother any time. Day or night. Even knowing after one or two days, an apology and the promise it would never happen again, Yuka would go home to Persona.

"You didn't do so bad yourself, Hyuuga."

He smirked. The hum inside her swelled.

"For a lying skunk."

His expression showed no offense. "I didn't lie, Mikan. And you aren't stuck in a three-story walk-up with sagging boobs and a couple of kids on a cop's salary."

"Hell, no."

He smirked wider. "Then what are you pissed at me for?"

She attempted indignation. "You could have at least called and given me the chance to turn you down."

"I wasn't that nice a guy."

"You weren't a nice guy at all."

"I'm still not a nice guy."

Mikan heard the warning and appreciated it.

"So, what brings you back down memory lane?"

"My mother. I'm afraid something's happened to her. She's missing."

"Missing?" he became all cop now. Again Mikan saw the man he had become.

"I called her last night. My sister left a voicemail yesterday to call her. She sounded a bit hysterical, but then again, that's not unusual for Luna. She seems to thrive on high drama. I called the last number I had for her, but it'd been disconnected. That's not unusual for Luna. So I called my mother to see if she has a number for her. When there was no answer, I called the bar. They said mom was gone. Said she'd taken some cash and left him."

"You don't believe him?"

The cynical twist of her lips revealed the woman she had become. "Would you?"

"I don't believe anybody."

"Me, neither."

Nothing in his eyes flickered sympathy. She was grateful.

"She says anything to you about leaving him?"

Mikan shifted. Her gaze skittered about the office's walls. "I never really got that dutiful daughter routine down. I sent flowers on birthdays, Mother's Day, checked in with her every few months, but we weren't close." She didn't have to ask for understanding, not from Natsume, but she knew her eyes pleaded with him anyway.

"So, how do you know your mother didn't take the cash and split last night?"

"People don't change., Natsume."

"Some do."

"Maybe." She'd give him that much, but she could see the brittleness that kept his eyes dark and made him choose to wear a gun strapped to his side. Despite all appearances, he was holding on just like her.

"How far could she have gotten without her car?" she asked.

"She left her car?" Natsume was cool enough no to lean forward, but she'd gotten his interest.

"And that's about it." Her mother's dresser drawers had been empty; her bedroom closet had been the same except for a few hangers. Nothing. Not one odd sock, old shirt. In the mirrored medicine chest in the bathroom, there'd been no makeup, no Noxzema, no Topaz that her mother said was the only thing that killed the stink of a Saturday night behind the bar. It was almost as if someone wanted to erase all traces. Except for her mother's hot red 1950 thunderbird convertible, she'd called "Itchigo" had been parked in the drive.

"My mother's car keys were on the kitchen counter along with a dry cleaning ticket for next Tuesday and an overdue books. Mom always did like to meet her responsibilities."

"No note? Anything like that?"

Mikan shook her head.

"Somebody picked your mother up. A girlfriend?"

He was respectful enough not to say "boyfriend." After all, Yuka Serio had changed his diapers. Still, the possibility Yuka had run off with another man was there like the springs bruising Mikan's butt right now.

"I guess anything's possible." She gave Natsume a deliberate glance. "Nah. You know my mother. She brought up that marriage is a sacrament, divorce is a sin."

Yuka's first husband – Mikan's father – had a heart attack one morning while having cornflakes and coffee when Mikan was seven. Four years later, her mother had married Rei' Persona' Serio. The honeymoon hadn't lasted long. Yuka's choices in love were bad as Mikan's hot stock picks.

"Only a few months ago, my mother and Persona had gotten a new place. Bought a fixer-upper not far from downtown, but far enough. The place needed some work, but it had a couple of wooded acres. Mom said the deer would come and eat right out of her hand. The last time I spoke with her, she…" Dead air. "She sounded happy."

"When was that?"

She counted back mentally, avoiding Natsume's gaze. "Five, six, maybe eight weeks."

"That's a long time for happiness to last."

At least in the world they'd come from.

"When's the last time you talked to your step-sister?"

Guilt made her gaze flit about the room again. "She called me about three, four months ago. We didn't talk much." She shrugged, hating that she still felt the need to ask for absolution. "Same old, same old. She asked for money. I sent it." She was almost afraid to ask. "You know anything about her? Maybe where I can find her?"

"She was hanging out at a place called 'Mr. Bear's Cottage' down lower Northern Woods."

"Near the port?"

"I'll find her," he said.

Stay out of it, she heard in his tone. She threw him her best low look of warning. He gave it right back to her.

"I used to walk these streets too, Hyuuga."

"Yeah, in closeouts." His gaze raked over her body and her five hundred rabbits French outfit.

He had a point. That pissed her off even more. "Hey, I wasn't the only one who got my butt kicked from one end of Shinjuku to the other on more than one occasion."

"Stay away from the port."

He'd tried to tell her what to do. He'd made a big mistake.

He took out a business card. "Where are you staying?"

She had no idea. When she'd called and learned her mother was missing, she'd used her frequent flier miles to take the first available flight, then booked an Uber to her mother and step father's house where she'd found only "Ichigo and her black-haired, mysterious, scary step-father. She hadn't thought any further ahead than that. She wasn't going to stay at their house. She didn't know who was left in the old neighborhood.

"I'll get a hotel room."

"They just put up a new hotel downtown a few months ago. Give me your number. I assume your sister and mother know your number?"

She slanted her gaze. "Mom has my old number. My phone got stolen a few weeks ago. I meant to call and give her the new number…"

He glanced up. No sympathy, no reapproach, and she was grateful.

"Mom always called the apartment anyway."

He wrote on the card. "On the front is the station house number. This is my phone number and email address on the back. Call in your room number when you get one. I'll bring Luna to you." He stood. "In the meantime, hang out at the hotel, order some room service and watch some Netflix shows and paint your toenails."

Damn, if he hadn't done it again – ordered her around. She was getting steamed even if the things this man did with toes were almost worth excusing his arrogance. "She's my mother, Natsume."

"Whatever happened, it's not your fault, Mikan."

"I know that." But it sure felt like it.

"Have any recent pictures of your mother on you?"

"And you almost had me guilt-free here."

"We'll need one. I'll start looking for Luna, stop by your step-father's bar and talk to Persona. C'mon." He touched her arm with a carefulness she didn't remember. "I'll walk you out."

"Besides being righter of wrongs, got any other good surprises for me, Hyuuga?" she asked as they left the station house, crossed into the parking lot. "Married?"

"I'm not that much of a changed man." He spotted the Thunderbird. "You're driving your mother's car?"

"I'm borrowing it." They reached the car. She slid into the driver's seat.

He moved between the open door and the car. "What about you?"

"What about me?"

"Married?"

"Was engaged. Until he broke my jaw. So much for true love." She shrugged. "Like mother, like daughter, huh?"

He shook his head, telling her no. Mercifully the crimson of his eyes stayed hard, flat. She wouldn't accept otherwise from him.

"Well, I did take the Limoges vase we'd gotten from his aunt as a wedding present and gave him a concussion."

"You'd always did have a classy way about you." He smiled, a compatriot, and she remembered why she'd let him get into her pants.

"A cop and a Central Town wheeler-dealer.:

She didn't correct him. "Who'd have thought it when we were young."

For a second, the crimson eyes softened. "We were never young, Yukihara."

He looked at her so long her insides hummed like a hive. He was a crazy-maker.

"You ever have a cop before, Yukihara?"

Bless him. She shook her head, straining to hear him above the purr.

He closed her door. "Yeah, you did."

"That didn't count."

He ran the back of his finger down her cheek. "Yeah, it did." He grinned, shut the car door.

She fastened her seat belt.

Lower downtown had once been a wasteland of low-income housing, abandon buildings, small inner-city businesses with bars across their windows. But revitalization fueled by district representatives eager to get one step closer to the governor's mansion sitting high in the distance and an influx of single young professionals had made the area fashionably urban in the past few years.

Now townhouses alternated with crack houses. Hookies complained to city hall about the lack of decent parking. Still, the renewal had not reached where Mikan was headed. The warehouses were flat brown or sad yellow and had the look of abandonment whether they were or not. The barges sat heavy and still in the gray-green water, and the smell of fish and fruit and longshoremen's sweat wafted through the car's vents. Despite the heat and lack of air-conditioning, she'd left the top up, and only the back windows cracked/ She hadn't spent two hundred rabbits on a haircut to let nature have its way. Still, the sweat trickling down her sides was form more than the summer heat. No one knew except her and an overprices therapist; even fewer would believe it, but she hated to drive.

She parked in a lot several streets over from the docks, locked the car, and started toward a squat, flat-roofed building with a neon Miller sign in one window and 'Mr. Bear's Cabin' in faded blue letter above its door. She had changed her clothes from well-heeled Central Town to denim and one hundred percent cotton, charged at B. Lodge's uptown. She figured that concession was close enough to obeying Natsume's orders to stay away from the port.

She stepped into the bar, stopping to adjust to the darkness after the day's bright sun. For that second, she wished she didn't always feel compelled to do the opposite of whatever she was told to do. Even in common denim and white cotton and Keds, she was as conspicuous as a hungry starlet.

She made a beeline for the bar, inviting the men to go back to their dart games and their beer and their alcohol-induced sense that nothing was amiss.

The bartender was beefy and bald with a beard that hung halfway down his chest in obvious compensation to his head's lack of hair. He had the massive bicep, and Mikan suspected that he doubled as a bouncer on two rabbits draft night. She counted five tattoos in his left arm alone before he growled. "What can I do for you?"

He threw a cardboard coaster on the cracked Naugahyde counter. She appreciated the attempt at the ambiance. She slung herself onto a stool as if she were a regular and smile to show him there was no reason why they couldn't be friends.

He folded his arms, crushing his bread to his chest. The rattlesnake inked down his right arm seemed to unfurl.

"I was told I might find Luna Serio here."

"That right? Who told you that?"

She hesitated and was instantly outed. The man's eye narrows. Natsume was right. She'd kept sharp dealing with the daily roller-coaster ride of Central Town, the early-learned practice of trusting no one and showing no fear making her seem born to broker. But she'd been away from these streets long.

She had just matched the man's mean squint when something flickered in his brown eyes.

"Mikan?"

She kept her own stare hard. "Maybe."

The man's meaty lips smiled. "Mikan Yukihara."

Mikan concentrated on the man's face, but nothing clicked.

"It's me, Mochu. Mochiage."

"Mochiage?" She remembered a sunken chested bean of a boy whose butt was kicked up and down Shinjuku ten times more than Natsume and hers put together.

The fleshy smile widen. "Actually, they call me Mochu now."

"Makes sense," she agreed.

"A little Marines, A little steroid, and ba-da-bing."

"Ba-da-bing." Mikan echoed.

He wiped several sticky rings off the bar. "What can I get ya? It's on the house."

It wasn't much past noon and the strongest drink she'd had in the past four years was a nonfat latte.

"Double snakebite." She wasn't about to lose any freshly gained ground.

"So, what brings you home?" Mochu set the shot in front of her.

She supposed if she'd ever really had a home, this city would come the closest. "What else?" She picked up the glass, her eyes crossing from the drink's fumes. "Family."

"What always," he agreed with a truly pained expression for a man with a dagger dripping blood on his forearm.

"Hear, hear," she toasted. Mochu watched her closely. It was now or never. She'd been gone too long and too far to be trusted based on old times alone. This one's for you, Mom. She swallowed the drink in one gulp. She smacked her lips, released a satisfied "A-h-h." She still had it.

"Looking for your little sis, huh?" Mochu picked up her glass for a refill. Her pleasure at her performance waned.

"The last number I have for her is no longer in service. I heard she hung here."

"She in trouble?"

She told him the truth. "I don't know."

"She never seems to stray far from it." He set another shot in front of her and leaned against the back of the counter.

Mikan recognized the challenge. In this neighborhood, proving yourself was part of the game. She eyed the drink. Two of these on an empty stomach and Gentleman George, who she'd seen still set up camp on the city's corners with an almost elegant woven basket for change and a paper bag of Mad Dog 20-20, would be suave compared to her. Still, she needed info, and she hadn't gotten any.

On the other hand, Mochu could be calling her bluff. They'd both played the game. She reached for the drink. On principle alone, she never backed away from a dare.

She had the glass to her lips when Mochu circled her wrist with his callused palm. "'Shiro Neko.' You never could resist playing with the big boys, could you?"

She looked up from the upside-down cross, the motorcycle gang's signature tattoo, the Lords, inked on Mochu's inner forearm. "Story of my life, Mochu."

He downed the drink himself. "I heard you did pretty good. Luna, she was always going on about you."

Compared to her younger sister's mixed-up life, Gentleman George was a success story.

Mochu poured himself another shot. "Luna was real proud of you."

The guilt was familiar as it was keen. She'd stayed away with acceptable excuses, but she knew the real reason she rarely came home. She was afraid – afraid of the helplessness she experienced every time she thought of her sister, her mother. Afraid of the small chant that came every time she saw them. There but for the grace of God… Now her mother was missing, her sister obviously still strung out, and she, the prodigal daughter, right back where she began – broke, frustrated, burning for more than her barely blue-collar roots. And, as illustrated by her earlier reaction to a man who had ruined more women than a cheap bikini wax, not one iota wiser.

"Listen, I'll tell you what I told Hyuuga –"

"Natsume's been here already?" Not that it mattered, she reminded herself. Besides a moment of insanity when she almost got married to her slimeball ex-fiance, she'd never let anyone tell her what to do.

"You kept up with Natsume?" He eyed her slyly. "You two used to cha-cha, no?"

"It was once –"

Mochu lifted his bushy eyebrows.

"Hey –" She'd given up the virgin act readily long ago when she learned what awaited on the other side. Still, nine years of Sunday school and no patent leather shoes during her formative years were hard to break. "What do you know about it anyway?"

Mochu shrugged. "Nothing. Hyuuga' cha-cha'-ed every skirt I knew. Just checking to see if it's been a clean sweep.

"Where's my sister, Mochu?"

Her tone was too close to "cut the crap." Mochu's gaze went into caution mode. She knew what he was thinking. Shiro Neko.

Sunken-chested butt-kicked bean boy, she mentally threw right back.

Mochu heaved a sigh. The skull earring in his right ear shimmered. "All right."

One for Shiro Neko.

"I'll tell you what I told Natsume. Natsume. A cop. Can you beat that?"

"I'm still trying to wrap my mind around it. So where can I find Luna?"

"She worked here for about two months…when she showed up. Most of the time, if she did show, she was too lit up to be any use to me anyway, but she'd start singing the blues, and well, her and I, we go back some."

Mikan nodded. Like most addicts, her sister was a master of manipulation. It was a survival skill. Even aware of it. Mikan herself had let her sister work her over than once.

"She hung out off and on with a dude who worked the tankers. Name's Yome. He'd come up from Osaka. Smooth dog. Threw a lot of money around whenever the ship docked in the port."

"He still around?"

"He comes and goes. I haven't seen him in a while. I haven't seen Luna either. A couple of weeks ago, I caught her taking cash out of the register and pocketing it. I had to let her go. She got all huffy as if I had some nerve firing her because she was stealing me blind. She's a real piece of work, that one."

"She's a classic. And you haven't seen her since?"

"A few nights ago, stopped by your father's joint –"

"He's not my father."

The big man raised his hands, her point made. "Wednesday, I think."

"You talk to her?"

Mochu shook his head. "No, I stayed away. Your mother was serving that night. She and your little sister seemed to have a 'discussion.' Then Luna stomped out, not looking too happy. Nor too healthy."

"My mom was working a Wednesday? The last time I talked to her, she was only working Friday and Saturday nights."

Mochu shrugged. "Maybe she was filling in for one of the other girls. Picking up a little spare cash."

For the new house? Or a new life?

"What was Yome's first name?"

"Koko. He busted a guy's nose one night for calling him 'Kokoro.'"

"Sounds like a sweetheart. He and Luna like to hang out anywhere else?"

"Anywhere there was action if they're still hanging together. One of the regulars last week said they'd seen Luna at a place uptown. The Golden Cue. But she wasn't with Yome."

Mikan slid off the stool, pulling out the twenty she'd found stuffed between the car's front seat cushions when she'd searched for the seat belt. "Thank, Mochu."

"Hey, I told you it's on the house."

Mikan hesitated. She didn't like accepting favors. Time come, they'd be called in. But a perceived insult could be just as deadly. She worked to appear gracious.

"Okay, well, thanks again."

"How long you in town?"

"I'm not sure." She looked into Mochu's eyes, the size and shade of rabbit pellets. "A while, I guess." She scribbled her cell number on a cocktail guess napkin. "If you see Luna, will you give her this? Tell her I'm looking for her."

Mochu enjoyed watching her walk to her car. He watched as she got into her car, jumped right back out, her mouth working while she took down the car's convertible top. Still talking to herself, she got back in, checked the side and rear mirrors, then drove out of sight. He waited another minute before he picked up the phone.

What do you think? Is it good enough for you? Let me know your thoughts by leaving a review or send me your opinion via DM. All reactions are welcome!

I will try my best to upload one chapter per week, but no promises. See you in the next chapter ;)

XOXO
Claire-chan143