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just try and stay away from it. I don’t care if
it’s a boyfriend, drugs, or a pimp. You got lucky this time. Don’t try your
luck again. I don’t want to see you wheeled here inside a body bag next time.”
    I slid down from the cot and
grabbed my bag and hiked it up onto my shoulder. “I knew I wasn’t going to get
hurt, don’t worry.”
    He snapped off his plastic gloves
and bounced them into the trash. “How could you be so sure?”
    “ Kitto Katsu ,” I said. The
words were foreign to him, but oh-so-familiar to me.
    “ Kitto Katsu ?” he asked.
    “Yeah, it’s my motto. It translates
to, I will surely win .”
    “It sounds… Japanese?”
    “It is Japanese.” I was in the
doorway now, pretending it didn’t make me sad to be leaving his gem-like eyes
and extremely thorough hands.
    “Does a girl like you make it to
Japan often, Alice?”
    “Mostly just to visit the Tokyo Sky
Tree. I mean how else do you think I learned to climb the Eiffel Tower?”
    He looked confused. I knew he was
dismissing it as another one of my tall tales. I wasn’t about to reveal to him
how my boss, Motley, had funded an intensive martial arts training ritual for
me, which just happened to culminate on the rickety two-thousand-foot skeleton
of the Tokyo Sky Tree during a finance-related lull in its construction. It had
felt like climbing to the stars. I was wearing a light-reflective suit that
made me nearly invisible the naked eye as I ascended like the Greek god Icarus.
Get too close and the sun might burn you up. But I hadn’t burned, I had shined.
I had conquered it. Kitto Katsu . I caught a glimpse of my reflection in
the metal cabinet doors that lined the room and saw that my shoulder was
wrapped in bandages like butcher paper. I wasn’t shining at the moment. My neck
was trimmed with ghoulish mustard-and-grape-colored bruises. I drank in one
last vision of the handsome doctor, so clean by comparison, and walked out.

Chapter Two: Big Red X’s
    I SCURRIED DOWN the corridor towards the emergency room lobby and blew by the
receptionist’s desk without signing myself out. A skyline of gilded domes and
scaffolding awaited me outside. I spun through the hospital’s turnstile doors,
and when I got on the sidewalk I reached inside my bag and felt that my trusty
snub-nose revolver was still in place. My phone was at my ear. My fingers were
dialing the phone number I dial every time I am about to throw a hissy fit.
    The number of my partner, Rabbit.
    Well, Rabbit is just what we call
him. His real name is Lenny Rabitz. Based solely on appearances, he is nobody
you would take seriously. He has light-brownish hair that would be a curly mop
if he didn’t shear it. He is gawky, rail thin, and incurably awkward with
girls. He has a craft for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time and a
penchant for pissing me off royally.
    Thing is, Rabbit is a bona fide
genius, especially with computers and technology. Up until three years ago he
had been the kind of guy who never had to lie about who he was his whole life.
Rich parents, private schools, and a perfect GPA to boot. Then Lenny Rabitz got
caught running a high-stakes poker racket out of his Yale dorm room. After
being expelled by his school and disowned by his parents on the same day, you
better believe it was this ex-golden child’s best day of his life when the
November Hit happened. Motley found the kid looking forlorn at a bus stop on
Crown Street in New Haven with a laptop case on his shoulder and he offered him
a job and a chance to start over.
    “Alice!” Rabbit managed to twist my
name out of his exacerbated throat.
    “Damn it, Rabbit.” I was
practically howling. “Did you see what happened up there?”
    “I’m sorry, Alice.”
    “You’re sorry? Sorry? You watched
some guy pull a gun on me on the Eiffel Tower and all you can say is sorry ?”
    “Correction, Alice, I watched a guy
pull a gun on you from three-hundred yards away. Plus it was dark.”
    “Where