Read John Rain 08: Graveyard of Memories for Free Online

forgiveness than ask permission. I’d give him another day, anyway, and give myself a night to sleep on it.
    Sleep. Where the hell was that going to happen? A hotel, I supposed. But not one of the big ones—I couldn’t afford the rates, for one thing, and didn’t want to deal with a front desk or other forms of scrutiny, for another.
    I looked up at a passing road sign and saw I was heading toward Uguisudani—Nightingale Valley, though if nightingales had ever been prevalent there, they had long since departed for more salubrious climes. The area was known, even notorious, for streetwalkers, many of them of the “mature” variety, and for its profusion of love hotels. These were smaller establishments catering, as the nomenclature implies, to amorous couples looking for a place they could use for an hour or at most a night. Love hotels were numerous, they were discreet, and they were everywhere. Tens of thousands of people rotated through them every day, sometimes every hour. Finding someone hopping from one to another one night at a time would be a shell game not even the yakuza could win.
    I parked Thanatos in a lot overflowing with bicycles and motor scooters, and walked along the road paralleling the train tracks. The night was still warm and it had stopped raining, but my clothes were wet, and I was cold to the point of shivering. I picked up a bento dinner from a vendor, and turned in to a labyrinth of twisting alleys lit in the gaudiest neon, the signs advertising places with names like Pussy Cat and Aladdin’s Cave and Casanova , some with plaster cupid statues in front of them, others with illuminated fountains, each more garish than the next. Hookers dressed to cater to every fantasy—demure schoolgirl, brazen slut, leather-clad dominatrix—trawled the area, sizing me up, trying for eye contact, forgetting me the moment they failed to achieve it.
    I ducked down a particularly narrow alley, and was rewarded with a place called Hotel Apex. Devoid of cupids, fountains, or even neon, it was obviously a no-frills place serving the lower end of the market. Just what I was looking for. I ducked inside the privacy wall and went through the front door. Inside was a tiny lobby—not much more than a vestibule—with a reception window to the left and an elevator the width of a coffin straight ahead. I stepped over to the reception window, and was surprised to see a very pretty girl sitting on the other side of the glass. I had been expecting an oba-san —the standard receptionist in this type of establishment being an old woman.
    The girl glanced up at me, her expression neutral. It looked like she had been reading something, though I couldn’t see what. There was a tape recorder on the desk to her left, playing some kind of jazz. I loved Bill Evans—I’d first heard Sunday at the Village Vanguard when I was sixteen—but didn’t know much beyond that, and didn’t recognize what she was listening to.
    “Rest or stay?” she asked, meaning did I want a room by the hour, or for the whole night. Her tone indicated supreme lack of interest, and pretty as she was, there was something tough in her demeanor, though I couldn’t put my finger on what. She had long hair, at the moment pulled into a ponytail. Her skin was beautiful, I couldn’t help but notice, and—in contrast to that of the professional girls outside—unembellished by makeup. Nor was she dressed to impress: a navy sweatshirt with New York City stitched across the front in faded gray letters; no earrings; no adornments. I wouldn’t say I was particularly subtle or sophisticated at the time, but I got the message she was trying to convey: I’m not trying to look good for you, so leave me the fuck alone.
    “Uh, a stay, I guess,” I said.
    She looked at me for a moment, probably wondering how someone could be so dumb that he wandered into a love hotel not knowing if he wanted a room for an hour or for the whole night. The fact that I was alone