A few minutes later, Plummer tried to open his eyes, which still hurt like hell -- even more than his right wrist. No result. He seemed to be lying face up on a floor, with his wrists, thumbs, and ankles bound together. "You bastard," he groaned, "I'm blind! You've blinded me, you--"

"Don't be stupid," said Takumo. "It's just a little home-made pepper spray."

"I can't see a fucking thing!"

"You're in a dark room, with a bandage over your eyes, so don't exaggerate. It should stop hurting in an hour or two. Sorry about your hands; I only meant to dislocate your thumbs and your wrist, but I think I may've broken them. You'd better go see a doctor when you get out of here."

"You're letting me go?"

"In a minute or two. You're going to deliver a message for me, and you can do that much more easily if you're alive. Besides, getting rid of your body is more trouble than it's worth. First things first, though. Who sent you?"

"Get--" Before he could finish, Takumo bent his left little finger backward, and the second word became a gasp.

"Ah, that's better," said Takumo. "A nice clean dislocation. I must be getting the hang of this koppojutsu stuff at last. So. Who're you working for? Nakatani?"

"Who?"

Takumo looked at him, and nodded; the ignorance seemed genuine. "There's nothing in this hovel worth stealing, so someone carrying the sort of gear you had -- lockpick, silenced pistol -- doesn't break into a dump like this except under orders. So who's your boss?" No answer. "Hegarty? Gacy? Lowe?" A slight flinch. "Thought so; he likes them dumb. You don't know who Lowe works for?"

"Who's Lowe?"

"Can we cut the crap? You were supposed to ask me for information, right?" No answer. "You think you're the first patsy sent here?" Plummer flinched. "Lowe didn't tell you that? I've been averaging one every three months for the past two years. I preferred it when he was sending the women; it's a pity he didn't believe what I told them. He really must be scraping the bottom of the barrel by now."

"Get--" He grunted in pain as the little finger on his right hand was bent backward with an audible snap.

"Oops. So sorry," said Takumo, cheerfully. "Look, man, whoever you are, you were sent here to find Magistrale, weren't you? Like all the others were. So I'm going to tell you the same thing I told them; I don't know where he is, and it wouldn't do you any good if I did. Freakin' Hell, if he was here when any of you goons came blundering in, you'd know all about it. Or maybe not; he has ways of disposing of corpses that're much more efficient than the pet-food factories. Lowe didn't tell you about his body count, either, did he?" He smiled, noticing that the intruder was perspiring more freely. "I didn't think so.

"So. I'm going to let you go. Tell your freakin' boss that I don't know where Magistrale is, and that if he keeps using me as a training exercise for second-rate rent-a-thugs I'm going to start charging; the neighbors have begun complaining. As it is, I'm going to keep those lockpicks and tools, and your ammo; you can keep the gun, though I'd recommend you dump it before you get arrested. You've parked nearby?" No answer. "You on your own?" No answer, until Takumo grabbed the ring finger of his left hand.

"Yes!"

The stuntman sighed. "Pity. You won't be in any condition to drive for another hour or so. Where are you parked?"

"Two, three blocks away."

"Venice Boulevard?" Plummer nodded. "Okay, I'm going to cut the tape around your legs. Don't try kicking me or anything stupid like that; I'm using a very large, very sharp blade. Okay, now try standing up."

Plummer moved his feet apart, startled to find that he could. He rolled over on to his knees, then stood unsteadily, his wrists still bound before him. "Okay, hold your hands out at arm's length, as far apart as possible, and don't flinch. Yeah, that's fine." This time, Plummer heard -- or imagined he heard -- a faint whispering sound as the blade swung through the air and slashed through the tape.

"Okay," said Takumo, a moment later. "Take three steps forward... that's good, stop, now turn left... another two steps... left again," Plummer heard a door open. "Now four steps forward. Don't try removing the bandage until you're outside."

Plummer nodded, and tried to guess his captor's location from the sound of his voice. The pain from his eyes and the broken bones in his hands made concentration almost impossible, but he listened carefully, and on his third step, jabbed with his right elbow at where he expected his target's nose to be. His funny bone hit something hard and unyielding; the explosion of pain almost masked the feeling of a cold metal point prodding him behind the left kidney.

"Don't back up," said Takumo. "Don't turn around. Just take one more step forward, and never come back here again. Ever."

Plummer staggered forward, and felt the door slam behind him an instant later. Using the fingers of his left hand only, he prized the bandage away from his eyes and looked around. It was still dark. He glanced at his watch: 3:58 A.M. The little freak had taken less than twenty minutes to break him; he only hoped his arms worked well enough to let him drive out of here. He was at the bottom of the stairs before he started wondering what he was going to tell Lowe.

Charlie Takumo returned his ninjato to its scabbard, and leaned against the kitchen wall. He'd been becoming complacent; the last intruder had broken in less than six weeks before, and he hadn't expected another attack for at least another month. He was just glad that years of film and theatre work, and his mother's unshakable belief that he was the son of Charles Manson, had taught him how to play a tough guy without cracking a smile.

For all his martial arts training and the collection of weapons in his small apartment, Takumo's adult life had been reasonably nonviolent until nearly two years before, when a rokuro-kubi -- a disembodied head with a murderous pair of hands; a nightmare come to life -- had flown into his dorm in a Calgary youth hostel. The rokuro-kubi had intended to attack the room's other occupant, a young photographer named Michelangelo Magistrale, but Takumo was incapable of pretending to be asleep while someone else was in danger a few meters away, and had come to Magistrale's aid. The rokuro-kubi had fled, and the two men had become friends -- a friendship that had led to Takumo being poisoned by another monster, fighting and killing two young women trained as ninja, and helping Magistrale break into the Bel Air mansion of Tatsuo Tamenaga, a magician with yakuza connections. Magistrale -- Mage to his friends -- had killed Tamenaga, then disappeared from L.A. to learn more about the talismans that had given the magician his power. Unfortunately, someone seemed determined to avenge the old man, and their hirelings had visited Takumo's apartment more often in the past year than Magistrale had.

Takumo took a few deep breaths, finding his center, then padded across the tatami -- woven straw mats -- back to the bedroom. His computer had been bought secondhand a few weeks after Tamenaga's death, and was now almost an antique, but it still did everything Takumo needed it to do; a little word processing, surfing the Web (though with excruciating slowness), and most importantly, sending and receiving e-mail. He logged on, deleted the junk mail that his spambuster hadn't caught, then posted a brief message to alt.fan.dirty-pair.