Screeech—whoosh!
That was the sound of a drifting turn. The tires scraped a mark across the road as the car shot forward without losing speed.
The traffic cops had spent their lives catching street racers, but they had never seen a rich kid so confident in his driving, nor had they ever seen anyone use this kind of car for a high-speed chase.
"Seat belt, seat belt!" Conan, in the passenger seat, frantically yanked down the seat belt to improve his odds of survival.
Ai, meanwhile, braced herself against the front seat while the car was moving at high speed, kicked her short legs twice in the air, flipped into the back, and very deliberately sat on the side closest to Yimi.
"Where did you learn this?!"
For one instant, Conan genuinely wondered whether this little girl had taken the same drug they had. And he had certainly never heard of a car that could start just because someone shoved a pen into it.
"Congratulations, Host, on unlocking the achievement [Learned It in Hawaii]. Reward: 5% portal energy."
"Learned it in Hawaii." Yimi copied the answer.
Conan was speechless.
Then he realized that if a child Yimi's size had to step on the accelerator, she could not even see the whole road ahead.
He had originally thought that escaping from right under Gin's nose might simply take a little time. Now it looked as though they had simply traded one way of dying for another.
A police siren sounded from behind. The traffic cops who had seen her driving so outrageously were coming to check her license... no, they were coming to save them.
"Guh... They found us." Yimi used her superb driving skills and tried to shake them.
★☆★☆★☆
At Haido City Hotel, Yimi finally stopped after leading the police car around for two laps and had no choice but to get out with the other two. Before leaving, she even pulled out her pen. She still needed it to do her homework later.
"What do we do, next?" The kitty looked at Conan, the mastermind.
Conan rolled his eyes and took a long time to recover. He had not fainted from fear. He was simply speechless.
He grabbed Yimi by the shoulders and shook her back and forth. "What is your brain even made of?!"
Yimi became unhappy too. "You said, steal the car."
The moment she heard they were going to steal a Black Organization car, she had simply gotten to work. Now he was blaming her?
Ai nodded. "You did say it."
"I only said it would be nice if we had a car-stealing tool! Now even bugging it is pointless..."
There definitely wouldn't be any clues in the car for him to inspect. The Black Organization was always careful about that sort of thing.
Conan's gaze slowly drifted away, because the dutiful traffic cops had caught up and were surrounding the Porsche parked in the lot.
The young detective had never imagined that one day he would feel guilty at the sight of the police. Fortunately, he had remembered to wipe away all three of their fingerprints.
"Gin definitely wasn't the one who called the police, right?" Conan muttered under his breath.
Hopefully nobody had seen that the driver was a little girl.
"Anyway, let's hide for now. It's already lucky we didn't die because of your recklessness. And I suppose we do have her to thank for getting us away safely." Ai said this to Conan while walking into the hotel.
Right. A child's identity was difficult to uncover. She had to survive and meet her sister again. As long as she kept hiding like this, nobody else would be hurt.
"Don't suddenly do something that dangerous again!" Conan raised a hand as if to knock Yimi on the head. Remembering that the little girl had no sense of how much strength to use, however, he awkwardly lowered it again.
Haido City Hotel seemed to have been completely reserved for a memorial gathering. Everyone present was dressed formally and appeared to have status or standing. Conan had even seen some of them on television.
There were so many people that it was impossible for everyone to know everyone else. If the three children mixed into the crowd, people would probably assume somebody else had brought them.
Conan had never been chased by the police like that in his life. All he wanted was to find a back door and leave quickly.
He led the way, so naturally he did not see Ai, who was holding Yimi's hand behind him, suddenly go blank-eyed and visibly terrified, reacting exactly as she had when she first noticed Gin's car.
She could feel it. There was someone from the Organization in this hall too!
Had they caught up?
Ai clutched Yimi's clothes tightly, breathing a little harder as she urged in a low voice, "Let's go..."
"Are you sick?" Yimi was confused. She had just used Love Train on Ai in class.
Rather than being sick, Ai looked scared. Yimi knew that expression far too well. Sometimes when she ran into Diego, she reacted exactly the way Ai was reacting now.
Yimi looked around and met the eyes of a famous actress who was watching them. She was the only woman paying attention to the children. The woman gave them a gentle smile, but it looked just a little fake.
Conan heard them talking and turned around, only for the host's booming voice to grab his attention.
"Let us now enjoy several slides from Director Sakamaki's private collection that were never released to the public during his lifetime."
"Slides?"
Naturally, the lights had to be turned off for a slideshow. Before they could react, the hall went quiet and dark.
"Pfft—"
The sound was so faint that the host almost drowned it out. It was a gunshot, weakened by one of this world's absurdly effective silencers.
Then came the sound of shattering glass. Something seemed to crash down.
At the same time, a handkerchief floated slowly down and landed over Conan's head, bringing with it the smell of gunpowder.
"What happened?"
"Turn the lights on!" Realizing something, Conan hurriedly shouted in a randomly altered voice.
Yimi's little mouth hung slightly open. Darkness obviously could not block a cat's vision. She had seen the entire thing clearly: an old man covered his gun with a handkerchief, raised it, and precisely shot through the chain holding a chandelier, making it fall and crush someone.
Seeing her expression, Conan—who had been wondering how to search for clues—felt the corner of his mouth twitch as he stared at her vertical pupils. "Don't tell me you saw it again?"
"I saw it." Yimi nodded and admitted it.
"What did you see?" Conan lowered his voice.
"Give me, the gadgets." Yimi held out her hand.
The kitty had a mission. She had to do the deduction herself.
"Nothing good ever happens when I give them to you." Conan refused.
So Yimi simply snatched them herself. It was karmic payback for all the times Conan had grabbed her phone.
Knowing he could not beat her, Conan did not resist. He sat there with dead-fish eyes, waiting to see how she planned to finish things when she could not produce any evidence. He did not believe a culprit who had prepared a trick like this would dare keep the gun on himself.
But Ai suddenly put a hand on both their shoulders. "This is no time to play detective, A-Ming, Xiaohua."
A-Ming? Xiaohua?
Conan froze.
Why had she suddenly made up fake names even less believable than "Edogawa Conan"? If she thought they were in that much danger, could it be...?
Yimi, of course, had no idea what the other two were thinking. By the time Conan realized something was wrong, she had already raised the watch and fired a needle at the blonde actress she had noticed earlier, the one standing relatively close by. Yimi thought this was the woman who had frightened Ai.
The actress covered her neck in surprise and sank heavily into a seated position.
"Wait..." Conan lightly tugged at the corner of Yimi's clothes.
But a voice imitating Conan's usual tone had already come out. "Everyone, I already know who the culprit is. The white-haired one—it's you."
Conan watched Yimi casually fiddle with the bowtie and switch from Mouri Kogoro's voice to that woman's voice, then once again stared with dead-fish eyes.
How did you always manage to dial in the exact voice of whoever you had just anesthetized?
Like the culprits Yimi had accused before, the old man who had fired the shot instantly broke into a sweat.
As an executive of the Black Organization, however, he was not going to panic simply because someone started a deduction.
He looked toward the woman sitting on the floor and drawing everyone's attention.
Vermouth, what the hell are you doing?!