"Professor, why did you give her the watch and the voice-changing bowtie?!"
Now back in his child body, Conan slammed the table and harshly questioned Professor Agasa. This time, he was genuinely angry.
Professor Agasa broke into a nervous sweat and tried to calm him down. "Now, now, Shinichi. I refused on principle at first too, but then she brought out a game console I'd never seen before and offered to trade it for two days..."
"You threw away your principles over one game console? I bet she secretly slipped you sweets too, didn't she?" On the other side, Ai extended an index finger and poked his big belly. Even her usual cool voice carried a hint of anger.
For once, she and Conan were on the same side.
The lights flickered on and off, casting shifting shadows over the childish faces of the two kids and somehow putting even more pressure on Professor Agasa.
He hurriedly explained, "No! It's just that this console really is unlike anything I've ever seen. Its technology is at least ten years ahead of what's widely available on the market. If I can figure out how it works, the limitations on game development could be..."
"But she's a kid who only causes trouble." Conan moved the hand he had slammed on the table, revealing the newspaper underneath.
The head of such a large company being assassinated naturally made the front page.
In the photograph, taken by who knew whom while Gin was still unconscious, Ooba and the president's daughter were captured clearly. Gin, the key figure in the entire event, appeared only from a terrible angle—after all, who cared about the identity of some nameless eyewitness?
But even though the angle made him look like a random passerby, it did not stop Ai or Conan from recognizing Gin at a glance. Combined with that solemn pose, there was no need to wonder what had happened.
Neither of them knew how the little thing had managed it. In any case, she had stumbled into another incident, picked herself a Jinchuriki, and Gin happened to be the unlucky passerby.
It was incredibly fortunate that she had not been shot dead on the spot. Conan genuinely felt lingering fear for Yimi, though at the same time he could not help regretting that he had missed the chance to follow Gin back then.
The lights flickered again. Conan involuntarily looked toward Yimi by the door. The reason the lights kept blinking was that the child had one knee braced on a chair and was pressing the switch, trying to balance it exactly between "on" and "off."
The Professor stopped her and handed back the perfectly intact game console. "All right. Can you return the watch and bowtie now?"
"Oh..." Yimi took out both items.
Conan practically snatched them back. "What were you thinking when you fired an anesthetic needle at him?"
He had assumed Yimi probably knew Gin. So many things had happened lately that Conan had nearly forgotten all the suspicious points surrounding Yimi.
"Because he was, right in front of me." Yimi hugged her game console and tried to climb down from the chair, but her posture had been strange to begin with, and she fell to the floor with a thump.
That was the inconvenient thing about a human body. If she had been in cat form, she would have landed on all four paws no matter what.
"Are you okay?" Ai quickly helped her up.
Yimi nodded and continued answering Conan's question. "Ai said, anybody was fine."
"You mean you don't know him?" Conan pointed at Gin in the corner of the newspaper photograph.
"Don't know him." Yimi shook her head.
When she stole the car that day, she had not even seen Gin approaching from across the street.
The corner of Conan's mouth twitched twice. "So you're saying your motive really was to randomly grab some unlucky person and have him 'deduce' for you?"
Ai gave Yimi a light karate chop on the forehead. "I bear some responsibility for saying that, but if you genuinely thought it was fine to make some random person lose consciousness, that's going too far."
Of course, if the person was Gin, then he absolutely deserved it. But the child's motive had been to grab any random unlucky person. It would have been bad if she had chosen somebody else.
"Sorry." Yimi's ears drooped.
And even after all that, the mission still had not completed.
Hearing her apology, Conan instead laughed awkwardly. "The Professor's anesthetic needles are actually completely harmless."
So far, when Yimi had not been around, he had shot Uncle Kogoro, Sonoko, a rookie police officer, and even Hattori. Uncle Kogoro had taken by far the most shots.
That was not the point.
Conan stared intently at Yimi, because she had just lied to him. At least, that was what he believed.
That little brat absolutely knew Gin. She had at least spoken with him before. Otherwise, how could she possibly reproduce Gin's voice?
At the amusement park she had heard the culprit, the victim, and Conan himself. Even the female celebrity at the memorial gathering could be explained by Yimi having heard her on television. But how was Gin supposed to be explained?
Conan refused to believe in a coincidence so absurd that Yimi could randomly turn the dial and land on the exact voice of the person she had just knocked unconscious.
Could she have done it deliberately to buy him time to escape the restaurant?
...
In an underground black-market bar belonging to the Organization, Gin sat in a corner with the newspaper folded into a narrow strip, reading it in silence. Only when his cigarette burned down did he stub it out and shift positions.
The report did not identify the eyewitness, but based on what had happened at the scene, it was not hard to infer that he had apparently spoken with those people.
Gin touched his neck. The sensation had indeed felt like being anesthetized, strangely similar to the recently famous Sleeping Kogoro. But now even Gin was not entirely certain.
He frowned slightly, then disregarded appearances and pulled up his trouser leg to study a scrape that looked as though he had fallen.
He had not bumped into anything just now. There was no reason for his knee to be scraped for no reason. This sort of thing had happened more than once. On the day his car was stolen, for example, his hand had become as cold as if he had been grabbing snow.
His physical examination showed absolutely nothing wrong with his body. That had made him pay close attention to changes in his surroundings lately. If he could unconsciously move outside his awareness for even one second, it would be enough to cause something like this unexplained scrape.
Unfortunately, whenever the abnormalities happened, there had been no camera prepared, and his partners had not seen anything either.
A tall, thin-looking man approached nervously and greeted him. "G-Gin-san, I'm the partner who was recently assigned to you..."
Gin glanced at the man. He had absolutely no need for a partner. He simply did not want to drive himself.
"What did you see?" Gin asked. He wanted to know whether he had just suddenly done something "unconsciously" and scraped himself.
"S-See what?" The new underling's breath caught.
The man before him was a monster whose last four partners had died in a very short span of time. Rumor said that when you worked with Gin, saying a single wrong word could get you killed.
Did I see something I shouldn't have? What? That newspaper? Is that Gin in the photo? He isn't supposed to show his face in public. I don't know what the article says, but if Gin got recorded there, the Organization might be unhappy...
If Gin suddenly decided to betray the Organization, then I might be the first person he kills.
No, wait. Gin is already a traitor, isn't he?! How could anyone lose four henchmen in such a short time?
The underling clenched his teeth and did his best to suppress the trembling that would make him look pathetic.
Seeing an expression on the man's face straight out of Fire Punch, and already hypersensitive to the bizarre suicidal behavior of his previous followers, Gin could not help thinking along those lines too. He knew perfectly well how suspicious he looked and gave a cold snort. "Don't think I'll become any gentler just because of what happened to the others."
Being thin-skinned was completely useless around him. Someone in his position was obviously not going to change himself to accommodate a partner.
No matter how many came, he would never go soft on them, even if his tone really had become noticeably better than at the beginning.
The new underling sucked in a cold breath.
Gin was directly using the previous men to threaten him. He was not even pretending otherwise!
He's a traitor anyway. If I do nothing, I'll die for sure. I've killed plenty of people too—
The new underling drew his gun as fast as he could and tried to aim at Gin. Before his hand had even fully risen, Gin snatched up a table knife and pinned the man's hand to the table with it, then seized the gun and pointed it back at him.
"You want to die?" Gin asked coldly.
You were going to kill me anyway!
The new underling reached for Gin's gun.
Bang!
Another corpse.
Gin looked down at the body on the floor, irritation appearing in his eyes.
Was this man an undercover agent? But Gin had already lowered his standards for drivers considerably. The only remaining requirement was absolute loyalty to the Organization, and an undercover agent would not choose a moment like this to suddenly turn on him.
"Hope you enjoyed the show, Bourbon." Gin turned his gaze toward Bourbon, who had entered the bar at some unknown point. This should be the man the higher-ups had sent to investigate him.
Gin was more inclined to think Bourbon was trying to frame him by sending this man over. But after another glance at the newspaper, then thinking about his own position, condition, and wording, he felt that perhaps he was simply becoming overly suspicious.
"Are you saying this was a bad time for me to show up?" Bourbon smiled without warmth.
He could easily make a big deal out of what he had just seen. Yet for some reason, he also felt like covering for Gin first—though doing that might put Bourbon himself in danger too.