It had taken Sly about half an hour to get from Puyallup to the piers, worrying that Modal would have moved on by the time she made it. But no, when she took up her position across the road from Kamikaze Sushi, his big Blitzen was still parked out front. For the past hour she’d been cooling her heels in the doorway, waiting for the elf to reappear. Listening to the music, which she could hear clearly even at this distance, she fantasized about warming herself with a thimble-cup of hot sake. Impossible, of course. The whole purpose of this exercise was to cut Modal out of the pack, drag him off somewhere quiet, and ask him some probing questions. (She suddenly shivered again, but this time not with cold. An image of little Louis flashed through her mind, Louis screaming his way through an interrogation. With an effort, she pushed the picture back into the furthest recesses of her brain.)