Year of the Demon

by Steve Bein

  “Sure. At my brother’s wedding.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Not since academy.”

  “Me neither,” said Mariko. She lowered her voice even more and said, “Does it make you scared, knowing they have submachine guns in there?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  Mariko took a deep breath through her nose and held it awhile before blowing it out. It felt good to have someone on the team she didn’t have to be defensive with. With everyone else she was always on her guard, because everyone else was all too willing to see her as a girly-girl if she ever showed a moment’s weakness. But she and Han could tell each other the truth—even if only in private—and while she wouldn’t be caught dead whining to him, just being able to admit she was scared lessened her fear somehow.

  “Jump-off point in one minute,” the driver said.

  That palpable, silenced excitement mounted. It was strange, feeling that much nervous energy restrained by cops who were otherwise as rowdy as hormone-addled frat boys. She couldn’t see them well in the red light, but somehow Mariko knew even the SWAT guys were tensing up. “Han,” Mariko said, “you put your lid on yet?”

  “Nope.”

  “Well, put it on, damn it. I don’t want to tell the LT C-team didn’t hit their door on time because my partner bobbled his helmet while he was getting out of the van.”

  “Jump-off in twenty,” said the driver. The doors opened up and suddenly the cabin filled with light and industrial stink. Acrid paint smells told Mariko there had to be an auto body shop nearby, and a wind out of the west carried all the smog that should have been marinating Tokyo and Yokohama. Or maybe that was the exhaust from teams A and D, which pulled away faster and faster as Mariko’s van slowed to a halt.

  Then she was following Han, her heart pounding just as hard as her heels pounded the pavement. She wished her gear wasn’t so heavy, wished her goggles weren’t fogging up so soon, wished she’d spent a little less time on the pistol range and a little more time training for her next triathlon.

  But just like running a tri, this too proved to be a case of pre-race jitters. She overtook Han as they turned the corner into a narrow alley. She could have passed the SWAT operators too, but she reminded herself that it was their job to breach the target, her job to seize the dope once the target was secure.

  As they passed a shabby, weather-beaten, wood plank fence, Mariko got her first look at their target. It was a two-story slab of beige bricks nearly identical to the buildings beside it. There were six of them, lined up like the pips of a die on a dirty, seldom-used lot. Apart from being a tenth as high as most of the buildings in the neighborhood, the target and its little siblings were utterly without character. Light shone through most of the windows, which was good; it was easy to see perps behind them.

  Mariko kept the darkened windows in her peripheral vision as she ran. Her focus was on the back door, and on the empty expanse of concrete between her and it. It was the only exposed stretch of their approach, but there was no getting to the C-side of the target, the back side, except to cross it. If the buildings on this dirty lot were the six pips on a die, the target building was the lower right pip and C-team was just rounding the lower left. Running right past the two were the twin tracks of the Chuo-Sobu Line, where the clackety-clack, clackety-clack of the 7:03 was getting louder and louder by the second. There was no crossing the train tracks—they were fenced, and the chief of police had nixed SWAT’s plan to just cut through the fences and approach the C-side directly—and so the only way to the back door was to cross that shooting gallery of a parking lot.

  Mariko’s team tucked themselves into a corner to catch their breath. They waited for the train for the same reason they’d been so careful in strapping their gear down tight: speed and surprise were their only sure defense against automatic fire. The helmet and vest were half armor, half security blanket; every cop knew there was no protection against a lucky shot. Submachine guns could spit out a lot of potentially lucky shots.

  Mariko heard a little snik behind her and turned around to see Han adjusting the straps of the helmet he’d just put on. He shot her a wink and a grin. “Go time.”

  The train was upon them before she knew it, and then they were running again. Off to Mariko’s left, A-team’s big black van roared through the parking lot and B-team was almost to the B-side windows. As Mariko’s element reached the C-side door, the SWAT guy with the ram—a heavy goddamn thing by the look of it; Mariko could hardly believe he’d kept pace with the rest of the team—charged the door and laid into it.

  The ram bounced back.

  He hammered the door again, but the ram bounced off like it was made of rubber. “Shit,” Mariko said. So much for owning the building in the first five seconds.

  Now that the train had gone, she could hear shouting, shattering windows, the explosion of flash-bangs. Now two SWAT guys were on the ram, beating the holy hell out of the door. They were supposed to have made their breach by now. A-team would already have punched right through the front door, and if Mariko’s team couldn’t punch their door, their suspects would only have A-team to shoot at.

  Mariko didn’t like the thought of volunteering to draw some of that fire, but the whole point of converging on the target at once was to overwhelm and confuse the opposition. Besides, the longer her suspects had to think, the more time they had to find weapons or flush product down the toilet.

  She pulled a flash-bang grenade from her belt and set it on the windowsill behind her. “Get down,” she said, and she tried to hide her whole body under her helmet.

  White light consumed the world. The concussion was enough to buckle her knees. It sounded like Armageddon, but it sure blew the hell out of the window. Mariko hopped through the gap, Han following like her own shadow.

  For Mariko the world narrowed to whatever her pistol could see. She put her front sight on the empty doorway, then this corner, then that one, not checking the other two because that was Han’s area and she knew he’d do it right. The furniture didn’t even register to her except as cover.

  With the room cleared she and Han made for the hall, looking for the bathroom. When they raided residences, that was where perps disposed of product, and there was no reason a commercial storefront’s toilets couldn’t be used for the same purpose. Mariko reached the hallway just in time to see the C-side door exploding inward, finally succumbing to the ram. Two of her SWAT guys breached and held. The other two followed Mariko and Han.

  Footsteps thundered on a flight of stairs somewhere nearby. So many voices were shouting through Mariko’s earpiece that she couldn’t keep them straight. She rounded a corner and saw a balding man in a maroon track suit closing a door behind him. She only got a glimpse of the room on the other side of the door, but she thought she saw some kind of heavy machinery back there.

  In an instant Han had a pistol on the suspect too, shouting at him to get down, and both SWAT guys had him in the wavering glow of the flashlights undermounted on the barrels of their M4s. The man in the track suit gave all four cops a cocky smile, held his hands up near his head, and let something small and shiny fall from his right hand.

  Keys.

  That arrogant smile told Mariko all she needed to know. Her suspect didn’t care about being arrested. All he had to do was stand there getting handcuffed long enough for some machine on the other side of that door to destroy all of her precious evidence.

  She rushed the perp. Still wearing that cocksure smile, he stood with his hands in front of him, as if to offer his wrists. It was the sort of pose she’d only seen in people who had been handcuffed before. Mariko took the tiniest bit of delight in seeing his eyes widen a bit as she drew near. Apparently he assumed she’d slow down before she reached him. But body armor wasn’t just for stopping bullets.

  She hit him like a wrecking ball. They crashed through the locked door, which, unlike the reinforced door that had repelled the battering ram, was just an interior door like the
ones she’d expect to find in the average apartment. She let her shoulder pad sink into her suspect’s solar plexus, rolling right over it and up to her feet. Han would be on the guy; Mariko didn’t need to look back and check. She didn’t recognize any of the weird machines standing in front of her—and there were a lot of them—but she didn’t need to. She just hit the STOP button on the one that was mixing a bunch of white powder.

  She learned afterward that the machine was for making those biodegradable packing peanuts, and that doing so involved turning cornstarch into tiny little pellets, which were then subjected to extremely high heat to expand them to their peanutty volume. She also learned that mixing highly combustible amphetamines into the cornstarch wasn’t exactly a foolproof method to make a whole lot of speed disappear, but if you let the laced cornstarch hit the pellet processor, it was a great way to flood the building with noxious gases and make the whole neighborhood smell like ammonia for a week. In the moment, though, Mariko stood with her hands on her hips, panting a bit and smiling down at the guy she’d just blasted through the door.

  Frowning at the splintered doorframe, Han said, “You know, Mariko, I thought we worked pretty well as a team, but I have to tell you I didn’t see that one coming.”

  Mariko grinned at him, enjoying her adrenaline high. “Opened the door, didn’t it?”

  “Yeah. But you know, these do that too.” He jingled the perp’s keys at her. “And these don’t give the SWAT guys heart attacks and make them hope they can clear the big roomful of weird-ass machines before someone puts a bullet in the chick they’re supposed to protect.”

  SWAT had indeed cleared the rest of the factory floor, and judging by the chatter coming over the wire, the operation was over. It seemed impossible. “Han, how long did this thing take?”

  “What, the op?”

  “Yeah.”

  He shrugged. “Starting from when we first hit the back door? I don’t know. A minute, maybe? No, less than that, I think.”

  “Me too. Call it forty-five seconds.”

  “Okay. So what?”

  “So,” Mariko said, “was that the best forty-five seconds or what? Damn, I love this job.”

  2

  Mariko sat on the edge of the desk in the shipping company’s sales office and waited for her verbal beating.

  It was inevitable. She’d violated standard operating procedure, and cops who violated SOP suffered a thorough pummeling by a commanding officer. Han knew it too, and he sat beside her on the broad desktop, arms folded across the peeling TMPD patch on his chest, equally resigned to the same fate. “Hey, check that out,” he said, as if making small talk could distract them from their impending fate. “You think we can get these guys on weapons possession?”

  Mariko had been looking at the same thing: a weather-beaten katana, obviously ancient, sitting on an elegant wooden holder on the shelf that ran the perimeter of the room, forty centimeters or so below the tiles of the drop ceiling. It was a shelf designed for collections, but this was a collection that defied categorization. Another katana, this one of spring steel, coupled with a little placard verifying its authenticity as an actual prop used in filming Kurosawa’s Yojimbo. An iron demon mask pitted with rust and age. A series of ceramic samurai figurines that looked more like action figures than art. A bronze helmet, its studded laths worn green with age, clearly a fragile piece that ought to have been behind glass in a museum. A wooden Fudo statue of the same vintage, lacquered in red, his trademark sword and lariat wrought in solid gold. An autographed head shot of Toshiro Mifune. Hanzo the Razor on LaserDisc, also autographed. One after the next, a parade of miscellany circumnavigating an otherwise coherent and cohesive room.

  Mariko gazed absently at the old iron mask while rehearsing what she’d say in her own defense. The facts were plain: if she hadn’t breached the target when she did, she and her element might never have seen their perp closing that door behind him. They would simply have put a rifle on the locked door, cleared the rest of the building, and only then punched the factory floor, after they’d collected a full complement. Impeccable tactics, but it might have made the difference between having a bunch of hard evidence mixed into a hopper full of cornstarch and having hazmat teams evacuating the neighborhood while every hospital in town was choked with a glut of narcs and SWAT cops getting treated for chemical burns of the eyes, sinuses, and lungs.

  All perfectly sound observations. All of them irrelevant if either she or Han had sustained an injury. SOP was SOP, and breaking it brought down the Hammer of God, regardless of whether anyone actually got hurt.

  Han must have been entertaining similar thoughts. His right foot was doing a sewing machine impression, and he rapped his thumbs nervously on the top of his helmet, which he held in his lap. “Hey,” she said, “does that demon mask look familiar to you?”

  “Huh?” She’d snapped him out of some distant reverie. “Uh, no, not really. You?”

  “Yeah, but I can’t place it.” Mariko frowned. The more she looked at it, the more she was certain she ought to recognize the mask. It was like seeing the face of an old high school classmate, someone she ought to know but whose name maddeningly escaped her. Suddenly she found Han’s little drumbeat against his helmet distracting. She was about to ask him to stop when Sakakibara stormed into the office.

  Instantly both of them stood to attention. “There they are,” Sakakibara said, “Butch and Sundance.”

  Sakakibara never called anyone by name. He rarely took the trouble even to tell people which nicknames applied to them; he just made them up on the fly and expected everyone else to sort it out. Sometimes he’d give someone three or four names a day; other times the first nickname would stick like a steel-tipped dart and hang on for years.

  He marched around them to drop heavily into the salesman’s chair behind the big desk. “The SWAT commander says I’m to suspend you for a month without pay and bust both of you back to general patrol. Says it’s no good for you to run around trying to get yourselves killed while his boys are trying to do their job. He’s not wrong about that.”

  “Sir,” Mariko said, “if we had breached even ten seconds later than we did—”

  Sakakibara fixed her with a glare. “Who the hell gave you permission to speak?”

  “Sorry, sir.”

  “Which one of you pulled the stunt with the flash-bang?”

  “I did, sir.” Mariko said it quickly, knowing that Han might well take the hit for her if she left him the opportunity. He’d been with Narcotics for eight years already, serving under Sakakibara for five of those. The LT was likely to go easier on a seasoned veteran than the newest addition to his team.

  “The SWAT guys are having a fit over that, believe you me,” Sakakibara said. “Any guesses as to why?”

  Mariko had a few. Broken glass was a hazard, period; there was a reason the SWAT operators all wore Kevlar gloves and Nomex hoods. And Mariko got lucky that she’d ported a carpeted room with her flash-bang. Crossing a glass-strewn linoleum floor was like tap-dancing on marbles.

  But Sakakibara didn’t give her a chance to reply. “If you ask me, I figure it’s because none of them thought of it first. Wish I was there to see it; it must have been pretty damn cool.”

  “It was,” Han said. Mariko just looked at the floor, struggling to restrain a grin.

  “All right, chalk one up for Batgirl. So blah, blah, blah, don’t do that again, consider yourselves chastised. Now sit your munchkin asses down.”

  Mariko and Han did as they were told, taking the two swivel chairs facing the desk. The chairs and the desk were a matching set, and they would have been at the height of fashion if this were 1981. Mariko allowed these details to pass by more or less unnoticed, as she was still trying to figure out the nickname. “Munchkin” was simple—Han was a head shorter than their LT and Mariko was shorter still—but “Batgirl” took a little longer. The stunt with the window. With the flash-bang. That she got from her belt. Utility belt. Batgirl.
r />   Mariko hoped that wouldn’t be the nickname that stuck.

  “Either of you know the name Urano Soseki?” Mariko and Han both shook their heads. “Well, you’re about to,” Sakakibara said. “He’s your buyer. Runs this place for the Kamaguchi-gumi. You’ll find him out back in the ambo. Did I hear it right? Did you Justice League him through a door?”

  “Yes, sir.” Mariko didn’t know whether to feel proud or ashamed.

  Sakakibara gave her an approving nod. “Not bad for a munchkin. Anyway, like I was saying, Neck Brace-san is your principal buyer. We’ve got five of his crew too, but they’re little fish. You’ll want to talk to them eventually, but get to Neck Brace before they wheel him out of here.”

  “Sir,” Mariko said, “I could swear I heard an ambulance leaving five or ten minutes ago. Are you sure he’s still here?”

  Sakakibara looked at her with unfeigned surprise, and more than a little disdain. “Are you questioning my judgment?”

  “Sorry, sir.”

  “You’ve got pretty big balls for a chick.”

  At first Mariko read his tone as angry, but she changed her mind when he gave her a wry, snorting chuckle. “Not that I have to explain myself to you, but yes, we had two ambos on scene. The one you heard was running your seller to the OR. Neck Brace and his boys roughed the guy up pretty good.”

  Mariko frowned. “Do we know why?”

  “That’s your job to figure out.”

  “Sir,” Han said, “does this mean you’re giving us this case?”

  “Put that together all by yourself, did you? I figure Frodo here would be hungry for it, seeing as it’s Kamaguchis buying serious weight and it’s Kamaguchis that put the hit out on her. What do you say, Frodo? You want these guys or not?”

  Mariko could only assume she was Frodo, though for the moment she was less concerned about the nickname and more concerned about Sakakibara’s loaded question. She had a history with the Kamaguchi-gumi, all right. Not of her own design; they just took it personally when a cop got famous by taking down one of their own. Fuchida Shuzo—the man who chopped off Mariko’s trigger finger, the one whose crazed face flashed before her eyes every time she went down to the pistol range to retrain her left hand—was once a street enforcer under Kamaguchi Ryusuke.