Year of the Demon

by Steve Bein

  43

  In the aftermath, coming down from her adrenaline high, Mariko took stock of her surroundings. The giant storeroom—and in a mattress shop the store room was truly gigantic—wasn’t as empty as she’d first thought, though obviously there was room enough to ride a motorcycle. Once there must have been racks or bins big enough to contain mattresses, but those had gone. A couple of forklifts still remained, abandoned in a corner. The right-hand wall was dominated by a production line of sorts, a long string of collapsible tables blocking both fire doors on that side. D-team hadn’t even managed to breach the building; their entries were blocked, locked from the inside, useless.

  Near the tables, black steel barrels and plastic drums of a similar size stood like troops in rank and file, festooned with warning labels instead of insignia. At first glance, Mariko had expected to see an assembly line for cyanide-laced MDA. She’d seen enough stash houses to recognize a meth lab for what it was, and this wasn’t that. This room smelled more like motor oil than ammonia. In a quick scan of the folding tables Mariko saw pipe cutters, spools of wire, a cardboard box full of outmoded cell phones, a smaller box full of SIM cards—nothing useful for a meth cook. The only items that made sense to her were the hexamine and sodium cyanide labels on the barrels and drums.

  Even in retrospect it took some concentration to string together the chain of events. B-team had been the first to enter, and Joko Daishi’s cultists had mobbed them. It must have been at about that time that someone hit the button to open the big loading dock doors. That might have been Joko Daishi, who would then have gone for his bike.

  However that went down, another mob of cultists had been heading to cut off Mariko’s element at the very instant she booted the door to the storeroom. Even in the heat of the moment, she’d thought the door had given way more easily than it should have. It seemed to have exploded away from her foot. But what probably happened was that one of the cultists was opening the door just as she kicked it in. It must have struck him full in the face, knocking him unconscious. Mariko shot right past him, but the rest of her team had run smack into his cohort of cultists. Han and the others on A-team were mobbed, but they handled their fight better than B-team, which was why Joko Daishi made his run at the A-side door. Mariko just had the bad luck to be the only one left standing in front of it.

  The final tally was sixteen Divine Wind cultists, plus their leader and prophet, plus one more unexpected treasure: Glorious Victory Unsought. Mariko spotted the empty scabbard first, lying empty on one of the collapsible plastic tables, and imagined the worst: the cult had sold the sword for drug money. When one of her officers announced he’d found a giant sword, relief surged through Mariko’s veins like morphine. Then she asked where it was, and when he pointed her toward what was left of Joko Daishi’s motorcycle, she thought she might throw up on her shoes. The reason her sword wasn’t in its scabbard was that the cultists had mounted a sheath for it on the bike, and now the bike was a debris field twenty meters long, ending in a crumpled heap wadded up against the wall and suppurating oil.

  Emotionally, Glorious Victory Unsought ranked with the few existing pictures of Mariko’s father, who, because he’d always been the family photographer, rarely appeared in their photo albums himself. Sometimes Mariko wondered whether her family would be offended by how much sentimental value she found in Glorious Victory Unsought. She’d only known Yamada-sensei for a matter of weeks, yet somehow he’d become a grandfather to her, a mentor and role model. What did it mean that she held her sensei’s last gift on par with precious family photos? Mariko didn’t even know how she felt about that herself. She only knew that it was true, and that she’d never forgive herself if her Inazuma blade was reduced to a steel ribbon entangled in the remains of the bike.

  But she was lucky, or else Master Inazuma’s masterpiece was bound to a different fate. The bike had fallen on its left side and Glorious Victory’s scratch-built scabbard was mounted on the right. Three different colors of fluid leaked from the wreckage, and the air above it shimmered with heat, but the sword sat on top unharmed.

  The only other material items in the win column were a couple of mostly empty barrels of hexamine and sodium cyanide. No MDA, no speed, no other drugs. In the loss column she had two cops from B-team nursing leg injuries bad enough to leave them in the fetal position gritting their teeth and awaiting an ambulance. She had no ID on Joko Daishi and he wouldn’t offer any other name. There was no sign of his lieutenant, Akahata, though Mariko had placed an APB on his motorcycle. But her most significant loss was her composure.

  She hadn’t backed up her partner in a fistfight, which, technically, was all to the good, since of her element she was the only one able to keep a weapon trained on Joko Daishi. She hadn’t been able to bring herself to shoot, which was also good, since Joko Daishi had—miraculously—survived being snagged by the chin off the back of a speeding motorcycle, and so they now had their prime suspect alive to interrogate. She’d hastily orchestrated a raid that could have gone much worse but didn’t. Her officers were outnumbered because a quarter of their force never actually made it into the building. They were uncoordinated in their movements. It was only because they all performed admirably that no one got shot. In other words, with the lone exception of her perfectly executed irimi-nage, Mariko had fucked up everything she could possibly have fucked up, and yet somehow everything had worked out for the best—or if not for the best, then pretty damn well, all things considered.

  Self-confidence didn’t come easily to Mariko. She knew she was good at her job, but the job was relentless. Tiny errors could have major ramifications, and overshadowing that was the constant threat of being seen as incompetent just because she was a woman. Losing her right forefinger had set her at least a year behind on the pistol range, a fact that wouldn’t have mattered much in any other outfit in the country. Most beat cops went from academy to retirement without ever drawing a weapon, because most police work was reactive. Apart from traffic violations, most cops rarely witnessed a crime; the calls always came after the fact. But Narcotics didn’t just react; it initiated action too, and that meant Mariko was might have to draw down on people now and again. How was she going to do that if she couldn’t trust her aim?

  She should have taken the shot. Joko Daishi had come within a millisecond of killing her. She could have changed her angle; even crouching down and firing upward would have been enough to take C-team out of harm’s way. That should have been her instinctual response, but instead she’d committed an egregious mistake: she thought about it.

  She remembered Yamada-sensei’s term for that. Paralysis through analysis. Han would say the same thing about baseball that Yamada said of swordsmanship: hitting a moving target had to be done automatically or not at all. Deliberate concentration could only screw it up. Marksmanship was no different. Yamada-sensei once told her it was better to drop the weapon than to get tangled up in thinking. At least that way no one would get hurt.

  That meant the next best alternative was to quit Narcotics and start working a beat instead. Go the rest of her career without any real risk of shooting or being shot at. Her mother would have loved it. And Mariko would have given up everything she’d worked so hard for, for so many years.

  She could have missed with her irimi-nage. She could have broken every bone in her arm. She could have killed Joko Daishi, just the same as if she’d shot him, but with a lot more risk to herself and her fellow officers. So much had been at stake, and Mariko’s nerve had failed. Paralysis through analysis. She wasn’t sure she’d ever forgive herself.

  “Hey,” said Han, “you okay?”

  “What?” Mariko paid only enough attention to know he was there. “Yeah,” she said distantly, “I’m fine.”

  Han clapped her on the shoulder. “This was a win, Mariko. Come on, we’ve got a crazy-ass cult leader to interrogate.”

  That snapped her out of her reverie. “He’s conscious?”

  “Conscious? Hell, he�
��s walking around.”

  It was impossible. Joko Daishi must have hit a hundred kilometers an hour by the time she ripped him off the bike. So when she saw him walking, a cop pushing him by his handcuffed wrists, the demon mask pushed up onto the top of his head, all she could say was, “You should be dead.”

  He laughed—a good-natured laugh, amiable, not forced. “You cannot kill me. It is not yet my time.”

  Han aped his laugh right back at him. “If you’d have landed on your head instead of your shoulders, it would have been your time, all right. We’ve got a couple of murders to pin on you—a kid named Shino and the little old lady whose house you killed him in—but when it comes time to charge you, I’ll make sure riding without a helmet makes the list.”

  “I have seen the hour of my death,” said Joko Daishi, “and also the manner. I shall die by the sword.”

  Mariko didn’t care if that was a biblical reference, a deliberate jab at her famed samurai showdown, or just the ramblings of a grade-one concussion. One way or the other, the guy was a nutcase.

  He was smaller than she’d thought. He’d been downright terrifying on that motorcycle, his beard and hair streaming from his devil’s face as if his head were ablaze and trailing black smoke. He did not look at them when he spoke, but rather stared off into the distance, his tone reverent, as if there were a god in the room for him to talk to. Again Mariko reached the same conclusion: nutcase.

  Something about him was familiar, but she couldn’t put her finger on it until they’d walked him all the way to the wall. They put his shoulder blades against the dusty cinder blocks and made him sit, hands cuffed behind his back, and every last movement should have hurt like hell. He was lucky to be alive. He wore white clothes, loose but otherwise nondescript, certainly not padded like motorcycle leathers. Given how he’d landed off the bike, his entire back should have been in spasms.

  Mariko could explain that away easily enough: his cult gave him easy access to kilos upon kilos of speed. He’d feel pain when he came down off his high, but not until. Yet he limped, an odd, rolling gait that couldn’t have come from Mariko’s high-speed takedown. If it wasn’t from pain, it must have been from a pre-existing injury, and Mariko would have sworn she’d seen that limp before.

  Sudden insight flashed. She had seen it before, only a grainy image of it, on a low-fidelity security camera feed. “You’re the one who stole the mask,” she said.

  “He is?” Han blurted.

  “I saw him on the Bulldog’s security camera tape. He walked right past us to steal that mask from Kamaguchi Hanzo. Dressed head to toe in SWAT armor, remember?” She rounded on Joko Daishi. “That was a nice touch.”

  “There is no place the Wind cannot reach,” he said.

  “And I’m guessing you’re the same son of a bitch who broke into my apartment and stole my sword.”

  He responded with an eerie, peeping-through-the-window kind of smile that gave Mariko the creeps. She’d been eyed up and down like a piece of meat before. Guys did that all the time, responding with an “I’d hit that” smile when they liked what they saw. This wasn’t like that. This was the smile of a serial rapist, one who was willing to kidnap and batter and bury alive because he didn’t really understand that other human beings were real. The “I’d hit that” guys viewed women as sex toys; Joko Daishi saw people as children’s toys: fascinating in their own way, but hollow, incapable of pain or fear, worth only as much as he valued them. And he had watched Mariko in her sleep.

  Chills washed over Mariko like an icy wave, raising goose bumps all over her body. A vision flashed in her mind: Joko Daishi looming over her bed, silent, ghostly, masked behind the iron face of a demon. He had the sinister patience of a stalker, an invisible, disquieting, perpetual presence. It was every woman’s deepest dread: the ex-boyfriend who would never relent, never disappear, never let her go.

  “Is that true?” Han demanded, snapping Mariko out of her nightmare. “Did you break into my partner’s apartment?”

  There was that smile again. “There is no place the Wind cannot reach.”

  “The same goes for the Kamaguchi-gumi,” Mariko said, feigning a cocksure confidence she did not feel. “Remember that sword you saw yourself dying on? The Bulldog’s going to be the one who rams it through your chest.”

  “Kamaguchi did not respond quickly enough for our needs. The New Year approaches. The appointed hour is at hand. Securing the mask was necessary to usher in the Year of the Demon.”

  Mariko and Han shared a glance. He could see in her what she saw in him: this man scared the hell out of both of them. But rather than revealing that fact, Han said, “Is this dude turning you on?”

  “Big-time.”

  Turning to their suspect, Han said, “See how that big loading dock door is open and we’re not freezing our balls off? That’s because it’s summer out there. We’ve got a few months until New Year’s, buddy.”

  Mariko remembered the calendars in the basement where they found Shino. She wasn’t able to make much sense of them at the time, but she did remember that they seemed to be based on planetary cycles, not the Chinese or Western calendars. Not that it mattered. For all she cared, he could hang his pretty calendars in his rubber room in the asylum. In any case, she had bigger fish to fry. “I want you to tell me where the MDA is,” she said.

  He blinked. Frowning, confused, he said, “I cannot help you.”

  “MDA,” Han said. “Psychedelic amphetamines. You know how to cook them—or your people do anyway. Maybe your boy Akahata, neh?”

  “Akahata-san is a servant of the Purging Fire,” said Joko Daishi. “He carries out his divine duty.”

  “Right now?” Mariko felt something cramp up in her as she said it. Had she executed her sting more professionally, Akahata wouldn’t have escaped. C-team hadn’t been in position. Mariko wondered if she should have waited for SWAT after all.

  “You cannot stop him,” Joko Daishi said. “He is bound on his holy errand.”

  “And what might that be?” said Mariko.

  “Purging society of its impurities.”

  His serenity gave Mariko chills. “With MDA or with cyanide?” she said. “It’s both, isn’t it? How many people worship the great Joko Daishi? How many did you talk into following your path?”

  “Do you even have the stones to follow it yourself?” said Han. “No. When we came, you tried to run. You’re not the type to go down with the ship, are you? You’re going to let all your people kill themselves and then you’re going to go recruit another batch.”

  Joko Daishi cackled, not like a cartoon evil genius but like a little boy watching the cartoon. “You understand nothing. But soon you will. The Wind is coming. There is no place it cannot reach.”

  Mariko inspected the table next to him. She saw nuts, bolts, rubber bands, all in little piles; sheets of foil, boxes of stainless steel BBs; duct tape, wire strippers, lengths of copper pipe. None of it was standard fare for making speed or Ecstasy. All in all it seemed less like a meth lab and more like the back room of a small appliance repair shop. And above it all, hanging on the wall, was another copy of that weird planetary calendar, just like the one from the house where they found Shino’s body. The calendar was all off—twenty-four months instead of twelve, ellipsoid instead of linear, festooned with astrological markers—but only one day was circled on it, and Mariko had a good guess about what that day might be: New Year’s Day of the Year of the Demon.

  You understand nothing. That’s what Joko Daishi had said. It made Mariko think of the knowing laugh she’d heard from the lawyer, Hamaya Jiro, right before Han stormed out of that hospital room, right before Akahata slipped out of the TMPD’s grasp. She remembered with perfect clarity how that laugh had chilled her. That was the moment she realized the Divine Wind were dangerous. The cyanide cinched it. Coupled with her MDA theory, everything pointed to poisoned pills. A Jim Jones–style mass homicide, masked as a mass suicide. But Joko Daishi seemed sure that she and Han ha
d it all wrong.

  Mariko looked at the table again, then at the madman sitting beside it, then at the barrels of hazardous chemicals arrayed at the end of the line of tables. That motor oil smell permeated her nostrils and seeped into her mouth. She remembered what Joko Daishi said about his lieutenant, Akahata: he is bound on his holy errand. She remembered what Yamada-sensei had written about the mask too, and about the weapon fetish attached to it.

  “Han,” she said, “take a walk with me.” When they were well out of their suspect’s hearing, she said, “What do we know about hexamine?”

  “Big barrels like those ones make a whole lot of MDA.”

  “No, I mean what do we know? What if we don’t assume he’s cooking?”

  Han shook his head. “We know he cooks. How else do you explain Akahata carrying fifty kilos of speed?”

  “They could be unrelated, neh?”

  “What about the Daishi? The drug, not the dude. Word on the street says it’s outselling cigarettes. And we never heard of it until we heard of this idiot.”

  “I know,” said Mariko. “Just bear with me. I’m not saying he’s not cooking; I’m just saying he’s not cooking here. Does this place feel like a meth lab to you?”

  Han looked around. “Honestly? No.”

  “Neh? That’s been bugging me since the minute we kicked down the door.”

  “So what are you getting at?”

  “Han, what if he’s using the hexamine for something else? What else is it good for?”

  He shrugged. “What am I, a pharmacist? I barely passed high school chemistry.”

  “But you’ve got a smartphone, neh?”

  Han nodded and opened his Web browser, and Mariko headed back toward their suspect. “Joko Daishi,” she said. “Great Teacher of the Purging Fire. Teach me. Tell me what needs cleansing.”