Year of the Demon

by Steve Bein

  “You shot at me,” was all he could say.

  “I want you to sit down, okay?” She did what she could to herd him away from the body, but though he consented to sit against one of the tile-faced pillars, she couldn’t get him to pull his gaze away from Akahata’s face, much less look her in the eye.

  “I want you to know I’ll be speaking to your commanding officer,” said a voice from behind her.

  It took her by surprise; she’d honestly forgotten anyone else existed apart from her, the kid, and Akahata. She turned to see a tall, blond gaijin with a little mustache and wispy beard. Only upon seeing him did it occur to her that he’d spoken in English. Now she heard the Japanese voices too: hurried whispers from the opposite platform, distant panicked chattering echoing all the way down from street level, just as her pistol’s report must have echoed all the way up.

  Mariko stood from her crouch beside the high school boy and assessed the gaijin. He seemed the graduate student type to her: he had a computer bag slung over his shoulder, and despite his Midwestern accent his shoes were European, vaguely hippieish. His face was grave, the sort of expression she’d seen before in people who had narrowly escaped what should have been a fatal car crash, or a house fire. She had a good guess of what he intended to tell her CO, and she wasn’t in the mood at the moment. “There’s no need to thank me, sir—”

  She could tell she’d taken him aback, as happened all too often when she responded to gaijin in fluid, unaccented English. She assumed this was another case like that, but then she saw his expression shift from solemnity to outrage. “Thank you? Are you joking? You just shot an unarmed man!”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You just shot a civilian in cold blood. I’m going to stand right here until your commanding officer arrives, and I’m going to tell him exactly what I saw. You endangered that boy’s life to shoot an unarmed janitor. In my country we call that reckless endangerment and excessive force.”

  We’re not in your country, Mariko wanted to say. She could also have gone with Are you fucking kidding me? I just saved your life. She was still wired from her standoff with Akahata and now this skinny, self-righteous prick had her adrenaline spiking yet again. Politeness was beyond her, but she managed to resist face-planting him on the floor to slap handcuffs on him. She stood chest to chest with him and said, “Sir, I don’t think you have the slightest goddamn clue what just went down here.”

  “I know exactly what ‘went down’ here, Officer. I study law at the University of—”

  “Mariko!”

  It was Han’s voice, and hearing it made Mariko’s mind do back flips. She was relieved and elated and discombobulated at once. How had he gotten here? Was all of this some sort of post-traumatic hallucination? But no, there he was, racing down the stairs. “You all right?” he said, his words tumbling out in one unbroken torrent. “Did you find him? Is he—?”

  The gaijin law student was still talking, but Mariko ignored him. “I’m fine,” she said, reverting to Japanese. “Akahata’s down. We’ve got a kid who’s pretty roughed up, but he’ll pull through sooner or later. Akahata used him as a shield.”

  Han looked past her shoulder, and looking at no more than his face Mariko could tell the instant he saw Akahata’s body. “You—?”

  “Yeah.”

  His eyes flicked back to hers. “You okay?” He wasn’t asking whether she was hurt.

  Mariko hadn’t had time to conduct her moral assessment yet. The high school boy wasn’t far wrong: Mariko hadn’t shot at him, but she’d sure as hell shot near him. And it seemed the kid and the prattling gaijin were thinking along the same lines: Mariko shouldn’t have pulled the trigger.

  The decision seemed right at the time. Or rather, trying to decide had fractured her composure, so she derailed the decision process and let her instincts do the driving. But her gut instinct seemed right at the time, and it seemed right with the benefit of hindsight too. So why were those two so pissed off?

  At last the truth finally struck her: neither of them knew about the bomb.

  They’d seen her shoot an assailant she could have talked down. She could have stalled, placated, waited for backup, pepper-sprayed. She could have done anything, but as they saw it, her response to an unarmed man with a hostage in a simple choke hold was to shoot to kill.

  Mariko turned from Han to the gaijin, ready to explain the misunderstanding. Then she caught herself short. Should she tell him the truth? Let him know how close he’d come to dying? Show him Akahata’s detonator? The guy was being a royal prick; did he even deserve an explanation?

  More to the point, what were the ramifications of letting it slip that someone had managed to get thirty or forty kilos of high explosives into the Tokyo subway system? Mariko was perfectly happy for that decision to stay well above her pay grade.

  “Mariko, who is this asshole?” Han pointed at the gaijin.

  “He was just leaving,” Mariko said. Switching back to English, she said, “Sir, I’ll be more than happy to discuss the ins and outs of the Japanese legal system some other time, but for now I’m going to have to ask you to get the hell away from my crime scene.”

  “Do you think I’m going to stand for this?” the guy said. “I’m going to—”

  “Fuck off,” said Han.

  The law student reacted as if Han had slapped him in the face. Perhaps he hadn’t expected to hear a second Japanese cop speaking English. More likely, it was the first time he’d ever heard a Japanese person drop the F-bomb. Either way, it made him go stand somewhere else to wait for a lieutenant to complain to.

  “Why, Detective Watanabe!” Mariko said, reverting to Japanese again. “I had no idea you spoke such fluent English.”

  “And I had no idea anyone in this department remembered it doesn’t actually say ‘Han’ on my business card. No wonder you made sergeant. You’ve got a mind made for paperwork.”

  “Now that’s low.”

  “So you’re okay, then?”

  Mariko felt her pulse quicken. Even while he was joking, his attention had never wavered from how she was coping with shooting Akahata. Now that things had calmed down a little, Mariko found herself feeling more conflicted than she’d realized at first. She knew she’d fired in self-defense, and in defense of the lives of everyone else on that platform. But there he was, staring blankly at the ceiling, a puppet snipped from its strings. And there was Mariko, with a second death on her hands. After Fuchida, that made two this year. More than the rest of Narcotics combined. And yet she didn’t know what else she could have done. She’d given Akahata the option of submitting peacefully and he hadn’t taken her up on the invitation. A bullet in the brainpan didn’t seem out of line.

  At least not to Mariko. A few dozen onlookers still lingered on the opposite platform, and by now one of them had probably recognized her. Her fame after the Fuchida affair might have been short-lived, but her missing finger was memorable and it only took one eyewitness to spot it. Reflexively she stuck her right hand in her pocket, knowing it was far too late to start any attempt at damage control. Even as she tabled her own moral assessment for later, even as she told her partner she was okay, she wondered what the consequences would be for killing a man that every last bystander would describe as being unarmed.

  Whatever the consequences might be, there wasn’t a thing she could do about them at this point. Even if there were, she could hear a platoon of cops coming down the stairs, and when they reached her they would need orders. She had a shell-shocked teenager to deal with, a body to zip up and roll away, a bomb to quarantine, a major subway station to restore to working order, and if she really got cracking she might get it done by midnight. “Seriously,” she told Han, “I think I’m all right. Ask me again in a couple of days, maybe. For now, let’s get this crime scene locked down.”

  62

  “Tell me again why you don’t want me to call the papers,” Mariko’s mother said.

  She sat with her two daughters around h
er living room coffee table, all of them sitting on the floor and playing rummy. Mariko had been appraising both of them without saying a word. Her mom was wearing a polo shirt with a logo embroidered on it that Mariko didn’t recognize, probably from the manufacturer of something related to her beloved sport of Ping-Pong. She seemed radiant, not careworn, as she’d so often been of late. Of course she’d panicked after she found out her eldest daughter had been in the same room as thirty-odd kilos of high explosives, but that was after the fact, after she knew Mariko was safely at home. More important, Mariko guessed, was that her second daughter was also safely at home.

  Saori was looking good. She’d regained some of the weight she’d lost. Her hair didn’t seem so brittle and her skin had regained its luster. The scabs she’d accumulated from when she was using, the bruises, the pallor, had vanished. Her teeth would never recover from the years of meth abuse, but otherwise she was back to being her contented, girlish self.

  “Yeah,” Saori said, “you’re a hero, Miko. Didn’t you save, like, fifty people?”

  “Fifty-two,” Mariko said. And killed one, she could have added. Akahata’s death had a completely different character than Fuchida’s. With Fuchida it was a simple quid pro quo: he gutted her, Mariko stabbed him back. But Akahata hadn’t actually done anything violent; he’d only threatened to. Mariko shot him preemptively. With a couple of days’ hindsight she’d expected to feel some guilt over it, but still none had come. She didn’t feel good about it, either. If anything, she was just apprehensive about what would come next.

  A psychologist might have been able to explain the scientific reasons why she preferred to look ahead rather than back. Mariko knew she might seek out a psychologist someday. Every sensible cop in Narcotics had asked her how she was doing, and all the thoughtless ones had asked her what it felt like to shoot somebody. Sooner or later that would wear on her. And she hadn’t been in the field since the incident. Sakakibara benched Han and ordered Mariko to take two days of vacation time, which meant Mariko hadn’t so much as looked at her pistol since she’d checked out of post that night. Maybe she’d get the jitters when she came back to work, but for the moment she was thankful to be with her family, and that was all she needed.

  Not for Saori, though. “Fifty-two,” she said, gripping Mariko’s wrist insistently. “Shouldn’t you get a headline for that? Shouldn’t I get a headline for that? My big sister in the news again—and not for what they’re saying now. Come on, Miko, you deserve better than this.”

  “I can’t,” Mariko said. “For one thing, the department’s already given its statement. For another, you might have noticed they didn’t mention the bomb in that statement. You have to understand how important it is to keep that secret. I told you two because I think you have a right to know, but if the bomb scare gets out, it gives Joko Daishi exactly what he wants: mass panic.”

  It didn’t feel good to say that out loud. It might be that fifty-two onlookers saw a cop shoot an unarmed janitor, but Mariko knew the truth. She knew how close they’d come. A dozen different theories were circulating on talk radio, doing the same kind of postgame could’ve-would’ve-should’ve analysis that followed every baseball game, and Mariko had the power to disperse all of their blissful ignorance with a simple phone call. So did her bosses. But TMPD couldn’t exonerate her without explaining about the bomb, and that they could not do. The mere mention of it would cause a rash of panic, plus God knew what else on talk radio.

  No, better for Tokyo’s hero lady cop to take the momentary hit to her reputation. Everyone in Narcotics knew the score, the top brass did too, and if rumors of the truth managed to slip out here or there, at least there was no one to recognize them officially. Even Joko Daishi couldn’t do it. For one thing, he was more Tyler Durden than Osama bin Laden: not the type to claim credit for his political cause, most certainly not when his agent had failed. For another, inmates didn’t have the right to call press conferences. So the department quashed his cause and considered Mariko collateral damage.

  “You two have to understand,” Mariko said. “Seriously, you can’t talk about this. To anyone. Okay?”

  “But what if—?” Saori began.

  “If anyone asks you about it, tell them your sister thought the assailant was a direct threat to his hostage’s life. You don’t have to have a knife or a baseball bat to kill somebody. Crushing the guy’s windpipe does the job just fine.”

  She flapped her cards on the table. “Oh,” she added, “and I’m out.”

  Again Mariko found herself receiving a punishment she didn’t deserve—a round of boos this time, though she supposed this was a whole lot better than the thrashing she was taking in the press. Those stories would lose their shine before the week was out, passing out of public memory just as quickly, though for the moment they really did sting. And unlike the press corps and the radio harpies, Mariko’s mom followed up with another round of dessert.

  “Okay, girls,” she said after they finished their cherry cobbler, “one more game and then this old woman has to get to bed.”

  “Sorry, I can’t,” Mariko said. “I’ve got someone I still have to meet tonight.”

  “Oooh,” Saori said. “A date! Is he hot?”

  “No. Most definitely not.”

  “Who, then?” Saori said. At the same moment, their mom frowned and said, “It’s someone from work, isn’t it?”

  “Sort of.” The whole truth was complicated. She was looking forward to ending her professional relationship with this man, but she didn’t particularly look forward to being in the same room with him.

  • • •

  She spent most of her train ride thinking about Han, about what to do with him, about where the moral lines lay. One way or another, her partner was going to stand before Internal Affairs. Her gut told her to stick up for him. Ten seconds of reflection on that told her she had a stronger obligation to stick up for the law. If a citizen broke the rules and got away with it, that was just a fact of life, but if a cop broke the rules and got away with it, that chipped away at the rules themselves. Law enforcement without accountability was a police state, not a police department.

  What if Sakakibara decided to back Han’s play? What if he found a way to wriggle around the fact that one of his officers ignored a suspect’s civil liberties? Did it matter that the very next day the same suspect tried to murder Mariko and fifty-two other people? No. In civilian life it would matter, but legally, rights were rights.

  The Americans had a good word for them: inalienable. A right that could be stripped depending on the situation wasn’t a right at all. Sakakibara respected that. He was good police, and he was a real hard-ass when it came to playing it by the book. But he always said it was to protect his unit’s conviction rate. What if, just this one time, he could boost Joko Daishi’s prison time by covering for a detective who strayed outside the lines and then came right back in? If he defended Han, Mariko would be left with the choice of crossing her CO and betraying her partner, or else looking the other way on a moral question that just wasn’t up for negotiation.

  With all of that on her mind, she walked up to the building she didn’t want to walk up to and rang the doorbell she didn’t want to ring.

  When the steel doors slid open, Bullet was waiting for her inside, taking up half the elevator. Ever his chatty self, he said nothing on their ride up to Kamaguchi Hanzo’s apartment.

  “There she is,” the Bulldog said with a sharp-toothed grin, “my hot little gokudo cop.” He got up from his sofa, a huge Western-style block of black leather, tossed his TV remote aside and picked up a sweating bottle of beer. “Get your tight little ass in here and tell me what you got for me.”

  “Everything you want,” Mariko said. She remained just outside the elevator, standing her ground just to show the Bulldog she wouldn’t follow his orders. “We claimed your mask as evidence.”

  “So? Where is it?”

  “A phone call away.” She pulled a smartphone from h
er pocket and held it out as if to offer it to him. “If I deliver your mask, you’ll call off the bounty on my head?”

  “That’s the deal, honey.”

  “And your dad? I’m square with him too?”

  “He gave the contract to me. I’m the only guy you have to worry about.”

  “Then I’ve got you on record admitting to conspiracy to commit homicide.” She came closer, showing him the phone’s little screen.

  Bullet took a menacing step forward. “Taking this phone from me won’t do you any good,” she told him, never taking her eyes off the Bulldog. “I’m not the one recording this. My department is. You getting all this, sir?”

  “Loud and clear,” Sakakibara said. He sounded gruff and authoritative even through the tiny speaker.

  “Have a good night, sir.” She dropped the phone back in her pocket. “So here’s the deal: I’ll give your mask back anyway, since it’s yours, but you’re going to call off the hit on me one way or the other. You do understand how this works, neh? We don’t just come after you, we come after your dad. And yeah, I can’t touch him, and yeah, there’ll be blowback to cops in this city for a while to come, but at the end of the day cops and yakuzas are going to settle back into their old ways, and the only thing different is going to be you, implicating your old man on record. How well do you see that working out for you at the next family function?”

  Kamaguchi rose from the couch, switching his grip on the beer bottle as if to use it as a weapon. He fixed her with a glare that said he might just chuck her phone off the balcony anyway, and her with it. Then his gaze flicked down to her left hand, which without her knowing it was resting on the heel of her SIG Sauer.

  “You’re not afraid to use that, are you?” he said. His tone was almost congratulatory.

  “Nope.”

  “Heh. I heard about that. You and the guy in the subway. He’s the one who stole my mask?”