Tokyo Noir: The Complete First Season

by J. Scott Matthews

  Then a glass bottle shot down out of a nearby tree, as if thrown straight down with great force. At that, the four boys stopped, turned, and looked at the tree. Satoshi looked too, as he watched himself jump down out of it.

  He regarded the vision of his former self there as he stood looking at the other boys. Satoshi saw a tall, gaunt scarecrow of a boy. Even as he watched the others, he still had a faraway look in his eyes. His face was bruised, with one eye blackened. There was a trail of blood down his white shirt.

  Young Satoshi took a last drag on the joint he had been smoking up in the tree and flicked it away. He never took his eyes off the others.

  “Fuck off,” was all he said.

  “Fuck you, Satoshi,” one of the boys on top said. “What’s it to you?”

  Satoshi took a step closer. “Up.”

  The boys exchanged a glance but stood up. The one they had been beating on scooted away but didn’t get up.

  “Good. Now fuck off.”

  “Why don’t you fucking—”

  That was as far as the ringleader got before Satoshi drove a fist into his gut that knocked the wind out of him and brought him to his knees. Then he brought an elbow down on his forehead that split the skin open above one eye. The other two stared in mute horror at the blood gushing from their howling leader. One backed away, the other charged Satoshi. Satoshi laid him out with a perfectly timed hook that sent the boy sprawling. He turned to the third.

  “Pick them up. And fuck. Off.”

  They did as they were told, turning back occasionally as they hobbled towards the park’s exit. Satoshi glanced back down at the boy on the ground and walked over to him. The boy held a hand out.

  “Thanks for that. They—”

  Satoshi roughly dragged the small boy to his feet. Then he pushed him hard in the chest, nearly sending him sprawling again.

  “Hit me.”

  “What? I—”

  Satoshi pushed him again.

  “Hit me!”

  The boy’s face crumpled, and he looked like he was going to cry. He sniffled a few times as he tried backing away. Satoshi stayed on him. Finally, backed up against a tree, the boy threw a sloppy roundhouse in the direction of Satoshi’s head. Satoshi caught the boy’s balled fist in his hand and held it.

  “With your leg.”

  “What?”

  “Punch with your leg. That’s how you get power. Like this.”

  Satoshi went up on the ball of his right foot, which he tilted out at a ninety-degree angle. He threw a punch slowly, pointing at his knee, which he dropped forward as he followed through with the punch. He did it again, this time showing him how to rotate the shoulder. Then again, faster. Then again at full speed. He held up the palm of his hand.

  “You do it. Like I showed you. None of this haymaker shit.”

  The boy tried it. His first few missed or glanced off Satoshi’s hand. Satoshi corrected his form. The next few glanced off his hand too, until he landed one with power.

  “Good. Keep your guard up with your other hand like this. A hook is the same principle. Drop the knee and pivot on your foot, but with more of an upper-body twist …”

  Satoshi stood there watching his younger self as he drilled the other boy around the playground until finally they were both exhausted and sat swinging slowly on the swings.

  “What were they after you for?” Satoshi asked the boy.

  “I don’t know. They’re always picking on me.”

  “You didn’t do anything to them? It’s not the first time I’ve seen you take a beating.”

  “I didn’t do anything to them. I don’t do anything to my dad, either, but he still beats me.” The boy sniffled. “What about you? What happened to you?” he said, motioning towards Satoshi’s bloody shirt and bruised face.

  “One of my customers turned violent. Tried to take my stash.”

  “Did he?”

  “Almost. Junkies’ll turn on you sometimes, if you’re not careful.”

  “You deal?”

  “Yeah. Have to. I’m Satoshi, by the way.”

  “My name’s Masa.”

  Satoshi watched the two of them as they sat swinging idly on the swing set. He remembered the feeling of pity mixed with sadness he felt for the boy back then. It was what had led him to say yes when Masa asked to meet up again later, which soon turned into a friendship between the two.

  Now, Satoshi shook his head to clear it and moved on. He really needed to cut back on the Dextro-MXE. It was making him see things that weren’t there anymore.

  Chapter Fourteen

  By the time Mei made it up to her fifth-floor apartment, her respirator mask was fogged up. Her arms were aching from the heavy case files she had dragged home through the crush of the subway. She awkwardly fumbled with her keys while holding the papers up to let herself into her tiny apartment.

  About to lose her case files, she hurried over the faux-hardwood floors to dump them onto her kitchen table. She reached for a bottle of gin that was on the shelf. But even though it was Friday night and her body demanded a drink, she couldn’t let herself have one just yet. She took out the coffee instead.

  She had already canceled her plans to meet up with Akiko and her other friends. They didn’t even sound surprised anymore when she canceled on them. While her coffee brewed, she quickly microwaved a packaged dinner from the refrigerator and ate. She hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and from what she had gleaned so far, she knew she didn’t want to be eating as she read the case file. Her meal finished, she poured herself a cup of coffee and sat down at the table.

  A perfectly shit ending to an absolutely horrible week, she thought as she opened the folder.

  Victim number one: Hiroshi Sato; twenty-nine years old. Little information had been dug up on him, but if he had been working a legitimate job, he’d hid it well. Presumed to be a low-level street dealer whose last known residence was a tiny apartment in Kawasaki City.

  Cause of death was strangulation, with bruising indicative of a wire garrote and ligature wounds around the wrists indicating that he had been restrained prior to strangulation. His eyes, lungs, liver, and gallbladder had been removed. This mutilation had been performed after death, judging from the relative lack of blood loss. The body had been found in a construction site for a new aboveground rail line in a corner of Yoyogi Park on April eighth, during a photo-op staged by the governor’s office.

  This had clearly been carefully planned and executed for maximum exposure, and it had worked like a charm. Not only had the governor essentially declared war on the killer, but the story had been front-page news for four days straight. Everyone knew about it, and everyone was afraid.

  Victim number two: Alyona Petrov; twenty-four years old. Arrived in Tokyo from Russia on a three-month tourist visa, which she had overstayed by roughly one month. No luck so far in finding out where she had been staying. Efforts were still being made to contact her next of kin.

  Like the first victim, death was by strangulation, though in her case her windpipe had been crushed. She had had sexual intercourse several hours before her death, but no signs of assault. Similar ligature wounds indicated that she had been bound. Her gallbladder, kidneys, lungs, liver, and heart had been removed. What was left of her had been unceremoniously dumped in a crumpled heap in the backstreets several blocks from Shibuya Station.

  Victim number three: Detective Takeshi Suga; forty-four years old. Former lead investigator in the serial killer case, and (according to colleagues) a consummate and devoted media whore. This one was most likely provocation, showing the police just what the killer was capable of. Or it might have been done in retaliation for Suga’s frequent grandstanding about the case to the media and his assurances that justice would be swift. Either way, the discovery of his body had unleashed a storm of media coverage and crippling public fear.

  His body had the same ligature wounds, indicating that he had been bound before being killed. He also had the same internal organs removed a
s the second victim, though in this case, the lack of bruising around the neck and extensive blood loss indicated that his heart had still been beating when he had been sliced open. The only drug found in his system was ibuprofen, indicating that his was not a painless death under anesthesia. No, this was meant to send a message.

  Victim number four: Tetsuo Kobayashi; thirty-nine years old. Prominent labor union leader in the construction industry, suspected of having ties to organized crime (this caught Mei’s attention).

  Found in an abandoned factory on Tsukishima Island. He had been strangled like the others, and the body had been eviscerated. But according to the ME’s initial estimate, the internal organs had been left intact. Strong possibility that another victim or two had been killed and removed from the scene, or that a fight had occurred and the killer had been badly wounded.

  Next she read through the coverage of the case thus far—not because she thought it would contain any additional details, but to familiarize herself with what the press was saying. If she would have to run press conferences on this case (an idea that made her skin crawl), she wanted to know the narratives and angles the press was pushing.

  Her job as a police officer had made her wary of the media, but even she was surprised by how they were reporting the case. Once a pattern had been established and some of the grislier details had been released, the reporting had taken on a distinctly tabloid feel. Headlines blared about death cults targeting victims for dark rituals, while others screamed about a lone psycho mutilating corpses for their own twisted reasons. Mei quickly grew tired of the coverage and dumped the papers in the recycle bin.

  When she finally finished for the night, Mei felt somewhat queasy. For all her studying, she had learned more about what had happened to the bodies of these people than she had learned about who they were before. Not that it mattered, she supposed, but on some level she didn’t like the idea of breaking them down merely to hunks of meat with evidence in, on, and around them.

  But then, that’s the job, she thought as she reached for that bottle of gin.

  Chapter Fifteen

  After his social visit on his mother, Satoshi made some calls and then hopped in a cab down to the dockside area of Minato Ward. He got out several blocks from his destination and walked the rest of the way, just in case anyone was keeping track. There he met a man who was waiting in the office behind a warehouse. The man flicked a set of keys his way.

  “White van, second on the left. Have it back by first shift Monday morning,” he said, getting to his feet.

  “It’s already loaded?”

  “Yup, three hundred pounds of the stuff.”

  Satoshi nodded and walked on by. He heaved himself up into the driver’s seat and checked that his cargo was all there. Then he took out his phone and dialed the Toymaker.

  “Yeah, it’s Satoshi. Where are you tonight? … What office number? … Okay, on my way.”

  He put the van in gear and drove off. Before long, he arrived at a nondescript office building and pulled off down a back alley behind his destination. He saw the Toymaker’s assistant emerge from the shadows, barring his path.

  The Toymaker was a former 3-D printing specialist and fabricator now under permanent contract with Vasili to produce his crews’ weaponry. Not many people knew his actual name, as he usually insisted on being called Professor. He would commandeer an office of Vasili’s legit businesses and use it as his laboratory for the night. This method had initially been suggested by the Toymaker himself, owing to his crippling paranoia about pretty much everything.

  This itinerant fly-by-night operation was largely believed to be the cause of an explosion that had taken out the copier room and most of the break room at one of Vasili’s lending operations. For his part, the Toymaker vehemently denied all involvement, despite the story his singed eyebrows told.

  He worked with a crew of one: a big black guy named Jeremy. How those two had gotten hooked up was a mystery to Satoshi, but he never saw one without the other close by. And judging by the Toymaker’s interesting use of language of late, it seemed like the two of them had struck up a friendship. Because while the Toymaker still talked like a college professor, he sprinkled it with liberal doses of street slang.

  As Satoshi maneuvered the van down the tight alley, Jeremy guided him in, holding up a hand to stop when he was in far enough.

  “‘Sup, dawg,” Jeremy said when Satoshi got down from the van.

  “How’s it going? I’m Satoshi. I’m normally with Tengu’s crew.”

  “I remember you. Heard you were coming.” He held a closed fist out for a bump, which Satoshi returned.

  “Alright. Think you can give me a hand carrying this shit up to your boss?” Satoshi asked, motioning towards the heavy boxes in the back of the truck.

  “No, but I can give you a hand by watching it down here.”

  “Come on, man, just—”

  “Orders, man. I don’t leave the entrance till he calls me up.”

  “Fair enough.”

  Satoshi loaded a dolly he found in the back of the truck and wheeled the boxes to the elevator, huffing from the exertion.

  The office was mostly dark; the only light came from an incandescent blue glow emanating from one corner, which illuminated a short academic type. The hair remaining on his balding scalp was close-cropped, while the wrinkled skin of his face spoke to his advanced age. Every time Satoshi had seen the man, he was always wearing a blue jumpsuit, like what a janitor would wear. He looked up from the computer he was working on and watched Satoshi approach.

  “‘Sup, dawg,” he said when Satoshi dumped the boxes by him, holding his fist out. “Pound it out.”

  Satoshi smiled and obliged. “How you doing?”

  “Alright, alright,” the man said. “Perfect timing. I’m just finishing the first run. Just about cleaned out my powder.”

  “Well, got three hundred pounds here for you,” Satoshi said, patting the top box.

  “Tight. Just firing up the printer for a last pass.”

  Satoshi walked over to the 3-D printer that had been set up on one of the tables and peered inside. It was roughly the size and shape of an oven. Up top it had a glass window he could look into, below which was a cabinet that was roughly two feet tall. It was hooked up to the laptop that the Toymaker was currently hunched over.

  Inside, Satoshi could see several pieces of metal that were half-submerged in a fine-grain powder. He heard a whirring sound and saw the tray containing the metal and the powder sink. Then an arm that had been recessed on one side of the process chamber came out, smoothing powder over top of the metal pieces until they were completely covered.

  “Check this out,” the Toymaker said.

  A shower of sparks erupted from the powder atop where one of the metal pieces was located. There was no visible laser from the top, just a flowering of sparks that traced an outline above the piece until the steel powder had been fused into solid metal with the lower layers. This process was repeated a number of times before the bed lowered itself and the arm pushed a fresh layer of powder over top.

  “You make the bullets too, right?”

  “Yup, full-service weapons shop. Oh, speaking of weapons. Vasili said you’ve got a blank check to cash, so take whatever you like. You best step correct if you’re going after Masa.”

  “Why’s that?” Satoshi asked.

  “He picked up some pretty heavy gear for some hush-hush job Vasili put him on. I mean, we’re talking heavy artillery. I wasn’t entirely comfortable giving him that much iron, but the order came from the big man himself, so I wasn’t about to give no static. Not sure what he did with it to earn a bounty.”

  “Vasili didn’t mention anything about that to me.”

  “It’s about time if you ask me,” the Toymaker said, his eyes fixed on the printer. “Masa’s been let off the leash for too long. You’d be doing everyone a favor by putting that mad dog down. Too much beefing, too many bodies on that boy.”

&
nbsp; “Fuck’s sake, man, you talk about him like he was Ichiro the Strangler or something.”

  “Well, Ichiro might have been a cold-blooded murderer, but at least he got shit done. That whole Ginza land development deal was all him.”

  “Look, I don’t want to talk—”

  “Print’s done.”

  The Toymaker began pulling the printed pieces from the thin layer of metal powder still on the bed with tweezers and placing them on a nearby rack. They looked like firing chambers to Satoshi, but he was no expert on making guns. Just using them.

  “Yo, do me a solid and help me reload this bitch.”

  As the Toymaker said this, he called up another design on his print software and calibrated the machine. Satoshi dutifully heaved up the first box and walked it over to the printer.

  “Hatch on the top. Just pour it in, the machine will take care of the rest.”

  Satoshi did as he was told.

  “I guess it’s to be expected, though. You’re gonna have people like that in every crowd, more so in a place like this. That perpetual fog, makes people crazy. Then the Rot sets in.”

  Satoshi really didn’t want to be talking about this. He sighed.

  “The Rot? Come on, isn’t that shit just urban legend? You really believe in that?”

  “I believe in mental illness, shit yeah, I do. It can be exacerbated by prolonged deprivation of sunlight, and the constant fear of radiation, and smog, a lack of Vitamin D, and who knows what else in the air out there. Makes sane people mad and mad people dangerous. Call it what you want, but I absolutely believe it’s real.”

  The Rot was one of the more prominent of the urban myths and legends that had taken root in the people’s minds soon after the fog had covered the city and stayed. Depending on who you asked, the Rot was either the physical toll enacted on the crumbling infrastructure as a result of the increased moisture from the water in the abandoned underground lines and water channels crisscrossing the city, or the toll the permanent fog took on people’s health and well-being. Cancer. Asthma. Lethargy. Cognitive deterioration.