Year of the Demon fb-2

by Steve Bein

  Mariko swallowed. “You sound like you could use a way to take out some aggression, sir.”

  “Get to the point, Frodo.”

  “How would you feel about jumping in the ring with a circuit court judge?”

  Sakakibara grumbled. “What do you need?”

  “Search warrants, sir. We’ve got two chemical distributors licensed to sell sodium cyanide. And since you just got me two more detectives—”

  “Fine. What do you need? Inventory?”

  “And shipping manifests. Personnel records. Employee absence reports. Phone and e-mail records if you can get them.”

  Sakakibara’s breath came loud through his nose, roaring low like a jet engine flying past his phone’s receiver. “Anything else? Maybe the phone numbers of the companies’ most eligible bachelors?”

  “Why not? No workaholics, and if he can cook, that would be a plus.”

  “Don’t push me, Frodo.”

  “Sorry, sir.”

  More growling and grumbling from Sakakibara. At last he said, “Start typing up the paperwork. I’ll have a judge in the unit to sign them within the hour. But I swear to you right now, I’ll smother that son of a bitch with a pillow before I put one more chair around my poker table.”

  In the end he only needed half an hour. He stormed out of the elevator with his jaw clenched, the veins bulging in his temples, and a worried-looking judge in tow. Mariko wondered what Sakakibara had told him to put that look on his face. The judge scribbled his signature on everything Mariko put in front of him, taking only a few seconds each to skim the pages. Yet again her thoughts returned to Han, and what a corrupt commanding officer might have been able to get a hurried judge to sign off on. Backdated paperwork okaying Shino to tail the Divine Wind? It wasn’t hard to imagine.

  But once again, ruminating about morality and civil rights had to give way to practicality. Mariko had two new detectives and two chemical supply companies to investigate. She reassigned four others to join them, making a total of three detectives per company, and detailed two patrolmen to raid the nearest coffee shop and bring up as much caffeine as the store would sell them.

  Part of her hoped her detail wouldn’t find anything until tomorrow. She hadn’t forgotten how hard it had been to drag herself into post this morning, how Sakakibara said she looked like hell. A long, stressful day full of moral conundrums couldn’t possibly have improved her condition. What she really needed was a good meal, a hot shower, and ten or twelve hours of sleep. She didn’t exactly want her team to fail, but she would have been thrilled if they didn’t succeed until noon tomorrow.

  Which, given her luck, meant they got a hit on one of her search warrants before she could finish digesting her lunch. She’d tasked one of her detectives with checking calls from Anatole Organics against activity in area cellular towers. He found a number of one-to-one matches on the time stamps, which was inevitable—there would be pizza deliveries, salesmen calling in from the road, corporate reps who got lost on the way to an on-site meeting—but a string of them corresponded with calls from the cell phone of an Akahata Daisuke. Always wary of coincidence, Mariko followed up on it, and sure enough, it was the same Akahata she’d met in the hospital, the fanatic who never stopped chanting his mantra.

  As soon as she confirmed the match, her heart began to race. A growing dread had been swelling in her gut like a tumor, ever since they’d discovered the cyanide. There might have been some who argued that anyone crazy enough to join the Divine Wind deserved whatever fate Joko Daishi would lead them to, but Mariko didn’t fall in that camp. Mass murder was mass murder, regardless of whether the victim was willing to swallow the poisoned pill. With Akahata out of pocket and Joko Daishi still a ghost, each passing hour amplified her queasy sense of foreboding. Every time she looked at the clock, she wondered how much time she had before the fateful bell would toll.

  And since Han was better on the keyboard, Mariko could only stand by and wait as he executed the very same searches she would have done. Once again their likemindedness struck her. There was no point in hunting and pecking her own way through; whatever she might have learned through the computer, Han would learn it first. So Mariko made what phone calls she could, but her concentration never strayed far from Han.

  “Got it!” he said. “Rented storefront in Bunkyo. Tax-exempt status, leased to the Church of the Divine Wind.” He released a sigh he seemed to have been bottling up for some time; evidently he was every bit as nervous as Mariko was. “I figured we were going to get a front company, you know? But I guess the regs on prohibited substances are too strict for that. This isn’t a front; it’s the real deal.”

  “Let’s move,” said Mariko.

  42

  She’d never commanded a raid before. The decision didn’t come easily, either. The biggest part of her wanted to wait for Lieutenant Sakakibara, but he was busy unruffling the feathers of all the circuit court judges he’d pissed off in railroading his warrants through the system, and Mariko’s growing sense of dread wouldn’t accept unnecessary delays. She might have asked SWAT to take command, but their reputation in Narcotics was that they were too slow to respond. The SWAT guys would have cast it in a different light, to be sure: you couldn’t prep an assault on a target in a matter of minutes, and barging in without a plan was a good way to get people killed. Asking them to launch a raid in less than an hour would be like asking a drunk surgeon to operate before sobering up. The right thing to do—the professional thing to do—was to say no.

  So, since Sakakibara had already assigned a small army to report directly to Mariko, she decided to deploy it. Borrowing heavily from SWAT’s playbook, she found electronic maps of the Divine Wind’s rented storefront-become-church and studied the layout carefully. She chose a staging ground in a parking lot half a kilometer away from the target building, where she could convene everyone in her command. And now she stood in a circle with them, with all of them looking expectantly at her. It was discomfiting, having twenty cops glued to her every word. She couldn’t help noticing that, as usual, she was by far the smallest one in the group.

  “Listen up,” she said, too quietly if she wanted to command as much authority as Sakakibara would have done. That was a lot easier at his size than at hers, and until she’d worked with them long enough to earn their respect, most guys in the department treated her not as a cop but a girl cop. She wasn’t off to a great start, but she had no choice but to raise her voice and soldier on. “I’m not going to try to stage this like the SWAT guys would. We’re just going to do good old-fashioned police work. Treat this like you did it back in academy, when you focused on the fundamentals. Watch your corners, clear your doorways, nobody enters a room by himself. Got it?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” her twenty officers said, much louder than she’d anticipated. She entertained the thought that maybe this wasn’t going as poorly as she thought—or maybe her nervousness just made everything bad seem worse and everything good seem as thin as Han’s cigarette smoke.

  “Consider our targets to be armed and dangerous,” she said. She meant the chemicals, not guns and knives, and now she wished she’d remembered to requisition gas masks for everyone. SWAT wouldn’t have forgotten that. “Remember, on paper this place qualifies as a church. That means we might be seeing parishioners in there, not just bad guys. But we know our bad guys have killed at least once using cyanide, maybe using a laced pill, and we suspect they’re willing to kill a lot more. If you see civilians trying to pop pills, do what you can to stop them—but don’t let that compromise officer safety, understand?”

  Her chorus boomed, “Yes, ma’am!”

  “All right. Let’s hit it.”

  When they breached the building, it was nothing like the SWAT raid of Kamaguchi’s shipping company. There, four teams had hit four sides of the target in the same instant. Here, Mariko heard shouts from inside before she even reached the front door. She, Han, and the four cops with them broke into a dead sprint.

 
; The target used to be a discount mattress retailer, which meant it was big. The commotion was coming from somewhere to Mariko’s left—what SWAT would have called the B-side of the target—but she repressed the urge to head that way. One of the officers with her did not. She didn’t bother to call after him; she’d have words with him later about breaking ranks, but for now she only had eyes for her own objective.

  Han reached the door before she did and put his boot into it. It burst open and Mariko was through. She’d expected to see what was happening on the B-side, but to her left was a flat wall. The room she was in—probably the showroom floor at one time—was now empty and dimly lit. B-team must have hit offices or a stockroom, something on the opposite side of that wall. She couldn’t help them. She could only clear the area in front of her.

  An exit sign glowed green on the back wall, with a steel door beneath it. On the other side of that door, a motorcycle engine roared to life, followed by another. Mariko’s team declared the vacant showroom clear. Mariko couldn’t even remember any details of the area; she knew only that wherever she pointed her SIG, there was nothing dangerous to be found.

  Mariko charged the steel door and kicked it with everything she had. It burst open and she breached the next room. Sunlight blinded her. The room was a cavernous expanse, the sun streaming in from the truck-sized door scrolling itself open on the far wall. Han was right on Mariko’s heels, shouting “down, down, down!” at someone off to her right, someone Mariko hadn’t even seen. Her eyes were fixed on the two motorcyclists in front of her.

  They were big bikes, maybe fourteen hundred cc’s, and Mariko instantly recognized one of the riders as Akahata. His face, still purple and livid, was too bruised for him to wear a helmet. The man astride the second bike had long black hair and wore an iron demon mask instead of a helmet. He could only be Joko Daishi.

  He cut a sharp turn in front of her, filling the air with the stink of scorched rubber. Akahata had already made the same turn, and now he rocketed away. He raced for the loading dock on the far side of the room, where that scrolling door rolled ever higher. Mariko saw five cops—her C-team—converging on the opening door, pistols drawn. Akahata cranked the throttle, jumped the loading dock, and blew past her officers before they could react. Joko Daishi whipped his bike around and gunned it.

  Mariko put her front sight on him but hesitated before she took her shot, doubting her aim with her left hand. C-team advanced on the door, closing Joko Daishi’s line of escape.

  He put the bike down in a hard spin, forcing a howl out of the back tire and leaving a wide black slash on the concrete floor. His engine roared louder than gunfire. He made for the emergency exit on the B-side, where Mariko’s officers were already embroiled in a fistfight with three or four men in white. Mariko could only assume they were Divine Wind cultists, but whoever they were, their free-for-all blocked the fire exit.

  Two of her B-side cops spotted the bike, broke free of the fight, and brought their weapons to bear. Joko Daishi whirled again, leaning so low his knee touched the floor. It was the same squealing spinout as before, only this time he used it as a leg sweep. His back tire arced wide, breaking bones, reaping both cops to the ground. He rammed the throttle again and bore down on Mariko like a charging warhorse.

  She didn’t know what happened to the rest of her element. Han was gone. The cops with them were gone. The door behind her was still open; she didn’t know why, didn’t care. For Mariko the whole world was herself and Joko Daishi.

  She put her front sight right on that iron demon mask but she couldn’t pull the trigger. It would be the first time she’d ever fired her weapon in the line of duty. She was shooting left-handed and rattled. And she had five cops behind her target. Her training took over; she simply couldn’t risk the shot.

  He was nearly on top of her. Her body weight wouldn’t be enough to slow him. He’d blast her right through the open doorway and keep accelerating. There was no one else behind her; she was literally the last line of defense. And she stepped out of the way.

  The technique that her TMPD aikido class called irimi-nage looked a lot like the one American pro wrestlers called a clothesline. She caught Joko Daishi with it right under the chin. If she were an American wrestler, it probably would have torn her arm clean off, but she didn’t match her target power to power. She just redirected his momentum upward and backward, absorbing none of it herself. The world went into slow motion. The motorcycle roared past her, loud as machine gun fire. Mariko turned her irimi-nage downward. Joko Daishi hit the floor like a meteor.

  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.