Year of the Demon (18 page)

Nine meters now. Nanami cut a diagonal across the flagstone courtyard of a Shinto shrine three hundred years older than the high-rises that flanked it. Mariko cut a sharper angle and closed the gap.

Eight meters. She dogged Nanami into the narrow alley between the shrine and one of the apartment buildings. It was a dead straightaway. In seconds he widened the gap to ten meters, then twelve.

And then Han blindsided him. Just as Nanami cleared the corner of the apartment complex, Han hit him in the knees with a perfect double-leg takedown. The two men hit the ground in a rolling skirmish that saw Han take a flailing haymaker to the jaw before Mariko tackled Nanami and laid him out flat.

“Good morning again,” Han said, rubbing his cheek and kneeling on the back of Nanami’s neck. “You should have listened the first time, Nanami-san. All we wanted to do was talk.”

Mariko cuffed Nanami’s wrists behind his back. His highlighted hair sponged up a lingering pool of early morning rainwater. “Sweet double-leg,” she said.

“Thanks,” said Han. “Sorry I was a few seconds late on the cutoff.”

“Don’t worry about it. Your jaw okay?”

Han stretched it out a bit. “Yeah,” he said, “but I think I chipped a tooth. See, Nanami-san? All you had to do was talk and we wouldn’t have to bring you in. But now I need to file an injury report, and that means we have to arrest you.”

“Shit,” Nanami said, “if I’da known you had all this pincer movement shit, I wouldn’ta lit out like that.”

Mariko felt him relax in her grip. It was only the repeat offenders that did that. First-timers always struggled a while, straining in vain against the cuffs. There was a bit of a learning curve before a perp could get comfortable in this situation, but Nanami was an old hand at this.

Mariko wished she could be as calm. The break-in this morning still had her rattled, and the theft of her sensei’s sword—her most prized possession—left her feeling bereft. Even her endorphin high wasn’t enough to distract her from her worries. All the more reason not to file an official report on the burglary; if Lieutenant Sakakibara thought she was distracted, he could bench her. She blinked hard, wiped the sweat off the back of her neck, and got her head back in the game.

“Speed,” she said. “You buy from the Kamaguchi-gumi,
neh
?”

“You know I do.” Nanami sighed it as much as said it, his tone sullen. He wasn’t wrong. They did know it, and that’s why Han had chosen to pay him a visit in the first place. Han had scores of street contacts. Developing a network was inevitable after eight years in Narcotics, but Han was the master: he seemed to have an informant for any given occasion. When they left post that morning, Mariko had said she wanted to talk to someone with Kamaguchi-gumi connections and who also knew where to score top-shelf speed. Han’s reply was inevitable: “I know just the guy.”

“So how’s their product?” Han asked Nanami.

“Kamaguchi? Used to be shit. Now it’s good. You wanna get off my head now?”

Han transferred some weight out of the knee on Nanami’s neck, but he didn’t let him go. “I heard the Kamaguchis have been last in the league,” he said. “Are you saying my intel is bullshit?”

Nanami tried to shake his head, but he couldn’t do it with his chin pressed into the concrete. “Damn, Han, you gotta treat me right. I’m talking,
neh
? Why you gotta get all police brutality on me?”

Mariko felt her heart rate surge at that—brutality was a serious charge, and it pissed her off when people threw it around like it was nothing—but Han just laughed it off. “You resisted arrest and assaulted an officer. Consider yourself lucky you don’t have a face full of pepper spray.”

Mariko’s phone buzzed in her pocket. She ignored it. “The sooner you talk, the sooner he can let you up,” she said.

“Used to be the Kamaguchis were way behind,” said Nanami. “In the market,
neh
? Now they’re killing it. They got the Daishi. New shit. Kamaguchi’s the only ones who got it.”

“Daishi?” Mariko had never heard of it. She looked at Han, who shrugged. Evidently he didn’t know any more than she did. “Any good?”

“Don’t get any better.”

Her phone stopped buzzing, only to start anew a couple of seconds later. Mariko guessed it was her mother, the only person she knew who would keep calling until Mariko picked up, so she thumbed a button through the fabric of her pocket to let her voice mail pick it up. She looked to Han and silently—with no more than a glance to Nanami, a slight tilt of the head, and a quick raise of the eyebrows—asked what they should do. Han replied by standing up, letting all the pressure off Nanami’s neck. Once again Mariko felt thankful to have a partner whose stream of thought aligned so closely with her own. For one thing, it allowed such acts of near telepathy, which was very handy when neither of them wanted to reveal to a street connection that they’d never heard of this Daishi. For another, thinking like a good narc meant she was a good narc.

She pointed to her jawline and gave Han a querying look, and he replied with a nod and a thumbs-up: in response to her unasked question, he confirmed that his jaw and his tooth were fine, and they wouldn’t need to arrest the kid after all. “Next time when we say we just want to talk,” she said, unlocking the cuffs, “maybe you should consider the possibility that we just want to talk.”

Nanami got to his feet. He knew his part in this unspoken conversation too: he hadn’t seen any of Mariko’s communication with Han, but the fact that they let him stand of his own accord meant he wasn’t going to jail this morning. He gave them a short, contrite, professional bow and left.

Once again the phone buzzed in Mariko’s pocket. “Hold on,” she told Han. “My mom’s having a fit.” She answered the call with an exasperated “Yeah?”

“That’s not a tone you want to take with me,” said a rasping male voice. “You don’t want to ignore my calls either.”

Mariko looked at the caller ID and couldn’t believe her eyes.
KAMAGUCHI HANZO
, it said. The Bulldog. Son of Kamaguchi Ryusuke, underboss of the Kamaguchi-gumi. Former confederate of Fuchida Shuzo, the yakuza enforcer Mariko had killed in her now-famous swordfight. As the Kamaguchi-gumi’s equalizer, the Bulldog had the contract on Mariko’s life, and unless Mariko missed her guess, the Bulldog had passed up a chance to kill her this morning. He’d stolen Glorious Victory instead—though the question of why was a mystery that was never far from her thoughts.

She almost put the Kamaguchi on speakerphone, then thought better of it and just beckoned Han to listen in with her. “Bulldog-san,” she said, more for Han’s benefit than anything, “you want to tell me how you got this number?”

“Heh. Not by asking politely.”

Mariko would not be intimidated by this man—or at least not let
him
know she was scared. “I’m beginning to think you’ve got the hots for me,” she said. “First you break into my apartment. Then you beat up some poor guy to get my phone number. I’m flattered.”

“What? Break into—? Ah, fuck it. Where are you at? I’m sending a car for you.”

She and Han looked at each other in disbelief. Mariko had to take a second look at her phone, as if to verify that it was still in her hand, that she’d actually dragged herself out of bed, that this whole god-awful morning hadn’t been some terrible dream. “And what makes you think I would voluntarily get in a car with you?”

“I got a bargain for you. I think you’re going to like it.”

She gave the phone another quizzical look. “A bargain?”

“You heard me. You get me something I want and I’ll give you something you want.”

Mariko couldn’t tell which she felt more: confusion or fury. Two seconds ago he seemed to have no idea about her break-in this morning. Now it sounded like he was offering Glorious Victory as a bargaining chip.

In the end, fury won out. “Now listen here, you son of a bitch. I’m not going to be dragged into some kind of bullshit bartering game for my own property. You bring my sword back; then we can talk.”

“I got no idea what you’re talking about, you loopy—”

“Go to hell,” Mariko said. Then she hung up.

Han gawped at her in amazement. “Was that really Kamaguchi Hanzo?”

“Yeah.” Her phone rang again. She clicked the call directly to voice mail.

“
The
Kamguchi Hanzo? Like, the Bulldog crazy guy Kamaguchi Hanzo?”

“Yeah.”

“And you told him to go to hell?”

“I guess so.” Her phone chirped again. She clicked to ignore it again.

“Mariko, this is a golden opportunity. You need to take that call.”

“What?”
Mariko shot him a you-need-to-go-back-to-the-loony-bin sort of look. “You’re kidding me. ‘Golden opportunity’?”

Her phone buzzed in her fist again, and Han nodded toward it. “Think about it. What’s the one thing a detective needs more than anything else to work narcotics?”

The look on Mariko’s face didn’t change. “A partner who doesn’t want to see her shot dead by a yakuza?”

“Come on. What am I always telling you need to develop?”

“A network of contacts.” She answered him as if she were answering a teacher’s rhetorical question in grade school.

“Exactly. And who could be a better contact than Kamaguchi Hanzo? This dude’s probably got access to everything the Kamaguchi-gumi is running. Dope, guns, extortion, racketeering, you name it.” Han was so excited he couldn’t stand still. “I’m telling you, Mariko, this is amazing. I’ve been in this division for eight years and I’ve
never
had the chance to develop a high-level connection like this.”

“I bet you never had any of them put a price on your head either.”

“I don’t think he wants to shoot you. I really think he wants to talk.”

Mariko looked down at her phone, which was vibrating in her hand like a fly trapped in a jar. She was tired of feeling unsafe. She wanted to answer the phone and challenge the Bulldog to a shoot-out at high noon. Clint Eastwood antics weren’t her cup of tea, and she still wasn’t all that confident in her marksmanship left-handed, but at least a good old-fashioned shoot-’em-up would see her problems resolved once and for all.

And yet Han was right. This was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and every indication said Kamaguchi didn’t intend to kill her. First, he seemed to be honestly confused about the sword theft. Second, he wasn’t the type to call in advance to schedule a drive-by.

Damn it all, she thought. Then she answered her phone.

“Bitch, you hang up on me again, I’ll make you regret it.”

Mariko rolled her eyes and almost hung up. Only a panicked gesture from Han made her think twice. She sighed and said, “What do you want?”

“I told you. A bargain. Tell me where to pick you up.”

“Metropolitan Police HQ,” she said. “Chiyoda-ku.”

“Fine. Half an hour.” And the line went dead.

The silence made Mariko’s heart race. She’d just made a date with the man who was hired to kill her. And he had just agreed to meet the target of his assassination order in front of a high-rise full of cops. More to herself than anyone, she said, “I can’t believe I’m going to go through with this.”

“You’re not going alone,” Han said. He gave her shoulder a reassuring squeeze. “I’ll be right behind you in an unmarked car, with two others on a rolling tail.”

“I’m not scared,” she said. It was only a little lie. “It’s just . . . the guy’s a gangster, Han. He makes a living destroying other people’s lives. Do I really want to get into bed with him?”

“This is Narcotics, Mariko. We deal with bad people. It’s part of the job.”

“Yeah, I get that. It’s just . . .”

She didn’t know how to finish her own thought. Fortunately she and Han shared a telepathic wavelength. “It’s a gamble,” he said. “I know. You’re on first base and you’re thinking of stealing second. That’s just one of the risks you take sometimes if you want to win the ball game.”

17

T
he Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department’s headquarters looked like a giant concrete book, standing on end and opened slightly, with a three-story drink twizzler for a bookmark. The building’s eighteen floors of unadorned, wedge-shaped, postmodern concrete loomed over the heart of Chiyoda City, Tokyo’s governmental district, right across the street from the Ministry of Justice and right across the moat from the Imperial Palace gardens. A phallic red-and-white tower stood atop the building, complete with three observation decks full of various antennae, dish-shaped and mini-phallus-shaped, whose arcane purposes Mariko couldn’t begin to guess at.

The mere sight of the HQ building still sent a thrill rippling over Mariko’s skin. She’d worked so hard to get onto the TMPD, harder still to make detective and sergeant, and seeing the department’s headquarters through the windshield of a squad car confirmed for her what still seemed unreal: that at last she’d made her way to her dream assignment in Narcotics. Moreover, HQ’s overlook of the Imperial Palace stirred memories heavily laden with happiness and grief. She’d only been in the palace once, and it was the murder of her beloved sensei that had prompted her visit. Thinking of Dr. Yamada was enough to make her want to cry, but since that was something she could never let a coworker see, she had to suppress the urge every time she showed up to work.

And that was on days when no gangsters came calling. Talking to Kamaguchi on the phone had shaken her to the core, and she hadn’t been herself even before she saw his name on the caller ID. If Kamaguchi wasn’t responsible for the break-in, who was? And if he didn’t have Glorious Victory, what could he possibly offer as a bargaining chip? And what did he want in return?

Han was pretty shaken up too. He tried not to show it, but he was already on his third cigarette, and he paced back and forth in front of the HQ building like a panther in a cage. “Are you sure we shouldn’t call Sakakibara in on this? We could have snipers on all these rooftops in ten minutes flat.”

“You were the one who said this was a good idea.”

“Yeah, but that was before I knew I was going to be waiting on the sidewalk with you. If he shoots at you, he might hit me by mistake.”