Year of the Demon

by Steve Bein

  “You’re thinking they’re gaijin?”

  “Maybe. Or sourcing their precursor chemicals from out of country, anyway. Someplace cheap; it’s obvious they don’t need the cash. This mask, is it the only antique they’re interested in? Or have they been trading for a lot of stuff like that?”

  “Kamaguchi says it was just the mask, just this one time. Otherwise it’s always the hexamine. But I think the mask thief and my sword thief are the same guy.”

  Han’s eyebrows popped halfway up his forehead. “Seriously? That’s a hell of an inference.”

  Mariko explained her logic. Han gave her a dubious look. “Twenty-first-century ninja clan, huh? Maybe you need to go back to the drawing board with that one.”

  “Okay, fine,” she said, “the last part might be a little imaginative. But you have to admit it’s a hell of a coincidence, these two artifacts being stolen on the same night.”

  Han agreed, his long hair flopping as he nodded. “Point taken,” he said, “but how does that help us make an arrest?”

  “Well . . . it doesn’t. It’s still true, though.”

  Mariko was embarrassed, but at least she got a sympathetic smile out of Han. “Chalk up a point for Oshiro,” he said. “Back to the other thing, I have to tell you I just don’t get it. Why are these guys trading speed just to make MDA? Why not just cook the MDA themselves? Cut Kamaguchi out completely?”

  Mariko shrugged. “Maybe they can’t. Maybe the hexamine’s too hard to come by wherever they’re from.”

  “Yeah, maybe.” Han went silent, frowning and looking out the windshield for a long time. At length he said, “Something’s not adding up. How much product are we talking about here? How much hexamine has Kamaguchi been selling them?”

  “A barrel every few weeks,” said Mariko.

  “So why haven’t we seen any arrests? If a new wave of psychedelic speed hit the streets, I’d have heard of it.”

  “The Daishi got past you.”

  “Yeah,” said Han, “and I’m mighty pissed off about that. My people are letting me down. But in a daily log it wouldn’t say ‘Daishi’; it would just say ‘amphetamine.’ We should have seen log entries with ‘MDA’ on them by now.”

  “Maybe they’re selling it overseas? No. Never mind.”

  Han shook his head too. Japan was expensive. Dealers here imported from Thailand, North Korea, Cambodia—the cheap markets. Export the other way didn’t make sense. Mariko wished she’d reached that conclusion a few seconds earlier, before she’d said the stupid thing she’d said. She supposed she should be glad she caught her mistake before Han had to correct her, but she was embarrassed nonetheless. It was the years of perfectionism that did it, the fear of her male counterparts seeing her as a girl instead of a policewoman. That wasn’t a big concern with Han, but still, even the little failures burned, lingering, like droplets of hot oil spat from a frying pan.

  “So this Daishi,” she said, “what are the chances it’s the same stuff we seized from that packing company last night? I mean, it’s got to be, neh?”

  “Got to be,” Han said. “We should set up a couple of buy-busts just to be sure, get ourselves a sample to compare it to—but I’m getting sidetracked. Get back to your meeting on the mound with Kamaguchi.”

  “Okay,” Mariko said, “so our buyer marks Kamaguchi, plays to his ego by overpaying for the hexamine, then says he wants the mask and hints that he’ll overpay again—”

  “So Kamaguchi thinks he’s got a live one, because this dumb-ass has been overpaying for months.” Han laughed in disbelief. “You’d think a career criminal would have seen that con before.”

  “Yeah, these guys never made sense to me. Kamaguchi’s not a moron. He’s not even lazy. You wouldn’t believe how much work he puts into keeping his money off the books. If he worked half as hard as a car salesman as he does as a yakuza, he’d still be able to rent a place in Ebisu and none of his clients would ever try to play him the way he just got played.”

  “Maybe so, but nobody pays for cars in amphetamines.”

  “Antique masks either.”

  “Touché.” He stopped to think for the space of about half a block—which wasn’t long, because he was driving a lot faster than Mariko usually saw him drive. “Wait. Why pay him at all?”

  “Who? The Divine Wind?”

  “Yeah. I mean, I get why he wants to be paid in Daishi instead of cash. His own product is shit, and it’s expensive to boot. The Daishi’s better all around. But why should these dudes pay at all? They’re obviously willing to steal from him; why not start there? Just waltz in and steal the mask from the get-go?”

  “Would you piss off the Bulldog if you didn’t have to?”

  “Well, no, now that you put it that way.” Han gunned it through an intersection to make a yellow light. “So you’re thinking what? They tried to play it straight at first, but then he strung them along—”

  “Longer than they could wait.” Mariko nodded. “I think last night is just them running out of time and getting desperate.”

  They sat in silence for a while, Han driving, Mariko watching the city fly by, both of them mulling over the idea. “All right,” Han said at last, “I’ll buy it. Still, the whole thing looks too good to be true for Kamaguchi-gumi, doesn’t it? They get better product, and more of it, and all they have to part with is a chemical sitting around some warehouse, a precursor chemical for a drug they don’t even cook.”

  “So what? This is breaking news? Dealer tries to get top-quality dope for bargain basement prices? Not much of a headline, Han.”

  “No, I’m asking, what’s in it for the Divine Wind? If a deal’s too good to be true on one side, then the other side’s getting the shaft, neh? And they had six months to think about this. They’ve got to be the dumbest bunch of drug dealers I’ve ever heard of.”

  “You’re thinking like a narc. The way to solve this is to think like a cultist.”

  “Huh.” Han thought for a second, then shook his head. Laughing at himself, he said, “See, this is what we need you for, Mariko. You know how you’re riding yourself all the time for being the new recruit in Narcotics? Well, stop. I’ve been swimming in this pool so long I forget there’s such a thing as dry land. We need you. You’re amphibious.”

  “Gee, you really know how to make a girl feel good about herself.”

  “Come on, you know what I mean.”

  “Oh, I do. Amphibious. Very sexy. That line’s got to kill on the speed dating scene.”

  At last she got the blush she wanted out of him. “Fine,” he said, “so I’m a Neanderthal. Guilty as charged. Will you teach me how to think like a cultist now?”

  Mariko indulged in a self-satisfied smile. “The MDA’s a hallucinogen, neh? Perfect for tripping at, you know, prayer meetings or whatever. So maybe . . . maybe the priest wears the mask to heighten the trip.”

  “So what are you saying? These guys are devil worshippers? Please don’t tell me they stole your sword to make human sacrifices.”

  “I don’t know. I’m just spitballing here. But fanatics are willing to risk a lot for their faith, neh? It goes a long way toward explaining why they’re taking such awful risks to get a mask and a sword. Maybe they need them for some ritual that happens on a certain day—”

  “Or when Venus is aligned with Jupiter or whatever.” Han thought about it for a moment, then nodded. “Yeah, could be. I guess we’ll find out soon enough.”

  “How do you figure that?”

  “We’re on our way to Intensive Care. One of our suspects lawyered up.”

  19

  Mariko didn’t care for hospitals. She supposed nobody actually liked hospitals, especially when, like Mariko, they’d recently been confined to one. She was laid up for a solid week after her sword fight with Fuchida, but that wasn’t why she had a hang-up about hospitals. It was her father’s death that made her so uneasy.

  It wasn’t an easy thing to explain. There was no drama to it. She hadn’t carri
ed him bleeding into the emergency room. She wasn’t in the room for his death rattle. She hadn’t been there at all. She’d known he was sick when she went off to school, but her parents hadn’t revealed how sick. He’d been weak for a long time by then, long enough that the daily fear of death had subsided. It was disturbing how quickly a family could return to business as usual even when one of their number was dying. Get the groceries, do your homework, clean the dishes, Dad’s got cancer. So Mariko went off to college with her father’s blessing, and then—in her memory it had only been a matter of days—her mom called to tell her he was dead.

  For years after that, Mariko had wished she could have been in that hospital room. At a minimum, she wished she’d been the one to make the choice of whether or not to come. At eighteen she hadn’t had it in her to make that choice unemotionally; she would have dropped everything, no matter the effect on her GPA, and that was precisely why her parents hadn’t called. They knew their daughter well.

  All the same, Mariko still thought she should have had the right to make the choice herself. Now and again, even all these years later, she tried to imagine the room where he died. There were no photographs. It wasn’t the sort of event you broke out the cameras for. Mariko had never asked her mom to describe it—nor her sister, now that she thought about it, though Saori was younger, so she’d been there until the end. For all Mariko knew, the room where her dad had died looked exactly like the room she was standing in now.

  She’d never seen the man in this room before, but she’d seen plenty of battery victims in her time. He seemed to sink into his bed. Both eyes were blacked. A huge swollen dome dominated the right side of his face from eyebrow to hairline, obviously the result of some massive blunt force trauma; it looked like someone had managed to shove a hamburger bun up under one of his eyelids. A neck brace squished wrinkles into his unshaven cheeks. Both lips were punctuated with cuts. His forearms were nothing but knotted, swollen bruises—almost certainly defensive wounds—but neither was broken. In short, by the standards of the Kamaguchi-gumi, he’d gotten off light. He’d stay under observation for a few days, but he wouldn’t spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair.

  The suspect’s mouth moved constantly. At first Mariko thought he was delirious, but after a while she saw he was chanting the same words over and over again. A mantra. His eyes blazed at her, the whites as brilliant as the full moon, unnaturally bright thanks to the red and purple contusions that surrounded them. Mariko could barely hear him, but given the way he stared at her, it seemed he meant to speak directly to her. And that wasn’t what she found weird; the weird part was her sneaking suspicion that this man looked at everyone with that same thousand-yard stare. It made her not want to get close enough to hear that mantra of his.

  The only other person in the room was SWAT’s tactical medic, who was so obviously exhausted that Mariko wasn’t sure he’d be safe to drive himself home. “He’s been spouting that same line ever since we put him in the ambo,” the tac medic said. “Never stops, never sleeps.”

  “That’s speed for you,” Han said.

  Mariko had reached the same conclusion. Staying up for days on end was probably just another day at the office for a cult that cooked massive quantities of amphetamines. On the other hand, selling that much product probably left a good amount of cash on hand for legal fees.

  The lawyer was already reaching into his pocket for his business card as he walked into the room. “Officers,” he said, giving Mariko and Han a short bow. His tone was a little too familiar, his dress a little shy of the immaculate benchmark set by the rest of his profession. His shirt was pressed to perfection, but he hadn’t quite tucked it all the way in. His suit was of second-best quality, which was to say far more expensive than anything Mariko or even Lieutenant Sakakibara could ever justify putting in their rotation, yet not quite up to snuff in the scrutinizing glare of the courtroom spotlight. If he were a gaijin businessman, no one would ever have noticed these details, but in a Japanese defense attorney they bespoke pride, swagger, even gall.

  But it was understated swagger, swagger by implication, just like the quality of the business card he proffered with both hands, one to Han and then one to Mariko. The card was not paper but wood, a veneer thinner than cardstock and smoother than silk. HAMAYA JIRO, it read, ATTORNEY AT LAW.

  It was an implicit request for Mariko and Han to offer their own cards, and to be professional they had no choice but to oblige. Hamaya had already set the terms of their relationship. “I’m sure you’ll agree,” he said, “that Akahata-san is not yet in any condition to endure a police interrogation.”

  Mariko eyed the man in the bed, whose eyes still blazed like a madman’s. His lips still moved in their playback loop, chanting their mantra. “Akahata, is it? He looks ready to talk to me, Counselor.”

  Hamaya gave her an insouciant bow. “He speaks, yes, but not to anyone in this room. He prays for Joko Daishi to liberate our souls.”

  Han and Mariko shared a knowing glance. It was the second time they’d across the word daishi this morning. Without seeing the kanji, there was no way of knowing what daishi meant—with these two characters it meant “nun,” with those two, “cardboard”—and so when Nanami had said the Kamaguchi-gumi was slinging Daishi these days, there wasn’t much for a narc detective to do with the information. Daishi could have been a nickname, an ingredient, anything. But in context, Joko Daishi could only be Great Teacher Joko, the same daishi as Kobo Daishi, whose name was known to everyone. Kobo Daishi was the sobriquet given to Kukai, the eighth-century monk who had contributed as much to Buddhism as anyone in Japanese history. No doubt the name Joko Daishi was meant to evoke images of Kobo Daishi, earning credibility by association.

  “Joko Daishi, huh?” Mariko eyed the tweaker in the hospital bed. “Let me guess: he’s the leader of your Divine Wind?”

  “The very same,” said Hamaya, bowing, his eyes closing, his voice full of reverence. Akahata’s chanting went from a silent mouthing to a barely audible whisper. His lips redoubled their pace.

  Not seeing the kanji for Joko, Mariko couldn’t do anything with the name. It would have been nice to have something to plug into a search engine. She’d have liked to wheedle the name the old-fashioned way too, but somehow she didn’t think it would fly if she suddenly expressed interest in joining the Divine Wind and asked Hamaya to write down his whack-job leader’s name and home address.

  The latter might well have been a psychiatric ward. There was no doubt in her mind that this Joko Daishi was a loony and an extremist. It took an extremist to command such loyalty from Akahata, a brand of loyalty that was almost literally undying: that head trauma might easily have killed him, and if it had, he’d have gone to his grave with Joko Daishi’s name on his lips. Nor did Mariko harbor any doubt that the Daishi pills that Nanami was popping these days were directly connected to the man called Daishi that Akahata prayed to. One glance at Han told her he was thinking the same thing.

  “Good to know,” Han said. “Now let me take a wild guess and say the way Joko Daishi liberates our souls is to get us all high.”

  Hamaya admitted the smallest of smirks. “That would be illegal, Detective.”

  “Now, what if the thing he was using to do the liberating was MDA?” Mariko said, making Hamaya shift his attention to her. She and Han made a habit of speaking in turns. They had a good rapport that way, each anticipating where the other was going, riffing off each other, always redirecting a suspect’s focus, never letting him feel settled. It worked on suspects’ lawyers too. “A nice high with some gentle hallucinations—good spiritual stuff, that. Pass enough of that around and you could probably start a cult.”

  “Maybe so,” said Han. “Of course, he’d need a steady supply to make enough MDA for a whole cult to take part.”

  “But wait,” said Mariko, “hasn’t your client been making deals with the Kamaguchi-gumi for whole barrels of hexamine?”

  “That’s right,” said Han. “He�
�s been doing that for months, hasn’t he? Do you know what you can make with hexamine, Hamaya-san?”

  “I’m sure I have no idea.”

  “Well, your client does,” said Mariko. “I mean, he’d have to. He knows how to cook speed, after all. Lots of it. Enough to make himself very rich—rich enough to purchase expensive antiques, for instance. Masks, swords, that kind of thing. If he didn’t feel like stealing them, of course.”

  Han poked Hamaya on the shoulder and whispered, “This is the part where you say, ‘Allegedly.’”

  “Now, why would a guy who likes to cook amphetamines give a whole bunch of his product away?” said Mariko, laying claim to Hamaya’s most obvious legal riposte. She figured they might as well get a good look at it now, before the case went to court. Urano Soseki, the capo that oversaw the Kamaguchi-gumi’s shipping and packing plant, had claimed the same defense right from the outset, just minutes after Mariko had blasted him through that door: there was never any dope deal. No money had changed hands. In court Hamaya could make a mirroring claim on Akahata’s behalf: since the speed was in the Kamaguchi-gumi’s possession, it clearly belonged to them. A buy wasn’t a buy until someone paid for something.

  That wouldn’t wash for Urano’s crew. Just having the speed on the premises was more than enough to convict them. But Akahata was innocent until proven guilty. Unless Mariko and Han could prove he’d been involved in the deal—and holding a big wad of dope money was the usual proof in these cases—Akahata’s only criminal activity that night had been as the victim of aggravated battery. She and Han always had the option of getting Urano to dime out Akahata, but Urano’s credibility as a witness wouldn’t hold up under scrutiny. Mariko could take her turn on the stand, but she’d have a hard time convincing a jury why Akahata would use fifty or sixty kilos of speed to buy an old rusty mask, and an even harder time explaining how she’d discovered that information while hanging out in Kamaguchi Hanzo’s kitchen. Unless Akahata admitted to felony possession, Hamaya would see him walk.