Year of the Demon fb-2

by Steve Bein

  The tactical medic wasn’t as enlightened. He thapped Urano in the forehead with a knuckle and said, “Shut up.”

  Han hopped up in the back of the ambulance and sat down next to Urano. “So,” he said, “I guess you know you’re going to prison for a while.”

  “You got nothing on me,” said Urano.

  “I don’t know about that,” Mariko said. “There’s all that speed in your cornstarch hopper. That’s got to count for something.”

  Urano snorted. “It’s not mine.”

  “Sorry,” Han said, “that’s not the way this works. See, if it’s illegal and it’s in your building, we’ve got you on possession.”

  Mariko nodded. “Felony possession, since our guys are saying you’ve got quite a bit of it in there. How much did they say, Han?”

  “At least fifty kilos,” said Han. “Maybe more.”

  “That’s right. Urano-san, did you know that machine in there has a scale built into it?” He didn’t need her to connect the rest of the dots. There was an inventory log too, and nothing could be easier than checking the weight of what was actually in the machine against the weight of the bags some factory worker had recorded pouring into the machine.

  “You got nothing,” said Urano. “We didn’t pay for it. It’s not ours.”

  “Really?” Han said. “So, what, some guy just came by and decided to donate a whole bunch of speed?”

  “It’s not ours,” said Urano, his patience fading fast. He tried to sit up to look Han in the eye; a jolt of pain slammed him flat on his back. “Not ours,” he grunted. “We told that little shit not to bring it by here. He said you were coming. I told him we’d set up another meet. The dumb bastard came by anyway.”

  “And that’s why you and your boys beat the hell out of him,” said Mariko.

  “So we get to add aggravated battery to the possession charge,” said Han.

  “Not possession. It’s not ours.” Another shot of pain made Urano wince. “Book me on the assault thing. Fine. He deserved it. But we didn’t pay for the shit. We don’t even got any money around here. Go look. You see any big stacks of bills, you tell me; I could use them. But we got nothing. We bought nothing. So you got nothing.”

  “You keep saying that,” said Han. “We’ll have to sit down and chat sometime about how the drug trade works.”

  “But maybe downtown,” said Mariko.

  “Yeah,” said Han, “and maybe after you go see a doctor. You look like someone kicked your ass.”

  Mariko and Han sat on the concrete lip of the dock as they watched the ambulance pull away. Han fished through his pockets for a pack of cigarettes. Lighting up, he said, “You think he’s telling the truth about the cash?”

  “I didn’t see anything.”

  “Me neither.” He said it with a knowing tone. When it came to narcotics, no one wanted to tell the truth. Users, dealers, suppliers, all of them lied—and not just to cops, but to their own loved ones and even to themselves. Mariko knew that all too well, as did anyone with a history of addiction in the family. Mariko prided herself on her ability to detect when someone was lying to her, and if anything, Han was better at it than she was. Eight years on Narcotics meant eight years of seeing through the smokescreens.

  “So what are these guys selling the dope for, if not for cash? A hostage, maybe?”

  “I don’t like it,” Mariko said. “Why piss off the hostage takers? You’ve got to deliver payment on their terms, neh?”

  “Good point.”

  “But what, then? You can’t have a drug buy with no money.”

  “Yeah,” Han said around his cigarette, “but you’re not supposed to have dealers show up to a blown sting either. Urano said his guy knew we were coming.”

  “Which means his guy doesn’t mind pissing off the Kamaguchi-gumi. He’s got to be out of his mind.”

  “Or desperate.”

  “Lucky to be alive either way. Assuming he survives, that is.”

  “Right,” said Han. “Sakakibara said the dude’s in surgery, neh?”

  Mariko nodded. “So we’ve got a seller who’s willing to take enormous risks—”

  “Enormous by dope slingers’ standards. Not exactly my grandma’s sewing circle.”

  “Exactly,” she said. “And a buyer who’s willing to beat his supplier half to death. Is this case making any sense to you?”

  “Nope.”

  “Me neither.” Mariko chuckled and shook her head. “But you’re interested, neh?”

  “Oh yeah.”

  “Me too.”

  3

  Mariko could smell herself in the elevator. She was sweaty, her matted hair felt as if it still had a helmet strapped onto it, and she smelled faintly of Fourth of July fireworks.

  She was the only person in the whole apartment building who would have drawn that comparison. She was the only one who had ever celebrated the Fourth of July, because she was the only one who spent her childhood in the States. It was strange, thinking of fireworks she hadn’t smelled since junior high, and she wondered why on earth her hair would suddenly share that smell. Then she remembered the flash-bang going off right above her head.

  The elevator announced her floor with a canned voice that sounded just like the woman who narrated those airline safety videos. Mariko hauled herself out of the elevator and tromped down the narrow corridor to her apartment. Her boots felt like they were made of lead and she wanted nothing more than to take a hot shower and collapse into bed. But that was a pipe dream. She’d won enough races and tussled with enough bad guys to know her body’s reaction to an adrenaline high. She wasn’t going to sleep anytime soon.

  That was all right, because she had some research to do.

  But the shower came first. Then she flicked on the electric teapot, and when it clicked itself off she poured boiling water into two extruded polystyrene containers of Cup Noodles. It was something of a post-workout ritual for her, planting herself on the bed, savoring the soy sauce smell of instant ramen, and cracking open one of her old sensei’s notebooks. Usually her evening workouts involved swords, not bulldozing bad guys through locked doors, but the cool-down ritual was equally effective in either case.

  Professor Yamada Yasuo, her first kenjutsu teacher, had earned himself a seat in the pantheon of Japan’s greatest medieval historians. He harbored a fascination with the material culture of the samurai that began with his first week in army boot camp and stayed with him until his dying day, leading him to earn black belts in every sword art Japan had to offer. Fate had a cruel sense of irony: Yamada-sensei died of a vicious sword wound, and at the hand of his own student, no less. Fuchida Shuzo was a butcher and a sociopath, and after killing Yamada, he’d forced Mariko into the sword fight that cost Mariko her finger and Fuchida his life. Mariko wasn’t religious, but she knew fate’s cruel irony when she saw it: living by the sword and dying by the sword and all that.

  She had the honor of being Yamada’s last kenjutsu student, and also of being the inheritor of all of his notebooks. He’d written everything by hand—had never even owned a computer—and most of his work was over Mariko’s head. In fact, much of it was over the heads of the many tenured and gray-haired history professors whose dissertation committees he’d chaired back when they were in school, but even so, Mariko enjoyed working her way through his notes. She thought of them as her way to have a little conversation with him.

  Tonight, however, she was looking for something specific. That demon mask, the one on the office shelf in the packing plant, was familiar somehow. At first she thought it might have been a pop culture thing—growing up overseas, she’d missed out on a lot of her generation’s icons—but Han hadn’t recognized it either. That made her think the mask must have been somewhere in Yamada-sensei’s many scribblings.

  She had hundreds of his notebooks, stacked in tightly packed banker’s boxes along the far wall of her tiny bedroom. She had no space for them, but neither could she bear to part with them. She liked coming h
ome to him, even if all she had left of him was his old notes and his sword. Glorious Victory Unsought, the final masterpiece of Master Inazuma, rested in the sword rack she’d installed over her bed. It was enormous, a horseman’s weapon, and it threatened to pull out the mounting screws with its weight. That in and of itself might have been tempting fate’s sense of irony—in a land of earthquakes, a swordswoman was unwise to sleep directly under her weapon—but the sword was so long that this was the only wall it would fit on.

  She was skimming tonight, not reading, and she worked her way through five volumes in the time it took her to finish her dinner. It was on the last page of the last notebook that she found what she was looking for.

  The demon mask stared back at her. Its long, curving fangs were sharper than its stubby horns, its face wrought in a permanent grimace. It had a sharp row of incisors but no lower jaw, as it covered only the top half of the face, like something one might wear to a masquerade ball.

  Yamada-sensei must have sketched it when he was younger, before he lost his vision. He’d surrounded it with notes, including guesses at its weight and size, and also the names of some historical figures attached to it. Mariko only recognized one of the names: Hideyoshi, one of the San Eiketsu, the Three Unifiers. Toyotomi Hideyoshi, Oda Nobunaga, and Tokugawa Ieyasu were the founding fathers of her country, three great warlords who united dozens of warring fiefdoms and turned them into one pacified empire. If not for them, there would be no Japan.

  A thrill of adrenaline clenched Mariko’s stomach and froze her breath in her lungs. It was the same feeling she would expect after narrowly missing what should have been a fatal car crash. Not two hours ago, she’d raided that packing plant with a small army of cops. What if the Kamaguchis had initiated a firefight? Both sides had automatic weapons. This was the kind of artifact that Indiana Jones would risk his life to recover, and one stray bullet could have destroyed it forever.

  It was uncanny that she should own the only notebook with a sketch of this mask and that she just so happened to be in the same room with the mask. Not so long ago, she would have called it a spooky coincidence, but this was Yamada’s notebook, and her time with him had been weird enough that she’d stopped using the word coincidence when it came to him.

  Of course it was possible that Yamada’s mask had nothing to do with the mask she’d seen tonight. More than possible, in fact. Probable. Almost certain. There were thousands of masks in Japanese history, tens of thousands, and as a historian and a lover of medieval artifacts, Yamada would have had an interest in any number of them. But his particular speciality—his raison d’être, in fact—was studying the artifacts that no one else dared to study lest they be accused of believing in magic. Mariko wasn’t ready to believe in magic, but she did believe in fate. Her experience with Yamada left her no other choice. And that meant she had to admit the possibility that she and the mask were fated to cross paths.

  A strange catharsis settled over her. She’d satisfied her curiosity about the mask. She’d reinforced her faith in her own powers of recollection, association, and deduction—never a bad thing for the only female detective in a department run by chauvinism and prejudice. And she’d forged a new connection with her departed sensei. She didn’t like believing in fate. It was too close to astrology for her, too trippy-hippy, so if she had to suffer her new belief, it was good to find more evidence in support of it.

  And it was good to find something that made sense tonight. It was weird enough to cross paths with an artifact like the mask, and her new narcotics case was weirder still. A buy with no cash. A supplier with no fear of cops or yakuzas. Nothing about the case made sense. It was the kind of thing to keep her up all night, staring at the ceiling and working over one failed theory after the next. Catharsis was the best sleeping aid she knew of. As tired as she was, it couldn’t have come at a better time.

  4

  The instant she awoke, she knew something was wrong.

  It was impossible to say what tipped her off. It might have been some scent in the air, noticeable only on a subliminal level. Mariko couldn’t say for sure. It wasn’t her alarm clock—it hadn’t gone off yet—and there was no other noise in her apartment. Mariko only knew that something wasn’t right. And that was before she saw Glorious Victory was missing.

  Her sword was always the first thing she saw in the morning, right above her head as soon as she awoke. And now it was gone. An intruder had been in her apartment. He’d been standing right over her, in her bed, asleep. He could have done anything to her. And he’d stolen the most valuable thing she’d ever own.

  The sight of the empty sword rack hit her like a hammer in the chest, but she didn’t have time to think about it. Someone had been in her apartment. Her only safe place wasn’t safe anymore. Someone had been in her apartment.

  Her pistol was at work, locked in a desk drawer. Her Cheetah stun baton was on the little wall-mounted bookshelf above her kitchen table. Her gaze flew wildly around the room, looking for a weapon. There was nothing. The intruder might still be in her home and she was unarmed—and caught in panties and a T-shirt, no less. She’d never felt more vulnerable.

  The best weapon she could find was her alarm clock—battery powered, not heavy enough to really hurt anyone, but it was the best she could do. She gripped it like a cavewoman’s brain-clubbing rock and got a sight line on her kitchen. It was clear. She traded the clock for the Cheetah, then opened a drawer with her free hand and dug around for her biggest kitchen knife. It seemed cheap, flimsy, almost toylike now that she needed to use it for self-defense. But she was as heavily armed as she could make herself, so she checked the last hiding place in her apartment: her bathroom. It was empty.

  She went to relock her door, only to find it was already locked. She’d actually hoped she’d forgotten to lock it the night before, because now the truth was clear: she wasn’t safe at all. Not here. Her doors and windows were no protection. Someone had been standing over her in her bed. He could have beaten her with her own stun baton. He could have put that flimsy knife to her throat. Raped her. Killed her. Anything.

  Noise erupted behind her. She whirled, her breath frozen, her heart pierced by a million icy needles. She brought her feeble weapons to bear, but only in vain. It was just her alarm clock.

  It buzzed irritably on her countertop, louder than it had ever been. In truth it only seemed that way, and Mariko knew it. She was jumpy. The damn thing had taken her by surprise.

  She killed it and slumped to the floor. Her back pressed against her front door, and the cold of the floor tiles seeped into her feet and her ass. She felt naked. What now? she thought. Call the cops? You are the cops. Call Mom? Saori? They wouldn’t be any help. But Mariko had to call someone. She didn’t want to deal with this on her own.

  That in itself was an alien instinct. Self-reliance was one of her strong suits, maybe her strongest. But this invasion of privacy had shaken her to the core.

  Dialing 110 was the right thing to do after a burglary. It was what she would have advised anyone else to do. But Mariko didn’t do it. She grabbed her phone and dialed Han. “Get to my place as quick as you can,” she said. “Bring a fingerprinting kit with you, and don’t touch my door until you dust it.”

  • • •

  “Screw the prints,” Han said, “how are you?”

  “I told you, I’m fine,” Mariko said. They both knew she was lying and they both knew why, and Mariko wished Han could just leave it at that. “What did you find on my doorknob?”

  “Prints all over it—most of them yours, probably, but we know your guy definitely didn’t wipe it clean. No scarring around the keyhole, so I don’t think he used a bump key. No scuffs on the frame near the jamb either, so I don’t think he worked the bolt. But I’ve got this funny suspicion that you knew all of that already. What’s going on here?”

  “Weird stuff. Ninja stuff.” Mariko took the fingerprinting kit from him and started dusting her apartment, starting with the sword rack i
n the bedroom. “I checked with the night watchman; only four people came in or out all night, and they all live here. The security cameras tell the same story. My windows are all intact, all locked from the inside—”

  “Which hardly matters, since you live on the seventeenth floor—”

  “But I checked anyway, just to be thorough. And you’re going to love this: the door chain was latched too.”

  “What? That’s impossible.”

  “Clearly not.”

  “Come on. How could he—?”

  “I don’t know, Han. All I know is that when I come home I always slide the chain on the little thingy, and when I woke up this morning, the chain was on the little thingy.”

  Han poked his head in her bedroom. “So your perp couldn’t have come through the door.”

  “Nope.”

  “And he couldn’t have come through a window.”

  “Not unless he knows how to relock them from outside.”

  Han scanned the room, maybe looking for additional entries and exits. “So what’d he do, pass through the wall?”

  “Kind of looks that way, doesn’t it? And he walked out of here with a sword this big.” She spread her arms as wide as they would go. “Not exactly inconspicuous. I’ve had the radio on ever since I called you. No reports of a ninja creeping through the neighborhood with a giant sword.”

  “To hell with the radio. You need to call Mulder and Scully. This isn’t a home invasion, it’s a damn X-Files episode.” He studied her for a second. “Shit, Mariko, I’m sorry. This has to be scary as hell for you.”

  “I’m not exactly thrilled about it, no.” She looked away from him, and pressed her eyes shut and her lips together as if sheer force of will could keep her face from going red. She didn’t want to have this conversation with another cop—not even with Han, the one person she trusted more than anyone else on the force.