Year of the Demon fb-2

by Steve Bein

  Daigoro shook his head. “I cannot say how much rest we’re likely to get, either. We are quarry. The arrows bound for us are already in flight. And apart from all that, if we do not keep our tongues waggling, I’m apt to doze off and fall out of my saddle. Tell me, Goemon, why do you still ride with me?”

  Katsushima’s face grew stern. “You’re drowning, Daigoro. You need someone to help you keep your head above water.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re trying to carry your family and your father’s image and all the rest of it. It’s too much for a drowning man to bear, Daigoro. You need to let them go.”

  Exhausted as he was, Daigoro had trouble following the metaphor. He actually felt as if his armor were pulling him off his horse; it was not hard to imagine it dragging him underwater. “Speak plainly,” he said. “I do not understand.”

  Katsushima’s face grew sterner still. “I speak in circles because I don’t wish to give offense. We approach a crossroads, you and I. You have a problem in Shichio and a problem in your family. There is a single solution for both problems, one I’ve hinted at before. I can solve both problems for you with one stroke of my sword, but you bar me from doing so. You can solve it too, but you bar even yourself. A man can hold up his drowning friend, Daigoro, but only for so long. Sooner or later he must let him go or drown with him.”

  “I’m too tired for this, Goemon. Just tell me what you mean.”

  “No. You need to reach this conclusion yourself. Shichio means to marry your mother. In so doing he will destroy your clan forever. You cannot kill him; he is out of your reach. So what do you need to do?”

  “I don’t understand—”

  “Yes, you do. All it takes is one stroke of your sword to save your family name.”

  “Who—?”

  “You tell me, Daigoro. Who must die to save your family?”

  Daigoro’s pulse pounded in his ears. His breath came short and quick. He had to press against his saddle horn to keep himself upright. “My mother,” he said. “You’re telling me to kill my mother?”

  “Of course.”

  Daigoro stammered. A hundred objections bubbled up, but the only word he could make intelligible was “Why?”

  “Is it not clear? You should have put her out of her misery months ago.” Katsushima scowled, his voice harsh and low. He was losing his patience. Daigoro wished he could think faster, but he was just too tired, and Katsushima’s suggestion was too enormous for him to grasp.

  “No. I cannot—”

  “She is a constant distraction. Were it not for her, your negotiations with the Soras would have been a success, Inoue Shigekazu would be your ally instead of your father-in-law, Izu would be stable, and your house would be the stronger for it. Now she is the key that will unlock the Okuma clan. You cannot allow Shichio to take that key, Daigoro. If you don’t destroy it, he’ll use it to destroy you.”

  “No.” Daigoro’s heart pounded so hard he thought it might burst. He was scared and angry—angry not at Katsushima but at himself. Why could he not think faster? Everything Katsushima had said was true, but still, was there no counterargument?

  “There must be another way,” Daigoro said, but even to his own ears his voice sounded feeble.

  “Perhaps there is,” said Katsushima, “but that is why we stand at a crossroads. To me the right path is obvious. If you want to look for a different path, then here is where we part company. I cannot watch you destroy yourself, Daigoro. Standing up to Shichio and Hideyoshi was noble. Throwing yourself on Shichio’s sword is stupidity. And that is what you do if you allow him to marry your mother. He’ll turn your own men against you. It is more than foolish; it’s appalling, and I will not stand by and watch you do it.”

  “I’m so tired,” Daigoro said. “I can’t think. . . .”

  “What need is there for thinking? You need only to act. Ride with me, north and east, as fast as we can. Put your mother out of her misery. Save the rest of your clan.”

  “No. I can’t kill her, Goemon. I just can’t. And neither can I allow you to do it.”

  Katsushima frowned. “I will not kill her without your permission,” he said, “but I will not watch her sink you either. She is ballast, Daigoro. She will pull you under unless you ship her overboard.”

  With that Katsushima put his heels to his horse. Daigoro’s chestnut mare ambled to a halt, bending her head to eat a tussock of grass growing along the edge of the Tokaido. Daigoro was too tired to make her change her mind.

  He watched as the white dust settled in Katsushima’s wake. Now more than ever, he felt utterly alone.

  BOOK SEVEN

  HEISEI ERA, THE YEAR 22

  (2010 CE)

  41

  “Do I have to call him?”

  “Yeah, pretty much.”

  Mariko looked down at the phone in her hand, then looked back at her partner. She and Han sat at their desks in Narcotics, canned coffee at their beck and call. Phones rang, keyboards clicked, desk fans hummed, all background music to the ever-present murmur of a dozen different conversations. In short, the unit was abuzz, as well it should have been given the case Mariko was running. Cultist fanatics were at large in her city, well supplied with drugs, cyanide, and the willingness to distribute them liberally.

  Mariko’s sole advantage was a hard-nosed lieutenant who was willing to go to the mat with any commanding officer, anytime, to get what he wanted. Sakakibara reassigned every cop in his unit and commandeered another six or seven detectives besides, handing out orders like a blackjack dealer dealing cards. Back when Sakakibara first gave her this case, Mariko thought she was investigating the Kamaguchi-gumi on a simple trafficking ring. Now she lived under the cold, dark, looming shadow of a potential mass murder. She had two officers in the field trying to track down Akahata. Two others were working on Urano Soseki, the Kamaguchi-gumi’s capo, pressuring him to testify that Akahata was the one who delivered the Daishi. She paired another detective with a lab tech to sort out how much speed they’d seized in the packing plant raid and how to find a line on who cooked it. All of them reported to Mariko.

  But there was one lead on the Kamaguchi-gumi that Mariko had to follow herself. She took a deep breath to steel herself, poised her finger over her phone’s keypad, then thought better of it. “Han, you know I hate this guy.”

  Han blew his hair away from his face and took a sip of coffee. “Think of it as cultivating a contact,” he said. “This is police work, not a social call.”

  And you’ve been coloring outside the lines, thought Mariko. As far as she was concerned, Han’s judgment about good police work was suspect. But in this case he was right. She sighed and dialed the number.

  “Well, well, well,” said Kamaguchi Hanzo. “My hot little gokudo cop. I been wondering when I was going to hear from you.”

  Mariko already wanted to hang up. “I need you to tell me about your chemical supply company,” she said.

  “Fuck that. When are you going to give me my mask?”

  Mariko squeezed the phone; the plastic crackled in her grip. “We’re working on it. Tell me what you sold the Divine Wind.”

  “Hexa-something. Why ask me? Don’t you detectives keep a notepad or something?”

  “Just the hexamine? Nothing else?”

  “Nothing else.”

  “Don’t hold out on me, Kamaguchi. This is important.”

  “Look at the balls on you! What, you want me to sell them something else? I got girls, I got guns, I got whatever. Tell me where these cocksuckers are holed up and I promise I’ll deliver something they won’t forget.”

  Mariko rolled her eyes. “Did you sell them sodium cyanide?”

  “Hell, no.”

  “You sound pretty sure for a guy who only runs a front company. You can’t tell me you memorized every item in your inventory.”

  “You’re irritating as hell, you know that?”

  “The feeling’s mutual.”

  Kamaguchi snorted.
“I remember the cyanide because they asked me about it, okay? And I’ll tell you what I told them: I don’t deal in that shit.”

  “Why not?”

  “Prohibited substances list. There’s no money in it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Prohibited substances list. You buy that stuff, they watch you. You sell it, they watch you. You use it for anything dodgy, they watch you. Who’s got the time for it? I just sell other shit.”

  She cupped the phone against her shoulder. Whispering, she said, “Han, can I please hang up on this asshole now?”

  Han gave her a wink and a thumbs-up.

  “Good-bye, Kamaguchi-san.”

  She resisted the urge to hurl the phone at the wall. Instead she crushed it like a stress ball, squeezing more little crackling noises out of the plastic. “Tell me you got something good on the house,” she said.

  Han grinned. “Grand slam. Turns out it belonged to a cult member. She willed it to the Church of the Divine Wind right before she died.”

  “Not to Joko Daishi?”

  “If only. At least that way we’d have the dude’s real name in the will. But get this: the family got pissed that they didn’t get the house—”

  “Figures,” Mariko said. “It’s a nice house.”

  “It’s a damn expensive house. So one of the sons gets uppity and demands an autopsy. The rest of the family doesn’t go for it, but they okay some blood work. Guess what? The old bird tested positive for amphetamine.”

  A little thrill rippled down Mariko’s spine. “MDA?”

  “Can’t say. Can’t say on cyanide either—they didn’t test for it—but she was a geezer; it wouldn’t be that hard to induce a heart attack with a little speed.”

  That thrill chased itself up and down Mariko’s spine again. She felt a little guilty too; it was macabre to take pleasure in a hunch when that hunch was confirmed by a homicide. Nevertheless, she couldn’t help feeling encouraged; this murder reinforced her suspicion that the Divine Wind was willing to use cyanide-laced amphetamines to kill. “What else have you got?”

  “On the house? Let’s see.” Han reopened a window on his computer and drained the last of his coffee. “Five hookahs, thirty-eight jabs of heroin, big thing of cyanide. Everything says these guys split in a hurry, neh? I mean, there’s a ton of admissible evidence they could have stashed or destroyed or whatever.”

  Mariko nodded. Perps didn’t leave evidence behind if they could help it, and they almost never left expensive evidence behind. Whoever had been in that house, they’d left immediately after killing Shino. The only part Han had wrong was that it was admissible evidence; she and Han had gotten onto the house in violation of Akahata’s civil rights. She was glad they had evidence to draw inferences from, but nothing on Han’s list was worth a damn thing in court.

  “How about you?” he said. “You get anything?”

  “Pulled a couple of good prints from this,” she said, and she produced a carefully folded Ziploc bag from her back pocket. In it was the little fold-up Giants schedule she’d found next to the heroin on Joko Daishi’s altar.

  “Nice grab,” he said, clearly surprised to see the thing. “Where’d you get the Ziploc, by the way? Please don’t tell me you walk around with one in your pocket all day. If you’re going to go all TV cop on me, at least make it an evidence bag and carry a pair of tweezers.”

  “You’re a smart-ass.”

  “Guilty as charged.”

  “I swiped it from her kitchen,” she said. “And by the way, if anyone asks, you’re the one who swiped it from her kitchen. As long as you’re breaking regs, you can take the hit for stealing private property from dead little old ladies.”

  “Ouch.”

  “Pull that schedule out and tell me what you make of it.”

  He did as he was told, and crinkled his eyebrows just as Mariko did when she tried to make sense of the scribbles written on it. “What is this, some kind of prayer?”

  “That was my guess too.”

  “Look, today’s game is circled. I’ll bet somebody’s got tickets—and hey, if that prayer is for the Giants to win, maybe I’ll start praying to Joko Daishi too. They could use any help they can get.”

  “Go back a second,” Mariko said. “Tickets? For today’s game?”

  “Yeah, but if you’re thinking we might pull a lead out of that, you’ll have to tell me how we’re going to identify one nut job in a crowd of forty-two thousand.”

  Mariko’s fist renewed its stranglehold on her phone. She willed her fist to loosen, then took back the schedule and made a point of folding it slowly and precisely before bagging it again. She hoped it might calm her a bit. It didn’t work.

  Neither did angrily jamming it back into her pocket. “Han, I’ll be honest: I’m nervous. My gut tells me these guys are dangerous—a lot more dangerous than they’re letting on. And we have nothing. Akahata’s in the wind, and we haven’t so much as laid eyes on Joko Daishi, whoever the hell he is.”

  “So what’s our next move?”

  Mariko shrugged, wishing she had more to go on, wishing the caffeine she’d been slamming would hurry up and give her brain the kick-start it needed. “Kamaguchi tells me cyanide is too heavily monitored for him to trade in it.”

  “Do you believe him?”

  “Can’t see why not.”

  “Then let’s hope the fact that it’s restricted means we won’t have too many distributors to run down.”

  They didn’t. Not for the first time, Mariko wondered how detectives had ever gotten along without the Internet. It would have taken days to make the headway she and Han made in twenty minutes. Han was the faster typist, and not because he had ten fingers to Mariko’s nine; even before her injury she’d always clunked along with two fingers on the keys. His keyboard sounded like little galloping horses; hers clicked and clacked sporadically, like a bag of microwave popcorn right before the ding. She’d always done better with the paperwork you had to fill out by hand.

  It was a funny word, paperwork, now that it rarely involved paper anymore. Screenwork was more apropos, or keyboardwork, or something like that. She wondered what Yamada-sensei would have had to say on the matter.

  Thinking of him made her think about all those yellowing handwritten notebooks sitting in stacks in her bedroom, and that gave her second thoughts about the cyanide lead. According to Yamada, anyone wearing the mask became obsessed with weapons. Maybe cyanide pills could count as weapons, but they seemed a bit tame compared to cutting someone down with a sword. Mariko suspected Joko Daishi had grander, bloodier visions than that.

  “Huh,” Han said, interrupting her reverie. “How about that? Apparently you can use sodium cyanide to mine gold.”

  “Yeah, I saw that,” Mariko said.

  “Seems like a better use for it than murdering people.”

  Mariko chuckled weakly. She’d followed the gold mining trail too. Han was better on the computer, but Mariko had a stronger sense of what might lead where. She supposed it came from putting in time as a detective outside of Narcotics. Han knew exactly where to follow drug leads, but Mariko was better at seeing the overarching patterns, the counterintuitive connections. What seemed like random trivia for Han seemed like dots to connect for Mariko.

  And she’d already connected a few. “We’re not exactly mineral-rich as a country, neh? I mean, where do you think the nearest gold mine is?”

  Han scrunched his brow and thought about it for a second. “Beats me. Could be California for all I know.”

  “Exactly. And we know sodium cyanide is on the prohibited substances list, so you’d need something like a mining license to buy it, neh?”

  “That or some other license, maybe for some other kind of industry.”

  “Right,” said Mariko. “So I tracked down how many companies are authorized to sell it—”

  “Nice.”

  “—and the answer is two.”

  “Nice!” Han made a fist-pump. “So we just need to fig
ure out who they’ve been selling to—”

  “Or who they’ve been selling to under the counter.”

  “Exactly. Because these guys have already shown they’re willing to go black market for their dangerous chemicals.”

  Mariko used to love the fact that she and Han thought the same way. Now she wasn’t so sure. It made communication a whole lot easier, and it hadn’t been so long ago that she’d also considered it a badge of honor. Han was a good narc, or so she’d been inclined to think, and so if her mind worked like his, she must have been a good narc too. But that was before he’d stepped out of bounds, before he’d sent his CI to do what he couldn’t legally do himself. A vision flashed in her mind: Shino sprawled facedown on the floor, his skin sunburn red against the bright yellow of his Lakers jersey. If Mariko thought like Han, and if Han was capable of getting an innocent person killed, then what did that say about Mariko?

  She elected to avoid that question for the present, choosing instead to let the moral questions take a backseat to practicality. With no small amount of trepidation, she called her CO. Sakakibara answered with a growl.

  “Good morning, sir.”

  “This better be good,” he said.

  “Bad morning, sir?”

  “Hell, no. It’s not like I’ve been wringing favors out of every last lieutenant in this department to get you the manpower you need. Do you have any idea what this is going to do to my Thursday nights?”

  “Sir?”

  “Poker, Frodo. Lieutenant Tortoise in Violent Crimes takes for-fucking-ever deciding whether to call or fold. Like we all don’t know what’s coming. It would be easier on everyone if I could just knock him over the head with a baton and take his wallet. But no, the stupid bastard wants in, and thanks to this Divine Wind of yours, I needed to wangle two more detectives to your detail. So you’ve got them, damn you, but it’s going to ruin my Thursdays until I take enough of his money that he needs to start working a night job.”

  “You’re a hero and a public servant, sir.”

  “How nice for me. Now what the hell are you calling me for?”