Daughter of the Sword (37 page)

He walked into Tokyu Hands and boarded the steep and slender escalator. He rose above picture frames and scrapbooks, calligraphy paper and flower arranging tools, colored pens and modeling clays, fully seven floors’ worth of salvation in the form of distraction. As he neared the eighth floor he could smell coffee and stale pastry. The smooth glide of the escalator carried him up into view of the snack lounge, full of chattering women and the occasional table of
schoolgirls. The crowd did nothing to improve Fuchida’s general opinion of women. Not one in twenty of these would be worth even five minutes’ conversation, and of those, fewer than half would be worth seeing naked.

The only men to be seen wore white cloth hats and white-buttoned jackets, and worked behind the food counters—with one exception. Shaggy peroxide hair and a rumpled gray suit jacket identified Bumps Ryota even from behind, even from across the cafeteria crowd.

Fuchida made his way over to Bumps, who was sitting with a frightfully skinny woman with cute hair but bad teeth. “Come on, one bump,” she was saying to him. “Just one. Why not?”

“You see that panini grill back there?” Bumps pointed; the girl turned to look. “Your sister would fry my balls in it if I sold to you. Besides, I’m into E now. I don’t even have what you’re looking for.”

“But you know someone who does,” the girl said. She hadn’t noticed Fuchida standing over Bumps’s right shoulder. Neither had Bumps, for that matter, but the fact that the girl hadn’t noticed him bespoke a focus only seen in jonesing addicts.

And swordsmen, Fuchida realized. With his beautiful singer in hand it was easy to lose himself. Even in the midst of a forest, he would be blind to every leaf; there was only the sword and its target.

“No,” said Bumps. “I give you a name, I’ll be in a world of shit. Not just with cops either. Your sister, she’ll talk to
my
people too. I can’t help you.”

“You heard him,” Fuchida said. “Get lost.”

Bumps jumped. The skinny woman shot the kind of glare Fuchida would expect from a cornered rat, all anger and vulnerability. He gave her a look in return: the look of the eighty-kilo Akita that cornered the rat.

Strange, he thought as she got from her chair. He’d gone so long without police detection, and yet even ordinary people had instincts enough to know a killer on sight. “Good girl,” he said, and fixed his glare on her until she made her way shakily to the down escalator.

“Bumps,” Fuchida said, sitting in the chrome-and-pleather chair opposite him. The seat was still warm. The girl must have been nearly feverish for Fuchida to feel that through his clothing.

He laid the sheathed sword across his lap. Bumps eyed it nervously. A few other customers noted it too, but this was one of the few places in Yokohama where carrying a sword might be excusable. Stores like this still sold the cords and
washi
paper and wood lacquer needed for traditional sword displays. Police wouldn’t allow the weapon, of course, but in neighborhoods like this the police didn’t need to patrol much.

“H-hello,” Bumps said at length.

“Surprised to see me?”

A nervous smile flickered across Bumps’s lips. Fuchida found the man’s graying teeth disgusting.

“Still selling to the housewife set, are you, Bumps?”

“It’s good business. They got plenty of money, and nobody wants to lose face if they get caught. No risk of husbands pressing charges.”

“Nice. Sell much E to these broads?”

Bumps swallowed. Fuchida wasn’t supposed to know about that, and until this moment Bumps hadn’t been sure how much Fuchida had overheard. He was certain now, though. Fuchida could see the color draining from his face.

“Some,” Bumps stammered. “Their, uh, daughters. They buy too.”

“Oh. Good.” Fuchida smiled. “And cops? How much are they good for?”

Bumps’s thin fingers gripped the tabletop. “Uh—I don’t really know, Fuchida-san.”

“Seems like you should. Seems like you talk to them an awful lot.
Neh?
”

“That girl,” Bumps said, “the one who was here a second ago, she’s a pain in the ass. I just told her that stuff to get her off my back.”

“Really? Seemed to me maybe you said all that stuff because her sister’s a cop.
Neh?
That’s what I gathered from your riveting conversation. But I guess you must be playing the family angle just to get rid of her, huh?”

“Uh. Yeah.”

“Their family named Oshiro by any chance?”

“I—” Bumps said. “I, uh, I don’t know, Fuchida-san.” The knuckles on the table grew pale.

“The reason I ask,” Fuchida said, leaning forward to rest on his elbows, “is that there’s a lady cop in Tokyo named Oshiro. Lady cops are pretty rare,
neh
?”

Bumps shrugged. He smelled like dirty laundry, even over the smells of the kitchen. “I don’t know, Fuchida-san.”

“Too bad. I was hoping you could help me out. See, I’ve got this lady cop on my ass. Oshiro. She went and crawled so far up my ass I find myself thinking about her every time I have to take a shit. And when I think about her, you know what I think, Bumps?”

“N-no.”

“I think, how in the hell did this lady cop get on to me in the first place? So I called my guy in the TMPD and I asked him. You know what he told me? He said this Oshiro that’s up my ass is the same Oshiro that busted your ass for possession a couple of weeks back.”

“Oh, yeah.” Bumps gave him a nervous laugh and a meth-mouth smile. He couldn’t seem to decide whether to look Fuchida in the eye or to look at the sword in his lap. “Uh, yeah, I remember her. Major bitch,
neh
?”

Fuchida laughed. Bumps said it like he was afraid of her. Fuchida couldn’t imagine living a life like that, being afraid of people who weren’t even in the room.

He toned his laughter down to a thin, polite smile, and even that caused Bumps to flinch in fear. Fuchida relished it. People knew what to do with a madman swinging a sword. No need to come to grips with fright; all they had to do was run screaming. A gentleman with a sword, though—that was an enigma. It was hard to know whether to placate him or to make a mad dash for the door. Fuchida enjoyed watching the indecision play on Bumps’s sallow face.

At last Fuchida broke the silence. “Is she a bitch? I haven’t had a
chance to get to know her. But I suppose she’d have to be if she was going to fry your balls in a panini grill. This Oshiro, she
is
the one you were talking about a minute ago,
neh
? The tweaker’s sister?”

Bumps shook his head. The stink of unwashed hair blended with his dirty laundry smell. “Fuchida-san, I got no idea—”

“That’s all right. I can just go downstairs and ask your friend the tweaker. Hell, I can hook her up with some meth, since she’s having trouble getting that from you. She’ll probably be more than happy to talk to me then. But here’s the thing, Bumps. I had my mind all made up that I was going to go easy on you. Dealers in this town, they’re dropping like flies these days. It’s some crazy fucker with a sword that’s killing them. Maybe you heard about that.”

“Uh. Yeah. I heard.” Bumps’s eyes flicked back to the sword in Fuchida’s lap.

“Turns out they were talking too much, Bumps. The wrong ears were listening. Just like you,
neh
? But you were going to get lucky. I had my mind all made up that I wouldn’t lose my temper with you. I was going to play it nice and discreet. And now I find out you’ve been talking to cops.”

Bumps’s eyes careened like
pachinko
balls. They gauged the width of the table, the distance to the escalator, maybe comparing these to the reach of Fuchida’s blade. “Fuchida-san…”

“What’s good to eat here, Bumps?” Fuchida leaned back in his chair. “All this talk of panini is making me hungry.”

Bumps burst from his chair, sending it clattering to the linoleum floor. With a shriek he dashed for the escalator, colliding with every shopper between him and it. He careened off a trash bin, then fought his way onto the up escalator and scrambled madly downward.

Fuchida walked to the elevator and pressed the button with the curled knuckle of his forefinger. When diners looked at him, he shrugged, looking for all the world as if there wasn’t a sword in his left hand. He lost sight of Bumps’s wrinkled jacket as Bumps tumbled over the rubber handrail of the up escalator, landing gracelessly on the metal stairs gliding downward.

The elevator dinged and opened. Stupid, Fuchida thought. Bumps was considerably safer in public. But Bumps’s judgment wasn’t what it should have been. He suffered from that problem all too common among dealers: he partook of his own product. Stupid.

The button for the ground floor glowed under Fuchida’s knuckle and the burnished steel doors glided shut. He slid his beautiful singer a few inches out of her sheath, then slid her home again, drew her out and slid her home, enjoying the sound of her steel. It was a song he felt more than heard, vibrations in his palm as steel moved across wood. He slid her out and home again, only a few inches, just enough to feel her song in the bones of his fingers.

The elevator opened on a crowd of undisturbed shoppers. Bumps hadn’t made it down yet. Perhaps good judgment had finally caught up with him. Perhaps he’d scampered off to a fire escape. Or perhaps he was hiding between aisles somewhere upstairs, still gripped by amphetamine-amplified fears of his own making, not foreseeing the futility of hiding in a store that was soon to close. It hardly mattered. Bumps was no longer Fuchida’s primary target.

Fuchida saw her half a block away, hugging herself, a cigarette glowing in her right hand. As he drew nearer, he could see her collarbones, the sharp corners of her hip bones. He’d seen her kind before. There was skinny, and then there was meth skinny. A lot of his girls went from the former to the latter, even though he always told them he wouldn’t have meth skinny dancing at his club. It wasn’t a moral principle. He just preferred a woman to have some jiggle to her, and besides, the meth made them jabber too much at the clientele.

“What’s your name?” he said when he drew close enough.

“Piss off,” she said, not bothering to look up from the sidewalk.

“You’ve got some fight in you. I like that.”

That made her look up, and when she saw the one she’d just told to piss off, she blanched. “You,” she said.

“Me.” Fuchida bowed.

“What do you want?”

“I know some girls who like to party. They have what you’re looking for.”

“No.” She took half a step back, her cigarette in front of her now, the world’s feeblest weapon of self-defense. “I need to go home.”

“Who are you kidding? You’re a wreck, sweetheart. How long have you been wearing those clothes?”

“Shut up. Go away.”

Fuchida smiled, then did as he was told. On his fourth step, without bothering to turn around, he said, “You’ve got the wrong idea about me. These girls I know, they’ve got a hot shower. Laundry. But you don’t need any of that, right?”

He made it another four steps before she spoke. “Why should I trust you?”

“Don’t,” he said with a shrug. “I don’t care.” But he stopped where he stood. He pulled a small silver case from his pocket, and from the case he produced a business card. “My club,” he said. “You want to talk to the girls I know, you come by. Any business you might want to do, they’ll take care of you.”

She came toward him with an air of feigned confidence, like she was ten years old and he was a dead animal her schoolgirl friends had dared her to touch. She took the card from his hand with a sassy snap of the wrist. “This is all the way in Akihabara.”

“I’m going there right now,” Fuchida said, pointing across the avenue. “My car is just across the street.”

For three seconds she stood there thinking. Then she said, “All right. But don’t try anything. My sister’s a cop. She taught me how to do stuff you won’t like.”

“I’ll keep my distance,” Fuchida said with a smile. “What’s your name?”

“Saori.”

53

The cell rang in Mariko’s purse while she was at her mother’s. Her fingers fished past the Cheetah and the compact and her key chain before they found the chirping phone.

“Oshiro?”

“Yes,” said Mariko, and then with her thumb over the receiver, “Just a second, Mom.”

“Sorry to bother you off duty,” said the voice on the other end. It was a deep male voice, vaguely familiar to Mariko, but she couldn’t place it. “We got a fifty-two keeps mentioning your name.”

Fifty-two. 10-52 was TMPD code for an ambulance request.

Saori.

“How is she?” Mariko said. Her heart pounded so hard that the words shuddered in her throat. “Is she alive?”

“It’s a male,” the cop’s voice said. It could only be a cop; no one else would use the term
fifty-two
. “Slender, average height. No ID, but he says his name’s Kawamura Ryotarō. You know him?”

“No,” said Mariko. Then, after a second, “Well, maybe. Which hospital?”

“Tokai. Better hurry, Oshiro. He’s bleeding bad.”

As soon as Mariko hung up, her mother was clinging to her arm, fingernails digging like a cat’s claws. “Who was it?” she said. “Is it her? Is she all right?”

“I don’t know, Mom. It wasn’t Saori. Maybe someone who knows something, though. Mom, I need to go.”

It took fully five minutes for Mariko to disengage herself from her mother, fifteen minutes more before she reached the hospital. She approached the desk attendant in a rush, and then for a moment she couldn’t remember the name the cop on the phone had given her. At last she said, “Kawamura. Kawamura Ryotarō.”

The desk attendant looked at Mariko’s badge, then directed her to the waiting area of the emergency room. Just then the big white ER doors bumped open, tapped at first by the foot of a gurney, then pulled to the walls by the invisible hands of automated hinges. On the gurney lay Kawamura “Bumps” Ryota.

Bumps had one purple cheek, the eyebrow purple on that side too, and a fat pillow of ice packs was bound to his abdomen by what looked like half a kilometer of gauze. An IV drip hung from a tall chrome pole, its plastic vein snaking down until it entered Bumps’s left forearm. He lay on clean white sheets, but blood spattered the blue jumpsuit of the paramedic wheeling the gurney. A uniformed cop followed him, sunglasses propped in his hair and reflecting the ceiling’s rectangular lights.