Year of the Demon (44 page)

Two of her B-side cops spotted the bike, broke free of the fight, and brought their weapons to bear. Joko Daishi whirled again, leaning so low his knee touched the floor. It was the same squealing spinout as before, only this time he used it as a leg sweep. His back tire arced wide, breaking bones, reaping both cops to the ground. He rammed the throttle again and bore down on Mariko like a charging warhorse.

She didn’t know what happened to the rest of her element. Han was gone. The cops with them were gone. The door behind her was still open; she didn’t know why, didn’t care. For Mariko the whole world was herself and Joko Daishi.

She put her front sight right on that iron demon mask but she couldn’t pull the trigger. It would be the first time she’d ever fired her weapon in the line of duty. She was shooting left-handed and rattled. And she had five cops behind her target. Her training took over; she simply couldn’t risk the shot.

He was nearly on top of her. Her body weight wouldn’t be enough to slow him. He’d blast her right through the open doorway and keep accelerating. There was no one else behind her; she was literally the last line of defense. And she stepped out of the way.

The technique that her TMPD aikido class called
irimi-nage
looked a lot like the one American pro wrestlers called a clothesline. She caught Joko Daishi with it right under the chin. If she were an American wrestler, it probably would have torn her arm clean off, but she didn’t match her target power to power. She just redirected his momentum upward and backward, absorbing none of it herself. The world went into slow motion. The motorcycle roared past her, loud as machine gun fire. Mariko turned her
irimi-nage
downward. Joko Daishi hit the floor like a meteor.

43

I
n the aftermath, coming down from her adrenaline high, Mariko took stock of her surroundings. The giant storeroom—and in a mattress shop the store room was truly gigantic—wasn’t as empty as she’d first thought, though obviously there was room enough to ride a motorcycle. Once there must have been racks or bins big enough to contain mattresses, but those had gone. A couple of forklifts still remained, abandoned in a corner. The right-hand wall was dominated by a production line of sorts, a long string of collapsible tables blocking both fire doors on that side. D-team hadn’t even managed to breach the building; their entries were blocked, locked from the inside, useless.

Near the tables, black steel barrels and plastic drums of a similar size stood like troops in rank and file, festooned with warning labels instead of insignia. At first glance, Mariko had expected to see an assembly line for cyanide-laced MDA. She’d seen enough stash houses to recognize a meth lab for what it was, and this wasn’t that. This room smelled more like motor oil than ammonia. In a quick scan of the folding tables Mariko saw pipe cutters, spools of wire, a cardboard box full of outmoded cell phones, a smaller box full of SIM cards—nothing useful for a meth cook. The only items that made sense to her were the hexamine and sodium cyanide labels on the barrels and drums.

Even in retrospect it took some concentration to string together the chain of events. B-team had been the first to enter, and Joko Daishi’s cultists had mobbed them. It must have been at about that time that someone hit the button to open the big loading dock doors. That might have been Joko Daishi, who would then have gone for his bike.

However that went down, another mob of cultists had been heading to cut off Mariko’s element at the very instant she booted the door to the storeroom. Even in the heat of the moment, she’d thought the door had given way more easily than it should have. It seemed to have exploded away from her foot. But what probably happened was that one of the cultists was opening the door just as she kicked it in. It must have struck him full in the face, knocking him unconscious. Mariko shot right past him, but the rest of her team had run smack into his cohort of cultists. Han and the others on A-team were mobbed, but they handled their fight better than B-team, which was why Joko Daishi made his run at the A-side door. Mariko just had the bad luck to be the only one left standing in front of it.

The final tally was sixteen Divine Wind cultists, plus their leader and prophet, plus one more unexpected treasure: Glorious Victory Unsought. Mariko spotted the empty scabbard first, lying empty on one of the collapsible plastic tables, and imagined the worst: the cult had sold the sword for drug money. When one of her officers announced he’d found a giant sword, relief surged through Mariko’s veins like morphine. Then she asked where it was, and when he pointed her toward what was left of Joko Daishi’s motorcycle, she thought she might throw up on her shoes. The reason her sword wasn’t in its scabbard was that the cultists had mounted a sheath for it on the bike, and now the bike was a debris field twenty meters long, ending in a crumpled heap wadded up against the wall and suppurating oil.

Emotionally, Glorious Victory Unsought ranked with the few existing pictures of Mariko’s father, who, because he’d always been the family photographer, rarely appeared in their photo albums himself. Sometimes Mariko wondered whether her family would be offended by how much sentimental value she found in Glorious Victory Unsought. She’d only known Yamada-sensei
for a matter of weeks, yet somehow he’d become a grandfather to her, a mentor and role model. What did it mean that she held her sensei’s last gift on par with precious family photos? Mariko didn’t even know how she felt about that herself. She only knew that it was true, and that she’d never forgive herself if her Inazuma blade was reduced to a steel ribbon entangled in the remains of the bike.

But she was lucky, or else Master Inazuma’s masterpiece was bound to a different fate. The bike had fallen on its left side and Glorious Victory’s scratch-built scabbard was mounted on the right. Three different colors of fluid leaked from the wreckage, and the air above it shimmered with heat, but the sword sat on top unharmed.

The only other material items in the win column were a couple of mostly empty barrels of hexamine and sodium cyanide. No MDA, no speed, no other drugs. In the loss column she had two cops from B-team nursing leg injuries bad enough to leave them in the fetal position gritting their teeth and awaiting an ambulance. She had no ID on Joko Daishi and he wouldn’t offer any other name. There was no sign of his lieutenant, Akahata, though Mariko had placed an APB on his motorcycle. But her most significant loss was her composure.

She hadn’t backed up her partner in a fistfight, which, technically, was all to the good, since of her element she was the only one able to keep a weapon trained on Joko Daishi. She hadn’t been able to bring herself to shoot, which was also good, since Joko Daishi had—miraculously—survived being snagged by the chin off the back of a speeding motorcycle, and so they now had their prime suspect alive to interrogate. She’d hastily orchestrated a raid that could have gone much worse but didn’t. Her officers were outnumbered because a quarter of their force never actually made it into the building. They were uncoordinated in their movements. It was only because they all performed admirably that no one got shot. In other words, with the lone exception of her perfectly executed
irimi-nage
, Mariko had fucked up everything she could possibly have fucked up, and yet somehow everything had worked out for the best—or if not for the best, then pretty damn well, all things considered.

Self-confidence didn’t come easily to Mariko. She knew she was good at her job, but the job was relentless. Tiny errors could have major ramifications, and overshadowing that was the constant threat of being seen as incompetent just because she was a woman. Losing her right forefinger had set her at least a year behind on the pistol range, a fact that wouldn’t have mattered much in any other outfit in the country. Most beat cops went from academy to retirement without ever drawing a weapon, because most police work was reactive. Apart from traffic violations, most cops rarely witnessed a crime; the calls always came after the fact. But Narcotics didn’t just react; it initiated action too, and that meant Mariko was might have to draw down on people now and again. How was she going to do that if she couldn’t trust her aim?

She should have taken the shot. Joko Daishi had come within a millisecond of killing her. She could have changed her angle; even crouching down and firing upward would have been enough to take C-team out of harm’s way. That should have been her instinctual response, but instead she’d committed an egregious mistake: she thought about it.

She remembered Yamada-sensei’s
term for that. Paralysis through analysis. Han would say the same thing about baseball that Yamada said of swordsmanship: hitting a moving target had to be done automatically or not at all. Deliberate concentration could only screw it up. Marksmanship was no different. Yamada-sensei
once told her it was better to drop the weapon than to get tangled up in thinking. At least that way no one would get hurt.

That meant the next best alternative was to quit Narcotics and start working a beat instead. Go the rest of her career without any real risk of shooting or being shot at. Her mother would have loved it. And Mariko would have given up everything she’d worked so hard for, for so many years.

She could have missed with her
irimi-nage
. She could have broken every bone in her arm. She could have killed Joko Daishi, just the same as if she’d shot him, but with a lot more risk to herself and her fellow officers. So much had been at stake, and Mariko’s nerve had failed. Paralysis through analysis. She wasn’t sure she’d ever forgive herself.

“Hey,” said Han, “you okay?”

“What?” Mariko paid only enough attention to know he was there. “Yeah,” she said distantly, “I’m fine.”

Han clapped her on the shoulder. “This was a win, Mariko. Come on, we’ve got a crazy-ass cult leader to interrogate.”

That snapped her out of her reverie. “He’s conscious?”

“Conscious? Hell, he’s walking around.”

It was impossible. Joko Daishi must have hit a hundred kilometers an hour by the time she ripped him off the bike. So when she saw him walking, a cop pushing him by his handcuffed wrists, the demon mask pushed up onto the top of his head, all she could say was, “You should be dead.”

He laughed—a good-natured laugh, amiable, not forced. “You cannot kill me. It is not yet my time.”

Han aped his laugh right back at him. “If you’d have landed on your head instead of your shoulders, it would have been your time, all right. We’ve got a couple of murders to pin on you—a kid named Shino and the little old lady whose house you killed him in—but when it comes time to charge you, I’ll make sure riding without a helmet makes the list.”

“I have seen the hour of my death,” said Joko Daishi, “and also the manner. I shall die by the sword.”

Mariko didn’t care if that was a biblical reference, a deliberate jab at her famed samurai showdown, or just the ramblings of a grade-one concussion. One way or the other, the guy was a nutcase.

He was smaller than she’d thought. He’d been downright terrifying on that motorcycle, his beard and hair streaming from his devil’s face as if his head were ablaze and trailing black smoke. He did not look at them when he spoke, but rather stared off into the distance, his tone reverent, as if there were a god in the room for him to talk to. Again Mariko reached the same conclusion: nutcase.

Something about him was familiar, but she couldn’t put her finger on it until they’d walked him all the way to the wall. They put his shoulder blades against the dusty cinder blocks and made him sit, hands cuffed behind his back, and every last movement should have hurt like hell. He was lucky to be alive. He wore white clothes, loose but otherwise nondescript, certainly not padded like motorcycle leathers. Given how he’d landed off the bike, his entire back should have been in spasms.

Mariko could explain that away easily enough: his cult gave him easy access to kilos upon kilos of speed. He’d feel pain when he came down off his high, but not until. Yet he limped, an odd, rolling gait that couldn’t have come from Mariko’s high-speed takedown. If it wasn’t from pain, it must have been from a pre-existing injury, and Mariko would have sworn she’d seen that limp before.

Sudden insight flashed. She
had
seen it before, only a grainy image of it, on a low-fidelity security camera feed. “You’re the one who stole the mask,” she said.

“He is?” Han blurted.

“I saw him on the Bulldog’s security camera tape. He walked right past us to steal that mask from Kamaguchi Hanzo. Dressed head to toe in SWAT armor, remember?” She rounded on Joko Daishi. “That was a nice touch.”

“There is no place the Wind cannot reach,” he said.

“And I’m guessing you’re the same son of a bitch who broke into my apartment and stole my sword.”

He responded with an eerie, peeping-through-the-window kind of smile that gave Mariko the creeps. She’d been eyed up and down like a piece of meat before. Guys did that all the time, responding with an “I’d hit that” smile when they liked what they saw. This wasn’t like that. This was the smile of a serial rapist, one who was willing to kidnap and batter and bury alive because he didn’t really understand that other human beings were real. The “I’d hit that” guys viewed women as sex toys; Joko Daishi saw people as children’s toys: fascinating in their own way, but hollow, incapable of pain or fear, worth only as much as he valued them. And he had watched Mariko in her sleep.

Chills washed over Mariko like an icy wave, raising goose bumps all over her body. A vision flashed in her mind: Joko Daishi looming over her bed, silent, ghostly, masked behind the iron face of a demon. He had the sinister patience of a stalker, an invisible, disquieting, perpetual presence. It was every woman’s deepest dread: the ex-boyfriend who would never relent, never disappear, never let her go.

“Is that true?” Han demanded, snapping Mariko out of her nightmare. “Did you break into my partner’s apartment?”

There was that smile again. “There is no place the Wind cannot reach.”