Year of the Demon

Mariko hadn’t had time to conduct her moral assessment yet. The high school boy wasn’t far wrong: Mariko hadn’t shot at him, but she’d sure as hell shot near him. And it seemed the kid and the prattling gaijin were thinking along the same lines: Mariko shouldn’t have pulled the trigger.

The decision seemed right at the time. Or rather, trying to decide had fractured her composure, so she derailed the decision process and let her instincts do the driving. But her gut instinct seemed right at the time, and it seemed right with the benefit of hindsight too. So why were those two so pissed off?

At last the truth finally struck her: neither of them knew about the bomb.

They’d seen her shoot an assailant she could have talked down. She could have stalled, placated, waited for backup, pepper-sprayed. She could have done anything, but as they saw it, her response to an unarmed man with a hostage in a simple choke hold was to shoot to kill.

Mariko turned from Han to the gaijin, ready to explain the misunderstanding. Then she caught herself short. Should she tell him the truth? Let him know how close he’d come to dying? Show him Akahata’s detonator? The guy was being a royal prick; did he even deserve an explanation?

More to the point, what were the ramifications of letting it slip that someone had managed to get thirty or forty kilos of high explosives into the Tokyo subway system? Mariko was perfectly happy for that decision to stay well above her pay grade.

“Mariko, who is this asshole?” Han pointed at the gaijin.

“He was just leaving,” Mariko said. Switching back to English, she said, “Sir, I’ll be more than happy to discuss the ins and outs of the Japanese legal system some other time, but for now I’m going to have to ask you to get the hell away from my crime scene.”

“Do you think I’m going to stand for this?” the guy said. “I’m going to—”

“Fuck off,” said Han.

The law student reacted as if Han had slapped him in the face. Perhaps he hadn’t expected to hear a second Japanese cop speaking English. More likely, it was the first time he’d ever heard a Japanese person drop the F-bomb. Either way, it made him go stand somewhere else to wait for a lieutenant to complain to.

“Why, Detective Watanabe!” Mariko said, reverting to Japanese again. “I had no idea you spoke such fluent English.”

“And I had no idea anyone in this department remembered it doesn’t actually say ‘Han’ on my business card. No wonder you made sergeant. You’ve got a mind made for paperwork.”

“Now that’s low.”

“So you’re okay, then?”

Mariko felt her pulse quicken. Even while he was joking, his attention had never wavered from how she was coping with shooting Akahata. Now that things had calmed down a little, Mariko found herself feeling more conflicted than she’d realized at first. She knew she’d fired in self-defense, and in defense of the lives of everyone else on that platform. But there he was, staring blankly at the ceiling, a puppet snipped from its strings. And there was Mariko, with a second death on her hands. After Fuchida, that made two this year. More than the rest of Narcotics combined. And yet she didn’t know what else she could have done. She’d given Akahata the option of submitting peacefully and he hadn’t taken her up on the invitation. A bullet in the brainpan didn’t seem out of line.

At least not to Mariko. A few dozen onlookers still lingered on the opposite platform, and by now one of them had probably recognized her. Her fame after the Fuchida affair might have been short-lived, but her missing finger was memorable and it only took one eyewitness to spot it. Reflexively she stuck her right hand in her pocket, knowing it was far too late to start any attempt at damage control. Even as she tabled her own moral assessment for later, even as she told her partner she was okay, she wondered what the consequences would be for killing a man that every last bystander would describe as being unarmed.

Whatever the consequences might be, there wasn’t a thing she could do about them at this point. Even if there were, she could hear a platoon of cops coming down the stairs, and when they reached her they would need orders. She had a shell-shocked teenager to deal with, a body to zip up and roll away, a bomb to quarantine, a major subway station to restore to working order, and if she really got cracking she might get it done by midnight. “Seriously,” she told Han, “I think I’m all right. Ask me again in a couple of days, maybe. For now, let’s get this crime scene locked down.”

62

“Tell me again why you don’t want me to call the papers,” Mariko’s mother said.

She sat with her two daughters around her living room coffee table, all of them sitting on the floor and playing rummy. Mariko had been appraising both of them without saying a word. Her mom was wearing a polo shirt with a logo embroidered on it that Mariko didn’t recognize, probably from the manufacturer of something related to her beloved sport of Ping-Pong. She seemed radiant, not careworn, as she’d so often been of late. Of course she’d panicked after she found out her eldest daughter had been in the same room as thirty-odd kilos of high explosives, but that was after the fact, after she knew Mariko was safely at home. More important, Mariko guessed, was that her second daughter was also safely at home.

Saori was looking good. She’d regained some of the weight she’d lost. Her hair didn’t seem so brittle and her skin had regained its luster. The scabs she’d accumulated from when she was using, the bruises, the pallor, had vanished. Her teeth would never recover from the years of meth abuse, but otherwise she was back to being her contented, girlish self.

“Yeah,” Saori said, “you’re a hero, Miko. Didn’t you save, like, fifty people?”

“Fifty-two,” Mariko said. And killed one, she could have added. Akahata’s death had a completely different character than Fuchida’s. With Fuchida it was a simple quid pro quo: he gutted her, Mariko stabbed him back. But Akahata hadn’t actually done anything violent; he’d only threatened to. Mariko shot him preemptively. With a couple of days’ hindsight she’d expected to feel some guilt over it, but still none had come. She didn’t feel good about it, either. If anything, she was just apprehensive about what would come next.

A psychologist might have been able to explain the scientific reasons why she preferred to look ahead rather than back. Mariko knew she might seek out a psychologist someday. Every sensible cop in Narcotics had asked her how she was doing, and all the thoughtless ones had asked her what it felt like to shoot somebody. Sooner or later that would wear on her. And she hadn’t been in the field since the incident. Sakakibara benched Han and ordered Mariko to take two days of vacation time, which meant Mariko hadn’t so much as looked at her pistol since she’d checked out of post that night. Maybe she’d get the jitters when she came back to work, but for the moment she was thankful to be with her family, and that was all she needed.

Not for Saori, though. “Fifty-two,” she said, gripping Mariko’s wrist insistently. “Shouldn’t you get a headline for that? Shouldn’t I get a headline for that? My big sister in the news again—and not for what they’re saying now. Come on, Miko, you deserve better than this.”

“I can’t,” Mariko said. “For one thing, the department’s already given its statement. For another, you might have noticed they didn’t mention the bomb in that statement. You have to understand how important it is to keep that secret. I told you two because I think you have a right to know, but if the bomb scare gets out, it gives Joko Daishi exactly what he wants: mass panic.”

It didn’t feel good to say that out loud. It might be that fifty-two onlookers saw a cop shoot an unarmed janitor, but Mariko knew the truth. She knew how close they’d come. A dozen different theories were circulating on talk radio, doing the same kind of postgame could’ve-would’ve-should’ve analysis that followed every baseball game, and Mariko had the power to disperse all of their blissful ignorance with a simple phone call. So did her bosses. But TMPD couldn’t exonerate her without explaining about the bomb, and that they could not do. The mere mention of it would cause a rash of panic, plus God knew what else on talk radio.

No, better for Tokyo’s hero lady cop to take the momentary hit to her reputation. Everyone in Narcotics knew the score, the top brass did too, and if rumors of the truth managed to slip out here or there, at least there was no one to recognize them officially. Even Joko Daishi couldn’t do it. For one thing, he was more Tyler Durden than Osama bin Laden: not the type to claim credit for his political cause, most certainly not when his agent had failed. For another, inmates didn’t have the right to call press conferences. So the department quashed his cause