Year of the Demon

have listened the first time, Nanami-san. All we wanted to do was talk.”

Mariko cuffed Nanami’s wrists behind his back. His highlighted hair sponged up a lingering pool of early morning rainwater. “Sweet double-leg,” she said.

“Thanks,” said Han. “Sorry I was a few seconds late on the cutoff.”

“Don’t worry about it. Your jaw okay?”

Han stretched it out a bit. “Yeah,” he said, “but I think I chipped a tooth. See, Nanami-san? All you had to do was talk and we wouldn’t have to bring you in. But now I need to file an injury report, and that means we have to arrest you.”

“Shit,” Nanami said, “if I’da known you had all this pincer movement shit, I wouldn’ta lit out like that.”

Mariko felt him relax in her grip. It was only the repeat offenders that did that. First-timers always struggled a while, straining in vain against the cuffs. There was a bit of a learning curve before a perp could get comfortable in this situation, but Nanami was an old hand at this.

Mariko wished she could be as calm. The break-in this morning still had her rattled, and the theft of her sensei’s sword—her most prized possession—left her feeling bereft. Even her endorphin high wasn’t enough to distract her from her worries. All the more reason not to file an official report on the burglary; if Lieutenant Sakakibara thought she was distracted, he could bench her. She blinked hard, wiped the sweat off the back of her neck, and got her head back in the game.

“Speed,” she said. “You buy from the Kamaguchi-gumi, neh?”

“You know I do.” Nanami sighed it as much as said it, his tone sullen. He wasn’t wrong. They did know it, and that’s why Han had chosen to pay him a visit in the first place. Han had scores of street contacts. Developing a network was inevitable after eight years in Narcotics, but Han was the master: he seemed to have an informant for any given occasion. When they left post that morning, Mariko had said she wanted to talk to someone with Kamaguchi-gumi connections and who also knew where to score top-shelf speed. Han’s reply was inevitable: “I know just the guy.”

“So how’s their product?” Han asked Nanami.

“Kamaguchi? Used to be shit. Now it’s good. You wanna get off my head now?”

Han transferred some weight out of the knee on Nanami’s neck, but he didn’t let him go. “I heard the Kamaguchis have been last in the league,” he said. “Are you saying my intel is bullshit?”

Nanami tried to shake his head, but he couldn’t do it with his chin pressed into the concrete. “Damn, Han, you gotta treat me right. I’m talking, neh? Why you gotta get all police brutality on me?”

Mariko felt her heart rate surge at that—brutality was a serious charge, and it pissed her off when people threw it around like it was nothing—but Han just laughed it off. “You resisted arrest and assaulted an officer. Consider yourself lucky you don’t have a face full of pepper spray.”

Mariko’s phone buzzed in her pocket. She ignored it. “The sooner you talk, the sooner he can let you up,” she said.

“Used to be the Kamaguchis were way behind,” said Nanami. “In the market, neh? Now they’re killing it. They got the Daishi. New shit. Kamaguchi’s the only ones who got it.”

“Daishi?” Mariko had never heard of it. She looked at Han, who shrugged. Evidently he didn’t know any more than she did. “Any good?”

“Don’t get any better.”

Her phone stopped buzzing, only to start anew a couple of seconds later. Mariko guessed it was her mother, the only person she knew who would keep calling until Mariko picked up, so she thumbed a button through the fabric of her pocket to let her voice mail pick it up. She looked to Han and silently—with no more than a glance to Nanami, a slight tilt of the head, and a quick raise of the eyebrows—asked what they should do. Han replied by standing up, letting all the pressure off Nanami’s neck. Once again Mariko felt thankful to have a partner whose stream of thought aligned so closely with her own. For one thing, it allowed such acts of near telepathy, which was very handy when neither of them wanted to reveal to a street connection that they’d never heard of this Daishi. For another, thinking like a good narc meant she was a good narc.

She pointed to her jawline and gave Han a querying look, and he replied with a nod and a thumbs-up: in response to her unasked question, he confirmed that his jaw and his tooth were fine, and they wouldn’t need to arrest the kid after all. “Next time when we say we just want to talk,” she said, unlocking the cuffs, “maybe you should consider the possibility that we just want to talk.”

Nanami got to his feet. He knew his part in this unspoken conversation too: he hadn’t seen any of Mariko’s communication with Han, but the fact that they let him stand of his own accord meant he wasn’t going to jail this morning. He gave them a short, contrite, professional bow and left.

Once again the phone buzzed in Mariko’s pocket. “Hold on,” she told Han. “My mom’s having a fit.” She answered the call with an exasperated “Yeah?”

“That’s not a tone you want to take with me,” said a rasping male voice. “You don’t want to ignore my calls either.”

Mariko looked at the caller ID and couldn’t believe her eyes. KAMAGUCHI HANZO, it said. The Bulldog. Son of Kamaguchi Ryusuke, underboss of the Kamaguchi-gumi. Former confederate of Fuchida Shuzo, the yakuza enforcer Mariko had killed in her now-famous swordfight. As the Kamaguchi-gumi’s equalizer, the Bulldog had the contract on Mariko’s life, and unless Mariko missed her guess, the Bulldog had passed up a chance to kill her this morning. He’d stolen Glorious Victory instead—though the question of why was a mystery that was never far from her thoughts.

She almost put the Kamaguchi on speakerphone, then thought better of it and just beckoned Han to listen in with her. “Bulldog-san,” she said, more for Han’s benefit than anything, “you want to tell me how you got this number?”

“Heh. Not by asking politely.”

Mariko would not be intimidated by this man—or at least not let him know she was scared. “I’m beginning to think you’ve got the hots for me,” she said. “First you break into my apartment. Then you beat up some poor guy to get my phone number. I’m flattered.”

“What? Break into—? Ah, fuck it. Where are you at? I’m sending a car for you.”

She and Han looked at each other in disbelief. Mariko had to take a second look at her phone, as if to verify that it was still in her hand, that she’d actually dragged herself out of bed, that this whole god-awful morning hadn’t been some terrible dream. “And what makes you think I would voluntarily get in a car with you?”

“I got a bargain for you. I think you’re going to like it.”

She gave the phone another quizzical look. “A bargain?”

“You heard me. You get me something I want and I’ll give you something you want.”

Mariko couldn’t tell which she felt more: confusion or fury. Two seconds ago he seemed to have no idea about her break-in this morning. Now it sounded like he was offering Glorious Victory as a bargaining chip.

In the end, fury won out. “Now listen here, you son of a bitch. I’m not going to be dragged into some kind of bullshit bartering game for my own property. You bring my sword back; then we can talk.”

“I got no idea what you’re talking about, you loopy—”

“Go to hell,” Mariko said. Then she hung up.

Han gawped at her in amazement. “Was that really Kamaguchi Hanzo?”

“Yeah.” Her phone rang again. She clicked the call directly to voice mail.

“The Kamguchi Hanzo? Like, the Bulldog crazy guy Kamaguchi Hanzo?”

“Yeah.”

“And you told him to go to hell?”

“I guess so.” Her phone chirped again. She clicked to ignore it again.

“Mariko, this is a golden opportunity. You need to take that call.”

“What?” Mariko shot him a you-need-to-go-back-to-the-loony-bin sort of look. “You’re kidding me. ‘Golden opportunity’?”

Her phone buzzed in her fist again, and Han nodded toward it. “Think about it. What’s the one thing a detective needs more than anything else to work narcotics?”

The look on Mariko’s face didn’t change. “A partner who doesn’t want to see her shot dead by a