Year of the Demon

nicknames like “the Bulldog”—but in this case she guessed he was probably right about the mask thief being religious. For one thing, anyone who deliberately crossed the Kamaguchi-gumi would have to be pretty optimistic about the afterlife. For another, walking through an active crime scene dressed as a SWAT operative took a certain kind of lunatic fearlessness, one Mariko thought she was more likely to find among religious extremists than the dope slinger set.

And then there was the mask itself: an expensive trinket, yes, but the street value of the speed seizure was more than double what Kamaguchi’s insurance assessment said the mask was worth. Apart from religious fanaticism, Mariko couldn’t imagine what could tempt anyone to pay double its value and risk being caught in a police raid. It was a sure bet that the cops wouldn’t have seized the mask. It wasn’t contraband. The only reason Mariko had noticed it at all was that she’d half remembered that sketch of it in Yamada’s notebook.

So why not wait a few days to steal it? Someone could have recognized the perp wasn’t SWAT. He might have been masked and armored, but that limping, rolling gait was distinctive. It only made sense for the thief to come for the mask if he had to have it right then, at that appointed time for some appointed purpose, and that suggested a very weird belief set. Very weird, very specific, very strongly held—all of it pointed to a cult.

It pointed to the break-in at her apartment too. Centuries ago, the mask had some kind of connection to Inazuma steel. Last night, Kamaguchi’s mask and Mariko’s sword were stolen within hours of each other. It couldn’t be coincidence.

Now that Mariko thought about it, she wondered how the perp had stolen authentic SWAT armor too. Apart from the military, only SWAT could legally own fully automatic weapons, and so to say they kept their gear under lock and key was a gross understatement. Better to say it should have been as easy to steal a tank as to steal a bulletproof vest with SWAT’s label on it. Yet somehow this perp had the full getup.

Did these Divine Wind guys have an inside man? Was that how they’d known the raid was coming in advance? Or were they really modern-day ninja? Had they stolen the SWAT gear just as they’d stolen her sword? By passing through walls? It was impossible, and Mariko didn’t believe in the impossible. She was a detective; she believed what the evidence led her to believe. And faced with evidence of the impossible, a detective’s only choice was to reconsider what she meant by “possible.” In this case, that might mean a ninja clan operating in twenty- first-century Tokyo.

But that was something she’d have to sort out later. For now, she had a yakuza hit man bullshitting her. “So let’s pretend you don’t know why they want the mask,” she said.

“I’m telling you—”

“Never mind. How did they find out you have it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Come on. If you were an art collector, then yeah, maybe they’d come looking for you specifically. But you’re not. You just like to buy expensive toys that make you feel like you’re actually upper class instead of just pretending to be.”

“This is my house,” he said, slapping his chef’s knife down on the counter. “I’m not going to stand here and listen to—”

“Sure you are. You don’t know where to find the guys you’re looking for. You need me, neh? To save face. You lost your little plaything, and you’d better get it back before the street finds out you lost a mountain of speed too. As soon as word gets out that the Bulldog can’t protect his own doghouse . . . well, how long have you got before someone puts you to sleep?”

He glared at her with a raw, animalistic fury she’d only seen once before—in the eyes of his enforcer, Fuchida Shuzo, as Fuchida was trying to hack her to pieces. Kamaguchi would have strangled her then and there if he didn’t need her. She had no doubt of that. What she did have doubts about was his capacity for anger management. If she pushed him too far, he might kill her and figure out how to fix that little problem afterward. But backing down wasn’t a great option either. For bulldogs and yakuzas alike, fighting was all about posturing. To back down was to invite an immediate attack.

So Mariko took a gamble and just glared back at him.

If anything, he got angrier. “You’re walking pretty fucking close to the edge, girl.”

“You want to be gokudo, that’s where you walk.”

For a moment she thought she pushed him too far. He inhaled noisily, deeply, expanding his broad shoulders—maybe fueling up for a short but deadly fight that would cost Mariko her life. Then hung his head back and laughed. “You got some fire in you, that’s for sure. I can’t tell if I want to fight you or fuck you.”

“I can tell you what happens if you try either one. Now what’s it going to be? Are you going to tell me what I need to know?”

18

“They played him,” Mariko said. “The light’s green, by the way.”

“Who played him?” said Han. “What the hell happened up there?”

“Green means go,” she said.

At last he managed to direct some of his concentration away from her and back to driving. “Mariko, come on.”

“I told you already: those cult fanatics. The Divine Wind.”

“I thought you said he played them.”

“That’s what Kamaguchi thinks. He says a buyer approached him maybe six months ago through one of his front companies, some chemical supply place down in Odaiba. The buyer was a front man for this Divine Wind. The guy’s been buying hexamine by the barrel, making payment in Daishi. Kamaguchi says he conned the guy into paying double the volume he should have. But I think the buyer marked him as the owner of the mask from the beginning and wanted to play dumb.”

“Wait a minute,” Han said. “Did you say hexamine?”

“Yep.”

“So our buyer’s making MDA?”

“Looks like it,” said Mariko, happy to hear Han was thinking along the same lines. A boutique amphetamine like MDA fit in perfectly with Mariko’s mental profile of the cultist fanatic clientele. They were more likely to go for stimulants than depressants. MDA was both an upper and a hallucinogen, a religious experience in tablet form. Hexamine might have had a hundred industrial uses Mariko had never heard of, but in narcotics circles it was only known as a key ingredient in MDA.

“So his buyer’s got to be a hell of a cook,” said Han. “MDA’s rare, but this Daishi is something else. It’s not just the best speed on the street; it’s also cheap enough that these dudes can afford to sling it around by the truckload.”

“You’re thinking they’re gaijin?”

“Maybe. Or sourcing their precursor chemicals from out of country, anyway. Someplace cheap; it’s obvious they don’t need the cash. This mask, is it the only antique they’re interested in? Or have they been trading for a lot of stuff like that?”

“Kamaguchi says it was just the mask, just this one time. Otherwise it’s always the hexamine. But I think the mask thief and my sword thief are the same guy.”

Han’s eyebrows popped halfway up his forehead. “Seriously? That’s a hell of an inference.”

Mariko explained her logic. Han gave her a dubious look. “Twenty-first-century ninja clan, huh? Maybe you need to go back to the drawing board with that one.”

“Okay, fine,” she said, “the last part might be a little imaginative. But you have to admit it’s a hell of a coincidence, these two artifacts being stolen on the same night.”

Han agreed, his long hair flopping as he nodded. “Point taken,” he said, “but how does that help us make an arrest?”

“Well . . . it doesn’t. It’s still true, though.”