Year of the Demon

Mariko was embarrassed, but at least she got a sympathetic smile out of Han. “Chalk up a point for Oshiro,” he said. “Back to the other thing, I have to tell you I just don’t get it. Why are these guys trading speed just to make MDA? Why not just cook the MDA themselves? Cut Kamaguchi out completely?”

Mariko shrugged. “Maybe they can’t. Maybe the hexamine’s too hard to come by wherever they’re from.”

“Yeah, maybe.” Han went silent, frowning and looking out the windshield for a long time. At length he said, “Something’s not adding up. How much product are we talking about here? How much hexamine has Kamaguchi been selling them?”

“A barrel every few weeks,” said Mariko.

“So why haven’t we seen any arrests? If a new wave of psychedelic speed hit the streets, I’d have heard of it.”

“The Daishi got past you.”

“Yeah,” said Han, “and I’m mighty pissed off about that. My people are letting me down. But in a daily log it wouldn’t say ‘Daishi’; it would just say ‘amphetamine.’ We should have seen log entries with ‘MDA’ on them by now.”

“Maybe they’re selling it overseas? No. Never mind.”

Han shook his head too. Japan was expensive. Dealers here imported from Thailand, North Korea, Cambodia—the cheap markets. Export the other way didn’t make sense. Mariko wished she’d reached that conclusion a few seconds earlier, before she’d said the stupid thing she’d said. She supposed she should be glad she caught her mistake before Han had to correct her, but she was embarrassed nonetheless. It was the years of perfectionism that did it, the fear of her male counterparts seeing her as a girl instead of a policewoman. That wasn’t a big concern with Han, but still, even the little failures burned, lingering, like droplets of hot oil spat from a frying pan.

“So this Daishi,” she said, “what are the chances it’s the same stuff we seized from that packing company last night? I mean, it’s got to be, neh?”

“Got to be,” Han said. “We should set up a couple of buy-busts just to be sure, get ourselves a sample to compare it to—but I’m getting sidetracked. Get back to your meeting on the mound with Kamaguchi.”

“Okay,” Mariko said, “so our buyer marks Kamaguchi, plays to his ego by overpaying for the hexamine, then says he wants the mask and hints that he’ll overpay again—”

“So Kamaguchi thinks he’s got a live one, because this dumb-ass has been overpaying for months.” Han laughed in disbelief. “You’d think a career criminal would have seen that con before.”

“Yeah, these guys never made sense to me. Kamaguchi’s not a moron. He’s not even lazy. You wouldn’t believe how much work he puts into keeping his money off the books. If he worked half as hard as a car salesman as he does as a yakuza, he’d still be able to rent a place in Ebisu and none of his clients would ever try to play him the way he just got played.”

“Maybe so, but nobody pays for cars in amphetamines.”

“Antique masks either.”

“Touche.” He stopped to think for the space of about half a block—which wasn’t long, because he was driving a lot faster than Mariko usually saw him drive. “Wait. Why pay him at all?”

“Who? The Divine Wind?”

“Yeah. I mean, I get why he wants to be paid in Daishi instead of cash. His own product is shit, and it’s expensive to boot. The Daishi’s better all around. But why should these dudes pay at all? They’re obviously willing to steal from him; why not start there? Just waltz in and steal the mask from the get-go?”

“Would you piss off the Bulldog if you didn’t have to?”

“Well, no, now that you put it that way.” Han gunned it through an intersection to make a yellow light. “So you’re thinking what? They tried to play it straight at first, but then he strung them along—”

“Longer than they could wait.” Mariko nodded. “I think last night is just them running out of time and getting desperate.”

They sat in silence for a while, Han driving, Mariko watching the city fly by, both of them mulling over the idea. “All right,” Han said at last, “I’ll buy it. Still, the whole thing looks too good to be true for Kamaguchi-gumi, doesn’t it? They get better product, and more of it, and all they have to part with is a chemical sitting around some warehouse, a precursor chemical for a drug they don’t even cook.”

“So what? This is breaking news? Dealer tries to get top-quality dope for bargain basement prices? Not much of a headline, Han.”

“No, I’m asking, what’s in it for the Divine Wind? If a deal’s too good to be true on one side, then the other side’s getting the shaft, neh? And they had six months to think about this. They’ve got to be the dumbest bunch of drug dealers I’ve ever heard of.”

“You’re thinking like a narc. The way to solve this is to think like a cultist.”

“Huh.” Han thought for a second, then shook his head. Laughing at himself, he said, “See, this is what we need you for, Mariko. You know how you’re riding yourself all the time for being the new recruit in Narcotics? Well, stop. I’ve been swimming in this pool so long I forget there’s such a thing as dry land. We need you. You’re amphibious.”

“Gee, you really know how to make a girl feel good about herself.”

“Come on, you know what I mean.”

“Oh, I do. Amphibious. Very sexy. That line’s got to kill on the speed dating scene.”

At last she got the blush she wanted out of him. “Fine,” he said, “so I’m a Neanderthal. Guilty as charged. Will you teach me how to think like a cultist now?”

Mariko indulged in a self-satisfied smile. “The MDA’s a hallucinogen, neh? Perfect for tripping at, you know, prayer meetings or whatever. So maybe . . . maybe the priest wears the mask to heighten the trip.”

“So what are you saying? These guys are devil worshippers? Please don’t tell me they stole your sword to make human sacrifices.”

“I don’t know. I’m just spitballing here. But fanatics are willing to risk a lot for their faith, neh? It goes a long way toward explaining why they’re taking such awful risks to get a mask and a sword. Maybe they need them for some ritual that happens on a certain day—”

“Or when Venus is aligned with Jupiter or whatever.” Han thought about it for a moment, then nodded. “Yeah, could be. I guess we’ll find out soon enough.”

“How do you figure that?”

“We’re on our way to Intensive Care. One of our suspects lawyered up.”

19

Mariko didn’t care for hospitals. She supposed nobody actually liked hospitals, especially when, like Mariko, they’d recently been confined to one. She was laid up for a solid week after her sword fight with Fuchida, but that wasn’t why she had a hang-up about hospitals. It was her father’s death that made her so uneasy.

It wasn’t an easy thing to explain. There was no drama to it. She hadn’t carried him bleeding into the emergency room. She wasn’t in the room for his death rattle. She hadn’t been there at all. She’d known he was sick when she went off to school, but her parents hadn’t revealed how sick. He’d been weak for a long time by then, long enough that the daily fear of death had subsided. It was disturbing how quickly a family could return to business as usual even when one of their number was dying. Get the groceries, do your homework, clean the dishes, Dad’s got cancer. So Mariko went off to college with her father’s blessing, and then —in her memory it had only been a matter of days—her mom called to tell her he was dead.

For years after that, Mariko had wished she could have been in that hospital room. At a minimum, she wished she’d been the one to make the choice of whether or not to come. At eighteen she hadn’t had it in her to make that choice unemotionally; she would have dropped everything, no matter the effect on her GPA, and that was precisely why her parents hadn’t called. They knew their daughter well.