Steve Bein: Year of the Demon

Thinking about her missing finger made her think about the last time she had to point a pistol at a human being. Fuchida Shuzo had cost her more than her trigger finger. She’d actually flatlined after he rammed his katana through her gut, and she had matching scars on her belly and back to prove it. But more than this, he’d scarred her self-confidence. Everyone on the force knew they could die in this line of work, but Mariko had died, if only for a few minutes, and ever since then she wondered how things might have gone if she’d pulled that trigger even a tenth of a second earlier—if she’d put a nine-millimeter hole right in his breastbone, if she’d spared herself the weeks of rehab, if she’d earned herself a bit of detached soul-searching about the ethics of killing in the line of duty rather than ruminations on everything she’d done wrong to let things get that far.

Those ruminations plagued her day and night, and images of Fuchida and his sword flashed in her mind every time she visited the pistol range. Sometimes it got so bad that she couldn’t even pull the trigger. The more she needed to hit the target dead center, the more she got mired in the fear of failure, and once she fell that deep into her own head, she couldn’t even put the next shot on the paper.

Her former sensei, Yamada Yasuo, had a term for that: paralysis through analysis. Swordsmanship and marksmanship were exactly the same: the more you thought about what you were doing, the less likely you were to do it right. So long as Mariko trapped herself in doubting her marksmanship, she was a danger to herself and others.

Now, listening to her pulse hammer against her eardrums, she worried she might freeze up when those van doors opened and her team had to move. Two thousand rounds she’d slung downrange, trying to train her left hand to do its job, and two thousand times she’d failed. Now other cops were counting on her, and if she failed tonight the way she did with Fuchida, it might be one of their lives on the line. She drew back the slide on her again, knowing it wasn’t necessary, needing to do it anyway.

She felt a tap on her shoulder pad and looked up. “Hey,” Han said, “you think you checked that weapon enough yet?”

It was a little embarrassing being caught in the act, but the fact that he’d noticed was reassuring. Han and Mariko were partners now, and his attention to detail might save her ass someday. She’d already made a habit of noting the details about him. He always put his helmet on at the last minute. He tended to bounce a little on the balls of his feet when he was nervous. He had an app on his phone that gave him inning-by-inning updates on his Yomiuri Giants. The TMPD patch Velcroed to the front of his bulletproof vest was old, curling at the corners. Hers was curling a bit too—the vests usually sat in storage, sometimes for years, and who would ever bother to peel the patches off?—but Han’s patch had a weaker hold on his chest, probably because he caught the curled-up corner of it with his thumb every time he reached up to brush his floppy hair away from his ear. He wore his hair longer than regulations allowed, and his sideburns—longer and bushier than Mariko had ever seen on a Japanese man—were against regs too. But violating the personal grooming protocol was one of the perks when you worked undercover, and Han made the most of it. He’d have worn a beard and mustache too, if only he could grow them, but his boyish face didn’t allow him that luxury.

“I’m pretty sure that chambered round hasn’t gone anywhere,” he said. “Then again, I haven’t checked it myself. You mind checking it for me?”

“Smart-ass.”

Han grinned. “Guilty as charged.”

She noticed he was bouncing a little on the balls of his feet, and since he didn’t make any noise Mariko knew he’d strapped everything down tight. The SWAT guys that filled the rest of the van were equally silent—no mean feat given the close quarters and the sheer numbers of magazines, flash-bangs, gas masks, and radios they’d affixed to their armor.

The floor rumbled, someone pulled the door shut, and they were off. The lone red lightbulb cast weird shadows. There was an electric tension in the air, a palpable enthusiasm silenced of necessity but champing at the bit. “Han,” Mariko whispered, “you ever had to wear a vest before?”

“Sure. At my brother’s wedding.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Not since academy.”

“Me neither,” said Mariko. She lowered her voice even more and said, “Does it make you scared, knowing they have submachine guns in there?”

“Well, yeah .”

Mariko took a deep breath through her nose and held it awhile before blowing it out. It felt good to have someone on the team she didn’t have to be defensive with. With everyone else she was always on her guard, because everyone else was all too willing to see her as a girly-girl if she ever showed a moment’s weakness. But she and Han could tell each other the truth—even if only in private—and while she wouldn’t be caught dead whining to him, just being able to admit she was scared lessened her fear somehow.

“Jump-off point in one minute,” the driver said.

That palpable, silenced excitement mounted. It was strange, feeling that much nervous energy restrained by cops who were otherwise as rowdy as hormone-addled frat boys. She couldn’t see them well in the red light, but somehow Mariko knew even the SWAT guys were tensing up. “Han,” Mariko said, “you put your lid on yet?”

“Nope.”

“Well, put it on, damn it. I don’t want to tell the LT C-team didn’t hit their door on time because my partner bobbled his helmet while he was getting out of the van.”

“Jump-off in twenty,” said the driver. The doors opened up and suddenly the cabin filled with light and industrial stink. Acrid paint smells told Mariko there had to be an auto body shop nearby, and a wind out of the west carried all the smog that should have been marinating Tokyo and Yokohama. Or maybe that was the exhaust from teams A and D, which pulled away faster and faster as Mariko’s van slowed to a halt.

Then she was following Han, her heart pounding just as hard as her heels pounded the pavement. She wished her gear wasn’t so heavy, wished her goggles weren’t fogging up so soon, wished she’d spent a little less time on the pistol range and a little more time training for her next triathlon.

But just like running a tri, this too proved to be a case of pre-race jitters. She overtook Han as they turned the corner into a narrow alley. She could have passed the SWAT operators too, but she reminded herself that it was their job to breach the target, her job to seize the dope once the target was secure.

As they passed a shabby, weather-beaten, wood plank fence, Mariko got her first look at their target. It was a two-story slab of beige bricks nearly identical to the buildings beside it. There were six of them, lined up like the pips of a die on a dirty, seldom-used lot. Apart from being a tenth as high as most of the buildings in the neighborhood, the target and its little siblings were utterly without character. Light shone through most of the windows, which was good; it was easy to see perps behind them.

Mariko kept the darkened windows in her peripheral vision as she ran. Her focus was on the back door, and on the empty expanse of concrete between her and it. It was the only exposed stretch of their approach, but there was no getting to the C-side of the target, the back side, except to cross it. If the buildings on this dirty lot were the six pips on a die, the target building was the lower right pip and C-team was just rounding the lower left. Running right past the two were the twin tracks of the Chuo-Sobu Line, where the clackety-clack, clackety-clack of the 7:03 was getting louder and louder by the second. There was no crossing the train tracks—they were fenced, and the chief of police had nixed SWAT’s plan to just cut through the fences and approach the C-side directly—and so the only way to the back door was to cross that shooting gallery of a parking lot.