Steve Bein: Year of the Demon

Mariko gazed absently at the old iron mask while rehearsing what she’d say in her own defense. The facts were plain: if she hadn’t breached the target when she did, she and her element might never have seen their perp closing that door behind him. They would simply have put a rifle on the locked door, cleared the rest of the building, and only then punched the factory floor, after they’d collected a full complement. Impeccable tactics, but it might have made the difference between having a bunch of hard evidence mixed into a hopper full of cornstarch and having hazmat teams evacuating the neighborhood while every hospital in town was choked with a glut of narcs and SWAT cops getting treated for chemical burns of the eyes, sinuses, and lungs.

All perfectly sound observations. All of them irrelevant if either she or Han had sustained an injury. SOP was SOP, and breaking it brought down the Hammer of God, regardless of whether anyone actually got hurt.

Han must have been entertaining similar thoughts. His right foot was doing a sewing machine impression, and he rapped his thumbs nervously on the top of his helmet, which he held in his lap. “Hey,” she said, “does that demon mask look familiar to you?”

“Huh?” She’d snapped him out of some distant reverie. “Uh, no, not really. You?”

“Yeah, but I can’t place it.” Mariko frowned. The more she looked at it, the more she was certain she ought to recognize the mask. It was like seeing the face of an old high school classmate, someone she ought to know but whose name maddeningly escaped her. Suddenly she found Han’s little drumbeat against his helmet distracting. She was about to ask him to stop when Sakakibara stormed into the office.

Instantly both of them stood to attention. “There they are,” Sakakibara said, “Butch and Sundance.”

Sakakibara never called anyone by name. He rarely took the trouble even to tell people which nicknames applied to them; he just made them up on the fly and expected everyone else to sort it out. Sometimes he’d give someone three or four names a day; other times the first nickname would stick like a steel-tipped dart and hang on for years.

He marched around them to drop heavily into the salesman’s chair behind the big desk. “The SWAT commander says I’m to suspend you for a month without pay and bust both of you back to general patrol. Says it’s no good for you to run around trying to get yourselves killed while his boys are trying to do their job. He’s not wrong about that.”

“Sir,” Mariko said, “if we had breached even ten seconds later than we did—”

Sakakibara fixed her with a glare. “Who the hell gave you permission to speak?”

“Sorry, sir.”

“Which one of you pulled the stunt with the flash-bang?”

“I did, sir.” Mariko said it quickly, knowing that Han might well take the hit for her if she left him the opportunity. He’d been with Narcotics for eight years already, serving under Sakakibara for five of those. The LT was likely to go easier on a seasoned veteran than the newest addition to his team.

“The SWAT guys are having a fit over that, believe you me,” Sakakibara said. “Any guesses as to why?”

Mariko had a few. Broken glass was a hazard, period; there was a reason the SWAT operators all wore Kevlar gloves and Nomex hoods. And Mariko got lucky that she’d ported a carpeted room with her flash-bang. Crossing a glass-strewn linoleum floor was like tap-dancing on marbles.

But Sakakibara didn’t give her a chance to reply. “If you ask me, I figure it’s because none of them thought of it first. Wish I was there to see it; it must have been pretty damn cool.”

“It was,” Han said. Mariko just looked at the floor, struggling to restrain a grin.

“All right, chalk one up for Batgirl. So blah, blah, blah, don’t do that again, consider yourselves chastised. Now sit your munchkin asses down.”

Mariko and Han did as they were told, taking the two swivel chairs facing the desk. The chairs and the desk were a matching set, and they would have been at the height of fashion if this were 1981. Mariko allowed these details to pass by more or less unnoticed, as she was still trying to figure out the nickname. “Munchkin” was simple—Han was a head shorter than their LT and Mariko was shorter still—but “Batgirl” took a little longer. The stunt with the window. With the flash-bang. That she got from her belt. Utility belt. Batgirl.

Mariko hoped that wouldn’t be the nickname that stuck.

“Either of you know the name Urano Soseki?” Mariko and Han both shook their heads. “Well, you’re about to,” Sakakibara said. “He’s your buyer. Runs this place for the Kamaguchi-gumi. You’ll find him out back in the ambo. Did I hear it right? Did you Justice League him through a door?”

“Yes, sir.” Mariko didn’t know whether to feel proud or ashamed.

Sakakibara gave her an approving nod. “Not bad for a munchkin. Anyway, like I was saying, Neck Brace-san is your principal buyer. We’ve got five of his crew too, but they’re little fish. You’ll want to talk to them eventually, but get to Neck Brace before they wheel him out of here.”

“Sir,” Mariko said, “I could swear I heard an ambulance leaving five or ten minutes ago. Are you sure he’s still here?”

Sakakibara looked at her with unfeigned surprise, and more than a little disdain. “Are you questioning my judgment?”

“Sorry, sir.”

“You’ve got pretty big balls for a chick.”

At first Mariko read his tone as angry, but she changed her mind when he gave her a wry, snorting chuckle. “Not that I have to explain myself to you, but yes, we had two ambos on scene. The one you heard was running your seller to the OR. Neck Brace and his boys roughed the guy up pretty good.”

Mariko frowned. “Do we know why?”

“That’s your job to figure out.”

“Sir,” Han said, “does this mean you’re giving us this case?”

“Put that together all by yourself, did you? I figure Frodo here would be hungry for it, seeing as it’s Kamaguchis buying serious weight and it’s Kamaguchis that put the hit out on her. What do you say, Frodo? You want these guys or not?”

Mariko could only assume she was Frodo, though for the moment she was less concerned about the nickname and more concerned about Sakakibara’s loaded question. She had a history with the Kamaguchi-gumi, all right. Not of her own design; they just took it personally when a cop got famous by taking down one of their own. Fuchida Shuzo—the man who chopped off Mariko’s trigger finger, the one whose crazed face flashed before her eyes every time she went down to the pistol range to retrain her left hand—was once a street enforcer under Kamaguchi Ryusuke.

Mariko had killed Fuchida out of sheer self-preservation, an offense that a high-ranking underboss like Kamaguchi Ryusuke wouldn’t usually take personally. Everyone had a right to self-defense, a right that Kamaguchi had exercised himself on more than one occasion, always with lethal effect. Word on the street was that Kamaguchi would have preferred to write off Fuchida’s death as an unfortunate cost of doing business. Fuchida had been getting uppity anyway, and it wasn’t as if Mariko was some contract killer from a rival clan. But thanks to Fuchida’s predilection for swords and a couple of bizarre twists of fate, Mariko had killed him in an honest-to-God duel, and that was the sort of thing that splashed Mariko’s picture and the phrase “samurai showdown” all over the nightly news for a week. Kamaguchi Ryusuke had to put out a contract on her after that. In his line of work it was just saving face.

He’d passed the job off to his youngest son, Hanzo, known on the streets as the Bulldog. Like his father, the Bulldog had an underbite and a big, muscular frame. Mariko remembered his photos from her debrief with Organized Crime. His father had a reputation for being cool, levelheaded, and tenaciously territorial, but the Bulldog was only known for a brutish, sloppy brand of bloodshed that had become his signature. OC had long suspected him of being the Kamaguchi-gumi’s go-to guy when it came to vendetta killings. Now it seemed he’d signed on to even the score on Fuchida Shuzo.