Disciple of the Wind (59 page)

Han was stunned speechless. For a fateful half second, he forgot to draw his sidearm. Endo wheeled around. His bat swung high and fast at Han’s forehead.

Fortunately, Mariko had figured out one second earlier that Endo was the enemy. She was already in motion. The only weapon she had in hand was her beer, so she threw it at Endo as hard as she could. Some deep-seated ballplayer’s instinct made him duck away from anything pitched at his face. His flinch reaction pulled his swing off kilter, and Han twisted just enough to take the bat in the shoulder, not the temple.

Mariko grabbed a pool cue on her way to Endo. A cue stick was no match for a baseball bat, but baseball was no match for
kenjutsu
. She rushed him with a bellowing
kiai
, hoping to draw him away from Han. It worked. Endo spun, his bat a speeding blur. Mariko stutter-stepped. The bat flew past her. She flicked her makeshift sword at Endo’s eyes.

She hit his cheek, not his eyeball. It still caused his head to snap back. Her cue stick flicked like a whip, striking the throat, the ear, the eye. With every blow she drove him back, and every time she stepped up to strike again. Han dove aside, and Mariko drove Endo right into the wall.

“Mariko, down!”

It was Han shouting. She didn’t think; she just ducked and rolled.

Bullets smashed through the door, sending a shower of glass into the pool hall. Mariko had expected the possibility of gunfire, but from Han, not from outside. There was only one person reckless enough to fire blindly into a place of business. The Bulldog had arrived.

He brought friends, too. Holes of sunlight opened in the front wall. Han and Mariko scrambled under the nearest pool table. Endo dove for the floor too, then Mariko lost track of him. She rolled behind one of the stout, broad table legs just in time to see it shudder as two bullets struck home. She heard more rounds skipping off the table top.

The whole front wall came down in a tinkling cascade. Light flooded the pool hall. Mariko looked around for Endo but couldn’t spot him. She didn’t dare stick her head out from cover.

More gunfire erupted outside. These were different weapons, smaller in caliber, and they came from farther away. She heard shouting, and then the weapons that had been slinging rounds her way started shooting in a different direction.

She peeked out from behind the heavy leg of the pool table. There was the Bulldog, crouched behind his Land Rover’s engine block and letting fly with an AK-47. Bullet was with him, along with six other yakuzas, all of them blazing away like they were in a video game. They were shooting away from Mariko, toward a small park on the other side of the street. Mariko couldn’t see who they were firing on, but she guessed it wasn’t cops. The Kamaguchi-gumi had no interest in starting a shooting war with the police; they were happy with the status quo. By the same token, cops wouldn’t have just opened fire; they would have ordered the Kamaguchis to drop their weapons first.

“Who the hell are they shooting at?” Han said. “It’s not SWAT.”

Mariko loved that she and Han thought along the same lines even in the midst of a firefight. “I think the Divine Wind just got here.”

A stray round from the park hummed over their heads, hit the light above their pool table, and brought it crashing down. “Dumbasses,” Han said. “Don’t they know they’re shooting at their own guy?”

“I don’t know if they are. Can you see Endo?”

Both of them scanned everything they could see without leaving cover. “No,” said Han. “Did he make it outside?”

“Probably. He was right by the door. If he’s still alive, he’ll have to come back for those.”

She nodded toward Glorious Victory and the mask. There they were, safe in their bags, surrounded by shattered glass and bullet-riddled barstools. Norika’s body lay next to them, staring blankly at the mask. “Damn,” Han said. “Karma’s a bitch, huh? She who clubs people in the head gets clubbed in the head.”

“I don’t think that’s how that verse goes.”

Mariko hoped Endo was alive. If he was, he’d do everything possible to take the mask to Joko Daishi, and Mariko and Han would follow him. If he was dead, then the odds against Mariko were long. She’d need someone else to follow back to Joko Daishi, which meant the Divine Wind would have to win the gunfight outside. That wasn’t likely; the Bulldog was a savage fighter. If the Kamaguchis won the battle, then Joko Daishi wouldn’t be so stupid as to walk up and demand the mask. He’d abandon the plan and come back for it some other time—
after
killing hundreds of innocent children.

In all likelihood, Endo was dead, splattered on the sidewalk just out of view. His brothers and sisters in the Divine Wind still sent stray bullets into the pool hall. Mariko risked a peek and saw the Bulldog drop behind the Land Rover to slam a new clip into his Kalashnikov. The man was clearly in his element. He even took a moment to pull a cigar from his jacket pocket. As he lit it, he accidentally made eye contact with Mariko. Seeing her made him do a double take. “Hey, sorry,” he shouted. “Didn’t know you were in there.”

Mariko was too stunned for words. In her vocabulary, “sorry” didn’t offset pumping forty or fifty rounds in someone’s direction. But she got lucky; someone else in her profession decided on an appropriate response.
“Throw down your weapons,”
blared the megaphone, and Mariko heard tires squealing to a stop. A police cruiser. It had to be.

Then came a second set of braking tires, and a second voice shouting commands over a loudspeaker. Mariko heard a helicopter too, low and coming lower. Now sirens rang out on all sides of the park. The cultists were effectively caged. The cavalry had come. It wasn’t SWAT; they must have been tied up elsewhere. This was general patrol. Tokyo’s police had never been stretched thinner, yet somehow they’d still managed to respond in minutes. They made Mariko proud to be a cop.

Even as she felt that swell of pride, everything went to hell.

Yakuzas had the good sense not to shoot at cops. There was no money in it. But cultists didn’t care about money. They didn’t care about good sense, either. One of them popped a round at a squad car. It was a terrible mistake.

The cops in the squad shot back, just as they were trained to do. The cultists returned fire. Every other cop on scene took aim and fired on the cultists, just as they were trained to do. Some hit; most missed. One of those misses punched right through two doors of the Land Rover and hit the Bulldog in the hip.

Once the Kamaguchi guns lit up, it was a free-for-all. The Bulldog was shouting at his own guys to calm the fuck down, but it was hard to hear him over the sound of gunfire and a raging testosterone rush. Then, as if he’d been waiting all along just for this cue, Endo Naomoto reappeared.

After the initial fusillade, Han and Mariko had taken shelter under their pool table, behind one of its broad, wall-like legs. Endo had been hiding behind the other leg the whole time. Now he dashed past Mariko, grabbed the bags holding the mask and the sword, and ran for the shot-out windows.

“Stop! Police!” Han shouted. Endo didn’t stop. Han took aim and put a round in his hamstring.

Endo crumpled, tumbling out of the pool hall and onto the sidewalk. The Bulldog heard Han’s shot and came around with the AK-47. Mariko yelled for him not to shoot—too late. As Endo limped to his feet, the Bulldog pulled the trigger.

The round took Endo through the lung. It should have drilled straight through him, killing Mariko next, but it must have taken a funny bounce off a rib, because it winged off in a random direction instead. Endo fell to his knees. In his right fist he held the mask and the sword as if they were trophies—as if by holding them high he could show defiance to his tormentors. His whole body quivered with the effort.

No one noticed the motorcycle until it was too late.

Joko Daishi shot past, a deafening blur of white and yellow. Then he was gone, and so were the sword and mask. Endo must have held on a little too tightly, because the handoff whipped him around hard, slamming him to the sidewalk. The bike’s high-pitched whine filled the air, though moments earlier the helicopter and the gunfire were all anyone could hear.

Kamaguchi was the first to react. He raised the rifle to his shoulder and spat round after round at the motorcycle. There was no mistaking the sound of a Kalashnikov; his shots slugged the air like giant metal fists, loud and slow and heavy. They stood no chance of hitting their target. Kamaguchi was a bully, not a marksman. He didn’t know anything about stance or breathing; he just shot stuff until it fell down. And Joko Daishi was
fast
. He might have slowed to fifty kilometers an hour when he grabbed the bags, but he’d be closer to a hundred and fifty by now.

But Han responded almost as quickly as Kamaguchi. By the time Mariko got out onto the street, Han had drawn a bead and braced himself against the corner of a wall. He fired once. More than a block away, Joko Daishi’s back tire blew out.

It was an impossible shot, one in a million. The bike fishtailed like mad. Somehow Joko Daishi brought it under control. He couldn’t ride it, but he brought it to a stop before it killed him. He dropped it in the middle of traffic and started to run.

Mariko sprinted up the street, slapping Han on the shoulder as she passed him. She didn’t turn around to see if he would follow; his footfalls told her everything she needed to know.

She was so intent on Joko Daishi that she forgot she was running right through a firefight. A cultist’s three-round burst reminded her. It spanked off a squad car’s windshield, so close that Mariko could hear the ricochets whistling past her. She ducked and reeled away but she didn’t stop running.

Ahead she saw a little traffic jam. A bunch of panicked motorists had slammed on their brakes at the sound of gunfire, and when the people behind them did the same, there was no backing out to get away. The smart civilians ducked as low as they could. The clueless ones poked their heads out for a better view.

Mariko ignored all of them; the only thing she cared about was the motorcycle stopped at the back end. The rider, guilty of felony stupidity, had pulled out his phone to film the gun battle. “TMPD!” she shouted. “We’re taking your bike!”

“We’re what?” Han said. “You know how to ride one of these things?”

“It’s been a while,” Mariko admitted. It was true, but not the whole truth. She’d learned to ride in central Illinois, where apart from romping around on dirt bikes, ATVs, and snowmobiles there wasn’t much to do. The last time she’d ridden a motorcycle, she was twelve years old.

But nothing else was agile enough to catch up with Joko Daishi. Mariko tore off, gunning it too hard and almost dumping Han off the back. When she shifted into second, she released the clutch too quickly and got a head butt in the back of the head. After that she was stable, at least until she hit the first curb. Her turns could have been smoother. Weaving between pedestrians went as well as could be expected,
inasmuch as no one broke any bones. But at least she caught sight of Joko Daishi.

He wasn’t fast on his feet. He limped with a rolling gait, and he’d made it only as far as the nearest subway station. Mariko got a glimpse of his bushy hair just as he ran down the stairs.

In the movies, she would have jumped the bike all the way down to the first landing. In her youth, she might have had the guts to try riding it down the stairs. But Mariko wasn’t a stuntwoman, and it had been a long time since she’d attacked the back hills of downstate Illinois. She jammed on the brakes, nearly throwing Han again, and stopped a few centimeters shy of sending Han, herself, and the bike in an avalanche down the stairwell.

They sprinted down, taking the steps two at a time. There was Joko Daishi, muscling his way through a sparse crowd. Han had no clear shot and Mariko had no weapon. They ran after him.

Joko Daishi vaulted the turnstiles, far more nimble than someone his age had any right to be. He hopped sidesaddle onto the next railing and slid out of view.

Mariko jumped the turnstiles; Han slipped under them in a baseball slide. Mariko snagged her toe on the way over, spiraled in midair, and landed on all fours. Han popped right to his feet, taking the lead. He slid down the railing with Mariko not far behind.

Downstairs, she could hear a train stop and open its doors. If Joko Daishi got on board before Mariko and Han could reach him, they were done for. But it wasn’t as if Mariko could make herself slide any faster.

She lost sight of Joko Daishi, then of Han. By the time she caught them, they were embroiled in a fistfight right next to the train. There weren’t many commuters—the whole city was on lockdown—and the few that were there had all fled the man with the demon mask. Mariko wasn’t sure when he’d taken the time to put it on. Glorious Victory Unsought was slung across his back, still in its sword bag, though that had come untied. A wild light shone in his eyes, and a childlike grin turned the corners of his mouth, even in the midst of a brawl.

Han punched him in the chin. Joko Daishi caught it, rolled with it, and slammed Han face-first into the side of the train. Han came away dizzy and bleeding. Then Mariko was in the mix. She hit Joko Daishi with a flying tackle, but somehow he turned with her. She found herself upside down and airborne, and she hit the ground three meters away. The department’s aikido instructors would have been proud of her breakfall. The cold tiles of the platform didn’t knock her out, didn’t knock the wind out of her either, and she rolled back to her feet.

Han threw three fast punches. Joko Daishi parried all three, then head-butted Han. His demon horns drew blood. Mariko came up from behind, looking for a sleeper hold to end the fight. Without even turning around, Joko Daishi stiff-armed her with a palm to the face. It laid her out flat.

She drew the Pikachu. Han reached for his sidearm. Joko Daishi snagged Han’s hand before it reached the pistol. With a quick twist he wrist-locked it, cranked it over, and sent Han flying right on top of Mariko. The Pikachu went spinning away.

The train doors closed. Exactly that much was right in the world. Joko Daishi might still escape, but not on this train.