he stumbled into the elevator and stabbed the DOOR CLOSE button with the relentless speed of a sewing machine. It didn’t help him. Mariko calmly walked the three or four meters to the elevator, stepped in beside him, and said, “What floor?”
“Oh. Um. Nine?”
“Nine it is. Looks like you broke your nose, Bumps.”
He touched a bleeding nostril with one hand while the other rubbed absently over his long, perm-stiffened, peroxide-orange hair. Mariko guessed the elevator wouldn’t smell great empty, but standing next to Bumps it stank like the bottom of a sweat-moistened laundry hamper. “Bumps, when’s the last time you changed your clothes?”
“Uh . . . I’m not for sure on that.”
Mariko shook her head in disgust. As far as she knew, Bumps was playing by the rules of their CI arrangement: he provided regular intelligence leading to arrests and he wasn’t dealing hard stuff on the side. But nothing about their agreement said he had to stay sober.
“Fuck this, we’re getting off here.” She hit the THREE button just in time for the elevator to stop there and open up. The musty carpet in the hallway didn’t smell any better than the cockroach spray in the elevator, but both of them smelled a whole lot nicer than Bumps.
He floated in the hall in that strange, weightless, tweaker way, as if gravity had only a tenuous hold on him. Between the perm and the peroxide, his hair was as stiff as paintbrush bristles, and since it didn’t spill down normally it reinforced the illusion that he might blow away at any moment. “So, uh, what can I do for you, Officer?”
“You spend time by the harbor, neh? Lots of business down that way?”
“Sure. But I’m not, you know, like . . . I mean, we got that agreement.”
“Yeah, I remember, Bumps. What time did you wake up this morning? Have you even been up long enough to know what’s going on?”
He nodded hugely, his eyes wide. “Those kids? Heavy shit.”
“Yeah. So here’s the thing: the guy who took them, he’s got to be hiding them somewhere. Somewhere with a lot of room, with no windows, ideally with only one exit. And it has to be a place not a lot of people ever have reason to go. You follow me so far?”
“Uh-huh.”
Mariko had her doubts. But she had greater doubts about Furukawa’s reasoning. She could buy Joko Daishi hiding in plain sight; what she didn’t buy was that he’d hide exactly where Furukawa expected him to. The image of a school full of dead kids was terrifying, but she just couldn’t derail the logical part of her mind that wanted to know how he’d get all the kids in there without being spotted. Today of all days, people were going to call 110 if they saw something suspicious going down in a schoolyard.
Maybe there was a decommissioned school being torn down somewhere. Maybe Joko Daishi had planned for that months in advance. With the Wind’s resources, he could have bought out a construction company, secured the demolition contract for a school, and filled the whole job site with his cultists. That would give him a perfect front for moving kids in a few at a time. All of that was possible. Even so, Mariko thought it much more likely that Furukawa’s closed school idea was bogus.
“Here’s my theory,” she told Bumps. “Shipping containers. No windows, one entry, and once it’s locked there’s no way for those helicopters up there to spot the kids.” And easy to fill with cyanide gas, if that was the way Joko Daishi wanted to play it. She didn’t have the stomach to say that aloud. She felt stupid indulging in a childish superstition like that, but if ever there was a day not to jinx something, today was the day.
Bumps walked to the end of the hall, where a dirty window commanded a less than beautiful view of the harbor. Mariko followed. “A lot of containers down there,” he said.
“Exactly. So get down to the waterfront and talk to your people. Have them talk to their people. I’m interested in unusual traffic patterns. Moving these kids is going to take hundreds of cars, so someone’s got to have seen—hey, are you listening to me?”
“Huh?” Bumps flinched when Mariko snapped her fingers in his ear. “Yeah. I got you. It’s just . . .” He laughed ruefully, and surprised himself as much as Mariko when a tear rolled down his cheek. “Today’s not going to be