a good day to have a drug problem, know what I mean? If shit goes bad, I don’t know if they got enough meth in this city to get me through it.”
Mariko took a step back. She actually needed to find her balance; his words struck her like a tsunami. Somehow she’d just assumed that people like Bumps were disconnected from current events, and that these attacks on her city passed right over their heads. Bumps showed her a deeper truth: Joko Daishi had shaken her city all the way down to the gutters. But if even Mariko and Bumps were on the same side against him, he’d also created a sort of citywide unity.
“Let me know what you hear, Bumps. And do it fast; the clock is ticking.”
“Yeah. Totally. Wait . . . does it have to be shipping containers?”
“No. That’s just a pet theory.”
Bumps chewed his lower lip with his gray meth-mouth teeth. “How about train cars?”
“Maybe, yeah. What are you thinking?”
“I know a guy. A car thief. Specializes in rental cars. Because the insurance is good, neh? The customers don’t take it personal, and—”
“Get to the point, Bumps.”
“Okay, you know what an Elf is? Like, an Isuzu Elf? Boxy little truck?”
“Sure.”
“Well, my guy has a thing for them. They’re super-popular rentals. The chop shops give him a real good price on—”
“The point, Bumps.”
“His girlfriend likes E. He used to buy from me. This morning he calls me and says he wants to buy everything I got. She has some friends coming over or something, and they like to party, and he’s all excited because he’s got a line on all these Elfs. They’re coming by Shinagawa Station one after the other. That’s where he lives, down by the rail yard—”
Mariko’s least favorite part about dealing with meth-heads was that when they were tweaking they just couldn’t shut up. “Did he see any kids in these trucks?”
“Well, you can’t really see inside them. The back is just a big box, you know?”
“Exactly. Did he see them stop anywhere?”
“He didn’t see them, no. . . .”
“So he didn’t see anyone take a bunch of kids out of the back, did he?”
“Um . . .”
Mariko wanted to smack him in the head. “Then what the hell does this have to do with anything, Bumps? I told you the clock is ticking.”
“Oh yeah, the train cars. See, there’s a bunch of them in the rail yard. Like, hundreds. Parked, just sitting there, you know? No one ever goes back there, because why would they? The cars are all empty. So my guy, he’s wondering, how come all those Elfs are going into the rail yard if there’s nothing back there?”
Bingo, Mariko thought. Hiding in plain sight, but not where Furukawa expected. And who would suspect foul play if they saw delivery trucks coming to meet cargo trains? The two went together like rice and shoyu.
She punched the elevator call button, then decided that way was too slow; she’d take the stairs. “Shinagawa rail yard. You’re positive?”
“Yeah, pretty much.”
She wasn’t going to get anything more conclusive than “pretty much” from a tweaker. “Thanks, Bumps. Be seeing you.”
She sprinted down the stairs, jumped in the car, and gunned it. Shinagawa Station was well within Bumps’s turf, just a few blocks away from his rattrap apartment. When she got there, she pulled onto a skinny, little-used frontage road running parallel to the train tracks. It occurred to her that she’d spent her entire adult life in Tokyo and she’d never been here before. She passed through Shinagawa Station dozens of times a year, yet she’d never ventured as far as the rail yard, just a few hundred meters north of it. Not that there was much cause to come. There was nothing to do, no one to meet, nothing to shop for. The sightseeing consisted of dirt, gravel, weeds, kilometers of steel rail, and a few hundred train cars. It was all fenced in, and she had to drive around a bit before she got to a place where authorized personnel could pass through a gate and get into the yard itself.
Beside the gate, a uniformed rent-a-cop sat in a box not much bigger than one of those huge American refrigerators, manning a radio and minding his own business. At the sight of him it dawned on her that she had no idea how to proceed. Usually she’d have her badge, gun, radio, and probably a partner. Had she come in a squad car,