Sakakibara unfolded himself and stood up to his full height, which was considerable. “Bribing a peace officer is a serious crime, Buzz Cut. I’m confiscating this as evidence.”
Sakakibara rarely called anyone by their real names. He assigned nicknames on the fly and never bothered to explain them. The name Han was a Sakakibara creation; Han’s real name was Watanabe, but just as his Han Solo hairstyle had earned him one nickname, his new regulation haircut now earned him another. Mariko wondered what Sakakibara called himself. Sonny Chiba, for his thick black hair that sat on his head like a helmet? Yao Ming, for his height? Mariko would put a vote in for Grumpy Hardass if she had a say. It was probably a good thing that she didn’t.
“Hell, Frodo, you look about as good as I do,” he said. It had taken Mariko a while to figure out her own moniker. The hobbit part was easy—she was short—but the nickname really turned on Mariko’s missing finger.
“Thank you, sir. You sure know how to make a gal feel good about herself.”
“Don’t get cute. In fact, turn around and go back where you came from. I know why you’re here.”
“Sir?”
“You’ve got a pet theory about who staged this attack. You’re thinking it’s only a matter of time before the boys in the bomb squad come back with chemical signatures for hexamine. When they do, it’ll prove you were right all along. And for some reason you got it in your little hobbit head that if His Eminence hears all of this, he’ll be oh so very proud of you and he’ll give you your sergeant’s tags back.”
Mariko blinked. She tried to rebut but had some trouble opening her mouth. In fact, her reaction would have been exactly the same if she were a cartoon character and a stick of cartoon dynamite blew up in her face.
“Holy shit,” Han said. “Mariko, you got demoted?”
“Uh, yeah,” Mariko said, finding her voice again. “Lost my temper with Kusama.”
Now Han was dumbstruck. She could see the wheels working in his head. He’d lost his detective’s rank during a case they’d worked together, when she served not only as his partner but also his shift sergeant. This was Japan; guilt by association was the law. For Han, the only question was why she hadn’t told him already that his own misconduct had damaged her career.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “It had nothing to do with you—”
“And it doesn’t fucking matter, even if it did,” Sakakibara said, as polite as ever. “Look around, both of you. You and I are standing in a bomb crater. That means everything has changed. Everything. So today is not the day I lose one of my sergeants because she’s got a discipline problem.”
He stabbed her in the shoulder with a long, callused finger. “Don’t misunderstand me, Frodo. On any other day, you’d get what you had coming. But today the TMPD needs every detail sergeant it can find, and that means that if you keep your damn mouth shut, maybe I can save your career. Understand?”
Mariko nodded and bowed. “Thank you, sir.”
“And you, Buzz, I’m going to shoot for getting you reassigned to detectives again. But listen to me: if you ever stray outside the lines again, I swear to you, I’ll mount you as a ramming prow on my car.”
Han nodded, chastened. Losing his assignment in Narcotics was a mistake he’d always regret, and one Mariko figured he’d never recover from. Then again, she supposed it was only fair that the TMPD reshuffle the deck in the light of a major terrorist attack.
A sudden shift in background noise drew Mariko’s attention. A gaggle of voices all shouted at once, their tone insistent, not inquisitive. It could only be that last burst of reporters’ questions as someone called a press conference to a close.
Sakakibara caught it too. “All right, here comes His Majesty,” he said. “Both of you, just shut the hell up and let me do my job.”
Captain Kusama became a different man as soon as he got out of sight of the cameras. His cheerfulness and vigor were just a masquerade for the press; once he joined Sakakibara behind the big, blocky Unimog, his shoulders slumped and he breathed as if he’d just come up for air. He didn’t have a word to spare for anyone until he got a cigarette in his mouth.
“Detective Oshiro,” he said, eyeing her up and down. Suddenly she was self-conscious about the state of