too aggressive for this line of work. I wouldn’t be surprised if you killed those two men only after your emotions got the better of you.”
And now it all comes out, Mariko thought. He’s a misogynist, pure and simple. Yes, she’d blown her top with him. Yes, she shouldn’t have. But if Sakakibara had been in Mariko’s shoes, forced to kill in self-defense, no one would ever have called his emotions into question. He would have done his duty, period. And if Sakakibara had made the same argument Mariko had about Joko Daishi, using the same words and the same tone, Kusama would never have called him moody or temperamental. Assertive, perhaps, but for men of Kusama’s generation, women weren’t afforded the luxury of being assertive. Their vocabulary for “assertive woman” was “bitch.”
Mariko had no safe way to react. If she objected, she’d only become more of a bitch in Kusama’s eyes. If she remained silent, she’d be a docile bitch who accepted her punishment. Her best option was to remove herself from the situation before she dug herself any deeper, but getting up and walking out was, once again, typical of a petulant bitch.
She squared her shoulders, sat back in her chair, and pressed her lips shut. Strong but not assertive. Her sergeant’s bars stared back at her, along with their doppelganger reflected in the wood.
“You’ve killed two men in the line of duty,” Kusama said. “So far this year, that’s two more than the rest of the department combined. Now you tell me what I’m supposed to do with that.”
Mariko said nothing; she only made a face as if she were thinking carefully about the question. That wasn’t bitchy. In truth she only had thoughts for her stripped sergeant’s tag. It was hard to believe such a little thing could be so heavy, so laden with meaning.
“Ah,” he said, “so you do understand.” He’d misinterpreted her silence, but Mariko wasn’t going to correct him. “You’ve given me reason enough to put you behind a desk for the rest of your career. Don’t think I won’t. I can suffocate you with this job. I can make you spend your days dreaming of some prince on a white horse to marry you and whisk you away from all of this.”
That was something else he’d never have said to Sakakibara. Still Mariko said nothing.
“I had such high hopes for you,” Kusama went on. “It’s a shame that so many people saw you shoot Akahata. If only you’d found some other solution, there might have been a better way to spin this.”
“I’m backing her play on this one,” Sakakibara said. “If you’re facing someone packing his own bodyweight in high explosives, you don’t spend a lot of time looking for ‘other solutions.’”
Mariko wanted to say the same thing, though her language wouldn’t have been quite so polite. She didn’t care for being the damsel in distress, and Sakakibara wasn’t much of a shining knight, but so long as she was banned from speaking in her own defense, it came as a great relief when he dipped his shield in front of her to ward off an attack.
“I appreciate your lieutenant’s point,” Kusama said. “But you understand what I mean. If only it had been your partner to shoot Akahata, all of this would have been so much easier.”
Mariko nodded, though in truth the more rational choice was to strangle him. Did he think she wanted to be the one to take a life? She’d have been perfectly content to switch places. Even Han would have preferred it; he wasn’t vexed by the moral problems that kept Mariko up at night. Besides, only blind luck had put Mariko on the scene instead of Han. Had the coin flip landed the other way, the headline would have been that Han shot first and asked questions later, and no one would ever have known that Mariko was involved. Instead it was the other way around: Han still enjoyed his anonymity, and Mariko was the one who went to sleep thinking of that gunshot echoing off the tunnel walls.
“As it stands,” Kusama said, “my hands are tied. We operate within a system, Detective Oshiro, and the rules of that system are designed to protect the public without trampling anyone’s civil rights. If the rules are flexible, they can’t do what they were created to do. So as much as I might like to, I cannot bend the rules. It’s not for lack of will; it’s for