Year of the Demon Read Online Free PDF

to a blown sting either. Urano said his guy knew we were coming.”
    “Which means his guy doesn’t mind pissing off the Kamaguchi-gumi. He’s got to be out of his mind.”
    “Or desperate.”
    “Lucky to be alive either way. Assuming he survives, that is.”
    “Right,” said Han. “Sakakibara said the dude’s in surgery, neh ?”
    Mariko nodded. “So we’ve got a seller who’s willing to take enormous risks—”
    “Enormous by dope slingers’ standards. Not exactly my grandma’s sewing circle.”
    “Exactly,” she said. “And a buyer who’s willing to beat his supplier half to death. Is this case making any sense to you?”
    “Nope.”
    “Me neither.” Mariko chuckled and shook her head. “But you’re interested, neh ?”
    “Oh yeah.”
    “Me too.”

3
    M ariko could smell herself in the elevator. She was sweaty, her matted hair felt as if it still had a helmet strapped onto it, and she smelled faintly of Fourth of July fireworks.
    She was the only person in the whole apartment building who would have drawn that comparison. She was the only one who had ever celebrated the Fourth of July, because she was the only one who spent her childhood in the States. It was strange, thinking of fireworks she hadn’t smelled since junior high, and she wondered why on earth her hair would suddenly share that smell. Then she remembered the flash-bang going off right above her head.
    The elevator announced her floor with a canned voice that sounded just like the woman who narrated those airline safety videos. Mariko hauled herself out of the elevator and tromped down the narrow corridor to her apartment. Her boots felt like they were made of lead and she wanted nothing more than to take a hot shower and collapse into bed. But that was a pipe dream. She’d won enough races and tussled with enough bad guys to know her body’s reaction to an adrenaline high. She wasn’t going to sleep anytime soon.
    That was all right, because she had some research to do.
    But the shower came first. Then she flicked on the electric teapot, and when it clicked itself off she poured boiling water into two extruded polystyrene containers of Cup Noodles. It was something of a post-workout ritual for her, planting herself on the bed, savoring the soy sauce smell of instant ramen, and cracking open one of her old sensei’snotebooks. Usually her evening workouts involved swords, not bulldozing bad guys through locked doors, but the cool-down ritual was equally effective in either case.
    Professor Yamada Yasuo, her first kenjutsu teacher, had earned himself a seat in the pantheon of Japan’s greatest medieval historians. He harbored a fascination with the material culture of the samurai that began with his first week in army boot camp and stayed with him until his dying day, leading him to earn black belts in every sword art Japan had to offer. Fate had a cruel sense of irony: Yamada-senseidied of a vicious sword wound, and at the hand of his own student, no less. Fuchida Shuzo was a butcher and a sociopath, and after killing Yamada, he’d forced Mariko into the sword fight that cost Mariko her finger and Fuchida his life. Mariko wasn’t religious, but she knew fate’s cruel irony when she saw it: living by the sword and dying by the sword and all that.
    She had the honor of being Yamada’s last kenjutsu student, and also of being the inheritor of all of his notebooks. He’d written everything by hand—had never even owned a computer—and most of his work was over Mariko’s head. In fact, much of it was over the heads of the many tenured and gray-haired history professors whose dissertation committees he’d chaired back when they were in school, but even so, Mariko enjoyed working her way through his notes. She thought of them as her way to have a little conversation with him.
    Tonight, however, she was looking for something specific. That demon mask, the one on the office shelf in the packing plant, was familiar somehow. At