Bad Cop, Worse Cop

Some fifteen clicks downriver Mizuki finally laid off the throttle and puttered towards the left-hand bank. I’d noticed no sign, no spoor, no phantoms or corner-eye glimpses, not even a funny smell, and I was getting antsy. Kenta just looked irritable; like a grunt hurrying up and waiting; annoyed at the delay but not doubting the outcome.

I turned to Mizuki. “So…?”

She glared at me. “So what, Yankee?”

I sighed.

The place she’d slowed featured what looked like a lush park on the right bank, but she aimed for a wide silt-deposit sandbar on the left, angling for the spot where it started to bloom into the river from the shore. She ran the boat’s prow up onto the silt with gentle skill and killed the motor. For the first time in over a half-hour my hearing wasn’t deadened by the outboard’s roar; electronic earplugs now amplifying the vreee vreee vreeeeeee of cicada-song. The birds, however, were subdued; already posted up in the trees before the incoming storm.

Mizuki walked past us, paused in the prow to slip off her shoes, gathered her robes so that the hem lifted to mid-calf, re-tightened her obi to hold it there (somehow, without her sword so much as slipping,) and stepped barefoot onto the silt. She strode away purposefully, not bothering to look back, sinking ankle-deep in the silt. Kenta and I clambered out after her, and I noticed Kenta turning to scan the riverbank opposite as I scanned the one before us.

By the time we caught up to her Mizuki was kneeling on the grassy bank, finishing drawing a circle with five evenly-spaced symbols around it’s edge with a bottle of lawn-marking chalk. I half-turned my back to her, letting my gaze feel over the landscape near and far for anything out-of-place – only to find myself looking back at Kenta as our scans merged. We couldn’t help grin at each other. Just two grunts who knew what it was like to kill time while the mage did some wizard shit.

Mizuki swept a short ritual dagger through the air nine times, the dulled blade making whooshing motions I could hear even over the rising wind, and followed it with nine somatic gestures made by folding her hands and fingers together in odd ways. I turned back to my area scan and heard her exclaim: “Spirit of the divine equations, command the water yokai! Call the Kappa!”

The air temperature dropped noticeably. To my right a small paper doll made from elaborate origami floated past, dwarfed by the large cucumber it was carrying. It drifted out over the water, hovering.

Nothing happened, then continued to happen.

Mizuki glared daggers and depth charges at the placid water below her doll. “It’s close,” she said to us quietly. “I can sense it. It just won’t show itself.”

“… if you can sense it, can’t you–”

“There’s several here, you idiotic uncultured alien earth clod,” Mizuki hissed. “The park across the river’s a natural elemental focus point and there’s three shrines and a temple not a two hundred meters from where we stand; a natural safe harbor for any neutral spirit. Pinpointing one is impossible.”

“Nande dete konai no?” Kenta asked.

“Scared,” Mizuki replied simply. She knelt by the water, clapped her hands together and bowed to the river, before beginning a polite supplication that wasn’t quite able to cover the jagged edge in her tone. Tapping my foot impatiently, I continued to scan the picturesque riverbank as the thunderheads loomed over us, river rushes waving in the rising wind as fireflies ambled about–

–I froze.

Then continued turning my head as if I’d seen nothing. Then back again in the usual steady cadence, and there they were; fireflies ambling about before noonday and untouched by the wind.

I closed my eyes and sighed, taking in the scent of the Tone, the rising wind, the storm now coming,and said, clear and loud: “SILENCE, SWORD-SQUAW.”

My voice carried clear across the river even in the wind. Mizuki, interrupted mid-supplication, swung to bear on me over her shoulder like a tank turret.

“Your medicine is weak,” I intoned. “Chief Big Totem Pole will now call his powerful medicine, servant spirit, thunder bird.”

Her look of homicidal wrath flowed into one of apprehensive concern; like the moment after the first whiff as you hope you’re not smelling cat shit on the carpet.

I drew the 1911 and fired into the reeds; the big .45 booming across the river like thunder.

The reeds exploded in motion; a blur of green limbs, and the .45 bucked again, sending the humanoid sprawling into the shallows. It came up spitting river muck and howling but before it could rise I brought my size-eleven combat boot down on its shell-covered back and leaned my weight into it.

“Call me Shredder,” I said, leaning over to press the 1911 against its seaweed-like hair, “because I’m gonna break my Foot Clan off in your ass if you so much as twitch.”

I never did see what hit me. There was just a WHAM against my temple and then I was sprawled over the grassy bank, head wet and stinging as a vague memory of taking a point-blank blast to the ole noggin from the neighbor’s kid with a CPS 2000. It’d hurt, and I’d been mad…

… I shook off the stun and reality came crashing back in, especially the part where I was a grown-ass adult and the government had issued me a gun, and I sat up to gain a sight picture – only to find Mizuki patting the kappa on the shoulder, one hand holding its injured leg underwater.

“The hell did you just do?”

“Far less than you deserve,” Mizuki said hotly. “There there now, calm down, I’m here, calm down,” she crooned to the ugly beak-faced shell-backed swampy-smelling temu dot com medamusil-mutant-sumo-turtle, who was clinging to Mizuki’s arm and watching my gun in terror. She was focused on her patient but kept checking me suspiciously, eyes flashing with wrath each time.

“… what?”

“You violent cruel unbelievable Yankee swine,” she said, voice brimming with emotion. “How dare you offer such insult!”

“… to a kappa.”

“To a river spirit!” she almost shrieked. “Kenta, shut him up!”

I glanced at Kenta, who was indeed patting the air in a “hold up” motion.

I stumbled to my feet. Espying my boonie hat on the ground I leaned over to retrieve it and almost tipped over – still a little disoriented from the blast of magically-focused water against my head. I pointed at the kappa. “Don’t they steal ass-balls?”

Kenta grimaced and made a so-so motion with his hand.

“They should gut you and stuff you for a museum display,” Mizuki spat at me. She made a seal with one hand, faint blue radiance filling the water as she channeled magic through the other. “You’re the perfect representative specimen of an American.”

“Eh?”

“An insensitive slow-witted racist who shoots first and asks questions later!”

I stared blankly at her as reality seemed to lose traction; the soap-opera effect where it slid past separate from me, on the other side of slick glass.

Turning to look at Kenta, I pointed at the woman from a very old-fashioned Japanese family who’d attacked me on-sight not twenty-four hours ago and queried him with my gaze, only to get a shrug.

* * *

The kappa talked, eventually – or rather confided in Mizuki, whispering to her while I sat cross-legged fifteen meters away, glaring at it and tapping the Colt against me knee.

The news wasn’t good.

The storm was nigh-upon us now; wind rippling the river Tone’s surface as we roared along at the boat’s top speed; Mizuki not even blinking as fine spray o’er the bow wetted her face. She had the scent now, the “kagare,” and though she didn’t say it, the tight line of her mouth and eyes probing far ahead told me she was scared – not for herself, but for whoever was upriver.

“THE HELL IS A MIZUCHI?” I yelled at Kenta over the engine’s roar.

“NOTHING GOOD!” he said, and encircled a phantom with his arms as if to say, big.

For the thousandth time since the masher, since Mosul, since the sorcerer and the saber, I found myself wishing I was a mage; wishing I could just turn my soul to the wind and sniff out danger like a spiritual bloodhound rather than waiting for boons from the powers beyond. Holding my government phone in both hands and tapping carefully as the boat juddered beneath me, I opened the secure message ap and typed “ALFA FOXTROT UTAH P1, AO 36.132839, 139.731439 PLUS THIRTY DOWNSTREAM GET SIERRA HOTEL EDDIE,” the app’s custom keybinds letting me enter the phonetics and lat/long automatically with shortcuts. I tapped send and watched nervously, but ole rocketman came through once again; a Starshield bird confirming reciept as it bounced it to the nearest ground station for priority rebroadcast/relay through MILSTARs. The ball was rolling and within minutes some guys in a big room full of screens in St. Louis would be going apeshit as drones that didn’t exist took off from bases they weren’t at and a handful of Rubies or Sapphires or whatever gemstone was in vogue lately turned their eyes towards Nippon.

But until then, I was on my own – and the storm was close astern.