The taxi passed beneath an elevated train track and onto Oume Road and stopped.
“This is as far as I go,” the cabbie said. “I’ll round it down to the nearest ten-yen.”
“You gotta be kidding me,” Sasaki grumbled. “It’s another quarter mile to the police station. I’ll round it up to the nearest hundred, so keep going.”
“Hey, don’t give me no lip about it. You don’t get out now, I’ll round it up to whatever you’ve got on you. Capisce?” The cabbie reached for the control panel on the seat console.
“Yeah, I got it,” Sasaki said, thumping his hands on his knees.
The air was hotter and more humid than downtown. The sultry air felt as if individual molecules of water were clinging to the skin and getting absorbed directly into the body. And in perverse exchange, the demonic miasmas welling up all around seemed to rob the soul of all ambition. Walking a dozen paces was enough to bring a strong man to his knees.
Sasaki raised his left hand to his eyes. The winding chain-link fence was over ten feet tall. Now and then blue-white sparks showered down. The five-hundred thousand volts of high-tension current had snatched a harmless gremlin out of the sky.
If a commando police patrol car hadn’t passed by, Sasaki might have collapsed after another twenty yards or so.
“What the hell you doing something like that for?” one of the cops sighed. “We’ve warned people so many damned times about walking here from the station, you’d think they’d get the message. But there’s still a couple every year.”
His partner added, “The miasma from the park blows through here the strongest. Don’t you listen to the news?”
Sasaki shook his head. The news updates at six in the morning, noon, six at night, and midnight broadcast DMZ miasma density eco-zone warnings to the general public on the public television screens. Though lately they had become more part of a general safety policy directed at tourists and visitors. The previous February, the “Third Mopping-Up Operation” had yielded great results.
Sasaki was treated in the infirmary of the Shinjuku police station. After some bed rest, he started feeling mostly normal again. The diagnostic machine next to his bed analyzed the symptoms when he was brought in and dispensed the proper amount of medicine. Sasaki mulled over the three white pills and pocketed them.
There wasn’t a doctor. He must be helping out at the affiliated hospital. Suspects were constantly being hauled down to the station. If they hadn’t already gotten roughed up pretty severely for “resisting,” interrogation was bound to leave many of the rest of them half dead.
Sasaki discharged himself from the infirmary, found an elevator, and pushed the button for the third underground level. The cops had confirmed his ID in the patrol car. After explaining what he was doing in Shinjuku, he was given an all-access badge.
The third underground level was lined with steel doors. Interrogation rooms. All of the doors were bent and dented, the marks left by criminals freaking out inside. In this city, there was no underestimating the kind of damage a roid rage could inflict on two-inch hardened steel.
Sasaki knocked on the door marked with the number seven. The fingerprint lock clicked and the eight-inch steel door silently slid open. The windowless, steel-lined, battle-hardened ten foot square room was designed to contain the worst effects of a suicide bomber.
The wall on the right held an intercom and switch panel. Facing the entrance was a wooden table and two chairs. The lights recessed into the ceiling filled the dreary space with cool light. The fair features of the young man standing behind the table cast off a cold fire all their own.