Sign of the Dragon (Tatsu Yamada Book 1) by Niall Teasdale (e reader TXT) 📕

was scowling. ‘You know damn well what you’ve done. Not only are you selling the new stuff, but you lied to me about it.’

‘I didn’t!’

‘Which? Lie or sell poison?’

‘Both! Either! I don’t know. If I was selling– I didn’t know!’

Tatsu stared at him, and he tried to escape her glare by folding himself in as though he could collapse into a singularity. He was telling the truth. But the lab had found that more than half of the drugs confiscated from him were the new type. ‘Let’s say I believe you. You are selling the new stuff, Walt. The lab confirmed it. It’s lethal, Walt. Trying to get off the stuff is just about impossible. It’ll kill you without medical intervention. When you eventually get into court, they’re going to lock you away until you die of old age.’

‘What? No! I didn’t–’

‘You have to have a new supplier. You tell me where you got the stuff, I put in a word with the judge, and then you only spend twenty years inside. If you’re good, you could be out in half that.’

‘Ten years? You think that’s a good deal?’

‘I think I have you on distributing a drug which imprisons its users in purgatory for the rest of their lives. I think I also have you on distributing a potentially lethal version of that drug. And I think you’re a ketō about to face a Japanese judge who won’t like you anyway. Ten years is the best deal you’re going to get. Who did you get it from?’

~~~

Tatsu checked the feed from the assault team’s tactical network. Ten suitably equipped officers were readying to raid the building in Nagasakudai where Walt had said he got the new rapture. Tatsu was not in command of the troops, but she was in overall command of the operation. There had been some mutterings about her waiting in the command vehicle – which was hidden in an alley a block away – while the building was made secure, but the tactical teams at Chiba HQ knew her, and they knew that she was as tough or tougher than any of them.

Instead, Tatsu was scouting. Wearing a tatty overcoat to conceal her weapon, she was moving through the corridors of a largely disused apartment building, seeing what could be seen. The ground floor was shops and storage space, and she had already located the actual distribution centre down there. Calling it that was probably a bit of an exaggeration. That was where a few men were sitting around dealing out packets of blue powder to the street dealers who came in to buy. It had seemed a logical place for production, but there was no sign of that. She was going over the rest of the five-storey building for signs of a factory.

The interesting thing was that the suppliers were Japanese. Their outfits were about right for a street gang in Chiba until you took a close look. Everything was a bit too good. The quality was fairly high and the outfits were a little too new. These were outsiders pretending to be locals. The area they had set up in was part of an unclaimed region of the refugee zone. The only people who really owned this part of Chiba were the Denshitoakuma. The Yankees and the Hispanic gangs stayed out, for the most part, and the major criminal groups viewed it as contested territory. If outsiders were making their home there, it likely represented another attempt by some yakuza group to push into the zone.

There were others in the building. Locals destitute enough to need somewhere to squat had taken some of the apartments. Unless the place got a new owner with the means to clear them out, they were likely to keep a roof over their heads. They had no power and nothing but the municipal wireless network, but they had shelter from the wind and rain. Of course, since the rainy season had finally broken, they were less well-off without air conditioning, but you took the rough with the smooth.

The outsiders had brought in portable generators to give them power where they needed it. That turned out to be the top floor, though it was not for producing the drug. They had set up the top floor as housing and storage. This was where they lived while in Chiba. They had also taken the precaution of keeping their main supply away from the distribution point.

‘What are you doing up here?’

Her luck had run out. Tatsu turned to see a man in dirty jeans and an expensive leather jacket staring at her down the main corridor. He had, apparently, not seen her leaving the storage room they had made by knocking through a few walls to link several apartments, otherwise he would have known exactly why she was there.

‘You know you people aren’t allowed on this floor,’ the man continued. ‘If we have to, we’ll clear all of you out… Wait a minute, you’re Japanese.’

Tatsu tripped the go signal on the TacNet system. ‘It’s worse than that,’ she said.

‘What do you mean? What’s worse?’

‘I’m Japanese, and I’m a cop.’

He looked at her for about a second and a half, not really taking in what she was saying. Probably about then he realised his communications were down because the jammer a drone had carried up onto the roof was now operational. There were a number of holes in the radio noise to let the tactical network operate, but none of them were in the ranges used in Wi-Fi. The criminals were effectively isolated from one another, unless they could talk directly. With no calling out to warn anyone and a cop before him, he went for whatever weapon he had under his jacket.

Tatsu was faster. A rocket-propelled projectile punched through the man’s right bicep, tearing the muscle apart as it