The Falling Sun
Nichibotsu - Sunset

The Evening of Slaughter.
     She was in the Mission District when it happened.
     Eyes watched her suspiciously, a group of vested youths glaring across the street at another group of vested youths; their fingers twitched; their blood boiled. Without realising, she walked into the middle of it.
     Sparks flew, and she was devoured by the brawl. An innocent between rivals.
     As easy as wrong place, wrong time – and she was taken from me.

Officer Arthur Lawrence of the San Francisco Police Department drummed his fingers against the steering-wheel as he monitored the decrepit warehouse behind the Union Square Financial Park.
     It was an ugly building. A tin rectangle with a crooked face, as if the place had lost badly in a fistfight. It looked like the lair for every gangster, hippy, and drug-dealer in the state.
     San Francisco in 1969 had plenty of those.
     A cosmopolitan hive of sleaze, San Francisco was one of the biggest contradictions in the United States. A stew pot of cultures and criminal organisations. The kind of city where the streets were colourful and bold, but if you looked close enough, there was blood in that rainbow. A place where harmony was pure luck – if you could call the ceaseless war between gangsters and peace-protesters an equilibrium.
     Lawrence was distracted from these thoughts by his approaching partner, Alonso Garcia, whose lean frame filled the windshield as he came round the side of the car.
     Arthur had been Alonso’s partner for several months – since the Los Siete De La Raza incident back in May, when an undercover officer had been killed; the seven involved arrested. Usually, officers road out in pairs, but due to shortages – and a city that devoured police like kindle – manpower was thin; they each had their own car.
     Officer Lawrence opened the door and slipped from the standard-issue Dodge Coronet.
     Officer Garcia leant on the bonnet, said: “Ugly, isn’t it? I had a pry – the garage round the side’s locked. This is the only way in. We’ve got them couped.”
     “Any sign of a vehicle?”
     “Nope. I bet they must’ve dumped it somewhere –”
     “And carried the body? Surely not.”
     “They could’ve moved the vehicle afterwards.”
     “Maybe,” Lawrence chewed his tongue; “Let’s hope that dispatch was right.”
     “About that,” Garcia started; “Didn’t you think the call was strange? Little detail, no specifics, just get told to come here. I asked for who we’re looking for – dispatch said they weren’t told nothing. That’s never happened.” Both men narrowed their eyes; “If someone called in, how did they know it was here?”
     “What you thinking?”
     “I dunno, just – I don’t know. It’s strange.”
     “Come on.”
     The pair reached the warehouse. Professional mode quashed their anxiety. They posed either side of the door, ready to breach the decrepit building.
     “Backup?” Lawrence asked.
     “What do you think?”
     He nodded and pushed a hand against the door. Paint flaked. “We’re doing this?”
     “We’re doing this.”
     With a shove, the door opened.
     “What the hell died in here?” Lawrence spurted, and he threw a hand to his nose and mouth to mask the stench.
     The pair flicked on their combat flashlights and waded into the shadows.
     “This reminds me,” Officer Garcia whispered; “There was a restaurant we raided a couple of months back – O’Donnell and I – in Chinatown. Chinks were putting rats in the food. Place stunk. God help if someone’d lit a match…”
     San Francisco, the country, the world, they were always on the verge of a spark; pure luck had kept them alive.
     “Who do you think we’ll find?” Garcia asked.
     Lawrence knew what he hoped to uncover. A case to elevate his prestige. The Big One. The infamous Zodiac Killer.
     “I guess we’ll find out.” Is all he said to his partner, and he gestured to a doorway on his right, which his flashlight had revealed; “Look.”
     A faint light emanated from the room. There could be someone inside.
     The two officers prepared to breach. This time, however, they produced their revolvers, Smith and Wesson sixty-sixes. Cautiously, they filed round the corner.
     The room was empty.
     A small office: a chair and a couple of desks, each one smothered with papers; various jottings and scribblings up the walls. A lantern in oriental design, lit with a flame, flickered in the corner, shedding light on a section of the wall that was covered in newspaper clippings and photographs. The stench that had begun to burn their throats was not coming from here.
     Both officers holstered their weapons and investigated the sprawl of documents, intrigued as much as they were disturbed.
Officer Lawrence stabbed his flashlight at the desk. A proliferation of eyes stared back at him from the photographs spread there. Beneath them were gnawed maps of some complex. They weren’t labelled, and they appeared to have been drawn by someone who was not a skilled architect.
     Lawrence could not distinguish any connection between the photographs, some of which depicted masses of emaciated, ragged people behind barbed wire, and others that illustrated sharp skylines of the city.
     He picked a newspaper clipping and aimed his flashlight at it. It was dated February 19th, 1942. A ghosted face of Franklin D. Roosevelt stared out at him. The headline read:
     ‘President Signs Executive Order 9066: Japs at Home in America Deadly.’
     He scanned on: ‘After the unprecedented attack on Pearl Harbour by Japanese forces, President Roosevelt has signed Executive Order 9066, declaring that all enemy aliens in the United States are a threat. Action to remove them from positions of influence or sabotage is underway, with the FBI already mounting an unannounced arrest of church leaders and others in positions of influence within the community. The 120,000 or so Japanese aliens will be relocated to safe and hospitable camps for the remainder of the war.’
     Officer Lawrence knew the history, but it had been before his time. How did it relate to a kidnapping here in 1969? It was unlike the Zodiac Killer’s previous attacks. A copycat? There were plenty of imposters disrupting the force with their false claims to fame.
     “Hey, look at this.” Garcia called. He was also holding a newspaper, his flashlight pointed at it. Lawrence recognised the cold man whose photograph dominated the page:
     “John Thorbes? The one who ran for mayor?”
     “The very same.” Garcia said; “And look.” He drew the flashlight to a wall plastered with John Thorbes photographs. Many were circled with red ink or slashed, perhaps by a knife.
     “No wonder dispatch kept it confidential.” Lawrence mused; “If the press finds out – well…”
     There would be uproar, and questions, and they wouldn’t be the two men on the job.
     After what had happened to President Kennedy and Martin Luther King, any threat to someone important wasn’t only taken seriously, it was amplified into a conspiracy by the press.
     “There’s your motive,” begun Garcia; “Money. His head’ll demand a big ransom. Hey! Maybe the opposition’s done this – to get Thorbes out of the picture. Mark his name or some such. I always thought that Alioto had something off about him.”
     That didn’t make sense to Lawrence. He wasn’t so quick to jump to conclusions. “But look at these –” he gestured to the photographs of the prison-like complex and the newspaper he had just read; “how do they connect?”
     “Maybe Mr. Zodiac Killer likes veterans.”
     “No. Look.”
     “Thorbes had a busy career, so what?”
     “No.” Lawrence grabbed a different newspaper and thrust it in his partner’s face; “What’s a turf war in Little Saigon got to do with a man who ran for mayor?”
     “Everything. It was his slogan. He promised to clean the city from stuff like that.”
     Lawrence wasn’t convinced.
     Garcia slapped him on the back and dragged him towards the exit. “Come on,” he said; “Let’s go rescue ourselves a war hero.”
     Lawrence nodded and followed.
     His flashlight, however, landed on a coloured photograph. It caught his attention. A woman in a red kimono sitting on a bench.
     The image was signed and dated: My Issho, for when the sun sets. 1965. Unconsciously, Lawrence pocketed the photograph.
     The men reached another door – this one at the end of the hall. A large vent was set into the wall, splattered with fossilised meat guts. A chilled air thrummed from the grate. The fetid odour.
     Again, the two officers breached; they knocked through the door.
     “Oh, come on.” Garcia exhaled.
     This room was also empty. Except for the ceiling, which was a complex tangle of tracks; each one with a dangling hook. The warehouse had clearly been a meat packing plant before its retirement. That at least explained the smell.
     Officer Garcia punched his flashlight at the air.
     Both he and Lawrence were beginning to think that dispatch had been sent a false call. The youths of the city often did that, not only as pranks but to deliberately waste police time – an institute that many protestors thought was corrupt, overpowered, and should be defunded.
     Fortunately, Garcia’s ferocious torch-wielding revealed another door in the gloom. It was in the far corner, a red and green light above it that would have once told people if the abattoir was in use.
     “Count of three.” Garcia said. He counted down on his fingers…
     They barged through the door.
     “Finally –” came a gravelly voice as they entered; “I’ve been scratching my arse round here. What took you so damn long?”
     Both men stopped their advance, lingering between the origin of the voice and the door. What they had heard frustrated them. What they saw brought relief.
     John F. Thorbes looked a lot smaller than he did on television, especially restrained to the chair. A gaunt mask, a combination of pronounced cheekbones and battle scars, also contrasted the fiction of the televised world. There was a patch of blood across his head.
     “Come on!” he roared.
     Officer Lawrence edged forwards. The kidnapper was not in sight. He ventured: “Sir, are you okay? Are you hurt? Or –”
     “No, no thanks to you lot. Now get me outta here!”
     “We will, sir. But…” Garcia crouched towards the chair. He focussed on the crates in the corner; “Is anyone in here, sir? Anyone in the shadows?”
     “Untie me.”
     “Mr. Thorbes, sir –”
     “Untie me now.”
     “We can help you.” Lawrence added; “But we need to secure the room.”
     “Y’know who I am?”
     “Are they armed, sir?”
     “They ain’t shit.”
     Stabbing his gun at the corner of the room, Garcia commanded: “If anyone’s there, come out with your hands up.”
     “Hands up, move slowly.”
     “We don’t want trouble – we can solve this.”
     “Damn yella, he is.”
     “Mr. Thorbes, sir, please.”
     “Come on out. Now.”
     “Slowly. Where we can see you.”
     “Now…”
     There was movement. Both men saw it. They gripped their revolvers tighter; converged their flashlights.
     A silhouette was revealed. Was this who they had come for?
     Officer Lawrence edged closer.
     The figure stretched and pointed; “That man is a murderer.”
     And the handcuffs snapped upon its wrists.