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It's another rainy Saturday night, and Reki is angry with the world. What else is new? He wants to skate, and maybe it's the droop of his usually lively red hair because of the rain, and maybe he pretends to himself that the police won't bother with him because they won't want to come out in this weather, but he gets on the board he has with him and races the cars, driven by salarymen on their way home, or to bars, or meeting up with their families. Who knows, or cares, what they're doing?
The anger is just starting to subside when a jolt of adrenaline brings it right back into focus. A young cop, a rookie, probably Reki's own age, is holding up a hand.
An instant decision must be made. Stop as asked, or skate on in hope there will be no chase.
In the past, and this has happened several times before, Reki always stopped. Sometimes all he had to do was show his identification. More often, he submitted to a thorough search, having every snack and pen and any other openable item on his person opened. The cop would ask, with a veneer of courtesy over the hard hand of state power, to open each item, and Reki would consent to every indignity. A couple of times, they even squeezed his shoes to see if he had something concealed there. Reki looks a bit, he supposes, like a cop's idea of a druggie.
This time, no. This time Reki doesn't stop.
He knows right away it's a bad choice, because the young cop jumps into the front passenger seat of the patrol logo kei truck and whoever is driving it starts following Reki. These vehicles aren't fast, but a fast car could outpace the best S skateboarder on a regular paved road, and even this boxy minitruck can keep up.
As long as there aren't too many pedestrians. It's rainy, so there aren't as many as usual, but Reki can head to a busy intersection where his skateboard might be able to weave between what foot traffic there is where a police van, even a tiny one, can't.
He's making it worse, not better. First he realizes that is when the second cop car shows up, this time a real car, a sedan with lights on top and everything. They box him in. Reki hops the curb, tries to take the railing of a staircase that no car could handle, hoping the cops won't pursue on foot, but of course, they do. His fury is incandescent by this time. How dare the police waste their time chasing a skateboarder who the only law he's breaking is skateboarding on too busy a street, when there has to be serious crime going on right under their noses that they're just ignoring? He is ranting aloud about this, addressing an absent Langa, and he realizes as he finally gives up, stopping and bending down to pick up his board, that his phone has put a call through.
There's a buzzing feeling to the sound it makes in his pocket. Reki can't quite make out what the voice on the other end of the line is saying, or even who it is. He said Langa's name, so maybe his phone dialed Langa, but he really does not want Langa or anyone else on his phone's autodial to get mixed up in this particular trouble he's made for himself. So he turns the phone off without looking at it, thumb finding the power button in a nearly automatic gesture that says shut the fuck up and go away to the phone, the police, and the bystanders on this wretched, drenched, weekend-evening city street who are huddling under their umbrellas watching Reki maybe get arrested.
Board under one arm, Reki waits. Water trails run down his forehead into his eyes, making him squint. The world gets blurred around him.
Five officers, for just him? They're surrounding him. Reki stands still, fear finally overcoming the anger rendering him frozen in place. "Put down the skateboard," a deep voice says. Two of them are really big guys, tall and muscular, the other three closer to Reki's own height and build.
Reki slowly lowers the board to the ground, his hands shaky. "This delinquent must be on drugs," one of the regular sized cops says to the one next to him. This one has extra short hair, like maybe he shaved his head at some point not long before. Maybe he has something to prove.
"No, officer," Reki says, trying to be extra polite.
"You think talking to me that way buys you something, punk? It does not. Officer Satou, search him, I'm sure you'll find contraband."
Satou, the biggest guy, puts his hand into Reki's pockets, one by one. It's a big hand. He pulls out the few things Reki is carrying: wallet, key ring, bottle of mineral oil, a couple of chamois rags, a fist-sized cube of crepe cleaner for the grip tape. He holds up this last item. "Officer Ishida, look at this."
They're going to arrest him for a block of gooey stuff used to clean sandpaper? "That's just," Reki begins, but he's interrupted.
"You do not need to find contraband to arrest this criminal," a sixth cop says, coming up behind Reki. "He fled after being commanded to stop. He rode a device prohibited from use in traffic or around pedestrians. Recklessly endangering the public, and attempted evasion of arrest, are charges that will give the prosecutor no difficulty. This substance," he finishes, "is not illegal. It is a standard maintenance material, made of rubber similar to an eraser."
"Maybe he ditched the drugs as he tried to run away," the other big cop suggests.
"Check along the route," Ishida says, or the one Reki thinks is Ishida.
He shouldn't have been skating in the rain, even on an already fucked up board that he was planning to scrap anyway. It's going to be a mess. If he gets an ankle tag, he won't be allowed into S anymore, and that's probably the best possible outcome of this situation. He definitely won't be skating any S if he is locked up.
So it's a weird shock to see a familiar head of shiny hair and hear the smooth voice of the S big man himself suddenly appear in between the police. Reki already kind of thinks Adam has supernatural powers when he skates, but how does he appear in the middle of the rainy city just while Reki is in the biggest trouble maybe of his entire life?
And, since he is who he is, is he going to make it better, or is he going to make it worse? There is no way to know, but for some reason, Reki's fear subsides, without the anger resurging, either. It's like he gets steadier, for no reason other than here's someone from S and the Reki who skates S is a steadier guy than the Reki who gets searched by cops.
Not just someone from S. The man is like, S itself, personified. Yet S disguised, too, because there's no wild mask and violent passion, just a solid, powerful presence in an expensive business suit.
He's speaking quietly to the cops, and they melt away, go to the kei truck and the patrol sedan and drive off, leaving Reki with this unusual Adam-but-not-Adam alone in the striped pedestrian section that runs down the middle of the roadway. "Thank you very much," Reki says to him. "I don't mean anything rude by this, but how, why, are you here, helping me?"
"You are a voter," the man says.
Reki's nerves break into a laugh. "What? Seriously?"
"And a member of an exclusive fellowship I value highly," he adds obliquely.
"Huh, I guess so," Reki says. At S, Adam says, more than once, that Reki isn't interesting to him, that he sees nothing in him. But it's true, he is still part of the fellowship of S, one of the few. "Not just anyone goes there," he says.
"But you do. So take more care of yourself. I should not have to do this again." There's a bit of menace in that voice this time, that strangely makes it more familiar to Reki, and therefore kind of reassuring in a perverse way.
"Yeah." Reki turns to go.
"A ride is available," his rescuer offers.
But Reki doesn't want that kind of debt, not to Adam, not even in this situation. "I can find my own way home." He heads off into the rainy night.
A thought strikes him, but Adam is already out of earshot, out of sight. There is no point, but Reki calls after him anyway, since there's a slight chance he might hear, after all. "Give Langa my regards."