Officer Shogo Sugimura was especially distracted that morning, when the sun was so weak and feeble it could barely creep its way through the wisps of clouds. He wished he could blame the weather for getting him down. They were deep in a cold snap, or at least as cold as the city ever got. It wasn't snowing, but it felt like it should be. The air was crisp and clean, but cold enough it was painful to breathe. Wisps of steam caught his breath that morning when Officer Sugimura went from the convenience store where he bought coffee every morning to his patrol car. He felt like it was cigarette smoke; like he was the brave but jaded antihero cop in one of the film noir movies that he liked to stay up watching on Saturday nights.

Of course, Sugimura's life wasn't as simple as a black and white movie with husky voiced sensual women. No, his life was complex in a simple, everyday way. To begin with, he spent his first fifteen or twenty minutes of the morning rounds brooding about his boss. Ages ago, when Sugimura had begun working at the force, his boss had been a good enough guy; a little older than Sugimura, but friendly with the rookie, an ally in the politics of police-work. Then they had promoted the slimy little cocksucker. Then all of a sudden the asshole was not only higher ranking than Sugimura, rank became important.

"Hey there, pal," the weasel-faced moron would say with that stupid city-slicker accent, "I don't mean to pull rank on you or anything, but I'm such a hot-shot down here at headquarters now, I need you to go out on assignments while I sat on my fat-ass doing paperwork and contemplating screwing my secretary on my desk in front of the cheaply framed pictures of my wife and kids. Yeah, you go ahead and do all the manual labor, the dirty work. I have a corner office with blinds now; I don't need to play buddies with you, do I?"

One of these days, Sugimura was going to do something about that guy.

But work wasn't the only thing driving Sugimura to distraction. Oh no, it couldn't be just a bad coworker, now could it? On top of that, he had to have problems with the wife, now didn't he? Yuka Sugimura had been just a hair shy of being a goddess when she was a young, newly wedded girl of 21. She had always had perfect hair, a soft crooked smile, and she hadn't complained at all about her sex life. Fast forward 16 years and one kid, Mrs. Sugimura had lost her girlish figure, her perfect hair, her kind, submissive voice. She had morphed into a mother, a woman with a screeching voice and sagging tits. She was vaguely disgusted with their sex life, although nothing Sugimura tried or offered to try seemed to please her. She spent her days complaining about their house – she had been so proud of it when they bought it 12 years ago – and nagging Sugimura and their 15 year-old son. Somewhere, she turned away from being his loving, sweet wife into being his mother.

What made the situation worse was that Sugimura didn't want a divorce, but he didn't want to be married to this woman either. Yuka, for all her flaws, stuck with him, raised his child, still laughed at his anecdotes about work, even when they were stupid. She looked pretty good with the proper clothes, make-up and the right lighting. True, she wasn't supple and lithe anymore, not like she was when they were married, not like the young, naïve women Sugimura had cheated on her with. But being single? Could he do it? Or could he sink into this pit of middle-age, middle-class, average-ness with his wife, once extraordinary who was now perfectly average herself? Both thoughts were depressing, and Sugimura couldn't decide which he found worse.

That was what was driving him crazy. If he and Yuka were getting a divorce, he could have handled it. If they were going to work out their problems, he could handle that too. But this in between, this gray area where they didn't talk or fuck or fight was just driving him nuts. It's from being a cop for so long, he told himself, I don't like surprises, and I don't like maybes.

About the time Sugimura was sipping at the dregs of his convenience-store coffee, his police radio began to squawk at him. He set down the Styrofoam cup and picked up the plastic paw he had to speak into.

"Sugimura here."

"There's been a call, can you get it?" the distorted voice on the other end recited an address.

"I got it," Sugimura said, hoping this would be something quick.

"It sounds like an accident or something, maybe," the voice informed him.

Maybe, Sugimura thought. Maybe.

The neighborhood Sugimura had been called to was not in a bad part of town, but it was close. The trees were skeletal and dying, and not just because of the cold weather. The houses were cheaply made, and from the window of his car Sugimura could make out the signs of home-repairs, roofs patched, windows broken and sealed with tape. There were cars in almost every driveway this early in the morning, but they were old and cheap cars, fitting companions to the houses. Paired with the overcast sky, it was a sad neighborhood, smelled like desperation frozen in cold, cold that wouldn't even snow yet.

Sugimura pulled up to the designated house, a very much used silver car taking up most of the driveway. Somebody was home. As he stepped out of his own vehicle, a middle-aged man approached him in old paint-stained work clothes, looking pale and concerned. Like he'd seen a ghost.

"You're the one that called?" Sugimura asked the man.

"Yes, sir, I'm the next-door neighbor," the man answered.

"Can you tell me what's going on?" Sugimura asked.

"Kazuo and I were supposed to work on my roof today," the old man began. "We were going to get an early start. When he didn't come over, I called to see if he was up. Nobody answered. I know they're home; it's Kazuo's day off, and his car is there. He wouldn't leave when we had to get up so early. Anyway, I went over there and knocked on the door, but again no one answered. So I went around the back, to look through the sliding glass door and see if Kayoko was up making breakfast or something." The man paused. "I saw … through the glass, I saw a leg."

"A leg?" Sugimura was bored already. Somebody probably just fell down the stairs and hit their head.

"Yeah …" the man looked towards the house. "I just want to make sure everything is ok."

Sugimura nodded, and began to walk up the driveway. He knocked on the door and waited, but sure enough, no answer. After a couple more tries and waiting a few moments, he headed around the house to the back, to see if he could see this leg. On the way there he tried to peek through the windows, but they all had screens and were impenetrable.

The sliding glass door in back of the house looked into the kitchen, which was clean and perfectly in order. Just beyond the small table lodged in the corner of the neat little room Sugimura could see a doorway, and just through that … yes, there was a strip of whiteness there. A leg, its occupant lying on their stomach. Accident, surely.

Sugimura examined the lock on the door. Cheap, of course. Didn't anyone care enough to build these houses decently? Sugimura picked the lock open with a small tool he kept in his belt, barely requiring any effort. It made sense, in an odd way, though. The houses were poor and contained nothing, so why bother to put a nice lock on the door? Let the criminals in, it's not like there was anything to steal.

His police-issue boots squeaking on the linoleum floor, Sugimura wished he could take them off. Not on duty, though. He called out; announcing his presence, but the house was dead, felt dead.

He approached the doorway, looking for the owner of the leg. He flipped the light switch by the doorway.

And that's when Sugimura saw the blood.