Tokyo.
Tanaka crouched beside the trash cans behind the convenience store and tugged his raincoat hood lower.
He had traded two cans of expired beer to a homeless man for the raincoat. It was blue, with a hole in it, and water kept seeping through the right shoulder.
A newspaper lay spread on the ground before him.
The rain had soaked most of it, but he had protected the middle section with a plastic bag.
It was a copy of The Mainichi Shimbun he had picked up at Ikebukuro Station three days earlier, page seven, local news.
The headline read: "Two assistant inspectors at the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department suspected of accepting bribes; prosecutors launch investigation."
Two photographs appeared beneath the headline.
Tanaka recognized one of them.
No, he knew them both.
An assistant inspector in the Mobile Investigation Unit's Third Division.
Last year, when Tanaka was still on the force, they had worked on the same floor.
The man brought two boxed lunches every morning, one for himself and one for a female officer in the Intelligence Division.
On the surface, he was a nice guy.
But Tanaka knew he took three hundred thousand yen a month from an organized crime syndicate.
He knew because he had seen it himself.
It had happened two months before he was fired.
During a surveillance operation, he had stumbled upon Matsuda accepting an envelope from someone in a black Lexus in a parking lot.
He had taken a picture and handed it to his superior.
His superior told him to delete it.
"You saw wrong." That was what his superior had said.
Three days later, Tanaka's gun went off accidentally during an arrest, and the bullet tore through the suspect's shoulder.
The suspect lost too much blood and died on the way