Rain Fall (19 page)

The cowardly little weasel. I squeezed his balls suddenly and hard, and he would have cried out if I hadn’t had the grip on his throat. Then I let go in both places and he spilled to the ground, retching.

“Okay, Benny, here’s what you’re going to do,” I said. “You’re going to call your buddy at my apartment. I know he has a cell phone. Tell him you’re calling from the subway station. I’ve been spotted, and he needs to meet you at the station immediately. Use my exact words. If you use your own words or I hear you say anything that doesn’t fit with that message, I’ll kill you. Do it right, and you can go.” Of course, it was always possible that these guys used an all-clear code, the absence of which indicated a problem, but I didn’t think they were that smart. Besides, I hadn’t heard anything like an all-clear code on the call Benny got in my apartment.

He looked up at me, his eyes pleading. “You’ll let me go?”

“If you do this letter-perfect.” I handed him his phone.

He did it, just like I told him to. His voice sounded pretty steady. I took the phone back when he was done. He was still looking up at me from his knees. “I can go now?” he said.

Then he saw my eyes. “You promised! You promised!” he panted. “Please, I was only following orders.” He actually said it.

“Orders are a bitch,” I said, looking down at him.

He was starting to hyperventilate. “Don’t kill me! I have a wife and children!”

My hips were already swiveling into position. “I’ll
have someone send flowers,” I whispered, and blasted the knife edge of my hand into the back of his neck. I felt the vertebrae splinter and he spasmed, then slumped to the ground.

There was nothing I could do but leave him there. But my apartment was already blown. I was going to have to find another, anyway, so the heat the body would bring to Sengoku would be as irrelevant as it was unavoidable.

I stepped over the body and took a few steps back to the parking area I’d passed. I heard the door to my building slam shut.

The front of the parking area was roped off, and the ropes were strung across pylons that were planted in sand. I grabbed a fistful of sand from around one of the pylons and returned to my position at the corner of the wall, peeking out past the edge. I didn’t see Benny’s buddy. Shit, he’d made a right down the narrow alley connecting my street with the one parallel to it, about fifteen meters from my apartment. I had expected him to stick to the main roads.

This was a problem. He was ahead of me now, and there was nowhere I could set up for him and wait. Besides, I didn’t even know what he looked like. If he made it to the main artery by the station, I wouldn’t be able to separate him from all the other people. It had to be now.

I sprinted down my street, pulling up short at the alley. I flashed my head past the corner and saw a solitary figure walking away from me.

I scanned the ground, looking for a weapon. Nothing the right size for a club. Too bad.

I turned into the alley, about seven meters behind him. He was wearing a waist-length leather jacket and had a squat, powerful build. Even from behind, I could see that his neck was massive. He was carrying something with him—a cane, it looked like. Not good. The sand had better do the trick.

I had closed the gap to about three meters and was just getting ready to call out to him when he looked back over his shoulder. I hadn’t made a sound, and I’d been keeping my eyes off him for the most part and diverting my attention. There’s an old, animal part of you that can sense when you’re being hunted. I’d learned that in the war. But I’d also learned not to give off the vibrations that set off a person’s alarm bells. This guy had sensitive antennae.

He turned and faced me, and I could see the confusion in his expression. Benny had said I’d been spotted at the station. I was coming from the other direction. He was trying to clear the disparity with the central computer.

I saw his ears, puffed out like cauliflowers, disfigured from repeated blows. Japanese
judoka
and
kendoka
don’t believe in protective gear; practitioners sometimes wear their scarred lobes, which they develop from head butts in judo and bamboo sword blows in kendo, like badges of honor. Awareness of his possible skills registered at some level of my consciousness.

I used everything I had to project that I was just Joe Pedestrian wanting to go around him, to buy myself the extra second. I moved to the left, took two more steps. Caught the recognition hardening on his face.
Saw the cane start to come up in slow motion, his left foot driving forward to add power to the blow.

I flung the sand in his face and leaped aside. His head recoiled but the cane kept coming up; a split second later it snapped down in a blur. Despite the power of the blow he brought it up short when it failed to connect with his target, and then, with the same fluid speed, he cut through the air horizontally. I moved back diagonally, off the line of attack, staying on my toes. I could see him grimacing, his eyes squeezed shut. The sand had hit him squarely. Keeping his hands from wiping his eyes showed a lot of training. But he couldn’t see.

He took a cautious step forward, the cane on guard. Tears were streaming from his wounded eyes. He could tell I was in front of him but he didn’t know where.

I had to wait until he was past me to make my move. I’d seen how fast he was with the cane.

He held his position, his nostrils flaring as though he was trying to catch my scent.
Jesus, how is he keeping himself from wiping his eyes?
I thought.
He must be in agony.

With a loud
kiyai
he leapt forward, slashing horizontally at waist level. But he’d guessed wrong; I was farther back. Then, just as suddenly, he took two long steps backward, his left hand coming loose from the cane and desperately wiping at his eyes.

That’s what I’d been waiting for. I plunged in, raising my right fist for a hammer blow to his clavicle. I brought it down hard but at the last instant he shifted slightly, his trapezius muscles taking the impact. I followed with a left elbow strike, trying for the sphenoid but connecting mostly with his ear.

Before I could get in another blow, he had whipped the cane around behind me and grabbed it with his free hand. Then he yanked me into him with a bear hug, the cane slicing into my back. He arched backward and my feet left the ground. My breath was driven out of me. Pain exploded in my kidneys.

I fought the urge to force myself away, knowing that I couldn’t match his strength. Instead, I wrapped my arms around his neck and swung my legs up behind his back. The cane felt like it was going to cut through my spine.

The move surprised him and he lost his balance. He took a step backward, releasing the cane and pinwheeling his left arm. I crossed my legs behind his back and dropped my weight suddenly, forcing him to overcorrect and pitch forward onto me. We hit the ground hard. I was underneath and took most of the impact. But now we were in my parlor.

I grabbed a cross grip on the lapels of his jacket and slammed in
gyaku-jujime,
one of the first strangles a
judoka
learns. He reacted instantly, releasing the cane and going for my eyes. I whipped my head back and forth, trying to avoid his fingers, using my legs to control his torso. At one point he grabbed one of my ears but I yanked loose.

The choke wasn’t perfect. I had more windpipe than carotid, and he fought for a long time, his groping getting more desperate. But there was nothing he could do. I kept the grip even after he had stopped struggling, rotating my head to see if anyone was coming. Nobody.

When I was sure that we were well past the point
where he could be playing dead, I released the grip and kicked out from under him. Christ, he was heavy. I slid away from him and stood up, my back screaming from the cane, my breath heaving in and out in ragged gasps.

I knew from long experience that he wasn’t dead. People black out from strangles in the
dojo
with some regularity; it’s not a serious thing. If the unconsciousness is deep, like this one was, then you need to sit them up and slap them on the back, do a little CPR to get them breathing again.

This guy was going to have to find someone else to jump-start his battery. I would have liked to have questioned him, but this was no Benny.

I squatted down, one hand on the ground to steady myself, and went through his pockets. Found a cell phone in the breast pocket of his jacket. Quickly went through his other pockets. Found the pepper spray. Other than that I came up empty.

I stood up, pulses of pain shooting through my back, and started walking toward my apartment. Two schoolgirls in their blue sailor uniforms were passing just as I emerged from the alley and turned left onto my street. Their mouths dropped when they saw me, but I ignored them. Why were they staring like that? I reached up with my hand, felt the wetness on my cheek. Shit, I was bleeding. He’d scratched the hell out of my face.

I walked to my building as quickly as I could, wincing as I went up the two flights of steps. I let myself in, then wet a washcloth at the bathroom sink and wiped some of the blood off my face. The image staring back
at me from the mirror looked bad, and it was going to be awhile before it started to look better.

The apartment around me felt strange. It had always been a haven, an anonymous safe house. Now it had been exposed, by Holtzer and the Agency—two ghosts from a past I thought I’d left behind. I needed to know why they were after me. Professional? Personal? With Holtzer, probably both.

I grabbed the things I needed and shoved them into a bag, then headed for the door, turning once to glance around before leaving. Everything looked the same as always; there was no sign of the people who’d been here. I wondered when I would see the place again.

Outside I headed in the direction of Sugamo. From there I could catch the Yamanote line back to Shibuya, back to Midori. Maybe the cell phones would provide some clues.

B
Y THE TIME
I reached the hotel, the pain in my back had become a dull throbbing. My left eye was swollen—he’d gotten a finger in there at one point—and my head ached, probably from when he’d tried to tear loose one of my ears.

I shuffled past the old woman at the front desk, flashing my keys as I went by so she’d know I was already registered. She glanced up and then went back to her reading. I tried to give her only my right profile, which was in better shape than the left. She didn’t seem to notice my face.

I knocked on the door so Midori would know I was coming and then let myself in with the key.

She was sitting on the bed, and jumped when she saw my swollen eye and the scratches on my face. “What happened?” she gasped, and despite the pain the concern in her voice warmed me.

“Someone was waiting for me at my apartment,” I said, locking the door behind me. I let my coat fall off my back and eased myself onto the couch. “It looks like we’re both pretty popular lately.”

She came over and knelt down next to me, her eyes searching my face. “Your eye looks bad. Let me get you some ice from the freezer.”

I watched her walk away from me. She was wearing jeans and a navy sweatshirt that she must have picked up while I was out, and with her hair tied back I had a nice view of the proportions of her shoulders and waist, the curve of her hips. The next thing I knew I was wanting her so much I could almost have forgotten the pain in my back. There was nothing I could do about it. As any soldier who’s really been through it can tell you, extreme horniness is a reaction to combat. One second you’re fighting for your life, and then when it’s over you’ve got a hard-on the size of Manhattan. I don’t know why it happens, but it does.

She came back with some ice in a towel and I shifted on the couch, embarrassed. Electric pain jolted through my back but it didn’t make a dent in my predicament. She knelt down again and held the ice against my eye, smoothing my hair back at the same time. Better if she’d just dumped the cubes in my lap.

She eased me back on the couch and I grimaced, intensely aware of how near she was. “Does that hurt?” she asked, her touch instantly becoming tentative.

“No, it’s okay. The guy who cut up my face hit me in the back with a cane. It’ll be okay.”

Midori held the ice against my eye, her free hand warm on the side of my head, while I sat stiffly, afraid to move and embarrassed at my reaction, and the moment spun slowly out.

At one point she shifted the ice, and I reached to take it from her, but she continued to hold it and my
hand wound up covering hers. The back of her hand was warm against my palm, the ice cold on my fingertips. “That feels good,” I told her. She didn’t ask whether I meant the ice or her hand. I wasn’t sure myself.

“You were gone for a long time,” she said after a while. “I didn’t know what to do. I was going to call you, but then I was starting to think, maybe you and those men in my apartment set this up, like good cop, bad cop, to get me to trust you.”

“I would have thought the same. I can imagine how this must all seem to you.”

“It was starting to seem pretty unreal, actually. Until I saw you again.”

I looked at the towel, now speckled red where it had been pressed against my face. “Nothing like a little blood to make things seem real.”