I stood up. “Okay.”
One of the bodyguards approached. I started toward my bag, but he got there ahead of me. He picked it up and slid it over his shoulder. “I’ll take this,” he said.
I gave no sign that this was a problem for me. The cell phone, at least, much smaller than the gun, was in my pocket. I shrugged and said, “Thanks.”
Murakami motioned toward the door with a tilt of his head. “Outside.”
My heart rate had doubled but my voice was cool. “Sure,” I called to him. “Just going to take a leak first.”
I walked to the back of the room and into the bathroom. I was already so juiced from adrenaline that I couldn’t have pissed if I had to, but that wasn’t what I had come to do.
I was looking for a weapon of convenience. I would call Tatsu after I found it. Maybe some powdered soap that I could toss into someone’s eyes, or a mop handle that I could break off into a nightstick. Anything that would improve the currently ugly odds.
My eyes swept the room but there was nothing. The soap was liquid. If there was a mop, they kept it elsewhere.
You should have done this before it mattered. Stupid. Stupid.
One thing. There was a brass doorstop screwed into the wall just above the floor and behind the door. I knelt and tried to turn it. It was too close to the floor for me to get a hand around. And it was coated in probably ten layers of paint and looked as old as the building. It wouldn’t budge.
“Fuck,” I breathed. I could have tried stomping on it with my heel, but that might have broken off the point that was screwed into the wall.
Instead I tried pressing one way with my palm, then the other. Up, down. Left, right. I jiggled it but felt no new play. Damn it, this is taking too long.
I squeezed it between the thumbs and forefingers of both hands as hard as I could and rotated it counterclockwise. For a second I thought my fingers had slipped, but then I realized that it had turned.
I unscrewed it the rest of the way and stood just as the bathroom door opened. It was one of the bodyguards.
He looked at me. “Everything okay?” he asked, holding the door open.
I palmed the doorstop. “Just washing my hands. Be right with you.”
He nodded and left. The door closed behind him and I shoved the doorstop into my right front pocket.
Of course, I didn’t know for certain that they were on to me. Murakami might have just been there to talk about whatever it was he had in mind at Damask Rose. But that didn’t matter. The important thing is to accept the facts early. Most people don’t want to believe the crime or the ambush or whatever the violence is going to be is really going to happen. At some level they know better, but they keep themselves in denial until the proof really comes in. At which point, of course, it’s too late to do anything about it.
If I have to err, it’s on the side of assuming the worst. This way, if I’m wrong, I can always apologize. Or send flowers. You err on the other side, the flowers will be coming to you.
I pulled out the cell phone and pressed the speed dial key as I walked out. The first thing I noticed was that the gym was empty. It was just Murakami and his two goons, standing between me and the door. They’d set my bag down near the front entrance. I didn’t see the gun, so it seemed that they hadn’t thought to open the bag during my brief absence.
“What’s going on?” I asked, but casually, as though I was too stupid to realize anything was seriously amiss and was counting on Murakami for a straight answer.
“Everything’s fine,” he said, and they began to move toward me. “We just asked the others to wait outside so we could have some privacy.”
“Oh, okay,” I said. I held up the cell phone. “Just got to make a quick phone call.”
“Later,” he said.
I hoped Tatsu and his men were close by. They’d have to be right around the corner if they were going to be of any use to me.
“You sure?” I asked, looking at him, giving the call time to go through. “It’ll only take a minute.”
“Later,” he said again. The bodyguards had fanned out to his flanks.
I glanced down and saw that the call had connected. “Okay,” I said with a shrug. I put my hands in my pockets-putting the phone away with my left, palming the doorstop with my right. I would wait until they were in striking distance.
But they stopped just outside that range. I watched them with a quizzical, sheepish look, as if to say, Hey, guys, what’s all this about?
Murakami eyeballed me for a long moment. When he spoke his voice was a low growl. “We’ve got a problem,” he said.
“A problem?”
“Yeah. A problem as in, your name isn’t Arai. It’s Rain.”
I let my eyes move fearfully from face to face, to the exit, then back again. I wanted them to think I might bolt. Which I sure as shit would if I could.
“Hold him,” Murakami said.
The man to my left lunged. I was ready for it. My hands had already popped free of my pockets and I extended my left arm as though to block him. He took the bait, grabbing my forearm with both hands to immobilize it while his partner moved in from the right. I snaked the hand he was trying to hold over his left wrist, trapping it, and used the grip to yank myself toward him. He was braced for me to try to pull in the opposite direction and couldn’t react in time to stop me from closing the distance. The doorstop was already out, palmed in my fist with the screw point jutting out between my middle and forefinger like the world’s nastiest signet ring.
I popped a quick jab over his trapped left arm and up into his neck, aiming for just under the jaw line. It wasn’t a power shot but it didn’t need to be; what it needed was accuracy, and that it had. The tip plunged in like a corkscrew hypodermic, and before he could pull away I twisted downward and ripped back. He yelped and leaped away, instinctively clapping his hand over the resultant tear. Blood jetted out from between his fingers, and I knew I’d hit the carotid.
He made a horrified gurgling noise and clapped his other hand over the spot, but blood continued to pour out. I swung back to my right. His friend had pulled up short, unsure of what had just happened, shocked by all the blood. I slipped the doorstop between my thumb and forefinger as though it was a knife and brandished it at him Hollywood style, my arm extended and the weapon way too far from my body.
When he realized that I wasn’t holding a machete, he tried to grab my juicy target of an arm. I let him get my wrist, then made as though I was trying to yank free. He braced against the pressure, straightening his forward knee, his eyes and all his focus on the weapon. Using our counterbalanced pulling to brace myself, I raised my right foot off the floor and shot it into his forward knee. At the last instant he saw it coming and tried to twist away, but he had too much weight on the leg. The kick blew through his knee and he crumbled to the floor with a shriek.
Murakami was still standing between me and the door. He looked calmly at the two fallen men, one screaming and writhing on his back, the other sitting and clutching his hands tightly to his spurting neck in a gesture of burlesque mortification. Then he looked back at me. He smiled, revealing the bridge.
“You’re good,” he said. “You don’t look like much, but you’re good.”
“Your friend needs a doctor,” I said, breathing hard. “If he doesn’t get proper attention he’s going to bleed out inside five minutes, maybe less.”
He shrugged. “You think I want him as a bodyguard after this? If he wasn’t going to die, I’d kill him myself.”
The fallen man was drenched with blood and staring at Murakami blankly. His mouth opened and closed but no sound emerged. After a moment he slumped soundlessly to his side.
Murakami looked down at him, then back to me. He shrugged again.
“Looks like you saved me the trouble,” he said.
C’mon, Tatsu, where the fuck are you?