The Last Assassin

I walked up from behind and prodded them each with a wet boot. No response. Okay, they were out. I secured the HK in the holster and felt under their jackets. The lead guy had reached for something at one point, so I knew they were carrying. There it was, a pistol in his unending waistband. I pulled it out and flung it into the surf, then, in spite of all the folds of flesh, managed to repeat the operation for the other guy.

I grabbed the top guy's wrist. I pulled hard but it was like trying to uproot a tree.

Shit, the bottom guy was definitely eating mud. I pulled hard again. Again he didn't budge.

A moment later, Dox reached my position. 'Nice shooting,' he said. 'One shot, one kill. Or in this case three shots, three kills.'

'Give me a hand with this guy,' I said, still trying to pull the sumo by the wrist. 'I think he's smothering the one underneath him.'

'Ah, shit.' Dox dropped the tranquilizer rifle and grabbed the sumo by the arm. We managed to pull him partly off his partner, but not enough. I squatted down and lifted the bottom guy's head off the ground. His eyes were shut and his face was covered with mud. I couldn't tell if he was breathing.

'If that boy needs resuscitating, you can count me out,' Dox said from behind me.

I put my ear near the sumo's mouth but couldn't hear anything. 'He's still getting crushed. We've got to move the one on top. Roll him or something.'

'Shit, man, I'd rather try moving that Cadillac back there.'

'I'm serious, goddamnit. We can't have one of these guys dead from suffocation. It won't fit.'

Dox moved up alongside me and we both grabbed the back of the top guy's coat. The material was slippery with rain and mud and it was hard to get a solid grip. I thought, Worst case, if he's dead, we grab one of the machine pistols and shoot him. Then it'll look like he died in a gunfight with the Chinese and his partner got away with the money and drugs. Not as good as three dead triads and two missing yakuza, but not a total loss, either.

I looked at Dox. 'One, two, three!'

We pulled. The inert mass of the sumo pulled back. The inert mass won.

'Now there's a quality garment for you,' Dox said. 'For a second there, about four hundred pounds were suspended by nothing but raincoat.'

'Again. One, two…'

With a berserker yell, the sumo rolled over and seized my wrist in one massive paw. Whether he'd been playing possum or had come to suddenly, I didn't know. I yelled, 'Fuck!' and tried to jerk away, but I might as well have been a child.

Dox reacted instantly. He took a long step back and cleared leather. 'Don't shoot!' I yelled. 'Not with the same guns that did the Chinese!'

The sumo's face was glistening with dripping mud and water. His eyes were wild, his teeth bared. He snarled and started reeling me in by the wrist.

I dropped down on my ass and planted both boots against the side of his face. I strained backward, and the combined strength of my back and quadriceps broke his grip.

I rolled away from him and came to my feet at the same instant he did. He bellowed something unintelligible and charged me. I dodged and yelled to Dox, Tranq gun!'

The sumo charged again. This time I barely managed to slip by him. His speed and coordination were off because of the tranquilizer, but I didn't know how much longer that was going to last.

The sumo stopped and faced me, his breath rumbling in and out of his chest. He was starting to think, I could tell. He was going to slow it down this time, and he wasn't going to miss.

There was a soft crack off to the side. The sumo grabbed his stomach and grunted. Then he looked up at me, his eyes blazing.

'I told you, neck shots!' I yelled, and pulled out the HK.

'I'm doing the best I can here!' I heard Dox yell from somewhere on my right.

'Ugoku na! Samonaito utsuzo!' I yelled in Japanese. Don't move, or I'll shoot! I hoped the threat would give him pause. If I really had to shoot him, it would ruin everything. But if I didn't, he was going to break me like a matchstick.

Then I realized: the sumo had heard us speaking English, and now Japanese. That wasn't something I wanted remembered. But maybe I could obscure it.

'Wau ai ni!' I yelled at him, using pretty much the only Chinese I know. 'Wau ai ni! Ni ai wau ma?'

My shouting seemed only to make the sumo angrier. He dropped one hand to the ground like a linebacker in a three-point stance. His breathing was locomotive loud. I wondered for a crazy second, Maybe the guy speaks Chinese?

I feinted left, then right, thinking, Come on, come on, the shit is supposed to be fast-acting…

The sumo tracked me with rage-filled eyes. Then he shook his head as though to clear it. I breathed silent words of gratitude.

The sumo took an unsteady step toward me, then another. I circled toward the surf. There was less light in the sky over the water, and he would have a harder time silhouetting me there.

He kept coming, but he was on autopilot now, his arms stretched out in front of him as though he was sleepwalking. I moved off to the side and watched him. He took two steps. Three. Another.

Oh, shit, he was going to make it to the water.

'Oi! Kochi da! Kochi da!' I yelled. Hey! Over here! Over here! Then some Chinese again, to obscure things: 'Wau ai ni! Wau ai ni!'

He was at the edge of the water now. I yelled again.

He started to turn toward me. I let out a sigh of relief.

He tottered for a second, swaying first toward shore, then toward sea.

Dox moved up next to me and shouldered the rifle. We watched in mute fascination.

Shore, sea.

I realized Dox and I were leaning backward as though to influence him with body English. Dox whispered, 'Come on, come on…'

The sumo pitched forward and hit the surf with a crash that sent a geyser up around him. 'Shit, here we go again,' Dox said, and we charged in after him.

For a guy who weighed just south of a quarter ton, the sumo floated pretty well. We got ahold of the lapels of his jacket and somehow managed to turn him on his back and drag him up onto the muddy beach far enough so that his face was out of the water.

We moved a few feet away from him and stood sucking wind. After a moment, Dox laughed. 'Well, that was a mad minute if I ever had one,' he said.

I laughed, too. Yeah, it had been a close one.

'Hey, man,' he said, 'what the fuck were you yelling at him in Chinese?'

'I don't want them telling anyone their attackers were using English and Japanese. If it gets back to Yamaoto, it sounds too much like me. I was trying to obscure things.'

'Yeah, but "Wau ai ni"? "I love you"? You're telling that boy you love him, no wonder he tried to kill us!'

We laughed again. 'It's the only Chinese I know,' I said.

'Well, it is a useful phrase, in my experience. Sometime you'll have to tell me the story behind how you learned it.'

'All right,' I said, still catching my breath. 'Let's…'

The ground shook underneath us. I looked up and there was the second sumo, barreling down on us like a freight train along the surf.

Dox swung the rifle off his shoulder. Everything seemed to be moving in slow motion.

I yelled, 'For Christ's sake, neck shot!'

Dox dropped to one knee and brought the rifle around. But there wasn't enough time. The sumo blasted into him like a cannonball and the dart went skidding along the mud without its small charge going off". Dox flew through the air and hit the ground hard. The sumo turned on him.

Without thinking, I took two steps in and leaped onto the sumo's back. I slammed in hadakajime, the sleeper hold I'd employed thousands of times in my decades of judo at Tokyo's Kodokan. Properly placed, the strangle cuts off the flow of blood to the brain and induces unconsciousness in seconds. But proper placement against a guy whose neck could have stood in for a telephone pole wasn't really an option. I could tell the hold wasn't putting the sumo out. If anything, it was making him angrier. He snarled and reached back for me but I hunkered down away from his desperate grasp. Then he started spinning in circles, trying to fling me off. I hung on for dear life. He went faster and gave my arms a mighty northward shove. His neck and head were slippery with mud and I lost my grip and flew off him. I hit the ground and rolled away, primally terrified he was going to body slam me.