A Lonely Resurrection

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. 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.
    Damn it, 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 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, then immediately hit the speed dial key for Tatsu.
    Of course, I didn’t know for certain 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.
    The first thing I noticed as I exited the restroom 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 mobile 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 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