RainStorm

off
    his head and blasted a hammer fist into his face, snapping my body
    forward to generate momentum and getting my weight into the
    blow. Once. Twice. Again.
    I felt his body go limp and the razor dropped from his hand. I
    transferred his wrist to my left hand and groped for the razor with
    my right. There it was, on the ground, next to his thigh. I grabbed
    it carefully and slid off him. His face was a bloody mess and he was
    groaning, seemingly semiconscious.
    I knelt beside him and hooked the fingers of my free hand under
    his jawline. I hauled his head back and raised the razor.
    A voice cried out sharply in Japanese from behind me. "Yamero!" Stop!
    I froze, thinking, What the fuck?
    I looked back over my shoulder. Two serious-looking Japanese
    stared back at me, each with a pistol pointing at my face. "Yamero!" one of them said again. "Kamisori otose!" Drop the razor!
    I did as he asked and started to stand. My right leg wobbled,
    then went out under me. I looked down and saw why. My thigh
    was gashed wide open and spurting blood. My wrist was doing the
    same.
    I sank down to my knees and looked at them. "You must be Belghazi's
    new yakuza friends, is that right?" I asked them in Japanese.
    They ignored me. Beside me, Belghazi stirred.
    He must have had them positioned up the road as backup, and
    they'd moved in when the shooting started. Maybe they'd been accompanying
    him since Macau. Sure, he knew I would be looking
    for Arabs again, and he'd even supplied a few--distractions at the
    periphery, diverting me from the real players. Tatsu had been right.
    Belghazi groaned and sat up, then got unsteadily to his feet. I
    watched him, my face impassive. I was already kneeling, and now
    I placed my hands calmly across my bloody thighs, the fingers
    pressed lightly together and pointed in at forty-five degrees. I drew
    my head and shoulders up into seiza, or natural posture, the formal
    attitude of traditional Japanese culture, an integral element of martial
    arts, of the tea ceremony, and, perhaps most of all, of the dignified
    moments before seppuku, or ritual suicide.
    Belghazi rocked on his feet, cradling his broken arm, blood running
    down his face from a gash in his forehead. It looked like one
    of the hammer fists had broken his nose. His body convulsed, then
    he leaned forward and vomited. His men watched and said nothing.
    He spat a few times and wiped his face with his good hand. For
    a few moments he stood leaning that way, catching his breath. Finally
    he straightened and said to me in English, his voice ragged,
    "How have you been tracking me?"
    I ignored him. It seemed that my luck had finally run out. I expected
    no help from Dox. There was a bag with five million dollars
    in it being contested in front of his position. I couldn't reasonably
    expect him to abandon it. I was alone now, fittingly enough, and I
    had no good options.
    "Tell me how you have been tracking me, and I promise to kill
    you quickly. If you don't, I will make you suffer."
    My mind began to drift. I barely heard his questions. The urgency
    of his tone seemed strange to me, irrelevant. I wondered at
    some level whether I was suffering from the effects of blood loss.
    "I will ask you a final time," he was saying. I noticed that he had
    picked up the razor. "Then I will slice your face apart."
    I looked out at the harbor and had the oddest sense that I was
    connected with it somehow, that my spirit was leaving my body
    and expanding outward. I was vaguely surprised at how unafraid I
    was. Death catches everyone eventually, and I had never harbored
    any illusions about its ability to catch me. That it had hesitated so
    long to do so seemed born more of a desire to mock me than of
    any real inclination to wait. Death had tired of that game, and had
    finally moved in to collect what we all owe.
    Well, come and get it, I thought. Go ahead, take what's yours. Choke
    on it.
    There was a strange sound, softer than the pop of a champagne
    cork, louder than the fizzing of a seltzer bottle. I looked over and
    was surprised to see a fine mist erupting out of one of the yakuza's heads. Probably I should have done something about that. But the
    event seemed to have little to do with me.
    The other yakuza had turned to look at his partner, whose body
    was sliding straight to the ground like a suddenly liquefying pole.
    The yakuza's mouth was hanging open, as though in shock or incomprehension.
    But only for a second. Because then his head