RainStorm

and air-conditioning units hung from soot-colored
    windows, high-tension wires sagged across overhead. Signs in Chinese characters leered from buildings like lichens clinging to trees,
    their paint gone to rust, colors faded to gray. Here was an emaciated,
    shirtless man, asleep or unconscious in a lawn chair; there was a
    plumper specimen, leaning against a lamppost, clipping his fingernails
    with supreme nonchalance. An indistinct cacophony blanketed
    the area like fog: people shouting into cell phones, street stall hawkers
    exhorting potential customers, cars and horns and jackhammers
    A couple of pigeons soared from one rooftop to another, flapping
    their wings in seeming amusement at the seething mass below.
    My friends would be trying to take all this in, process it, decide
    what it meant for them and for their chances of getting away with
    what they were here to do. It would take them a few minutes to
    work all that out. They didn't know that a few minutes was all they
    had left.
    I browsed the open-air stalls and popped in and out of a few
    electronics stores, checking unobtrusively as I did so to ensure that
    my friends weren't getting too close, that they hadn't yet made up
    their minds. To them, it would look like I had left Keiko shopping
    for clothes while I indulged a taste for computer gadgets and pirated
    software. And I did make a couple of purchases as I browsed.
    A pair of athletic socks--thick, knee-length, light gray. A plain
    navy baseball cap. And a dozen Duracell look-alike D-cell batteries.
    All for about twenty Hong Kong dollars. I smiled at the bargains
    to be had in Sham Shui Po.
    While we walked, I shoved the baseball cap in a back pocket.
    Then, working in front of my waist and mostly by feel to ensure
    that my pursuers wouldn't see, I pushed my left hand into one of
    the socks and pulled the other sock over it, doubling them up. I
    slipped eight of the batteries inside, discarding the rest in a trash-can,
    and tied off the sock just above the batteries to make sure they
    would stay clumped together. I wrapped the open end of the sock
    around my right hand twice like a bandage, using three fingers to
    secure it and holding the weighted end between my thumb and
    forefinger. As I turned a corner, I released the weighted end. It
    dropped about twenty centimeters, stopping with a heavy bounce
    as the batteries reached the limit of the material's extension. I
    looped the material around my right hand until the weighted end
    nestled into my palm, then hooked my thumbs into my front pockets
    as I walked, concealing the improvised flail from the men behind
    me.
    I took them in a counterclockwise arc that ended at a three-story
    food market half a kilometer from the station entrance. I went
    inside, checking as I did so to make sure that they were still an appropriate
    distance behind me. I had no trouble picking them out of
    the crowd. They were the only non-Asians around.
    Which was a problem for them, but not an insurmountable one.
    The market was so massively crowded and clamorous that, if they
    could get close, they could put a knife in a kidney or a silenced bullet
    through my spine without anyone noticing when it happened
    or remembering it afterward. If I were in their shoes, this was the
    place I'd make my move.
    I moved up one of the alleys of food stalls toward the escalators
    I knew were at the other end. Meat hung from hooks around me,
    the air sharp with the smell of fresh blood. Butchered eels writhed
    on bamboo serving plates, their severed halves twitching independently. Mouths on disembodied fish heads slowly opened and
    closed, the gills behind them rippling, trying still to draw breath.
    Hawkers gestured and shouted and coaxed. Masses of shrimp and
    crabs and frogs twitched in wire baskets. A severed goat's head
    twirled from a hook, its teeth clenched in final rictus, its dead eyes
    staring past the tumult at some bleak and final horizon.
    I broke free of the thick crowd just before I reached the escalator.
    I took it two steps at a time, dodging past the stationary riders,
    knowing the men behind me would read my sudden acceleration
    as a sign that I'd made them and was trying to escape. As soon as
    they cleared the crowds as I had, they would pursue. And if they
    caught me, they wouldn't take another chance. They would act.
    At the top of the escalator, I looked back. There they were, at
    the bottom, trying to squeeze past the people in their way. Perfect.
    There was a