The Last Assassin

I looked at him. 'What do you know?'

'That you've gotten your signals crossed one too many times.'

'Is that what you call it? You know what she did? She went to New York to try to scare Midori away. And she's so good at what she does, it worked.'

'I know what she did. She told me. She feels awful about it. She tried to tell you when you were leaving for New York, but she says you wouldn't listen.'

'What is there to talk about? She did what she did.'

'She made a mistake, is what she did. And she knows it.'

'Yeah? Well, fuck her.'

'Pardon me for saying so, partner, but is it possible you're being just a tad ungrateful here?'

I took a swallow of the whiskey and glared at him.

He stared right back. 'You know, she flew halfway around the world and risked her life to help you with your problem. She killed one man who was trying to get the drop on you. And she killed two more the moment she realized they would harm your family if they lived.'

'You know why she came out here? She felt guilty over the little op she pulled on Midori behind my back. The one Midori was so freaked out by, it made her set me up to be killed.'

'Who cares why she came? That woman is devoted to you, son, only you're so eager for an excuse to go back to your 'it's me all alone against the world' bullshit that you won't even admit it.'

I looked at him. 'What do you want from me, Dox?'

'I want you not to become the miserable recluse part of you insists on being.'

'You want me to tell you I'm hurt? I feel betrayed? Well, I won't. I don't need your shoulder to cry on.'

'Yes you do, partner. You need someone's.'

'You're wrong.'

'I see what you're doing. You got hurt 'cause you trusted. And now you're telling yourself, 'See? I was right not to trust, this is what happens when you trust. Well, I'll just never trust again, that's what I'll do.''

'Are you coming up with this shit yourself, or have you been talking to Delilah?'

'She sees it, too. But that doesn't mean much. You're so damn obvious.'

'You know, the two of you understand each other so well, why don't you just take her. You've been spending enough time with her, from the sound of it.'

'Oh, this is the part where you make the outrageous accusations to insult your friend so he leaves and spares you the burden of having to admit that you're the asshole who pushed him away.'

I put my elbows on the table and rested my face in my hands.

'It ain't like that between Delilah and me,' he said, 'and you know it. But it is like that between the two of you. And if you walk away from that now, you are the biggest fool I've ever known.'

I looked at him. 'She sent you here to plead her case, is that it?'

'No, dumbass, you told me not to invite her, remember? She doesn't even know you're back in Tokyo, and she's worried about you, too. I'll call her and tell her, otherwise I'll be complicit in your childish nonsense. But if you were smart you'd call her first.'

I finished my whiskey and stood up. 'Do whatever you want,' I said, throwing some bills on the table. 'I just came back to pick up my money.'

55

I went back to Rio. It wasn't home, just where I was living for the moment. But I had nowhere else to go.

I stayed up late and got up late and took a lot of walks. I read some books of the embarrassingly self-help persuasion. None had quite the title I was looking for — Killer's Ten-Step Conscience Cure, maybe, or Your Best Life After Betrayal, something like that — but I picked up a few insights along the way.

More than anything else, I threw myself into grueling jujitsu workouts. At first, I thought I was having control issues not so different from what drives people with eating disorders. Then I thought maybe it was some kind of age-denial thing, because if you can do two hours of nonstop matwork in an un-air-conditioned room during Rio's December summer, it must mean you're immortal.

But as the workouts grew more intense, resulting in a series of minor injuries, I realized what was really going on. I was trying to punish myself. Because, deep down, I knew everything Dox had said to me at Heartman was true.

Sometimes I think the urge to believe in our own worldview is our most powerful intellectual imperative, the mind's equivalent of feeding, fighting, and fornicating. People will eagerly twist facts into wholly unrecognizable shapes to fit them into existing suppositions. They'll ignore the obvious, select the irrelevant, and spin it all into a tapestry of self-deception, solely to justify an idea, no matter how impoverished or self-destructive.

And that's what I'd been doing. What had Dox called it? My 'it's me all alone against the world bullshit,' that was it. And to support that bullshit, I'd been deluding myself in a variety of areas.

For one thing, I'd been making too much of Midori's memory. Yes, we had chemistry. And the time we'd been pursued by Yamaoto in Tokyo had involved enough friction so that sparks were inevitable. But after our split, I wanted to believe that whatever had been between us was unique, that it could never happen again. Because if it