Philo, Patrick, the Japanese doctor-slash-executioner, and Mifumo were left to assess each other, Kaipo Mawpaw in repose.
Mifumo raised his sword with a flourish, brought it near to his face to admire it. “There are notches on this handle,” he said. “This katana is generations old. Hundreds, and hundreds, and hundreds of years old, handed down from Samurai to Samurai. How many have been beheaded by it, I’m not really sure, but I suppose the notches would tell the story if we cared to count them, there are so many. And now—”
His examination of the handle ended. He bowed dramatically toward Philo. He presented the sword to him, handle first. “You must do me this honor, Philo Trout-san. The victor… must vanquish the defeated.”
“I’m not doing that, Jerry.”
Rebuffed, Mifumo laid the sword on the floor. He began disrobing. Shoes, socks, shirt, pants, leaving himself in his gym trunks only. He dropped to one knee, leaned forward, and bowed to expose the back of his neck.
“Pick it up, Philo-san. I would rather you, my conqueror, restore my honor than suffer more scorn at the hand of the oyabun. Please. Do this for me. A warrior like you. Pick it up… use it…”
Philo eyed the sword, then eyed the gun he’d discarded, then came back to the sword. Patrick and the doctor didn’t move.
“Jerry, no.”
“So be it.” Mifumo reached into his bag and found his small tantō knife. “Philo Trout, I bid you good-bye… as a true Samurai.”
The tantō blade entered Mifumo’s abdomen with a hard, two-handed push and a soft “unhhh,” the Samurai warrior muting his scream, his eyes widening while he rotated it internally to do maximum damage. As his insides spilled onto the floor, he fell forward onto them and the tantō, pushing it deeper, apologizing through the pain to his ancestors in Japanese.
A distraught Patrick moved to Kaipo, hovered over her body, assessing the damage from a scalpel to her midsection. The Yakuza doctor rushed to Mifumo, a helpless, bloody mess.
Philo pocketed his gun and reached for Mifumo’s sword, one-handing it off the floor, its heft considerable. “Hey, Doc,” Philo said to the Yakuza doctor, the sword by Philo’s side. “C’mere…”
A new plan. The room was about to get a lot messier.
34
The door kicked open and the Yakuza soldiers streamed into the room with the chicken slaughterhouse conveyor. A man speaking on a phone trailed them, walking swiftly to make his entrance behind a bevy of drawn handguns. A collective gasp plus groaning and gagging rose up from the room’s newest occupants.
The man spat on the floor, trying to rid his mouth of the taste of death, then spoke into the phone again. “We are, um, here, Oyabun…”
A voice blasted through the phone’s speaker. “Is the doctor finished?”
Yabuki’s man surveyed the room. “Are you?” he said to the room’s only occupant, their grim-reaper executioner contractor who was hazmatted head to toe, and who answered with a muffled “yes” and a thumbs-up.
“We are checking, Oyabun,” the soldier said into the phone to Yabuki.
Blood had splattered the floor, the ceiling, the conveyor belt, the executioner’s hazmat suit dripping with it, from headgear to shoes. No body, just squishy mush underfoot and multiple white Styrofoam coolers lined up along a back wall, a cloudy mist above them from dry ice, their lids ajar, bloody handprints on them.
He elbowed the doctor-cleaner out of the way, began pulling open cooler after cooler, finding splayed arms, hacked feet, minced buttocks, strips of muscle and bone, a gloppy mixture of internal organs, grimacing at the sight inside each cooler, having to quit after only a few, unable to stomach the search. He yelled at the doctor. “The head? Where is the head?”
Their grim reaper located a certain cooler, lifted off the lid, reached inside with both gloved hands. He gripped the head in front and in back, lifted it, a profile reveal only: black, blood-soaked hair, blood-smeared face, neck as far south as the shoulder line.
Yabuki’s voice came screaming through the phone’s speaker. “Did you forget about me? Answer me! Is it done?”
“Yes, Oyabun, it is done.”
“Excellent. Now bring all of her to me. I will give that Yankee dog Lanakai what he wants. Next, listen carefully. Have the men take my yacht and motor over to that unholy island. It’s time for us to tidy it up a bit.”
Each man’s ticket out of the bloodbath of a room was to carry a cooler full of body parts slop. With the bucket brigade of coolers winding down, only a few left, Yabuki’s man texted his oyabun: What do I do with the exterminator?
He waited for a response, did a slow turn to see where their hazmatted contractor was. Not here. Not in the next room. Not in the next. Gone. He retraced his footsteps. Nowhere to be found. He went to a window.
A steep drop started a few feet beyond the ledge, leading away from the abandoned building camouflaged by heavy vegetation, hiding in virtual plain sight. Seventy-eighty yards away at the bottom of the hill sat a quiet business park and a neighborhood, all connected by paved streets, the only vehicle on the road an idling street sweeper.
The return text from Yabuki: Eliminate him.
He swore in Japanese, stopped cursing only when he saw a blur of blue hazmat on the bottom half of the hill, scrambling to stay upright, then finally sliding the last few yards onto the curb. Tucked under the man’s arm was one of the white Styrofoam coolers. More cursing, which was interrupted by a drawn pistol that sprayed semiauto gunshots down the hill, zipping through the tree canopy, the bullet spray reaching the street sweeper, pinging the metal. The blue target got to his feet and scuttled to the protection of the other side of the truck, climbing into the driver’s side door.
The Yakuza man’s
