Authors: John Donohue
vehicles and faded away into the building. Part of me wanted
to listen for the telltale bang of the back door as he hightailed it
into the gulley and away, but I forced myself to face what was
coming.
A real fight, a fight to the death, is called
shinken shobu.
There are no rules, just stratagems. You study your opponent,
scanning for danger, probing for weaknesses. You know your
own faults well enough. Or you should if you pick up a
shinken,
a live sword.
The man who was coming was ruthless. I had thwarted
him and he would be angry. He wasn’t mentally stable to begin
with; being called the Butcher was a tribute to a savage anger
and the inability to control it. I could use that.
What did he know of me? Little enough. I was some sort of
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Kage
scholar who’d stumbled on a manuscript that was valuable for
reasons I didn’t realize at first. I was also some sort of martial
artist, but he was a man who lived in a bloody world. I could
imagine his dismissive idea of martial artists—delusional peo-
ple in exotic pajamas pretending to be warriors. He knew that
I had somehow survived the killers he had sent to Brooklyn,
but probably believed that it was an accident, a fluke. Now I
was on his turf and he would be eager to end this and prove his
worth to his gang.
He would think I was naïve. That I would want to make a
deal for my life. He’d let me try. He’d play with me for a time.
But then he’d take the manuscript and, no matter what deal I’d
offer, he’d kill me.
Or he’d try.
There were ten of them, arms and necks dark with the wind-
ing stain of tattoos. A few cradled shotguns; many had large,
nickel-plated pistols stuck conspicuously in the waistbands of
baggy pants. El Carnicero approached me empty-handed. He
had thick black hair that was slicked back from a high, narrow
forehead. His eyes were hidden behind wraparound sunglasses.
His face was lean, and when he smiled you could see the play
of muscle and tendon along his jaw line.
“Dr. Burke,” he said, with a sarcastic emphasis on the title.
He glanced toward the building on his right and made a quick
gesture with his head. Two of his men peeled off and checked
it. They came out and reported.
“
No hay nadie, jefe
,” one said.
I felt a brief surge of betrayal and remembered Daley’s own
description of himself: an entrepreneur. The fact that he was
gone spoke volumes about his assessment of the situation: there
was no profit to be made here.
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John Donohue
“You came alone, as promised,” el Carnicero said, incredu-
lous. His speech had only the slightest trace of an accent. “Man,
you are always a surprise…” He leaned back and said loudly.
“He came alone!” His men laughed. The snakes writhed just
under skin as he smiled once more. He looked at me, raising his
chin up to one side as if critically appraising an object. “Hey,
you’re not quite what I expected.”
The story of my life.
But Yamashita has taught me that there
are advantages to being more than you seem. To keeping your
true nature in the shadows.
“That’s what
Los Gemenos
thought,” I said.
His chin came down and he faced me directly. The set-
ting sun flashed on the surface of his sunglasses. He raised his
arms to indicate the men standing behind them. They formed
a rough arc, their backs to the vehicles. “
Mira
. I’m not stupid,
bro. I’ve got backup.”
“I told you to come alone.” I tried to sound angry.
“Oh,
si
… but I have been doing this too long, man. And
rules are meant for games.” He turned slightly to his men. “And
we’re not playing fucking games, eh?” A few of the gang mem-
bers laughed scornfully at me.
He sat down with a sigh of contentment in one of the
chairs. “Hey, think of it as a sign of respect, Dr. Burke. Maybe
I think enough of you to believe that you might be dangerous.”
I sat down as wel . The chairs were far enough from the metal
drum that we could see each other. I had measured the distances
careful y. It’s what al good swordsmen do. The ability to gauge
distance and use it to your advantage is a critical skil . Living or
dying can be measured in a matter of inches. El Carnicero had a
reputation as someone who liked to use a knife. I wanted him far
enough away from me to make a deadly lunge difficult.
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Kage
The dark sunglasses hid his eyes from me, but I could
imagine the small darting movements they would make as he
assessed the situation.
He leaned forward and placed a hand on the manuscript
in its package. Or he could have been shifting his body a few
inches closer in preparation for an attack. I felt the air crackle
with nuance and dangerous possibility.
“So,” he said, “this is the book with Westmann’s notes? The
lists of the trails?”
“Yes.”
He opened the package and leafed through the pages, his
lips pressed together as if doing something distasteful. “
Claro
,”
he said, “but let’s be sure, get another set of eyes on this…” He
leaned back and turned toward the Hummers.
“Xochi!”
A door opened and Xochi slid out of the vehicle. He looked
much as he had that day I met him on the trail: dressed in hik-
ing clothes, his long, dark hair in a loose ponytail, his eyes hid
by high-tech sunglasses. But his gait as he approached El Car-
nicero was hesitant, stiff. Xochi seemed fearful of being near
the man. But he came.
Xochi inspected the package, moving carefully through the
pages and examining in depth the section with the trail. He
avoided looking at me. When he was done, he glanced furtively
at me, then nodded to his master and murmured something.
“
Todas las paginas?”
“
Si
,” Xochi answered, “
todas
.” He backed away from the
two of us like someone desperate to escape a booby trap, but
fearful that his haste might detonate it.
“This book is mine,” El Carnicero said, sitting back com-
fortably in his chair.
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John Donohue
“I am willing to return it to you,” I said.
Again, the unsettling smile. “Hey, nice. But you know, in
my world, you don’t get things like this without a price tag.”
“Consider it a gift,” I said.
It intrigued him. He sat up and leaned forward. “
Un reg-
alo
… this I understand.” He wagged a finger at me. “You are
a clever one, Dr. Burke. In my culture, gifts entail obligations,
no
?”I nodded my agreement.
The smile flattened out. The jaw line quivered. “And what
would be the obligation that comes with this gift?”
I felt the impulse to mimic his settling back into a relaxed
posture in the chair, to appear confident as we dickered. I didn’t
do it. The position would put me off balance and vulnerable
to attack. This is the draining aspect of the high-tension period
before a fight is joined; the thousand and one shifts of position
and balance and attention, the cascade of sensations that need
to be sorted and evaluated for threat.
“Simple,” I said. “Leave me alone. Leave those I love alone.”
“Simple?” he countered, “I don’t think so…”
“I don’t care about what you’re up to,” I broke in. “I live a
world away. Take the package. Walk away. I’ll do the same.”
He laughed then. “Oh, Dr. Burke, man, you don’t have the
fucking slightest idea about my world, do you?” He gestured
and one of his men started to come forward, drawing a pistol.
I held up my hand in the signal Steve and I had agreed on;
the green dot of a laser sight flicked on the book in front of us,
then onto El Carnicero’s chest, then onto the torso of the man
with the pistol.
“I understand your world better than you think,” I told
him.
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Kage
I wished I could see his eyes, notice whether they widened
with fear or tightened with anger. But I couldn’t. Was there a
slight hunching of the shoulder muscles? El Carnicero stood
and I did the same. I could almost sense him tensing for an
attack, noting the placement of obstacles, the length of my
arms, and just where he would stick the knife.
“Hey, pretty clever, Dr. Burke. You’re not so innocent after
all… What’s next?”
“You take the package and walk away. You never bother me
again and I forget we ever met.” I knew that I was going to have
to kill him, but part of me still hoped I could get him to just
walk away.
“
Ay, Dio.
If only it were that simple. For me, you see, there’s
more at stake…” He gestured at his men. “They follow me
because I am a man who achieves what he sets out to do.”
“You got the book…” I started, but he grunted in derision.
“Dr. Burke, I sent men to get the book back and punish the
one who took it. Only one of my goals has been achieved. So,
bro, I’m afraid that I’ve really got to finish what I started.”
One of the gang members near a Hummer started to sidle
away into the brush, perhaps hoping to be able to flank me.
The echoing crack of the rifle came at the same time that the
round punched into the hood of the vehicle near him. The man
froze in his tracks.
El Carnicero nodded. “So. You know what they call this in
the movies, Burke?” I noticed that the title was gone. He was
getting angry, getting ready.
“A Mexican standoff,” I said. “Seems appropriate.”
“I have more guns than you,” he told me.
“My shooter is under orders to kill you first,” I told him.
Even through the rifle’s scope, the intensity of the situation
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John Donohue
was clear to Steve Hasegawa. His voice buzzed in my earpiece.
Got you covered, Burke. He’s in my sights.
The green laser dot was
on El Carnicero.
“Take the packet and walk away,” I urged the gang leader.
“You get what you want, I drop out of sight and never bother
you again.” I gestured at his men. “They’ll buy that.”
But I could tell from the tension in his frame that El Car-
nicero was not going to take the deal and that I was going to
have to follow through with what I had come to do. The anger
started to leak out of him, like fluid seeping through cracks in
a surface, straining his ability to control it.
The snakes wiggled. He smiled. “Man, you still do not get
this…”
Hasegawa’s voice.
Movement on the perimeter, Burke.
“I don’t need to understand,” I told El Carnicero.
Burke! I got a string of men coming through the brush to the
south.
“I just want to walk away,” I assured him. But by then we
both knew that I was lying.
“You’re not walking anywhere, Burke.”
Pull out of there, Burke. Hostiles in sight. I’ll meet you…
Then
the transmission was cut off.
I whirled to look behind me up the hill toward Steve’s posi-
tion and El Carnicero lunged at me.
I felt a momentary jolt of fear, and then a perverse relief as
experience took over. After all, Yamashita had been launching
attacks at me for more than fifteen years. But a real fight is
different from the
dojo.
There’s a certain crazy intensity at the
core of someone who’s really trying to kill you. I stayed low,
minimizing the target for El Carnicero, letting him enter into
my space and turning him slightly so his energy blew past me.
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Kage
I needed the momentary break in the action so I could spot the
knife—a butcher’s weapon of choice.
I hate fighting with knives. They can punch into you or
slice you up. If they’re configured right they can cut you on the
thrust or on the backhand withdrawal. It’s hard to walk away
unscathed. There’s an old exercise that’s used in karate
dojo
to
show just how lethal a knife fight is. The attacker takes a red
Magic Marker and uses it instead of the weapon. The defend-
er’s job is to disarm the assailant without having the white sur-
face of the
gi
marred by the red marker. Invariably, even in a
successful disarming technique, the defender’s sleeves and even
his torso is slashed with crimson ink that shows where the cuts
would have been.
El Carnicero was quick; he arrested his momentum and
managed to slam into me. We sprawled in the dirt.
The blade.
Watch the blade.
This is where it got tricky. When you were in
close and couldn’t immobilize the knife.
Finish this quick.
Oth-
erwise, he’d slip the thing in me and it would be all over.
I could hear voices that were raised in alarm all around me,
but they were distant, unimportant things. I was collapsing
into a dense, frantic organism totally focused on one thing and
one thing only.
The knife.
The boot slammed into me from behind, knocking me