Hard Rain

extremis he was
    actually able to get the weight off his chest. I hooked a foot under
    the horizontal supports at the bottom of the bench and used the
    leverage to add additional pressure to the bar, and again it settled
    against his chest.
    I felt a tremor in the weights as his arms began to shake with
    exertion. Again the bar moved slightly north.
    Suddenly I was struck by the reek of feces. His sympathetic nervous
    system, in desperation, was shutting down nonessential bodily
    activities, including sphincter control, and diverting all available
    energy to his muscles.
    The rally lasted only another moment. Then his arms began to shake
    more violently, and I felt the bar moving downward, more deeply into
    his chest. There was a slight hissing as his breath was driven out
    through his nostrils and pursed lips. I felt his eyes on my face but
    kept my attention on his torso and the bar. Still he made no sound.
    Seconds went by, then more. His position didn't change. I waited. His
    skin began to blue. I waited longer.
    Finally, I eased off the pressure I had been putting on the bar and
    released my grip.
    His eyes were still on me, but they no longer perceived. I stepped
    back, out of their sightless ambit, and paused to observe the scene. It
    looked like what it almost was: a weightlifting addict, alone and late
    at night, tries to handle more than he can, gets caught under the bar,
    suffocates and dies there. A bizarre accident.
    I changed back into my street clothes. Picked up my bag, moved to the
    door. A series of cracks rang out behind me, like the snaps of dried
    under. I turned to look one last time, realizing as I did that the
    sound was of his ribs giving way. No question, he was done. Only his
    convulsive grip on the bar remained, as though the fingers refused to
    believe what the body had already accepted.
    I stepped into the dark hallway and waited until the street was clear.
    Then I eased out onto the sidewalk and into the shadows around me.
    Two.
    I slipped away from the area on foot along a series of secondary
    streets in Roppongi and Akasaka, cutting across narrow alleyways in a
    manner which, to the uninitiated, would have looked like a series of
    simple shortcuts to wherever I was going, but which were in fact
    designed to force a follower or team of followers to reveal themselves
    in an effort to keep up. With a few deliberate exceptions, all my
    surveillance detection moves are accomplished under the guise of
    seemingly normal pedestrian behavior. If I'm being followed because
    some organization has taken an interest but hasn't yet managed to
    confirm who I am, I'm not going to give the game away by acting like
    anything other than John Q. Citizen.
    After about a half-hour I was confident that I wasn't being tailed, and
    my pace began to slow in accompaniment to my mood. I found myself
    moving in a long, counterclockwise semicircle that I only half
    acknowledged was taking me in the direction of Aoyama Bochi, the
    enormous cemetery laid out like a triangular green bandage at the
    center of the city's fashionable western districts.
    On the north side of Roppongi-dori, I passed a small colony of
    cardboard shelters, the way stations of wandering homeless men whose
    lives were, in a sense, as detached and anonymous as my own. I set
    down the gym bag I was carrying, knowing that the bag and its contents
    of workout clothes and weightlifting gloves would quickly be
    distributed and assimilated among the gaunt and trackless wraiths
    nearby. Within days, perhaps hours, the discarded remnants of this
    last job would have been bleached of any trace of their origins, each
    just another nameless, colorless item among nameless, colorless souls,
    the flotsam and jetsam of loneliness and despair that fall from time to
    time into Tokyo's collective blind spot and from there into oblivion.
    Freed of the burden I had been carrying, I moved on, this time circling
    east. Under an overpass at Nogizaka, north of Roppongi-dori, I saw a
    half-dozen chinpira, gaudy in sleek racing leathers, squatting in a
    tight semicircle, their low-slung metal motorcycles parked on the
    footpath alongside them. Fragments of their conversation skipped off
    the side of the concrete wall to my right, the words unintelligible but
    the notes tuned as tight as the tricked-out exhaust pipes of their
    machines. They were probably jacked on kakuseizai, the methamphetamine
    that has been the Japanese drug of choice since the