The brute looked up at Lett with as if suddenly realizing he was there. “You. Hello. Do you know how they know?”

“Know what?”

“How Lansdale knows this location. About Reuben! I don’t understand how. Only I know it. Tell me how.” He added a sickly sneer that not even a bow could’ve helped.

“Search me, mister, I’m just the help.” Lett shrugged.

The Japanese brute stood over Reuben with his arms cocked as if the bloody sandbag of a human in the chair were a boulder that he had to roll away with his bare hands.

Reuben woke again with a start. His surviving eye popped open. He wheezed to the Japanese man, “Why? You promised. You promised your honorable commander. Why do you give it away?”

“You shut up!” the Japanese man barked. His hands kept compacting then springing open; squeezing, opening.

One side of Reuben’s face moved to contort into a smile. It had to hurt like hell. “You know what they do to me now. What they must do. It’s what you do.”

Reuben passed out again. The Japanese man squatted down, his back straight, his wrists fixed atop his knees, staring into space now.

About five minutes later, Lansdale strode back into the tent grinning. “Chop-chop,” he said to the Japanese brute, who stared back, not understanding.

“When the work’s begun, don’t leave it till it’s done,” Lansdale chirped. “Be the labor great or small, do it well or not at all.”

The Japanese man only grimaced, still squatting. Lansdale stood near him and gazed down on him as if about to give his kept thug a kiss on those dents in his skull.

“I’m back, Kodama,” Lansdale said. “We will continue. Understand?”

“We continue? So we finish?” the man called Kodama said.

“That’s right, kemosabe.”

“What mean ‘kemosabe’?”

“It means ‘trusty scout.’” Lansdale winked at Lett.

“Ah,” Kodama said. He muttered in Japanese.

Then Kodama glared at Lett, shot up, and bounded over to Lett. “You!”

Lett straightened up but not too much, the hot ball of disgust in his gut not letting him.

“You shoot man,” Kodama barked at him, stabbing a finger at their target passed out in the chair. “You.”

A normal man might have blanched, reared up, stormed out. But Lett had been places a normal man would never know. In times like these, just as in his nightmare daydreams and night terrors and blackouts, time did not exist. He was back in all those horrid places at once, all planes converging. It made him calmer somehow.

And there was also the fact that he had emptied his magazine.

He eyed all of them at once. Kodama’s scowl. Lansdale’s smirk behind Kodama’s shoulder. The commando’s eyebrows riding high. The target whimpering, trying to keep that one eye open.

“No, you shoot him,” Lett replied. “You Japanese started all this.”

Kodama growled, stepped closer to Lett.