Kato carries a large bowl of food scraps out to the dumpster behind his Japanese Hibachi Restaurant near Myrtle Beach. As Kato shakes the garbage out of the bowl he feels a painful blow on the back of his head.

Kato turns to face his attacker. They wrestle to the ground. Kato manages to free himself from the struggle and runs up the steps to the kitchen with the attacker only a few steps behind.

Once inside the kitchen the attacker leaves Kato and heads for the cash register. What’s different in this criminal scenario is the attacker is wearing a gorilla suit, at least it looks like a gorilla suit, but the creature doesn’t act like a real gorilla.

Robbers usually use a bandanna or a stocking mask -- but this bandit is an original. Maybe Kato thought it was Mike, the gorilla who escaped briefly from Riverbanks Zoo a few weeks ago. We learned that Mike hasn’t left Riverbanks since that fateful escape.

Kato, hard working fry-cook that he is, chases the gorilla suit, only now Kato is armed with something he knows how to use -- a meat cleaver.

The gorilla lashes out against Kato but the cook counters with a swing of his trusty cleaver. The encounter ends quickly as Kato strikes the gorilla’s shoulder.

The cleaver sticks in the gorilla. Kato must have hit a tender spot because the gorilla -- or the guy inside the furry suit -- screams out some pretty foul language.

With the meat cleaver still stuck in his shoulder, the gorilla-guy makes a speedy exit out the back door and vanishes into the night.

When the cops arrive they have difficulty writing their report so it won’t sound like a script from a weird movie.

Last we heard, the cops were checking hospital emergency rooms, looking for a guy, or maybe a gorilla, with a meat cleaver stuck in his shoulder.