Cold Hit

by Christopher G. Moore

“Did he tell you that I started something in a bar? Something that was stupid.”

  Pratt did that little shrug of his. The one he did with his kids when they were telling him a half-truth and it was something that annoyed him. “Jess said you did something he hadn’t ever thought a farang would do. You defended a bar ying. You showed compassion. That was his word.”

  “Jess got it all wrong. I didn’t like the way the guy was looking at me. That’s all. It had nothing to do with the girl. Some asshole in a muscle shirt.”

  “Sure, Vincent,” said Pratt, opening his briefcase. “I brought you something that might be useful in keeping Wes Naylor alive. After he leaves Bangkok, he can die in any way and any place he pleases. But I don’t want him dying in Bangkok.”

  He tossed a folder onto the bed. Calvino slowly opened it and saw that there was an auditor’s report about the hotel Dr. Nat, his brother, Dr. Damrong, and Wes Naylor were preparing to buy. Confidential and private was stamped all over the report. Calvino looked at the words, which meant one thing in the States—meaning privacy and confidentiality—but repackaged and imported into Bangkok, the ideas floated in the air, bursting like bubbles. Calvino leafed through the report, then flipped back to the executive summary. Company bank accounts were in the individual names of directors and not of the hotel company. The company had received millions of baht but no official company receipts had ever been issued. There had been all kinds of advance cash payments and no documents or explanations as to who made the payments or what they were made for. The depreciation expenses were totally screwed up. There had been overpayments to creditors by millions of baht. There were millions of baht more for maintenance of the elevators and hotel premises but the transactions were unrecorded. Receipts were not attached to payment vouchers. Seven BMW’s had been bought with company funds and registered in family members’ names. Forty-three employees with Isan family names and upcountry addresses were listed on a “ghost” payroll. In other words, a family-run business operation where the family pocket and the company pocket were in the same pair of pants and everyone’s fingers were dirty from grabbing whatever could be hauled away.

  “Not what I would call a clean bill of health,” said Calvino. “All those sticky fingers in the rice bowl.”

  “With one finger on a trigger aiming at Wes Naylor.”

  “He’s a pretty reckless guy. And not all that sane. That’s not a good combination, Pratt.”

  “You signed on to keep him alive.”

  “I have been making mistakes all week. The Naylor job is not my first mistake.” Calvino put down the report. “You show this to Jess yet?”

  “I gave him a copy.”

  “What did he say?”

  “That Dr. Nat had already sent him a copy of the report.”

  “No surprises, in other words.”

  “Something like that.”

  “If I thought someone was trying to kill me, I mean really had a contract out, I wouldn’t be delivering letters to bar yings. I wouldn’t be in Thailand. You know what I am saying?”

  “You’re right. Naylor’s not afraid. Meaning, as you said, he is very stupid or very clever or crazy,” said Pratt.

  “I don’t take Wes Naylor to be a stupid man. He’s a greedy and careless man and that makes him dangerous. I was joking about the crazy part. Well, maybe kidding a little.”

  On Pratt’s way out of the hong, Calvino spotted Lek sauntering down the corridor as if she were a ying on a low-flying Brandy mission. She had changed out of her work clothes, putting on a tight, slinky red dress. A different line of work clothes. There was no underwear line under that dress either. No nylons. Hips swinging as she walked; long, thin legs in black high heels with the strap over the ankle. She had Monster Fuck written all over her. Pratt blocked the doorway as Lek stopped, her hand resting on one hip, eyes bright in the corridor light, her full lips parted in a smile. The curve of her breasts revealed under the red fabric. This time-rat had never looked so good, thought Calvino. And her husband Jack ran around on her as if he didn’t know or care what he had waiting for him at home. Now she had gone on her own DNA run to the Brandy Hotel. Calvino wasn’t sure whether he knew what to say or had anything worth saying to her. Pratt understood the situation from the moment Lek smiled at Calvino.

  “As I was saying, I think your infection should clear up in a couple of days,” said Pratt. “Just take the pills like I told you.”

  “Doc, what about sex?” asked Calvino.

  “You don’t want to pass this one on to anyone. No sex.”

  “But the pills you gave me, they will work, right?”

  Pratt shrugged. “For your sake, let’s hope so. I’ll have the full lab report tomorrow. Stop at my office tomorrow afternoon. And hope for the best, Mr. Calvino. Hope for the best.” Pratt winked, then pushed ahead from the door and walked down the corridor. He pressed the button and before the elevator arrived, the lady in the red dress was standing beside him, looking grim, smoking a cigarette and shaking her head.

  “You just saved my life,” she said to Pratt. “Farang mai dee.” The foreigners are bad. She was waiting for the normal Thai co-conspirator agreement on this point.

  Not tonight, not with this cop pretending to be a doctor. The elevator arrived. “When I cut a foreigner open, you know he or she looks exactly the same inside as you or me. So I can’t say they are bad and we are good. Under the knife, we all look the same. Same heart, liver, lungs, and kidneys. There is no difference.”

  On the way down in silence Pratt wondered if he believed that.

  EIGHT

  WHEN PRATT HAD disappeared into the elevator with Lek it was about 3:00 a.m. The ying time-rat had gone home without fulfilling her carefully planned insemination session. Calvino sat back in a chair outside of Naylor’s door. He nodded off, his chin on his chest. A few minutes later he was out, watching the stranger walk into the village. The tall, thin man was teaching the villagers the art of making fire. Villagers danced naked around the flames. The stranger removed the black hood obscuring his face. It was Naylor’s face and Calvino watched as the village elders lifted him up and threw him into the flames. A loud bang echoed down the corridor and Calvino lifted his head, rubbed his eyes and looked around. A few feet away a working ying had slammed the door on the way out. She walked uneasily down the corridor in her highheels, swaying as if she had too much to drink or had done drugs. Not long afterwards, other yings emerged like bees out of a honeycomb and headed for the elevator at the end of the corridor. He couldn’t sleep any longer. All the activity of yings coming and going from the hongs along with the sound of moaning and screaming penetrating the walls spilled into the corridor. It was as if a special-effects sound track were playing in the background; the sound track that came packaged as part of the price of a short-time.

  Passionate doorway kisses and hugs, then money changed hands, the door closed, the ying lighting a cigarette, collecting herself, breathing out a long sigh, then pushing off with just enough steam to reach the elevator. Calvino heard the angry American voice shouting into the phone inside the hong across corridor.

  “Tim. I want to speak to Tim. No, not Kim. It’s Tim. I just told you it’s Tim and not Kim. I want to speak to him. Tim that is T for Thailand and not K for knife. You know knife, right? Okay, I will spell Tim. It’s T for Thailand. I for India. And M for moron. Tim.”

  The tourists were different from the old Asian hands, he thought. The yings turned a lot of tourists into moody, screaming, middle-aged teenagers. What gave old hands their edge was life spent in the proximity of surplus of beautiful, available yings; there wasn’t any rationing. These Goddess-like creatures had opened a door into a world where suddenly a man’s class, age, nationality, education, and accent no longer counted. They had no way of judging such farang matters, so they counted for nothing. A surplus of yings created a level playing field with enough supply to accommodate every guy so long as he spoke two or three words of Thai and had some cash ready to spend
. Jealousy was wasted as the supply was constant. Competition among men was viewed as adolescent behavior. With the never ending flow of yings, hoarding, even competition, made no sense. The old hands—or at least most of them—checked their egos at the bar door; they cultivated a mellow, detached attitude about sex. Calvino’s surplus/rationing law of sex translated into those who rationed time with men they didn’t love for money. Once she loved the guy, then she wanted not only his money but all of his time. Money-rat turned into time-rat. When a ying fell in love, then a man had only one choice: he rationed his time or he lost it altogether. Rationing time made her attentive, kind, considerate, interested, and always available. Once she moved in, life was over, like Jack’s life. Lek had created surplus time with her man, turning her affection for him into indifference, her kindness into contempt, her attention into boredom. She was out hunting for another man.

  About four in the morning, Naylor opened the door wide enough to ask Calvino to go out of the hotel and buy something for Jep’s mosquito bites; she was scratching herself until the blood spilled onto the sheets. Calvino knocked on Jess’s door, they had a short exchange in the doorway; Calvino looked inside. Jess opened the door wider. He saw Colonel Pratt inside the room.

  “Come in for a moment,” said Pratt.

  “What’s going on?” He exchanged a long look with Pratt.

  “Come in and shut the door,” said Pratt.

  Jess sat back at the table covered with computer print-outs, photographs, and a laptop with an Excel file showing some kind of a graph. “As you know, I work undercover narcotics in LA,” said Jess. “Pratt and I are comparing notes.”

  Calvino looked over at Pratt. “We think one of the men Jess busted with one kilo of heroin is connected to one of the major players in the North. They are refining the heroin in factories over the border in Burma and then it transits through Thailand.”

  “We’ve already figured out that a lot of heroin is on the street in LA. We are pretty certain it is coming through Thailand,” said Jess. “What we can’t figure out is what happens to it between Burma and LA.”

  “The heroin from the Burmese border just disappears,” said Pratt. “We are trying to track it and we think the guy Jess arrested can help.”

  “What you’re saying is the bodyguard assignment for Naylor is cover for an LAPD drug investigation,” said Calvino. “I can’t believe that I’ve been set up. And to run cover for a drug case. Someone might have let me know.”

  He stared straight at Pratt. They had an understanding, going back many years: honesty and loyalty above everything else. The pact was never to hide the ball from the other. And Pratt knew what Calvino was thinking, that he had let him down, drawn him into a situation without really explaining what the situation was.

  “No one has conned you, Vincent. This is a legitimate bodyguard job,” said Pratt.

  “Colonel Pratt’s right about that. It was my idea to try and work a new angle on the drug case while I am here,” said Jess, turning around the computer screen so that Calvino could see it. “See the graph. That’s the amount of heroin increase on the streets of LA in the last two years.” The line shot up like the graph of an Internet IPO.

  “I still haven’t got a straight answer. Is Naylor being used as a decoy in a drug investigation?” asked Calvino.

  Jess bit his lower lip and slowly shook his head. “Not exactly.”

  “That’s what I figured. Yes and no. Not exactly. Maybe. One of those Thai answers that means nothing. Christ, I should’ve known, four grand for four days has to involve something like drugs,” said Calvino, sitting down at the table in front of the computer.

  “No one knows that I am in Thailand. Not even my wife,” said Jess.

  “Like you have taken advantage of me,” said Calvino. Not even his wife, thought Calvino. Something was starting to add up; weren’t the DEA and the Embassy supposed to be involved in drug suppression? If LAPD was doing an end run, there had to be some question as to whether those assets in Bangkok had been compromised.

  “Naylor’s not been set up. Let’s say we have taken advantage of the situation.”

  “You could make a call to the DEA at the Embassy, but you have done that. Meaning there is a trust issue. Someone taking advantage of their position and the situation.”

  He went out of the room without waiting for any reply.

  Nothing was straightforward in Thailand: there was always another agenda. And thinking no agenda existed behind the scenes was the mistake of a greenhorn. Like delivering a birthday card and thinking it was only a birthday card. On the way to Bumrungrad Hospital, Calvino thought about quitting the job; going home, sleeping in his own bed, and letting Pratt and Jess sort out whatever play they had in motion. Instead, he went to the hospital and saw a doctor, picked up a prescription for pain pills and cream for the bites, and returned to the Brandy. He passed the cream through the half-opened door to Naylor. By the time he had returned, Pratt had gone and Jess was asleep. At 5:30 a.m. Jess relieved Calvino on the watch. Calvino hadn’t fallen asleep but sat, his arms folded, thinking about what he should do, when Jess tapped him on the shoulder.

  “Get some sleep,” said Jess as he held a small metal detector the size of a pack of cigarettes out, pointing it towards Naylor’s room.

  Calvino looked up slowly. “Are you beaming yourself up to the Starship Enterprise or is that a video game?”

  “It scans for open circuits, polarity reversals, possible transmitting devices up to one thousand feet away. See the LED? If it flashes, then it detects a change. Someone has bugged Naylor’s room. It picks up the radiation of any transmitting device.”

  “Sorry I asked,” said Calvino as he rose from the chair and walked to his room without saying anything further.

  In the morning they were to take Naylor to his appointment with the hotel owners. Calvino knocked on Naylor’s door. A few minutes later he opened the door and Calvino saw Jep curled up in the bed. Against all expectations, she hadn’t gone short time—the rationed commercial time of no more than two hours allotted to customers like Wes Naylor. Instead, she had stayed all night, which meant a different rate applied and altogether different ying methods of emotional calculation were in motion. She was still sleeping in Naylor’s bed when Naylor opened the door and found Calvino and Jess standing outside in the corridor.

  “Time to go, Wes,” said Jess.

  “Yeah, I know. I am behind schedule.” He held a jar of cream in one hand; the cream smeared on the fingers of the other hand. It had taken him less than twenty-four hours to switch from hunting for the Monster Fuck to fulfilling the role of an emotional NGO. Jep’s mosquito-mutilated body lay motionless under the sheets. Another explanation for her presence was that the pain pills had knocked her out; she was outside of time, outside of pain, dancing in the shadows of the flames of the stranger.

  “You did plan to close the deal today?” asked Calvino.

  “Don’t be a wise guy. That’s why I am in Bangkok. You guys look like shit,” Naylor said.

  “You don’t look so good yourself,” said Calvino.

  “Soon you’ll be on a plane back to Los Angeles,” said Jess. “And we can all catch up on our sleep.”

  “I will be here as long as it takes. If you signed on for four days, that is your business with Dr. Nat. It’s got nothing to do with me,” said Naylor

  Naylor slammed the door, locked it from the inside.

  Calvino turned and started to walk away from the door, then stopped and turned and looked at Jess. “I am not going to talk about your drug bust. Whatever that is, I don’t know. And to tell you the truth I don’t want to know. I am not a cop. And I’ve been thinking about what you said, that no one knows you are here, not even your wife. After I had a look at the auditor’s report on the company that owns the hotel last night,” said Calvino. “It is clear that someone in that Chinese family might want to kill the deal. And kill the messenger as well.”

  “Colonel Pratt said you wo
uld come around.”

  “Come around what? You mean blind corners with no one telling me what is waiting.”

  “My investigation in LA has nothing to do with you or what you’ve been asked to do. They are separate matters.”

  Nothing is ever separate in this life or in this world, thought Calvino. “And no doubt you will be the first to tell me when they come together,” said Calvino.

  “What I can tell you is to expect some problems this morning at the hotel,” said Jess.

  “Guaranteed.”

  “Nothing money can’t fix,” said Jess. He smiled, arms folded, leaning back against the door to Naylor’s hong.

  “Does Doc Nat know that he’s financing an LAPD drug investigation? Or was that just another separate kind of deal?” asked Calvino.

  Jess smiled, put an arm on Calvino’s shoulder. “It is separate. Dr. Nat’s getting what he paid for. I don’t see how my investigation causes him any problem. As for the deal itself? He didn’t hire us to review the deal. That’s his business. So we leave it alone. Keep it simple. We don’t get involved in their deal. We only do what Dr. Nat hired us to do. Guard the asset.” Every time he referred to Naylor as the capital “A” asset, Calvino shook his head in disbelief. The quality of assets had depreciated substantially in Thailand but calling Naylor an asset was like calling a non-performing loan an asset. One could call Naylor an asset or whatever one wanted, but Calvino wasn’t yet convinced that Naylor was adding real value to Dr. Nat’s deal.

  “Maybe it’s not our problem directly. But why send Naylor? Why didn’t he come himself? Why does he need a farang to deal with a dysfunctional Chinese family? The members of this family have committed every possible commercial crime anyone has ever thought of and then added a couple more.”

  “You don’t understand how Thai people think. If there is a problem, send another person. And why not a farang? They are more expensive to have killed. I thought you would have learned that during all your years here.”