The Fourth Watcher pr-2

by Timothy Hallinan

  Cold blue fluorescent light, the color of ancient ice, the old embedded smell of cooking oil. “Go down to Mrs. Pongsiri’s,” he says.

  He turns to his own door and slips the key into the lock that controls the dead bolt. He clicks the lock home and then thinks better of it and turns the key back, leaving only the flimsy Indonesian lock that he can literally pick with a bobby pin: no point inviting them to kick the door in. He hears Rose and Miaow moving down the hallway, and then the elevator, directly opposite Rafferty’s front door, groans into motion.

  Heading down to the lobby. Someone coming up.

  “Hurry,” he calls. “Bang on the door.” He twists the key, tries to pull it out.

  It sticks in the lock.

  “She’ll be asleep,” Rose says.

  “Now.” He yanks at the key again. The lock won’t let it go.

  It’s been giving him trouble for weeks, but not like this. The lock has been reluctant to let the key slip out, but he’s always been able to wiggle it free. He tries a wiggle or two and then puts a foot against the door and uses all his body weight. The key won’t budge. His shirt is suddenly wet beneath the arms.

  He can hear Rose knocking politely on Mrs. Pongsiri’s door, halfway along the hall on the other side, and he swears aloud, lets go of the key, runs down the hallway, and slams his fist against the thin metal door, heavily enough to buckle it. The elevator is louder now, coming up, probably only three or four floors away. He raises his fist again, and the door opens to reveal Mrs. Pongsiri in a silk bathrobe, her face smeared with some kind of white cream.

  “Mr. Rafferty,” she says.

  “In,” Rafferty says to Rose. Miaow’s eyes are wide now. To Mrs. Pongsiri he says, “Sorry, sorry. I’ll explain later.”

  Mrs. Pongsiri blinks at him as though he’s out of focus, and then something hard happens to her face beneath its mask of cream, something that tells Rafferty she knows what it is to be on the run in the middle of the night. “Of course,” she says, stepping aside. “Come in.”

  Rafferty pulls the door closed behind them and sprints back to his own door. He twists the key and yanks all the way from the knees, practically wrenching his back. Nothing. Grabbing a deep breath, he forces himself to be still for a moment, then gently turns the key all the way in the other direction, brings it vertical again, and tugs.

  The elevator bell rings.

  The key glides free.

  No time to get to Mrs. Pongsiri’s. He runs to the end of the hall, hearing the elevator doors begin to slide apart, and slips through the door to the fire stairs. At the last moment, he sticks the tongue of his belt between the latch and the doorframe to keep it from clicking shut.

  Voices in the hall, speaking Thai.

  Rafferty eases the door open half an inch and puts an eye to the crack.

  Three of them, gathered at his door. They look like farmers, burned dark by the Thai sun, wearing loose clothes and flap sandals, but they don’t move like farmers. The one in the center motions the others away and puts his ear to the door. In a fluid movement, he lifts his shirttail and pulls out a gun.

  The man nearest Rafferty also has a gun in his hand, a tiny popgun just big enough to die from. The third holds a knife, nicked and rusty in spots, but with a honed, shiny edge, an edge that has had a lot of care lavished on it. It is maybe ten inches long, a little smaller than a machete. The man in the center makes an abrupt gesture, hand toward the floor, and the one with the knife drops to his hands and knees and looks for light seeping through the crack under Rafferty’s door. He gets up again, shaking his head.

  The man in the center, clearly the one in charge, waves the others to either side of the door and tries the knob. Then he leans down to examine the lock. The gun disappears beneath his shirt, and his hand comes back out with a small piece of metal in it. It takes him only a few seconds to spring the lock. When he tries to pull the pick free, it sticks.

  He tries again, but the pick is frozen in the lock. The three of them consult in whispers, apparently arguing about whether to leave it in the lock, and then the man in the middle gives it a dismissive wave and pushes the door open very slowly, standing back as it swings inward. He motions the one to his left, the one with the knife, against the wall-Stay here is the message-and the other two go in, moving quickly and silently. Their guns are extended in front of them, gripped in both hands.

  They’ve had practice at this.

  The man with his back to the wall purses his lips as though to whistle and looks at his watch. He is plump and almost merry-looking, except for the knife. He leans back and closes his eyes, letting the knife dangle from his hand. For a very brief moment, Rafferty considers taking it away from him and wrapping it around his head, but the man’s eyes open and he glances down the hall in Rafferty’s direction.

  Rafferty freezes, feeling his heartbeat all the way down to his wrists. If he closes the door, the man will spot the motion. If he leaves it ajar, the man may see it and come to investigate. As slowly as he can ever remember moving, Rafferty eases the gun out of his pants and waits, holding his breath, and the man’s eyes travel past the door and back up the hall. He actually is whistling, very quietly, and this fact ping-pongs around in Rafferty’s mind, stirring up a substantial amount of new discomfort. He would be happier if the man were nervous.

  The whistling stops, and Rafferty shifts his feet so he can see what’s caught the man’s eye. He finds himself looking at the dent he left in Mrs. Pongsiri’s door.

  The fat man frowns, pushes himself away from the wall, and begins to move down the hall. He walks like a bear, heavy on his feet, his knees slightly bent and bowed out. The knife swishes once against the leg of his trousers, and Rafferty’s mind amplifies it into a slap.

  Rafferty slips out of his shoes and puts his shoulder to the door.

  A brusque interrogative whisper: The other two have come out of Rafferty’s apartment. The one who picked the lock looks down the hall and snaps his fingers once, a sound as sharp as a breaking bone, and the fat one turns back and then points at Mrs. Pongsiri’s door, eyebrows raised in question. The leader shakes his head and turns back to Rafferty’s door, pulling it closed and applying himself again to extricating the pick from the lock. The third man crosses the hall and pushes the button for the elevator.

  The fat man whispers urgently, but the pick wins the battle for the leader’s attention, and he waves the fat man away. The fat man takes the leader’s shoulder and turns him up the hall, pointing down at the floor, at the strip of light beneath Mrs. Pongsiri’s door. The leader stops, one hand on the stuck pick, his eyes following the direction of the fat man’s finger. All three of them stand motionless.

  The elevator bell rings, but nobody moves. Rafferty watches the light from the elevator car brighten and strike the three men as the doors slide open, then diminish as they begin to close again. At the last moment, the leader gives up on freeing the pick and lunges for the elevator, extending a hand to force the doors open again. The others start to follow.

  Rafferty’s cell phone rings.

  All three heads swivel toward the end of the hall, and Rafferty lets the door slip closed, already halfway up the first flight of stairs, the shoes in his hand hampering him as he punches at the phone to turn it off-it’s his father calling, he sees. He takes the steps three at a time, as lightly as possible, hearing the door on his landing open and the sharp whisper of commands ricocheting up the stairwell. They don’t know whether he’s gone up or down; they’ll have to split up, so the only question is whether one or two of them will be coming after him. The one thing he’s halfway sure of is that they won’t send the man with the knife on his own; the man in charge will want a gun in both directions.

  Rafferty lives on the eighth floor of twelve. The door to the roof is kept bolted from inside as a burglary precaution, but there’s no way to know whether the padlock on the bolt will be hanging open, as it often is, or whether Mrs. Song, his landlady, will have secured it on her
rounds. That gives him four floors to maneuver in, and he doesn’t know a soul on any of them.

  He hears shoes echoing on the stairs, but there’s no way to sort them out, to see how many are going up or down. A grunt from below, something clattering, metal on metal: a ring on the handrail or a gun in someone’s hand. He can hear labored breathing-the fat man coming up? Then there’s a burst of argument from below: Something’s wrong.

  He doesn’t remember having passed the tenth floor, but he tries the door to the eleventh, hoping to distract them by slipping out and calling for the elevator, and realizes what they were arguing about. The door is locked. It can be opened only from the inside.

  That almost certainly means they’re all locked, including the door to the roof. The only open door will be the one leading into the lobby. He’s in a vertical dead end.

  The feet below him have slowed, their owner probably listening to the discussion farther down the stairs: two voices, which means they decided that Rafferty was trying to get down to the street, and sent the weight in that direction. Only one coming after him, then. One with a gun.

  On the other hand, Rafferty thinks, maybe not, registering the heft of his own gun in his hand. He sights the Glock down the stairs, aiming for the concrete wall at a thirty-degree angle, hoping for a nice, lethal series of caroms, and pulls the trigger.

  A shout of surprise from the man just below him, then a sharp command from farther down. The shot is ringing in his ears, but he can hear the voices over it.

  He fires again, twice, aiming obliquely at the wall. The bullets spang off it and hit several other walls before one of them bangs into the metal stairs with a sound like the Bell at the Center of the World.

  The man below him gives a panicky grunt, then calls a question, but Rafferty can’t make out the words. Then there is silence.

  He leans back against the wall, waiting, watching the stairs. If it was the fat man he heard panting, his pursuer is armed only with a knife. He has no doubt he can gut-shoot the man; it’s a big gut, and its owner will have a whole flight of stairs to climb between the time he comes into shooting range and the point at which he’ll be able to do Rafferty any harm. That’ll leave two, both carrying automatics.

  Not the best odds.

  He edges his way across the landing, tasting salt in his mouth. He’s bitten through his lower lip. When he can see the corner of the stairs, the few inches that will give him the most time to aim, he raises the Glock in both hands and waits.

  Nothing.

  Then a scuffle of movement, fast, and he feels the muscles in his legs loosen in panic, and he jams his back against the wall for support, but no one appears on the stairs below him, no fat man with a knife, no one ducking into view for a quick look. Just feet on the stairs.

  Going down.

  23

  It Starts Ugly and Gets Worse

  Months later, when Rafferty looks back on the three days that followed their abandonment of the apartment, what he will remember is the blur of movement, the weight of exhaustion, and the smell of rain. Bits and pieces of what happened will stay with him, hard and flashbulb bright, sharp-edged and fragmentary as reflections in bits of a broken mirror.

  Snapshots in a loose pile, random and unsequenced.

  Maybe, he will think, it is better that he remembers it that way. Better he doesn’t have to carry with him the fear and the fury, the desperation and the moments of soul-sinking hopelessness when he knew for a certainty that everything he cared about in the world was about to be destroyed, scattered, irretrievably lost.

  He doesn’t remember the call he placed to Arthit after his shots chased the three intruders away, but he retains a vivid mental image of the blinking cherry lights on the police cars, four of them, that Arthit dispatched to the basement parking area beneath his building. Cars that took him in one direction and Rose, with Miaow bundled in her arms, in another, the two cars without passengers screeching up the driveway and vanishing aimlessly into the night. He wasn’t there to see it, but he knows that the car carrying Miaow and Rose disappeared into the parking lot of Arthit’s police station. Five minutes later three cars came out again, each taking a different direction. When the driver of the car with Rose and Miaow in it had done enough figure eights to be satisfied that any possible watchers were following the other cars, he took them to Arthit’s house, where Noi let them in, and she and Rose put Miaow to bed.

  Rose said it took more than an hour, with both her and Noi sitting at Miaow’s bedside, for the child to fall asleep.

  Rafferty remembers very clearly how he felt when Rose told him that. He wanted, slowly and creatively, to kill Arnold Prettyman.

  Another detail: the pouches of weariness beneath Arthit’s eyes, shaded a poisonous green by the fluorescent lights bouncing off the walls in the interrogation room where he and Rafferty talked after Rose and Miaow had been safely tucked away. The room is painted that peculiar shade of spoiled pea soup that’s been sold by the millions of gallons to government institutions around the world. Rafferty, whose mind is searching desperately for something neutral to focus on for a moment, finds himself wondering what the salesman’s pitch might possibly be: “It starts ugly and gets worse”?

  “He was terrified,” Rafferty says.

  Arthit slides a big cop shoe over the scuffed linoleum, producing a gritty sound that makes Rafferty’s teeth itch. “You don’t actually know that, do you? He was a medium-level spook, Poke, delusions of grandeur aside. They’re good actors. Their critics kill them if they’re not convincing.”

  “No,” Rafferty says. “He was sweating like a pig.”

  “Do pigs sweat?” This is the kind of thing that interests Arthit.

  Rafferty makes a show of pulling out his notebook. “That’s a fascinating question, Arthit, one I plan to look into as soon as I have the time.” He writes it down in large letters.

  “Curiosity is an essential part of the good policeman’s armament,” Arthit says sententiously, and Rafferty realizes that his friend is trying to calm him. “Almost as important as a strong bladder.”

  “So yes, I believe him. I think he was frightened enough to sell me.”

  Arthit closes his eyes. He is clearly exhausted. “Before we go shoot him through the head, run it past me again. Just the high points.”

  Rafferty begins to check off his fingers, starting with his thumb. “My sainted father emerges from the mists of time-”

  “A coelacanth dredged from the depths,” Arthit suggests through a yawn. “The alluvial ancestor of the pangolin.”

  Rafferty waves him off and goes to finger number two. “I ask Arnold to employ his skills. Many people who terrify Arnold express interest. He perspires extravagantly and keeps making eyes at his gun.” He raises finger number three, which happens to be the middle one. Arthit eyes it expressionlessly. “The Three Musketeers appear.”

  “Well, if you put it like that. .” Arthit says.

  Rafferty rests his chin on his hand, realizes it is a mistake, and sits upright. That way, if he goes to sleep, the fall will wake him. “What are those things scientists look for? Starts with a v.”

  “Variables,” Arthit says, stressing the patience. “As you know perfectly well.”

  “Well, there haven’t been any other variables in my life.”

  Arthit sits forward. “You don’t call a U.S. Secret Service agent and thirty thousand in counterfeit money a variable? Your life must be much more interesting than mine.”

  “Those people have a plan in place. It has nothing to do with busting into my apartment in the middle of the night with guns in their hands.”

  Arthit’s hands are flat on the table. “About your father,” he says. “How much of this do you intend to share with us?”

  “With the cops in general, not bloody much. With you personally, everything.”

  “And the reason?”

  “I still don’t know about those two cops with Elson.”

  Arthit is still for a moment
, and then he gives Rafferty a minimal nod. “So. We’ve done the A-plus-B thing and come up with C. What about your intuition?”

  “What is this, Down with Reason Week? First Arnold, then Rose, now you. Is this some sort of plot to accelerate the decline of the West? Replace the scientific method with feelings?”

  “The question stands,” Arthit says.

  “All right. In deference to your cultural orientation, I’ll play. My intuition tells me that my father got himself into some very deep shit in China and it’s chased him to Bangkok. And that Arnold got leaned on by the chasers and decided it was easier to sell me than to get his bones broken one at a time.”

  “That’s a fair summary,” Arthit says. He cups his hands on the table as though he’s trapped a grasshopper under them. “A little thin on feelings, but fair.”

  “Boy. And to think I’ve been selling feelings short.”

  “My own personal feeling,” Arthit says, “is that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. The Arabs say that.”

  “I’m sure they do, but I have no idea what it means in this case. I mean, who’s the enemy?”

  “Your enemy,” Arthit says.

  “Who’s the other enemy?”

  Arthit’s gaze flickers. “You, I suppose.”

  “I thought we were friends.”

  “No. You’re their enemy.” He sketches an invisible diagram on the table with his fingers and stares at it. “The. . um, enemy’s enemy,” he adds.

  “The other enemy,” Rafferty says by way of clarification. “I mean, if I’m an enemy and they’re an enemy, who’s the friend?”

  Arthit pulls in the corners of his mouth. “I am?”

  Rafferty nods. “Do you know any other Arab sayings that burn to be spoken at the moment?”

  “A good friend is like water in your camel,” Arthit says at once.

  “I’ve heard that one a million times.”

  “Wise people, the Arabs,” Arthit says, nodding sagely.

  “They discovered zero,” Rafferty replies, “although I’ve never been sure why that’s anything to write home about.”