The Fourth Watcher pr-2

by Timothy Hallinan

  “Look, Arthit, you can put these guys away forever. They’ve probably got families to worry about. And cops in prison have a short life expectancy. When they finally get out, if they ever do, they’ll still have to worry about Chu. We have to persuade them that if they play with us, the whole thing goes away.”

  “We could make them promise to try to protect Rose and Miaow.”

  “We could try.” Poke hopes Arthit can’t hear the doubt in his voice. He looks out over the mud-smeared desolation of the building site. All it lacks to mirror his emotional state is a dead dog. “So will you talk to them?”

  “Oh, well,” Arthit says. “Let’s give it a go.”

  Rafferty climbs back up the stairs, feeling like he’s done it a hundred times, and opens the door. The two men on the floor follow him with their eyes, trying to read his face. He puts the cell phone on the desk and presses the “speaker” button. Into the phone he says, “Arthit, meet Pradya and Sriyat.” He points at the two cops. “You’re going to talk to someone. He’s a police colonel, and he’s the only guy in the world who can get you out of this.”

  “Your shirt is yellow,” Miaow says.

  Noi, her head in Rose’s lap, opens her eyes and looks, startled, at Miaow.

  The man with the gun glances down at himself, as though checking. “And?”

  “That means you love the king.”

  The man squints at her, puzzled. “Everybody loves the king.”

  “And you have a bracelet,” Miaow says. “Can I look at it?”

  “Why not?” The man transfers the gun to his left hand and extends his right. Miaow comes up to him and slips a finger under the yellow rubber bracelet. “ ‘Long live the king,’” she reads aloud. Like yellow clothing, the bracelets are everywhere in Thailand since King Bhumibol entered the fiftieth year of his reign.

  “The king is everyone’s father,” the man says.

  Miaow tugs the bracelet and lets go, so it snaps lightly against the man’s arm, and brings her eyes up to his. “Would the king be proud of you now?”

  The man straightens as though he has been struck, and the muscles in his face go rigid as plaster. He brings his right hand up, across his chest and all the way to his left shoulder, and he backhands Miaow across the face.

  The blow knocks Miaow sideways. She lands on her right arm, her elbow making a cracking sound as it strikes the cement. A line of blood threads down from one nostril, but she ignores it and raises herself on the injured elbow to look the man in the eyes.

  Rose has started to rise, but Noi’s weight holds her down. “You,” Rose spits. “You would make the king weep.”

  The man gets up very quickly and holds the gun out, his arm shaking and his face tight enough to crack. He racks a shell into the chamber.

  The rain grows louder as the door to the warehouse opens, and Colonel Chu comes in, peeling off a raincoat. He stops at the tableau in front of him and hisses like a snake. The man with the gun snaps his head around to see Chu’s eyes blowing holes in him.

  “Lower the gun,” Chu says quietly, almost a whisper.

  The man does so, looking down at the floor. He is suddenly perspiring.

  Chu crosses the floor and extends a hand. After a one-heartbeat pause, the man holds out the gun. Without looking at it, Chu pushes the magazine release. The magazine snicks out into his waiting hand. He ejects the shell in the chamber and flips the gun so he’s holding it by the barrel. He says, “Show me your teeth.”

  The man glances around the room as though he hopes there is help there somewhere, and says, “My teeth?”

  “Now,” Chu says. “Show them to me now.”

  The man peels back his lips to reveal two crooked lines of teeth, and Chu lifts the automatic and snaps it forward precisely, using a corner of the grip to break one of the man’s incisors. The man chokes off a scream and drops to one knee, a hand clapped over his bleeding mouth.

  “You have thirty-one left,” Chu says, “and I’ll break every one of them.” His face is as calm as that of someone who is reading an uninteresting book. “These people are my currency,” he says. “Shoot them and you’re stealing from me. People who steal from me have short, unhappy lives, although I’m sure that many of them would like to die long before they’re allowed to.” His eyes slide over to Miaow, still on the floor, and he says, “You. If you want to grow up, wipe your face and get back over there, where you belong.”

  35

  Not Really the Go-To Guy on Hip-Hop

  One thing at a time. He can only think about one thing at a time. If he doesn’t focus, he’ll be paralyzed. He won’t know which direction to pursue. Can’t think about Miaow, Rose, and Noi. Can’t think about his father. Can’t worry about Colonel Chu. What he can do right now is sit next to Peachy, in what must be the worst restaurant in Bangkok, and look through the window at the bank.

  “It’s the wrong man,” Peachy says for the second time. This time she yanks at his sleeve to drive the point home. “They’re talking to the wrong man.”

  “What a surprise,” Rafferty says. “Since it’s Petchara who pointed him out.”

  The only thing in the restaurant’s plus column is a tinted front window, covered with a reflective film on the outside, installed to keep the afternoon sun from roasting the diners before they die of food poisoning.

  Rafferty is thankful to be unobserved, although no one on the other side of the street is exercising much vigilance. He and Peachy might as well be standing on the sidewalk in Ronald McDonald costumes and waving. Elson hasn’t looked up in a quarter of an hour. After ten minutes of bullying the teller through the glass divider, he did his CSI wallet flip and was led to the other side of the partition, where he shooed the teller off his stool and took control of the man’s computer. He attacked it like a finalist in the Geek Olympics, occasionally shaking his head in impatience. The teller hovers anxiously, literally wringing his hands, while Petchara and the other cop stand around on the lobby side of the glass in the loose-jointed stance of people with nothing to do.

  The most attentive person in the bank is the teller Peachy identified as the one who passed her the bad bills. He sits bolt upright at his station, three windows down, his eyes darting everywhere, a man following the flight of an invisible hummingbird. His pallor is evident even under the bank’s fluorescent lights.

  Elson stands, shoving the stool back, his finger jammed accusingly against the computer screen. He snaps a question. From behind him a man in a wrinkled suit, who seems to be the branch manager, ducks his head several times. If he had a cap, Rafferty thinks, he’d doff it and tug his forelock. Without turning away from the computer, Elson says something, and the manager scurries off.

  “I don’t understand,” Peachy says.

  “Sure you do.” Rafferty sips his coffee, made from some instant left over from World War II and three times the suggested amount of water. “They did everything they could to keep Elson away from the bank. We screwed that up, so now they’re keeping him away from the man who knows where the money came from.”

  Peachy says, “Oh.”

  Outside, a young woman wearing the blue skirt and white blouse of a Thai high-school girl, a stack of books clasped to her chest, dawdles indolently up to the window, exuding the flat rejection of the entire planet that characterizes teens everywhere. There’s nowhere in the world, her stance says, that she wants to go, and she isn’t even eager not to get there. She stops and leans wearily against the window with her back to Rafferty, giving him an excellent view of her shoulders and her long, straight black hair. If she were transparent, he could see Elson,

  but as it is, he can’t.

  “That’s funny,” Peachy says.

  “Not very,” Rafferty says, craning to see around the girl.

  “She shouldn’t be standing there. She’s very pale. Why would she stand in the sun like that?” Thais are keenly aware of skin color, with the pale end of the spectrum being the most desirable.

  “Pale, is
she?” Rafferty asks, being polite. He still can’t see Elson, but the bank manager comes into view from some office somewhere, carrying a cardboard box full of small pieces of papers-deposit slips, Rafferty would guess.

  “Pale as a Chinese,” Peachy says, and makes a tsk-tsk sound. She puts her fingers to her cheek. “She’s going to ruin her skin. Prem always says-”

  Rafferty says, “Chinese?” He leans forward and raps the glass twice, sharply, with his ring.

  The girl turns and smiles. It is Ming Li. She gives him a snotty little schoolgirl wave, just the tips of her fingers, and heads for the door.

  In the bank across the street, Elson is also waving, waving a piece of paper beneath the nose of the unfortunate teller. The teller takes it, and his face falls. He looks at Elson, and his shoulders rise and drop down again, the universal gesture for Huh? Then Elson does a Come here gesture to the cops and holds out his hand for the slip.

  “Food any good?” Ming Li slips into the booth.

  “Depends,” Rafferty says, watching the bank. “When was the last time you ate?”

  “Last night. We had to be at the warehouses pretty early.”

  “Not long enough,” Rafferty says. “Give it a week and come back.”

  Ming Li studies Rafferty’s plate. “What have you got?”

  He ignores her, intent on the scene across the street, but she bangs the edge of the plate with a fork as a prompt, and he says, “Gristle, fat, elderly tomatoes, and some sort of roots with dirt on them.”

  “Yum,” Ming Li says. She picks up his chopsticks, dips them in his water glass, and wipes them on a napkin. He turns to watch her tweeze some shreds of meat and put them into her mouth. She chews experimentally and swallows. “Awful,” she says, taking more.

  Peachy jams a finger into his arm and says, “Look.”

  Elson has brought the teller out of the enclosure and into the lobby area. The two cops pat the man down, then take him by the elbows and steer him toward the doors to the sidewalk. Elson follows, being trailed by the bank manager, who’s obviously protesting. Something he says stops Elson, and the Secret Service man turns to him. The two of them have a somewhat heated exchange.

  “Do you know about the other guy?” Ming Li asks with her mouth full.

  “The other guy,” Rafferty says.

  “I knew you hadn’t spotted him. I passed him a couple of times, just leaning against a building a couple of shops up and looking through that same window. Big, broad in the shoulders, maybe some kind of weight lifter. Looks like a steroids poster. Scarred face, broken nose. Maybe Chinese, maybe Korean.”

  “You passed him twice? And he didn’t see you?”

  “Actually,” Ming Li says, using her fingers to scrub dirt from the roots of whatever she’s eating, “I passed him three times. And no, he didn’t see me. Why would he? You didn’t.”

  “You didn’t pass me three times.”

  “If you say so.” She wipes her fingers on the napkin and looks at the smear of dirt. “Can I have some of your coffee?”

  “It’s not actually coffee,” Rafferty says. “It’s a cup that might have held coffee in 1973, and hot water has been poured into it.”

  Ming Li picks it up and drinks anyway. Then she looks down at the cup and says, “That’s nasty.” She reviews the word for a moment and says, “Nasty? Is that what they say?”

  Looking out the window, Rafferty says, “Is that what who says?” Elson, his argument over, makes an impatient wave at Petchara and the other cop, and they hustle the teller through the doors.

  Ming Li gives Rafferty a little whuffing sound to indicate how obvious it is. “Those hip-hop singers on MTV.”

  As the doors close behind him, Elson calls for the others to wait, pulls out a cell phone, and punches a number.

  Rafferty says, “I’m not really the go-to guy on hip-hop. If you want to know anything about OFR, though, I’m your man.”

  “What’s OFR?”

  “Old Fart Rock.”

  “No, thanks. Except, how long do you think until the Rolling Stones are doing ads for Viagra? Maybe use that song-what’s it called? — ‘Start Me Up.’”

  “The young are so cruel.”

  Ming Li is watching Elson and his crew approach the corner, the teller arguing at every step. “So we’re not going to follow those guys?”

  “They’re not going anyplace interesting. See the guy three seats away from the empty window?”

  Ming Li counts chairs. “The one with the wet shirt?”

  “Him,” Rafferty says. “I think he’s going someplace interesting. And my guess is that your steroids guy is going there, too.” He glances at his watch. “About forty-five minutes left. Can you get Leung here?”

  Ming Li picks up some more of the greens between her chopsticks, touches the roots, and rubs her fingers together. “I know they grow vegetables in dirt, but this is silly.”

  “Leung,” Rafferty repeats. “Can you get Leung here?”

  “He’s here already,” she says. She chews, and he can hear the grit between her teeth. “If you can’t see Leung, it means he’s here.”

  Forty minutes later, Rafferty says, “This is it.” He is watching the bank. “You straight with it?”

  “Sure,” Ming Li says. “Leung’s half a block from here, on the other side of the big guy. I dawdle my way up there, looking demure and harmless. Just chillin’.”

  “Jesus,” Rafferty says.

  “So the big guy’s between us, in the tweezers,” Ming Li says. “That’s what Frank calls it, the tweezers. You and Peachy pick up the teller. Then we see what happens.”

  “Okay, good,” Rafferty says. “Are you armed?”

  Ming Li lifts the cover of the book on top of her stack to reveal a recessed square cut into the pages. Nestled into it is a small automatic, maybe a twenty-five-millimeter. It’s been blued, but the bluing has worn off around the grip and trigger guard to reveal the shine of steel. It’s seen some use. “School’s fierce. Got to watch out for the homeys.”

  “And you can shoot that thing?”

  “Better than I can pitch.”

  The lights in the bank lobby flicker and dim, and the manager opens the door for the last couple of customers.

  “Here we go,” Rafferty says, but Ming Li is already out the door. He throws some bills on the table. A moment later the bank door opens again, and two men and a woman exit. The last one out is the man they want. Peachy says, “I’m not sure I can do this.”

  “I’m not sure you can either,” Rafferty says. “But I haven’t got anybody else.”

  36

  Death Threats and a Strawberry Shake

  "The little wet man’s coming toward us,” Ming Li says on the phone. “Don’t turn the corner. He looks over his shoulder all the time.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “We’re standing here. I’m a rich schoolgirl on the phone, and Leung is my faithful servant. He just took the books so I could make a call, and now he’s standing a respectful distance away, appropriate to our class difference. Ouch.”

  “What happened?” Rafferty and Peachy are stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, people parting left and right to get around them.

  “Leung pinched me.”

  “You had it coming. What I mean is, why are you with Leung? You’re supposed to be on either side of the big guy. What happened to the old tweezers?”

  “He noticed me. Looked at me a couple of times. Probably got a thing for schoolgirls. So I had to pass him. Don’t worry, he’s written me off. He’s watching your little wet man, and the little wet man keeps

  looking behind him.”

  “I need to know everything they do.”

  “Gosh,” Ming Li says. “Everything? I’m just a girl.”

  “This is the big leagues.”

  “Okay, here he comes. The big one. I think you can come around the corner now.”

  Rafferty grabs Peachy’s sleeve and hauls her behind him, with Peachy apologizing t
o everyone they bump into. They round the corner, and Rafferty sees the big man take the arm of the teller and drag him to the curb. There is a quick verbal exchange, the big man bending down to get his face close to the teller’s, and the teller nods eight or nine times, very fast, and then attempts some sort of argument, which is broken off when the big man shakes him like a rag mop. The teller looks like he is going to burst into tears. Then the big man reaches into his suit coat, and the teller mirrors the movement. Each comes up with a manila envelope.

  Ten or twelve yards beyond them, Ming Li chatters brightly into her phone, right foot lifted and hooked behind the white sock on the left ankle. With her free hand, she toys with her hair, rolling a wisp of it between her fingers as though nothing in the world were more urgent than split ends.

  The men exchange envelopes.

  “Ming Li. You and Leung stay with the big guy. I don’t care what it takes, don’t lose him.”

  “Big brother,” Ming Li says. “I’ve been training for this all my life.”

  “Good. Keep your phone on.”

  The big man gives the teller a shove, just enough to make him stagger back a step, and heads off down the sidewalk. He passes Ming Li and Leung without a glance but then sneaks a look back at Ming Li. The teller exhales heavily, wipes his face, and pulls out a cell phone.

  “Go, Peachy,” Rafferty says.

  Reluctantly Peachy covers the distance to the teller, as slowly as someone navigating a forest of thorns. She has lifted a hand to touch him politely on the shoulder when he looks up and sees her. The cell phone drops from his hand and hits the pavement, and the battery pops out. He takes a quick step back, mouth open, as though Peachy has fangs, claws, and a snake’s forked tongue. A second backward step brings him up against Rafferty. Rafferty has already pulled his wallet out, and when the man whirls to face him, Rafferty lets it drop open and then flips it closed again before the man can register that the shiny object inside it is a large silver cuff link.