The Fear Artist pr-5

by Timothy Hallinan

  “He, he, he moved it,” she says. “From here to there and then here again. To fool me. But I, I, I know where it is.”

  Rafferty gets up and goes back to the table. It’s not just Southeast Asia, he realizes. It’s someplace specific. Positioning himself so she can’t see what he’s doing, he takes the camera out again and snaps three shots of the tabletop. As he puts the camera back, he says, “It’s here somewhere, isn’t it?”

  “A clue,” she says accusingly. “I left you a clue. You don’t see anything.”

  “You’re so smart,” he says. Relatively close to him and a little to his left is a stretch of track that leads through rubber plantations, paralleling a two-lane road. It goes past the train station where he found the key and then skirts a small village. On the track, about ten inches from the train station, on the opposite side from the station, is the plastic ear from his mask.

  “The train will be coming toward me, right?” he says. “There will be people in the station and people on the train.”

  “The boom is Plan A,” she says. “The fire is Plan B. Plan C is the boom and the-”

  Her voice breaks off. He hears the curtain slide over her, and then he hears a noise from the door to the kitchen that stops the blood in his veins.

  “He doesn’t need to know what Plan C is,” Murphy says. He pushes Ming Li in ahead of him, the revolver in his hand pointed at the center of her back. “Treasure’s not usually so friendly. You’re lucky she didn’t sink her teeth into you.” He gives Ming Li another push. “Go over to your friend.”

  “Brother,” she says, joining Rafferty at the table. She’s not wearing the mask, and her eyes are all over the room.

  “Treasure,” Murphy says, “come out from there. Now. You don’t want me to have to come get you.”

  The green curtain slides aside. Treasure’s face hangs down, hidden by her hair. She seems to be looking directly at her feet.

  “Go to the dining room,” he says. “Get the magic chair. Now.”

  She runs across the room and out through the door. For that moment Murphy’s eyes are on her, and Rafferty raises his hand to put it on Ming Li’s shoulder, but Murphy points the gun at him and shakes his head. Ming Li has turned her own head to follow Treasure, and when she looks back to Murphy, her eyes are as hard and black as onyx.

  Murphy leans against the train table. The locomotive continues its tikka-tikka-tikka path past his left hand, its engineer unaware of the giant in the sky. “Where are your Viet witnesses?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “We’ll see about that.”

  “I don’t know. Not any more than Bey did.”

  “Bey? Oh, Bey. Right. In Wyoming. That was her real name, wasn’t it?”

  “It was.”

  “She didn’t mention more witnesses. Maybe Paul didn’t ask. Do they exist?”

  “Four of them. But I don’t know where they are.”

  Murphy says, “Mmm-hmmm.” He seems to be thinking about something else.

  “But Bey did say that Billie Joe was in Bangkok.”

  “On the wrong side again,” Murphy says, “working for the poor, persecuted ragheads. All I had to do was get some people on the inside to put out the word about the demonstration, and there he was. And there you were, too.”

  “By accident.”

  “Looks like it. He told you Eckersley’s name. Why didn’t you just say so? I probably would have watched you for a little bit and then let you go.”

  “I didn’t remember it.”

  “Doesn’t matter now. Doesn’t much matter about the witnesses either. According to Shen, you’ve fucked me good and proper.” His eyes go to the open closet, and he shakes his head again. “Everything. This little shit just told you everything, didn’t she? My little Treasure.”

  “If you hadn’t walked in,” Rafferty says, “I’d have taken her with me.”

  “That would have been good. She’s a problem, she is.” He looks toward the door that Treasure disappeared through. “So you found survivors of the massacre. Talked to the newspapers, the Vietnamese, the Americans. A trifecta. Guaranteed to give the pussy patrol the squits. Same as they get every time we’re in a fucking war.”

  “Is that what this is?” Rafferty says “A war? I thought it was a license for you to fuck people up.”

  “You don’t care that people are getting blown up down south,” Murphy says. The cords at the side of his neck are beginning to stand out. “You don’t care that they throw bombs into the marketplaces and the elementary schools and cut the heads off monks. You don’t give a shit that the most powerful country of the twenty-first century can’t figure out how to protect itself from a few illiterates who are still stuck in the ninth, still trying to get even for the fucking Crusades.” He walks across the room, stiff-jointed with anger, until he has his back to the curtain that Treasure had wrapped herself in. “Just like you didn’t care, or you wouldn’t have if you’d been old enough, that nobody knew who the enemy was in Vietnam, that a sweet-looking old granny-san could roll a grenade at you without even saying hello.”

  Treasure comes slowly into the room dragging one of the spindly chairs that had been drawn up to the dining-room table, and Murphy points to her to bring it to him.

  “No,” he says, “what you need is a Nazi army, all in a uniform that says ‘bad guy’ from half a mile away, with blood on their teeth and dueling scars. Waste those people, you’d sit in front of your TV and applaud. Wave your flag and get all teary-eyed. But women? Children? Some twelve-year-old Muhammad with a suicide vest in his closet? Ohhhhh, nooooooooo, Mr. Bill,” he says in a falsetto. “The weepy wailers come out in the papers and on TV, and when the weepy wailers come out, the pussy patrol gets the squits, and you know what happens then?”

  Ming Li says, “Pussy patrol is a nice phrase.” She sounds calm, but her eyes haven’t left Murphy’s.

  “What happens then,” Murphy says, and his face is suddenly scarlet, “what happens then is that we lose the fucking war.” He’s spitting at them as he talks. With his free hand, he snatches the chair from Treasure, who leaps backward and stands at an unconscious approximation of attention, with her feet together and her arms straight down, tight at her sides. Murphy turns the chair around and sets it in front of himself, leaning on its back. “Because here’s the chain of command,” he says, “here’s how it works. A bunch of guys, and these days maybe a woman, in two-thousand-dollar suits and a uniform or two, sit around a polished table in some air-conditioned room so they won’t have to get too warm or too cold and say things like ‘measured response’ and ‘surges’ and ‘tactical support’ and ‘appropriate force,’ and that’s at one end of the chain, okay?” He holds his hands up, about two feet apart, the revolver pointed at the ceiling, and he moves them, still separated by a couple of feet, left to right in jerky increments, as if measuring something. “And at the other end of the chain is some poor asshole on his back in the dirt, swelling up in the sun, with his intestines tied around his neck. So, you know, all well and good, that guy’s not going to cut off another head, and his friends will probably think twice about it, too, but then somebody takes a picture, and it gets into the papers, and the weepy wailers start up, and those people who were sitting around that table and sending down the orders in their nice, polite language turn into the pussy patrol, waving their hands and saying, ‘Not us, no, no, not us, we never called for such a thing, we would never condone the indiscriminate use of lethal force against a civilian population.’ And right then and there, they lose the war, no matter how many Americans have been shot to death and blown up trying to win it, and lost their arms and legs and dicks-do you know that castration from improvised explosive devices is one of the most common injuries in Iraq? — because these people in their suits and their fucking air-conditioning still haven’t figured out that there’s no such thing as civilians anymore.”

  “Let us walk out of here,” Rafferty says. His mouth is so dry he can hear his lips slidi
ng over his teeth, and his voice sounds thin in his ears. “You’ve got your money. You know how to disappear. You’ve done it before.”

  “Not that easy,” Murphy says. “Not anywhere near that easy. I’m going to disappear, but you, you’re a loose end.” He sits in the chair, the gun loosely pointed at them. “Treasure.”

  Treasure doesn’t move.

  “Treasure,” Murphy says again.

  The child begins to sway back and forth, her head still down. She leans so far forward that Rafferty steps toward her to break her fall, but Murphy raises the gun so it’s aimed at Rafferty’s chest. Treasure slowly lifts her head until she’s looking at her father.

  “You two,” Murphy says. “Pull up your shirts.”

  Rafferty does, followed by Ming Lee. Murphy’s eyes drop to the gun at Rafferty’s waist and then go to Ming Li, and he says, “Girl. Turn around.” When her back is to him and the gun is visible at the small of her back, Murphy says, “Stop turning.”

  He leans back in the chair, and it creaks. “Both of you. Hands on your head, fingers interlaced, and don’t neither of you move. Treasure. You get those guns.”

  “ ‘Don’t neither of you,’ ” Ming Li says, and Rafferty hears her swallow. “I learned English in China, and I speak it better than you do.”

  “You’re prettier than I am, too, but that’s not going to help you. Do it, Treasure. And bring them here.”

  The child remains still.

  “Treasure,” Murphy says. “Come here.”

  The girl remains where she is, and Rafferty sees her hands curl into fists.

  “She’s showing off for company,” Murphy says. “If you’re not standing in front of me by the count of three, you know what’s going to happen. One … two …”

  “Leave her alone,” Rafferty says.

  “Three,” Murphy says, and by the time he’s finished the word, she’s standing in front of him. He lifts his free hand and slaps her face. Her head whips to one side and back, but her feet don’t move. Rafferty involuntarily starts forward, but Murphy’s gun returns to him. “Never get between a parent and a child. You just make things worse. Treasure has broken some big rules, and she knows it. Treasure,” he says, a little more loudly, and she raises her head halfway, so she seems to be looking at his knees. “Go get the guns and bring them to me.”

  She turns, moving disjointedly toward Rafferty, her head still down as though she’s presenting her bare neck to the blade, her feet sliding over the carpet and her back stiff. She pulls the gun from under his belt without so much as a glance at him, and then she goes to Ming Li and takes hers.

  Ming Li says, “Poor baby.”

  “On the windowsill,” Murphy says.

  The child looks up at Rafferty, and he gives her a tiny nod: Do as you’re told. The guns look enormous in her hands. She does that slow, sliding walk, never lifting her feet from the carpet, until she’s at the window. Murphy turns his head slightly to keep her in sight, warily, Rafferty thinks. “Up there,” he says. “Put them right there, on the sill. Now come here.” When she’s reached him, he puts his free arm around her as she squeezes her eyes shut, and he lifts her to his knee.

  “We’re going to do a little show for our guests,” Murphy says. “Do you want to, Treasure?” He puts his hand on the back of her neck and squeezes the muscle, and when her mouth opens, he answers in an uncanny imitation of her voice, “Yes.” He relaxes his pressure, and her mouth closes. He squeezes again, one time for each syllable, and the child’s mouth seems to say, “Yes, Daddy, please.” Her eyes are wide now, white showing all the way around her irises. Her gaze goes to Rafferty and bounces away with something like shame, looking everywhere in the room.

  “What do I say to people when Daddy’s not here?” Murphy says, and Treasure’s mouth opens and closes again as that high, breathless voice says, “Nothing.”

  Ming Li says, “That’s enough, you sick fuck. Just shoot us.”

  There’s a movement at the edge of Rafferty’s vision, and he turns to the door to see the small woman from the bedroom, wearing a T-shirt and shorts, the clothes she’d undoubtedly worn in her village, holding a glass of cherry-colored whiskey, and she shrills, “Baby!” and throws the glass at Murphy.

  It hits him on the left shoulder and splashes on him as Treasure leaps from his lap, and he jumps up, swearing, but Neeni retreats down the hall, saying, “My baby, my baby,” and Treasure grabs the chair he was sitting in by its legs and runs at the train table, swinging the chair over her head and bringing it down on the miniature world, and tiny trees and bits of buildings fly into the air. She lifts it again, emitting a high, thin, ceiling-scraping scream, and slams it into the train table again, and this time pieces fly several feet in the air.

  Ming Li takes two quick steps toward the windowsill with the guns on it, but Murphy says, “Don’t,” and comes toward the ruined miniatures as Treasure, still screaming, raises the chair again. When Murphy’s eyes go to the movement, Rafferty grabs the engine of the train and yanks it off the tracks. The last two or three cars break off and tumble free, but the rest of them remain attached, and when he swings it around, what hits Murphy across the face is the sharp-cornered end of a twenty-pound metal whip.

  It rips skin from his forehead and snaps his head back and sends him crashing against the table, his gun arm hanging down, his elbow against the edge of the table, and Rafferty raises his right foot and puts all his weight into forcing his shoe straight through the wrist of Murphy’s gun hand. Hears the change in the intensity of Murphy’s scream and the muffled sound of the elbow snapping backward. The gun falls from Murphy’s hand.

  Treasure drops the chair and leans forward at the waist, fists clenched, screaming, “Do it again, do it again, do it again!” and Murphy pushes himself away from the table, his face a mass of blood and torn skin, and lurches toward the guns on the windowsill. But Ming Li is already there, and she fires twice at Murphy’s midsection, and he folds in half with a long shudder of a groan and goes down.

  Coming up with the gun Murphy dropped, Rafferty hears nothing but the echo of the shots and then, from the hall, a rapidly repeated prayer in Lao.

  Murphy moans and rolls over.

  Ming Li steps back, out of his reach, with her gun aimed at his forehead. Her face is pale, but her hand is steady.

  “Always had trouble …” Murphy says. He grabs a breath and says, “… shooting the pretty ones.”

  Her voice shaking, Ming Li says, “You didn’t even get close, fat man.”

  Murphy is losing a lot of blood, the stain spreading rapidly outward over the carpet. To Poke, Ming Li says, “What should we do?”

  “We’re going to let him die,” Rafferty says. “And then I’m going to figure out how to deal with this.” He takes a quick step toward her, puts his arms around her, and squeezes. To the side of his neck, Ming Li says, “Might be a good idea to start that now. Figuring out how to deal with this, I mean.”

  He pushes her to arm’s length and looks at her, but she won’t meet his eyes. “Are you okay?”

  “I’ll be better when I’m moving.”

  Murphy makes a noise that might be a cough, and Ming Li steps back, slipping out of Rafferty’s grasp, and points the gun at Murphy’s midsection.

  Rafferty says, “Here you go, then. Get Neeni-that’s the woman who threw the glass-and take her out to the car. Carry her, if you have to. The maid, whatever her name is, can take care of her.”

  “Where will she be?”

  “In her room, I think, probably in bed. Straight down the hall, the door to the left. Grab some clothes for her. I don’t think she’ll be coming back.”

  “And?”

  “And then come back in here and get three or four of the briefcases in that closet. Take them to the car. They’re full of money.”

  “What about you?”

  “I’m going to find Treasure.”

  He watches Ming Li go, moving quickly but not hurriedly, and thinks, Frank taught he
r well. His heart is hammering in his temples, and he thinks his knees might go out. So he kneels down beside Murphy and studies him. The man’s breathing is shallow and irregular, and his eyes seem to be watching something projected on the ceiling. His face is white as paper, making the hair on his head and the tufts coming out of his nostrils seem a brighter orange, almost clownish. The smell of blood rises from the carpet around him. Rafferty is slightly surprised to find that he feels no pity for the man. When he stands up, he nudges Murphy’s side with his toe. He gets no reaction.

  He leaves the room through the door to the kitchen and sees the double doors at the back of the dining room standing wide, with rain slanting in to puddle on the floor, and he realizes he’s lost track of time. It could have been a minute since Treasure ran out of the train room, or it could have been five.

  He does a quick check of at the living room-unoccupied-and decides she’s outside. From what he can see, she more or less lives outside. He takes the distance to the back door at a trot, then slows and steps through it into the night.

  There’s rain, but it’s not heavy enough to impair visibility. The yards is as wide as the house, though not particularly deep, backing up fifteen or twenty feet to a white plaster wall that’s got some kind of dense hedge growing in front of it, four or five feet thick. The foliage looks black, although it’s probably dark green. Three trees spread their branches to create a sort of canopy over most of the ground.

  The water back here is at least four inches deep. He starts by jogging to his left, his shoulder only a few inches from the wall of the house, slowing when he comes to the living-room windows, which permit a long rectangle of pale light to reflect on the standing water and shine off the trunk of the nearest tree. The hedge is a dark green, shiny-leafed, thorny-looking, and dense. At the end of the house there’s a wall that runs straight back to create a corner with the hedged wall at the rear, so unless she’s gone over the wall, this isn’t where she came. He doesn’t see a way over the wall.