by Jake Needham
Tay sighed, stood up, and walked out to the sidewalk. He shook a cigarette out of the pack and glanced back at the woman. She glared at him, still itching to order him not to smoke, but he was outside the restaurant and now there was nothing she could do about it.
He had always believed there was something deranged about the fanatics who treated smokers as if they were having public sex with goats. Didn’t these people have anything better to do than scream at other people who enjoyed a cigarette now and then? No, probably not, which was no doubt the reason they put so much energy into their screaming.
Tay stood in the shadows smoking quietly. It had begun to rain again and he listened to the staccato splashing of the drops on Serangoon Road and the plop, plop, plop of a drip from a gutter somewhere nearby. The street was the color of steel and the rain scratched the twilight and gave it the silvery, monochrome tint of an old silent movie. The city hung in the air like a spectral projection.
The two men in the Toyota hadn’t moved and Tay still couldn’t work out who they were or what they were doing there. He doubted they were CID or even Central Narcotics. His gut told him they were ISD, but then how did they get there? If they had followed Suparman’s sister there, surely they would have spotted Kang and Lee and they would know somebody else was around, too. But if they knew somebody else was around, would they just be sitting out there in the open? No, of course they wouldn’t. That meant they didn’t know, even if Tay couldn’t quite see how that could be.
If they hadn’t followed the sister, how did they get there? Had ISD known all along she would slip out of Chinatown and go to the Fortuna Hotel? Tay shook his head. He didn’t see how that made the slightest amount of sense. All this cloak and dagger bullshit gave him indigestion so he decided to stop thinking about it, smoke his cigarette, and see what developed.
Nothing at all developed the whole time he was smoking. But then he took a final puff, dropped the butt on the sidewalk, and stood on it with the heel of his shoe, and that was exactly when something did develop.
A silver blue Hi-Lux van, unmarked and without windows, stopped right behind the white Toyota. The door in the side of the van slid open and three men got out. Big men, all wearing dark sunglasses and all with their shirts hanging over their belts. Tay knew the look. They had guns under those shirttails.
“You better come see this,” Tay called out softly to Kang and Lee.
When they both got to the front of the restaurant, the three men were standing on the sidewalk next to the van. They weren’t exactly hiding, but Tay noticed the men stayed far enough up Serangoon Road so as not to be visible from the hotel’s lobby. One of them walked over to the passenger side of the Toyota and bent down to talk to the men inside. It was a short conversation. After less than a minute he straightened up and walked back to the group by the van.
“Who are those guys?” Lee asked.
Tay said nothing.
“You think they’re ISD, don’t you, sir?”
Tay looked at the faces of the three men. He didn’t think he recognized them, but at that distance he couldn’t be sure. Maybe he had seen a couple of them in the meeting at New Phoenix Park, maybe he hadn’t.
So Tay said nothing. He only lifted his shoulders and let them fall in the smallest possible shrug.
“Now who the hell is that?”
Tay glanced at Kang to see what he was talking about and Kang pointed at the apartment building across Owen Road from the hotel.
The building was old and a little rundown. Once white with blue trim, nothing was now even close to the color it must have been on whatever long-ago day it had last been painted. Rusty air-conditioner units poked through the walls at regular intervals and long streaks of brown water striped the building beneath them. Something about the structure seemed vaguely familiar to Tay. Had he once investigated a case that had some connection to it? If he had, he couldn’t put his finger on what case it might have been.
“Third floor, sir. The corner window.”
Tay counted up to the third floor and his eyes found the corner of the building.
“Do you see her, sir? The girl?”
Tay did see her. She was standing close to the glass and appeared to be watching the same men he and Kang were watching.
She was European, or perhaps American or Australian. Certainly not Asian. Long blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail, suntanned face, and features so neat and regular they could have been molded from plastic. She was attractive, no doubt about that, but something in the way she held herself gave Tay the sense she carried a presence, too, although what kind of presence he had no idea.
The distance was too great to be certain, but Tay guessed the girl was in her thirties, which meant he probably shouldn’t be thinking of her as a girl. At Tay’s age, however, he found himself thinking of almost all the attractive woman he encountered as girls. No doubt a great many people, most of them women, would be outraged to know he was harboring such thoughts, but thankfully none of them did. And if he kept his mouth shut, maybe none of them ever would.
“If those men are ISD and they’re watching Suparman’s sister,” Kang said, “who is that girl watching them? She’s not one of ours, is she?”
Tay shook his head.
“Okay, we’re CID and she’s not ours. They’re ISD and she’s watching them so she's not theirs either. Who does that leave? Who the hell is she?”
It was a good question. Tay had no answer for it so he said nothing.
CHAPTER TWENTY
SERGEANT LEE HAD kept her eyes on the men in the Toyota while Tay and Kang were speculating about the girl who appeared to be observing from the apartment building.
“Look, sir,” she cut in, “they’re getting out.”
Tay shifted his eyes from the girl in the window to the men in the Toyota. He watched them walk up Serangoon Road and turn right into Owen Road. Whoever the men were, they were going into the Fortuna Hotel.
“I’ll bet Suparman is in there with his sister right now,” Kang said. “And those guys really are ISD and they are going to take him down.”
“Why would ISD have all those people watching the Temple Street Inn for Suparman if they knew he was really at the Fortuna Hotel?”
Kang shrugged. “You got me, sir.”
Tay looked back up at the window in the rundown apartment building from which the girl had been watching. She was gone. That was strange. Had she just lost interest or had she—
“Bloody hell,” Kang muttered, interrupting Tay’s meditations. He looked back to see what had caught Kang’s attention.
The silver van was rolling slowly down Serangoon Road. When it got to Owen Road, it turned, crossed over to the wrong side of the street, and stopped in front of the hotel entrance. The sliding door slammed back on the sidewalk side of the vehicle and four men piled out, the three who had been standing on the sidewalk before and a tall man wearing an Indonesian-batik shirt that Tay couldn’t see clearly.
“What do you want to do, sir?”
Tay said nothing.
“We can’t just stand here and watch.”
“Why not, Sergeant? We don’t even know what the hell it is we’re watching.”
“But, sir—”
“Look, why do I have to keep reminding you we’re not here? And if we’re not here,” Tay said pointing toward the lobby of the Hotel Fortuna, “we’re certainly not over there either.”
That was true as far as it went, Tay knew, but it didn’t go very far.
Tay was certain the men they were watching were ISD. They must be at the Fortuna Hotel because they knew Suparman’s sister was meeting Suparman there, and now they were going in to take Suparman down.
But if these men really were ISD and they were there to take Suparman down, what was all that bullshit Goh had shoveled over everybody about the Temple Street Inn? Was that just intentional misdirection for some reason, or had everything simply changed at the last minute and no one bothered to tell CID?
&nb
sp; Tay wasn’t a stand-and-watch kind of guy, but he didn’t see what alternative they had. What were they going to do? Rush into the hotel and shout, you’re under arrest! They had two pistols between the three of them and there were five or six armed men in the hotel. The odds were lousy.
“It’s a hotel, sir.”
It was the first time Sergeant Lee had spoken up since the flurry of action began and both Tay and Kang looked at her.
“A hotel is open to the public. I can just walk into the lobby and see what’s going on.”
“We all could, Sergeant Lee, but we’re not.”
“I think we should, sir, and I ought to be the one to do it. People usually think a woman is harmless. You and Sergeant Kang might spook them.”
“And are you harmless?”
“Only if I want to be.”
Tay smiled in spite of himself.
The three of them stood in silence and watched, but because of the silver van blocking their view of the lobby entrance there wasn’t much to see. The upper floors of the hotel were all visible, of course, but no one was at any of the windows, none of the windows were open even if they could be opened, and nothing up there seemed unusual or out of place.
If there was gunfire, Tay knew, they would have to go in. Although he didn’t say that out loud, he was certain Kang and Lee knew it, too. They couldn’t just stand there if they heard gunfire. So he hoped to hell he wouldn’t hear gunfire because he didn’t have the faintest idea what they would do if they did have to go into the hotel.
“Did you say there are no entrances or exits other than the lobby and one emergency exit?”
“Yes, sir,” Sergeant Lee said. “The emergency exit is that metal door next to the Western Union office.”
Tay ran his eyes over the shops on the ground floor of the hotel until he found the Western Union office. The metal door next to it looked insignificant, more like the door to a storage room than an emergency exit from the hotel, but he knew Lee was certain or she wouldn’t have said anything.
After what felt like half an hour but was really more like five minutes, one of the men came back out through the lobby entrance and walked out to Serangoon Road. He stood on the corner looking in first one direction then the other as if he were expecting someone. He took out his telephone and spoke for perhaps fifteen seconds. Then he shoved his phone back in his pocket, turned around, and went back inside the hotel.
“What was that all about?” Kang asked.
Tay shrugged. “I have absolutely no idea.”
“It looks like they’re expecting somebody. You think it’s Suparman they’re expecting?”
Tay said nothing.
“I don’t get it,” Lee said. “They’re not making any effort to conceal themselves. Won’t that frighten off Suparman if he does show up?”
“Maybe he’s already inside,” Kang said.
“Then why hasn’t ISD grabbed him?”
“Maybe those guys aren’t ISD.”
“We’re going around in circles,” Tay said.
The rain had stopped, but the tires of the cars passing on Serangoon Road made little hissing sounds in the water spread over its surface. Tay got bored looking at nothing. He shook another Marlboro out of his pack and lit it.
“Did either of you try the emergency exit to see if it opens from the outside?” Tay asked.
“No, sir,” Lee said. “I wasn’t thinking about making entry, just about how people could get out of the hotel.”
“I want you and Sergeant Kang over there by the emergency exit. Check and make sure you can get inside through it. If something happens and we have to go in, I’ll take the front and the two of you take it.”
“You’re not armed, sir,” Kang said.
“I’m well aware of that, Sergeant, but we aren't going to shoot it out with those guys. Our best hope is for me to get their attention and then you and Sergeant Lee come in behind them. If you can cover them before they realize you’re there, perhaps we can get control of the situation before anybody gets hurt.”
“And what will we do then, sir?”
Tay smoked quietly and thought about that for a moment. Finally he shrugged and said, “I have no idea.”
Kang and Lee crossed Serangoon Road about a hundred feet north of the hotel and strolled casually back toward the emergency exit on the sidewalk. When they were still thirty yards away, Kang stopped walking so abruptly that Lee bumped into him.
“Did you hear that?” he asked her.
She shook her head.
“I thought I heard gunshots.”
“From inside the hotel?”
Kang nodded and cocked his head, but now all he heard was the traffic on Serangoon Road.
“You really didn’t hear anything?” he asked.
Sergeant Lee shook her head again.
Kang glanced across the road at Tay, but he didn’t look like he had heard anything either.
“Maybe it was something else,” Kang said.
But it wasn’t something else, because at exactly that moment everything began to happen at once.
The gray metal door next to the Western Union office banged open from the inside and a woman ran out into Serangoon Road. She spotted a taxi moving north and jumped into the street to cut it off.
A chorus of car horns sounded and a green Mercedes veered out of his lane to avoid the woman. A bus trying to get out of the way of the Mercedes clipped the side of a flatbed truck that was loaded with automobile tires. The impact dislodged one of the truck’s tie-downs and two tires slid off the back of the truck, bounced upright on the concrete road surface, and wobbled wildly off into the traffic.
“Bloody hell,” Kang muttered to Lee. “Where did she come from?”
One of the bouncing tires crossed in front of the green Mercedes and the driver slammed on his brakes. He was immediately rear-ended by a white Audi whose driver had turned his head to look at the truck that was now skewed sideways across the road.
The woman ran into the inside lane waving her arms at the taxi and it slammed to a stop right in front of her. She stumbled and fell, catching herself on the hood.
“That’s her!” Lee shouted to Kang. “That’s the sister!”
Kang took half a dozen running steps and grabbed the emergency exit door just before it slammed shut.
“You grab her, Linda! I’m going in!”
Holding the door open with his hip, Kang unholstered his H&K forty calibre, racked the slide to chamber a round, and plunged into the hotel.
Kang’s run toward the emergency exit had caught the eye of the woman even though she was still lying against the hood of the taxi. When she saw Kang disappear into the hotel, she pushed herself up, abandoned the taxi, and took off running up Serangoon Road.
Sergeant Lee went after the woman just as Kang had asked her to, but she was uneasy and she kept shooting glances over her shoulder at the emergency exit. She knew she shouldn’t have let Kang go in by himself. Then she spotted Tay sprinting through the traffic toward the lobby of the hotel and that made up her mind for her. She let the woman go, turned around, and ran after Kang.
Inside the door, Lee found herself in what looked like a large storeroom. Several pieces of luggage sat in front of a set of open shelves filled with cleaning supplies. There were two black vinyl chairs pushed into the opposite corner and several large cardboard boxes piled on and around the chairs. In the wall next to the shelves was a door with an aluminum crash bar and a sign above it that said EXIT.
Behind her, the din of car horns was deafening.
The collisions had blocked Serangoon Road and drivers were frustrated and impatient. When the woman got about a hundred feet up the road, she saw nobody was chasing her and she slowed to walk and looked back over her shoulder at the havoc she had left behind her.
That was why she didn’t see the white box truck.
It came out of a side street and the driver was so surprised to discover the break in what was normally heavy traffic t
hat he gunned the truck straight out into Serangoon Road without slowing down. He hardly expected to find a woman standing in front of him.
She never had a chance.
The impact flipped her high into the air and she came down on top of the truck’s cab. Her body bounced off the truck and onto the roadway twenty feet behind it. Then it rolled another ten feet until it stopped up against the curb.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
THE LOBBY OF the Fortuna Hotel was as small, nondescript, and functional as Tay had imagined. A reception desk on the left, two low-backed black vinyl chairs on the right, and an elevator and a staircase straight ahead. Next to the staircase was a black metal door with a sign above it that said Emergency Exit.
An elderly Chinese man peered quizzically at Tay from behind the tiny registration desk. He wore a rumpled white shirt and rimless glasses with lenses so thick they looked as if they had been cut from the bottoms of soft drink bottles.
“How you get here so quick?” he asked Tay.
“What are you talking about?”
“I just call police,” the desk clerk said. “One minute ago. But you here already.” The old man’s eyes narrowed. “You no police?”
Tay pulled out his warrant card and held it up. The old man leaned forward. He squinted at Tay’s warrant card so intently his eyes were almost closed. He began slowly reading it, moving his lips with each word.
“Look at me,” Tay snapped. “Why did you call the police?”
The man lifted his eyes from Tay’s warrant card.
“Heard BANG, didn’t I? Sound like gun, I think. Then woman run downstairs and go out there.”
The clerk pointed at the black metal door next to the staircase.
