Paying Back Jack

by Christopher G. Moore

  He dropped heavily into the balcony chair. Finishing his whiskey, he put the glass on the table. Then he went inside the suite and phoned the reception. A woman’s voice came on the line. “Someone just fell from this hotel,” he said. “Phone an ambulance and the police.”

  “Yes, sir,” she said. The police had already been called.

  “I saw her.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “She’s dead.”

  “Let us notify the police.”

  He put down the phone and went back onto the balcony and looked down.

  It had been as if she’d briefly stopped her long swan dive to say a short goodbye to a stranger, a final silent farewell. It made him a witness to death for the second time in two days. He’d done the right thing by reporting it, he told himself. Colonel Pratt would have to be notified. But not right away. He needed to think through what had happened.

  She had plunged head first, and that bothered him. When someone jumps off a building, it’s almost always feet first. This is a basic human instinct. People are hardwired to fear heights. High off the ground, looking down, a ying who is determined to kill herself will calculate where to go over the edge, and even then some inner voice will still tell her to land on her feet. A murder victim is a different story. Most of the time there is a struggle. Even if the victim is surprised from behind, the result is the same: the victim is pushed over the edge, and the force throws her off balance. There’s no time for her instinct to kick in and override the natural fear. Calvino wrapped his fist around his glass and pressed it to his lips, forgetting it was empty. Realizing his mistake, he put it down hard on the table and sank into the chair, head in his hands.

  This isn’t good, but it’s okay, he told himself. Shit like this happens. Pratt knows that. It just happens more frequently to some people. I wasn’t doing anything, just having a drink. People get themselves murdered all the time. He shouldn’t take it personally. He had nothing to do with it. He knew what he had to do. He had to go downstairs and tell the police what he’d seen.

  He remembered her smile as the seagull had flown away. There had been some heat behind the ice.

  Calvino left a message for Pratt, and took the lift to the lobby. When he walked out, he saw the police were talking with the receptionist and the bellhop. With clarity, Calvino saw his future, and having a holiday wasn’t part of it. He saw himself filling out endless police reports, attending interrogations, and inevitably, viewing the dead body. He’d be asked, “Was that the woman you saw dropping past your balcony, Mr. Calvino?”

  He’d lost his appetite for the steak dinner and revised his dining plans. He’d talk with the cops and then go back to his room and watch what little was left of the setting sun. A few minutes later when his cell phone rang, he didn’t answer it. He saw Pratt’s number in the missed call window. Calvino told himself he needed to handle this his way.

  THREE

  FOR PRIVATE SECURITY contractors like Alan Jarrett, dawn was not just the start of a new day; it was a favorite time for executions, torture, or confessions. Interrogators, ambush point men, dictators who worked along the edge of the dark side of truth, they watched their targets illuminated by the first light on the horizon. Old military habits tend to graft onto a life, and after some years in the service no one can tell the grafted bits from the original. Dawn work detail was one of those grafts. Civilians slept through the dawn. Soldiers and ex-soldiers doing a soldier’s job were up and already at work, checking weapons and the perimeter, heading out for that place no one wants to go, with no choice in the matter. Dawn was the time for a hanging or an ambush. Jarrett and his buddy Tracer, both five days in from Kabul, had an appointment here in Bangkok, a job to do. Then they’d fly back to Afghanistan.

  At five in the morning the new day’s light was no more than a fragile crack at the edge of the sky, running like a fissure of gold in a deep shaft. Within fifteen minutes daybreak would spread into a full-blown dawn. As if programmed, Jarrett’s eyes opened. He reached above his head and pulled back the curtain to look out. Letting the curtain fall, he laid his head back on the pillow and relaxed his muscles against the sheets. He felt the chill in the air and listened to the background buzz of the short time hotel room’s air-conditioning. It was always good to wake up in a safe civilian zone, an environment removed from the danger that lay just ahead. Jarrett raised his left arm slowly and glanced at his Rolex. It was 5:27 a.m.

  His head slowly pivoted on the pillow. A ying in her early twenties, naked, back turned toward him, slept with one fist clasping the sheet waist-high. She moaned as she turned over, as if responding to someone in her dreamscape. She was an upcountry beekeeper’s daughter, and he wondered if in her dreams she was out in the fields tending the hives. Or was she just back in the bar, fleeing from a drunk who was pawing her? Rivulets of long black hair fell over her pillow. Her breathing was slow, regular, the kind that accompanies the deepest sleep. Jarrett told himself she was dreaming of tending hives somewhere in Surin province, the sun on her face and buckets of honey at her feet. At least he wanted to believe that. She introduced herself as Wan, which meant “sweet”—as in honey sweet. He had known her eight hours, long enough to learn her life story, or at least the edited version bar yings learn to tell. Her charm and body were enough to cause him to feel the excitement that comes with an unexpected close encounter with a young woman.

  He smiled, thinking of an old blues song “A man always has a price to pay/A woman knows her value/But she sells it for what she can/There’s always a price/always a price/but you don’t always know how much/til you break it/always a price/and it ain’t always money.”

  Jarrett slipped out of bed without disturbing Wan. He moved like a shadow with its own life and purpose. The hotel room was smaller than he remembered from the night before. From the edge of the bed he crept over to the chair and slipped on his jeans and T-shirt. He froze as she curled on her side, moved her leg, and pulled the sheet up to her chin. He waited until she settled back down and her breathing became more regular; then he kept an eye on her as he dressed. He thought about how civilians slept in a different way. They could sleep through their own deaths, he thought. He reached over to her handbag, a fake Prada bag bought from a Sukhumvit street vendor, and tucked ten thousand baht into the front pocket.

  At the bar the night before, Jarrett had asked if her father’s bees were dying, like the ones in America. She’d blinked, shrugged. She didn’t know. Her father had abandoned the family and taken the bees with him. They’d been alive when he loaded them into two trucks.

  “Where you from?” she’d asked.

  “America, but I’m working in Afghanistan.”

  “You on holiday?”

  He smiled. “Working holiday.”

  “I need the money to get back into the bee business.” It was a clever variation on the handicapped-mother and water-buffalo-with-a-heat-stroke stories.

  “How much do you need?” His question hadn’t been serious.

  “Ten thousand baht.”

  “That’s a lot.”

  Wan had shrugged. “I just started working. I haven’t saved anything. Not yet.”

  She’d left her lady’s drink untouched. The mamasan who’d been eyeing her progress with the customer swept in from the shadows and ordered her to drink up. Wan had sipped her drink until the mama-san drifted away and flopped onto her stool in the corner.

  “My father come at night with his friends and take away all of the hives. He left us nothing. He loved those bees more than he loved us.”

  Jarrett had automatically divided the hotel room into coordinates. He moved from space to space, checking the curtains, the windows, the bathroom door, and going through the ying’s clothes and handbag. He found her ID card and tried to read it, but the Thai script defeated him. Her cell phone was turned off. He examined her makeup, lipstick, and brush, along with an inhaler, wrapped hard candy, and a box cutter. He slid open the blade and let dawn sun touch the sharp edg
e. Closing the blade again, he slipped the box cutter into his pocket.

  His movements had a purpose. Jarrett wasn’t just being sensitive; he was putting himself through a training exercise. The beekeeper’s daughter—number thirty-eight, Wan—was young, alert, in top physical condition. Exactly the type of person Jarrett liked to test his stealth skills against, sharpening them for use in the field. Moving around a room without waking someone was a specialized skill in his line of work. Not everyone could do it—go unnoticed, unheard.

  Using his training to anticipate another person’s reaction required regular practice. Working yings were a good challenge. They had street smarts and basic nighttime survival training. They worked in a world where they had to calculate each move in advance. They practiced the art of deception, set up emotional ambushes, and orchestrated side plays to defend their position and throw their customers’ counterattacks into disarray.

  Jarrett studied her on the bed. In the bar she had clung to him. She’d carried out the role of the playful ying, and her catlike purring and brushing of her body against his leg, side, and arm were precursors. Only cats and humans toy with their victims before killing them. She was playing with him, finding the vulnerable center before striking. A working ying acquired the unique ability to convince her customer that their roles were reversed, that she was the target. And she needs him for protection. The only magic in the relationship was this sleight of hand.

  Once inside the back-alley hotel room, she’d whispered to him that the bees had started dying in Thailand, too. Whole colonies had collapsed. Her eyes had grown large, as if she could see the horror unfolding as she spoke.

  She had smiled when he’d asked her about what she wanted out of life.

  Jarrett stood at the room door and took a last look at her. He thought about the empty beehive with only the queen bee and the royal jelly inside. The workers had gone walkabout, as the Australians say. “Abandoned” is the right word. Bees, like people, have been known to disappear. Buddhists say everything is impermanent. They understand the world of bees. It’s nature, just not human nature. Wan’s father had been swallowed up into the distant hills, finding sanctuary on the slopes where the Khmer Rouge had once laid down landmines. He’d returned home but only to get his bees. No one had seen him or heard from him. He’d timed his mission to avoid confronting his family. Abandonment of a losing position was an essential skill Jarrett had been taught in the service. Of all the skills he’d learned, he felt this one might be the most underestimated. Like something from an old blues song about how it’s too late to say you’re sorry.

  FOUR

  SIX FOOT THREE, New Orleans born and raised, Trace LeLand, who early on acquired the nickname Tracer, had played high school football and been all-state running back for three years. “Fast” didn’t cover Tracer with the ball on an open field; he outran the wind, the rain, his own shadow. He could also catch a football like no one else—he had magic hands, a great sense of timing, and perfect eyesight—from all those carrots his mother fed him when he was young, he liked to tell people. Tracer had had a scholarship to play football at Michigan but had gotten himself into some trouble when a guy from Rhode Island insulted his girlfriend.

  Tracer had been onstage playing saxophone in a honky-tonk bar when the guy, who turned out to be a banker one generation removed from Ireland, just wouldn’t take no for an answer and grabbed his girlfriend by the arm. That was a bad thing to see from the platform, blowing on the tenor sax and watching his girlfriend squirming, some jerk holding her by the wrist. He flew off the stage like a man heading for the end zone, and instead of catching a pass, he found himself standing between his lady and the banker. With the authorities, it didn’t seem to matter much that the banker had thrown the first punch, because after that, Tracer had hit him half a dozen times and was still hitting him as he collapsed on the floor. The bouncers had to drag Tracer off, his fists spinning like windmills, his girlfriend bawling her eyes out.

  The police came and arrested Tracer. The prosecutor filed a felony assault count, and in the plea-bargaining that followed, the trial judge made some comments that suggested that if Tracer had signed with LSU the way the boy’s mother had told him to, he would have been more lenient. Perhaps the charges would have been dropped. Louisiana is a serious football state and Tracer’s taking an offer from Michigan was something of an insult to LSU. But Tracer had figured the national spotlight of playing for a Big Ten powerhouse would get him closer to one of those hundred-million-dollar pro-football contracts.

  The trial judge made it clear to Tracer that his options had narrowed down to only two: a state correctional facility or the military. The marines suited Tracer, and by volunteering to serve, he could prove to everyone he was a loyal American even though he hadn’t signed to play for LSU. By the time he’d finished basic training, the past—with its potential trial, the lawyers, the judge with owl eyes and jagged, sharp teeth—had blurred. The jail cell where he’d been kept, the interrogation room, the courtroom, and tears falling down his mama’s face: all of it had fallen away like water under a distant bridge.

  Tracer hummed to himself as he drove. Singing was the way he passed the time, that and thinking about the words as he sang. “Women,” he said under his breath, smiling. There was no defending them. No predicting them. The blues were all about women doing crazy shit—only, until this experience, he hadn’t thought the words in the songs could apply to him. He’d thought, like most people, that he was the exception to the rule.

  As he drove into Pattaya, the traffic thickened up like water turning to ice. The car in front slowed, then stopped. After ten minutes, he was edging along Beach Road. Through the window, Tracer saw a number of uniformed police, a body snatcher’s van, and hordes of onlookers. A body under a white sheet was half in the road and half on the sidewalk. A man in a security guard’s uniform leaned down and pulled back the sheet, and a TV camera crew moved in to film the dead woman. What was your big sorrow, little lady? he thought. What team didn’t you make?

  The traffic picked up, and in a few minutes Tracer turned into the Royal Garden Plaza and parked in the shopping mall’s basement garage. He climbed out of the Mercedes and dragged an orange plastic traffic cone over to the side. Wiping his hands, he climbed back into the car and pulled into the spot. He locked the car and then put the traffic cone behind it, crossed the parking lot, and pushed the elevator button for the first floor. When he emerged from the elevator, he hadn’t walked more than twenty feet when he ran straight into two men in civilian dress who he knew from the look of were military; they were loitering outside an all-you-can-eat restaurant, studying the menu. They looked nineteen, twenty years old. About the same age he’d been when he’d enlisted, just in time to see action in the first Gulf War.

  “You boys with Cobra Gold?” asked Tracer.

  “Yes, sir,” they said at the same time. Just looking at Tracer they could see military written all over him.

  Tracer smiled. “Thought so. Watch yourself in Pattaya.”

  “We’ve been briefed about the situation, sir.”

  “Then you’ll be all right. Don’t forget that when push comes to shove, lady boys are more boy than lady.”

  “There’s not a lot of lady in that boy,” said one of the marines, breaking into a smile. “We’re here to assist you, sir.”

  Whoever had come up with that password exchange knew a lot about Thailand. That would have been Mooney’s doing. Tracer was no prophet, but like he always said, the blues gives a man insight into the human condition. Working with a guy like Mooney, it paid to know something about the human capacity for bending the rules. The men shook hands with him and, seeing Tracer’s Marine Corps ring, exchanged a knowing glance. He wondered what Mooney had told them. His bet would be next to nothing. “A jarhead’s head ain’t a place to store knowledge,” Mooney had once said. “It’s a place to store orders, one at a time.”

  “Why don’t I take you boys to dinner?” Tracer t
urned up the amps on his hundred-watt smile. “I know a place where they bring you a steak that just about defeats any man.”

  On the walk to the restaurant one of the jarheads whispered into his cell phone, letting Mooney know everything was going according to plan.

  They walked a couple hundred meters along Beach Road to a small restaurant. Once they were seated at the booth, one of the jar-heads asked Tracer about the first Gulf War. Bar girls talk about sex, bond traders about the market, soldiers about war.

  “You boys done your tour in Iraq?”

  They nodded, smiles coming off their faces.

  “Then you know that no one who’s been there wants to talk about it. But if you wanna talk about football, I’d put money on Michigan taking the conference this year. They got a quarterback who shifts downfield like Spider-Man.”

  His companions looked disappointed, shifting their knives and forks around.

  “Okay, I saw some shit, did some shit,” Tracer said. “Some I was proud of, other stuff I’d just as soon forget. You know what I’m saying?”

  The two marines knew what Tracer was trying to say; they’d seen and done some shit themselves. When the steaks were delivered to the table, the meat was hanging over both sides of the plate. The conversation eased into college football, women, and bars. He told them about the dead woman he’d seen in the street. The jarheads listened as Tracer described the scene. “Shit happens,” said one of the men. “Civilians don’t get it,” said the other.

  Tracer paid the bill and left the two marines to find their own path to the yings. Not so much a path as a super highway with tollbooths as far as the eye could see. They’d learn that civilians in Pattaya have their own roadside ambushes.