Paying Back Jack

by Christopher G. Moore

  “Looks like no one has tossed the room,” said Calvino as Colonel Pratt slid the balcony door open and stepped outside onto the tiled floor.

  “That includes us. Housekeeping was told to not enter the room, but if they had to go in, then to not touch anything,” said Colonel Pratt, standing at the railing. It was the most Thai of instructions.

  Calvino followed the Colonel outside, disappointed about the restrictions on inspecting the room. He looked straight ahead at the beach and sea, holding onto the railing. He glanced down at the street. Fifteen floors was a long way to fall. It was more likely an eighteen-story drop to the street by the time the lobby and mezzanine levels were factored in. She’d had a few final seconds of consciousness—what had gone through her mind, knowing that she was going to die, knowing that nothing she could do, say, or think could save her? His stomach churned, and he turned away. He hated heights and couldn’t understand why people spent huge sums of money to climb mountains only to fall into a crevice or die of frostbite. How anyone could sum the courage to jump off a balcony fell in the same category of wonderment. He pulled away from the railing, feeling shaken. Turning his back to the ocean view, he tried to clear his mind of the flood of disturbances racing through it. Then he walked from the balcony into the sitting room. The suite was cookie-cutter identical to his own.

  The sheets of the bed had been neatly pulled back and the pillows bunched into a pile at the center with a book nearby. It was a self-help book on relationships with a smiling, confident woman on the cover who looked like a beauty-contest winner.

  Colonel Pratt closed the balcony door and walked across the room. He took photographs of the table, the closet, and the bed. “Early this morning, I went to the house where Nongluck’s parents live. They were still asleep when I arrived. They invited me inside. I told them about their daughter’s death. The mother broke down and cried, but the father didn’t look surprised. He said she’d had problems in her personal life. Of course, what they meant was she had a problem with a boyfriend. The mother confirmed that a series of boyfriends had caused her nothing but anguish. She wailed that she’d killed herself over a man, but she didn’t say who he was. That can wait for later.”

  “Was there any connection between the family and Apichart?”

  Colonel Pratt shook his head. “They’d never heard of him.”

  Calvino, frustrated by the answer, walked into the bathroom and examined, without touching, Nongluck’s shampoo, soap, and cosmetics, neatly arranged in rows along with the standard hotel toiletry items. A bottle of Opium perfume was open. That seemed strange. A woman as tidy as Nongluck wouldn’t be leaving her prized perfume open to the elements. He called to Colonel Pratt, who’d been taking more photographs.

  When the Colonel stepped inside the bathroom, Calvino was on his knees looking at the bathtub. “You’ll need to get the hairs out of the drain. Hairs and skin from the sink, too. And check the lid on the toilet. It was up when I came in. Women always keep the lid down. They shouldn’t flush the toilet until lab guys have swabbed down the inside. And look at the perfume bottle. It’s open. She doesn’t strike me as someone who’d leave it like that.”

  “Where did you come up with all of this?” asked Colonel Pratt.

  Calvino smiled, looked over his shoulder. “I study investigative techniques.”

  “Sounds like you saw that program on National Geographic about bathtub murders.”

  Calvino’s cheeks flushed two shades short of a red light. “It was a good show. Mao and Noriega watched it with me last night.”

  A couple of seconds passed before Pratt registered that Calvino was talking about the two policemen who had stayed overnight in the room. He’d been joking about the TV forensic show; Calvino apparently hadn’t taken it as such.

  “You watched that bathtub murder investigation with the police?”

  Calvino nodded as if it was the most natural way to spend time with two cops. “During a commercial break, Mao went into my bathroom and swabbed it down.”

  “In this case, a woman died. The police want to know why. The local politicians may try to make something of it.”

  The election campaign had made Pratt cautious about what was possible. The daily cycle of mudslinging, lies, rumors, and vilification had exhausted him. Everyone was treading water, waiting to see who won.

  “I’d like to have talked to her,” said Calvino.

  Pratt had already gathered from the parents the background of the dead woman: her name, age, occupation, marital status, hometown, history of mental problems, and conflicts with family, neighbors, or friends. The police lab report said there were small traces of alcohol in her blood. But her blood tested negative for drugs. There was no evidence of a struggle in the room. And so far there was no evidence that anyone other than Nongluck had been in the room. Hotel rooms were like working girls; they had many customers, people with no connection to each other, coming and going over a short period of time, making it more difficult for investigators than a room in a house or an office.

  It was only after they left room 1542 that Calvino began to enjoy his release from house arrest. When he turned up at the reception desk with the Colonel, they had his invoice prepared. The concierge in the far corner stared at him without a smile. As he checked out, everyone behind the reception desk seemed relieved to see him, with his suitcase and case of whiskey at his feet. The bill for room service ran to two pages. Calvino studied it, clicking his tongue like a Bantu warrior on the eve of battle. Colonel Pratt asked to see it. He glanced through the steaks, the fries, the ice cream, the pasta, the vodka, the Russian food with names he couldn’t pronounce; he flipped the page and read through the various delivery charges and expenses. He did the sums in his head. Vincent had managed to run up about a week’s worth of room service charges in one night. The owner would be satisfied; General Yosaporn would not lose face. Colonel Pratt handed the invoice back to the clerk and told him that the owner’s friend, General Yosaporn, had arranged Calvino’s stay.

  The clerk stared at the desk. A colonel in full dress uniform had spoken.

  “No problem, sir,” he said.

  The hotel staff shuffled and looked at their hands. None of them were willing to push for cash in the circumstance of a colonel supporting a farang. If anything, they were relieved to see Calvino leaving, and the manager who had been hovering behind the desk slipped away into his office. The matter was settled. With the invoice cleared, Colonel Pratt asked who had been on duty at the front desk the day before. After talking with a couple of hotel staff, he found the receptionist, who remembered checking in Nongluck. She had checked in, alone, at 2:10 p.m. the day before her death. They had made a photocopy of her Thai ID card. She had gone to her room and only later returned downstairs to pay for her room and Calvino’s upgrade. She had used fresh one-thousand-baht notes. She had said the upgrade was a gift, and no one should tell the farang. Let it be a surprise. There had been nothing out of the ordinary about her that afternoon. She had smiled and counted out the cash, slid it across the reception desk, and watched as the clerk counted it again.

  On the day of Nongluck’s death, the receptionist recalled, she had worn a blue dress and carried a Prada handbag and a plastic Siam Paragon shopping bag with a bottle of wine inside. A bellhop remembered watching her walk out the front entrance an hour later and stop in front of the spirit house, where she’d lit incense sticks. A few minutes later, she had returned to the lobby, waited for the elevator, and returned to her suite. No member of the staff remembered seeing her leave the hotel after that. Could someone have gotten past security and slipped into her room without even passing another guest? No one at reception admitted that this could have happened.

  Calvino suggested checking the security downstairs, on the way out of the hotel. The two of them found the garage security guy who’d been working the day shift on the day of the death. Lots of cars had come and gone during the day.

  “Did you see anything unusual yesterd
ay afternoon? Maybe a car that you remember?” asked Colonel Pratt.

  The guard remembered a Thai arriving in a red sports car the previous afternoon. It had been a beauty, a European two-seater, polished, not a scratch on it, tinted windows. No, he didn’t remember the license plate number; he was too busy looking at his own face reflected in the high sheen of the car. But he thought it might have been a Bangkok plate.

  “Why do you think that?” asked Colonel Pratt.

  The guard told him that if it had been a local car, he’d have recognized it. He’d have known who owned it. A car like that wouldn’t be a secret for long in a small town like Pattaya. It was flashy like a car from the movies, a car built and sold to attract attention, the attention of women in particular. It wasn’t a family car the guard described. And it wasn’t the kind of car you’d drive to commit a murder, thought Calvino. A professional hit man would have driven a plain vanilla Honda.

  Whomever the driver of the sports car was, Calvino had a good idea he hadn’t planned to kill anyone. But maybe things turned out in a way he hadn’t anticipated. Something unexpected might have come up—a surge of anger, the wrong word or look—and Nongluck could have found herself airborne.

  EIGHT

  TRACER REALIZED THAT it felt good to be back in Bangkok. He stretched his arms and turned up the music as he glided through the early morning traffic on Sukhumvit Road. The rain slanted against the windscreen, the wipers working overtime. The city roads were wet and slick, and traffic from the motorway had started to build. He passed the Emporium Shopping Mall and Benjasiri Park, then turned into Washington Square. Taking a parking ticket, he drove on until he eased the S-Class Mercedes in a parking space in front of the Bourbon Street Restaurant. He sat in the car, leaving the air conditioner on, listening to Muddy Waters’s “Got My Mojo Workin’” and keeping the beat on the steering wheel. He touched the small leather pouch he wore under his shirt. He didn’t go anywhere without his mojo bag with the pinch of spices, herbs, a snake tooth, and the dead body of a mean motherfucker of a black widow spider.

  He didn’t object when his friend and fellow LRAS employee Alan Jarrett had suggested the restaurant in Washington Square because it was a good place to sit, wait, let the power rise up inside, get strong. And it was around the corner from a short time hotel where Jarrett had planned to spend the night. Time stops when a man is in touch with his mojo. Six in the morning and Tracer was ready to go to work. Mooney’s men had stored the .308 in the trunk. And Jarrett was all set, he thought.

  He sat in the car as the security guard came around with an umbrella and opened his door. Tracer got out of the car, locked the door, ducked his head under the umbrella, and walked up the steps to the front door. The girls behind the counter gave him the early-in-the-morning once-over. A man at that time of the morning was in the neighborhood to order himself some coffee, bacon, and eggs. The security guard, who had folded up the umbrella, followed Tracer through the door and told the waitresses that the black man had arrived in a Benz with embassy plates. The yings looked at Tracer, thinking he was a diplomat, someone they had to treat real nice. Not many African diplomats rolled into Washington Square at six in the morning on a rainy day, or, for that matter, any time, any day, rain or shine. Tracer turned right, walked over to the bar, dropped the car keys on the counter, and ordered a coffee.

  “Bring it black, bring it strong,” said Tracer.

  The waitress stared long and hard, like she had some problem.

  “The man wants a coffee,” said Jarrett. “Is there any part of that message you don’t understand?”

  She turned away and walked over to the coffee pot.

  “You’re in a good mood.” Tracer slid onto the stool next to Jarrett. “Rain got you down?”

  “How was Waters?”

  “He didn’t make his flight.”

  “You didn’t expect him to,” said Jarrett.

  “Mooney had all the details. There wasn’t much for Waters to do. Shake hands and calm down Mooney.”

  “And you could do that?”

  “Got that right. Mooney had me meet him in a bar with two of the most movement-challenged dancers I’ve ever seen. Looked like they were made of stone. Mooney was their only customer. Apparently he owned the place, so he wasn’t exactly a customer.”

  “That’s the point. You control the perimeter. An ideal place. I can see why Mooney chose it. No one coming in or out in the middle of your business. Just the two of you talking about the old times.”

  The waitress delivered Tracer’s mug of coffee.

  “Mooney said we’ve got three days before he comes personally to get his weapons.”

  “You scared, Tracer? I don’t find myself in fear of Mooney.”

  Tracer blew on his coffee before taking a sip.

  Jarrett was in a work phase, and when he worked he avoided coffee, tea, and alcohol. Chemicals cause a reaction in the human body, change the reflexes, vision, depth perception. A drunk doesn’t last long in combat. Jarrett’s military training kicked in, and he told himself he didn’t miss the coffee—until, of course, he saw Tracer enjoying a cup, smacking his lips. Jarrett promised himself a pot of fresh brew once the job was done. He liked giving himself a reward for completing a mission.

  While waiting for Tracer, Jarrett had been watching a middle-aged farang with a young woman at a table in the back. The woman looked like an office worker. The farang had eaten wolfishly, downing his bacon and eggs in big gulps, soaking his toast in the egg yolk. The ying had slowly sipped Chinese tea. He wore a suit and a tie, and she wore a short skirt and a blouse with creases on the sleeve sharp enough to cut butter, and she showed a bit of style with a pair of pearl earrings large enough to indicate she had experience in prying open large oysters. Not too much makeup—but who wore makeup at 6:00 a.m.?—and she had that self-confident, determined way of sitting, listening to the farang rattle on but not committing her expression to one emotion or another. Jarrett glanced at the time.

  “We’ve got lots of time,” said Tracer.

  “Time is the one thing no one has lots of.”

  Tracer nodded as if to concede the point. “Just let me finish my coffee. I’ve had a long drive. Tell me, how did it go with Miss Honey Bee last night?”

  “It was all milk and honey.” As they’d lain together in bed, Wan had told him how she’d sneak up on the hives, sit down, and watch the bees for hours. She watched them dance. In the darkness of the room she’d stroked his bare chest and said that when you understand the meaning of their dance, you learn something about nature. All the dancing was communicating important information: the distance to food, the direction, the force of the prevailing winds. At the bar, she’d watch the yings dance, looking for some pattern, some directional indicator toward the honey. She’d said there was a lot to learn from watching bees dance.

  “She seemed different from the others,” said Tracer.

  “I never met anyone in a bar like her.”

  Tracer ordered him another orange juice. “You have any idea how much orange juice I drank in Pattaya?”

  Jarrett shrugged. The pained expression on Tracer’s face made Jarrett smile.

  “A gallon and a half at least,” said Tracer.

  “Your eyeballs must be floating.”

  “Don’t worry. There’s nothing wrong with either my bladder or my eyes.”

  Jarrett needed to have his spotter’s eyes sharp and focused, checking out the target and the perimeter around it. He needed Tracer at the top of his form, and Tracer was giving his usual reassurances. “No problems in Pattaya?”

  “The only hiccup was driving in yesterday on Beach Road—the traffic. If you’d have told me the cars were backed up to the Cambodian border, I’d have not called you a liar. Nothing was moving. I edged along for half an hour until I finally saw the problem. There were cops and reporters and a dead Thai woman on the driveway in front of a hotel. They had a sheet over her. But people kept pulling it back for the TV cameras. I
rolled down my window and asked someone what had happened. Young Thai guy says a woman’s done killed herself. I say to myself, baby, if I’d been there two hours earlier and we’d had a drink, listened to the blues, I could’ve talked you into living.”

  “Life doesn’t always let you choose your dance partners,” said Jarrett.

  “Where’d you read that?”

  Jarrett cracked a smile. “Miss Honey Bee said that.”

  Tracer raised an eyebrow. “That girl’s workin’ her mojo on you.”

  The smile on Jarrett’s face widened. “Yeah, that crossed my mind.”

  More than once, Tracer’s Louisiana gris-gris, a homegrown mojo, had shown some power to defeat an enemy or to entice a friend.

  He glanced over at the ying at the table with her farang boyfriend. It occurred to him that if Wan had the tailoring and makeup, she wouldn’t look much different. Where was the dividing line between the ying who watched bees dancing and an office worker sipping tea at six in the morning? Weren’t they both harvesting as much honey as they could while the flowers bloomed?

  NINE

  A SLICK FILM of oil coated the wet street. A red and blue Honda 150cc came out of nowhere. The rider had a black helmet with flames along the sides and a tinted visor pushed back on his head. He wore the motorcycle taxi uniform—cheap plastic sandals, faded blue jeans, and an unbuttoned orange vest over a Liverpool football T-shirt. He steered with one hand and held a cell phone to his ear with the other. Calvino slammed on the brakes, made a hard left and clipped the rear left side of a Mercedes parked in front of Bourbon Street. The motorcycle driver lost his cell phone, frantically pulled out of a freefall, regained control, and opened the throttle. He turned, drove back, picked up his cell phone, and cursed and spat at Calvino.

  Calvino sat at the wheel for a full minute before he reversed and pulled into the empty parking spot next to the Mercedes. He closed his eyes and remembered the two men on the motorcycle spinning out of control, their bike slamming against the cargo of gas cylinders, the explosion, the burning bike cart wheeling into the base of the banyan tree. That hadn’t been an accident. He’d caused them to die. Calvino’s stomach churned, upset and angry. He’d just come close to killing another man on a motorcycle. He looked at his hands. They were shaking. He tried to steady himself by gripping down hard on the steering wheel. He told himself it wasn’t his fault that the motorcycle had been going the wrong way, the driver not paying attention. On the bright side, maybe his luck had turned.