Paying Back Jack

by Christopher G. Moore

  Somporn arrived in his new Lexus for an appointment with Cat every Wednesday. He arrived between ten and eleven in the morning, stayed through lunch, and left around two in the afternoon. His visits had become predictable, routine. As Calvino had noted in his report, Somporn’s world was without surprises, and that made him vulnerable.

  What Jarrett and Tracer were waiting for was Somporn’s weekly love-in with a ying who understood that, like her lover’s new Lexus, sooner or later she’d be traded in for a new model. On the surface Cat appeared devoted to Somporn. Her habits were only slightly less predictable than his, and she was no more careful to cover her tracks than he was. Both of them were a private investigator’s dream. They lived in worlds they thought they controlled—more than that for Somporn, who lived in a world he thought he owned.

  Jarrett folded his hands behind his head and sat back in his chair. The Jack Malone Foundation in Hong Kong had confirmed that Casey’s money had received. Tracer had turned on his iPod, hooked up to two small speakers. The words poured out: “Just get it done. Don’t matter how you do it.”

  Jarrett checked his watch. They had an hour to wait.

  As Calvino climbed the stairs to his office, he heard someone calling his name from the street below. He leaned over the railing toward the massage yings sitting in front of the massage parlor. One of the yings called up, “Tell Ratana—Noi come to office late.” Behind her was a customer. Evidently, she was going out for a short time. It wasn’t the first time Noi had dumped her kid on Ratana for an additional hour to turn a trick. Strangely, Ratana no longer complained about working in an office above a massage parlor. The ying would eventually come into the office and collect her daughter. Which one of the babies was hers? He couldn’t keep straight the shifting combination of babies who lurked along the edges of the playpen any more than he could identify fish in an aquarium. Little kids were like old people in that way; their features blurred into a generic rubbery face; hairless, jug-eared, wet-mouthed. It was difficult for him to remember how the office ran before Ratana had given birth to a dead man’s child.

  He hadn’t been expected; as far as Ratana and everyone on the soi knew, Calvino had left town. As soon as he opened the door, the whiff of babies hit him like a wall of freshly fertilized soil. Then came the sound of their blubbering and incoherent babbling, their armorpiercing cries, their shaking of rattles, and their bouncing against the sides of their small, caged world.

  The space had been transformed from an office into a community daycare center. Ratana’s desk had been pushed aside to make space for a playpen with see-through nylon mesh for tiny little fists to grasp, squeeze, pull—the basic exercise program for a six-month-old. Mouth open, Calvino stood frozen on the spot, surveying the wreckage that the children had unleashed. Ratana sat behind her desk, earphones from an iPod on, sipping coffee, looking at her computer, and singing out of tune. On the screen, she read about how to be a perfect parent on a working mothers’ website—actually a blog written by a Thai living in Los Angeles—adorned with teddy bear logos and pictures of two small snotty-nosed babies whose every movement was caught on the web cam.

  He walked to her desk, reached over, and pulled out an earphone.

  “Noi’s going to be late picking up her kid,” he said.

  She jumped. “I wasn’t expecting you until later.”

  “She was just leaving with a customer.”

  Ratana shrugged, turning away from the computer screen. She had dressed casually in a pair of black slacks and a white blouse stained with baby slobber and bits of baby food. Her hair fell across her face. She pushed it back, twisting around in her chair as she scanned Calvino from head to toe. She had already talked to Colonel Pratt the night of Calvino’s detention, confirming that she’d never heard Calvino mention the woman who’d fallen to her death.

  “I’m sorry about Pattaya. What a terrible thing!”

  “Pratt told you?” He wasn’t surprised.

  She nodded. Calvino’s best friend and his office assistant had long ago established a line of independent communication. “I thought you’d be in this afternoon.”

  “I wanted to finish up on Beckwith’s case.” He showed her the pictures on his digital camera. The babies stirred in their sleep. Ratana put a finger to her lips. Sometimes he forgot the new rule of the office: talk in a whisper. “I had a minor accident in Washington Square.”

  “Anyone hurt?” Her hand instinctively touched her throat.

  “The car I hit was parked. No one inside.”

  She sighed. “That’s a relief. I’ll handle the paperwork with the insurance company.”

  “The owner’s handling it.” The attitude of the two men irritated him, made him shake his head. But compared to the lockdown in Pattaya, the incident made little impression. As he stepped back, he brushed against a pram, which rolled into the playpen. The reception area had become a minefield of car seats, buggies, toys, piles of disposable diapers, bottles, and bottle warmers. Getting through to his office had become an ordeal.

  One of babies in the playpen started bawling. The others soon joined in. Ratana leaned over her desk and made some of those cooing noises interspersed with tongue clicking that mothers use to soothe infants. The language of comfort, an ancient, borderless language.

  “Colonel Pratt asked you to phone,” she said.

  Calvino had switched off his cell phone, but there was no way to avoid messages filtering through to his office. He didn’t want to talk with Pratt or anyone else. He wanted to forget the dead ying falling past his balcony.

  “They’re hungry,” said Ratana, reaching out for the bottles. “Let me know when you want me to phone Colonel Pratt.” Babies sucking on their bottles, their tiny legs in the air, had suddenly become individual forces to reckon with. “Why don’t I phone the Colonel now?”

  “Not now. Later.”

  He found a path into his office and collapsed at his desk. He had needed the vacation from the office, from the babies, from Ratana, from Colonel Pratt, from the clients and chaos of Bangkok. No one could handle Bangkok full blast very long without a break.

  “You’re upset,” she said. “Tell me what’s wrong.”

  “Telling you what’s right would take less time.”

  The Pattaya police had put him through the chili-grinding machine, she thought. That accounted for his flushed face, hot temper.

  “I’m curious about one thing,” he said.

  That made her happy for a moment. “What thing?”

  “How many babies are out there?” He nodded in the direction of her office. “I thought there were three.”

  “Four,” she said.

  “Some investigator,” he said. “I can’t even keep track of the number of babies in my reception area.” He thought he’d correctly counted the babies in the playpen—three, four, five? Perception sometimes failed to attach the right number. It was the same with time passing. How long had it taken the ying to fall to her death? Two, three, four seconds? The police had asked him. Time did strange things too, getting tangled up like a clump of babies, hampering judgment.

  “Colonel Pratt said the Pattaya police don’t consider you a suspect.”

  “They told Pratt what he wanted to hear. It’s the Thai way.”

  “So there is no problem. That’s good,” she said, confirming that the Thai way had followed him straight to his desk.

  Snuggling a cooing baby against her chest, she returned to Calvino’s office and sat in a chair opposite his desk.

  “John-John’s sleeping,” she whispered, swaying the child from side to side, making a clicking sound with her tongue.

  Every time he looked at the baby, he asked himself whether the luk-krueng farang kid looked more like his father or mother.

  The baby’s father, John Lovell, had been murdered and cremated a year and a half earlier. Ratana’s mother had counseled her to get an abortion; so had her friends. Until the baby was born, Ratana’s mother had insisted that farangs i
n Thailand were all scam artists, con men, grifters, or dangerous criminals. Since John-John’s birth, her mother phoned a half a dozen times a day with advice, worried that Ratana was giving the baby insufficient attention, telling her to quit her job and devote herself to the baby full-time, and instead of campaigning for an abortion, now campaigned for Ratana and John-John to move back to the shelter of the ancestral home. The old lady would have made a perfect Thai politician.

  “Someone knew where I was staying in Pattaya. I need to know if you told anyone about the hotel.”

  Ratana raised her hand and drew an imaginary line like a schoolteacher across the room and the playpen. “Do you really think I’d ever let you down?”

  She waited for the emotion to register in his face. It was one thing that Calvino was convinced wouldn’t happen. “Any other messages while I was away?”

  “A few clients phoned. Mrs. Beckwith phoned. Her husband’s being transferred to Chicago and …”

  “She wants to close the case,” said Calvino.

  “There’s no point in continuing. They’re leaving Thailand. And Casey’s messenger will deliver forty-thousand baht this afternoon,” said Ratana with a radiant smile. She had saved the good news for just the right moment to lift her boss’s shattered spirits.

  “Did he call when I was away?”

  “I told him you were out of town.”

  “Did he say anything else?” asked Calvino.

  “He said he was very happy with your work.” She snuffled John-John’s cheek. He had seen her perform this ritual before. The sniffing of her baby appeared to intoxicate Ratana. It gave her a baby high. The gesture was one that Thais commonly performed on their loved ones. Her nose on John-John’s neck, she breathed in, then gently exhaled. The smelling-ceremony style was a mixture of wine tasting and perfume sampling. She never tired of burying her nose into John-John as if she wished to breathe him into her lungs. It was feeding time, and Ratana unfastened her blouse.

  Calvino looked away. “Why don’t you go back to your desk? You’ll be more comfortable.”

  Ratana smiled, shaking her head. “You mean you’ll be more comfortable.”

  Life revolved around the edges of reality for most people. They saw and heard and felt what they wanted. Calvino had no reason to believe Ratana had dropped his travel arrangements with anyone. Alone at his desk once again, he checked his email, wondering who had passed on his Pattaya hotel arrangements. Of course it could have been Apichart, or one of the investigators sifting through the remains of two dead men in the Soi 33 carnage. Who else would have gone to the trouble of finding out where he’d gone?

  THIRTEEN

  JARRETT PRESSED HIS EYE against the daytime telescopic lens, his feet firm on the floor, one elbow positioned on the table. A two-foot silencer on the end of the barrel gave the weapon an otherworldly appearance. He stretched his arms and shook his hands loosely at his side as he waited for Tracer, standing to his right, to confirm the target. Tracer, his ears plugged and wired, stood a foot back from Jarrett’s position, looking through a pair of binoculars at the buildings in the vicinity of the target.

  Tracer and Jarrett had supplied each building within a ninety-degree arc of the target with a code name: Ripper, Papa Bear, Grizzly, Scorpion, Firebird, Rooks, and Black Sheep. The target building itself was code-named Zapper. The code names and locations had been written in large, careful blue lettering on a white board. The white board rested on a chair to Jarrett’s left. All Jarrett had to do was look up from the telescopic site at the white board if he needed a confirmation. That wouldn’t be necessary because he had the information memorized. But there was comfort in having it there, knowing that memory sometimes failed. It was a lot of information to keep straight. Screwups more often than not were information screwups; communication gummed up as it worked its way down the chain of command.

  Floors and units also had codes running left to right, such as one-eight for the first unit on the eighth floor. Tracer passed three-nine on Firebird, paused, looking for any activity before moving on. He’d studied the buildings and the line-of-fire floors of each one. Waters hadn’t indicated any problem. But that wasn’t the point. Training kicked in, and it had to be assumed that a force with hostile intention might be in one of the buildings. Only a rookie would focus just on the target on the balcony of three-nine Zapper, never letting it cross his mind that someone could be targeting him. As the blues teach, when anguish gets hung out to dry, it finds itself in a world wet with anger, rage, and revenge.

  “Tracer, there isn’t anything alive that I can’t hit at three hundred and fifty meters.” This wasn’t a boast, just a fact. Jarrett was talking to himself, giving himself a talking-to, knowing the time for liftoff was approaching.

  “I know that for a fact.” Tracer didn’t look away from his binoculars. It had just turned eleven when Tracer spotted movement at the sliding-glass door leading to the balcony. “We got someone at three-nine Zapper. A woman,” said Tracer. “She’s with an Asian male.”

  Jarrett embraced the rifle, staring through the daytime telescope. Kate’s eye picked up the woman, as did Tracer’s binoculars.

  “Got her.” He watched her through the crosshairs.

  “She’s a looker,” said Tracer. She wore a dark short skirt and silk blouse, diamond earrings in both ears, and another larger diamond mounted in a gold pendant around her neck. A woman with a diamond at her throat was a woman not just displaying the number of carats she thought she was worth, but the real value a man had placed upon her. Her hair had been pulled back from her forehead and ears and tied with a clip.

  “If you’ve got money, you don’t buy ugly,” said Tracer.

  “But it don’t buy love.”

  The binoculars scanned the distance. “Got that right, but it can pay some rent.” He paused. “The balcony door’s sliding back. She’s out. He’s behind her. His right hand is on the small of her back like he’s balancing her.”

  The telescope picked out a man’s head. Jarrett leaned into his embrace with Kate.

  “Wait,” said Tracer. Two, three beats of silence. “That’s not him. That’s not our target.” He reached down and picked up the photo of Somporn.

  “You sure it’s not him?” Jarrett had the man in the crosshairs, his finger on the trigger.

  “Look at the photo.”

  “I know what Somporn looks like.”

  “Then you’re seeing a guy thirty years younger and half-a-foot taller than Somporn. If that’s our target, then that boy’s got himself a major face-lift and some elevator shoes.”

  Jarrett looked again and then sat back in his chair, drumming his fingers on the edge of the table. He was wound up, pumped with adrenaline, and the race had been called off.

  “Then who is he?”

  “Does he look Thai to you?” asked Tracer.

  Jarrett rested his right eye snug against the scope.

  “He looks like a Japanese punk rapper. Look at that wild, thick kinky hair. Looks like an eagle’s nest,” said Tracer, with a whoop of glee that dove into a valley of disappointment.

  They both watched the young woman in the short skirt and silk blouse show her stuff. “Either he’s a boy toy, or she’s double-dipping,” said Jarrett.

  “The bitch is kissing him,” said Tracer. “Like a bear licking honey.”

  Jarrett shivered as he thought how close he’d come to killing the wrong man. A mistaken identity had been what had killed Jack. Jack’s red hair had been a near perfect match for an Australian named MacDonald. He shook off the image of Jack, thinking instead back to the beekeeper sleeping in bed early in the morning. He wondered what time she’d woken up, found the money, put on her clothes, and left. He glanced at the photo of Somporn taped to the side of the whiteboard and looked back through the telescope sight. “Tracer, you hear about the bees going AWOL? Dying everywhere?”

  “We’re finished here,” said Tracer. “At least for today. I can’t see Somporn joining this party. I
’d bet the bank he’s not coming around to make up a threesome.” Tracer reached over to a side table and cranked up the music. The empty, disappointed space of the sitting room filled with the voice of a wailing blues singer. She was singing about the moment of truth when a man satisfies a woman, makes her knees go weak. They both watched Somporn’s mia noi and her boy toy dancing on the balcony as they listened to the lyrics. “Don’t be shy, satisfy me. Try and try and try.”

  “You hungry? And I don’t mean for the crap Casey bought,” Jarrett asked. Suddenly the aborted mission had given him a craving for a cheeseburger and French fries.

  “I feel like catfish and hush puppies,” said Tracer.

  “I’d settle for a burger and fries.”

  “Nothing much to keep us here. I’d say Mr. Somporn ain’t showin’.”

  Tracer lowered his binoculars and glanced at Jarrett, who lifted his head up from the scope. Jarrett still had the white feather in his hat. A broad smile crossed Tracer’s face. “Bees dying. Yeah, I dig it. We’ve got ourselves a situation.”

  Jarrett looked down the length of the silencer fixed to the barrel of the rifle. There wasn’t going to be anything but silence today, he thought. He leaned on his elbows, staring through the telescopic lens, watching the action. “Maybe we got the wrong floor or unit? Wrong date or time? Wrong something.”

  Tracer smirked. “There you have it. Wrong something. Three-nine Zapper.”

  “Casey’s report might’ve been fucked up.”