Paying Back Jack

by Christopher G. Moore

The women at the table looked down at the tiles. It was the first time they’d had to prepare for the passage of a freight-train-sized lie. “No, I don’t think Meow said anything about a Nongluck,” said one of the women. The others agreed.

  The thing about lies is that the truth is lying just out of reach, waiting. In most cases, it’s waiting for money. He wondered how much the ladies might be siphoning off. Something, of course, but not enough to defeat the larger purpose. The Thais understood that crossing a line over into greed was a money handler’s death warrant. None of these ladies looked like they wanted to get themselves killed. Calvino removed his wallet and took out a thousand-baht note—later he kicked himself for not taking out the five-hundred-baht note next to it—and walked back to the chair where he had got the haircut. He laid the note on the seat of the chair. “Tell you what, the first lady who can remember something, anything Meow might have mentioned about Khun Nongluck, gets the thousand-baht note.”

  A group of women neck-deep into rigging an election could definitely be bought. It was just a matter of time. He waited a minute and then paced between the chair and the door, staring down at the banknote. Making them believe that at any moment he was going to stick it back in his wallet.

  Cat was a good customer, and she’d left behind a load of cash, but she was gone. That was the reality. Absence was a problem. There was no shield other than a physical one, and the temptation of a quick cash transaction was what determined elections, paid school fees, and smoothed the transmission of information. The ying who had cut Calvino’s hair grabbed the thousand-baht note just a fraction of a second before the other stylist, who was at a distance disadvantage. “She didn’t like Nongluck. She said Nongluck was no good, a cheap woman. And what did men see in a cheap woman?”

  “Any reason for Meow to say Nongluck was a cheap woman?”

  “A woman’s thing,” said the winning stylist, having pocketed the money.

  “Meaning the bad blood was over a man,” said Calvino.

  Behind their faces, upon the recognition of truth being spoken and before a switch could be flipped, he saw a gnat-sized object of truth whip past at the speed of light.

  Walking out of the beauty salon, Calvino felt he’d gotten far more than he’d bargained for when he’d followed the gray Camry to the moo baan. He’d walked into an old Bangkok sealed away in the past. It was in such places that some men found a way to secure their future. Casey, the private contractor with interrogation expertise, good street contacts, and a payload of anger over a dead son, was locked in a version of the past fueled by hatred. Then there was Somporn, the businessman and politician, with a ying salting cash around his election district.

  But there were a couple of troubling things about Casey. He’d hired Calvino to follow Cat. But he claimed not to know about the dead ying in Pattaya. Maybe he was telling the truth, unless he had a reason to lie. That left open the possibility of Apichart, still the man who had a motive to frame him with a murder rap. It occurred to him that Casey might have a use for the information about Cat’s movements and associations beyond the one he had disclosed. Was he going to use the information only to ruin Somporn’s election chances? That seemed too subtle and indirect for Casey. Besides, the disclosure of a mia noi might help Somporn get votes. Eliot Spitzer, the ex–New York governor, had been born in the wrong country, he thought. Calvino decided he’d leave out of his report the detail about Cat’s role in acting as Somporn’s bagman to the constituency. It was always good to hold something back from a client who was holding back his motives for hiring you in the first place.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  JARRETT LEANED FORWARD, the Sorbothane recoil pad firm against his right shoulder. His eye touched the outer rim of the telescopic lens. For a couple of minutes he didn’t move; it didn’t even look like he was breathing. A soft quiet filled the room as Tracer changed the music. During that moment, as his finger rested firm against the trigger, Jarrett felt like a god, the Old Testament god perhaps, with the absolute power of death. He knew that feeling of power from his work in Bosnia, Somalia, Cali, Gijón, Baghdad, and Kabul. To take a life is the ultimate act. Snipers are gods.

  The inner city core was a common factor in most of these jobs, with its concrete and steel and glass on all sides, and canyons filled with people and cars. And at night, the lights came on and the target appeared like a white ghost through the infrared scope. He leaned back from the rifle, his back pressed against the chair, arms folded over his chest.

  Tracer stretched out over the pool table, looking at the cue ball and the yellow number-one ball for a long shot into the far-corner pocket. He executed the shot, dropping the red-striped eleven ball into the corner pocket, the cue ball rolling back with lots of back-spin. Smiling, he chalked up the cue stick, looking at the lay of the table, contemplating his next shot as he walked the side of the table.

  “I’ve been thinking about Casey. You ever wonder how he came up with forty-grand cash? He’s working an interrogation assignment. That means he’s on a monthly salary. How do you save that kind of money and live?”

  “Waters said Casey used his life savings,” said Jarrett. “Besides, that’s the deal. Always has been. No more, no less.” Forty grand had been the amount Ian MacDonald had left behind with a note on the table of the beach house. When they’d returned with the boat, they went back into the house. Jarrett’s father had found the note and money. The note had said, “For Jack.” MacDonald was gone.

  “I am aware of that. But Casey doesn’t strike me as a man with that kind of money.” Tracer sank the blue-striped ten in the side pocket.

  “Then I don’t get what you are saying.”

  Tracer shrugged and rested his head on the back of the sofa. “I thought that was a pretty good shot.”

  “You got a problem with Casey?”

  “Just wondering. In my experience, guys like Casey no more have forty grand than pigs got wings.” Tracer missed a bank shot on the green-striped fourteen.

  Jarrett walked around the table, leaning down, lining up for a straight side shot at the red three ball. “If he didn’t save it, where’d he get the money?” The cue slid smoothly over the blue felt. He made the shot, missing the pocket.

  “Fuck if I know. But at the same time I don’t wanna be fucked around for not knowing. I mean, it’s something to think about. That’s a bunch of money.”

  Jarrett couldn’t concentrate on his game. He glanced up at the whiteboard. On one side, they kept score of their pool games. But the other side was strictly reserved for business. He sighed and shook his head. Seeing that he was behind, he lay down his cue and walked back to the rifle. He sat down and peered through the telescope sight, looking at the activity inside Ripper before moving next door to the chrome and glass of Papa Bear, then over to the office tower Grizzly. He fit his eye on the scope, scanning windows from Scorpion, Firebird, Rooks, and Black Sheep before stopping back at Zapper three-nine. “Clear,” said Jarrett.

  “You give up?” asked Tracer, standing at the pool table.

  “I never give up.”

  Tracer knew that was true. Jarrett was dogged; the man never got tired, never flinched, never broke his concentration with his job. But pool was another matter. That was understandable, as shooting had some history attached to it. “Another thing,” Tracer said after a pause. He had picked up his binoculars and focused on a young woman doing yoga on a mat inside her condo sitting room. Sitting like a Buddha in the lotus position, eyes closed. He wondered if Jarrett ever relaxed. He looked at the woman’s face; it was serene and radiant like she was witnessing eternity at the end of a long tunnel.

  “What other thing?”

  “It’s about your beekeeper’s daughter taking off with that guy, the kid, and the white woman. He’s the same guy who ran into our car. Early in the morning he’s snooping on some poor married guy in Washington Square. Then he shows up in your bar with a white woman and a street kid. What’s with this guy? You looked at that white woman
like you knew her from somewhere.”

  Jarrett stretched back, arms over his head, yawned. “Just wondering what she was doing in the bar with the kid.”

  “I’m not worried about her. It’s your Thai squeeze I’m talking about. What’s she doing with that investigator? Because that’s exactly the kind of guy who could cause a problem.”

  “Wan doesn’t know anything. I slept with her. There wasn’t a lot of conversation. It was a crazy idea, I know, but I wanted to give her money to quit the bar and go home.”

  So much for free will, thought Tracer. Like the blues song said, a man with a woman is gonna leave his mind in the ditch. He’s only going to talk from his heart, and that’s going to throw him into a bigger ditch down the road.

  Jarrett rocked the pad against his shoulder, feeling the weight of the rifle. “You worry too much about stuff. Reading things into something that’s not there.”

  “Like the forty grand,” said Tracer.

  “That’s a good example. You know the history. That’s the number.”

  “You ever go to a bank and ask for forty grand?”

  Jarrett smiled and shook his head. “What are you saying?”

  “I got a close look at a couple of the bundles of cash. It didn’t look like those hundred-dollar bills came from any bank vault. That money had the smell of street money. Those bills came from under the floor in a basement.”

  “What if they did? I don’t see your point. Do we care where Casey got the money? It doesn’t concern us.”

  It wasn’t the first time they’d freelanced a special-ops mission that Waters’s boss hadn’t signed off on, but it was unusual. The company’s rules for such an engagement were strict. Employees worked for the company and followed company policy, and that policy was to make money from government contracts. Any assignment that threatened the company’s government revenues would never make it through the approval process. There had to be a good reason to go outside the company’s structure for a mission. Paying back Jack was a fail-safe reason for bypassing the system. If no one else was willing to do the job, then Jarrett and Tracer got the call.

  Tracer lowered the binoculars and walked back to the pool table. He retrieved his cue and started chalking up, the blue powder getting under his nails. “You gonna finish this game or forfeit?”

  “We ain’t finished talkin’ about the money.” Jarrett left his position and picked up his cue, shifting it from hand to hand.

  “We can talk about the money and play.”

  Jarrett looked over the sea of solids on the table, knowing he was in trouble unless he started dropping some balls.

  “In Casey’s case, the locals didn’t give him any justice,” said Jarrett. He nailed the solid-green six in the corner pocket.

  Tracer raised an eyebrow. “Good shot.”

  Jarrett followed up with the solid-red three in the side pocket. He felt that he’d found his groove and relaxed, chalking up his stick.

  “That leaves a man with one alternative: revenge,” said Jarrett. “It’s a word we both understand. You kill the man who killed your son. It don’t get any more basic than that. If that happened to you, Tracer, you’d find a way to get forty grand. You’d make it happen.” He banked the solid orange in the side pocket. Jarrett looked up, letting the pool cue slide down his hand until the bottom touched the floor. “I’d make it happen. What man wouldn’t? This is payback, Tracer, pure and simple. Casey’s a patriot. You know that. The man did three tours in ’Nam. A special-ops guy like Casey could pull forty grand out of a hat. He probably had it buried in some Vietnamese village, figuring that one day he’d need that stash.”

  “The bills he used were from the early 1990s,” said Tracer.

  Jarrett slowly moved around the pool table, stopping behind the solid-blue two. He sent it into a corner pocket and looked up. “Does it matter, Tracer? He got the money. He had every reason to come up with the cash.” Jarrett ran oil along the barrel of the rifle. Tracer could see he was still thinking about the money.

  “How’d you know about the bills?” Jarrett asked, eyeing the solid-yellow one ball.

  “Colonel Waters. I asked him.”

  It made Jarrett smile as he sent the cue ball and dispatched the number one into a side pocket. The fact that Tracer continued to use Waters’s old rank when he talked about him amused Jarrett. He was a company man now, a vice president at Logistic Risk Assessment Services. “Colonel” was a relic from his past. “Why’d you do that?”

  “Where a man gets his money tells you what kind of man you’re dealing with.”

  “What did Colonel Waters say?”

  Tracer’s eyes grew larger as Jarrett sunk the purple and orange balls, leaving only the wine-colored seven and the eight ball to finish the game.

  “Pretty much what you said. Casey had all the reason in the world to nail the motherfucker who put a hit out on his son. But he’s on special assignment in Bangkok. He’d compromise what he’s doing if he did it himself, and he’s not gonna risk the mission. Not even Casey. Waters said forget about where it came from.” He paused. “You gonna let me have another shot or not?”

  “But you aren’t forgetting.” He turned his attention to the seven ball, just missing the side pocket. Looking up, he was rewarded with a big smile on Tracer’s face.

  Tracer hummed along with the background music like he’d gotten a fresh start. “You forget something important, you lose. Pool or your life, it’s all the same thing when you stop paying attention.” He lined up on the striped purple and sent it sailing to the side pocket. The successful shot made him feel better until he saw that his follow-up shot on the striped green was snookered by Jarrett’s solid seven ball.

  “We’ve got the perfect cover for the assignment,” said Jarrett. “With this election in a couple of days, everyone will assume it was a political job. They won’t be looking for us. They’ll be looking for Thais with military connections, a business conflict, even his wife. He’s got a list around the block of people who’d like to see him dead.”

  “I’ve got no complaints about the timing,” said Tracer. He tried a bank shot that set up an easy corner-pocket shot on the solid seven for Jarrett.

  Jarrett took his time chalking his cue. The silence between them lasted until the seven dropped into the pocket. Only the eight ball remained between Jarrett and winning the game. “I asked Wan why the bees were dying, and you know what she said?”

  Tracer liked the idea that somehow Wan, with a ninth-grade education, had figured out the scientific mystery. “What’d she say caused it?”

  “Someone had dishonored the spirits and they were taking revenge.”

  Jarrett leaned against the pool table, taking his time.

  Tracer scratched his throat and sighed, waiting for the inevitable loss of the game. “In New Orleans, we knew that disturbed spirits could never cause anything good.” He stroked his mojo bag and smiled, thinking that maybe this beekeeper’s daughter knew something about life outside book learning.

  But that mojo didn’t stop Jarrett from rolling the eight ball in the right-corner pocket. When Jarrett looked up, he watched Tracer fingering his mojo bag, hoping against hope for a win. He was a practical man, and that meant relying on tangible things—wind, water, and fire—not as signs, but as real elements that could be used to heal or to destroy. There were no spirits, demons, or ghouls, only distance, wind, velocity, load, and opportunity. Sniping was taking that opportunity to the next level.

  Tracer racked up the balls for another game. “I let you win the first one.”

  A crooked grin crossed Jarrett’s face. “Harry always said, ‘Son, never insist on too much reality. People just don’t have the capacity for knowing too much.’” That came from a man who had made a career of tracking high-value targets who’d taken refuge in failed states. His son had followed in his father’s footsteps, keeping up the family tradition.

  “Your father was a wise man,” said Tracer. “My daddy believed in voo
doo, and I’d say he was a wise man, too.”

  “Yes, he was,” said Jarrett. He’d once met Tracer’s father when they were on leave from the marines. Watched him kill a chicken and mix the blood with rum and pass the cup for Tracer to drink, and then over to Jarrett. All eyes were on him as his lips touched the rim of the cup and he drank. The old man said that this had made them brothers. Tracer’s father had enough voodoo to get a French woman wild enough to leave her family in France to come live with him, as he ritualistically killed chickens, cast spells, and expelled demons. Wild enough to produce a man like Tracer.

  Jarrett’s father, Harry, had served three tours of duty at JUSMAG and performed his own kind of voodoo in marrying a woman from Istanbul. He was a senior adviser at USSOCOM at MacDill Air Force Base, a jumping-off point for assignments that took him from Berlin to Jakarta to Beijing and finally back to JUSMAG in Bangkok. He’d retired a year and a half ago. Harry and Lee had produced three children: Sam, the doctor; Janet, the Ph.D. in biotechnology; and then came their youngest son, the ex-marine sniper with a degree in criminology from John Jay College, who worked for a private contractor in Kabul with special-op assignments that took him in and out of Baghdad. His brother was pulling in five-hundred grand a year, and his sister was working toward a Nobel Prize at Stanford.

  But which one did the old man love the most? Jarrett had been the child invited to Hua Hin to celebrate the twenty-five-year reunion with Jack Malone. After Jack had gone missing, they’d gone to Ian MacDonald’s beach house, snuck in through the backdoor. Harry witnessed his son shoot a man whose assignment had been to kill MacDonald. Alan’s brother or sister could never compete with the bond created that night. Harry had himself one child who was practical. Who hadn’t been afraid and acted out of instinct; in a split second, as Varley swung his gun and fired on his father, Jarrett shot him in the head.

  “Harry’s most important lesson was to take life ten meters at a time.”

  When Jack Malone didn’t show, Harry returned to the hotel to wait for his call. After the third game of pool with Ian Mac-Donald, he’d pretty much told Jarrett the outline of his story. A Perth businessman named Cleary, who made his money in shady real estate, gold mines, pearls, and shipping, had made a death threat. But MacDonald said he wasn’t too worried. He called Jarrett around to the side of the pool table, patted his ankle with the cue stick, and then used the end to raise his pant cuff to reveal a handgun in a holster. Cleary bragged about the number of people he’d had killed before. It was part of doing business. Once in New York, the Perth businessman called in a favor with a drug-dealer connection to arrange for the murder of a banker who’d repossessed a couple of antique cars to settle a debt.