Paying Back Jack

by Christopher G. Moore

  “You’re saying Waters and Casey worked on special ops before?” asked Jarrett. He finished the beer and threw the bottle in a long arc, watching as it skittered over the surface and then sunk.

  “We’re not gonna catch any fish if you keep doing that.” Harry wrinkled his nose, feeling the sunburn tightening the skin.

  “We’re just pretending to fish.”

  “Speak for yourself,” said Harry, tugging on his line.

  He told his son about how Casey and Waters had had an annual reunion, one that coincided with Waters’s wedding anniversary. It didn’t matter where they were stationed or living, they always met outside MacDill Air Force Base in Florida. There was a seafood restaurant there that Casey loved. During the most recent reunion, they’d cracked crab legs there and drunk beer as they caught up with each other’s lives. Only it hadn’t been all that happy of a meeting. The secret prison in Thailand had been blown; a military lawyer had cautioned Casey to cooperate in the investigation, to tell the truth. There had been videotapes of the torture but they’d been destroyed, the lawyer told Casey. After a lifetime of doing his duty for his country, it looked like his country was going to reward him with a prison cell. Casey knew how the system worked; it was just a matter of time before he was reeled in and put through an inquisition.

  Harry stood up, stretched his legs, walked over to the bait bucket, looked inside, and spit over the side. “Now comes the conjecture part.”

  Jarrett nodded, opening another beer, sweat pouring down his neck. He touched the cold beer bottle against his cheek and waited until Harry sat down. He came back with a chunk of tuna and slipped the hook into the center of the flesh before casting the line back. Harry wasn’t the kind of man who rushed into judgment. “It could’ve happened like this. Casey and Waters met and discussed life over a few drinks. Let’s say they met in a bar near the base, a classy place—not the usual place they drank, but Waters was paying the bill. Casey had been uneasy, looking over his shoulder. The upscale nature of the place made him feel uncomfortable. Waters got him to relax with a couple of accents and jokes. Then Waters said something about how the government hadn’t really given a shit about looking after veterans, how their company was no better than the government, and the real men of honor were being fucked around. I suspect that would’ve scored points with Casey, who’d thought he’d been lucky to not get busted in Baghdad and to get an assignment in Bangkok. His luck ran out when he got an appointment to testify before Congress. They discussed the unfinished business of his son’s death. During dinner, they considered how to put things right, including avenging the death of Casey’s son. When Waters came to me, using me as a sounding board, I told him frankly that I had reservations. But I let him talk me into it.”

  “How’d he do that?”

  His father looked at him for a full half-minute. “He said, what if that had been your son? I am afraid he got to me.”

  “Where’d they get the money?”

  Harry smiled and said, “Offer a man a million dollars and he’ll become indignant; offer him a couple of million and his point of view shifts from north to south on the moral compass.” Harry had a nibble on his line and picked up the pole and started reeling in the line, but was getting resistance. He definitely had something on the other end. Jarrett helped him with the pole, and reached down with a net and brought on deck a thirty-pound grouper, gills heaving in and out, body and tail flopping around on deck. The huge mouth gasped for air. Conscious and half-paralyzed, the fish struggled until Harry lifted the club, stopped, looked at it.

  “You ever wonder why they call one of these a ‘priest’?” he asked.

  “Because it’s used for last rites?”

  Harry rewarded his son with a smile as he brought down the club on the grouper’s head. The body went still, and Harry dropped the club on the deck, knelt down beside the large fish and examined it. Death stalked them in the Gulf of Thailand. Neither man said anything as Jarrett gutted the fish, drawing in the seagulls as he flung the guts into the sea.

  “As I was saying, someone threw a sizeable amount of money at Casey,” he said. “I did a little checking, and found money had gone into an offshore account in Casey’s name. It’s not apparent who had transferred the money or why. These guys were pros, and catching them wasn’t an easy thing.”

  “How much money?”

  “Two million,” said Harry.

  “That’s enough.”

  “Seems so,” said Harry, looking over at the cleaned fish. “Looks like we caught supper.”

  “You caught it.”

  “I figure Casey and Waters hammered out a deal. They’d bring Tracer and you in and make a forty-thousand-dollar contribution to the Jack Malone Foundation. They had me on their side. It looked pretty solid in their eyes. Casey had the perfect cover for a paying-back-Jack mission; his son had been murdered in Thailand, the police force didn’t have a reputation for solving crimes without the perp making a confession and reenacting the crime in front of TV cameras and the press. Casey was someone both of us had known in the past. Waters had vouched for him. There was nothing to raise a suspicion.”

  “Tracer kept talking about how Casey’s money had a funny smell. Like it’d been buried.”

  “We don’t know that all of the money paid went into that account. There was probably cash. When you’re talking about criminal activity, you’re talkin’ billions of dollars a year. One of these days, the government’s gonna find there’s more money buried in the ground than stuffed in bank vaults. Most of it illegal.”

  Harry didn’t bother baiting his line. He left the pole on the deck.

  “You wanna go back, dad?”

  “Not a bad idea. The sun’s getting to me. And we got what we came for.”

  Jarrett moved to start up the engine, then turned, bent down on the deck, facing his father. “If we’d have killed Somporn, and Casey had killed us, the Thai police would have been left with an unsolved crime, a mystery with no clues. He made it appear that he’d left the country.”

  “I think Casey gave his ticket to Waters, who used it to board the flight to London. Gate security had been shown a phony passport in Casey’s name, along with the boarding card.”

  “Conjecture. But seems reasonable.”

  “Who paid them the money?”

  “That’s where it gets real complicated,” said Harry, seeing his son had no intention of returning to shore without a few more answers. “I’ve been thinking about the newspaper from Hua Hin he put in the condo, and the pool table. So I did some checking. It could be that Casey was making it appear that your death was connected to Cleary who was still running scam deals out of Perth.”

  “Why would he go to the trouble?”

  Harry smiled much the way Tracer had. “He wanted to fuck with us. It could be as simple as that. Look what he did for a living. And that was certainly part of his stock in trade.”

  “You’re saying we don’t know?”

  Harry nodded. “It comes down to that. We’ve got a gap in our information big enough to fly a C-130 through. We don’t know if MacDonald ever told Cleary what happened that night.”

  Jarrett thought his old man had lost it. “That’s crazy. MacDonald was scared shitless. They’d burned him with cigarettes.”

  “What if I told you I had information that they were back in business? Another thing, you remember the guy with the gold earring?”

  Varley. Jarrett would never forget killing him.

  “Seems that he was Cleary’s nephew. We thought at the time that those two guys weren’t professionals. We got that part right.” Harry stared at the dead fish, tapping the gaping mouth with his toe. He looked up, not smiling, not frowning, but with his worried look. “Maybe they got loaded on Perth bud and MacDonald said, ‘What if I told you I know who did your nephew and his friend?’ Cleary would have been all ears, don’t you think?”

  “That’s conjecture?”

  “Varley was his nephew. That’s a fact.�
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  “I can’t believe MacDonald would do that.” Jarrett sat back hard on the deck chair.

  Harry shrugged, opened the sunblock-lotion bottle and started applying lotion to his face. “What about this guy Calvino?”

  “What about him?”

  “Another MacDonald? Another loose end to deal with in the future?”

  Jarrett cracked a smile. “You said it was conjecture about MacDonald.”

  “I did.”

  “Calvino saved our ass.”

  “Like we saved MacDonald’s?” Harry wasn’t smiling. He missed sunblock on his left shoulder and the skin was already turning red.

  Jarrett watched as several seagulls swooped down, following the boat, looking for more guts and blood. “It’s about the odds.”

  His father made a face as he touched the sunburnt shoulder. “It’s always about the odds. You got to figure him right. Even then, you got to ask yourself, ‘Am I willing to lose the bet?’”

  Jarrett fired up the engines and headed back to Hua Hin. The boat smelled of fish. He looked up and saw the seagulls following behind. They were also playing the odds.

  FORTY-FOUR

  CHUCK BECKWITH, the cheating husband Calvino had photographed at the Washington Square—a few seconds after his first encounter with Jarrett and Tracer—barged into Calvino’s office and threatened him. The man didn’t understand he was in the wrong weight class the moment he’d stepped into Calvino’s ring.

  Calvino sifted through all the Bangkoks within Bangkok that he knew and couldn’t come up with anything as lame as Beckwith. The man was a loser, one of the emotional cripples that yings learned had one essential function—they were reliable cash machines. Calvino had seen the spouses of clients like this before, bullies with American wives whose attack folded at the first sign of resistance. Pale, shaking with rage, Beckwith rushed him, throwing a sloppy, loopy punch. The fist flew out like it was the first time the man had ever tried to hit another man. Calvino deflected it with his forearm and swung hard, hitting Beckwith in the mouth and then again, hard, in the flabby midsection. Instead of a brick wall, Calvino’s fist hit a pillow. There was no need to hit him again. Beckwith emitted a sound like air escaping from a puncture. His eyes bulged like an insect with its guts run through by a long, sharp pin. Calvino pushed him over and onto the floor with his foot. Beckwith doubled over and vomited on the floor. What came out was scrambled molten lava of bacon and eggs that smelled worse than the diapers of Ratana’s kid.

  “That’s a bad diet for someone looking to pick a fight,” said Calvino.

  The outraged husband tried to raise himself up but failed and sat down hard on his ass with his legs sprawled out. His intention to be a tough guy was there inside his head. He’d seen it all in movies and television, but in reality nothing ever worked so smoothly. His right hook was pathetic. He was an out-of-shape, middle-aged farang who’d forgotten he was no longer in high school or beating up on his wife.

  “Don’t come around with threats, Mr. Beckwith. I don’t like threats. You can understand that. Your wife hired me. I did the job. You take the consequences. Don’t come along and try and lay your problems with your wife on me. Now get the fuck out of my office. I’m meeting my tailor.”

  Calvino helped him to his feet and escorted him through the reception area and out the door.

  “What time is my appointment?”

  Ratana looked at her diary. “After your lunch with Colonel Pratt.”

  She handed him a computer printout. There were several pages, and the color printer made the sports jackets as attractive as a full-page ad in Vanity Fair.

  “I recommend Armani.”

  Calvino sifted through the printouts and liked what he saw. “Armani?”

  “The Brioni didn’t last long,” she said. “It’s time for a change.”

  “The problem has been the fabric. This time I want the right material. Something that’s easy to dry clean.”

  Baby clothes hung along the side of the playpen. “Blood’s hard to get out unless you rinse it right away in cold water.”

  “I’ll remember that.” He folded up the prints and put them inside his jacket.

  Colonel Pratt arrived for lunch a few minutes after Calvino had sat down. The Italian restaurant off Asoke had only been open for a few months. The décor was suitable for a colonel, and the homemade lasagna was worth the visit. Calvino was studying the Armani sports jackets in the printouts when Colonel Pratt pulled back a chair and sat down.

  “Nice-looking jacket,” he said.

  Calvino had a mellow smile. “Ratana showed you these pictures of the Armani?” He knew the answer to the question. The two of them had conspired to upgrade his tailoring, but so far they’d been faced with unforeseen challenges that would test the limits of any brand.

  “I liked the Brioni, but it wasn’t all that durable,” the Colonel said.

  Calvino liked it when the Colonel tried his hand at farang humor.

  “Speaking of durability, Apichart’s now an adviser to the new government.”

  “It’s his advertising background they want.”

  “He’s also not bad at shuffling up a makeshift hit team,” said Calvino.

  “Isn’t that what advertising agencies do?”

  Calvino took out the newspaper clipping from New Jersey. There was a photograph of Waters’s body wrapped in a tarpaulin in the trunk of a Buick. “Here’s a present,” Calvino said, handing the Colonel the clipping.

  As Colonel Pratt sat back in his chair, he put on his reading glasses, and read the article. When the Colonel looked up, removing his reading glasses at the same time, Calvino said, “Remember that Thai proverb, the one about the fish with the big mouth? Here’s one who should have kept his mouth shut.”

  “I thought you might have some news about Casey.”

  “I recommend the lasagna,” Calvino said. “And the rocket salad. And half-a-liter of house red. That should do it.”

  “No one seems to know where to look for Casey. With all the resources of the American government, I find that strange,” said Colonel Pratt.

  Calvino smiled and folded the clipping, putting it back in his jacket. “What if I told you the Colombians and the Americans were wasting their money looking for him?”

  “They wouldn’t believe you.”

  Calvino had a broad grin. “Exactly right. They’d just keep on looking.”

  “If he’s alive, they’ll find him sooner or later. These people don’t give up.”

  “That would be good,” said Calvino. “I hope they can put the pieces together.”

  The waitress came to the table, and the Colonel ordered the lamb chops and pumpkin soup. Calvino wavered for a second before sticking with the lasagna and salad.

  “Some people think Casey might have copied the video of some interrogations. That could prove embarrassing for the government,” said Colonel Pratt. “I had a strange dream last night. Casey was in it. Only he was in the distance, lying still on a raised platform. From a side door a man appeared and came straight up to where I stood. He pointed at Casey and said, ‘I spoke with someone who saw him die, and he said that Casey openly confessed his treasons, begged for forgiveness, and repented deeply. He never did anything in his whole life that looked as good as the way he died.’”

  “Isn’t that Shakespeare?”

  “Macbeth,” said Colonel Pratt.

  “Pratt, sometimes dreams are real.”

  “You think my dream about Casey is a sign?”

  Calvino shrugged as his salad arrived. “Casey’s like a picture that fell out of the frame and disappeared.” Pratt had some idea that Calvino was holding back.

  “Out of the frame as in dead, or on the run?”

  Calvino shifted his weight as their main courses arrived. Calvino eyed the lamb chops as he inhaled hot steam rising from his own plate. “Maybe. But there’s a whole range of possibilities. Take the Chinese deity, Guan Yu. He’s the god of war and literature. In Singapor
e and Hong Kong the locals have shrines to him. Guan Yu’s the god of the police brotherhood. And the Triad and other Chinese gangsters, he’s their god too. The gangsters, cops, and poets all put their faith in the same god.”

  “Guan Yu isn’t going to find Casey.”

  Calvino tasted the lasagna, wishing he’d ordered the lamb chops. “This is a little salty. But it’s good.” He wiped his face with the cloth napkin, took a sip of wine. “Of course Guan Yu won’t find Casey. That’s okay. The people who are looking would be better off hunting for Santa Claus.”

  A grin came across Colonel Pratt’s face. “He’s dead.”

  Calvino held his fork suspended over his plate. “He’s dead.”

  “Next time you should try the lamb chops,” said Colonel Pratt.

  “Did you really have that dream about Casey with a ghost who channeled Shakespeare?”

  “You’re starting to sound like a wife,” said Colonel Pratt, cutting into the lamb chop.

  Calvino stared at the lasagna going cold on the end of his fork, still suspended midair. He thought about Marisa and how, for a moment, he’d asked himself if she could be a wife, could be his wife. They’d sat across a table in a restaurant, and she’d told him that what she wanted more than anything was to go home. She knew he was already home.

  Colonel Pratt raised his wine glass. Getting no reaction from Calvino, he reached across the table and clinked the rim of Calvino’s glass where it stood. “I’d like to make a toast.”