The Queen of Patpong: A Poke Rafferty Thriller

by Timothy Hallinan

  Howard locks the wheel and moves to the other side of the boat. He makes a curt “hurry up” gesture with his hand, leaning over to look down at the water. Rose gets up unsteadily, feet spread wide, and waits for the boat to do its sideways rock, then hurries across and grabs hold before the next swell rises up beneath them. She knows she doesn’t want to look down at the water. She has an instinctive feeling that watching it stream by will be the final ingredient in a mix of motion that’s likely to bring her lunch back up into the light of day.

  “Down there,” Howard says, pointing. “See them?”

  She looks down and then, immediately, up again. “I can’t,” she says.

  “What do you mean, you can’t?” The words sound barbed to her.

  “I get sick.”

  “No you won’t. Just look for a minute, and then I’ll give you something to make you feel better.”

  “What?”

  “A pill. I should have given it to you before we left. You’re getting seasick, is all. The pill will fix it.”

  “Seasick,” Rose says.

  “This isn’t a language lesson,” Howard says, “and those fucking things aren’t going to be out there forever. Look.” He points toward the water at about a forty-five-degree angle, and Rose searches the dark surface.

  She sees nothing but the Andaman. The day is on the way out now, the clouds an angrier, deeper gray that verges on black, and the surface of the water is powder gray and oily-looking. And then she sees rounded shapes, as though the water has thickened into spheres that are barely floating, only the very tops exposed to the air.

  She rips her eyes away from the water and looks up at Howard, to find him studying her intently. “Like this?” she says, and she makes a little curved motion with her hand, as though running it over the top of a ball.

  “Right,” Howard says. “You can only see the top, but what you need to worry about is what’s underneath. They’re jellyfish.”

  “I know jellyfish,” Rose says. “I eat. You have pill?”

  “In a minute. These jellyfish are different. They’re sea wasps. The tentacles are a couple of feet long—”

  Rose says, “Tenta . . .”

  “Tentacles,” Howard says between his teeth. “You know.” He holds up his hand, curved, with the fingers pointing down, and wiggles the fingers. “Tentacles.”

  “Okay, okay,” Rose says. “Why you yell at me?”

  “Can’t even have a fucking conversation.”

  “I speaking English,” Rose says, suddenly angry herself. “You no speaking Thai.”

  “Why the fuck would I speak Thai? English is the world’s language. Nobody speaks Thai.”

  “I speak Thai.” She’s furious enough to forget she’s feeling sick. “Maybe we go home.”

  “When I say we go home, we go home. The sea wasps,” he repeats with a bad imitation of patience. “When you brush the tentacles, they break off and stick to you, okay? They’re poisonous. You know poisonous?”

  Rose says, “Not stupid.”

  “No point in taking a vote about that, since there are only two of us. The sea wasps. You get stung once, you’re going to get sick. Two or three times, you’re dead.”

  Rose says, “Pill.”

  “They’ll kill you.”

  “So I not go in water. They cannot jump in boat, na? Give me pill. Now.”

  Howard says, “In a minute.”

  “I do on you.” Rose sticks a finger down her throat to make it clear, and Howard jumps back. He’s swearing, she can tell that, but she doesn’t know the words. He goes to the suitcase, opens the zippered compartment on the outside, and pulls out a small, foil-backed blister card with pills in it. He pushes two of the pills through the foil and hands them to Rose, and Rose grabs his water bottle to wash them down.

  “No,” Howard says, but it’s too late. Rose takes a gulp, and then her eyes grow enormous, and she spits all of it, pills included, over the side. Then she leans over and is shudderingly sick, losing everything she ate into the Andaman. When she’s finished, she wipes her chin and rounds on Howard, her fists clenched.

  “You crazy? Drink vodka?”

  Howard snatches the bottle from her hand, plants a hand in the center of her chest, and pushes. Rose stumbles backward until the backs of her knees hit the bench, and then her legs collapse and she falls on her rump.

  “Sit the fuck down and stay there,” Howard says. He points a finger at her, his eyes tiny with fury. “And shut up.”

  It begins to rain.

  THE SEARCHLIGHT on the front of the boat is like a finger pointing forward, making a long silver streak through the rain. They haven’t spoken in more than an hour, and it’s almost completely dark now, the sea barely darker than the sky, except for the trail of luminescence that’s churned into a cold green glow in the boat’s wake.

  They’re both soaked. Rose is huddled in a ball, shivering, her jacket and T-shirt a cold weight on her back and shoulders. Howard seems not to have noticed the rain.

  He has drained the first bottle and is a third of the way through a second.

  “Slow it down,” he says aloud, and pulls back on the throttle, a handle positioned to the right of the wheel. Rose has been watching him whenever he’s been turned away from her. Pushing the throttle down slows the boat. Pulling up makes it go faster. Throttle, wheel. Engine on the end of the pipe. Switch for the searchlight.

  Off to the right—starboard, Rose thinks irrelevantly—is what looks like a small floating palace of brilliant white light. And behind it, or at least smaller, so probably more distant, is another. She has no way of knowing how far away they are, but they look like angels of safety out there in the dark, luminous points of refuge.

  “Squid fishermen,” Howard says, following her gaze. “Lanterns hung out all over the boat. Squid come to light like whores come to money.” His tone is conversational, reasonable. He might be talking about the wedding. With his eyes on the distant lights, he takes another drink and looks at the glowing green navigational screen set into the wooden panel beside the wheel. Then he looks left and scans the dark surface of the sea. “Ought to be there,” he says. “Don’t want to find them before we see them.”

  He puts the water bottle down and leaps up onto the boat’s side. Then, moving sideways, he edges around the plastic windscreen until he’s next to the searchlight. At precisely the moment Rose gets her feet under her, her eyes on the throttle, Howard says, “Give me any kind of trouble at all, any kind, and I’ll break your neck. Understand?”

  Rose nods.

  “Say it.”

  “Understand.”

  “She’s learning,” Howard says, as though there were a third person present. “She’s actually learning.” He sits on the deck beside the light, which is sending up ropes of steam where the rain hits the hot metal housing, and grabs the frame that surrounds it. He twists the light left and sweeps it back and forth. He says, “Damn, I’m good.” Then he wiggles the light back and forth and says, “Take a look, sweetie.”

  Rose lets her eyes follow the beam through the darkness and the slanting rainfall until it bounces off something pale, not colorless but not a color that carries across distance, especially under these conditions. Tan, she thinks. Light brown. It’s low and rounded, rising gradually out of the water, no more than a foot above it, and it’s long, maybe eighty or a hundred paces in length. Smooth and featureless, as though it’s been sanded down for thousands of years.

  “That’s the big one!” Howard shouts into the rain. “Over here is its little sister.” He shifts the light to the right to reveal another stone, about half as long, and even lower, than the first, its sloping sides just peeking above the water.

  “There’s another one back behind the bigger one, but you can’t see it. The Three Sisters. Also called the Bitches because they’ve ripped the bottom out of so many boats.” He turns the light so it’s facing front again and then scoots crablike back toward the cabin area. “At high tide,” he s
ays, “about six hours from now, they’ll be underwater. Fucking everything’s hit them for centuries and centuries. Chinese junks, Javanese pirate ships, the occasional fancy yacht. Great dive site, stuff all over the bottom.”

  He’s back in the cabin, facing her. She hasn’t moved from the bench. He looks down at her and then shakes his head. “You finally figured it out, didn’t you?”

  She responds, but her voice is almost a whisper. “Figured . . .” She closes her eyes, hearing Fon’s voice: Clothes folded by the door, shoes on top, just scoop it all up as you go. She says, more loudly than she’d intended, “Oom.”

  “You’re not as dumb as you seem,” Howard says.

  Rose says, “Why?”

  “Because I can. Because God in his infinite wisdom has humored my little quirk by providing me with an endless supply of brainless whores to play with and cops who don’t give a shit.” He points a finger at her, eyebrows high, meaning, Don’t move, and goes back to the wheel and does something that reverses the boat, pulling it back from the rocks. “Not a good idea to drift into them.” He pulls the plastic bottle out from under again and drinks, then goes to the rear of the boat and picks up something heavy that’s all points, on the end of a chain that’s wrapped around a cylinder. He drops the object into the water and the cylinder spins as the chain unspools, the handle on one side whipping around so fast it’s a blur.

  “There,” he says. “Finished with housekeeping.” He takes a step toward her.

  Rose fastens the snaps at the cuffs of her windbreaker. Maybe a layer of cloth will be enough to protect her skin. Not much she can do about her face.

  “Still cold?” Howard takes another step and stops. He slips his right hand into the pocket of his jeans and comes out with a leather sheath that has a bone handle protruding from it. Rose hears the unsnapping of the little strap over the handle as loudly as she would a shot. Howard’s looking at her as though she’s transparent, as though he can see the bench beneath her, the edge of the boat behind her.

  Shoes on top, Rose thinks.

  With the same relaxed, unfocused gaze, Howard pulls out the knife.

  Rose yanks her feet up, lifts them as high and as quickly as she can, pushes up with her hands against the bench, and rolls backward over the edge of the boat. Just before she hits, she sees, upside down, the golden glare of the squid boats in the far distance. Then she’s in the water.

  Her clothes grab at her, the jacket ballooning out, and she forces herself to remain under long enough to do the bottom two snaps. It’s pink, it’ll show if he shines a light down, but her long hair is black and it’s billowing around her. The water feels very warm after the windy rain.

  She forces herself down, pulling herself through the blackness until her shoulder touches the boat. She knows she’s invisible here; the outward curvature of the hull makes it impossible for anyone on board to look down at the point at which the boat enters the water. She turns so the hull is against her back, trying to present the narrowest possible silhouette, and allows herself to float up until her head breaks free of the water. With her mouth wide open, she grabs some deep breaths while she listens to Howard banging around on the boat, throwing things and screaming either meaningless sounds or a marathon of swearwords she doesn’t know. A moment later a beam hits the water two or three meters to her left and a good four or five meters away from the boat.

  Not the spotlight. He’s got a flashlight.

  “Rose!” he calls. “Rose!” He plays the light over the water. “Come on. It’s dangerous down there.”

  The light is moving slowly now, coming nearer, and again Howard says, drawing it out, “Rosieeeeee!” The light stops, and Rose’s heart stops with it. Clearly silhouetted at her eye level, glistening in the beam, are the curved tops of several sea wasps. They’re only a meter or two away. They hold the light, glowing as though from within.

  “Look at those,” Howard says in that same singsong voice. “You don’t want to be in there. Lots of bad things down there. Underneath you, next to you, behind you. Not a place for a pretty girl.” The boat rocks against her back as the light disappears. Now she can’t see the sea wasps, and panic uncurls in her chest. She edges right, toward the front of the boat, then stops. For all she knows, there are a dozen of them right there. Frozen in place, she hears a splash from the other side of the boat.

  Howard calls out, “That’s the rope. Come on, get over here. You can pull yourself up. The rope’s got knots in it. You can climb it like a ladder.” The light stretches out over her head again, twitching left and right and left again over the water, pure, jittery impatience. “Come on, Rose. I’m sorry. You’re right, I shouldn’t have been drinking. Listen, I’m throwing the bottle overboard.” Something flashes through the beam of light, and she hears a splash. It sends ripples toward her, probably bringing the sea wasps closer. “Please just get to the rope and come up. I’ll help you.” The light freezes at a point six or seven meters from the boat, and she can feel and hear Howard moving closer to the edge above her for a better look at whatever it is. After a moment he says, “Fuck,” and the beam begins to move again.

  For a minute or two, she tries to remain motionless as the sea lifts and lowers her. She peers into the darkness for the rounded shapes of the sea wasps. The boat rocks upward, which means Howard is back on the other side, probably playing the light in the direction of the rocks. He’s swearing over and over in a low voice, like someone who doesn’t know he’s doing it out loud. Then she can hear his shoes on the deck, going past her toward the front of the boat—the wheel, she thinks—and for a moment everything is quiet. Then Howard says, “Hello?” There’s a pause. “Yeah, got a problem here. How far away are you?” He waits. “How did that happen? Shit, you’re no good to me. Okay, okay. See you when I see you. And leave your phone open, so I don’t have to fuck around dialing you.”

  Rose knows she has to move. She can’t stay where she is, but she can’t think of anyplace safer. The water, which felt so warm when she entered it, now seems much cooler, seems to be leaching the heat from her body. And she’s uncomfortably aware of the dark depths beneath her, and of the sea wasps, invisible for now, floating level with her face or just beneath the surface.

  And then Howard calls, “Gotcha!” and the light shines right down the side of the boat, and Howard’s face dangles down, pale in the reflection of the flashlight. He’s managed to anchor his feet somehow so he can hang over the side, but the light is hitting nothing. It’s focused straight down, near the motor, but Rose knows he can turn it toward her at any second, and she grabs a breath and ducks under.

  If the sea wasps are like the jellyfish she dodged in Pattaya, she thinks, they usually stay on the surface or in the meter or so just below it. She forces herself down into the darkness, fighting against her buoyancy, until she can’t hold her breath anymore, and she stops her stroke and lets her body right itself to the vertical again. Rising, she bends her head forward at the sharpest possible angle as her shoulders slide up the curvature of the boat, hoping that her hair will protect her if she’s coming up beneath a sea wasp. When she breaks the surface, she lifts her head and grabs the biggest breath of her life, mouth wide open to make it as quiet as possible. Howard is banging around on the other side, and then she hears him go forward, probably to climb up near the spotlight and look down from the prow.

  She wants to get to the stern. She pictures the stretch of black water between her and it, and suddenly she has a strategy. She pulls her hand back into the sleeve of her jacket so no skin is exposed, extends her right arm along the side of the boat, and then sweeps it stiffly away, elbow straight, toward the bright pinpoint of the squid boats. She’s careful to stop when her arm is straight in front of her, terrified of sweeping a cluster of jellyfish into her face. Only when she’s finished the maneuver does she ease herself right, almost as far as her arm had reached, and repeat the action.

  The fourth time her arm encounters resistance, as though the water has s
uddenly thickened, and then she feels the dead, soft weight against her inner arm, just below the elbow. Her gasp is reflexive and, to her, deafening. She clamps her teeth together and keeps the arm moving, sweeping the cold, heavy, yielding mass aside. Then she pulls her arm down and holds her breath, shuddering violently and listening. It isn’t until she hears Howard still lumbering around on the prow, not rushing toward the sound she’d made, that she moves into the space she’s just cleared with her arm.

  She’s dizzy with fear, but there’s a hard little bit of knowledge gleaming inside her: The sea wasps can’t sting her through her clothes.

  With three more swipes of her arm—finding nothing more floating in the water—she’s at the corner, with her back still to the boat. The rain, which had lightened, begins to come down harder again, making the sea around her hiss as the drops strike. For several minutes, Howard remains relatively still, except for a couple of changes in weight, shifting from foot to foot, moving a few feet to one side or the other.

  He grunts.

  Grunting? Why? Lifting something? Lifting what? What’s so heavy? And then she hears a sharp snap, and she knows what it is. It’s the cuff of the rubber wet suit. It’s not for the cold, he’d said. It’s for something else. A second later there’s a loud splash as he strikes the sea’s surface on the other side of the boat.

  The only direction that makes sense is the one she’s most afraid to take: outward, away from the boat, away from the rocks, toward the fiery glow of the squid boats, maybe three or four kilometers away. She’s sure he’ll circle the boat first and then maybe swim toward the rocks to see whether she’s clinging to the far side of one of them.