PR02 - The Fourth Watcher

by Timothy Hallinan

  “Curiosity is an essential part of the good policeman’s armament,” Arthit says sententiously, and Rafferty realizes that his friend is trying to calm him. “Almost as important as a strong bladder.”

  “So yes, I believe him. I think he was frightened enough to sell me.”

  Arthit closes his eyes. He is clearly exhausted. “Before we go shoot him through the head, run it past me again. Just the high points.”

  Rafferty begins to check off his fingers, starting with his thumb. “My sainted father emerges from the mists of time—”

  “A coelacanth dredged from the depths,” Arthit suggests through a yawn. “The alluvial ancestor of the pangolin.”

  Rafferty waves him off and goes to finger number two. “I ask Arnold to employ his skills. Many people who terrify Arnold express interest. He perspires extravagantly and keeps making eyes at his gun.” He raises finger number three, which happens to be the middle one. Arthit eyes it expressionlessly. “The Three Musketeers appear.”

  “Well, if you put it like that . . .” Arthit says.

  Rafferty rests his chin on his hand, realizes it is a mistake, and sits upright. That way, if he goes to sleep, the fall will wake him. “What are those things scientists look for? Starts with a v.”

  “Variables,” Arthit says, stressing the patience. “As you know perfectly well.”

  “Well, there haven’t been any other variables in my life.”

  Arthit sits forward. “You don’t call a U.S. Secret Service agent and thirty thousand in counterfeit money a variable? Your life must be much more interesting than mine.”

  “Those people have a plan in place. It has nothing to do with busting into my apartment in the middle of the night with guns in their hands.”

  Arthit’s hands are flat on the table. “About your father,” he says. “How much of this do you intend to share with us?”

  “With the cops in general, not bloody much. With you personally, everything.”

  “And the reason?”

  “I still don’t know about those two cops with Elson.”

  Arthit is still for a moment, and then he gives Rafferty a minimal nod. “So. We’ve done the A-plus-B thing and come up with C. What about your intuition?”

  “What is this, Down with Reason Week? First Arnold, then Rose, now you. Is this some sort of plot to accelerate the decline of the West? Replace the scientific method with feelings?”

  “The question stands,” Arthit says.

  “All right. In deference to your cultural orientation, I’ll play. My intuition tells me that my father got himself into some very deep shit in China and it’s chased him to Bangkok. And that Arnold got leaned on by the chasers and decided it was easier to sell me than to get his bones broken one at a time.”

  “That’s a fair summary,” Arthit says. He cups his hands on the table as though he’s trapped a grasshopper under them. “A little thin on feelings, but fair.”

  “Boy. And to think I’ve been selling feelings short.”

  “My own personal feeling,” Arthit says, “is that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. The Arabs say that.”

  “I’m sure they do, but I have no idea what it means in this case. I mean, who’s the enemy?”

  “Your enemy,” Arthit says.

  “Who’s the other enemy?”

  Arthit’s gaze flickers. “You, I suppose.”

  “I thought we were friends.”

  “No. You’re their enemy.” He sketches an invisible diagram on the table with his fingers and stares at it. “The . . . um, enemy’s enemy,” he adds.

  “The other enemy,” Rafferty says by way of clarification. “I mean, if I’m an enemy and they’re an enemy, who’s the friend?”

  Arthit pulls in the corners of his mouth. “I am?”

  Rafferty nods. “Do you know any other Arab sayings that burn to be spoken at the moment?”

  “A good friend is like water in your camel,” Arthit says at once.

  “I’ve heard that one a million times.”

  “Wise people, the Arabs,” Arthit says, nodding sagely.

  “They discovered zero,” Rafferty replies, “although I’ve never been sure why that’s anything to write home about.”

  “Back to my feelings,” Arthit says, erasing the invisible diagram with his palm. “I feel that this is a good time to go take a tire iron to Arnold.”

  “Jesus,” Rafferty says. “I thought you’d never feel that.”

  ARNOLD PRETTYMAN’S TOP-SECRET hideaway, which it had taken Arthit fifteen seconds to locate on a computer, is situated in a drab, two-story squat of poured cement. The street-level floor has a slide-down metal door, which is open six inches at the bottom, allowing a splash of light to paint the sidewalk. American screech rock, all guitars and tight-jeans falsetto, is playing loudly inside.

  Arthit closes the car door quietly and motions for Rafferty to do the same. He pulls his gun.

  Rafferty puts his hand on the grip of his own gun, but Arthit stops him.

  “Don’t even think about it,” he says. “If anybody’s going to get shot tonight, he’s going to get shot by a cop.”

  Rafferty shakes his head, and Arthit leans in. “Use some sense here,” he hisses. “There’s only so much I can do, Poke. I can’t protect you if you kill someone.”

  He holds Poke’s eyes for a moment and then shifts the gun to his left hand, slips his right under the edge of the door, and slams it upward.

  Two teenage boys jump to their feet, register Arthit and the gun, and put their hands on top of their heads as if they know the drill. They are covered in grease.

  Rafferty scans the shop and sees six or seven motorcycles in various stages of dismemberment. The reason for the boys’ fear is obvious. This is a chop shop, where stolen motorcycles are broken up and combined into new ones.

  Arthit wiggles his gun, pointing the barrel at the floor. “Sit,” he says. The boys sit at once, hugging their knees, hands in plain sight. Arthit and Poke zigzag between fragments of motorcycle until they are standing directly over the boys. Arthit studies them for a second and points his gun at the more obviously terrified of the two.

  “You. Anyone upstairs?”

  “Don’t know,” the boy says. The smears of black grease surrounding his eyes make them a brilliant porcelain white. “People come and go.”

  Arthit glances at Rafferty, who shrugs.

  “Both of you,” Arthit says. “Give me your wallets.”

  The boys shift awkwardly to get their wallets out of their hip pockets and hand them over. Arthit passes them to Rafferty, who pulls out the identity cards and compares them to the faces staring up at him. Allowing for the grease, the boys’ faces match the ones on the cards.

  “You’ll get these back when we come down,” Arthit says. “If you’re not here, I promise you a nice long time in the monkey house.

  Clear?”

  “Clear,” says the tougher of the boys.

  Arthit lifts his chin toward the back of the shop, where there is a narrow flight of very steep concrete stairs. Poke follows him, and the music chases them up, echoing in the passageway.

  Six feet from the top, Arthit stops and says, “Oh, no.”

  By the time Poke smells it, a sharp char of flesh, Arthit is already through the door, his gun extended. He stops there as though he has run into a wall of glass, and Poke stops behind him and looks over his friend’s shoulder, looks at one of those snapshots that will stay with him forever. A single glance brands it on his brain, and he turns away, very quickly, trying to look at anything else in the world. Then he forces himself to face it again.

  Arnold Prettyman is wired to a chromium-backed chair, the wire cutting deeply into his arms and shoulders. His hands, wired tightly together, rest in his lap, if “rest” is a word that can be used to describe fists. His head lists to one side at a contortionist’s angle, and the left side of his face is black. His faded blue eyes look at Poke as though Poke were a window. The stench of burned
flesh is overpowering. Poke gags.

  Arthit automatically looks at his watch and says, “Four-twentythree.” Then his shoulders sag and his head droops forward. “You,” he says to Poke without turning. “Get out of here.”

  !24

  Major-League Heat

  killed him, Poke thinks. I didn’t mention the triad, and I killed him. With Prettyman’s death reverberating in his mind, the day he originally planned, a day he meant to

  spend dealing with the counterfeiting situation, suddenly seems irrelevant. The threat seems almost quaint. The new day’s first light is tinting the sky as he uses the key Arthit gave him to open the front door of the house. He locks it behind him and trudges into the living room, weighing several thousand pounds.

  Rose is asleep on the couch. A yellow cotton blanket covers her to the shoulders. Her knees are drawn up—the couch is too short for her—and one arm is outthrown, the hand dangling at the wrist, palm up. There is something terribly vulnerable in that loose hand, with its pale palm and curled fingers.

  Rose is not a light sleeper, and she doesn’t stir as he approaches her.

  He kneels to examine the face he has come to love: the mouth, its upper lip high in the middle and the lower full and generous. The delicate seashell whorl of her nostrils, perhaps the most beautiful curve he has ever seen. The smooth swelling of her cheekbones. He studies her face, every detail, for at least five minutes.

  She and Miaow are his life now. Nothing that concerns them is irrelevant.

  Then he turns around and goes out into the paling day to hail a tuk-tuk.

  Just to be on the safe side, he takes the tuk-tuk for a few blocks and gets out, waiting to see whether anyone seems to be paying attention to him. At this hour, though, there is virtually no one on the streets. He hails a cab, makes the driver circle his building three times as he looks for watchers, and then has the man drop him in the basement garage.

  To avoid the noise of the elevator in case someone is waiting on his floor, he takes the stairs. He gets all the way to the fifth floor, each step a yard high, before he remembers that the doors are locked on each floor. Muttering unflattering self-appraisal, he goes back down to the lobby, crosses his fingers, and pushes the “up” button.

  Not much he can do when the elevator doors open except stand as far as possible to one side with the gun out. The hallway is empty.

  It takes him a couple of minutes to work the pick out of the lock and insert his own key. When he pulls the key back, it slips out as though it has been greased. He thinks briefly of kicking the door into small pieces but decides that the satisfaction isn’t worth the noise and enters the apartment with his gun in both hands.

  He needn’t have bothered. The place is deserted.

  It takes only a few minutes to get what he needs, a change of clothes for all of them and—as an afterthought—Miaow’s new cell phone, which she had left on top of her desk, surrounded by a circlet of browning ginger flowers like a small metallic shrine. The bag of counterfeit money, much to his relief, is still in its hiding place on the top shelf of the closet. The men last night had been looking for people, not loot. From the safe concealed in the headboard above his bed, he removes his third ammunition clip and the rest of his own reserve of money. He will need every baht of it. On the way out, he makes one more stop in the kitchen to get a jar of Nescafé for Rose, who lives on it, since he’s not sure Noi will have any in her kitchen. He throws it all into a canvas tote bag, takes a last, regretful look around, and heads for the stairs.

  As he reaches the seventh floor, his cell phone rings.

  “Where the hell are you?” Arthit demands.

  “How nice to hear your voice.”

  “Why aren’t you at my house? You’re not supposed to be out wandering around.” He can hear Noi’s voice in the background, questioning and concerned. “Tell me you haven’t gone someplace really stupid,” Arthit says. “Your apartment, for example.”

  “Okay, I won’t tell you I went to my apartment.”

  “There are moments, long moments, when I doubt your sanity. You’re contaminated now. There’s no way you can come back here until I can arrange something so complicated it would take a small army to track it.”

  “I’ve got things to do. I won’t come back without calling you.”

  “You certainly won’t.”

  “Are we still on to creep Elson?”

  “We are. I need some sleep first.”

  “So why aren’t you getting it?”

  “The chopper choppers,” Arthit says. “The boys downstairs from the apartment we visited a few hours ago.”

  “Yes, Arthit? Are you going to make me ask you about them?”

  “Aren’t we touchy this morning? Four guys, they said. Three of them you’ve already met, by the descriptions. The fourth was a very tall, very thin Chinese man in his seventies. Military-looking, they said.”

  “Anything more? A tonsure, a third eye, or anything? Something that would distinguish him from any other very tall, very thin Chinese man in his seventies?”

  “One of those moles the Chinese seem to admire. About the size of a ten-baht coin—or, to translate it into American for you, a quarter— with hairs growing out of it. Three or four inches long.”

  “How’d they know he was Chinese? As opposed, say, to Korean.”

  “One of the boys has a Chinese mother. He heard the thin man swear at one of the others in what is apparently a timelessly popular Chinese oath.”

  “They hear any names?”

  “If they had heard any names,” Arthit says, more than a bit briskly, “do you think that information would be so far down on this list?”

  “Sorry. Guess we’re both a little cranky.”

  “Well,” Arthit says, “when you want some sleep, call me and I’ll arrange some way for you to get to my place.” He yawns. “I’ll phone you

  later. And, Poke?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Try to keep today’s to-do list of stupid things really short. You might limit it to the one you’ve already done.”

  “My phone’s breaking up,” Rafferty says. He punches it off and slips it into his pocket. Then, for the second time in less than six hours, he walks away from the place he has grown to think of as home.

  IN THE SILOM BRANCH of Coffee World, he fools around on Google for thirty minutes or so as he drinks a quart of black coffee with half a dozen shots of espresso thrown in to raise the octane level. The words “Chinese triads” bring up 1,180,000 hits. He narrows it to “Chinese triads Shanghai,” and the number is still something on the magnitude of science’s best guess about the age of the earth, so he gives it up and concentrates on the act of jangling his central nervous system into some persuasive imitation of consciousness.

  When he realizes he has reached the point of diminishing returns, he takes out the phone and punches in the number he had thought he would never dial.

  “Poke.” It is Ming Li, sounding cool and unsurprised as always.

  “Is he there?”

  “He’s asleep.”

  “Wake him up.”

  “You’re on your cell,” she says. “Nothing worth waking him up for should be said on a cell. What time is it?”

  “Eight-twenty. And it’s important to you and important to me.”

  “Tell me where you are.”

  Why not? It’s a little late to worry about any threat from Frank. He tells her.

  “Twenty minutes,” Ming Li says. Then she hangs up.

  It’s too early for his first planned stop of the day. The man he is going to see, whom he interviewed when he was in the first stages of researching his abandoned book, works seven days a week, but he won’t be open for business until eleven or so. Since Rafferty’s in front of a keyboard, he decides he’ll take the most optimistic outlook: Everything will work out, and he still has to earn a living. He pulls his notebook from his pocket, opens Word, and begins to key in his notes about the spies.

  He’s sur
prised at how easily it comes. He transcribes a few words from the notebook, and then new impressions and new observations crowd in on him, and he weaves them into his notes. What had been the outline of a story begins to become the story itself, complete with the details that bring a place, a person, to life. Tired as he is, the words slip out with little resistance, and gradually the picture assembles itself, sentence by sentence, before his eyes. The trails these men took to come here, the peculiar mixture of openness and secrecy that characterizes their conversations, the eyes, different colors and different shapes, but always in motion.

  Arnold Prettyman’s eyes, open and unseeing.

  His burned hands wired to the chair.

  “Not very vigilant,” Ming Li says, and he jumps two inches straight up from his seat. Ming Li steps back and says, “My, my. Maybe you shouldn’t have any more coffee, older brother.”

  “I haven’t slept in forty-eight hours,” Rafferty says. “If it weren’t for coffee, I’d be speaking to you from the floor.”

  She pulls up the stool next to him. She is immaculate in a free-hanging white T-shirt and loose-fitting black slacks. Every man in the coffeehouse stares at her. “What’s that?” she says, leaning forward to read the screen.

  “It’s money,” he says. He highlights the text, hits “copy,” drops it into an e-mail to himself, and sends it off. Then he gets up and says, “Let’s go.”

  “I want some coffee.”

  He looks through the window at the developing day. “Get it to go.”

  IN THE NEXT twenty minutes, Ming Li leads him through a tangle of turnarounds, drop-backs, blind alleys, stop-and-watch points, and random reversals that would disorient a homing pigeon. Even Rafferty doesn’t know where they are, and he says so.

  “Six weeks with city maps before we came,” Ming Li says. “I must have spent a hundred hours on Google Earth.” She turns into a clothing store and positions herself at the window, behind the mannequins.

  “Frank’s drill,” she says, watching the street. She finishes the coffee, slurping it a bit.

  “Frank’s drill,” he repeats, looking over her shoulder. Nothing catches his eye. “Did Frank’s drill include teaching you to throw major-league heat?”