PR02 - The Fourth Watcher

by Timothy Hallinan

  “I thought maybe he just told you.” Rose feels a vague disappointment and realizes she should know better.

  “Just told me? When?” Noi stirs the cup, which contains a liquid black enough to be a petroleum derivative.

  “Fifteen, twenty minutes ago. When he came home.”

  Noi turns to her and hands her the cup, which Rose half drains. “Arthit came home?”

  “I didn’t see him, but I heard him as I was waking up. He was walking in the hall.”

  Noi feels a prickling low in her back and then, again, the draft on her neck, and she turns to look across the kitchen at the back door. It is ajar.

  Suddenly the heat inside her is gone, and she is freezing. She goes to the door and tries to pull it closed.

  Instead it is pulled outward.

  The man standing there—tall, thin, with an enormous mole on his cheek—gives her a grandfatherly smile and comes in as though he’s been invited.

  MIAOW HAS BEEN curled up in bed, listening to the women talking. Their voices give her a warm, comfortable feeling, softer than the quilt Rose threw over her. Then, abruptly, the talk stops. She turns her head to the open door and hears something new: quick movement, a gasp, a man’s voice.

  It takes her a moment to get off the bed, slowly enough for it not to creak, and to throw the quilt over it. She slips through the door and tiptoes down the hall. The hallway is dim, but the kitchen is a warm, buttery yellow, and she can see them.

  Four men. Two of them holding Noi. And then Rose comes into sight, at a run, and grabs a teapot from the stove and hurls it at the nearest man. Hot water—Miaow can see it steam—arcs from the pot and splashes on the man as the teapot hits him in the chest, and the man cries out. Suddenly there are guns, and Rose is backing away.

  Miaow steps back. No one has looked toward her. Moving slowly, afraid to take her eyes off them, she reaches the room where she slept, where she thinks her cell phone might be.

  But when she looks, it’s not there.

  She hears a burst of protest from Rose, followed by a slap and then silence. Miaow is looking everywhere in the room for something, anything, she can use as a weapon, and then she hears voices again. The men are moving through the house now, talking in low voices. The house is not big; it’s only a matter of moments before they find her. The fear she feels is a familiar companion from her years on the street, the same fear she felt in back alleys when she was hiding from one of the men who liked to hurt children.

  The important thing, she knows, is to think clearly.

  They are in the living room now. One man is giving orders. He mentions a place that Miaow knows, because Rafferty took her there, and Miaow makes herself memorize the name, afraid the fear will chase it out of her mind. If they are in the living room, how much time does she have? Her mental map of the house is vague. She was very drowsy when they carried her in. She is sure, though, there are only one or two rooms to go. She forces herself to continue to survey the room without rushing, looking for anything that might be useful. On the bookshelf, she sees it. It’s not a weapon, but she can use it.

  A children’s book, full of bright animals and easy words in big print, the kind of thing Rafferty used to buy her. She grabs it, snatches a pen from the desk, and creeps into the closet. The closet will give her an extra minute.

  She has to leave something for Poke. It can’t be anything the men can read.

  If only she had her phone.

  The idea sweeps over her. She closes her eyes for a moment, trying to visualize. As she hears them coming nearer, she rips a page out of the book and begins to write, just numbers. She writes them fast, almost without thinking.

  By the time they open the closet door and she looks up at them, she has shoved the book and the pen into the far corner of the closet and folded the note into a tight square in her palm. There are two of them.

  Miaow keeps her face calm. At least she can deny them the satisfaction of her fear.

  The tall man with the mole says something to the fat man behind him, and the fat man bends down and picks her up as though she were a bagful of happybirthday presents, slinging her over his shoulder with her arms trailing down his back.

  The man with the mole is walking ahead of them, so he can’t see. Miaow holds her breath and drops the square of paper.

  !29

  Asterisks Would Take Too Long

  ounds to me like you’ve got a partner,” Arthit is saying. He is a terrible driver even when he’s paying attention. When he drives and talks at the same time, Rafferty would gener

  ally prefer to be running alongside the car.

  The wheels stray blithely over the centerline in the road.

  “Forget it,” Rafferty says, looking for the inevitable oncoming truck. “You’ve got to trust a partner.”

  “You’re rigid,” Arthit says. “I think it’s an American trait.”

  “Would you like it if I suddenly started to list Thai traits?”

  “But listen to yourself.” Arthit launches into a left turn from the right-hand lane, and Rafferty hears a peeved little “Hallelujah Chorus” of brakes and horns behind them. “You haven’t seen the man in more than twenty years. He could be completely different by now, all the way to his core. And you’re behaving like he’s been gone fifteen minutes, like he just got back from a trip to the store. Like he hasn’t even changed his shirt.”

  “What he’s told me about how he spent that twenty years isn’t very reassuring.”

  “That’s exactly why he can help you,” Arthit says. He accelerates out of sheer enthusiasm. “He’s right. The triads and the North Koreans do business. When they’re not trying to kill each other. Who knows? Maybe this is a chance for you to put your relationship back together.”

  “I can’t tell you how tired I am of all this family counseling. I’ve gotten along without him for more than half of my life. I’m used to it. It’s not like there’s a gaping hole with ‘Pop’ written on it. Anyway, he’s a crook.”

  “A crook,” Arthit says, “is just what you need. Maybe it’s fate.”

  “I’m not passive enough to have a fate. And I think we’ve got the counterfeiting thing under control.”

  “The best-laid plans,” Arthit says.

  Rafferty settles back in his seat and closes his eyes. “Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

  “You’ll be more fun when you’ve slept.” Arthit makes a second left, onto his street this time, scraping the curb as he always does.

  “Did I used to be fun?” Rafferty asks.

  “Within reason,” Arthit says. “Considering that you’re not Thai. But I guess the Filipinos know how to enjoy—” He breaks off and slows the car.

  “What?” Rafferty asks, and then follows his friend’s eyes.

  The front door to Arthit’s house is standing wide open.

  RAFFERTY’S FIRST PASS through the house is taken at a dead run, slamming into furniture and bursting into and out of rooms in the hope that somebody will be in them, a panicked circuit that brings him back to the living room and onto the couch, although he has no memory of having sat down. He draws four or five deep breaths to center himself, focuses on his heartbeat until it drops into double digits per minute, and decides to begin again. No one he loves, no one Arthit loves, is here, but there must be something.

  He hears Arthit somewhere, banging doors open and closed.

  The living room reflects Noi’s knack for graceful order. Nothing is out of place other than the canvas director’s chair he knocked over when he ran through the first time. If there was a struggle, resistance of any kind, it didn’t take place here.

  Pushing himself to his feet, he moves down the hallway, his sneakers squeaking on the gleaming hardwood, and into the kitchen. Arthit stands in the doorway, looking at the table. Rafferty can’t meet his eyes. A cup of coffee, Nescafé from the thick dregs of pitch in the bottom of one of them, sits on one edge of the table, off center in its saucer. A spill of sugar surrounding the cup
marks the spot as Rose’s. She has a leaden hand with the sugar, adding it in heaps and scattering it like confetti. Another cup, as yet unfilled with water, is on the stove. Coffee measured, water not poured. And then he sees the teapot on the floor, surrounded by water. An unwelcome interruption of some sort.

  He can’t make himself focus on what that could have been.

  The kitchen door—open, as the front had been—leads to the back garden, Noi’s pride before the disease began to make movement painful. Rafferty stands in the doorframe, his shadow stretching in front of him all the way to the stone-defined border, where dead begonias and zinnias silently signal neglect. Few things are sadder to Rafferty than a dying garden, and this one prompts a surge of the purest grief. He can still see it as a wash of bloom. Noi harvested flowers by the armload whenever he and Rose had dinner with them; he vividly remembers craning at the three of them over the explosion of color in the middle of the table.

  Arthit comes up behind him and, after a moment, puts a hand on his shoulder.

  Rafferty reaches up and pats the hand and then steps back inside, and Arthit closes the door and locks it automatically. Then he stops moving, looking down at what he has just done. When his face comes up to Rafferty’s, the expression on it is almost unbearable.

  “The rest of the house,” Rafferty says. It is the first time either of them has spoken. “Let’s do it together.”

  “Right,” Arthit says. “Together.”

  The kitchen and breakfast area run the width of the house. The door on the right leads to the dining room, and the corridor on the left will take them back down the hallway to the bedrooms before it ends in the living room. They check the dining room from the doorway, Arthit snapping on the light. Rafferty can smell the lemon polish Noi uses on the table even now, when she and Arthit eat most of their meals in the kitchen to save her steps.

  The chairs are pulled neatly up to the table as though awaiting tardy guests. An overly formal bouquet of silk flowers, a melancholy replacement for the loose arrangements of bloom and scent of a year ago, sits dead center on the table’s mirror-smooth surface. A spill of mail is the only spontaneous thing in the room. Everything else seems to be in place, as it was in the living room, and Rafferty feels his spirits lift slightly. He can’t imagine Rose allowing anyone to take her—and especially Miaow—out of the house without a mammoth struggle. There should be damage everywhere. He has an adrenaline-imprinted memory of the evening in the King’s Castle Bar when she poleaxed a six-foot Aussie. Beer-blitzed, the Aussie had yanked the buttons off the blouse of an excruciatingly shy new barmaid, a tiny, wide-eyed girl just arrived from the northeast. The Aussie had taken a table and two stools down with him on his way to the floor and landed flat on his back with his eyes rolling back like fruit salad in a slot machine.

  “They would have put up more of a fight,” Rafferty says.

  “If they could,” Arthit says.

  The two of them stand there, listening to what they’ve just said. Rafferty says, “Arthit. I’m so sorry.”

  Arthit doesn’t even glance at him. “We haven’t got time for that. Let’s go.” They take another look at the living room, Rafferty pausing to put the director’s chair upright, and then the master bedroom. Noi and Arthit’s bed is rumpled on one side: Noi’s afternoon nap, Rafferty guesses. The covers have been folded back neatly. The sheets have the sharp, topographical creases that come with sweat, although the room is cool. To Rafferty the sheets are a map of pain. He sees it in the sheets, he has seen it in the halting rhythm of Noi’s walk, he has seen it in Arthit’s face. He has never seen it in Noi’s.

  But still: The room is neat. Against his better judgment, his hopes continue to rise.

  He follows Arthit into the bathroom, spotless except for one long black hair in the tub, one of the dozens Rose sheds every day without any apparent effect. Her toothbrush stands in a glass next to Miaow’s bright pink one. Just for the hell of it, Rafferty runs his thumb over the bristles. “Damp,” he says. Arthit nods.

  And then Arthit pushes open the door to the guest room, pushes it farther than Rafferty had, and they both see it: a small, tightly folded square of paper. Rafferty starts to bend down, but Arthit grunts and shoulders him out of the way, pulls a handkerchief from his pocket. Using the handkerchief, he picks up the square of paper, and the two of them go into the living room, where Arthit carefully opens it.

  Rafferty could have told from six feet away that Miaow wrote it. The compulsively neat hand, the ruler-straight lines: She brings to writing the same obsessive control she puts into the part in her hair and the corners of the sheets when she makes a bed. For years she could control nothing in her life. Now she controls the things she can.

  “What the hell?” Arthit says. Rafferty looks at it more closely.

  It says:

  4.61.32.62.41.82.62.74.61.63.53.32.52.53

  “They’re pairs,” Arthit says. “Figure the periods are just separators.” He slides the note, still protected by the handkerchief, a few inches in Rafferty’s direction.

  “Not the first number,” Rafferty says. “It’s alone.”

  The two of them sit close together, studying it, looking for patterns, trying—Rafferty realizes—not to think about anything else. Avoiding the beast in the room: the memory of Arnold Prettyman wired to a chair with half his face burned away.

  “This is Miaow, right?” Arthit demands.

  “No question.”

  Arthit holds the paper up to the light. A bright yellow illustration of a cheerful duck bleeds through from the other side. “Why periods?”

  “They’re fast,” Rafferty says. “Anything else, like asterisks, would take too long.”

  “The numbers,” Arthit says. He screws up his face. “Nothing higher than the eighties, nothing lower than the thirties.”

  “The second digits in the pairs,” Rafferty says. “One, two, three, four.”

  “Nothing above four.” The two of them sit, shoulders touching, heads bent over the note.

  “She took the time,” Arthit says. “She hid somewhere and took the time to do this.” He looks up at Rafferty. “She was sleeping in the guest room. Maybe they came in through the kitchen. Noi and Rose are there, about to share a cup of coffee. Miaow is awake, down the hall. She hears something, sees something. She hides—” He blinks. “The front door,” he says, his face suddenly soft. “If they came in through the kitchen, she could have gotten out through the front door. Maybe even gotten away. Instead she hid and wrote this.”

  “My girl,” Rafferty says. The words, heavy and rough-edged, scrape the inside of his throat. “Brave as a fucking lion.”

  Arthit makes a sound that might be a sob. He makes it once. Then he wipes his face with a fist like a ham and says, “Next steps.”

  Poke takes another look at Miaow’s note. “Arnold introduced me to a guy,” he says. He pushes the picture of Prettyman from his mind. “He does codes.”

  “Get him.” Arthit stands and crosses the room. Looks out the window at the front yard as though he half expects to see them there, laughing and waving at him. Pleased with their joke.

  Rafferty pulls the phone from his pocket, and it rings. He snaps it open and pushes the “answer” key so hard the phone flips out of his hand, and he has to scrabble beneath the table to recover it. He picks it up and puts it to his ear.

  “Mr. Rafferty,” a man’s voice says. “My name is Colonel Chu.”

  !30

  You Guys Are So Old

  ou,” Rafferty says. “He wants you.” Frank’s eyes are lowered slightly. He sits, once again, on

  the edge of the bed, seemingly unaware of Arthit’s glare. Given its intensity, Rafferty wouldn’t be surprised to see two smoking holes appear in the center of his father’s chest.

  “Only me?” Frank says without even glancing up. He looks like a man listening to music from a distant room. “Not Leung? Not Ming Li?”

  “Only you. Mr. One and Only.”

 
; “He doesn’t know about Ming Li,” Frank says. He turns his head slightly, but his eyes remain fixed on a point in the middle of the floor. “He knows she exists, but he doesn’t know who she is, who I’ve trained her to be. He probably thinks she’s with her mother. I’m surprised about Leung, though.”

  “I’ve been thinking about that myself,” Rafferty says. Leung, sitting on a rickety wooden chair, gives him a startled glance and looks away.

  “You can’t give Frank to him,” Ming Li says.

  “And why not, exactly?” This is Arthit.

  “He’ll kill them all,” Ming Li says as though it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “Your wife and daughter.” She looks over at Arthit. “His wife. Anything else would be too much work.”

  “I don’t know,” Frank says. “If you give me to him, I mean. He might not.”

  “He’ll kill you,” Ming Li says.

  “Of course he will. But he might not kill the others.”

  Rafferty stares at his father. Ming Li follows his lead. A silence stretches around them.

  “He’s not stupid,” Frank continues. He still has not looked at anyone in the room. “He just needs a reason to let them live.”

  “What kind of reason?” Arthit asks.

  “Something to his benefit.”

  “Like what?” Ming Li says. “If he gets you, if he gets the box, he’s got everything he wants.”

  “No,” Frank says. “Not quite. He hasn’t gotten out alive.” He leans back against the wall. “Give me a minute.”

  Arthit pushes himself away from the wall, the shoulders of his uniform dark with the rain that has begun to fall again. He and Rafferty had gotten wet changing vehicles four times on their way to Khao San Road.

  While Frank thinks, Ming Li asks, “You’re supposed to call him?”

  “Yeah. Let it ring a couple of times and hang up. Then, within thirty minutes, he’ll call me back.”

  “He’s on a cell, and we’ve got the number,” Arthit says. “Wherever he is, he doesn’t want to get triangulated. So he’ll get as far as he can from his base and then call back.”