Fringe 03 - Sins of the Father

by Christa Faust

  “Jaruk, you dog,” he said when he picked up. “How’s it hanging?”

  The voice on the other end was female and hesitant, speaking in a heavy Thai accent.

  “Sorry,” the voice said. “I am Pim. Jaruk’s wife. This is Peter Bishop?”

  “Yeah,” Peter said, frowning. “That’s me.”

  “He want me tell you Little Eddie is coming,” she said. “You run now.”

  “Jesus,” Peter said, an icy dread congealing in his belly. “Let me talk to him.”

  “He in hospital,” Pim said, her voice breaking. “He say he very sorry for telling. You run now, Peter. Run now.”

  The line went dead.

  Peter just stood there for way too long, staring at the dead phone, his mind blank except for a shrill, echoing fear filling his head like a car alarm.

  Little Eddie.

  Jesus, that was bad.

  Physically speaking, there was nothing particularly big about Big Eddie Guthrie. He was pretty average in height, about five foot nine, with a stocky build and more wiry gray hair growing out of his large ears than on his shiny freckled head. But he was known as Big Eddie because he had a son, also named Eddie.

  Unlike his dad, Little Eddie was big in every dimension. He was six foot four, broad-shouldered and thick through the middle. The kind of hard, heavy build that didn’t come from working out at a gym. He was handsome in a thuggish, gangster-actor kind of way with dark hair and pale-blue eyes that were only pretty if you didn’t look too close. He was a dog-kicker. Two hundred and fifty pounds of bad news.

  And he was coming for Peter.

  Peter sidled up to the door and peered down the crowded Monireth Boulevard, first one way, then the other. Motorbikes and pedicabs jockeyed for position with cars and vans, and the sidewalk was bustling with pedestrians. Unlike his Bangkok accommodation, the Lucky Star was clean and modern, as was the section of town in which it stood.

  He noticed Tess and Michael standing by a rickety food stall about a half a block away, talking to someone who had his back to Peter. Someone large, towering far above the dark heads of the bustling locals. He’d recognize those hulking shoulders anywhere.

  Kelly, the rat bastard, was pointing back toward the bar. Tess was shaking her head and gripping Kelly’s sleeve, until she spotted Peter. Her eyes went wide, silently warning him away with a subtle tilt of her head. But before he could heed her warning, Little Eddie swung around to face him, ham-hock fists clenching.

  His pale, Scottish complexion was blotchy and pink from the tropical heat, and he was sweating through his tight-fitting shirt. His hair was damp and pasted to his forehead. The only part of him that didn’t look overheated was the cold smile that spread across his thin lips when his gaze locked on Peter.

  There was a strange frozen moment where the two of them just stood there, a tense tableau of tall, unmoving outsiders like rocks in a river, diverting the natural flow of the urban nightlife around them.

  Then Peter broke and ran.

  He tore down the crowded street, dodging buzzing scooters and curious bystanders. He faked to make it look as if he was headed toward an alley, and then turned the other way at the last second, running for a busy main drag that ran perpendicular to Monireth. He needed to stick with the crowds, use the urban bustle and chaos as cover, because if Little Eddie got him alone, even for a second, it would all be over.

  After a few blocks, he risked a glance over his shoulder and saw that Little Eddie was rapidly gaining on him, shoving people out of his way as he came. Despite his size, his long legs gave him an advantage, and nothing slowed him down.

  When Peter turned back again, he was too late to stop himself from crashing into a tiny old man who was attempting to dismount from a bicycle. It was so laden with stuffed animals that only half of the front wheel was visible.

  “Sohm toh, Grandpa,” Peter said, hoping that he’d pulled the right Southeast Asian apology out of his panic-addled brain as he hauled the terrified old man to his shaky feet and pressed some sweaty bills into his hand without checking to see if they were riel, baht, or American dollars.

  Then Peter jumped on the bike and shoved away from the crooked curb, barely missing being sideswiped by a tour bus as he darted between two motorbikes. It was hardly ideal transportation, but he was all out of options, and if he didn’t do something, Little Eddie would be on him like pissed-off rhino.

  He felt a tug on the back of the bike, making it wobble to the left and when he looked back over his shoulder, he saw Eddie a short distance behind, holding a pink bunny rabbit the size of a small child and looking as if he was about to have a stroke from the heat.

  But Peter couldn’t keep his eye on his pursuer. He had to pay attention to the dangerous and unpredictable Phnom Penh traffic, or he was going to get creamed.

  As soon as he turned away from Little Eddie, though, something bounced off the back of his head—the stuffed rabbit, no doubt. It didn’t hurt, but it startled him and caused him to swerve slightly. It took his full attention to straighten out the overburdened bike while avoiding a large gaping pothole to his right and a taxi full of drunken tourists to his left.

  Then the sharp crack of a gunshot shattered his concentration.

  A puff of white polyester stuffing flew up from the blue teddy bear that’d taken the bullet intended for Peter. The fluff clung to his hair, stuck to his sweaty face, and got into his mouth. He spat out as much as he could and swatted at the clumps in his hair.

  Then he took a header directly into the pothole, just as a second shot sailed through the humid city air where his body had been only seconds before. Peter flew over the handlebars and landed face down in a toxic puddle composed primarily of gasoline, rancid fish guts, and piss.

  He rolled out of the street, spitting and gagging, just in time to avoid being flattened by two more taxi cabs and a pedicab with no passengers. Teddy bears went flying everywhere, the bike crashed off to one side, and Peter was drenched with filthy water as the taxis’ wheels hit the puddle he’d recently vacated.

  But he had more important things to worry about. Like the fact that Little Eddie was still shooting at him. He couldn’t seriously be trying to kill Peter—not yet anyway. After all, if Peter were dead, his dad would never get his money. And it was a large enough sum that he probably wasn’t yet ready to write it off. Of course, Little Eddie had notoriously poor impulse control, and really wasn’t much of a thinker.

  So Peter couldn’t take any chances.

  He scanned the street for options and spotted the big “Welcome” sign over the entrance to the sprawling Night Market, about fifty yards away. If there were any place in this city where a big white guy could get lost, that was it. He ran for it without looking back.

  The Night Market was a maze of cluttered stalls and vendors selling anything and everything, from cooked food and sweets to raw fish, fruit, and flowers. There were bootleg CDs and movies, religious items, and tacky plastic souvenirs. Tourists crammed the spaces between stalls, daring each other to try exotic delicacies and snapping photos and haggling over the price of Buddhas. Bare wooden two-by-fours held up cloth canopies, and the sound of music emanated from the large central stage.

  Peter slipped easily into the flow of the crowd, eliciting little notice beyond a few grimaces at his wet hair, dirty face, and the aroma of urine wafting from his stained shirt.

  He looked back over the heads of the shoppers, searching for one of the few people in Phnom Penh who was taller than him. He spotted Little Eddie back by the entrance, hung up like a Clydesdale horse trying to cut across a herd of stubborn, clueless sheep. The horse image was reinforced by the fact that he was all lathered up and drenched with sweat from the run, as if he’d been ridden hard by a heartless master. The tropical swelter was revealing itself to be Peter’s ally.

  If he was lucky, the burly Scotsman might just keel over from heat exhaustion.

  He ducked behind a stand selling durian, hoping the sharp, powerful smell
of the notoriously odiferous fruit would cover his own stink as he pulled his stained shirt over his head and used it to clean off his face and hair as best he could. When he was done, he tossed it into an open trash barrel that was already filled with the spiked empty durian shells whose pale gooey guts had been served to the more adventurous tourists. The pretty young girl in charge of the stand couldn’t stop giggling at the sight of this large shirtless foreigner crouched behind her pile of spiky green fruit. It seemed kind of cute, until she started calling her friends over to look at him, too.

  He waved his hands, shook his head and put a finger to his lips in a desperate universal pantomime for quiet. He cycled through the few Khmer phrases he knew and couldn’t come up with anything useful other than the word for please, which he whispered over and over.

  Too late.

  Little Eddie had spotted him. And he was reaching for the small of his back, presumably to retrieve whatever he’d been using to shoot at his quarry out on the street.

  Peter had less than a fraction of a second to decide what to do. He was all out of genius, so he grabbed one of the spiky, football-sized fruits and flung it at Little Eddie as hard as he could.

  The durian hit Little Eddie square in the face and both his hands—including the one that now held a gun—flew up in surprise and shock. Without stopping to think about it, Peter picked up another fruit and then another, throwing them both in quick succession. The first bounced off Little Eddie’s broad chest with minimal effect, but the second hit his gun hand, breaking open against the barrel and knocking the pistol from his grip.

  The acrid, rotten-smelling pulp from the center of the broken fruit exploded all over Little Eddie’s face and chest, clearing away the crowd faster and more effectively than the fact that he was brandishing a deadly weapon. While Little Eddie was knuckling the noxious mush out of his eyes and groping for his fallen gun, Peter made a run for it.

  He dodged between stalls, ducked under curtains, and wound up in a small, open-air food court with colorful mats laid out on the ground behind the stage for customers to sit and eat, picnic-style. He stumbled over a row of shoes that people had taken off and left on the edge of the mats, apologizing in every language he knew along the way.

  On the way out, he took a precious minute to grab a brown Tiger Beer T-shirt from a vendor near a side exit, and throw a random handful of money at the baffled, toothless old woman behind the table. He’d taken the largest one he could spot at a glance, but it was still laughably tight, and too short for his lanky torso. A good two inches of skin was visible between his belt and the lower hem.

  Still, they wouldn’t let him on a plane without a shirt, so it would have to do. Because he needed to be on a plane—any plane—and he needed to be on it five minutes ago.

  He tore out through the side entrance and dove into the first cab waiting in the taxi rank. The driver was a cocky young guy with a hustler’s smile and a kickboxer’s lean, sinewy build under his loose pink tank top.

  “Airport,” he said to the driver.

  “Luggage?” the driver asked with an arched brow.

  Instead of an answer, Peter gave the guy money, and looked out the open window at the side entrance and the market beyond. He couldn’t see Little Eddie yet, but he could see the leading edge of the commotion and chaos that meant his nemesis wasn’t far behind.

  “Yes, sir,” the driver said. “Airport, right away, sir.”

  The kid floored the gas and peeled out. As the taxi merged into the flow of erratic Phnom Penh traffic, Peter glanced back through the rear window.

  No sign of Little Eddie.

  He’d made it. For now.

  Covering his eyes with his forearm, he sank gratefully down into the seat.

  Peter sat squashed into a narrow, economy-class middle seat with his knees up to his chin and his arms folded as if he were in a coffin. Which, to tell the truth, might actually have been more comfortable. But he wasn’t complaining.

  He’d had to hustle and sweet-talk and pull favors, but eventually was lucky enough to score the last available seat on this fully packed flight to Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris. And he’d done so before Little Eddie had been able to hose off the durian stink and make his way to the airport.

  Which didn’t mean Peter was free and safe—it just bought him a little bit more time. So he had to use that time as wisely as possible. Once he was on the ground in France, he would need to finagle a flight to the United States, get his ass to Washington, DC, to meet Tessa, and figure out how to get that money from Doctor Lachaux.

  But for the moment, there was nothing he could do but try to catch whatever meager shut-eye was possible in this torturously uncomfortable seat. And try not to think about anyone named Eddie.

  He wasn’t having much luck with either.

  EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND 2007

  It had seemed to him like a sure thing.

  It wasn’t his first visit to Edinburgh, but he never got used to the place. It still seemed to him like an elaborate set for some elf movie, with its curvy, cobblestone streets, quaint old buildings, and that big gloomy castle looking down on everyone like a disapproving maiden aunt. Glasgow was uglier and grittier, but felt more like a real city to Peter. It was harder to understand the accent, but easier to get lost and go unnoticed.

  As with all cities he visited, Peter naturally gravitated toward the most touristy area, which in this case was the strip of shops along Princes Street. He’d chosen a bland, mid-range franchise hotel as his home base, but when he’d booked the room, he’d been unaware of a massive citywide construction project that had just begun tearing up the street right in front of the hotel.

  Which, in retrospect, explained the deep discount he’d received.

  So he was feeling hostile and running on too little sleep, up way too early and glowering at the noisy and seemingly pointless construction as he stood on the street and tried to get his head together. It wasn’t quite raining—more like a foggy drift of floating moisture that clung to his hair and shirt, and made him feel like he was inside a cold humidifier.

  When Micki Rose finally showed, she announced her presence by pretending to rabbit punch him in the back of the neck.

  “Walk with me,” she said, heading off down Princes Street without waiting to see if he would follow. Even though she was a foot shorter than he was, he still had to walk fast to catch up to her.

  She was a scrappy little spitfire, barely a hundred pounds and built like a twelve-year-old boy. She dressed like one, too, favoring expensive trainers, loose-fitting track pants, and video-game T-shirts that easily disguised whatever deadly weapons she inevitably was packing. At thirty, she still looked underage, and took full advantage of it. With her natural-blond ponytail, big, wide-set blue eyes, and upturned button nose decorated with a delicate spray of freckles, she was the dictionary definition of cute.

  On the outside, anyway.

  Micki had the words Schemie Girl tattooed in Old English lettering arching across her hollow belly, a local phrase Peter didn’t completely understand. At first he thought it might be slang for a con artist, but discovered that it meant something more like “hood rat” or “white trash.” She showed this tattoo often, with a kind of defiant pride. But trash or not, she was hands down one of the smartest operators Peter had ever met. Razor sharp and utterly fearless. Ballsy, but never reckless or impulsive.

  Her scams always paid off, and paid off big. But if someone crossed her or got in the way of her score, she’d take them out without a second thought.

  He would never act on it, or even admit it, but he had developed a serious crush on Micki. She certainly wasn’t his type, physically, but there was something about her cold, ruthless brilliance that attracted him like a cat to a laser pointer. He could never resist her games.

  “This is the setup, right,” she said as soon as Peter caught up with her. “Been working this politician, a real pillar of the community by the name of Stephen Keith. Word is he likes �
�em young and flat as pavement, so I reckon I’d better investigate. Find out firsthand, like. I was thinking straight-up blackmail, but then I learn that he’s got a piece of a bantamweight champion called Lucky Munro. A big piece. So…”

  “So you snap some candid shots of Mr. Pillar-of-the-Community,” Peter said, swiftly catching on. “Use them to lean on him to have his boy throw the fight, and then clean up on an underdog bet.”

  “Close,” she said. “Only it’ll be video, not stills—and you’ll be the one doing the filming. I’ll be too busy being the star. Then, see, we each put down twenty-five thousand euros, and make it back times ten, easy. I take a ten-percent finder’s fee off the top, naturally, but the rest is yours to walk away with. Only no one else can know about this fix, and I mean no one. If word starts getting around, it’ll skew our odds, and then where will we be?”

  “Where indeed?” Peter agreed.

  “So.” She stopped short, looking up at him with a sharp, appraising gaze. “You in?”

  It sounded like a sweet setup. A sure thing. He knew it would be, too, because he’d known Micki for years and she’d never, ever laid a bet that hadn’t paid off. She was too careful. Too thorough. Every contingency planned for, and every angle covered.

  There was just one problem.

  Peter didn’t have twenty-five large in his hip pocket. It had been a real lean stretch, and it would be tough to scrape together twenty-five hundred on his own. But he knew a way to get it.

  Normally he wouldn’t even consider borrowing money from someone like Big Eddie Guthrie. But on a sure thing like this, he could turn the debt around in under a week, avoid the draconian vig, and still walk away with a healthy take.

  * * *

  Big Eddie’s office was above a chip shop. It had been lavishly decorated with more money than taste, but the thick, oily smell that drifted up from below reminded Peter that the thin veneer of class was just that.