Books by Timothy Hallinan
The Poke Rafferty Series
A Nail Through the Heart
The Fourth Watcher
Breathing Water
The Queen of Patpong
The Fear Artist
For the Dead
The Hot Countries
Fools’ River
Street Music
The Junior Bender Series
Crashed
Little Elvises
The Fame Thief
Herbie’s Game
King Maybe
Fields Where They Lay
Nighttown
The Simeon Grist Series
The Four Last Things
Everything but the Squeal
Skin Deep
Incinerator
The Man with No Time
The Bone Polisher
Pulped
Copyright © 2020 by Timothy Hallinan
All rights reserved.
Published by
Soho Press, Inc.
227 W 17th Street
New York, NY 10011
Hallinan, Timothy, author.
Series: The poke rafferty thrillers; 9
ISBN 978-1-64129-123-1
eISBN 978-1-64129-124-8
Subjects: 1. Suspense fiction.
LCC PS3558.A3923 S77 2020 | DDC 813/.54—dc23
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Once again,
for Munyin Choy
Part One
IT’S A BOY
1
Look Like Who?
“Oh-ho,” says the woman at the cash register, looking at the baby formula and the stacks of disposable diapers. “How old?”
The woman is in her middle forties and contentedly plump, hair dyed the color of a lit jack-o’-lantern. He can see the hair glowing at him from anywhere in the store. He’d spotted it, as always, the moment he entered the supermarket—ice-cold after the steam bath of Bangkok’s late afternoon—and immediately he’d thought, feeling like a dog wagging its tail, Here’s someone I haven’t told yet. The city’s number of uninformed people is dwindling, if he doesn’t count total strangers, but the impulse to share the news remains irresistible.
“Almost two week,” he says, in Thai. The language isn’t rich in plurals.
The cashier, whose badge reads nit in both Thai and English, has worked at the local branch of Foodland for two years, and for two years Rafferty has been speaking to her in his fractured but serviceable Thai and she’s been speaking to him in the cheerful, optimistic string of approximations that many Thais believe to be English. If pressed, Rafferty would have to admit that her English is a lot more like English than his Thai is like Thai.
Postponing the transaction in favor of a chat, she leans over the counter toward him, looking concerned. “Wife okay?”
“Wonderful. Better than I deserve.”
“This no good, you know,” she says, making a face as she opens a palm above the formula. There’s a recent and widely hailed law in Thailand to prevent the merchandising of baby formula, some of which is cheaply made, smuggled in like dope, criminally short on nourishment, and occasionally toxic. As with a great many Thai laws, this one was designed to create the impression that something is being done without actually doing anything that might cut into the fat boys’ fifteen-percent slice of the trade. “Merchandising,” whatever that is, is strictly prohibited. Selling it, on the other hand, is no problem.
The cashier, who had picked up two packets of formula, drops them as though they’re dirty. She reaches up and mimics squeezing her right breast twice, as quickly and efficiently as a clown squeezing the bulb of his horn, and holds up an instructional finger. “Better.”
He says in Thai, feeling almost medical, “Her nipples hurt.”
“Ha!” she says, triumphantly. “Suck strong. Boy. Very good.”
“I don’t know. I wanted a girl.” He’s had almost eight years of experience raising a girl. The only boy he’s ever known really well is himself, and he’s no recommendation.
“Boy better,” she says, with the kind of total confidence Rafferty can remember experiencing perhaps twice in his life. To the woman in line behind him, who has been fidgeting throughout the conversation, the cashier says “Just a minute” in Thai. Then, to him, in English, she says, “Boy better. Girl, worry, worry, worry.”
“I’m sorry, but I’m in a hurry,” the woman behind Rafferty says in English. She’s Thai, runway-model thin, well-dressed, and worried-looking, and he suddenly recognizes her as a teller in the bank he and Rose use most often. He’s about to step aside when the cashier says to her—in English, for his benefit—“Him have baby.”
“Really?” The woman’s face lights up. “Boy or girl?”
Rafferty says, “Boy.”
“Wife him,” the cashier tells her, “very beautiful. Thai lady, beautiful too much.”
“That’s wonderful,” the woman behind him says. “Girls are just one problem after another. How old now?”
“Him almost two week,” the cashier announces before Rafferty even opens his mouth. She points at the formula. “You think good, no good?”
“I think that kind is, mmmm, okay.” The bank teller scratches her head, a Thai gesture that means, I’m thinking. Rafferty sometimes wonders whether they picked it up from bad American movies. “Just stay away from Baby-Lac. That’s the one I keep reading about.”
Rafferty says, “I use your bank all the—”
“Oh,” she says, hand flat over her heart, “Mr. Rafferty.” Her smile is broad enough to suggest that this is the first good news she’s had in years. “So this is for—how wonderful, and yes, your wife is so beautiful. How old now?”
“I tell you already,” the cashier says, reclaiming her territory. “Almost two week.”
“Right, right, sorry,” the bank teller says. “Well, we’ll send you some flowers.”
“Thank you,” Rafferty says, trying to remember whether any American bank ever sent him flowers.
“Baby look like who?” the cashier demands.
“Like, like—well, I’m no baby expert,” he says, holding up a modest hand, “but he sort of looks like both of us.”
The cashier, who has begun to ring up his purchases, says, “Too bad.”
“How old now?” After an unprecedented absence of almost a month, Bob Campeau has reclaimed his immemorial stool at Leon and Toot’s Bar. It’s been Bob’s stool for so long that the bartender and owner, Toots, who is responsible for the wayward apostrophe on the bar’s sign, occasionally dusts him. But that doesn’t mean he’s universally loved, and without him on hand, the place has felt lighter, at times almost cheerful. Still, the first time Rafferty came in and found Campeau’s stool empty, he felt a disorienting pang of loss, as though he were looking at an aerial photo of Washington, DC, with the Potomac River missing.
Rafferty has detoured to Leon and Toot’s to dodge the heat and to see whether there’s anyone there whom he hasn’t told about the baby. Much to his surprise, it’s Campeau, and he’s actually evincing interest. Putting the supermarket bag on the bar, Rafferty says, “Almost two weeks.”
“Why the hell aren’t you home?”
“Buying for the baby.” He props up the sack, which seems to be contemplating falling over sideways.
“Look like Rose?”
“Like both of us, I think.” Toots sets down a glass of carbonated water with a discolored lemon slice floating in it. She’d given him a disapprovin
g twist of the mouth when he asked for a Singha. Rafferty says to her, “I’m not the one who’s nursing.”
“Too much to hope for,” Campeau says with a regretful shake of the head. “That kind of beauty, I mean. It’s like lightning. Not gonna strike twice in the same place.” Campeau, whose reign over this room began more than fifty years ago, when it was still called the Expat Bar, was Rose’s occasional patron back when she was working on Patpong. He remembers her fondly, a favor she does not return. For years he’s held a grudge against Poke for, as he put it, taking her off the market.
Rafferty says, “It’s a boy, Bob.”
Campeau shrugs off the detail. “Still.”
“I’m not such a terrible-looking guy.” Toots is squinting at him and sucking on a tooth. “Am I?”
“You want we take a vote?” Toots says, pronouncing it wote.
“You’re okay,” Campeau says. “Right number of arms and legs. Kid’ll probably walk upright.”
Rafferty says, “So where were you?”
“Land of cotton. Alabama. Brother died.”
“Sorry to hear it.”
“Aaaahhh,” Campeau says. “He was a horse’s ass.”
“Why’d you go, then?” The bubble water tastes like water with bubbles in it.
“My mother,” Campeau says. “Hadn’t seen her in forty-two years. Figured it was now or never.”
The notion of Campeau having a mother slows Rafferty down for a moment. He says, “Alabama, huh?”
“Asshole capital of the world,” Campeau says.
The front door opens and Pinky Holland comes in, wiping his bald head with what looks like a woman’s T-shirt in a shade of pink that would make a shrimp squint. “Jesus, it’s hot,” he says. “Hey, Bob, back in the Land of Smiles, huh?”
“And not a minute too soon,” Campeau says. “I’da killed the next person who said y’all in my presence.”
“Poke had a kid,” Pinky announces.
“Not unassisted,” Poke says.
“Yeah, yeah, we were just talking about it,” Campeau says. He scratches a cheekbone. “So, bar fines go up again?”
Pinky takes the glass of Something Toots has put down in front of him. “You’ve only been gone, what? A week?”
“Almost a month.”
“Well,” Pinky says, “time flies when you’re enjoying yourself. Still, it’s only a month and you’re worrying?”
“Month is plenty long,” Campeau says. “Bar fine’s the only thing in the world that goes up faster’n the price of oil.”
“Far as I know, not here in Patpong,” Pinky says. “Over at Soi Cowboy, maybe.”
Rafferty says, “The first week after the kid—”
“Soi Cowboy,” Campeau says. “For fucking Rockefellers. Who cares about Soi—”
“You’d probably be surprised to hear this,” Rafferty says, “but the thing about a kid this age—”
“Lookit that,” Pinky Holland says. He’s mopping his neck with the pink thing and squinting past Rafferty toward the street. “It’s that horrible old woman again.” Rafferty turns to look through the bar’s small, ambitiously unwashed front window and sees a dark-skinned, battered-looking woman, gray hair in an exploding bird’s nest, nostrils wider than her downturned mouth, peering in. The moment she realizes she’s being looked at, she disappears.
Campeau says, “An admirer.”
Poke says to Pinky, “What do you mean, again?”
“Third time I’ve seen her. When I came in just now, she was sitting on the curb across the street, looking at the door. Like Buddha was gonna come through it.”
“You’re a chick magnet,” Campeau says.
The bell over the door rings and the man Rafferty privately thinks of as the guy with the hair comes in, raking his fingers through his carefully sculpted waves to peel them back from a glistening forehead. With the conversational panache that makes him welcome everywhere, he says, “Hot out.”
Campeau says, “You’re kidding.”
“No, look at me. I’m all wet.”
A moment of silence glides by to acknowledge a straight line the entire company is allowing to pass. Toots says to him, “Usual?”
“Ummmm,” the guy with the hair says, slowing to give it some serious thought. He chews his lower lip as Campeau crosses his eyes. “Sure,” the guy with the hair finally says. “Why not?” To Campeau, he says, “You’re back.”
Looking down at himself, Campeau says, “Jesus, I am. You gotta break stuff like that gently.” To Rafferty, he says, “So. Mother-in-law there?”
“First four days, until she certified the child as likely to survive. Now she’s back up north and I’ve got an apartment full of former bar girls.”
Campeau’s ears practically prick up. “Names?”
“Lek,” Rafferty says, feeling an unanticipated bloom of irritation heat his face. “They’re all named Lek.”
Campeau’s anger, never far offstage, makes an entrance. “Don’t be a jerk. What do you think, I’m going to fucking come over and bar-fine them?”
“What I think is that they’re in a different phase of their lives and happy to be there.”
“Sheesh,” Campeau says, shaking his hand as though he’d burned his fingers. “What I think,” he says in a high, feminine voice. “Nothing more self-righteous than a recovered sinner. What’d you do, cut it off and donate it to the dick of the month club?”
“You know, Bob.” Rafferty gets up and drops some money on the bar. “I’d tell you to grow up, but if you did there wouldn’t be anything left.”
“Just ’cause you snagged the hot one—” Campeau begins.
“Arrested development,” Rafferty says, raising his voice. “With a life sentence. And fucking can it, Bob.”
The guy with the hair says, “You guys having an argument?”
Campeau says, “Ooohhh, he’s cranky. Not getting any since the baby?”
Rafferty is very, very tired. For twelve days he’s been banished from the big bed—which Rose is sharing with the baby—sleeping on a lumpy couch in two-hour stretches, in between fits of squalling from what used to be his bedroom. His adopted daughter, Miaow, has an unattractive case of the just-displaced-only-child sulks. He’s feeling guilty that he doesn’t seem to love the baby the way he’s supposed to. He’s dully aware of all this—and on a quest for a reasonable perspective he factors all of it into his response—and he still picks up his remaining half glass of bubble water, takes four irretrievable steps, and pours the cold drink onto the crotch of Campeau’s jeans.
Campeau leaps up, knocking his stool over with a bang, making everyone straighten up, and the guy with the hair, who has just hoisted his Usual, drops it onto the bar, and everyone jumps again at the noise. Toots shakes her head in a way that expresses a long, profound weariness at the limitations of men and picks up a damp and malodorous bar towel to mop up the Usual. Rafferty steps back, more than half hoping Campeau will take a swing at him. Only Pinky Holland is having a good time, sitting, chin on hand, bright-eyed with expectation.
Rafferty says, “Come on, Bob. Let me give you a real Arkansas welcome.”
Campeau says, “You hypocritical fucker,” and steps toward Rafferty, who sidesteps, swipes the filthy towel out of Toot’s hand and pushes it, wadded-up and stinking, into Campeau’s face. He keeps pushing it until Campeau steps backward, tangling his feet in the legs of his overturned stool, and goes down, hard, on his butt.
“Any time,” Rafferty says to him, seeing him through a haze of red as if someone had atomized blood into the air.
A bang from the right gets his attention. Toots has grabbed the billy club that hangs near the cash register and slammed the bar with it. Everyone is frozen, wide-eyed, their ears ringing.
“Him old man,” she says, pointing at Campeau. “You. Poke.” She gives him
the unambiguous thumb jerk over the shoulder that means the same thing all over the world. “You eighty-sick.”
Rafferty does the only smart thing he’s done in the past minute: he doesn’t correct her pronunciation. But he does say, “If you can’t wash old Arkansas down there out of that rag, I’ll buy you a new one.”
From the floor, Campeau says, “Alabama, you asshole.”
“Who cares?”
“Out,” Toots says.
Rafferty says, “When can I come back?
“Not today.” She picks up the supermarket bag and extends it over the counter. “Here. Give Rose kiss for me.”
“It’ll be a pleasure.”
From the floor, Campeau says, “This isn’t over.”
“Yeah? You going to burn a cross in my yard? You gonna poison me, slip some of your nine million tabs of fake Viagra into my drink?”
“Out, out.” Toots is making little scram gestures, flopping the backs of her hands toward the door. As it swings closed behind him, Rafferty hears Campeau growl at Toots, “Whaddya mean, old man?”
2
The Adoration
“You go long time,” Fon says, shaking her head in disapproval. It had taken her years on Patpong to polish her immaculate, note-perfect bar-girl English and to flash-freeze its development before it started to threaten her customers’ insecurities, and she’s proud of it; it supported her family for decades. She sees no reason to abandon it just because Rafferty wants to exercise his Thai. “You go to bar?” She’d opened the door for him because the deadbolt was fastened from inside, and behind her he could see that she, or someone, had remade the couch he’d slept on, folding more neatly than he had the blankets that, in theory, soften the lumps.
“A bar?” he says, helpless against the infallibility of bar-worker radar. “No. No, why would you say that?” It’s not a real lie, he thinks; at least, he hadn’t had anything to drink. Now that his anger has receded, he’s feeling wayward pangs of regret about having essentially decked Campeau in front of virtually everyone the man knows. Fon, who loathes Campeau, would get a kick out of the story, but he can’t tell it now that he’s lied to her. What a tangled web, etc. He says, “I need some sleep.”
Street Music Page 1
