by Jake Needham
Tay finished his cigarette and stubbed it out in the heavy glass ashtray on the table between them.
He needed something before this conversation went any further, but he wasn’t sure what it was. He didn’t want another cigarette. He wasn’t really much of a drinker and he never drank during the day, although he did sometimes look forward having to a drink in the early evening.
He looked at his watch.
Just after 4:30pm.
Close enough.
Chapter Four
Tay went into the kitchen and rummaged around in the cabinets until he found a bottle of Bushmills Irish whiskey. He poured two fingers into a tumbler and added two fingers of water from the tap.
“What do you want, John?” he called back into the living room.
“How about a cup of tea?”
Tay walked to the doorway and stood there looking at August.
“Are you serious?” he asked.
“Of course I’m not serious. You got any beer?”
“I might have a bottle or two of Tiger.”
“Tiger? I said beer, not a soft drink.”
“You want it or not?”
“If that’s the best you can do.”
“A glass?”
“Bottle’s fine.”
Tay brought the drinks into the living room, handed the bottle of Tiger to August, and settled back into the chair with his glass of Bushmills. For a while, no one spoke.
August knew better than to push Tay. He also knew he didn’t have to. He had Tay’s curiosity working for him. All he had to do was be patient and Tay would come to him. For his part, Tay didn’t think for a moment that August was sitting in his living room to propose he join some secret mob of political assassins. August knew him well enough to know that was a nonstarter. So why was August telling him all this? Why was he really here?
“This company you work for,” Tay asked when he decided the silence had gone on for long enough, “does it have a name?”
“Its formal name is Red River Consultants, but most people who know we exist just call us the Band.”
“The Band?” Tay couldn’t help snickering a little. “Really?”
“It was before my time,” August shrugged, “but the way I hear it somebody started calling us the Band years ago and it just stuck.”
“So, what do you call the guy who leads the Band? The Conductor?”
August just looked at him.
“Oh shit, John, tell me you’re not serious.”
August drank some more of his beer.
“You’ll get used to it,” he said.
“I’m obviously having a little trouble with this, John.”
“I can see that.”
“I’m flattered you trust me enough to tell me all those things, I really am, but I’m confused, too.”
“About what?”
“I don’t understand why you’re telling me.”
“I’m telling you because you’re the best investigator I’ve ever known.”
“For God’s sake, are we done dancing here yet, John? What do you want from me?”
“I just told you. Somebody tried to kill me. I need you to figure out who it was and then find them for me.”
Tay exhaled heavily and looked away. He and August had been through a lot together. He owed him a great deal, maybe even his life. And if someone had asked him fifteen minutes earlier, he would have said he would do anything August asked him to do.
It wasn’t just a matter of some sense of personal indebtedness. It was more than that. It was the friendship that had grown out of the things they had done together. Tay didn’t have many friends. The few he had mattered a lot to him.
The thing was, August had never asked him for his help before, but now that he was asking, it felt to Tay like this was too much to expect of anyone.
Looked at one way, August was just asking him to figure out who was behind some kind of a threat to him and to the people he worked for. It would be an investigation pretty much like all the hundreds of investigations Tay had conducted in his career as a homicide investigator in Singapore. Something happened and you figured out who caused it to happen and then found them. It might be a little more difficult because he didn’t know the territory he would have to work the way he knew Singapore, but not all that different. Not really. It was something he could do. Perhaps not easily, but he could do it.
Looked at another way, however, August was asking something much darker.
What would happen if Tay was able to identify and locate whoever it was August wanted him to identify and locate? Would August go around and talk to whoever it was and tell them to knock it off? Would August perhaps report the person’s location to the FBI and that would be that? Of course not.
August didn’t find people and call the law. In his world, August was the law, the avenging angel, the messenger of death. John August solved problems the old-fashioned way. He killed them.
Tay could understand how August could feel that what he was doing was right, he could even understand how in some circumstances he might feel that way himself, but it changed nothing. August would still be asking him to identify someone, find them, and mark them to be killed. Whatever loyalty he might feel toward August, he simply didn’t see how he could do that.
He had been a policeman for twenty-seven years. For twenty-seven years he had brought criminals to justice. No one really understood what that had all been about for him. No matter how utterly compromised the whole process was, it was still about human decency and values. He went after those who committed crimes for all those who did not. He figured somebody should, and he wanted it to be him.
Tay wanted to explain all that to August and make him understand why he could not do this, but he wasn’t sure how. So, he did what everyone does when they want to avoid bluntly turning someone away. He equivocated.
“I’m getting old, John. My knees hurt and I need glasses. I don’t have what it takes to run investigations anymore. I’m retired. I’m through.”
“Horseshit, Sam. Being an investigator wasn’t just your job, it’s who you are. You can’t retire from who you are.”
Tay had always been a digger, natural and obsessive. Sometimes he even saw himself as something of a grinder and he feared that might be true. More and more often he found himself wondering if he had always gotten by on hard work rather than talent. He hoped he had talent, but he wasn’t certain of that anymore.
“You’re wrong, John. I’m done. I’ve seen enough.”
And he had seen enough, that was true. Too much really. Any cop who was on the job long enough had seen things he would never talk to anybody about. The things he had seen in nearly two decades of investigating killings followed him home and crouched in the dark corners of his bedroom and whispered to him when he tried to sleep. He did not like what they whispered.
That was what he wanted to explain to August, but he didn’t know how to do it. He could barely explain it to himself except in a cascade of clichés. How could he ever hope to make August understand? He had no idea what to say.
August seemed to see that. Abruptly, he changed the subject.
“I’ve always liked this house, Sam.”
Tay’s thoughts flashed back to the only other time August had been in his house, at least the only other time that he knew of. August had suddenly appeared out of nowhere back then as well, although on that occasion he hadn’t bothered to ring the gate bell. He had let himself in through the French doors from the back garden at a moment when Tay was fully occupied trying to fend off three heavies who had forced their way into his house to… well, Tay hadn’t been entirely certain what they were there to do, but he was pretty sure it hadn’t been to bring him a bunch of flowers. August’s unexpected appearance had quickly settled the matter and the heavies bolted before they had the chance to do any damage. Tay owed August one for that, and he owed him for a few other things, too.
“It’s a house with a certain gravity,” August continue
d. “It feels anchored in a time that was better than this one.”
“I inherited it from—”
“Your father. Yes, you told me.”
Tay didn’t remember telling August anything of the sort, and he wondered for a moment if he really had told him he inherited the house from his father and forgotten all about it or if August had found it out some other way. August was like that. Over the years Tay had kept noticing that August knew things about him, things that Tay had no idea how he could possibly know.
He had first been introduced to August by a woman who was the Regional Security Officer in the American Embassy in Singapore. She and Tay had been working together on an investigation of the murder of the America ambassador’s wife. It was a particularly puzzling case because it hadn’t taken Tay very long to discover that no one appeared to want it to be solved. Not Tay’s bosses at Singapore CID, not the FBI who had stuck their noses into the investigation and tried to shut it down, and not even the American ambassador whose wife it was who was murdered and dumped in a room at the Singapore Marriott.
Back then, August had claimed to be retired from the United States State Department and told Tay he had bought a bar in Thailand just to give himself something to do. Tay had doubted from the very first that August was retired from anything, certainly not from the State Department, and he had doubted it even more when August pointed them in the right direction to solve the murder of the ambassador’s wife.
Ever since then, August had turned up on a remarkable number of occasions just when Tay needed him most. Tay never really had any idea where he came from or where he went to. One moment he wasn’t there, and then the next he was. That was how John August operated. He was a ghost.
Tay knew there was no point now in spiraling off into the sort of philosophical ramblings to which he was all too prone. That would accomplish nothing. He had already decided to let August tell his story so that’s what he would do.
“I suppose you might as well tell me what happened, John.”
And that was when August told Tay everything.
Well, almost everything.
John August never told anybody everything.
II
Exposito
Chapter Five
It was a fine morning in Pattaya. Air as smooth and warm as melted butter, a sky as hard and blue as glazed porcelain, and a breeze off the ocean in which you could smell the sweetness of childhood. It was the kind of a day that promises better times are coming.
Pattaya is a cheerfully seedy little Thai resort town a couple of hours south of Bangkok that has a decidedly dodgy reputation. It offers visitors a few crappy beaches, some mediocre hotels, a prodigious number of bars, and quite possibly more prostitutes than any other single spot in the entire world. It is also a place that has a perpetual buzz on, a place where violence is constantly lurking somewhere just beneath the surface. Pattaya is the sort of town that’s always on edge and trying hard not to show it.
John August dawdled his motorcycle along Beach Road relishing the emptiness of the morning streets, the softness of the breeze, and the warmth of the sunshine. August rode an old Norton Commando, a 1971 model with a coal-black paint job that he kept tuned to perfection and waxed to a mirror-like gloss. He was certain the Norton was about the most beautiful machine ever made. It was a pain in the ass to maintain, of course, but then when was anything that beautiful ever easy to live with?
Back when August had worked out of the American Embassy in Bangkok, he had known a DEA guy posted there who was a real bike nut. The man had invested more than a year of his life and a ridiculous amount of money in meticulously restoring the Norton to its full original glory. Eventually the fellow’s wife lost patience with him and laid down the law. She told him it was either her or the bike. The DEA guy offered August his choice. August picked the bike.
At the end of Beach Road, he rode straight ahead into what everybody in Pattaya called Walking Street. The road had an official name of some kind, he was sure, but he doubted anyone remembered what it was. Since it was closed off to vehicles at night, it had been called Walking Street by everyone for as long as he could remember. At night, Walking Street overflowed with the lost and misbegotten of the world and became the center ring of the circus that was Pattaya in the hours of darkness.
August goosed the Norton’s throttle and smiled. Down here past the beach, the sea was blocked off by densely packed shophouses lining both sides of the road. Most of the buildings housed bars or restaurants and the thicket of neon signs arching out over the street looked like the tangled branches of a metal and glass forest. August loved to hear the guttural sound of the big 750cc engine echoing in the confined space. He felt a little silly every time he revved the engine just to hear it growl, but he did it anyway.
Walking Street in daylight was sharply etched by the unrelenting sun of Thailand and generally almost deserted. The few people on the street during the day looked a bit lost to August, as if they couldn’t quite remember why they were there.
Occasionally, a few early customers could be seen scattered among the little open-air beer bars that were tucked away almost everywhere. These daylight customers were generally white men, mostly in their sixties or older, and dressed in wrinkled t-shirts and shorts that looked like they had been worn yesterday and maybe the day before, too. They were almost always sitting alone, a bottle of beer in front of them, and staring into the distance at sights only they could see. In the daylight hours, the loneliness of all those old men filled Walking Street like a fog. Sometimes it was so thick August could hardly breathe.
At night, Walking Street was a different place, maybe even a different planet. In the late hours, Pattaya heaved with partying mobs, the music boomed from a hundred open doorways, and the laughter rang harsh on the street corners. It was either a carnival of flashing lights or a neon nightmare, depending entirely on your point of view. Sometimes August thought he was too old for Pattaya, and sometimes he thought he wasn’t old enough. He couldn’t decide which it was.
August wasn’t just screwing around in Pattaya like most of the other foreigners who were there. He owned a bar he bought as a retirement gig after he stopped working for the government and he had renamed the place Secrets. A little cute maybe, but the irony appealed to him.
Secrets was a two-story shophouse painted dark green with brown trim. It didn’t look much like the other bars in Pattaya because it wasn’t. There were no flashing neon lights, no rock and roll booming through the door, just a modest entrance with a simple sign above it. Secrets was probably the only bar in Pattaya without a single go-go girl swinging from a silver pole and displaying her assets for the customers. Instead, the place was dark and woody with a clubby feel to it. It was the sort of place that caused people to lower their voices without thinking about it, the sort of place where you expected a little Billie Holliday or maybe some Chet Baker to be playing quietly in the background, and it usually was.
Secrets served simple but decent American food. Breakfast all day, thick burgers, dynamite chili, and a solid chicken-fried steak. It was a place that offered Pattaya’s foreign community some relief from the soul-deadening shabbiness for which Pattaya was famous. Not that shabbiness was always such a terrible thing, at least not the way August looked at it. Sometimes shabbiness just meant the place had a little soul.
Secrets didn’t open until four in the afternoon, although like most everywhere else in Pattaya the concept of opening hours was vague. If the door was unlocked, people could come in. If it wasn’t, they couldn’t. The door was almost always unlocked by late morning, but that didn’t make a great deal of difference since the traffic was usually light until early evening. Foreigners in Pattaya generally didn’t wake up until at least noon and few of them were willing to risk any form of serious perambulation for several hours after that.
August turned the Norton off Walking Street and rode about a hundred yards up a little soi that was too narrow for cars and trucks. When he stop
ped in front of Secrets, he killed the engine and locked the bike to a U-bolt he had concreted into the wall.
He grabbed his backpack off the back of the bike and stood for a moment looking up and down the soi. A tang of rotting garbage in the air blended with the ever-present aromas of raw sewage, burning charcoal, and fermented fish sauce. August smiled. The smells of Asia had become a part of him somehow. He wasn’t sure how that had happened, but it had.
No one was in sight in either direction and the little soi looked lonely and sad. At night, Pattaya was like a raucous border town. Tijuana on the Gulf of Thailand. In daylight, it felt like somebody had moved the border.
Inside Secrets, there was a long wooden bar on the right with ten high-backed stools and a brass foot rail. The rest of the space was one big room furnished with comfortable-looking black leather chairs grouped around low wooden tables. The lighting was indirect and came mostly from the brass floor lamps with brown and white striped shades that were positioned discreetly around the room. It was bright enough for people to see each other, but dim enough to discourage surgery.
A man behind the bar was leaning on his forearms reading a newspaper, and August nodded to him.
“Morning, Woods.”
Woods nodded back, but he didn’t say anything. He was dressed in his normal ensemble of jeans and a black T-shirt, but this morning he had a blue bandana wrapped around his head and knotted in the back. August wondered for a moment what the significance of the bandana was, but he decided not to ask.
Woods was a former Navy SEAL with red hair and a thick red beard and he didn’t talk a lot. Strangely enough Woods was his first name. No one had used Woods’ last name in so long that on the rare occasion August needed to come up with it for some reason he generally had to stop and think what it was.
“Coffee on yet?” August asked.
