Pattaya 24/7

by Christopher G. Moore

  PRAISE FOR

  PATTAYA 24/7

  “Calvino does it again . . . well-developed characters, and the pace keeps you reading well after you should have turned out the light.”

  —Farang Magazine (Thailand)

  “Intelligent and articulate, Moore offers a rich, passionate and original take on the private eye game, fans of the genre should definitely investigate, and fans of foreign intrigue will definitely appreciate.”

  —Kevin Burton Smith, January Magazine

  “The best in the Calvino series . . . The story is compelling.”

  —Bangkok Post

  “Pattaya 24/7 is one of best in the Calvino series—original, provocative, and rich with details and insights into the underworld of Thai police, provincial gangsters, hit squads, and terrorists.”

  —Pieke Bierman, award-wining author of Violetta

  “A cast of memorably eccentric figures in an exotic Southeast Asian backdrop”

  —The Japan Times

  “Pattaya 24/7 is a compelling, atmospheric and multi-layered murder investigation set in modern-day Thailand. The detective, Calvino, is a complex and engaging hero.”

  —Garry Disher, award-winning author of The Wyatt Novels

  “Pattaya 24/7 pulls the reader through a landmine of traumatic moods—anxiety, greed and fear.”

  —The Nation

  “Moore’s literary talents are obvious. This book is deeper than the well one of the characters was fished out of.”

  —Pattaya Mail

  “The colourful gallery of secondary characters in Pattaya 24/7 is a distinctive feature that increases the reader’s interest. We enjoy the spicy taste of hard-boiled fiction reinvented in an exotic but realistic place—in fact, not realistic, but real!.”

  —Thriller Magazine (Italy)

  PATTAYA 24/7

  A NOVEL

  BY

  CHRISTOPHER G. MOORE

  Published by

  Heaven Lake Press at Smashwords

  Copyright 2010 Christopher G. Moore

  Discover other titles by Christopher G. Moore at Smashwords.com:

  A Killing Smile

  A Bewitching Smile

  A Haunting Smile

  Chairs

  Publisher’s note

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  License Notes

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  For General Vasit Dejkhunjorn and

  Mark Abel

  ONE

  LUNCHTIME AT THE Lonestar Bar in Washington Square, the same six or eight middle-aged farangs leaning over their plates cutting into pieces of meatloaf. It was mostly the same old faces. One of those Galapagos Islands meeting places where exotic species cut off from the outside world gather, their evolutionary divergence displayed in sexual selection practices and mating rituals, livers, immunity from alcohol damage, and an unhealthy appetite for meatloaf. The owner, George, never ate, and sat watching the rain fall. He was fat enough to raise suspicion that he ate large amounts of food. But when did he eat? Darwin would have netted him and hauled him back to England for further examination.

  Most of the regulars figured George as a candidate for the secret eater award. McPhail said that George knew secrets about the kitchen and that was why he didn’t eat. He might not have been watching the rain; he could have been waiting to find out which of the six or eight regulars would croak first. He didn’t wait in silence.

  Sitting at a large booth under the stuffed water buffalo head, George nursed a beer surveying his empire and barking orders at the staff.

  “Change that goddamn music. I want country. Fucking country. Do you understand a boy band isn’t country?”

  “Yeah, change the music,” shouted Ed McPhail. “And turn the volume way the fuck down. Can’t you see I am trying to have a conversation? Jesus, George, we’ll be wearing hearing aids.”

  McPhail wore his black dyed snakeskin trousers with a white cotton shirt. He slowly pushed a Marlboro into his ivory cigarette holder.

  “I am eighty-two and can hear more in one fucking ear than you ever hear in a lifetime,” screamed George.

  McPhail made his free hand into a talking-head puppet, his fingers moving up and down over his thumb like lips over a stick jaw. McPhail gestured at George. George got the message. The DJ got the message, changed the music and turned it down.

  Calvino poured more salt onto his french fries as McPhail found his lighter.

  “As I was saying,” McPhail said, lighting a cigarette. “I had this uncle named Harry. He lived in a trailer a couple of hours out of San Francisco. He collected stuff. Clippings from newspapers, magazines, junk mail, and brochures. He had stacks and stacks of clippings, all a dirty yellow color—like nicotine-stained fingers yellow. That’s age, man, age. Getting old and going nowhere. Understand what I am saying? He had all of this shit everywhere: tables, the floor and the sofa, on chairs. There was enough heat pumping through that mountain of paper that the whole place could have gone up in blazes.

  “Uncle Harry kept all those clippings because they had some tiny piece of wisdom, some insight into the workings of the universe, and one day he was going back to read them all like one long narrative. But he never had time to read. All day he spent clipping more pieces and making new piles. Harry thought he would find a window into the human condition. “You know what he claimed? Swear to God. Harry said he had invented the TV and microwave but some assholes had robbed him of his inventions—stole his ideas. He said, ‘Son, I’ve always been ahead of my time.’ He planned one day to get all of his inventions back. He wrote every fucking law firm in the state asking them to take his case. He never got one reply. Not a single fucking letter. But the man believed in his own wisdom. All of those news articles had made him wise. Listen to this: Harry said that he invented the Internet in 1949. He had the proof. A piece of paper where he wrote down ‘internet’ and it was somewhere in one of the piles. He had other papers that showed he had invented the TV and microwave. Harry was a dreamer. He wanted to make good. He fucking tried. But he couldn’t get it together. He once said to me, ‘All I needed was a million dollars and I’d have left Bill Gates eating dust.’ ”

  “After everyone becomes a millionaire, then what?” said Calvino.

  “Then I’m putting up the goddamn prices. And when that day comes, maybe I can get someone to put on some goddamn country fucking music,” screamed George.

  “If the fucking Arabs don’t blow us all up before we can spend our money.” One of the demimondes sauntered over to change the music. She put on the country song about how in country music no one ever says the F-word.

  “Vinee, how the fuck are you going to make a million doing legwork for insurance companies? Man, there’s no money in chasing down live people pretending to be dead.”

  Looking around the bar, Calvino wondered if there were a number of dead people pretending to be alive. And it crossed his mind that he could well be one of them.

  “Bar yings understand the answer, McPhail.”

  “What is the answer to my question?” He had forgotten for a moment what his question had been. What remained in his head was now a blur—how does a private dick wor
king small cases ever hope to make any real money?

  “Yings know in the service business you need to understand the price issue.”

  “One thing’s for sure, bar yings ain’t gonna be millionaires any time soon.”

  “There’s more to life than supply-and-demand and making money.”

  “Try living without any fucking money,” George shouted down from his perch.

  “Everyone needs some money, George. Not being a mil- lionaire doesn’t make you a failure.”

  “Bullshit, everyone wants to be rich,” said George. “He’s right, pappy,” said McPhail.

  Calvino looked around the bar. He didn’t see any dollar millionaires; he didn’t see any millionaires, spooning their vegetable soup and reading the sports page of the Bangkok Post.

  “The word is, terrorists from the south might export their violence to Bangkok,” said Calvino. “You get blown up, what good is a million dollars?”

  McPhail rolled his eyes. A couple of the regulars looked up from their fried chicken. “You can get run over by a bus or a motorcycle, Calvino.”

  “Or a water buffalo,” shouted George.

  “My secretary’s fortuneteller said this would be the year of a major disaster.”

  “Fortunetellers, what the fuck do they know?” “What did your Uncle Harry know?”

  “What I am saying is, Uncle Harry spent his life clawing through some stack of newspapers looking for something and he never found what he was looking for. He wasted his life. What else has a man got but his time?”

  “His dreams,” said Calvino.

  “Calvino, you’re too fucking old to have dreams.”

  “McPhail, you’re too young to have stopped dreaming.”

  TWO

  THE GPS digital panel read N 11° 28ʹ 22.0ʺ and E 101° 45ʹ 17.7ʺ. Six small black bar graph spikes appeared on the panel, one after another, each one indicating a connection had been made with a satellite. Each satellite confirmed the co-ordinates. Two hundred dollars of GPS had plugged into a multi-billion dollar grid. Unlike the old days, when the best sailors would get lost, the Sunday sailor now had an instrument that made certain he would never be lost. The fading sun touched the horizon of the sea. Nothing but water—no pattern, no design, and no texture—and the sea was called the Gulf of Thailand. The trawler could be anywhere, anytime, any place—no landmarks to judge time or place. Water stretching as far as the eye could see. The GPS device allowed Captain Suthan to plot his trawler’s position with an accuracy of thirty meters. He shook his head. It was unbelievable to hold such an instrument. No smuggler could ever have made a better investment.

  From the center of the sun-reflected surface, a fishing boat sped across the open waters. The boat approached from the starboard side. Shielding his eyes against the brilliant sunlight, he raised his binoculars. Captain Suthan slowly pulled the focus sharp and tight, until he gradually made out the outline of three men inside the approaching boat. Two men huddled on a bench at the bow while the third man crouched at the stern, operating the outboard engine. The wind had died and as evening came, the hot air cooled. From the quarterdeck of the trawler, the captain watched the progress of the boat.

  The man working the engine also had a GPS, the glass catch- ing the reflection of sunlight. The captain slowly lowered his binoculars and glanced at his watch, making note of the time. The fishing boat had appeared exactly on time. The rendezvous had been precise in place and time.

  Considerable care had been taken in selecting the right location for the rendezvous. Sailing too close to sea-lanes disputed by Thailand, Cambodia, China, Vietnam or the Philippines invited the attention of patrol vessels and inspection by naval personnel. The captain had long experience in these waters and knew the risks of being spotted and stopped had grown after 9/11 and exploded after the school burnings, bombings, and killings in the southern provinces. It was a time of turmoil and suspicion and crackdowns and strange, terrifying diseases. Being at sea, one felt safe, isolated from all the threats, Captain Suthan thought. His pulse quickened. His trawler had entered a zone of danger.

  Few of the safe harbors from the old days remained. Places where smugglers operated with the kind of liberty that was unlikely to return in this life. Technology had cut both ways. While it was easy never to become lost, it was more difficult to not be found. Through his binoculars, the captain scanned the horizon for any other vessels. He saw nothing but the vast, open sea. He called down to the men to prepare for the fishing boat coming alongside. He had informed his crew only an hour before that they would be taking on board a man who was in need of urgent medical assistance. How did he know this? Captain Suthan had told his crew that he’d received an SOS call about the medical emergency. As the captain, he had a duty as the closest ship in the vicinity to give aid and assistance. This was a rescue procedure and the crew would assist in doing their job.

  Questions immediately came into the minds of some members of the crew. No one else on board had heard the emergency call come over the radio. How could such a call come from such a small craft as was approaching? Small fishing boats didn’t have such advanced electronic equipment. The captain assured them the fishing boat had taken the ailing man from a larger trawler. Why hadn’t this trawler helped the man? Why had they put him on a fishing boat? Those amongst the crew with these questions kept them to themselves. The atmosphere on the trawler, as they waited, grew tense; the men waited, watching the fishing boat as it closed in.

  The captain ordered the crew to keep their distance from the sick man. He was infected. But the captain didn’t say what disease the man in the fishing boat carried and was bringing onto the trawler. The captain used the Thai word tid-rok. This was a nicely vague term. It could have meant anything from diseases such as AIDS or malaria, to the bird flu. Rumors had circulated that SARS had re-emerged out of China and people were dying. More rumors circulated that bird flu had mutated with ordinary flu. And no one was certain if the authorities had covered up the latest outbreak. It didn’t take much imagination for the crew to assume the man coming onto the trawler had something deadly, something that might infect them.

  Their main reassurance was that the captain loved life as much as they did and he would be just as vulnerable to infection by a strange disease as any member of the crew. If he hadn’t shown concern, then what reason was there for them to feel unsettled and anxious? The stranger had filled them with dread from the moment his boat had been spotted. One of the Cambodians, or Khmer as the locals called them, said the captain would avoid the infected passenger, and that his plan was to throw the crew into the line of fire. The sick man’s breath would be on them. He would touch them. The disease would be passed on. The crew argued whether they should allow the infected man to board the trawler. Captain Suthan raised his binoculars and watched the crew, picking out the ringleader who had stirred up the others. He made a mental note as he focused on one of the Khmer.

  He felt Captain Suthan’s eyes on him. The Khmer glanced up and saw the captain training his binoculars at him. They locked eyes for a long second. The Khmer was the first to look away. He blinked. The captain lowered his binoculars and yelled down at the crew to prepare for the arrival of the emergency medical case. The fishing boat left a long wake as the boat glided across the sea. The captain signaled the man operating the engine. The men on the fishing boat waved back. The men on deck scrambled pushing a rope ladder over the starboard side. If this man was infected, no one wanted to be too close to the ladder when the man emerged onto the trawler.

  The Khmer and Thai crew discussed plans for what to do in the event the man in medical distress was unable to board without assistance. No one could agree what should be done. No one volunteered. Captain Suthan hadn’t given an order. The captain, one of the Thais argued, wanted to see for himself the condition of the passenger, and only then would he give his order. The boat drew close so that the crew and captain could, for the first time, see for themselves the faces of the men in the small bo
at. It wasn’t obvious which was the sick man. None of the three men looked any less able-bodied than the others. This left the mystery open as to who would be joining them on board the trawler. All they knew was that if he needed assistance, then no one had volunteered to go to his aid and the captain had given no order.

  The wind had picked up. The boat was fifty meters away as the first whitecaps appeared, rolling it slightly from side to side. Ten meters out the pilot of the fishing boat cut the engine and let the momentum carry it forward. The two men in front were dressed in old trousers and long-sleeved shirts. Under their balaclavas they wore white surgical masks. The sun caught the whiteness of the masks. A sense of alarm rose as a gasp from a couple of members of the crew. Experienced seamen understood the art of smuggling. The appearance of an unexpected visitor with pirated merchandise wasn’t something that disturbed the crew; such an incident meant side business with an additional profit potential and could only be welcomed. This felt like something quite different from ordinary smuggling. Too many news reports of fatal diseases had filtered down, and the appearance of the masks played to their fears. Except for their masks, the men in the boat could have been fishermen or rice farmers or laborers. Or they were smugglers delivering goods. The men on the boat might have been of any nationality. They might not have been men. They hung fenders and dropped the boarding ladder over the side.

  The first attempt to pull alongside failed. The fishing boat hit the hull, and bounced away, churning water as it spun around. The pilot started the engine and slowly edged forward.