Kiko only chuckled though, shaking her head.
“Black? A liar? No. He probably thinks he told me. Sometimes I think he can’t tell the difference between thinking about doing something and actually having done it.” She glanced at me again in the mirror, adding, “You might need to get used to it, doc. Especially now that you’re his favorite new toy.”
I bristled a little at that, even though I knew it was stupid.
I knew what she meant. She definitely didn’t mean it the way the more paranoid part of me wanted to take it, as in some kind of insinuation that anything more intimate was going on between me and Black. Even if she had been, I knew it was ridiculous to react in anything but indifference. Black hadn’t gone near me in that respect since our one aborted make-out session after we’d both nearly been killed. I was pretty sure that whole thing was off the table between the two of us now, at least if his actions towards me were any indication.
I figured he must have moved on. Or maybe he had rules about trying to bed one of his employees.
Whatever the reason, he’d more or less pretended like that whole thing hadn’t happened.
“Do you have any idea why he’s even there?” I said to Kiko. “Bangkok?”
“Is that where he is?” she mused.
Her voice remained friendly but disinterested.
I sighed, rubbing my face with a hand.
Turning around, I sank deeper into my seat. After another few seconds of thought, I pulled out my phone, clicking over to web browsing. I tried looking up how long I’d be airborne for a non-stop flight from San Francisco to Bangkok, but it turned out there weren’t any nonstop flights between those two places. The flight combinations listed on my online travel site ranged from seventeen to thirty hours, depending on layovers.
Clicking off my web browser, I exhaled again, half in tiredness that time.
Combing my fingers through my long dark hair, I rested my head on the back of the seat. I stared up at the limousine’s roof, wondering again what possessed me to agree to go to work for Black in the first place.
I also wondered why I wouldn’t just head to the beach as soon as I got there, leave him to fend for himself regarding whatever crazy mess in which he’d gotten himself.
I knew the answer, though.
To both questions, really.
2
FOLLOWING ORDERS
“MS. FOX?” A voice called out to me, barely audible over the traffic.
I turned, flustered, my two jackets already shed and balanced over two different arms.
It was hot. I should have tried to fit the jackets inside one of the bags.
Managing those, my purse, a long silver case which Kiko gave me a photograph of and told me to pick up in baggage claim in Bangkok, my phone and a different, white, carry-on suitcase––a roller bag I’d also never seen before today––had me more than a little overwhelmed.
That probably would have been true even without jet-lag and the eighty-five-degree heat with eighty percent humidity at six in the morning. The crowds of equally jet-lagged people trudging through customs and security with me and out towards the long line of taxis that waited outside the terminal didn’t help. We all bumped into one another and sweated on one another even as we stared around with equally bleary and unfocused eyes.
Since it was so early in the morning, there was a quietness in the air, too, however. People were friendly, if exhausted-looking. The crowds were less bad as well, I suspected, compared to what they might be in the middle of the day or early evening.
The two suitcases were probably the hardest part to manage.
Based on what Black said, I assumed the white roller bag must be filled with clothes from my own apartment––also thanks to Kiko. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what was in the larger, silver hard case, since it appeared to be fitted with an expensive-looking combination lock.
Whatever it contained, I highly suspected it wasn’t meant for me.
As I went through the revolving glass door to the sidewalk outside baggage claim, I found myself wishing I had an extra set of hands.
Even so, when that set of hands appeared, taking both jackets, the larger silver case and the roller bag away from me with a polite smile and a bow, I just stood there, confused. In the end, I felt strangely naked, despite my near-instant relief at having it all gone.
He left me my purse and phone, so that was the good news. I found myself thinking it likely wasn’t a thief, given that. I still wondered if maybe he’d confused me with someone else.
Then a woman called my name.
My eyes found her standing next to a white SUV parked at the curb.
She was Thai, maybe five-foot-two and in her early thirties, I guessed. She was well-dressed, wearing a black pencil skirt, three inch heels, and a sky blue blouse with a ruffle. She was also almost shockingly beautiful. She wore a suit jacket as well, but I didn’t see a bead of sweat on her. Her make-up appeared flawless. Her straight black hair had been swept up perfectly into a mother of pearl comb.
Her hands folded neatly in front of her as she smiled at me.
“Ms. Fox?” she repeated politely.
The man in the black suit who took the jackets and the two suitcases from me seconds earlier was already disappearing those inside the back door of the SUV as I approached.
“Hello,” I said, smiling. “You’re here for me?”
“You are a guest of Mr. Black, yes?”
Reaching her, I extended a hand, which she shook carefully.
“Yes,” I said, still doing my best to hide my puzzlement. “I’m his, uh... employee. You can call me Miriam. Or Miri.”
Smiling wider, she motioned towards the car politely with one hand.
“Please,” she said.
The man who’d taken my luggage now held open the rear car door.
Hesitating only the barest moment, I nodded stiffly, then followed the direction of her motioning hands.
Climbing into the back seat, I thanked the Thai driver right before he closed it. Then I watched him walk around the front of the car while the woman walked briskly around the back of it. The man opened the door in front and slid into the driver’s seat, which was on the right, like in England. The well-dressed woman opened the door opposite me. Sitting precisely on the same bench seat but across from me, she smiled at me again.
Neither of them spoke.
Seconds later, the car was moving out into traffic.
I looked out the window, at first seeing only glimpses of sky and greenery through pieces of the cement parking structure around the airport. Then we emerged into the early morning sunlight outside the complex and that light blue sky opened up. Once we climbed the onramp and entered the freeway proper I began to see buildings on either side of that long stretch of asphalt. They weren’t tall like I expected, not at first. Instead I saw elaborate billboards lining the freeway for a few miles, more greenery than I expected, snaking waterways that looked like canals and what looked like rows and rows of suburban homes with tile roofs.
We must be pretty far out from the city still, I thought.
We drove for a few more minutes in silence when I remembered something and turned, looking at the woman. She met my gaze, smiling as politely as before.
“Umm...” It hit me that she’d never given me a name. “What shall I call you?”
“You may call me Fah.”
“Fah?” I smiled. “Okay... Fah. Did Mr. Black tell you anything about picking up someone else?” I hesitated, trying to read a reaction in her eyes and failing. “He mentioned the Hanu Hotel to me... on Sathorn. His lawyer?”
She smiled, nodding. “Yes.”
“We can go there?”
She nodded again. “Chai, khá. Yes.”
I nodded, trying to hide my puzzlement. I found myself wondering if she spoke much English. Related to that, I wondered if she’d really understood what I’d said or was merely being polite.
Also, what she was doing in the car
with me exactly.
I ended up reading her briefly, with my mind, I mean.
I tried not to be invasive, but what I found reassured me. Black’s people had called her to come pick me up the night before. She’d worked with Black in Bangkok previously, and didn’t find his odd demands particularly surprising. She’d understood me about the hotel. She also knew we were supposed to go to the police station after that.
Once I knew that much, I relaxed a little.
Even so, it hit me in the same set of seconds that it had been pretty foolhardy of me to get into a car with total strangers. Really, if I hadn’t been so out of it, I should have read them before I let them take my bags and hustle me out of the airport. If there was ever a good use of psychic powers, it was to verify your escorts’ identities before getting into a strange car in a country where you don’t know the language.
I’d have to be more careful, at least until I could get some sleep.
My flight ended up being almost twenty-five hours––including layovers––with one stop in Tai Pei before arriving here. I’d spent a good chunk of the longer leg of that flight watching movies since I’ve never been any good at sleeping on planes.
I found myself thinking about Black now, as I stared out the window of the car, only seeing a blur of green broken by buildings and roofs as my mind wandered.
I really barely knew him. I’d barely even seen him since the whole Wedding Murder thing went down. Probably a full week passed before my body recovered enough for me to think about going back to work. Then I’d spent another week or so buried in reams of paperwork and security clearance crap for his company. That included everything from stacks of forms to fill out to range and written tests for firearms permits, tours of the databases and encryption software utilized by his team to conduct research, obtaining my own passwords, desk, phone and chair, as well as a small office in the main building on California Street.
Black also requested that I go through a medical examination by his team. When I agreed verbally, he also had me sign yet another written document that in part assured me the contents of that exam would be confidential and destroyed were I to leave his employ.
I didn’t see much of Black himself during that time.
He was around, but I don’t think we had a single real conversation over those few weeks, not even a work-related one.
We definitely hadn’t talked about anything else.
Hell, I don’t think we’d even been alone together.
He’d kept his promise about not bothering me in the apartment he set up for me in his building. In fact, if I were being completely truthful, he kept that promise a little better than I wanted... and definitely better than I expected. Since I lived under the same security protections in place both for his office and his own residence, he seemed to think that my being safe and under his direct purview was enough.
More frustrating still, I hadn’t gotten a single opportunity to ask him the million or so other things I wanted to know about him––meaning about who and what he was, or what he claimed to be, at least. He’d told me before that we’d talk about those things “later” when we had time to get into it all in more depth.
But that “later” never came.
He’d disappeared not long after the last time I tried to pin him down on a time for us to talk, and until his phone call of the day before, I hadn’t spoken to him.
When Black hadn’t reappeared after fifteen or so days, I’d moved out of the building on California Street and back to my own place on Clement in the Inner Richmond.
I’d decided to keep my old office on Fillmore too, since I didn’t want to dump all of my therapy clients––at least not overnight––and I was paid up on a year of lease. I’d been working out of there primarily for the past few weeks, rather than the building on California. One of Black’s tech guys even came and set me up to use the databases and the software encryption there, so I had to assume Black knew, or at least was okay with the move in theory.
His disappearance stung a bit though, I admit.
Not the fact that he’d left for work, which he’d already warned me he would do on a fairly frequent basis, but more the fact that he hadn’t bothered to tell me before he did. Also, if I were being totally honest, it bothered me that I hadn’t heard anything from him in the time since.
I don’t know what I expected when I went to work for him exactly, but I think some part of me thought he’d loop me into his plans a bit more.
More precisely, I thought he’d finally tell me some things.
When I first met him, he’d intimated a lot about who he really was, who he thought I was, where he thought we both came from and what it all meant. He’d fed me bits and pieces of some crazy conspiracy he seemed to operate under, which included him being from another dimension, some other race that looked more or less like humans, psychic assassins, alien religions that involved racial purity, crime lords...
Okay, and now, as I was thinking this, I found myself wondering why it was I wanted to talk to Black about any of it. Really, why had I even agreed to work with him?
But I did want to know.
I’d be lying to myself to claim I didn’t.
Even if I dismissed it all as lunacy in the end, I still wanted to hear it.
Black had affected me strangely since the moment I’d met him, and I wanted to understand a lot more about that, too. Moreover, there was definitely something different about him. Something beyond his scarily good psychic abilities and his weird gold eyes and his unusual accent and mannerisms. He could play at being like other people––I’d seen him do it pretty convincingly, in fact––but he wasn’t really like the rest of us. That difference, whatever it meant, was obvious to me whenever he wasn’t hiding it.
I was nervous, I realized.
Not about Bangkok, although being here was exhilarating too.
I was nervous to see Black again.
By the time I got that far in my loop of thought, we were pulling up in front of a skyscraper on a busy street in downtown Bangkok. I’d missed a good chunk of our approach to downtown while I’d been lost in my own head, only catching bits and pieces as we came off the highway near a snaking river and drove down a wide street with at least eight lanes of cars and lined by tall and short buildings on either side.
Now a big stone fountain loomed in front of me, half blocking my view of the street from the driveway where the SUV came to a stop. The decoration in the middle of that fountain was actually the name of the hotel facing the street, I realized. The white SUV parked behind the fountain on the circular driveway in front of the hotel, so those copper-colored letters now read backwards, but I could easily read them.
The Hanu Hotel.
I glanced towards the lobby, bending down to see through the window past the woman who still sat across from me. I saw a short flight of steps up to an entrance where two men in dark gray uniforms and white gloves stood, opening doors for guests both leaving and arriving.
Fah turned to me, smiling.
“Moment, please,” she said politely.
Snapping the latch on the door, she slid gracefully out to the driveway. She walked with crisp, perfectly balanced steps on her high heels, aiming straight up the carpeted stairs and into the lobby of the hotel. For a few moments, I just watched people walk in and out of the hotel, all of them well-dressed, many white and obviously on vacation.
When Fah came back down those steps a few moments later, I almost laughed when I saw the person she had in tow.
It was Farraday. Lawrence Farraday. Black’s lawyer from the States.
What the hell was he doing here?
Flushed with red blotches, his face looked overly large, like he’d swollen slightly since I last saw him. The same condition seemed to have turned his cherry-red tie into a weapon around his neck, and he tugged on it as he walked, maybe to keep from choking. His really bad, yellowish toupee sat slightly askew on his head. He wore a wrinkled tan trench coat, which tol
d me he’d probably just arrived too, especially since he wore the coat over a dark suit.
He slid into the back of the SUV with a pained-sounding exhale, and glanced at me in as much surprise as I felt at seeing him.
“Ms. Fox,” he said. “Hello.”
I glanced forward as Fah slid into the front passenger seat next to the driver. She didn’t look back at either of us.
“Hi, Mr. Farraday,” I said, smiling.
“Larry,” he said, grunting as he continued to battle his tie. “Call me Larry, Ms. Fox. Please.”
“All right,” I said. “But only if you call me Miri.”
“Deal,” he said.
His Brooklyn accent made me smile again. He exhaled sharply, grunting in relief when he finally got the knot to loosen around his neck. For a few seconds he just leaned there, breathing hard, dragging the knot further down his chest.
“Christ on a pogo stick. This weather is going to kill me.”
“Aren’t New York summers bad too?” I asked.
“Not in October,” he said, still fighting to breathe.
“Did you just get here too?” I asked sympathetically.
He glanced at me, his bloodshot blue eyes answering my question even before he spoke. “Just got off the damned plane. I didn’t even manage a drink at the hotel bar before that woman came into the lobby. I guess I should be grateful my suitcases are parked somewhere I can pass out later. Just don’t let me near the pool. You might find me floating in it... face down.”
I laughed for real that time. Then, leaning back in the SUV’s back seat, I combed my fingers through my hair, fighting to focus my own eyes.
“Yeah, I didn’t even make it to a hotel,” I said ruefully, glancing out the window as we pulled back out onto the busy, eight-lane street. I looked at Black’s lawyer, my tone a touch sharper. “Do you have any idea what I’m doing here, Larry?”
He threw up his hands, right before he glanced at me. “No idea.”
“Do you know what he’s being charged with?” I said.
“Nope,” he said.
“He didn’t tell you?”
Black As Night: A Quentin Black Paranormal Mystery (Quentin Black Mystery Book 2) Page 2