Cold Hit

by Christopher G. Moore

  “No problem.” He took a bite out of the sandwich, then waved at Ewok. “Send another Singha to Fat Ralph, will you sweetheart? He’s having a bad day.”

  “Remember I was telling you about the problem I had tracking down a woman named Noi?” asked Calvino.

  McPhail was still chewing his sandwich. “You found her and she did this?”

  “No, I haven’t met her. Not yet. She phoned from Roi Et and we arranged to meet on Tuesday at the Emporium.”

  “I knew you’d find her. The way you were throwing money around you must have had a hundred Noi’s falling out of the bushes. Maybe you ought to hire a bodyguard when you go after these yings.”

  Ewok delivered the Singha to McPhail, giving him an evil, nasty glare, then slid into the booth next to Calvino. She raised the double shot glass of Mekhong and toasted him. Touching the glass to her lips, she closed her eyes and swallowed the double-shot in one gulp. She winced, made a face, and swallowed some water, refusing to smile as if she had got religion.

  “You ever notice how Mekhong almost makes a human being out of Ewok?”

  A waitress brought Calvino vegetable soup and a chicken pot pie. The Lonesome Hawk bar was the kind of place where there was no need for him to order; they knew on Monday through Friday when he came through the door to just bring whatever the special was and he would eat it without much comment or complaint. But this was Saturday.

  His waitress spread a plastic mat on the table in front of Calvino. Ewok had gone to the bar and ordered a second Mekhong shooter. She knew Calvino was good for it and after the first shooter she was already forgetting how bad his face looked and how bad she was feeling about herself, her kid, her mother, her friends, about the hopelessness of her life. She looked over at Ricky hitting his head against the bar and knew exactly how he felt.

  “You may have got tagged on the snout, but I almost ended up in jail last night, man. It was a close call,” said McPhail, exhaling smoke from his nostrils.

  “Did you get caught swimming without a permit in the street?” asked Calvino, pushing aside the soup and cutting straight into the chicken pie, steam pouring out of the vent. McPhail, an antiques dealer, found those rare 12th century Khmer pieces, but before he could sell them to a collector, there were all kinds of obstacles: the military, the police, custom officials, NGOs, a chorus line of officials claiming McPhail was doing something illegal, wrong, like selling off the national treasure.

  “You think you’re being funny but you’re almost right. I was at Patpong. I got into a cab on Silom just opposite McDonalds. We take off. I say to the driver, ‘Do you mind if I smoke a joint?’ It’s pissing down rain. I always like to smoke in the rain. The driver turns around and says, ‘I am a cop.’ I mean he’s got the badge and all that shit. The old windscreen wipers are beating back and forth. And he’s looking real happy. He says, ‘Five thousand baht.’ I look at him, and say, ‘Hey, man, you gotta be kidding, man. I will eat it.’”

  Calvino smiled. “You said you were going to eat the joint?”

  “You got it, man. Then he’s got no evidence. I say to him, ‘Man, you see this? It’s your evidence. I eat it, you got nothing.’ The cop looks in the rear view mirror and he says, ‘Okay, one thousand baht.’ I say, ‘I am still gonna eat the sucker. Tell you what, I am gonna give you a hundred baht. The fare ain’t gonna be more than fifty baht. You make out; I get stoned.’ The cop thinks about this, and he says, ‘You mind if I turn off the air-conditioner and roll down the window?’ It’s pissing down rain and I say, ‘Fine, man, do it.’ I light up the joint, and am smoking away. Of course the fucking rain is coming in on me. This is his revenge. Get that fucking farang wet. I ask him, ‘How long you been a cop?’ He says, ‘Five years.’ I say, ‘You ever catch someone high on pot robbing a bank?’ He said, ‘No.’ I said, ‘You ever catch a crook killing someone on pot?’ He says, ‘No.’ I say, ‘You ever catch someone raping someone on pot?’ He says, ‘No.’ I say, ‘Doesn’t that tell you something? Pot isn’t causing any crime wave. It’s reducing crime. You guys ought to ease off.’ When we got to where I was going, I was totally wet from the rain coming through the open window, but his car was fucked up too. I figured I’d dry out before his car did. I gave him the hundred baht, and made certain he let me off in a dark spot, and I slipped away. Man, no way he could identify me. We all look alike to them in the light. In the dark and rain? No way that cop could finger me. What I am saying is this, before you ask a cab driver if it’s okay to smoke a joint, find out what his day job is first. Otherwise you could end up shitting yourself.”

  “I had two cops in my apartment today.”

  “They busted up your face for what?”

  “I got a new job. A bodyguard assignment.”

  “No shit? They’re hiring you after they saw your face? That’s something.”

  Fat Ralph was shouting at the help. “Put on some goddamn country music. Why isn’t there any music? And goddamn, will someone buy these fucking chicken pies? I need money.” A redneck bar not having country music playing was as close to sin as anyone could ever get in Bangkok. This wasn’t what motivated Fat Ralph; a failed chicken pot pie special was something that only a country music record could put right.

  “What are they paying?” asked McPhail.

  “One grand a day.”

  McPhail puffed hard on his cigarette. “That’s some real money for a change. Who are you protecting, Hun Sen?”

  “An American lawyer.”

  “Man, that’s even worse than guarding Hun Sen. No need to ask why someone wants to kill a lawyer.”

  “I need a favor, McPhail.”

  “What can I do? Guns, bullets, broads?”

  “I want you to meet Noi for me on Sunday.” He laid the photo of her on the table and slid it over to McPhail.

  McPhail eyed the woman in the photo, pouring his fresh beer into a glass, then taking a long sip.

  “She’s not bad looking. But someone sleeping looks better than when she wakes up and is flying around the room trying to hammer you or rip off whatever isn’t nailed down.” He was thinking about Calvino asking him to meet this woman. What was this about and why was he asking McPhail to make his appointment? This was the woman he was looking to find and now he wanted him, McPhail, to take the prize of the meeting? It didn’t make sense. The Ewok nuzzled against Calvino’s shoulder, sticking her tongue out at McPhail.

  “It doesn’t make sense,” said McPhail. “Why don’t you go out and meet her yourself? Ain’t you getting paid to do that?”

  “I have a conflict. She’s only available on Sunday. This Sunday. That’s it. Monday she’s on a plane to hong Kong. So it’s Sunday or never. And on Sunday, I am on bodyguard duty.”

  With a column of smoke rising from his cigarette, McPhail squinted and looked at Ewok through the haze; for the first time a dim, faint smile appeared at the very edges of Ewok’s mouth. It was a smile the way that planet earth was a cloud of dust on its way to being a planet four billion years ago. “And it would be just your luck that someone would whack out your lawyer while you were meeting with sleeping beauty.”

  “That would be my luck.”

  “Okay, but what do you want me to do with Noi? Buy her a couple of shooters and put her back to bed?”

  Calvino did not have much of an appetite. His chicken pot pie was largely untouched. Ewok leaned over and felt his forehead, then pressed her head gently against his shoulder. “I want her to make a telephone call. One call, McPhail. That’s it.”

  “This is about making a telephone call? Man, this private-eye business is strictly low rent. Delivering birthday cards, getting prostitutes to make phone calls. Maybe you ought to add driver’s training for newly arrived farangs.”

  “So you will do it?”

  “Of course I will do it.”

  “You got some time now?”

  “Does it look like I have an appointment with the Prime Minister?”

  “Good, let’s go do some shopping.�
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  FOUR

  FAT RALPH THREATENED that he was gonna throw each of the twenty-nine fucking unsold chicken pot pies one at a time into the street and watch the dogs get sick stuffing themselves and he then was going to put out a goddam contract to whack that fucker of a fortune teller. McPhail was one step behind Calvino as they left the Lonesome Hawk and the ravings of Fat Ralph. They walked along the road; the pavement was all broken and the parking spaces blocked with junk and laundry hung out to dry on metal gates. Calvino made a mental note to buy a lotto ticket which had the number twenty-nine. It was one of those Thai things; whenever someone died or some shit came down, the number with luck attached was found on the wall, door, car license of the victim. He saw no reason why the same principle shouldn’t apply to chicken pies flung into the snapping jaws of the soi dogs. One man’s bad luck brought another good fortune. That was how the universe kept itself in balance.

  Calvino had parked his car in front of the wine store that never seemed to have any customers. McPhail lit another cigarette from the one he had smoked to the fag end and threw the old one in the street, stepped on it with his shoes, ground it into the hot cement like he was making a statement. McPhail was always making statements. He blew out a lungful of smoke. McPhail gave a long, hard, mean look at a Thai male in his early thirties. Calvino knew the guy McPhail was giving the evil eye to was an undercover cop. McPhail had some bad jazz channel with the volume turned up inside his head and he looked like he might square off on the cop. Whatever had triggered this reaction in McPhail didn’t seem all that important as they paused under the baking hot sun. Calvino looked at the sky for clouds. Would it rain again? Would the night bring more floods sweeping down Sukhumvit Road? He hated to think about it as he fished in his jacket for the car keys. He smiled as he pulled out the key chain. Acting out of habit, he looked at the keys. What good were they? The window was busted; there was nothing to lock. Besides locks made no sense in Bangkok. Any fool could open a locked door in under two minutes unless of course they were being paid to open a locked door for a farang and then it would take about an hour so the fee the farang had to pay could be justified. Stealing direct as opposed to stealing in your face were two different time zones where money was minted. It was just the way it was. Calvino reached inside the broken window and opened the door.

  Then McPhail climbed in on the other side, slammed the door, pushed his seat back to gain some leg room, and adjusted his sunglasses so that they fit snug straight on his nose. McPhail had that grim, faraway look—a look that said he wanted to take a nap, suck on his cigarette and dream about making a big score in some jungle village deep inside Burma.

  “You’ve gone all quiet,” said Calvino.

  “You see that guy back there?”

  “The one you were staring at?”

  “Yeah, that’s the asshole.”

  “He’s a cop. His name is Surat.” Calvino saw this surprised him.

  But it was uncool to show his surprise. McPhail blew out some smoke.

  “I know he’s a fucking cop. But I didn’t know when I should have known it. You know what I mean?”

  Surat worked the Square as plainclothes cop. He often hung around one of the massage parlors. He leaned inside a doorway a couple of feet away from Calvino’s car. He fit into the background, and for the casual visitor or the regular with too much to drink, Surat could’ve been just about anyone hanging out in the Square. Another meaningless face amongst the security guards, touts, bouncers, messengers, waiters, merchants, traders, pimps, gangsters, or he might have been someone’s driver waiting outside the massage parlor while his boss was inside getting a blow job. Calvino remembered him straight away. The first time he laid eyes on Surat, Calvino made him as a cop; his traditional shirt with the Nehru collar was worn on the outside of his trousers, showing the bulge of a .357 magnum concealed in his belt. His hair was short like he’d been out of the monkhood for a month. His eyes were hard and always moving, following farangs coming and going from the bars. The Square was home to all types of locals, and they had a sameness, allowing them to blend in. Only Calvino’s nose told him this guy was a cop and he asked Pratt about him. Pratt confirmed his suspicion. Several weeks later, Calvino had been at the firing range with Pratt and they watched Surat draw and shoot a .357 magnum. The man was a good shot.

  “Well, Sir Rat,” said McPhail twisting up Surat’s name into something ugly in English. “The bastard caught me with a roach. I saw him coming at me and I tried to throw it down the drain. But I fucking missed. What a time to be a lousy shot. So Sir Rat leaned over and picked it up, and said, ‘I am a cop. You’re busted.’ I looked at him, and I thought, Man, this ain’t a cop. It’s some asshole trying to shake me down. He was holding onto my arms. I made one of my moves and broke his hold. It wasn’t all that hard. And I started to walk away. Big fucking mistake. He came after me, I mean really pissed off, and he pulled a big motherfucker of a .357 and put it against my head. ‘Okay, you’re a cop,’ I said. But he was too pissed to settle for two thousand baht. He gets on his walkie-talkie and they send a police car to the Square. I am in deep, deep shit. They book me, fingerprint me and haul my ass down to jail. I had to call in favors from people I don’t like to bother. These Thai friends came down and handled the negotiations. I was shaking like a leaf. It took my friends two hours to buy my ass out of there. I was shitting bricks. Forty thousand baht. They asked for a hundred thousand. Two hours later I was back in the Square nursing a Singha, and thinking to myself I am starting to understand what makes Ricky hit his head against the fucking counter. It ain’t because he killed all those Vietnamese, it is because he fucking miscalculated the most important decision of his life. It’s because he got sucker punched into going to ‘Nam in the first place.”

  McPhail sighed long and hard.

  “I’ve seen Surat on the firing range. He’s got a knack with the .357,” said Calvino.

  “Fuck, Calvino, where were you when I needed you?”

  Calvino stopped for traffic at the mouth of Rama IV. “Someplace else. We are always some place other than where we ought to be.”

  McPhail sucked on his cigarette. “Where I ought to be is looking over twenty thousand jade beads and two Burmese yings who are waiting for me to book my next trip to Rangoon.”

  Calvino turned his car into Rama IV and found himself behind a dump truck disgorging clouds of dust and gravel and building site debris. A gust of hot, dusty wind passed like a firestorm through the broken window. Choking and hacking, McPhail covered his nose and mouth. “What’s that guy hauling, toxic waste?” asked McPhail.

  The cloud of foul air was thick. Calvino watched the road through the fog of dust. Finally he left the dump truck on Rama IV as he turned into Soi 22. Driving in Bangkok was like going through one of those FBI urban terrorist training ranges where they gave a guy a gun and walked him down a specially built city block. In one window a dusky guy with a moustache popped up with an Uzi and in the doorway a pop-up target of a nine-year girl holding school books. There was never any warning. And you couldn’t trust anyone. Motorcycles cut in and out of the lanes, coming off sidewalks, going the wrong way down the road. Pickup trucks parked wherever the driver’s brain had cut out. Buses screaming down the outside lane, unloading passengers in the middle of traffic. A normal Bangkok traffic day. After a couple of near misses, Calvino took the short cut past the President Park connecting to Soi 24. McPhail leaned forward, his jaw dropped open, he stared at the broken window, the ragged edge of glass still hanging loose.

  “No wonder I can’t fucking breathe in here. There’s no window. Don’t tell me, not only did you get beat up, but someone burgled your car,” said McPhail.

  “I locked my keys inside last night.” The light changed but the traffic had not yet started to move.

  “You broke your window? In that rain. You broke your own fucking window? And I thought I’d done some dumb things in my life.”

  “It was flooding and I had to
get to the hospital. I was bleeding all over the place. A broken window was the last of my worries.”

  McPhail threw out the cigarette and lit a joint, closed his eyes, rolled down his window, and smiled. “Jesus, Calvino, you are running a streak of some really mean bad karma. What did you do in your last life to have all this shit come down on you?”

  Calvino smiled as they reached a four way stop, one of those Bangkok intersections where any self-respecting driver bluffed that he wouldn’t stop. Playing chicken made Calvino think of all those wasted pies Fat Ralph was crying about. On Bangkok streets, whoever had the better, more expensive car and could intimidate others, make them fearful, could force them to give him the right of way. In Thailand, stop and yield signs were roadside decorations; the real rule of the road was what one could get away with. “We’ve just turned the corner, McPhail. I see the beginning of a wonderful day.”

  He drove down the ramp and into the basement parking lot of the Emporium. Calvino parked close to the elevators on Level B1. He got out and slammed the door. Some loose pieces of glass fell onto the cement floor, turning the head of a guard. It was just glass breaking into finer pieces.

  “Guess it makes no sense to lock the door,” said McPhail, nodding at the broken window. “Besides what Thai would want to steal it? Where’s the face in driving a wreck?”

  ONCE they entered the shopping mall, Thailand disappeared—no smoke, no pollution, and no chaos. On the ground floor hall was the world of Louis Vuitton, Celine, Christain Dior, Hermes, Escada, and Versace. Calvino kept on his sunglasses; he felt conscious of how bad he looked and thought hiding under the glasses might help. But that was bullshit. Even without the beaten-up face, he would have kept them on. Why? He hated shopping malls; the whole idea was repulsive. He didn’t want to see anyone he knew in such a place. It was as if the displays in the windows had been shot out of the belly of a spacecraft hovering over the city. Alien names, alien fashion, and alien prices. A father pushed a stroller past Celine. A fat Chinese boy with dirty knees raced around in his designer shorts; he jumped on and off the first step of the escalator.