Cold Hit

by Christopher G. Moore

  “What’s your online name?”

  There was a toothy grin. “Weasel.” The girl looked like she was sleeping nestled in his armpit. This was the guy who had bar-fined another Cause-member’s girlfriend, violating one of the central tenets of the unwritten, informal code of ethics: don’t fuck your Cause brothers’ wives, girlfriends or steadies. The Cause brotherhood swore to uphold this code of ethics, which was nicknamed yings—your informal normal guidelines for sex. ying was short for poo-ying or “girl” in Thai. The only sin recognized by Cause-members was a violation of yings. Such violations were strongly discouraged.

  Naylor looked around the bar for Mucus. “I know you’ve come to patch things up between me and Mucus. But he’s too pissed off to show. I got word an hour ago. He doesn’t want the peace council. Thought you should know.”

  Naylor looked disappointed. “Maybe tomorrow.”

  Calvino motioned to Lek and waved off the drink.

  “Nah, we gotta go. But next time,” said Naylor, catching the gesture.

  “Jerry’s my real name,” said Mr. Biceps. “If it wasn’t for the Internet, most guys would have no idea they don’t have to put up with all that shit with American women.” Weasel clearly didn’t want to talk about what had happened between him and Mucus. Naylor couldn’t help wondering if the girl under his arm was the evidence to be presented to the peace council.

  “You got that right,” said Naylor. “Next time, I buy you a drink, Jerry.”

  Weasel disappeared back to the other end of the bar, carrying his catch. She hadn’t said a word the entire time.

  Naylor nodded towards Calvino before turning his attention to Jep as he moved his face close to hers, his nose touching hers. “What if the mosquito bites never happened? If you drop your pants and there are more than a dozen bites on your ass, I will pay your bar fine. How’s that for a deal?” Naylor took a five-hundred-baht note from his wallet and slammed it on the bar.

  “And if she loses, then what?” Lek asked from behind the bar.

  “She buys me a drink.”

  “Drop your pants,” Lek said in Thai to Jep. “Show this farang your ass.”

  She unfastened her belt and slipped the jeans over her hips. Turning around, she slid the jeans and underwear down and bent forward. “Jesus Christ, you ever seen anything like that?”

  Calvino glanced at Jep’s bare cheeks, all red, puffy, and raw from the mosquito bites and the scratching. “She wins, Naylor. Give her the money.”

  The girl cuddling against Jess shivered, turned her face, and buried it in his chest.

  “Look at those bites,” murmured Naylor.

  “Good one, Tailgunner,” said Jerry, shouting down the bar.

  “Sai kang-keng,” Calvino said to her. Put your pants on.

  Jerry cupped his hand and shouted a crack about Jep having AIDS. Then two more customers were laughing at her, making crude jokes about her having AIDS. Calvino was off the stool and over to his table where he lifted one of the customers up by his shirt. “It is the worse kind of scum that laughs at a girl trying to make a living the best way she can. What makes you think you’re better than her? When you laugh at someone else’s misery you stop being a human being. Why don’t you and your buddy get out?”

  “Don’t get involved with them,” said Jess’s voice in his ear. “It’s not the job.”

  But it was too late. The music had already stopped and the bar went into a deathly silent mode. One moment everyone in the bar is thinking about getting laid; a moment later, they are thinking about going to a hospital with their head split open. Eyeing Calvino with his bruised and stitched face in the half-darkness of the hong, his jaw hardened with anger, the two punters paid up their bill and left. The three farangs shifted nervously in their seats and also discreetly paid their bills, slipped out into the night through the beaded curtain entrance. Suddenly the bar was empty except for the dancers, the dek serve, Naylor, Jess and Calvino. And Weasel, who had been necking with his girl in such a way that it looked like he was kissing his own armpit, also paid up and joined the others who had left.

  “We were just having some fun, Tailgunner. You ought to get your friends to lighten up,” said Jerry, flexing his biceps on the way out.

  “You’re great for business, Vinee,” said Lek.

  “Jesus, Calvino, are you trying to destroy my reputation?” asked Naylor. “These men look up to me. How can I hold a peace council if I have no respect?”

  Calvino pulled a five-hundred-baht note out of his wallet and bought a round of lady’s drinks for the bar. He also bought a gin and tonic for Lek and asked her to send a Johnny Walker Black upstairs to Jack.

  “No respect? You have a reputation for what?” asked Calvino as he finished ordering the drinks.

  “Now we go back,” said Jess, gently uncoiling the girl from his lap as the farangs left the bar.

  Jep slumped forward on the bar counter, resting her head on her folded arms. Tears spilled down her face, splashing on her bare arms and onto the counter. She was crying softly.

  “Why are you crying, sweetheart? It’s all these problems Mr. Calvino is causing, isn’t it?” asked Naylor. He had his arm around her waist.

  She lifted her head, blew her nose on a bar napkin. “No one ever help me before,” she said.

  Naylor thought she meant him.

  “Anyone picks on you and my bodyguards will take care of that punk,” said Naylor, his face full of sympathy. He patted her on the shoulder.

  She did nothing to correct his confusion. “I think you good man.” Why turn away an opportunity?

  “Wes Naylor is a good man.”

  “You know in my life, only Jep help herself. Last night you know why I get drunk?”

  “I have no idea. Maybe your boyfriend broke your heart,” said Naylor.

  She shook her head. “My sister die. Boyfriend’s motorcycle crash. She die. He’s fine. I think too much. Remember everything. Like when I was eleven years old. Just a young girl. I go to the river with my sister. My friends, my sister, and me. We want to play in the water. We can’t swim so we stay close. Laughing together. Splashing each other. I laugh and laugh so hard and feel so good. When I get out of the river, I have a big shock. I feel something down there,” she touches between her legs. “And I look. It is terrible.”

  “What was it?” asked Naylor.

  She hesitates. “Not important.”

  “You can tell me. What was there?” asked Naylor.

  “A pling,” Jep said. “I forget the English word.”

  “Leech,” said Jess, who was listening to her story. “The English word for pling is a leech.”

  “The pling is inside me. Part in, part out. I start screaming. I don’t know what to do. My friends run away. My sister run away, too. They are too scared to help. I run around after them, this thing hanging around, hitting me on my thighs. It’s like I want to run away from the pling. But I can’t; it’s stuck inside me, sucking my blood. I cry so hard. I think I will die. I fall down on my knees. I can see myself in the river. Like a mirror. I am very afraid. But I reach down and I pull it out. This pling is in my hand and I throw it down. There is blood everywhere. On my legs, on my hands and arms. I look at the pling on the ground. It is big and fat with my blood. Sucked from inside here. I find a stick and I hit the pling until it is in small pieces. My blood is on the grass, and I sit there still and wait. Twenty, thirty minutes, maybe longer, I wait until my friends and sister come back. And they see all that blood and how pale I look, and they think I am ghost. That the pling has killed me and I come back for revenge. Now they are screaming and running away. They stop laughing. They are scared. Scared of me. And I know that I am alone. No one will ever help me. Not in this life. And now my sister, she die. And I want to think it is all mistake. That she’s sitting on the grass all pale and she will come running after me like I go after her. I know she won’t come. I know I can’t help her. She die jing jing. And my father, he say, ‘I name you dtoo yen.
I am a poor man. You are the only dtoo yen I ever have. The pling go up you. It is my fault. I bring bad luck on you. On our family.’ Then my sister die, he say the same thing. ‘dtoo yen, I do the wrong thing in my life,’ my father say. ‘I am sorry.’ It was the only time he ever say sorry to me.” Tears dropped down her cheeks.

  “Why don’t you let me help you?” said Naylor.

  “You have a wife?” asked Jep, fastening her belt. It was as if she had already shifted channels as if she surfed on remote control. She was now back to the standard bar question. The Fridge had gone ice cold.

  Naylor laughed, one of those loud thunderclouds of a laugh. “Me, a wife? You’ve got to be joking. I am a confirmed bachelor. A free-range rider. Mr. Tailgunner.”

  Calvino translated this into Thai. “Mai mee mia.” He has no wife. Jep understood without the translation.

  Jess was pacing back and forth, watching the door for any new customers, stopping to check out Naylor—doing his job in other words.

  “Okay, okay. We’ll go back to the hotel. These guys are staying with me. But don’t worry, they have their own hongs.”

  “Where are you staying?” asked Lek, wiping the bar counter.

  “The Brandy. All three of us. This Thai and this Italian.” He points a finger at Jess, then punches the air at Calvino. Lek smiled at Calvino; the kind of smile that registers a plan, a threat, an appointment in the making.

  Jep squeezed his hand. “I come back with you. You already pay bar fine.”

  “That was a bet. You won it fair and square. But if you wanna come back, I mean, you can come back. What I am saying is Eric said you were really nice and cute and it’s not far. The Brandy’s just across the street.” He was also thinking about the Cause brotherhood code of conduct and how this was Eric’s girl, and how Weasel, whose own reputation was under a cloud for poaching Mucus’ girl, had seen him in the bar. She was so goddamn tempting. Weasel was gone. So were the others. He would sneak her back, Naylor thought. He could always claim Jep had gone with Calvino or Jess.

  Jep knew where the Brandy was; probably knew the inside of most of the hongs.

  “Not a good idea,” Jess said to Naylor, looking Jep over.

  “I don’t think I asked you whether it was a good idea,” said Naylor.

  “Thank you for helping me,” Jep said to Calvino, as she touched the edge of his hand. A quick, soft movement.

  “I like this girl. So she’s coming with me whether you like it or not.”

  “Jep, do me a favor,” said Calvino in Thai.

  “Anything you want,” she replied.

  “Keep him off the street tonight. Make certain he stays in the hong,” said Calvino in Thai. Since Naylor’s barfining was likely at a minimum a technical breach of the yings, the odds were in their favor that Naylor wouldn’t venture out of his hong with Jep. Being disgraced by his Cause-members would be terrible for his Internet business.

  She nodded slowly, taking in Calvino’s instruction, trying to decide if this was his way of asking for repayment.

  “Hey, what are you telling her about me?” asked Naylor.

  “That you are kind and generous man.”

  “Like hell you did.”

  Jess wasn’t so sure he liked Calvino intervening in this way, taking the lead when he should have known it was his place to stay one step behind and let Jess make the decisions. Their asset had paid for a bar ying and was taking her back to the hotel. Jess clearly understood why Pratt had declined to escort Naylor once it became clear the Brandy Hotel was the destination. To make a stand would be pointless; one Thai against the two farangs, they would win. So Jess remembered his police training and remained calm; he did not raise his voice, show emotion.

  “For tonight,” said Jess. “I can go along with it.”

  “Tonight, tomorrow night. Let’s just get through the moment. You guys need to get a life. Better yet, take back a girl. I’ll pay the bar fines.”

  “We’re on duty,” said Jess. “No drinking, no yings.”

  “I’ve got to hand it to Doc Nat, he found the last two men in Thailand to take this job seriously.” He picked up the drink slips from the chit cup and added them up in his head. “Don’t forget the ten percent discount you give to Cause-members.”

  Calvino exchanged a look with Lek. She leaned forward, the palms of her hand flat on the counter, her fingers splayed out. All those many hours of working on her nails on full display. “The discount was Jack’s idea,” she said. “See you after closing.”

  “I am working.” Calvino watched as she raised her index finger snakelike and pointed it at him.

  “I won’t get in the way,” she said.

  All the while Calvino thought that nothing he would say would keep Lek from coming around to his hong. That he would just have to deal with the situation when she came knocking on the door. Jack had once said of his wife, “She’s a time rat. She would eat the hands of the clock face of any man.” Then he had grinned that terrible fisherman’s grin of pulling in an empty net and said, “All yings are time rats, time bandits. Open their guts and what you find inside their digestive tract are the seconds and minutes of a hundred men’s lives. Time cannibals. All those broken minute and hour hands just lying undigested in her stomach. It makes me want to drink.”

  And on the way out of the bar, Naylor walked ahead holding Jep’s tiny hand inside his huge fist. He was more than double her size. She looked like the eleven-year-old who had climbed out of the river and onto the soft, wet bank and discovered the ultimate facts of life as a pling dangled from her vagina—that you are basically alone in the universe, and come that moment of perfect terror, no one can save you but yourself. If you are lucky.

  Back in his hong, Calvino stretched out on the bed, hands folded behind his head. The only light came from the neon lights below and CNN flickering across the TV screen. He turned the volume off. There was nothing from the outside world that he wanted to hear. He was thinking that he had been too hard on the farang at Lovejoy. He tried to figure out why he had done what he did in the bar. Most guys like them arrived in a bewildered, lonely state—middle-aged men who had the look of men who had been in a guarded camp for many years, living in a police state with twenty-four hour surveillance. Sex, like politics, had always been local. Wars had always globalized sex. But the Internet globalized sex for the vast civilian population. No one forced them to wear uniforms, carry a gun, or get shot at. They could concentrate on hunting yings as a full-time occupation. And a generation of men were trying to understand what had happened to their lives and how their maturity had not prepared them for places like the Plaza. They were pumped from all the posting on the Internet but it never occurred to them that nowhere in all those postings was there ever one from one of the yings who actually worked the scene. Her voice was always absent. Punters always spoke for her. Attributed words to her, gave her motives and desires and expectations. Painted her any color they wanted. But none of the Cause-members ever asked if in that silence there were decent human beings, yings who were not on the con, yings looking for a way out. Not that Jep was necessarily that woman. But what was it in the hunters, what hunger or need was in them that made them accept the presumption that she couldn’t be? It was that presumption which was the creed of the Cause; one voice which said, presume guilt, presume the con, presume the rip-off. Calvino’s Law: Put the baby powder on the floor and take a shower but don’t assume the footprints of the girl you brought back will always lead to the cash box. And that was the worst part of thinking; one looked into the mirror of another’s hypocrisy and saw oneself.

  It had been McPhail who had once said, “Sex with a beautiful ying. What else is there worth rolling out of bed for in the morning and rolling back into bed for? Think about it. There ain’t anything else.”

  PRATT had lightly knocked on Calvino’s hong as he was about to turn up the volume and find a way out of all the troubled thoughts Naylor had caused him. Calvino hit the remote and the sound came
on. There was a major snowstorm in the Midwest and cars were skidding all over some Chicago highway. Pratt knocked again, this time his knuckles banging hard, a cop’s way of getting attention.

  “Lek, I don’t sleep with married yings. Go home,” said Calvino.

  The knock came again. He rolled off the bed, muttering under his breath as he unfastened the chain on the door and shouted through the crack. “Jesus, don’t you take no for an answer?”

  He checked the peephole. Pratt stood relaxed, his hands at his side. He was dressed in civilian clothes. His gun was in a shoulder holster. Calvino opened the door.

  “Expecting someone named Lek?” His smile kept on getting wider as he waited for an answer.

  “Someone who wants my body.”

  “A pound of a farang private eye’s flesh?” asked Pratt, turning and flashing a smile. “Therefore prepare thee to cut off the flesh. Shed thou no blood; nor cut thou less, nor more, but just a pound of flesh; if thou tak’st more, or less, than just a pound, be it but so much as makes it light or heavy in substance, or division of the twentieth part of one scruple, nay, if the scale do turn but in the estimation of a hair, thoudiest and all thy goods are confiscate.”

  Pratt walked across the hong and sat down as Calvino locked the door, thinking of the Merchant of Venice. Calvino ignored Pratt’s recital of Portia’s speech, knowing there was some message inside that would only distract him from his mission.

  “I just came away after having a long talk with Jess.”

  Why a long talk, wondered Calvino. What was hatching? Only he didn’t want to get distracted over the word “long” and so he kept to business. “The Plaza blew Jessada away. And it didn’t help his view of the world to find out about Naylor’s other business interest on the Internet. A website for single guys traveling to Bangkok. About peace councils and holding court for yings violations.”

  Pratt nodded. This he understood. “He might be Thai but he’s from LA.”