“What are you going to do, fucking shoot someone who isn’t armed? Is that what you are about? Why not just you and me finish it?”
Calvino shook his head. He had pulled his gun. “TJ, TJ I hate it when someone says something like that in a movie. Do you know how fucking stupid that line sounds? ‘Why not just you and me finish it?’ I am going to drop my gun to fight mano à mano with someone who says such stupid shit? I don’t think so. Of course, if you take one more step I will happily shoot off your balls. No problem. In Darwinian terms I really don’t think you have much of a future however this is gonna turn out.”
At this moment, Panya’s other son, who had emerged with an urn of ashes, came up behind Calvino and kicked the .38 out of his hand.
“Pee, this guy knows dad. And he says that dad’s here with Pee Chaiwat,” said Lek.
“Shit,” said his older brother, who backed off, turned and started talking to Lek.
“What do you mean, shit?” asked TJ. “Hey, man, I am fucking talking to you, Pruet.” Lek and his elder brother, Pruet, looked at TJ and they didn’t look that happy. “This guy’s bluffing. He doesn’t know your father. Let’s finish him off and get out of here.”
“One moment, please,” said the older brother who was a taller, more slender version of his fat little brother who had tried out his kickboxing skills. After a brief exchange in Thai, the brother with the urn put it on the ground, and both brothers disappeared around the corner, leaving TJ to do whatever he wanted to do to the farang—but as far they were concerned it no longer had anything to do with them.
“Hey, get back here.” TJ half ran after them, then stopped and walked back to the pickup.
“Your leadership skills could use some work, TJ,” said Calvino. His .38 was about ten feet away under a car.
“And you are going inside the coffin.” TJ, breathing heavily, stood with the knife clutched in his hand, waiting to make his move.
“Do you have any idea what you are involved in, TJ?” From the expression on TJ’s face he either knew or he didn’t care. “But guys who think the Chicago Bulls are still a team have shit for brains,” said Calvino.
It would have been better to call TJ a motherfucker than go after his team. When he saw that Calvino could not get to his gun, he rushed him, knocked him over, and sat on top of Calvino. Calvino had his hands locked around TJ’s hands, which had the six-inch blade. If he let up even a little, TJ would plunge the knife into his chest. And TJ was strong, one of those guys who worked out, lifted weights, not to mention that he was twenty years younger.
Two other Thais appeared. One was the driver of the Benz. They stood in the shade and watched the two farangs rolling on the ground. Monks, hearing the shouting, came running down the path, their sandals flip-flopping on the hot pavement. TJ was using all of his strength; no question he was going to kill Calvino if he had the chance; he was going to finish what he had likely been paid to do that night arrived with the birthday card. Calvino tried, doing one of those stunt man rolls, like this was the movies. But TJ was too strong. All Calvino managed to do was drag TJ’s leg through some fresh dog shit.
“TJ, tell me you really don’t want to go back in a box like Danny.”
TJ was thinking with his balls, his manhood, his ego, and he rotated his right shoulder just as Jess came up behind him with his gun drawn.
“Drop the knife,” Jess shouted.
TJ half looked around in time for Jess to hit him as hard as he could between the eyes with the butt end of a .9mm handgun. There was a loud, sickening thwack of metal against bone. Calvino’s hand came up with dog shit that he smeared over TJ’s face as the blood spurted out of the ragged gash left by the blow. TJ was out cold, face down in the dirt. Blood poured out of TJ’s shattered nose. Pratt knelt down beside Calvino, helping him to his feet.
“I was about to put out his lights,” said Calvino, trying to decide what to do with the dog shit between his fingers. He leaned down and picked up his severed sleeve and cleaned his hand.
Pratt turned TJ over on the ground and saw the soft yellowish wormy dog shit and blood covering what had once been a not unattractive face. “I’d say in another minute he would have knifed you,” said Pratt.
Calvino touched his own nose with his index finger and shrugged his shoulders. “He is a busy little bastard, running drugs, beating people up. I doubt even his mother would recognize him.” He got to his feet, and put a hand on Jess’ shoulder. “And by the way, Jess, thanks. I had the situation under control but I appreciate the help.”
“What happened to your jacket?” asked Pratt.
“I fell down. Don’t give me that look. That’s what happened. All right?”
The monk who had met Calvino ran over to TJ, knelt down, looking to find a pulse.
“He’s not dead,” said Calvino. “After a big meal of dog shit he’s just sleeping a little.”
“You could have killed him,” said the monk, looking up, his face filled with confusion.
“Like I said, I am from New York. If I’d wanted to kill him, he’d be dead. Believe it.”
Panya’s other two sons, Lek and Pruet, had run back to the parking lot and raised the alarm; the undertaker’s boys had saved Calvino’s life. They had found, their father and brother Chaiwat in the parking lot just as Calvino said. The reunion of one fearful, crooked family took place next to the van.
Calvino leaned down and picked the bag of heroin off the ground and handed it to Pratt. Whether Panya and his boys had any idea about what really was inside the coffin or not, it was difficult to tell. What they had been doing was close enough to standard procedure, including some back handers and special incentives; on the surface all they were doing was processing dead farangs, picking up the forms from the Police Hospital, getting the Embassy to process the papers, embalming the body, taking it out for a cremation, double charging for coffins. Doing what businessmen do: maximize profit in life and in death.
Pratt looked at TJ, then walked over to Calvino. “Khun Panya’s sons heard you talking to this farang as if you knew him.”
“I have a nose for these things.” He reached inside the pickup and threw Jess a Ziploc bag of drugs. “Take a look at this. The coffin is filled with heroin.”
The flight on which Daniel Ramsey’s body was scheduled would leave Don Muang at 5:00 a.m. That allowed some lead time before the smugglers found out things had not gone down the way they were supposed to and came like a mad pack of dogs to reclaim their drugs. They weren’t going to be all that happy to lose a seventy-five-kilo shipment.
Jess and Pratt pulled the coffin out of the pickup and put it on the ground not far from where TJ lay in his unconscious dog-shit sleep. Pratt squatted down, taking close-ups of the coffin interior from every angle. It was leaking heroin from where Calvino had ripped off the plywood panel. Pratt paused for a minute and looked up from the camera.
“Let me have the camera,” said Calvino. “I know it’s your brother-in-law’s. But I haven’t broken it yet, have I?”
Pratt handed him the camera but didn’t look all that happy doing so. Calvino turned the camera on TJ. He snapped one, two, then three shots.
“You are wasting film,” said Pratt.
“It’s digital. It doesn’t use film. Besides, I want to post these shots on the Internet,” said Calvino looking up from the camera.
“Yeah?” asked Jess “Why bother?”
TJ was still out cold.
“A Cause-member after a Monster Fuck,” said Calvino. He handed the camera back to Pratt.
They had a coffin full of the best evidence in the world: seventy-five kilos of heroin. Death sentence amounts of dope for an entire gang of smugglers. At the least for the guys who did the heavy lifting. But was the cache sufficient evidence for the big guys? It was already late afternoon when Pratt made a second phone call to a colonel in a special Thai drug unit. Colonel Virat had been waiting for this call. He and his men were elite cops who worked with the DEA, trained in the
States, straight, tough, no-bullshit cops. No one was going to slip them a white envelope of cash or threaten them or make them destroy the evidence or doctor the case.
When Pratt switched off the phone, he confirmed that Colonel Virat and his men were on their way to the wat. They would take over. Calvino stood off to the side, leaning against the Benz, nursing some bruised ribs in the shade. Pratt and Jess were talking about how they could get the heroin to LA and waiting for TJ to regain consciousness and for the narc police to arrive. A monk with a bowl of water knelt on the ground wiping the shit and blood off TJ’s face.
“Help me get him out of the sun,” said the monk.
Jess and Calvino grabbed TJ under his armpits and pulled him to the shady side of the pickup, his heels dragged along the pavement. They lowered TJ to the ground.
“What a sorry sonofabitch,” said Calvino looking down at TJ. “He’s gonna be hearing worms and tiny insects crawling inside his head.”
The monk knelt down again and dug some wormy dog shit out of TJ’s left ear.
Calvino had gone over and picked up his .38 police service revolver and put it back in his holster. “I came this close to shooting him.” He held his forefinger and thumb about an inch apart. “About the same distance he came to sticking that knife in my chest.”
“If you shot him, that wouldn’t have helped anyone but the men smuggling this shit,” said Jess. “They would like him dead.”
“And if he had killed me, he would have done five years for murdering a farang,” said Calvino.
“What sick fuck made this poor guy eat dog shit?” asked Naylor, who had suddenly appeared out of nowhere and stood just behind Pratt to shield himself in case Calvino decided to slam him around again.
“Wesley, my good man, that’s a good question. Why don’t you come over here and ask him yourself?” asked Calvino.
“Good man, my ass, you are a fucking sadist.” Naylor’s lower lip shot out and he shook his head the way a child does when he doesn’t want to do something he’s been asked to do. “No, I’ll watch from here. Thank you very fucking much.”
“You’re gonna get heat stroke. Get out of the sun.”
“If I pay you to be my bodyguard, will you stop hitting me?”
“I’ll have to think about that,” said Calvino. “There are certain satisfactions in life that money can’t buy.”
“I have a good feeling about this,” said Naylor, hands in his pocket as he sat on the gate of the pickup truck, looking down into the open coffin, its guts spilling out kilos of white gold.
SEVENTEEN
PRUET AND LEK broke into a run as they spotted the van. Lek pulled ahead, hitting the back door with the flat of his hands, yelling, “Father.” In the distance a temple bell rang, making a clear, distinctive sound like a fingernail ping against fine crystal. Chaiwat moved crablike to the back of the van and opened the door and found his two brothers out of breath, wide-eyed with fear.
“Pa, we must go. It is very bad,” said Pruet. His Adam’s apple looked like it had a spasm.
“We have a problem,” said Chaiwat.
Pruet was looking past his brother at the priest and nun.
“Who are they?”
Chaiwat shrugged, half-turned in his seat, glanced back, and said, “I don’t know.”
Pratt had been talking with a monk. Jess’s first reaction was to stay with the van and watch Panya and his sons. They were material witnesses and that status gave them every incentive to make a run for it. But the more he studied Panya’s face, the more he saw that the old man was not going anywhere. He had no energy. He was used up, defeated, scared. Jess half-turned in his seat and found Noi’s hand, giving it a firm squeeze.
“I never doubted you,” said Jess.
“Thanks. I hope you are not sweet-mouthing me.”
“It’s not my nature. I am not a farang,” he said, and he was about to say something else. “That song you sing about feeling the pain, feeling in love, and waiting for him to tell you he cares.”
She saw this and put a finger to her lips. “Yeah, I like that song, too. Nice words,” she said.
“Then you better go and sing that song.”
He nodded for her to get out the back. She didn’t need any more of an invitation.
“See you around,” she said, climbing past him and out of the door and stepping between Pruet and Lek.
She turned and waved.
“Yeah, see you around. Maybe on MTV,” said Jess.
He followed her out of the van. And Panya like a robot ambled out of the van and into the parking lot, looking like someone who wanted to run but had nowhere to run to.
A smile crossed her face. “You never know.”
Panya hadn’t even realized, as he embraced Pruet and Lek standing in the parking lot that Noi had slipped out of the van and had walked out to the main road where she caught a taxi. The nun had fled the scene but the priest had real staying power. Big tears splashed down Panya’s cheeks as he hugged his boys. “We go to America,” he said.
They thought the old man had lost his mind. But he knew exactly what he was saying.
“The police know,” said Chaiwat. “I think they know everything.”
Jess knew it was time to check on Calvino inside the wat.
Noi’s instinct had been right. She had said nothing to Panya or Chaiwat or to the other two sons whose name she never learned; leaving them in their fear and grief. Better to leave them with the impression of her as a nun on her way to church. She had been inside that church of fear, she knew that place and did not envy them for what was lying ahead. Their old way of life in Thailand was over, and that was a forever kind of over; and her new life was about to begin.
DON Muang Airport. Pratt knew that the international airport was the only practical way out of Thailand; practical meaning, he had a plausible explanation—backed by Colonel Virat—as to why things happened the way they did and why those who stayed behind made that decision and why Panya and his three sons were flying to LA. An entirely new cast of actors would have their credits high up in the “crawl” of the script written by the drug enforcement people who had swarmed into the wat and taken over as if it had been their operation from day one.
Pruet, the eldest of Panya’s sons, drove the pickup onto the ramp leading to the cargo terminal. Daniel Ramsey’s coffin and his ashes had been placed inside, all of the heroin had been put back inside, and the satin stapled back to the plywood panel. No one would ever know that Calvino had ripped it out with a tire iron. The Toyota van was followed by a mini fleet of unmarked cars. Colonel Virat, accompanied by two of his men, had a car, the DEA had two cars, and Pratt drove his brother-in-law’s van with Jess and Calvino riding up front. The best cover was always the same: stick to routine; vary it and everyone notices that something new, something different is going down. They make a mental note, they sense something isn’t the same and that makes them suspicious and that was the last thing anyone wanted to happen at the cargo terminal. Panya’s sons did what they had done many times before—they unloaded the coffin onto a trolley and pushed the trolley into a cargo bay. None of the officials or other people in the bay thought twice about their presence. They weren’t doing anything strange. They were getting on with their usual business, in the usual way, and smiling the usual smile. An official sat behind a counter watching a soccer match on TV. He looked up long enough to take the papers from Pruet and the airline ticket for the cargo. He looked over the side at the trolley, stamped the papers, and waited until the goalie stopped a score before handing them back. Lek, the fat dopey-looking son, set a bottle of Johnny Walker Black wrapped in a brown bag on the counter. The official reached up, grabbed the bottle by the neck and lowered it below the counter. He didn’t take his eye off the TV. They briefly talked about football. Pruet was a Manchester United fan, and they talked about betting and bookies. They talked about the weather, about food, and about the traffic. And how the clouds had been seeded with salt and the rain h
ad flooded Sukhumvit Road. They talked about everything except the cargo: the coffin, the remains that were supposed to be inside. A hand with thick blue veins came over the counter and passed the papers, all neatly stamped, back to the Panya boys, who walked back to the van. The fleet, which hadn’t killed their engines to keep the air-conditioning going full blast, followed the van as it headed out of the cargo terminal and crossed over to the international passenger terminal.
They parked inside the loading area next to the VIP building.
“We can handle it from here,” said Dean, a woman about five-eight wearing a conservative gray pantsuit. She was one of two DEA agents who had gone to the wat. What Dean meant was that Pratt and Calvino and Naylor were no longer needed. But she didn’t want to sound like a complete bitch so she left it a little vague, knowing that Colonel Virat had enough brains to pick up on what needed to be done.
Colonel Virat stepped up to Dean and whispered something. “Of course, Colonel Pratt will come along with us.”
“I guess that leaves you and me,” said Naylor.
“Calvino comes along,” said Pratt to Colonel Virat in Thai.
Dean puffed her cheeks up with air and blew hard; she was annoyed. She wore just enough lipstick to indicate that she had taken some care over her personal appearance. She had displayed just about the right amount of displeasure to indicate her attitude towards civilians. She was one of those cops who hated civilians. “But just don’t open your mouth about anything,” said Dean.
“But I signed all the fucking papers. And you are leaving me behind? Fucking white women.”
Dean spun around and put a knee straight into Naylor’s balls. “Fucking white men.”
No one said anything to Naylor who leaned over, holding the side of the van, a sound coming out of his throat like the sound of the last dog barking after all of the others have stopped. A tiny, distant scared sound that gets half lost before it hits the air.
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