Fatal Journeys

by Lucy Taylor

  “Well, no, but I’m just saying…” He waved his hand. “Aw, hell, I don’t know what I’m saying.”

  They sat in silence for a minute before Danny said, “You know what I hate most? It’s not that I’m scared of dying anymore. It’s feeling like I never did anything with my life. It all went by so fast—like a dream—and now it’s over and I’m like, wait a sec, this can’t be all there is to it. I never did anything important or special or even fucking noteworthy—I never made a difference to anybody.”

  “That’s not true. You raised some great kids—”

  Danny rolled his eyes. “Cut the bullshit! My son Jimmy’s doing fifteen to twenty for his third felony. Benjamin, he just got another DUI and moved back in with his mother. And Angie—shit, I don’t know what the hell Angie’s doing and I’m scared to ask!” He gave a sour smile. “Prob’ly make for a drama-filled wake, though. Wonder if any of ’em will show up.”

  Eddie couldn’t come up with a reply. He was thinking about Margaret and her mother, asking the same question about himself.

  Kurt stuck his head in the door. “Hey, you two old sad sacks. I thought this was supposed to be a party.” He held up the camcorder. “C’mon, boys, let’s make some memories.”

  “Of what?” Danny said. “Me croaking?”

  “Shut the fuck up before I kill you myself,” Eddie said, shoving Danny out the door ahead of him with one hand and pocketing the drugs with the other.

  ««—»»

  As they bar-hopped that evening and into the night, Eddie discovered a terrible truth: no matter how much booze he slugged back, he couldn’t get drunk. Since the age of twelve, when he figured out the combination to the lock on his father’s liquor cabinet, alcohol had been his reliable life partner and friend, amping him up when he required bravado, mellowing him out when he needed calm. When things got really crazy, sufficient amounts of it delivered him into the promised land of sweet, pain-free Oblivion.

  Now he felt betrayed and furious, because the drinks delivered only a gut-wrenching clarity, his thoughts brutally sharp. Danny’s words rat-tatted through his head like a drumroll. What had he done with his own life, for Christ’s sake? No wonder his daughter hated him—he was a loser, a low-life, a drunk.

  So outwardly, for Danny’s sake, he joined the party, but inwardly he brooded and fretted and ran himself down in a belittling loop of recrimination.

  A little before midnight, Danny, Lek and Kurt called it a night and cabbed back to their hotels, but Eddie wanted to walk. He headed back up Lai Kroh Road and loitered across the street from the Numbah One Noodle, which was closed up tight, the shades drawn down like sleepy lids over the plate glass windows.

  A strawberry-lipped girl cooed to him from a doorway in the nearby arcade. She might have been an owl serenading the stars for all the interest he felt. A pair of Tourist Police swaggered by, and from long habit in dealing with the law, he turned his face away and briefly fell into step with a group of Europeans carousing past.

  Recrossing the street, he slipped into the alleyway, noticing an area behind some garbage bins that was strewn with cigarette butts. He moved deeper into the alley and decided to wait. He was good at waiting. He’d learned how to do that in prison. The night settled around him, cloying and moist, the air marbled with the aroma of hibiscus and wet earth mingled with the sour smell of the garbage. Out on Lai Kroh Road, traffic hummed and horns squealed and The Joy Palace glowed in pink neon, but the alley was submerged in shadow, purplish and still like deep water.

  Presently, a man slouched by, glanced around, and rapped on a side door, which opened to admit him. This pattern was repeated three more times over the next hour. Then Toy strolled outside, ambled around the corner, and lit up a smoke. He began to talk, low and heatedly, which almost rattled Eddie into giving himself away until he realized Toy was speaking into a Bluetooth type device.

  Crouched on aching knees, Eddie fought the urge to grab the pimp by the throat and bash his head to bloody mush against the wall. He argued himself out of it. Still, the arrogance of a man who exploited children, yet felt safe to loiter in the darkness, puffing on a smoke, presented some possibilities.

  He was considering this when a taxi pulled up and disgorged Flat Top, who much to Eddie’s satisfaction, sported a butterfly bandage across his swollen nose. Toy greeted him, but instead of going into the noodle shop, the two men crossed the street and disappeared into the neon-veiled Joy Palace.

  As soon as Toy and Flat Top went inside, Eddie straightened, brushed himself off, and knocked on the side door.

  A bulky man with gelled hair and a face as flat and expressionless as a plank opened the door. He wore jeans and a black muscle shirt under a loose sport coat. His prolonged, silent scowl exuded such menace that Eddie figured he must practice it in front of a mirror.

  If there was some kind of profile for perverts, he must have passed it with flying colors, because the plank-faced guy gave him the most cursory once-over and admitted him.

  Inside, a stairway led to a green-paneled lounge and a dinky bar where a couple of solitary drinkers nursed Klong beers. Pornography featuring western actors played on a big screen TV.

  A petite, buxom woman, dimpled and round as a dumpling, perched behind a counter. She stood up when Eddie approached, made the wai gesture, and proposed a few ethnic specialties.

  “You want Thai? Cambodian? Vietnamese?”

  For a crazy instant, Eddie almost thought she was talking about food.

  The woman misread his hesitation. “You want boy? We got boy, too.”

  “No, no boy.” His voice boomed in his ears. Was he shouting? “A girl. Toy told me you have them young.” He put his hand down as though patting a child on the head. “Like so.”

  “You know Toy?”

  “Yeah, friends. Guy at a bar introduced us.”

  The woman cocked her head and considered him like a banker about to turn an undesirable customer down for a loan, then touched a taloned finger to her chin and chuckled softly, a prickly sound that scurried up Eddie’s neck like a spider. He shook off his desire to flee and fumbled his wallet out.

  “I want her for all night.”

  “No all night. Two thousand baht, one hour.”

  “I’ll give you ten thousand baht, and I take her with me. Have her back here tomorrow morning. That’s a good deal, lady. I’d take it, I was you.”

  “You not me.” A derisive smile gashed the woman’s face, but her eyes remained dull and impassive as a freshly-swept floor. She must hear this kind of pitch all night, Eddie thought.

  “One hour,” she said. “Two thousand baht. You have problem with that, talk to your friend Toy.”

  “No, no problem. An hour’s fine.

  The woman smiled and nodded enthusiastically. They were buddies again.

  She led him behind a gold curtain and up some stairs into a low-ceilinged hallway lined with numbered doors. An air-conditioner whirred somewhere, but the air was stagnant and moist, swirling with dust motes and smelling of disinfectant. Thai pop music blatted loudly over tinny speakers.

  The woman selected a door, unlocked it using a clutch of keys, and motioned Eddie inside. The room was minimalist sex club chic—a bamboo floor lamp with a low wattage bulb, a flat screen TV, and a queen-sized bed covered in blue silk sheets with a drip pattern of stains in the center.

  “Stay,” she said as though addressing a pet.

  Eddie waited, wondering if the next person to come to the door would be Toy or maybe the police. He wondered what Ilsa would say if she saw him now and then quashed the thought of her, because he was cat-nervous and needed to focus.

  The door opened gradually and the shadow of a child flowed into the room, silent as water. As the girl moved into the light, Eddie could see she wore pajamas with a black and red triangular pattern and red rhinestoned sandals. Her hair hung in a long ponytail, and she stared at her pink-painted toenails.

  He squatted before her, knowing he reeked of liquo
r and sour sweat, and tried his best to communicate by his tone of voice that he meant to help her.

  “Hi, honey. I’m Eddie. What’s your name?”

  She didn’t answer. The floor riveted her attention.

  “I’m not going to hurt you, understand? I’m getting you out of here. Okay? Speak English?”

  She looked up at him, her tiny round face so lacking in emotion that she might have been a life-like doll. “You want boom-boom or lick-lick?”

  Eddie recoiled. “Jesus, no, nothing like that.” He put his finger to his lips. “Shhh. You be quiet, and we’ll get out of here, okay?”

  He scooped her up and checked the hallway. Empty. The discordant music had stopped, leaving a disquieting silence in which all sounds seemed amplified. His own breathing boomed in his ears. From behind the eggshell-thin walls came the sounds of squeaking bedsprings, shuffling feet, murmured voices.

  At the end of the hall, a metal door opened into a stairwell. Descending it, he entered another corridor, narrow and poorly lit, that reeked of grease and cooked vegetables. He thought he must be near the noodle shop kitchen and began searching for a door connecting the two sections of the building. Worse case scenario, he figured he could break a window to get out. He tried a likely-looking door. It opened to reveal a small, gloomy room where a half dozen young girls lay curled on mattresses on the floor.

  An older girl, who appeared to be in her mid-teens, sat up and gaped at him. Eddie started to close the door, then saw the raw fear in her eyes and tried to reassure her.

  “I’ll send help,” he said.

  Her eyes flicked to the child in his arms. For a second, there was crystal cold silence. Then she threw back her head and screamed.

  From overhead came a staccato burst of voices. Feet trampled the stairs.

  Desperate for a means of escape or a place to hide, Eddie raced back down the hall, grabbing at doors along the way, finding them locked. The last door that he tried was poorly latched and gave when he put some muscle into it.

  There was a grunt and the banging of bedsprings, then a male voice like a wild beast roared, “Shut the effing door, we’re busy in here!”

  Eddie reeled, the scene before him stabbing his eyes like ice picks. His mind struggled to process the images—a camera mounted on a tripod, a child’s skinny legs, the white, thrusting rump of a man—and something cracked in his chest like a bone breaking.

  When he turned around, his face was inches from Toy, who bared his teeth and shoved a snub-nosed Glock .22 against the side of Eddie’s mouth.

  “Put her down,” said Toy, and when Eddie did so, bending slightly to lower her, he lifted the gun and hammered the butt into Eddie’s skull like a wrecking ball into a wall. The world receded to a pinpoint. A massive roaring filled his ears, and he felt himself sinking into red darkness.

  Suddenly Toy yelped and jerked up on his toes. A knife blade scraped so roughly into his neck that blood oozed out in a thin crimson line.

  “Drop the gun or I’ll cut your fucking throat,” Flat Top said.

  ««—»»

  Ilsa paced back and forth in the living room of the Thai-style wooden bungalow near the Ping River where Flat Top had brought Eddie, piling him into a tuk tuk, tipping the driver extra because of the blood he left on the seat. She wore a flowered silk robe and slippers and paused to only to light another Gauloise from the pack she’d been chain smoking ever since Eddie and Flat Top arrived. Between puffs, she’d furiously explained that Flat Top was her brother, David Abbott. Since the death of his daughter Tran, they’d been working for Child Rescue International, with Abbott trying to win Toy’s trust by playing the role of a pedophile attempting to buy a little girl.

  “I kept an eye out for pedophile johns and tried to buddy up with them,” Abbott interjected into her tirade. “Then I’d send their pictures and data on to Interpol.”

  “Now wait a minute,” Eddie said, wincing as Ilsa pressed a fresh ice pack to his throbbing head. He was lying on a sectional sofa, a painful lump that he tried to ignore jabbing his lower back. “You mean you thought I was one of them. I ought’a kick your ass.”

  “Hey, you looked the part,” said Abbott. “I saw you staring in the window of the noodle shop like a man trying to come to a decision about something, and whatever it was seemed a lot more important than what you were gonna have for lunch. You looked—I don’t know—haunted, freaked out. Sometimes the ones who still have a conscience, that’s how they look.”

  Eddie turned to Ilsa. “What about when you and me met at the bar? Had this guy here told you to bust my balls?”

  Ilsa exhaled a thin twist of smoke. “No, that was just me busting your balls. On general principles. I didn’t know you and David had already had a magic moment.” She paused to crush out her cigarette. “What you did tonight was incredibly stupid, Eddie. Nobody steals a kid from a Thai brothel, and certainly not Toy’s! He’s obsessed with protecting what he considers his. He doesn’t even sleep at night, just wanders around guarding his little house of horrors. He wouldn’t ’ve thought twice about killing you.”

  “She’s right,” Abbott said. “They’d be fishing your body out of the Ping.”

  “I still don’t get it,” Eddie said. “I saw you and Toy waltz into that bar, the two of you thick as thieves. I figured you’d be in there all night. Why’d you come back?”

  “Toy got a text from the Dragon Lady,” Abbott said. “She told him some weird guy claiming he was Toy’s friend wanted a young girl. I had a feeling it might be you, so I followed him back.”

  “What about the kid you were with yesterday? Toy let you take her?”

  “She isn’t one of Toy’s,” Abbott said. “She’s a girl Ilsa and I helped free from another brothel a few weeks ago. I wanted Toy to see her with me, then tell him I was making a porn flick and try to persuade him to sell me one of his girls. If he went for it, I’d be taping the whole conversation, which would be enough to get the police to organize a raid.” He glared at Eddie in disgust. “But that’s not going to happen now. I’ll never get near Toy again. In fact, now I’m a target. I may have to leave Chiang Mai.”

  In the silence that followed, the only sound was the tiny whoosh of Ilsa’s lighter and the soft scrape of her slippers on the polished wood floor.

  “So what do we do now?” he said.

  “There is no ‘we’. Now David and I try to figure a way to deal with the mess you’ve created.” She lit another cigarette and inhaled so deeply the smoke must have blackened her toenails. “Best case, Toy thinks you’re just a loony crusader on a misguided mission—which I guess pretty much sums it up, doesn’t it?—or maybe you were trying to kidnap a child for your own nasty purposes. I might have chosen otherwise, but David felt he couldn’t just stand there while Toy pistol-whipped you to death. So as far as infiltrating the brothel, he’s useless now.”

  “But the guy tried to kill me. David here’s a witness to that.”

  “Unfortunately another way to look at it is you’re a guy who was trying to run off with a kid, and David pulled a knife on the man who was trying to save her.”

  “What about the johns? There was a guy—” Eddie gulped and had to pause to collect himself. “—a guy in the room right behind me who must’ve seen or heard what went on.”

  “You think a man who has sex with children is gonna admit to it?” said Abbott.

  “Well, hell, I’ll go to the cops myself.”

  Ilsa sighed and sank down heavily into an arm chair. “Just know that if you go there with some wild story about Toy, odds are better that you’ll end up in prison than he does.”

  “So he just gets away with it?”

  “He does for now. Thanks to you getting involved in something you know nothing about.”

  Eddie figured he’d swallowed his ration of shit and then some. He got up gingerly and aimed his aching body at the door.

  “Hey, sorry, lady. Sorry I tried to make a difference.” He looked at Abbott. “Too goddamned
bad you didn’t cut the bastard’s throat when you had the chance. If you had, I’d’a been happy to put my prints on the knife and say it was me done it.”

  He let himself out into the moist, fragrant night and found himself in a garden fringed with frangipani and hibiscus, redolent of perfume. He heard his name called and Ilsa appeared in the doorframe, a darkly Rubenesque silhouette punctuated by the orange flare of her cigarette.

  In the ink-drop darkness of the garden, her low, throaty voice washed over him.

  “You tried to do a good thing, Eddie, there’s no shame in that. But no more heroics, okay? Go back to your friends. Whatever you saw tonight, let it go. Forget about it.”

  She had no way of knowing the effect her words had on him, but they acted like kerosene on the fire of his rage. For a second, his vision purpled and he had trouble drawing a breath.

  “That’s what you don’t get,” he said finally. He stood facing her so she wouldn’t notice the bulge that the .22 made under his shirt. In the confusion after Toy dropped it, he’d managed to palm the gun without Abbott noticing. “You don’t know what I saw. You got no idea. And if I don’t do something about it, I’m gonna to keep on seeing it ’til the day I die.”

  ««—»»

  A few minutes after leaving Ilsa and David’s house, a tuk-tuk dropped Eddie at his hotel, where he went to his room, popped a couple of Danny’s Vicodin and collected what he was going to need. Rain had begun to spatter the windows, so he put on a slicker and rain hat, which made it easier to conceal his battered face when he strolled past the snoozing desk clerk at the Mandarin Orchid and took the stairs to Kurt’s room.

  He banged on the door, and Kurt opened it, clad in boxer shorts and an undershirt. A TV bolted to the ceiling in one corner of the room blared, but Kurt appeared to have been sleeping through the commotion, his eyes sleep-encrusted, pillow marks indenting one cheek.

  “What is it?” he said, backpedaling as Eddie shouldered his way past him. “Hey, you’re dripping water on the floor!”

  Eddie took off his rain slicker and threw it over a chair. He checked the bathroom, the closet, and under the bed, then he started pulling out drawers, throwing Kurt’s meticulously folded t-shirts and trousers and underwear every which way.