The Fourth Watcher pr-2

by Timothy Hallinan

  “I didn’t care enough to ask.”

  “It will be extremely unfortunate for you if he succeeds.”

  “If it’s any comfort to you, I didn’t get the impression he was in a hurry.”

  “Oh, he’s in a hurry,” Chu says. “And you should be, too. Don’t call me again unless you have something to tell me.”

  “Got it.”

  “And if I don’t hear from you, I’ll make sure you know where to find them. What’s left of them.” Chu hangs up.

  Rafferty’s heart is pounding in his ears like a battering ram, and his lips feel thinner than Elson’s. He jams his finger at the button to return the call, and the phone rings for a long time before Chu picks it up and says, “What?”

  “You don’t get the last line,” Rafferty says. “Listen to me. If you kill the cop’s wife, you’re dead. This is a guy who knows everybody. He’s assigned to help the United States government on terrorist issues, the Muslim unrest in the south, and all that. He’s connected like a fucking octopus. And I personally guarantee you that if anything happens to my wife and daughter, I will devote my life to finding you and killing you. And don’t think I can’t find you. You were the other thing my father talked about.”

  “I’m terrified. Are you finished? I’m getting wet.”

  “No, I’m not finished. You hurt them and you’ll spend the rest of your life looking over your shoulder.”

  “I already spend my life looking over my shoulder. But thanks for the tip about the cop. And don’t call back until you’re ready to tell me where Frank is.” Lightning freezes the day for a second, and there is a burst of static on the line. When Chu comes back, he is saying, “Tick, tick, tick.” Then he hangs up again.

  Rafferty slams the phone closed with such force he cracks the display screen on the outside of it. Black paramecia swarm through the rain in front of his eyes. He grabs his wallet, turns back to the ATM, pushes in a card, and then reaches down and flicks off the safety on the Glock. He keys in his PIN, waits, snatches the ten thousand baht from the machine’s jaws, and pockets it, along with his card. Then he walks straight across the sidewalk and into the street. A truck is lumbering past, and Rafferty slants past it as it roars by, then darts behind it and runs alongside for a quarter of a block before peeling off and crossing the rest of the way to the sidewalk. He slows to a quick walk without looking back.

  Half a block past Patpong, the sidewalk borders a construction site for a building that has been going up for years. Hiding it from the sidewalk is an ugly fence of rippled metal. It has an opening in it just wide enough for one person to slip through, and Rafferty snags his shirt as he squeezes through it. He finds himself in an expanse of mud, liberally pockmarked by puddles too wide to jump: red-brown mud and the slate gray sky framed on the surface of the standing water. The skeleton of the building stretches skyward to disappear into the rain and mist. The floors and the elevator shafts are in place. Rafferty thinks briefly about the elevator and then dismisses it. All they’ll have to do is wait at the bottom.

  He needs them closer.

  He hears the corrugated fence creak as the two of them force their way through the opening.

  Work on the site has been called on account of the rain, but in a small trailer all the way across the site a light gleams through the falling water. The door is on the far side, and he heads for it, his feet slipping in the mud. It seems to take much longer to reach it than it should, and his back feels like it’s six feet wide and painted bright orange, but eventually he is there, and he circles around, climbs the first two of the four steps leading to the trailer, and tries the door.

  It opens. The light inside is a leathery yellow, an incandescent bulb in a lampshade the color of parchment. No one home.

  Moving quickly, he climbs the last two steps, leaving muddy footprints on them, and plants his boots on the floor. The trailer sags slightly beneath him. He moves left, all the way to a door, which he opens. It’s a bathroom. He leaves the door ajar and then pulls off his shoes and backtracks, avoiding his footprints. At the top of the stairs, he jumps. The mud underfoot is amazingly cold.

  He figures they will split up and come around both sides of the trailer, so he drops to his belly and slithers beneath its center, pulling himself along on his elbows until he is facing back the way he came. In a moment he sees their boots approaching.

  They pause in front of the trailer and hold a whispered conversation. The one on the right-the thinner one, Rafferty guesses-is in charge. He has the last word. They do as Rafferty expected, one going left and the other right. Silently, Rafferty pulls himself around 180 degrees so he is looking at the side of the trailer where the door is.

  The two pairs of boots trudge through the mud, pausing cautiously at the trailer’s corners, approach the steps, and stop. They are probably listening. Then one of them disappears behind the steps, followed by the other. Rafferty can no longer see their feet.

  But he can hear them. More whispering, followed by the sound of one pair of boots climbing the steps. The door opens, hard and fast. An instant later the other follows.

  Rafferty is out from under the trailer in two seconds flat, clawing at the gun. It is in his hand as he steps through the door and realizes immediately that he has made a mistake.

  The fat one is to his left, in front of the bathroom door. He turns in surprise as the trailer dips beneath Rafferty’s weight, glances at the gun, and brings his hands up, but he’s not the one Rafferty is thinking about as the door creaks behind him. A point of ice touches the back of his neck.

  “Put the gun on the desk,” the man behind him says in Thai. The fat one smiles. He has a merry smile.

  “Or what?” Rafferty says, not moving.

  “Or I’ll shoot you. It’s not what I’m supposed to do, but right now your gun is all I’m thinking about.”

  “How about this? How about you give me your gun, or I shoot your friend.”

  “That’s his problem,” says the man behind him. The fat one’s smile slips a notch.

  “Shoot me and Chu will kill you.”

  “Chu’s not here,” says the fat one. “You are.”

  Moving slowly, Rafferty puts his gun on the work desk to his right. “Now what?”

  “Now is a little awkward,” says the man behind him. “Why didn’t you just let us follow you? Why did you have to make fools of us?”

  “With all due respect,” Rafferty says, “I just put my gun down, and you didn’t. I think that makes me the fool.”

  “It’s a problem,” says the fat one, not entirely unsympathetically. “You spotted us, you pulled us into this place. Our superiors won’t be happy.”

  “Why don’t we just keep it to ourselves?” Rafferty says. “Go somewhere, get dry, maybe have a cup of coffee.”

  “You’re joking,” says the one behind him. He prods Rafferty’s neck with the gun. “Take three steps forward.”

  “I’ll buy,” Rafferty says. Once he has moved, there will be no way he can reach the gun.

  “You shouldn’t have embarrassed us,” says the fat one.

  Another prod. “I said move.”

  “Oh, come on. There’s got to be a way-”

  “Now.”

  Rafferty steps forward, and as he does so, he sees the fat one reach behind himself, sees his hand come back with the long knife in it.

  The fat one shrugs an apology and starts to move in, and Rafferty balances on the balls of his feet, ready to leap forward. Then the man behind Rafferty gasps, and the cold spot of the gun barrel disappears. The fat one backs up hastily, fast enough to bang his back on the bathroom door.

  Rafferty turns, sees the arm around the thin one’s throat, the gun at his temple, and behind him the cold, calm eyes of Leung.

  34

  You Have Thirty-One Left

  "She needs her medicine,” Rose says. “She should have told us that at the house,” says the man with the gun.

  Noi moans again, this time at a higher pitc
h. Her eyes are clamped closed, her face sheened with sweat that glues her bangs to her forehead. Her arms are drawn in as though she is chilled, and bent at acute angles, bringing the knotted hands to the level of her heart. Fine vertical lines edge her mouth. Rose had piled up ten or twelve empty burlap sacks to make a bed for her, but Noi has twisted herself halfway off them, so that her legs are bare against the cold concrete floor.

  “Are you human?” Rose says. “Look at her. She’s in pain you can’t even imagine.”

  “Probably not,” the man says. “Although that hot water hurt.” He looks at an irregular red patch on his forearm.

  “I can go get it,” Miaow says. “I can take a taxi.”

  “Listen to you,” the man says. The rain rattles on the tin roof like a handful of tacks. In places water has seeped in beneath the walls. The man is sitting on a wooden packing crate, the gun dangling lazily between spread knees. A dozen cigarette butts lie at his feet, folded over and smashed flat in a light snowfall of ash.

  “I can go now,” Miaow says. She stands up, and the gun comes to life, the barrel lifting six inches, a snake poising to strike.

  “No you can’t,” the man says. “Sit down or I’ll shoot you.”

  “You will not,” Miaow says. “I’m a little girl.”

  “And I’ve got one at home,” the man says. He hitches up his left trouser leg to preserve the crease and gives it a critical glance. “But I’ll shoot you anyway. Sit.” Miaow steps back, so she is flat against the wall, but she remains standing.

  “That means you have a wife,” Rose says. “Suppose Noi was your wife. Suppose your wife was in this kind of pain.”

  “Suppose I shoot you all now,” the man says. “I’m going to have to do it sooner or later.”

  Miaow says, “You won’t.”

  The man inserts two fingers into his shirt pocket and comes up with a cigarette. He checks the position of the filter, puts it between his lips, and picks up the lighter that’s beside him on the packing case, next to the empty ashtray. “I don’t particularly want to,” he says, lighting up. “But I will.”

  “Will not,” Miaow says.

  Rose says, “Miaow.”

  Miaow says, “Give my mother a cigarette.”

  The man’s eyes widen, and then he chokes on smoke, and the choke becomes a laugh. “Give your mother. .” he says, and then he laughs again.

  “She needs one,” Miaow says. “She smokes all the time. Even more than you.”

  “She burned me,” the man says. Miaow just stands there, one hand extended. He laughs again. “Okay, come here. You take it to her.”

  Miaow, still in her pink bunny pajamas, pushes herself away from the wall and goes to the man. He takes out a second cigarette and gives it to her, and Miaow puts it between her lips. The man lights it. Miaow blows the smoke out of her mouth, uses her sleeve to wipe the taste off her tongue, and eyes the coal professionally to make sure it’s alive. Then she looks up at the man.

  “You won’t, you know,” she says.

  “He came out of Warehouse Two,” Arthit says into the phone.

  “Are Ming Li and your guys still there?” Rafferty says. “Make sure they see which one he goes back into.”

  “Thank you,” Arthit says. “Are there any other routine procedures you’d like to suggest?”

  “That’s the only one that occurs to me. Listen, we’ve got kind of a problem at this end.”

  “Kind of a problem? And who’s ‘we’?”

  “Leung and me.”

  “Leung’s at your apartment?”

  “Well, no.”

  Something slams down on Arthit’s desk. “Poke-”

  “I know, I know. I couldn’t stay there. So I went out, and two of Chu’s goons picked me up. Anyway, Leung and I have them now.”

  “Leung and you have them now,” Arthit parrots.

  “Yeah. Both of them.”

  “And you think this is kind of a problem?” Arthit’s voice has risen into an unfamiliar tenor range. “What’s Chu going to do when they don’t come back? For all you know, they’re supposed to be checking in every half hour.”

  “Okay, but in the meantime we’ve got them.”

  “What a cock-up.” The British schoolboy inside Arthit occasionally surfaces in times of stress.

  “That’s not really constructive,” Rafferty says.

  “Fine. Constructive. Let’s think positively here. Give me your ‘ideal scenario,’ as they say in those books.”

  Rafferty eyes the two men, now sitting on the floor with their fingers interlaced over their heads while Leung leans against the desk, staring at them as though they were already dead. Their police badges are on the desk. The fat one doesn’t look so merry anymore. Neither of them meets Rafferty’s eyes. He says, “Just a minute,” and goes out onto the steps and closes the door behind him. “Okay. We get them to tell us which warehouse, and then we let them go, and they hurry back to Chu and keep their mouths shut.”

  “That certainly qualifies as ideal,” Arthit says.

  “You asked.”

  “I was hoping for something in the realm of the possible.”

  “It’s possible,” Rafferty says.

  “Would you like to- Wait, hang on. Call you back. My other phone’s ringing.”

  Rafferty folds his own phone, goes back into the trailer, and tries to emulate Leung’s stare. He might as well be intimidating furniture, for all the reaction he gets.

  “Hey,” he says. They look up at him. “It’s a funny thing,” he says. “I look at you guys and I don’t see killers.”

  “We’re not,” says the fat one.

  “Tell you what, then. Let’s sit here until Arnold Prettyman walks through this door.”

  “That was Chu,” the fat one says. “We wired Prettyman to the chair and knocked him around some, and then Chu sent us out of the room.”

  “He didn’t want us to hear anything Prettyman said,” the fat one says. “He never wants anyone to hear anything.”

  Rafferty looks at the badges on the desk, which say sriyat and pradya. “Which one of you is Pradya?”

  “I am,” says the fat one.

  “Well, Pradya, it’s too bad nobody got that on video, because right now it looks like the nail in your coffin.”

  “We didn’t know Chu was going to kill him,” says the thin one, Sriyat.

  “Right.”

  “He said he had questions, said it might get rough. But he never said that-”

  “Fine. I’m sure it came as a total surprise.” Without looking away from the prisoners, Rafferty goes to Leung, the trailer creaking beneath him, and whispers into Leung’s ear. Leung nods and pockets the gun he took off the thinner cop. Then he straightens and gestures to Pradya, the fat cop, to go into the bathroom.

  Rafferty pulls his own gun and points it at Sriyat.

  Both men look confused, but Pradya gets up and reluctantly opens the bathroom door. Leung lazily trails him in.

  Rafferty gazes down at the seated cop for a moment and then waves him to his feet and backs up to the far side of the trailer. Sriyat follows. Rafferty puts a finger to his lips, raises his eyebrows, and waits. Fifteen or twenty seconds creep past.

  From the other side of the bathroom door, a shot. Then another.

  Sriyat goes white, and his head involuntarily jerks around so he can look at the door. It remains closed.

  “Sriyat,” Rafferty says. “I’m over here.” The man turns to face him. His mouth is working as though he’s trying to dry-swallow a handful of pills.

  “Your friend just gave the wrong answer,” Rafferty says. “This is the question. Which warehouse are the women and the girl in?”

  “Three,” the man says at once.

  Rafferty raises the gun so it points directly at the man’s right eye. “Which one? And louder.”

  “Three!” Sriyat shouts.

  The door opens, and Leung pushes Pradya through it. Pradya looks wetter than he did when they came in from th
e rain, and he walks as though the trailer floor were pitching beneath his feet.

  “Same answer,” Leung says.

  Rafferty’s phone rings, and he flips it open.

  “He went into three,” Arthit says.

  “It’s three,” Rafferty says. “We’ve got confirmation here.”

  “Of course,” Arthit says, “Chu will probably move them when those guys don’t come back. If he doesn’t just kill the girls and leave them there.”

  “They’re going back,” Rafferty says. “That’s where you come in. Hold on. I can’t talk here.”

  He goes out again through the trailer door and into the rain. “Offer them a ticket,” he says. “They’re cops, right? Badges and everything. We’ve got them dead to rights. Murder, kidnapping, practically anything you can think of. You could come here and arrest them right now, and their lives would be over. Or you can promise to let them walk if they’ll go back to Chu and keep their mouths shut.”

  “I don’t know whether I can keep that promise.”

  “Arthit. Who cares?”

  “How do we know that they won’t-”

  “We don’t.”

  After a moment of silence, Arthit says, “That’s what I was looking for. Certainty.”

  “If you were in their shoes, whose side would you come down on?”

  “I wouldn’t be in their shoes. But I take your point. If they stick with Chu, they’re going to take a big one the minute he’s gone. If they go with us, they’ve got my promise. It doesn’t mean much, and they’ll probably suspect that, but. . If the boat is sinking, you’re going to grab anything that looks like a life vest.”

  “I couldn’t put it better myself.”

  “Still, it all depends on how much faith they put in my promise and how scared they are of Chu, and there’s no way for us to know any of that.”

  “So we’re back where we started.”

  “Let me think about it.”

  “When Chu called, I gave him a line about you, one that might be tough for him to check.” He tells Arthit the story he sold Chu.

  “It’s not bad at all,” Arthit says. “That counterterrorism stuff, they keep all that pretty close. I doubt that Chu could get a line to anyone who could contradict that.” He pauses. “But it only works for Noi. The goal has to be to get all three of them.”