The Hot Countries

by Timothy Hallinan

  “Do they have a house? Would you have your own bed? Do they have enough to eat?”

  “Yes.”

  The girl says, “Then you’re crazy.”

  Treasure puts her hands together, palm to palm, and clasps them between her knees, leaning forward until she’s bent almost double. As she straightens up, she says to Chalee, “Will you go back there with me? Please?”

  “No,” Chalee says. She looks away. “I can’t. They don’t really like me.”

  “Then that’s it,” Treasure says. She swallows loudly. “We’ll stay here.”

  “But . . .” Dok says, and falls silent.

  “But what?” Chalee says.

  “But what about that man, you know, the one who wants to take you?”

  Treasure is pressing her hands together so tightly her fingers are white. “I think I have to run.”

  In unison Dok and the girl on the cot say, “No.”

  The afternoon is far enough along now so that the slants of light pushing between the curtains stretch almost all the way across the floor to make bright, inviting paths to nowhere. Treasure follows one of them with her eyes and says, “I won’t go back.”

  “The man,” Dok says again.

  “They can’t protect me from him,” Treasure says. “He’d kill them all—Mrs. Anna, Mrs. Anna’s husband, that slow fat guy Poke hired. He could kill all of them in a minute. He could do it for fun.”

  Dok says, in a whisper so the girl on the cot can’t hear, “We have hiding places, near here. Even Boo doesn’t know about them.”

  Treasure says, mostly breath, “Show them to me.” Dok pops his lower lip out and rocks a little from side to side, considering. “Tonight,” he says. “When Boo’s asleep. But just to look, not to stay.”

  Chalee says, “But how are you going to tell Mrs. Anna?”

  “I know how,” Treasure says, and she gets up. Chalee follows suit, and after a moment Dok gets off his box. The girl on the cot says, “Pssshhhh,” a sound of disgust.

  As they go downstairs, the girl on the cot calls after them, “You’re all crazy.”

  Anna is writing on the whiteboard when a sort of tingling in the back of her neck tells her the energy in the room has changed. She turns to see Treasure come back in, followed by Dok and Chalee. All over the room, kids sit forward.

  Treasure and Chalee are wearing old clothes as they file between the other kids’ seats. Girls look at Chalee assessingly, and a couple of them put their heads together to whisper. In the lead, Treasure holds a neatly folded brown paper bag, and Anna knows what it contains. Treasure puts it carefully on Anna’s desk, says, “Thank you. I hope you can get your money back,” and goes to her seat. Chalee has already sat down, without so much as a glance at Anna.

  Dok is chewing on his lower lip, but when Anna looks at him, he stops and drops his gaze to the floor.

  Anna’s heart is pounding in her ears. She looks at Treasure, and when the girl won’t meet her eyes, she turns back to the whiteboard, trying to read what she just wrote.

  19

  Face Powder

  Rafferty is alone in the empty apartment, taking advantage of the solitude and half hoping Varney will burst through the door so Rafferty can shoot him. His Glock gleams on his desk, loaded and freshly wiped clean of Rose’s face powder, which has a way of sifting down through the tiny seams in their headboard and into the compartment concealed there, where the Glock is locked away when it’s not needed. He wonders how many other guys’ guns smell like face powder.

  His suitcase, battered by hundreds of thousands of miles, yawns open on the couch. There’s nothing in it, not even his shaving kit, but, he thinks, it’s a beginning. He’s actually pulled the suitcase out of the closet and carried it in here. He went into the bathroom and found the kit. While in there, he put into the kit the packet of moist paper towelettes that Rose uses on her face every night and had forgotten. Then he left the kit in the bathroom, but still. Surely all of that counts for something.

  Rose’s clean face. The scrubbed face of the girl with the birthmark, violently scrawled with makeup. Rafferty has a quick impulse to snatch up the gun and head out into the deepening dusk in the hope that Varney will materialize in his sights. He hates the man enough to pull the trigger and worry about the consequences later.

  Five or six sheets of paper are littered any old which way across his desk. They all have lists on them, or rather they have variations of the same list, representing attempts to think ahead and plan for contingencies: if this, then that. So far they’re rich in if-this entries and short on then-thats. Here and there a sketchy skull and crossbones occupies the space where a then-that is called for. The page with the most writing on it contains a rant he scribbled minutes ago to get it off his chest, using the kind of language that long ago would have earned him a slap from his half-Filipina mother.

  He pulls back, gratefully, from the matter at hand to speculate idly how his mother is. She’d been abandoned twice in the little stone house in the desert outside Lancaster, California, where Poke had grown up—first by Poke’s father and then, a few years later, by Poke, when he went into the wide world to find a place he could pretend was home. In their absence she’s remade herself into a real-estate agent who enjoys surprising success hawking sandy acres in the desert to people fleeing the skyrocketing cost of housing in Los Angeles or in areas with other attractions to recommend them. Water, for instance.

  The last time Rafferty saw her, she’d seemed like someone who’d been created to be viewed from a distance, her once-mercurial personality bottled firmly inside a surface so shiny it looked enameled. He’d meant to stay for a week, but it was evident after one eternal meal that he and his mother had little to say to each other, and he’d flown back across the Pacific the next day, without anything deeper than formal regret on either side.

  She’d started life as Angela Obregon, and after eighteen crowded years as Angie Rafferty, wife and mother, she was Angela Obregon again, a steely solitary, and she didn’t need anyone.

  Unlike Poke. He knows exactly who he needs, he’s got them, and he’s not going to let anyone take them away from him.

  He picks up a sheet he’d laid aside, which Miaow had found a use for. She’d been practicing her autograph in the Latin alphabet, wandering freely between ornate filigree and severe simplicity. There are multiple variations on each of her names: Miaow Rafferty and, more often, Mia Rafferty, along with a new one (to him) Moira Swan, which he hopes is a passing enthusiasm. At the bottom, in her crimped, tentative, everyday hand, are the names Philip Rafferty and Kwan Rafferty. Each name is written three times.

  When he’d first seen that his name and Rose’s had shouldered their way into this hand-scrawled fantasy of fame, he’d been taken unawares. He’d had to blink a couple of times to clear his vision.

  That was when he’d gotten up to get his gun.

  The apartment is smaller than it should be with a baby on the way, but it’s housed the only real family he’s ever had. He’ll say goodbye to it reluctantly, but everything that’s been important to him here—that small, unbreakable unit of three (or four, or five)—will remain intact. Whenever he thinks about it, he’s dazzled by the sheer improbability of the three of them finding and recognizing each other across distance, language, culture, belief, and expectations, and all of them realizing what they could have, what they might be able to build together. Rose would chalk it up to karma, but Rafferty thinks it was as random as winning a lottery.

  So: the gun, face powder or no face powder, its easy pull, its matte-black ugliness, the weight of it in his hand. He’s used it before, and the experience changed him forever, but he knows he can use it again. He has something he never thought he’d have, and no murderous son of a bitch with a mustache and yellow teeth is going to break it.

  As he resumes packing, he thinks that Varney has at least made it
clear to him what he’ll do to protect the union between him, Rose, and Miaow. And what he’ll do is anything.

  20

  A Starter Mansion for a Camel Trader

  The emotion he’d experienced in the apartment had been an odd mixture, a sort of grim intent wrapped around love. The early-evening traffic, a series of long waits interrupted by short jerks forward, and the sight of Pradya, the daytime thug, looking out of place in an armchair in the hotel lobby and failing to notice Rafferty coming through the revolving door, brings the grimness to the fore. By the time he slips his card into the slot on the door to their room, he’s feeling as if the ideal dinner would be something he’d personally killed.

  “We want to eat upstairs,” Rose announces the moment Rafferty drops his suitcase onto the thick carpet. “It’s fancy.” She’s gotten dressed up, for her, in long jeans and a top with three-quarter sleeves the color of a cyclamen, which makes her skin look like it’s been dusted with gold.

  “Can I sit for a minute?”

  “You can have five minutes if you want.” She turns to the window that runs the full length of the room. “Look,” she says. “This view is so much nicer than ours.”

  “When I can get up, I’ll look.” He sinks into the couch and then sinks some more. “Jesus,” he says. “What is this, quicksand?”

  “Isn’t it nice?” Rose says. She’s pulling the drapes all the way open so Rafferty can get the full effect of the panorama. “It’s much softer than the one we’ve got, and it’s so pretty.”

  “It is?” The couch is covered in cream-colored cloth with broad, shiny crimson stripes running down it like gift-wrap ribbon. Fleurs-de-lis gleam here and there, woven with some reflective synthetic thread into the cream areas. Stand the couch on end and revolve it, he thinks, and you’d have a giant barber pole. Looking around the room, he realizes he had completely forgotten, perhaps in self-defense, what it looks like.

  What it looks like is the waiting room for the Marie Antoinette Salon in an expensive brothel, where you sit until you’re permitted to enter the queen’s chamber, with the trick guillotine over the bed. The couch takes up much of the wall to the left of the door, giving him a good view of the huge, over-decorated living room, dominated by the long window. Fluffy Chinese approximations of Persian rugs smother the floor, and on the walls are pinkish paintings done in the kind of faux–French impressionist style so popular in convalescent hospitals the world around.

  Rose, who has been waiting for his reaction, says, “You don’t like it?”

  “The whole place,” he says, hearing the sourness in his voice, “looks like a starter mansion for a camel trader.”

  “I see,” Rose says, and his heart plummets at her tone. He’d been too self-involved to hear the excitement at the view in her voice. He hadn’t heard the yearning for a sofa like the one he’s still sinking into.

  “I’m sorry,” he says, trying to get up. His apology, which was to have included bounding across the room and masterfully taking her in his arms, gets lost in an awkward attempt to free himself from the couch’s embrace.

  “I know I don’t have very good taste,” Rose begins.

  “No, no,” he says, trying to stand. “Please—”

  “But I’m here—we’re here—because of you, and you could at least let me try to enjoy it.”

  “Wait, I didn’t mean—” He scoots as far forward on the cushion as he can, puts both palms flat on the table, leans over them, and pushes down, trying for leverage against the infinitely yielding couch.

  “After the baby’s born,” Rose says, “and we have a new place, you can do all the decorating so he or she has a chance of developing your wonderful taste. We wouldn’t want it to like the same awful things Miaow and I do.”

  “I’m sorry,” he says, launching himself from the table, and to his surprise, he’s standing. “I’m a snob and a jerk, and I feel terrible about what I just said, and I’ve had a wretched day, and . . . and, boy, you’re right, that’s quite a view, isn’t it?” He edges left, between the couch and the table, which is too close to it to permit easy movement. “I’ll just come on over there, and we’ll look at it together.”

  Rose says something in Thai that translates roughly into “hopeless,” but at least she seems a little less offended, and then, through the door that leads to the bedroom she chose, Miaow emerges and says, “What are you doing?”

  “I’m escaping from the couch,” he says, and looks up to see, behind Miaow, a teenage Caucasian boy of remarkable beauty with a flop of pale hair falling over his left eyebrow so perfectly that Rafferty figures a squad of angels sneaks into the kid’s room every morning while he’s asleep, just to arrange it. Rafferty says, “Hey there.”

  “This is my father,” Miaow says, and it sounds like a confession. “This is Andrew—I mean, Ned. I mean,” she concludes through her teeth, “Edward.”

  “Nice to meet you, Ed,” Rafferty says, getting away from the couch.

  “Edward,” Edward says.

  “Right,” Rafferty puts on a smile, because it allows him to bare his teeth. “And why are you here, Edward?”

  “We’re rehearsing, Dad,” Miaow says. “We open on Thursday, remember?”

  “You’re that Ned,” Rafferty says, “the Ned in the play.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I played Ned once, when I was your age.”

  “Yes?” Edward says with an absolutely total lack of interest.

  “Miaow’s got the good part, though.” Rafferty is determined to keep the conversation going, if only to keep himself from throwing the kid through the window, into Rose’s lovely view.

  Edward’s forehead wrinkles and he says, “Miaow?” just as Miaow says, “Mia. My name is—”

  “Sorry. Mia. Of course, Mia.” Moved by sheer malice, Rafferty says, “We call her Miaow sometimes, her mother and I, because she’s our little kittycat. Maybe this time next month it’ll be Moira.” He sees Miaow’s eyes widen in surprise. “It’s like having triplets.”

  “Where did you—” Miaow begins.

  “Sorry, Mia,” Rafferty says. “In fact, I might as well apologize to everyone all at once. Make a clean sweep. We seem to have gotten off on the wrong foot.” He heads for the door to usher the kid out. “But it’s been great to meet you, Edward, and I hope you get home safely.”

  Edward looks at Miaow. Miaow closes her eyes against the reality of the moment and says, “Edward’s going to dinner with us.”

  “Ahhh,” Rafferty says. “Well. Great. Peachy. Should have thought of that myself.”

  Edward says, “Mia said you did.” Miaow’s face is flaming.

  “Did she, now?” Rafferty says, happy that his daughter isn’t armed. “Well, Ed, if the triplets said so, it must be true.”

  His phone warbles at him, and the readout says leon. “You guys go ahead,” he says. “I need to get this.”

  21

  Three Questions

  It says:

  If you’re worried about protecting her, ask yourself three questions:

  Did you know that C-4 plastique, the explosive in Murphy’s closet, can’t be exploded by setting it on fire?

  Did you know that all the gas burners on the stove and in the oven had been turned on high without engaging the pilot flames? By the time the fire reached it, the kitchen was a bomb.

  The person who did this knew there were people in the house but she did it anyway. Who do you think that person was?

  He’s read it three times, and every time he reads it, he hears Treasure stammering over the story about Varney saying he wouldn’t be able to smell escaping gas. Almost unable to finish the sentence.

  “And you found this—” he begins.

  “In here,” Hofstedler says yet again, tugging at his shirt pocket. “I checked my money, and—”

  “Did someone brush up
against you?”

  “But of course,” Hofstedler says. “Wallace, you remember, I said to that man, ‘Why you aren’t looking where you are going?’”

  “Word for word,” Wallace says heavily. He’s nursing a beer as though he plans to make it last. His eyes are cloudy and loose in their sockets, roaming the room but not really fixing on anything. He seems to be on the other side of an invisible wall. Down at the end of the bar, on his usual stool far from everyone, Campeau listens with interest.

  “What did he look like?”

  “Like anybody,” Hofstedler says. Like the others in the bar, he pays close attention to the appearance of Thai females, but the males blend into a dark-skinned crowd, extras on the set, differentiated mainly by the color of their T-shirts. “Like a vendor, perhaps, or a tout.”

  “He was skinny, the way Thais are,” Wallace says. “And dark. Combed his hair up into that stupid ridge in the center that guys do now. Looks like the flame on a match.”

  “Where was it?”

  “Back there.” Hofstedler gestures in the direction of Surawong.

  “I know, Leon, but how far back there? How close to the bar? Was it obvious that you were coming in here?”

  “Naw,” Wallace says. “Farther back. And I know what you’re thinking.”

  “What?” Hofstedler says. “What he is thinking?”

  “He’s thinking that whoever it was, he recognized you and knew you’d call Poke.”

  Hofstedler nods. “Aaahhhh.”

  “So what’s the big deal?” Campeau says. “Varney knows what you look like.”

  Wallace says, “Varney wasn’t there.”

  “How can you know?” Hofstedler demands. “You were talking to me.”

  “I was looking,” Wallace says. “One thing I’m still good at, looking.”

  Hofstedler is shaking his head. “The street was full,” he says. “If you could see him, I would have—”