“No disrespect,” Wallace says, “but you could miss somebody in a closet. I did nothing for four years except look around.” He moistens his lips with the beer, without swallowing. “And there was another one, farther up the block. He spotted us first. We were handed off, one to the other. There was probably another at the other end, in case we went in that way. How I’d do it anyways.”
“I did not see two?” Hofstedler seems stricken.
“This is what I can do,” Wallace says. “I kept people alive doing it.” He puts the beer down and looks at it.
“Well, this makes me good and nervous,” Rafferty says.
“It should,” Wallace says.
Over him, Rafferty says, “The night that boy was killed. Someone saw Varney take a picture or two just before the boy ran by and I chased him.”
Hofstedler says, “A picture of you?”
“Yeah. Problem is, when he took the picture, I was standing with you and Wallace.”
“But this means—” Hofstedler begins. His face is all eyes.
“That he’s got us, too,” Wallace says. “And like I said, Poke, you should be nervous.”
“And maybe so should we,” Hofstedler says.
“He’s never going to stop watching you,” Wallace says to Poke. His words come slowly and evenly, almost without emphasis. “I figured out who he is. Ernie told me.”
“Wallace,” Hofstedler says, putting a hand on the man’s arm. “Ernie is dead.”
“Goddamn you, Leon, I know that.” Wallace shrugs off Leon’s hand so abruptly that he sloshes his beer onto the bar. Instantly Toots is there, mopping it up and saying, “Wallet, Wallet, no problem, Wallet.”
“It is a fucking problem when your friends think you’ve lost it,” Wallace says, pulling his glass out of Toots’s reach, since she’s trying to refill it. “I know he’s dead, Leon. He told me in a dream.”
“A dream,” Leon says despairingly.
“Let him talk,” Rafferty says. “Wallace, let Toots top you off, would you? Just to be polite.”
“Sorry, Toots,” Wallace says. “It was my goddamn dream, Leon, and it was Ernie I dreamed about because Ernie died like that, he was gutshot. That’s why it was Ernie who reminded me about Hartley, this guy from ’Nam. Because Hartley and this asshole with the mustache are the same guy—no, no, not like that,” he says to Poke, who shows signs of interrupting. “Not literally, but they might as well be. They like the same things. Before, I said Hartley was a back-shooter, and he was, but it was worse than that: he aimed low. He wanted to kill slow, and he wanted it to hurt, and that’s who this other asshole, Varney, is. He’s a back-shooter and a gut-shooter, I’d be willing to bet on it. You want to stay way far away from him.”
“Too late for that,” Rafferty says. “He’s chosen me.”
“Then I’ll tell you what, Poke,” Wallace says. “He’s sighting you. Right now, all the time. He’s got eyes on you, wherever you go. He likes sighting. Hartley shot like a son of a bitch, he could hit anything within a few square inches of where he aimed, and he’d wait longer to take a shot than anyone I ever saw. He’d miss good shots, just to stretch out the fun of waiting, and then he’d take exactly the shot he wanted to take, and what he wanted was the abdomen, where the most pain and the slowest, filthiest dying are. He brought down one VC after another, and he never got as high as the rib cage. He intends to hurt you before he kills you, Poke, and he’ll wait for fucking ever to do it.”
“Varney and Hartley,” Poke says.
“Twins,” Wallace says. “And you can’t wait him out, because he likes the waiting. What you gotta do, you gotta dangle it in front of him. Whatever it is, you gotta dig a big pit, fill it with snakes and spikes, stand on the other side, and just dangle that fucker. Make him come to you and then cut him into little pieces.”
“Can’t do it.”
Wallace sits back, visibly disengaging. “Up to you.”
“I’m not blowing you off, Wallace. He wants two things. One of them I don’t have, and the other is a person.”
Wallace says, “I didn’t tell you to give ’em to him. I said dangle ’em, or something that looks like them, to bring him up close. Because otherwise he’s going to be behind you until you’re trying to stuff your guts back into your shirt.”
Outside the bar he stands, shifting from one foot to the other as he tries to spot whoever has been assigned to watch him. He supposes he was observed all the way down Patpong when he arrived, without even catching a hint.
He’s got no idea how to protect Hofstedler and Wallace, if they need it. He’s stretched pretty thin just looking after his family and Treasure.
Treasure.
Is Varney’s note true or isn’t it? Either way he needs to tell Arthit about it. Arthit needs to know that it’s possible that the girl he’s trying to adopt blew up that house believing that her father, her mother, Rafferty, and Rafferty’s half sister, Ming Li, were inside it.
I’d believed she liked me, Rafferty thinks. Or maybe she couldn’t like anybody. The way she grew up . . .
And if Varney is telling the truth about Murphy’s kitchen, that’s information he could have gotten only from someone officially connected with the investigation, which Arthit had mentioned as a possibility all those weeks—no, only four days—ago.
He punches up Arthit’s number, so hard he nearly knocks the phone out of his hand, but before he can say a word, Arthit says, “Treasure didn’t come home with Anna. Anna waited for her and Chalee, but they didn’t come down, and now she can’t find them.”
“Maybe that’s better,” Rafferty says.
“Anna is at the shelter, crying. Doesn’t feel better to me.”
Scanning the street, Rafferty is sure he’s located one of his watchers, a rickety-looking guy in a long gray coat three sizes too big, who’s pawing without interest through a pile of women’s clothes. “Did she tell the guy on watch to stay there?”
“She told mine,” Arthit says. “She hasn’t seen yours.”
Rafferty feels a worm of uneasiness. The man in the gray coat catches him in mid-stare and turns away but shoots a look back over his shoulder. “He should have been there.”
“Maybe he got a better offer,” Arthit says. “Not the most dependable person in Bangkok.”
“I need to talk to you about something,” Rafferty says, searching the crowd for Varney. “But not now.”
“When?”
“Maybe tomorrow. We’ll see. Go take care of Anna.”
“The only way to take care of Anna,” Arthit says, “is to make this go right somehow.”
22
Skritch-Skritch-Skritch
Treasure isn’t aware she’s been asleep, but here’s Dok, gently shaking her shoulder and whispering, “Shhhh.” She opens her eyes wide against the darkness of the big room. There’s no moon, and the curtains absorb the city’s ambient light. A mosquito whines near her ear. She bats it away as she passes her tongue over her teeth to clean them.
She can hear and smell the sleeping girls. They breathe deeply and evenly, the sound coming from all directions as though the room itself were breathing. The air is edged with sweat, dirty clothes, and unwashed hair.
But not men.
She rolls over and sits up, and the cot creaks. She’d been sleeping on her left, and her clothes there are damp and cool with perspiration.
Dok hands her something. Her shoes. He whispers, “Don’t put them on,” and stands upright and begins to thread his way between the cots, heading toward the pale spill of light from the single fluorescent tube that hangs halfway down the stairs to the boy’s level. She watches his silhouette, slender, straight-backed, narrow-hipped. Even at his age, he’s obviously male. Still, whatever he’ll be later, for now he’s just Dok.
She’s halfway across the room when someone seizes her wrist. She s
tifles a yelp and looks down at the new girl, the one with the dark skin and the mosquito bites. “Where are you going?” It’s a hiss.
“Just out. We’ll be back.”
A girl nearby murmurs a protest in her sleep.
“Are you running away?”
“No.”
“Are you going someplace better? I want to know. Tell me, or I’ll shout.”
She shakes her arm. “We’re going to look for something to sell.” That’s what Dok and Chalee were doing when they found her. “Dumpsters.”
The girl says, “I want half.”
“Fine,” Treasure says. She reaches down and pries the girl’s fingers from her wrist.
“If you know someplace better,” the girl says, “please take me with you.”
“We’re just going out for a while.”
“If you don’t come back, I’ll tell.”
Treasure brushes aside the reaching hand. “We’ll be back.” Dok waits at the top of the stairs, his body straining in impatience. Treasure walks toward him on the balls of her feet, the way she walked when she didn’t want her father to hear her. She’s good at this. Seeing her coming, Dok goes silently down the stairs.
Chalee waits below, stifling a yawn and holding a long-handled broom, a riot of ragged bristles at the bottom. She’s wearing a sweatshirt with a hood and her old torn jeans. She waves Treasure to the side of the double door, locked only with a metal bar—hooked on one end—that runs through the two handles. “I looked out the windows,” she says. Instinctively she glances at the opening to Boo’s office even though it’s dark now, since he’s sleeping on the third floor with his girlfriend, Da, and the baby she was given as a prop when she was put on the sidewalk to beg. “I didn’t see anyone.”
“I’ll go out first,” Dok says. “Wait here. And don’t lock the door.” Chalee hands him the broom. He shoulders it like a rifle, pulls the heavy bar free, and passes it to Chalee. Then he takes a deep breath and strolls out as if there’s nothing at all on his mind. He pushes the door closed from the outside, and Chalee eases it the rest of the way, the bar dangling from her hand.
Treasure goes to the window, standing a few feet back so her pale face won’t emerge from the darkness for the benefit of anyone who might be watching, and waits for Dok to come into view. She says, hearing the tension in her voice, “Maybe we should have gone back to Mrs. Anna’s.”
“You can go,” Chalee says. “I wouldn’t blame you.”
“I can’t.”
“Well,” Chalee says, with a little flicker of anger in her voice, “that’s not my fault. I can’t be someplace they don’t want me.”
“They didn’t have enough time to get to know you,” Treasure says. “In a few days—”
“Never. And anyway, you don’t really want to be there.”
Treasure studies the floor at her feet. Then she says, “I’m—”
“You’re afraid of him. Mrs. Anna’s husband,” Chalee says.
Treasure rubs at the skin on her upper arms. “I’m afraid of all of them.”
“Not Boo.”
“No, but Boo is . . . Boo is just a big boy.” Treasure shifts to her right, looking out the window at an angle. “I still don’t see him.”
“If he doesn’t want you to see him, you won’t—”
“But there’s only one way out of here, right? We’re at the end of the alley, so he’d have to be right out there. What if somebody—” She can feel her voice rising, and she bites it off.
“There’s nothing to worry about. He’s okay.”
“Maybe we should go upstairs,” Treasure says. She feels the sting of Chalee’s gaze and says, “We could see better from up there.”
“Go where you want,” Chalee says. “I’m staying where Dok thinks I am.”
“It’s just that—” She’s suddenly shuddering, shivering to the center of her bones. “He should be out there, and he’s . . . he’s not. What if . . . I mean, what if—”
Chalee’s arm goes around her shoulder. “He’s fine, he’s fine,” she says. She hugs Treasure closer. “Come on, stop shaking. You’re all right, we’re all fine. He just wants to make sure we can get out of here without Poke’s guy seeing us.” She draws Treasure aside and looks through the window. “We’ll see him any minute.”
Treasure leans against Chalee, still shivering, and then a dark shape crosses the window, moving fast, and she gasps. Instantly Chalee clamps her free hand over Treasure’s mouth. The door opens a few inches, and Dok peers in. He registers the picture in front of him—Treasure rigid and wide-eyed, Chalee behind her with the arm holding the bar wrapped around Treasure’s neck and her other hand pressed over her mouth—and he frowns a question. Chalee loosens her hold on Treasure, who steps aside, looking out the window. Dok can hear her breathing, like someone who’s just broken the surface after too long underwater.
“It’s okay,” he whispers. His eyes go beyond them to the sleeping boys, finding the two who are awake and watching, up on one elbow. “We’ll be back,” he whispers to them and then, to Chalee and Treasure, “Let’s go.” He ducks back outside, and a second later his arm snakes back in to catch the door and hold it open. Chalee hooks a finger in Treasure’s sleeve, pulling her along. The sudden yank pulls Treasure off balance and nearly dislodges the stiff object, tightly wrapped in a napkin stolen from Anna’s house, that’s tucked into Treasure’s waistband and covered by her shirt. She slaps a hand over it to hold it in place. A moment later she’s outside, surrounded by the relative coolness of the night.
It’s drizzled recently. Through a ragged hole in the cloud cover, part of the moon’s face shines down, making the filthy concrete of the alley gleam like silver, momentarily redeemed by the wet night. Dok is already waiting at the bottom of the steps, shifting nervously from foot to foot and scanning the alley as Treasure, behind Chalee’s back, secures the stiff, napkin-wrapped bundle tucked into her waistband and comes down to stand beside Chalee, who’s still holding the iron bar that was used to lock the door.
The shelter is a few blocks uphill from the Chao Phraya. Treasure can smell the river and the port, a mixture of diesel fuel and mud, and she can almost hear the water’s whisper as it glides by below. The building where they sleep blocks the end of an elbow-shaped alley between dark warehouses. Twenty meters from their front door, the alley takes a forty-five-degree right turn and eventually ends in a narrow, badly paved street. Looking up at the fast-moving clouds, framed by the flat black roofs of the warehouses, Treasure feels a disorienting sense of motion. The tattered hole that briefly bared the moon’s gaze moves on, dulling the sheen on the concrete and plunging the night into a thicker, oilier darkness. Dok says, “We’re going to show you a way out that most people don’t know about, and a place to hide. This way.”
She thinks he’ll go forward, toward the point where the alley bends down toward the street, but instead he turns to his right, Chalee trotting along behind him. Treasure says, “Where are . . . ?” but Chalee loosens a sharp-edged “Shhhh.”
“This is a little scary,” Dok says, not whispering but keeping his voice low. “Treasure, you get in the middle and hold on to my shirt. Chalee, okay if you go last?”
“I’ve done it before,” Chalee says.
Dok says, “Are you all right, Treasure? Do you want to go back inside?”
“No.” Over his shoulder she’s located a narrow crack of absolute darkness between the edge of the shelter and the warehouse next door, barely wide enough for one adult to pass through. Dok, apparently thinking she’s staring at the broom on his shoulder, hoists it and says, “For rats.” He sweeps vigorously, back and forth in front of his feet.
“Dok is afraid of rats,” Chalee says.
“This will clear the way,” Dok says, licking his lips nervously, and something warms inside Treasure. He’s braving a thing that terrifies him, and
he’s doing it for her sake.
“Me, too,” she says. “You keep them away from us.”
“Right,” Dok says with a downward glance at the broom’s broken, uneven bristles. “Right.” He turns and walks to the black mouth of the alley, moving like he’s climbing a hill. Chalee follows him, and Treasure hurries past her and takes hold of the back of Dok’s shirt. A moment later she feels the weight of Chalee’s hand gripping her own shirt.
“Swipe it up in the air every few steps,” Chalee says. “Spiders.”
“I’m not afraid of spiders,” Treasure says. “There were big spiders in the hedge where I hid from my, my father. If I stayed in there overnight, they made webs to keep him away from me.”
Chalee says to Dok, “Sweep anyway.”
Dok pauses at the last step before the alley. Over his shoulder Treasure can see a dim rectangle, just bright enough to be visible. It seems to be an immeasurable distance away. “How far is that?” Treasure asks.
“Maybe fifteen meters.” Dok takes a deep breath and squares his shoulders. “Maybe twenty.” Treasure hears the scrabble of the broom’s bristles over concrete, and he leads them in.
The darkness presses in so closely that her ears pop. Her shoulders continually brush one rough wall or the other, and she fights down the panic that’s been crouching low in her gut ever since the moment, in Boo’s office, when Rafferty confirmed the shape of Paul’s tattoo. It had been a huge somersault: since she’d gotten to the shelter, she’d felt that she had finally passed through some kind of doorway to a refuge, gasping in relief, only to learn that the door hadn’t closed behind her. Paul is out there, and if he wants her, he’ll get her. No one can stop him. She shivers again, and behind her, Chalee tucks the bar under one arm and uses her free hand to smooth Treasure’s shoulder.
Chalee, she thinks, and the knot in her gut loosens a little. She focuses on the patch of almost-light at the end of the alley and the skritch-skritch-skritch of Dok’s broom. Afraid of rats, she thinks, and Dok’s leading her through this rat paradise. Dok and Chalee. Every now and then Dok grunts softly, and she thinks, Rat, but nothing scuttles back toward her or runs over or between her feet. What she has now, all she has in the world at this moment, is the patch of light, the skritch of Dok’s broom, his rough T-shirt rubbing between her fingers, and the sharp but not-unpleasant smell of his sweat. Boy sweat, not man sweat. And Chalee hanging on to her from behind.
The Hot Countries Page 18