Paying Back Jack

by Christopher G. Moore

“Not yet,” said Tracer. “But I’m lookin’ hard. What you look for is partly inside your head and partly something on the ground.”

  “I’m looking, too, but I don’t see anything different,” said Jarrett.

  Tracer shook his head, his back turned to Jarrett. “Finding a needle before a needle finds you takes more than just looking. You have to feel where a needle might hide.” The binoculars dangled from a string around his neck, resting solidly against his mojo bag.

  “A needle can hide wherever it wants,” said Jarrett.

  Tracer had gone out early in the morning to jog, stopped at Starbucks, and read the papers. “I saw something in the paper about how Casey’s disappeared. He’s part of some big investigation in Washington. I’d thought Waters would’ve called and said something. He phone you?” asked Tracer.

  Jarrett shook his head. “What’d the newspaper say they were investigating?”

  “Stuff happened in one of the prisons.”

  “We’ve been paid for the job. Nothing from Waters to say stand down.”

  “I don’t like it,” said Tracer.

  “It’s just another day, Tracer. I beat your sorry ass at pool and you’re in a bad mood. That’s all. We’ve done jobs like this one before. Sorry to hear about Casey’s problem. But it’s got nothing to do with us.”

  Tracer shook his head; jaw clenched, binoculars hanging around his neck, he walked around the large room. He’d gone into his thinking mode, observed Jarrett.

  “You remember Mark?”

  “One of the suits who fetches for the CEO.”

  “That’s him. The paper quotes him as saying Casey could’ve been involved in activities outside the scope of his authority. You ever think about the name?”

  Jarrett blinked at him and shrugged.

  “I am talking about Logistic Risk Assessment Services. It seems they’ve done an assessment on the risk of Casey’s hurting them. From the paper, I’d say it sounds like the company’s gonna cut him loose. Hang him out to dry.”

  “That’s fucked,” said Jarrett.

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to say.”

  Tracer looked back, nodded, then bent over his computer, feeding in and adjusting the formula for sighting Cat’s condo balcony. Wind, distance, the velocity of the round, temperature, and humidity would play a role on the drop rate of the .308 caliber soft-nosed slug from the end of the rifle barrel to the impact point on Somporn’s body.

  Tracer looked up from the computer screen. “Technical analysis gets us to the target. But what we do isn’t mechanical. Otherwise, Colonel Waters could send along a robot to do the job. We ain’t robots. I look for things in the field of vision that no formula could predict.”

  Jarrett nodded, upper teeth biting into his lip. Tracer working the mojo bag overtime wasn’t like him. He was part of a no-nonsense, straight-ahead, focused killing machine. It was normal to feel nervous as the anticipation of the moment came closer. But they were still hours away from the time the target would appear.

  “Talk to me. This could turn into some seriously bad shit.”

  Jarrett ran his hand through his hair and breathed out. “Where do you think Casey’s gone?”

  Tracer punched his forefinger against his own chest. “Me? I think he’s on the run from Congress. They want him to testify. They might as well kill Casey as make him a scapegoat for their secret prisons. The man’s had nothing but a streak of bad luck. Was Casey dragged into his bad luck? You gotta think about that.”

  Jarrett rose from his chair, walked over to the pool table, picked up his cue stick and sent the balls scattering across the table. “Okay, I’ve thought about it.”

  “What if our first day to do the job wasn’t really a screw-up over Somporn’s schedule? What if someone wanted to put us through a trial run? They wanted to see how we’d set up. What if we were told he’d be on the balcony so our location could be compromised. It could have been intentional.” Tracer’s pushback was always the same; after a succession of belly jabs from the voodoo handbook, he countered with an unexpected uppercut to the jaw by appealing to reason.

  Jarrett hadn’t seen that one coming.

  Jarrett aimed at the one ball and missed; the white cue ball rolled into the side pocket. He put the cue down on the table and leaned back, his arms folded over his chest.

  “Talk to me about why someone would set us up,” said Jarrett.

  “I’ve been thinking about a couple of things. You were supposed to meet Jack Malone with your dad in Hua Hin. What do we find in this condo? A newspaper from Hua Hin. Man, come on, this is fucking Bangkok. And this pool table. You tell me what was the color of the felt on the table you played on in Hua Hin?”

  “Blue.”

  Tracer nodded. “That right. It was blue. Same as this.”

  “What’re you saying?”

  Tracer threw up his hands, a look of anguish on his face. “Fuck if I know. But, I don’t like that we gave away our position on the first day. We’ve done that. If it wasn’t a real abort, someone’s locked to us right now, watching us. The other thing I already told you, but you think it’s some voodoo bullshit. The money Casey gave to Colonel Waters had the smell of earth. That money had been buried. And when I said something to Colonel Waters about it, he said not to worry.”

  “And you’re saying it has something to do with what happened in Hua Hin with my dad?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, rubbing the back of his neck with his right hand. “All I’m saying is the Hua Hin newspaper and that pool table gotta mean something. Like that night you walked into the bar in Hua Hin and found that guy with red hair and it wasn’t Jack. You told me it gave you a bad feeling. But you couldn’t say why.”

  Prior experience strongly suggested to Jarrett that when Tracer had a bad feeling, it was time to listen carefully. A couple of times Tracer’s sixth sense had saved them from getting shot. When a team sets up an ambush, the way they stay alive is to appreciate that on the other side there are sniper teams just like them, hunting for them, looking to ambush them before they can carry out their mission. In every hellhole they’d been sent to on a job, there had always been another side. And the men on the other side shot back. Jarrett and Tracer had friends who’d been killed because either the sniper or the spotter hadn’t had that extra feature beyond the formula for getting to the target. Tracer had an ability to put dates, smells, tones, and tiny wrinkles in the fabric of a mission into a larger frame and then focus and adjust until the danger around the target revealed itself.

  “You’re saying maybe we’ve been targeted?” The hair stood up on the back of Jarrett’s neck. He slapped his neck as if a black fly had landed on his skin and started racking the balls.

  Tracer closed the lid on his laptop and stretched out on the sofa, facing the balcony. Standard operating procedure in an urban fire-zone was to set up a clear line of fire to the target and to shelter against any countersniper team deployed inside that zone of fire. It was a little insurance policy against being ambushed. It had become a habit, even though it had been years since another sniper had taken a shot at them.

  “Somethin’s telling my mojo that someone’s out there,” said Tracer, one eye opening, as he twisted his finger around the string of the mojo bag. “I haven’t found him, but I ain’t stoppin’ until I do.” The same determination had made Tracer a top prospect for professional football. But back then, the thing that had been out there had caught him by surprise, dragged him down, put him in court, and shot him out the mouth of a cannon straight into the Marine Corps. By the time he’d picked himself up and dusted himself off, he was in the field spotting skinnies for Jarrett to pick off in Mogadishu. He wasn’t ever going to let that happen again.

  Jarrett walked back to the table, sat behind the sniper rifle, and looked down the barrel and silencer. He had a clear view of the balcony where Somporn would appear.

  “Are you saying we pack it in?” asked Jarrett.

  “I ain’t there yet.”r />
  Tracer rose from the sofa, using his binoculars to scan the horizon. He looked back over his shoulder at Jarrett who stood at the table, running his hand over the blue felt. Tracer knew he was thinking about that night years before in Hua Hin when Jack Malone had been a no-show. But the man had a good reason. He was dead.

  “You think your darling is on her way to the beehives in Surin? She was looking at that private investigator like she might be more interested in him than in bees.”

  Jarrett smiled, relieved for a moment to be thinking about the ying holding her backpack. “Her family lost all of their hives. That was how they’d made their living. I figure she’s on her way back home.”

  Tracer laughed, watching Jarrett leaning over the pool table, stroking it as if under the surface he’d find an answer to some larger question of loss. “Man, you are such a dreamer. That girl ain’t ever gonna stay put and raise bees. It’s not the nature of life.”

  THIRTY-THREE

  THE DAY BEFORE Casey had vanished, McPhail had followed him to an eye clinic in Soi Thong Lo. The following morning, Calvino had retraced Casey’s trail. Located in a rich section of Sukhumvit Road, the district had more than its share of inhabitants with bad eyes, and Chinese merchants seized the chance to make fast money by opening dozens of eye clinics. They competed for business in the collision of residential and commercial buildings, beauty parlors, fast-food restaurants, shopping malls, offices, nightclubs, taverns, and car dealerships. Casey had chosen a clinic set back from the main drag, meaning that the business didn’t depend on foot traffic. They had a higher class of clientele, the kind of people who would learn of it by word-of-mouth and then go to the trouble of finding it inside a high-rise. The first shop these clients would find there wasn’t an eye clinic but a flower shop for the well-heeled—girlfriends and hot dates, with weddings and funerals more of a sideline. A person would need a major head cold to visit the ground floor without noticing the scent of roses, geranium, and evergreens, with a whiff of tom yam gung from the staff’s leftover lunch. A woman might get a little heady from the fragrance; a man might think he’d stumbled into the women’s restroom by mistake.

  Above the commercial level rose a residential high-rise: floor after floor of ultra-modern serviced apartments and offices, devoted to the comfort of the well-off who wanted a barrier between themselves and ordinary Thais. It had been built for foreigners—European kitchen, American sitting room, Chinese ancestor-worship room. Teeming with different nationalities, the building was a beehive with all kinds of species living side by side. It was every place and no place. Arches and pillars and fountains and high ceilings combined Gothic, Delphic, and Victorian flourishes—touches randomly plucked from design magazines to carry the branded prestige associated with farang elites. The interiors could’ve been borrowed from the blueprints of a high-class whorehouse multiplied by twenty-nine floors.

  Following McPhail’s directions, Calvino had passed many high-rise buildings. One of them had been grand and elegant, with a uniformed security guard stationed at the front door. He’d recognized it. Cat’s condo was on the ninth floor. He remembered it from his stakeout. Her building, like the other luxury buildings in Thong Lo, was a universe away from the seedy beauty salon with the old crones playing mah-jongg and stapling bribes to Somporn campaign cards. He wondered if the sister who had worked in that dump had ever seen Cat’s place. This was more than just an average upgrade from the sea-level of a beauty salon stuck amid lower-middle-class shop-houses. Cat had come a long way; he gave her that much.

  He figured the sister would have been impressed. Living in such a building guaranteed a face so large that the occupant would have to turn sideways to get in and out of doors. But could Cat hold on to what she had? That was always the question with a mia noi. Lack of job security made a mia noi a little crazy except on a really hot day, when she might accelerate from mildly paranoid to barking-dog mad.

  Calvino headed inside to look for the eye clinic. The two buildings were on the same side of the road. What was Casey doing in Cat’s neighborhood? Why hire him to follow a woman whom he already knew where to find? He couldn’t have expected McPhail to have the answers; Calvino was still working through the possibilities arising from the proximity of the eye clinic to Cat’s condo.

  Calvino entered the heavily scented main lobby. Shops lined one wall. Elevators to the upper floors were on the other. A uniformed security guard sitting behind the reception desk was gazing into a compact mirror, pulling hairs out of his chin and occasionally looking up to check out someone walking to the elevators.

  A blast of cold air hit Calvino the way those icy fronts from Canada blow through New York, giving Upper East Side poodles and their matronly owners a shiver that cuts deep inside. Calvino stopped outside the eye clinic and looked through the window. Behind the counter was a ying in her early thirties in a nurselike uniform and cap. She looked all right if a man liked the doctor-and-nurse game. The presentation of the clinic fell between a hospital and a boutique spa. He picked up a brochure on the counter and opened it.

  “Do you have an appointment?” The nurse, receptionist, or whatever she called herself looked up from a game of solitaire on her computer screen. She looked bored, her eyes heavy, the line of her mouth dipping into the depression zone.

  Calvino shook his head. She stared at his eyes as if to determine the nature of his problem. “My friend Mr. Casey said this was a good place to have my eyes checked.”

  “Fill out the form, please.” She slid a piece of paper across the counter.

  “Do you remember Mr. Casey?”

  It was clear from her expression that she did not. He took out a photograph of Casey and handed it to her. “That’s Casey.”

  She slipped on her glasses and looked.

  She nodded. “Yes, I remember him. We fitted him with contact lenses.”

  Now he was getting somewhere. They had established a mutual acquaintance and that always made a woman relax. The life came back into her face and she managed a smile. The fact they both knew Casey had washed away the utter strangeness of an unknown farang coming in off the street. “Has he picked them up?”

  She checked her records. “Yesterday he came down to get them.”

  “Right, he lives upstairs.”

  She seemed happy that he knew about Casey. “Yes, he lives upstairs.”

  He slipped Casey’s record around. He had given his address as being on the ninth floor. “When was the last time you saw him?”

  She thought for a minute, growing suspicious of Calvino. “I don’t remember.”

  That was good enough for Vincent Calvino. He’d gone as far as he could with her, then the cold front had once again rolled across her face, freezing him out.

  “You can see the doctor now,” she said.

  He glanced at his watch. “Let me think about it. I need lunch. I wouldn’t do an eye test without eating. I can’t see right without food.”

  The food-injection argument nearly always won over the Thais. The common greeting, “Have you eaten rice yet?” came from this abiding, deep concern that hunger might overcome a person at any moment. No one ever would think of interfering with someone’s need to eat immediately. And that’s how it worked. The Thais didn’t work up an appetite; something happened in their gut that triggered a starvation reaction. Calvino saw what might just pass as sympathy in her eyes as he repeated his need to eat.

  “You’ll come back?”

  “After I eat a bowl of noodles,” he said, taking a namecard from the plastic box on the counter. He hadn’t filled in the form. He hadn’t really done anything that people coming into a clinic were supposed to do—nothing at all, really, except ask a bunch of questions. As he left, he knew she would remember him. She might phone Casey and tell him that someone had been looking for him. A farang who’d come into the clinic shivering from the air conditioning, a man hungry to dive into a bowl of noodles. But he hadn’t let his hunger get in the way of asking a lot of
awkward personal questions. She was in awe that the questions in this farang’s head had assumed priority over the immediate demands of his stomach; that was one thing a Thai rarely witnessed.

  He stopped in the door, turned around. “You like jazz?”

  She smiled.

  “Ever hear of a guitar player named Ball?”

  Her head tilted down, as if trying to recall a memory. “Is he Thai?”

  “He was last night when my friend and I had a talk with him.”

  THIRTY-FOUR

  COLONEL PRATT AND CALVINO waited until Ball got out of his red sports car. He’d parked it in the same spot as before, in front of Saxophone. When Ball spotted Colonel Pratt, he fumbled with his keys, trying to get back into his car, but his reaction came too late. Calvino grabbed the keys and slammed Ball against the car.

  “You’re going to let a farang do that to a Thai?” Ball asked, his eyes filled with rage, his lower lip quivering.

  Colonel Pratt’s expression remained calm. “We have some unfinished business.”

  “I have nothing more to say,” said Ball, folding his arms around his chest. “I want to call my lawyer.”

  The request was fallout from too much American TV. Americans were cowed by lawyers. Thais had no fear of them. There were forces more powerful than the law, and lawyers who went against those forces disappeared. Fear resided elsewhere, and Ball was staring straight in the face of his worst nightmare. Calvino touched the tip of the car key against the side of the car. “A car like this, people remember. You have to be careful or it can get scratched. Of course, you could sue me.” He ran the key against the side, leaving a sluglike trail across the front door.

  “Nothing to say? Never mind, I’ve just got started.” Calvino touched the key on the hood. He might as well have driven a fist between Ball’s legs.

  Ball went wild, grabbing Calvino’s arm. “Wait! Don’t do that!”

  Calvino pushed him against the car. “Don’t fuck with me, Ball.”