Paying Back Jack

by Christopher G. Moore

  “What if Casey paid for the job with money that’d been buried? It’s not the way you do things. People who use buried money do bad, evil things. You need special mojo against that kind of thing.”

  “I need more than that, Tracer. Give me something that shows Casey’s not one of us. That glare could be from anything. From an old hooker’s glass eye to a piece of crystal. Are you trying to get me spooked?”

  Tracer trained his binoculars on the light source. A light went on at five-nine Firebird. A woman stood behind an astronomer’s telescope looking at the stars. The lens was clear. The woman was joined by a man who gave her a glass of red wine. They kissed, and a moment later the light in the room went out and the balcony light was switched on.

  Jarrett looked up from his scope. “There are two of them, Tracer. They’re lovers. Star-gazers.” They were ghostly images in the crosshairs, heat vapors rising from their bodies.

  Tracer let out a long sigh, rubbing his thigh with the flat palm of his hand.

  Jarrett leaned forward, eye to the scope. “It’s time to go to work.”

  Somporn had stepped out onto the balcony with an arm wrapped around Cat’s waist, drawing her close to him. She wore a low-cut evening gown and a small tiara with glittering stones in her hair. Smiling and laughing, in her high heels she was eye-level with Somporn as they kissed. He looked like a man about to win an election, a man confident enough to leave the campaign trail for time with his mia noi.

  Jarrett had been at that precise moment before; the narrow lane between life and death. The target appeared on time. Jarrett’s finger touched the trigger. There weren’t many moments to compare with it; this presented a slice of time just before the final moment ran out.

  She danced with Somporn like she’d danced with Ball. This woman, Cat, had blues flowing through her soul, thought Tracer. But she also kept the target in motion, and Jarrett waited for the dancing to pause. All he needed was one brief moment.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  IN THE DARKNESS of Casey’s living room, Calvino worked his hands behind his back to unhook the small laser pen from one of the pockets sewn into the hem of his sports jacket. He thought of how Fon had held out the laser pen, insisting he take it as a gift. The pocket had a Velcro strip that he wedged his fingers into to open it. He slipped the laser pen out, pointed it toward the window, pressed the button with his thumb, quickly released it, and repeated the sequence of three short bursts, followed by three long ones, and then three more short bursts.

  “With all of their resources, they’ll find you, Casey. Wherever you go, they’ll have some connection who’ll let them know your precise location.”

  “You chase around after cheating husbands. You don’t know fuck.”

  Calvino sent Morse code for SOS with the laser pen again.

  “What don’t I know?”

  “That’d be a long list.”

  “You’re settling the score for your son. Somporn’s enemy number one.” Casey coughed up phlegm and spit across the room, missing Calvino by a couple of feet. “How are you going to settle that score?”

  “If your crooked friend the Colonel hadn’t paid off the Pattaya police, you’d be in jail, but at least you’d be alive. That was the idea, Calvino. But having you here works out just fine.”

  “Pratt’s never paid or taken a bribe,” said Calvino.

  “This place is a Mafia state. You think your colonel friend is an exception?”

  “Fuck you, Casey.”

  Casey laughed and pushed back his baseball cap. The anger rising off Calvino had given him some satisfaction. He had experience in knowing which buttons to push. It seemed to relax him in a strange way. He believed that an enemy is defeated with a combination of violence, fear, and surprise. Calvino, as far as Casey was concerned, was no different; his being a civilian made everything much simpler.

  Calvino had no way of knowing if whomever Casey had targeted would see the flash of light, and if they did, whether it would stand out and mean something. He punched out the Morse code for SOS. A man in uniform, or a mee see in Thai, would immediately recognize an SOS message. Judging from Casey’s position, he had the target in a direct line of vision. One way to be sure the laser message was delivered was to get on the outside and on to the balcony. The first principle of communication is to eliminate the noise. With all of the lights shooting from the building, seeing one point of light wouldn’t be easy, unless someone with training was looking. Calvino decided he had to get on the other side. Calvino thought about the glass in the windows. His fingers pressed through the blind, touching the glass. There was only one way through. He started to rock back and forth in his chair.

  “I’ve got to take a piss,” said Calvino. He squirmed in his chair. After a lull he started rocking the chair again.

  Casey lay flat on a bench behind the rifle with his right eye pressed against the scope, waiting for the muzzle flash from Jarrett’s rifle. He hadn’t turned on the infrared scope. He’d fixed the location of Jarrett’s rifle and scope and was locked in.

  Calvino thought that without the night-vision goggles, Casey looked much as he had the day he’d barged into the Lonesome Hawk for lunch and gotten under Old George’s skin.

  “Stop that fucking rocking.” Casey glanced up long enough to see that Calvino had reached a critical mass in the movement of the chair. Calvino, who had been positioned beside the ceiling-to-floor window in near darkness, was outlined in a soft ray of light that streaked over his shoulder. A few feet behind where he sat, the light faded and finally disappeared.

  Calvino waited until Casey had positioned himself behind the rifle again, his concentration focused as he stared through the nightscope, watching Jarrett through the crosshairs. Calvino pressed the laser pen to signal his SOS. He prayed that somewhere in the universe that mattered, someone would spot the speck of red light. Whether anyone had seen it against the backdrop of a street of high-rise buildings, Calvino had no idea. He could only hope. Because hope was all he had left.

  “Then let me go take a piss.”

  Calvino started rocking the chair and the front legs rose slightly from the floor. Casey trained his eye on the scope. “No time, friend. It’s rock ’n’ roll time.”

  Calvino had been gift-wrapped by an expert. He examined the balcony window. He had a couple of choices. He could go headfirst and risk his brain getting damaged on the way through the shards of glass, or he could do a skateboard flip and go through feet first, risking his genitals against jagged pieces of broken glass. Calvino thought about the two possibilities for a moment and then, as most men would do, decided to go through the window headfirst. He prayed that a crooked glass contractor had gone with an unauthorized cheap sheet for the window.

  Calvino inhaled, held his breath, and with all of his strength rocked the chair forward and then back as hard as he could push, flipping his feet through the curtains and shattering the glass window into a million pieces. The glass had been paper thin. But glass was glass, and going through a window clean only happened in the movies. He rolled onto the balcony with cuts biting deep into his legs and arms. An inch to the right and a shard of glass would have severed an artery. The curtain had come through the window with him and for a split second Casey’s head rose from the rifle.

  Tracer had been the first to spot the dot of light coming from Calvino’s laser pen. The beam was tiny but distinctive against the wall of steel, chrome, and glass closing out the night sky. Tracer had frowned, looked again. This wasn’t any signature from an infrared scope. Whatever it was, it had come from a window on the opposite side of Thong Lo. His elbows fixed on a table, Tracer had seen the pattern in the light. Everyone in special ops knew the Morse code for SOS. He read it through his binoculars, and then someone had exploded through the window and onto the balcony. “Rooks. Alpha-side, four-nine. Are you seeing what I’m seeing?”

  Jarrett raised a pair of night-vision binoculars to the ninth floor of Rooks and scanned from left to right, stopping
at the fourth unit. He saw the glowing white outline of a person in the fetal position, legs curled up, lying on the balcony in a debris of broken glass, blinds, and a rifle.

  “Sniper’s rifle,” said Tracer.

  “Got it,” said Jarrett.

  The man continued sending an SOS with the laser pen. Jarrett laid down the binoculars and looked through the infrared nightscope. He’d picked up the scope of a rifle and knew that he had only a couple of seconds to decide on a course of action.

  Jarrett repositioned the rifle, lining up with the new coordinates. He was eyeball-to-eyeball with Casey’s nightscope when he squeezed off a .308 caliber round. The silencer largely muffled the explosion. It sounded like an old car backfiring, a car with a rusty muffler that still absorbed most of the noise.

  Tracer swung the rifle around and had another look at the activity on Cat’s balcony. They were oblivious to the shot that had slammed into a building down the road. Cat continued to dance with Somporn, framed by the lights from the condo living room. She had positioned her man so that Jarrett had his choice of any number of perfect targets. Like a bullfighter with a red cape, she danced so as to remain in control of his advances.

  Over on the ninth floor of Rooks, a neighbor’s light had come on. The light illuminated the smashed window, a man bloodied and struggling. Tracer switched to a normal pair of binoculars.

  “Holy shit,” he said, passing them to Jarrett. “Have a look.”

  “Yeah, I’ve got him. A guy on the balcony,” said Jarrett. “Am I seeing what you’re seeing?”

  “Our favorite private investigator.”

  “What the fuck’s he doing?”

  “Looks like he’s tied up.”

  “Saved our ass. That’s what he did.”

  “Who’s the guy inside?”

  “Who was the guy inside? Whoever it was, you were right, Tracer.”

  “Casey?”

  “Fuck if I know.”

  “I have a visual on the target,” said Tracer. His binoculars had picked up Somporn on the balcony. Cat had kept him dancing, though he looked like he was losing steam. They’d go inside soon.

  “Jack’s gonna be paid back. But shooting Somporn isn’t the way we’re gonna do it. We’re standing down.”

  Tracer nodded.

  They exchanged a high five. Jarrett removed the earplugs and his hat, put on a jacket, and slipped on a necktie. Tracer stored away his earplugs, rubbed his ears good and hard, and then pulled his jacket off a chair and put it on. Together they broke down Kate and loaded it into the Pelican case. In less than five minutes they’d walked into the parking lot, opened the truck of the Benz, and put the case inside.

  Jarrett drove. Tracer sat in the backseat, assuming his cover as an ambassador in an embassy car.

  “We’re not going to Pattaya,” said Jarrett.

  “Mooney’s going to be very pissed off.”

  “You don’t know whether Mooney knew what was going down.”

  Tracer wrinkled his nose, shook his head. Jarrett caught sight of him in the rearview mirror. “It don’t matter much one way or another.”

  They pulled out of the condo building and onto Thong Lo, heading for Petchaburi Road, where they’d turn onto the motorway for the international airport.

  The lyrics of a blues song accompanied by piano, sax, and harmonica filled the silence as Jarrett drove: “You stole my soul when you left me. You buried it where I’ll never find it. ’Cos I know you ain’t ever comin’ back. Leavin’ me on the street walkin’ around like I was dead.”

  THIRTY-NINE

  ON THE BALCONY of Rooks four-nine, the lights from the neighboring residential high-rises and from the street threw a tangled web of long, dark shadows across the balcony where Calvino struggled. He had just enough light to see through the window. On the floor the body of Casey lay motionless.

  Calvino lay with his face resting against the tiles, his head swimming with the smell of blood. He worked his body to the side and, dragging the chair like a marooned shell creature, he crawled and slid across the balcony, the broken glass cutting into his shoulder and arm. Halfway up the wall, he saw the light switch for the balcony and managed to turn it on. He examined his hands. He’d been cut. He saw a large shard of glass protruding from the slider and he edged himself close enough so he could cut the duct tape around his ankles. With his feet free, he kicked out the remaining glass panel and dragged himself still taped to the chair through the opening and into the sitting room.

  He felt his knees wobble as he walked over and sat down beside Casey’s body. The anatomy had been transformed. There was a body, but no discernable head was attached. The stump of ragged flesh around the neck, half a jaw with some teeth, hung among the loose flaps of skin in the region where a head had once looked out on the world. The remains of a skull, flesh, and brains had splattered against the back wall in a grotesque graffiti. The brain parts, glossy and soft, shined as if some soft-bellied creature had colonized the wall. The force of the .308 soft-tipped slug had expanded on impact, tumbling at great velocity, ripping away Casey’s bully-like smile, shredding cheek, nose, forehead, and everything that had gone with it. Steam rose from the gaping wound where the head should have been. The body had landed face up—if there had been a face—with arms and legs flopping over a teak wood table.

  It was a chek bin moment. Payback. Someone had pushed back, and all that was left of Casey had become part of the décor.

  Calvino banged the chair against the wall until the duct tape around his torso loosened. He kept banging it until the chair fell free. For the first time, he was able to stand. He turned so that his back faced the wall and pushed his cuffed hands up far enough to hit an interior light switch.

  Light flooded the room. He moved to the table where Casey’s rifle had been mounted. He lowered himself into the chair and looked at a fresh stain of his own blood on his sports jacket. This time his jacket was soaked in it. He sat, breathing, feeling the air go in and out of his body. Feeling light-headed, knowing that he had to tap into a fresh reservoir of energy, he let the exhaustion pass before he moved over to Casey’s body. He used his shoulder to turn the body over. Dead weight had a great amount of resistance. Finally he leaned back and used his feet to finish the job.

  Calvino sat beside the body. Working blind, his hands cuffed, he fished through Casey’s pockets. After he found the keys, he dropped the key ring a half-a-dozen times before he could get the right key to fit the handcuffs. With his cuffs off, he searched all of Casey’s pockets, looked through the contents of his wallet, found more keys, and grabbed hold of the dead man’s cell phone. Calvino stuffed the handcuffs in one of Casey’s pockets. He opened Casey’s phone and scrolled through the list of calls dialed, calls received, and calls missed. Calvino saw the two numbers from Nongluck’s phone, the ones that he had used to call Casey. Scrolling through the address book, he found his own number listed under “Private Investigator.” Most of the addresses had generic descriptions, a combination of numbers and names: .308, Spotter, Private Eye. Impersonal and cold military codes and the kind of civilian shorthand labels a soldier might use.

  Looking at Casey’s phone, he had a second thought. Why not call .308? See who answered the phone. When he hit the auto dial, he listened to the ring. A man came onto the line. “You the one who fired that shot?”

  “Who the fuck …” and the line went dead.

  Calvino smiled, putting down the phone. He thought about phoning again. But he had what he wanted. He was glad he’d likely let the right person know that someone had a firsthand account of the accuracy of his shot. Assuming .308 in Casey’s cell-phone address book was the sniper who’d fired the shot.

  Calvino’s law: In case of doubt, always make the phone call.

  He walked down the corridor, pushed open the door to Casey’s bedroom, switched on the light, and looked around. He sat on the bed next to a carry-on case, which was still open. He pulled out the contents—DVDs, passport, tickets, files,
a notebook computer, and a change of clothes. Casey had packed light. Calvino took out one of the DVDs and put it into a DVD player below the TV in the sitting room. In the dark, with Casey’s body a few feet away, he played the video. Casey had a naked hooded suspect tied to a board, with water being poured down his throat. The man’s legs and feet were elevated, and his face was covered with a white muslin cloth. He struggled against his restraints as water was slowly poured into his mouth through a funnel forced between the lips. The gasping and gurgling were disturbing to hear as the sounds of pure terror filled the soundtrack. It looked like Casey had copied the contents of the destroyed secret-prison tapes. He watched the tape twice and then squatted down beside Casey. Calvino stared at the body before stepping back onto the balcony.

  The noise had caused someone to switch on a line. But below there were no sirens, no flashing red or blue police lights in the street. Excessive noise was something people accepted in Bangkok. They must have listened for a repeat but what they heard instead was a perfectly ordinary evening. The tiny rupture in the night had soon disappeared. He leaned forward at the railing. Nothing unusual in terms of movement or sound came from the neighboring units. It had started to occur to Calvino that the single shot hadn’t been detected over the general noise of traffic, TVs, stereos, and voices. There had been the moment of impact when the glass shattered. But it was over in an instant. For a sound to rise above the din of the nightly dragon dance of noise in a Bangkok street, it had to be not just loud but sustained. Whoever had fired the killing round, Calvino was sure, had already escaped. It had been a professional job, and Calvino understood that someone in that line of business would be gone as if carried on the wind. He decided that it was also time for him to leave.