Killing Rain

by Barry Eisler

  “Thanks for your understanding, man. It’s time for this young lady to have the experience of a lifetime. It’ll be nothing but disappointment for her after tonight, but that’s the price of a love-filled evening with Dox.”

  I nodded. I knew if I tried to speak I’d be done.

  He must have misinterpreted my silence. “Shit, man, there’s no need for you to spend the night alone. You’re not a bad-looking guy, and the ladies won’t know about your deficiencies until it’s too late, anyway. You could meet someone if you wanted to.”

  Part of me, a bigger part than I cared to admit, wanted to let him go through with it. And I would have paid almost anything to be there at the moment of truth. But he was a good friend. Hell, he’d saved my life. I couldn’t do it to him, even if he did deserve it.

  I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. “Dox. She’s a katoey.”

  Katoey, or “lady-boy,” has a range of meanings, from a guy who likes to dress in drag from time to time all the way to a man who has had transgender surgery and is now effectively a woman. They can be found all over Thailand and are generally accepted, if sometimes difficult to spot, within the society. Regardless of the differences, what they all have in common is that presumably Dox wouldn’t want to sleep with one.

  He scowled slightly and cocked his head. “Now that’s not like you, man. Don’t go trying to spoil my night just because you haven’t gotten one of your own.”

  “You didn’t notice her hands? They’re just a little big for her frame, don’t you think? And did you get a look at her Adam’s apple? Women don’t have Adam’s apples, and she’s wearing that high collar to conceal it.”

  Some of the color drained from his face. “Don’t fuck with me,” he said.

  I shook my head and stifled a laugh. “I’m not.”

  The girl walked back from the restroom as though on cue. Dox stood and turned to her. “Honey,” he said, “Dick over here thinks . . . he thinks . . .”

  I smiled gently and said to her, “I just didn’t want there to be a misunderstanding. Bob didn’t know you’re a katoey.”

  She smiled back, then looked at Dox, her eyes wide. “You no like katoey?”

  Dox lost a little more color. “I . . . I . . .” he stammered.

  “Me, I think you know,” she said. “So I no say.”

  “No, I didn’t know!” he said, his voice anguished.

  “Most men, no problem. When it dark . . .”

  “I ain’t like that.”

  She smiled. “Please, honey? I like you.”

  Dox’s expression was about halfway to physical illness. “Look,” he said, “I don’t mean to be rude, but could you just go?”

  She hesitated, then nodded. “Okay. Thank you for drinks with me.”

  “You’re welcome,” Dox said, his tone the quintessence of forlornness.

  She got up and left the club, no doubt disappointed that her investment of time had yielded so little. Dox looked gut-shot.

  He slumped into his chair and looked at me. “When did you spot that stuff about her hands and her neck? You let that go on for an awfully long time there, partner.”

  “Dox, I thought you knew. It was so obvious.”

  “It was not obvious. No, sir.”

  “You sure you don’t want to take her back to the hotel? If you hurry . . .”

  “Hell, yes, I’m sure.”

  “Because, c’mon, you had to know. At some level.”

  “No, I didn’t know at any level, not until you told me.”

  “Really? I mean, you pointed out that she was a little flat-chested. And I don’t know how you could have missed the hands and the Adam’s apple. Dox, she might as well have been wearing a sign.”

  “No, she was definitely not wearing a sign, man. Although I think she ought to.”

  I smiled. “Maybe you would have enjoyed it.”

  “Stop it.”

  “I mean, if she’d only given you a blow job, you would never even have known. You’d just think it was the best head you’d ever gotten. It would have become one of your most cherished memories.” I started to laugh. I couldn’t help it. “You never would have stopped telling me about it.”

  “Do you want another drink?” he asked. “I think I need one.”

  “How many, Dox? That’s the question. How many times before.”

  He signaled the waitress for two more, then shuddered. “Damn, that was a near thing. I’d thank you, if you’d stepped in a little sooner and were enjoying yourself a little less.”

  “Enjoying?”

  “Yeah, yeah. Very funny.” He drained his Stoli and shuddered again.

  I thought about going on, something about how, with all his local expertise, he had still almost unintentionally gone off with a lady-boy. Or presumably unintentionally. But he looked so glum that I decided to give it a rest.

  The band started up again. A few minutes later, Dox leaned over to me and said, “If you don’t mind, I’m ready to try something different. You’re welcome to join me, but I don’t know that where I’m going is apt to be your kind of place.”

  “Topless girls with numbers attached to their bikini bottoms?”

  “I’d say that’s likely, yes.”

  “Good. If they’re undressed, you’ll have a better chance of making sure . . . you know.”

  He scowled. “Are you coming?”

  “No, I’d better let you go alone. I wouldn’t want to interfere with a man’s quest to recover his masculinity. On the other hand, who’s going to warn you if you run into another . . .”

  “I’ll be fine alone, you Yankee degenerate.”

  I smiled and held out my hand. “All right then. We’ll talk in the morning?”

  “In the morning,” he said, and we shook. He got up, tossed a few hundred baht on the table, and headed for the door.

  I chuckled to myself. It was going to be good to have something in my arsenal that I could bring up anytime Dox gave me grief.

  I chuckled again, a little more softly. It was odd that she’d been in here, though. She seemed to have been on the make, and Brown Sugar was the wrong place for that. Sure, she could have come here to enjoy the music, to take a break, whatever, but the way she’d been looking around right away, the way she’d immediately zeroed in on Dox . . .

  Maybe that was opportunistic.

  Didn’t feel opportunistic. It felt focused.

  I chewed on that. Then, in a sort of semiconscious shorthand that was more suddenly present in its entirety than deduced piece by piece, I realized:

  If someone wanted to get to you and Dox, the first thing he’d look to do would be to separate you. To do that, if he were smart, he would employ some means that could distract, at least temporarily, your sensitivity to disparities in the local environment. Give you something you could focus on. A katoey, for example. Make you say, that’s what was bothering me—she’s not really a woman! Or, if you didn’t spot it, and one of you went off with her . . . boom, there you go, you’ve found your way to divide us.

  Maybe it would have been easier, more straightforward, to use a real woman as the bait. But a katoey would have certain advantages. A lady-boy could take better care of himself in a scrape. And he’d be used to acting, to passing himself off as something he wasn’t, to fooling people, lulling them.

  I felt the blood draining from my face, my heart begin to pound as an adrenaline dump kicked in. If Dox had still been at the table, he would have laughed at me. I didn’t care. There were certain things I would try to change about myself to accommodate our partnership. The way I go with my gut would never be one of them.

  I stood up and walked briskly to the door, as fast as I could move without being obvious. I was hoping I was wrong, but I knew I was right.

  FOURTEEN

  FOR AN INSTANT after exiting the bar, I didn’t focus on any one particular thing. I let it all in: the placement of the sidewalk tables and patrons, the parked cars, the pedestrians.

  Movement st
raight in front of me: a muscular Thai man in a black tee-shirt, mid-twenties, leaning against a cab at the curb, coming to his feet. “You need taxi?” he asked, in a thick Thai accent. He started moving toward me. “I give you ride. Use meter. Very good.”

  His hands were empty and he was still more than three meters away. I did a quick scan for Dox. He had walked out less than half a minute before me; he might still be in the area. I didn’t see him. But I didn’t have time to look further, or to worry about what might have happened to him.

  I checked my flanks.

  Left flank: Caucasian male, late forties, alone at one of the sidewalk tables.

  Right flank: two Thai men, mid-twenties and in shape like the first guy, watching me with a certain intensity, and getting up smoothly from their table.

  Would any of this ever stand up in court? Your Honor, my partner left after an encounter with a lady-boy. I stepped outside. Someone asked me if I needed a cab, and the men to my right were watching me with “that look,” if you know what I mean. That’s why I killed them all.

  Of course it wouldn’t stand up. But one of the things that separates people like me from live civilians and dead operators is an absolute ability and an absolute willingness to act decisively on evidence that in polite society would get you laughed at and that in court would get you thrown in jail. When you know, you know. You don’t wait for more evidence. You act. If you act wrong, you live with the consequences. You act wrong the other way, you don’t live at all.

  The man in front of me was now two meters away. “You need taxi?” he asked again. His right hand was out, motioning in a “Come this way” gesture.

  “Sure,” I said. I stepped toward him as though I intended to move past him on his right. He smiled, a smile that was supposed to look friendly but that to me was at least half-predatory.

  I smiled myself, an “Aren’t you kind to help me, I’m so clueless” kind of smile. He nodded, reassured that this was going to be easy.

  But it wasn’t going to be easy. It wasn’t going to be easy at all.

  Just before I pulled alongside him, I snatched his right wrist in my left hand and fed his arm over to my right. I hooked his tricep and dragged him past me. My weight on his arm pulled him forward, and as I circled clockwise behind him, I saw his mouth dropping open in surprise. Apparently my reaction wasn’t part of the rehearsal.

  I reached around his waist with my left hand and caught his right wrist. I cinched him in close and he grunted as some of the breath was driven from his lungs. We were both facing the bar now. The two men who had gotten up were two meters away to our left. I saw their faces hardening. Their hands were empty and I realized this was supposed to be a snatch, not a kill. Otherwise they would have had weapons and would already have used them.

  I sucked in a breath and bellowed, “Dox!” in the loudest voice I could muster, half to warn him if he was there, half to call for his help.

  The two men to the left started to charge forward.

  The guy I was holding took a wider stance and dropped his weight to create a more stable base, and I realized from the reaction he was trained. He tried to snap a head butt back at me, but my face was too far to the right and pressed up close against his shoulder. I reached down to my right front pocket where the knife was clipped in place. In one motion I cleared it, opened it, and thrust it forward from behind his spread legs into his perineum and balls.

  There’s a certain pitch of human scream that’s impossible to ignore, that drills directly into the most primitive parts of the brain. The kind that makes your hair stand up, your scrotum retract, your feet freeze dead in their tracks. That’s the scream that tore loose from this guy when my knife hit home, and it was exactly the scream I wanted. His partners moving in from the left were involuntarily stopped by it. Their conscious minds were thinking, What the fuck was that? Their unconscious minds were shouting, Who cares what it was! Run! They both pulled up short about a meter away from me.

  I didn’t wait for them to get the circuits clear. I shoved the man I’d been holding into them and turned to my right, ready to bug out. But another Thai man was coming from that direction, fast enough to have already closed the distance. He must have moved out from the alley to the right of the bar. The scream that had frozen his comrades hadn’t had the same effect on him. Either he was very brave, very stupid, or very hard of hearing. Regardless of the explanation, he was now in my way.

  I had already flipped the knife around in my hand to a reverse grip so that the blade was concealed along my wrist and lower forearm. Even so, Mr. Hearing Impaired must not have been paying proper attention, or he would have put two and two together: I was holding something in my hand, something that had just caused his partner to shriek like the eunuch he now was, and that something was probably sharp and pointy. Or the explanation for his failure to hesitate as his comrades had was indeed stupidity, because there is nothing quite so stupid as showing up for a knife fight unarmed.

  He paused a meter in front of me and raised his fists as though we were about to box. I noted, half-consciously, scars around his eyebrows and the bump of a previously broken nose, and realized, Muay Thai, these guys are Thai boxers.

  I detected a slight shift in his weight, a grounding of the left leg, and then his right shin was whipping in toward my left thigh. Thai boxing shin kicks can hit like baseball bats, and if I hadn’t seen it coming and so hadn’t had a fraction of a second to prepare, he would have blasted my leg out from under me and then I would have been fighting three men, or maybe more, from the ground.

  But I had that fraction of a second. I used it to move closer, just inside the sweet spot of the kick, and to drop my weight so my hip would take the main impact. I caught his leg as it hit, wrapping my left arm around his calf. He reacted instantly: he grabbed my head, braced himself on the captured leg, and leaped upward and toward me, his left knee coming around for my face, just as he had doubtless done countless times in the ring.

  But they don’t let knives in the ring. The sport wouldn’t be the same if they did.

  I raised my right arm and turtled my head in. The knee hit my forearm. It hurt, especially with the bruises Delilah had given me, but it beat a broken jaw. He started to return to the ground. I moved the knife out from along my forearm so that I was gripping it ice pick style, edge in, and plunged it into his right inner thigh where it connected to the pelvis. In the heat of the moment and pumped full of adrenaline, he seemed not to notice what had happened. But then I ripped down and back, tearing open his femoral artery and a lot of other real estate, too, and that seemed to get his attention. He howled and jerked convulsively away from me. I swept his good leg out from under him in modified ouchi-gari, a judo throw, and let him go as he fell, not wanting to take a chance on getting tangled up with him on the ground.

  I turned back to the other two guys, and was gratified to see them backing away. There was no doubt now that a knife was in play, and no doubt that it was being used by someone for more than just show. Apparently this was all more trouble than they wanted or had been led to expect. They turned and ran.

  I looked the other way. The white guy who had been sitting outside the bar had stood up. “Are you all right?” he asked, in American-accented English.

  I glanced all around. The people who had been sitting at the other tables outside were frozen in place, in shock. The men on the ground were moaning and writhing. From the wounds I had given them and the amount of blood spreading out on the pavement, I expected they would be dead in just a few more seconds.

  “I saw everything,” the white guy was saying. He started moving toward me. “They attacked you. It was self-defense. I’m a lawyer, I can help.”

  I thought, crazily, Great, just what I need, a lawyer.

  And then something came into focus. Maybe it was intuition. Maybe it was my unconscious sifting data that was invisible to my conscious mind, items like the way he’d been sitting at that table, with his feet firmly on the ground as t
hough ready for quick action; or his position, in what had been one of my blind spots as I exited the bar; or his calm and forthcoming expression of concern just now, when all the other onlookers were frozen or fleeing.

  He never gave off the vibe, none at all. I’d even overlooked him to start with. Maybe that was part of the plan: I was looking for more Thais, not a white guy. Maybe it was just that, whoever Perry Mason here was, he was definitely very good.

  He continued to move toward me. His hands were empty . . . or was that something in his left? I wasn’t sure. I shouted, “Stop right there!”

  He shook his head and said, “What are you talking about? I just want to help.” And kept moving in.

  When you tell someone who’s moving toward you to come no closer, with the appropriate air of gravity and command in your voice, and particularly when that air is augmented by the presence of a knife with which you’ve just killed two people, and the guy keeps coming anyway, you are not dealing with someone who needs a light for a cigarette, or directions, or the time of day, or whatever else was his ostensible excuse for invading your space. You are dealing with someone intent on taking something that you would prefer not to part with, up to and including your life, and his failure to heed your command is more than adequate proof of this, and of how you must now handle it.

  I did a quick perimeter check. Other than the shocked onlookers, some of whom were now coming to their senses and scurrying away, it looked like it was just the two of us. I started to move toward him.

  Suddenly, Perry Mason changed his tune. He started backing up. But it wasn’t a retreat, just a tactical pause. Because, as he moved smoothly backward, his free hand dropped equally smoothly to his right front pocket and pulled free a folding knife. It was opening even as it cleared his pants, and I could tell from the liquid ease with which he withdrew it that this man was no knife dilettante, but rather someone who had trained long, hard, and seriously to develop the proficiency and confidence I had just witnessed.