by Rich Larson
She continued to the underside of the shoe, wiping the needle-like heel clean, then paused. Dorian winced, thinking of all the many places he could have put the sticky. Slipped into her bag, or onto the small of her back, or even somewhere in her hair.
Nahm pincered the tiny plastic bead between two nails and peered at it. Dorian crossed his tattooed fingers, hoping she wasn’t one of the many girls addicted to Bollywood spy flicks. She frowned, then balled the sticky up in the used wipe and tossed it away. The stream of code floated a half-meter over, now useless, as the ute pulled in.
Dorian slid closer, watching Nahm get to her feet, smooth out her dress. For the first time, she looked slightly nervous. The ute’s shiny black door opened with a hiss. Dorian didn’t have an angle to see the interior as Nahm slithered inside, but the voice within was unmistakable, Cockney accent undisguised.
“Christ, what is that stink? Please do not track that shit in with you, love.”
Dorian didn’t get to hear Nahm’s retort. The door swooshed shut and the ute bullied its way back into the traffic. Dorian trotted over and picked up the bloody wipe, retrieving the sticky from inside. The smell barely bothered him, because Alexis Carrow was slumming it in Pattaya and he was going to blackmail the ever-loving shit out of her.
When Dorian tried to search Nahm’s profile again, he wasn’t particularly surprised to see she’d pulled it off Mixt and Skinspin and the rest. Either finding the sticky had spooked her, or her current customer was upping the pay enough to make exclusivity worthwhile. Dorian had to do things the old-fashioned way, with a sheaf of rumpled 200 Baht notes doled out to helpful individuals.
He didn’t find her on the beach until late afternoon, and almost didn’t recognize her when he did. She sat cross-legged on the palm-shaded sand, chatting to the old woman selling coconut milk and bags of crushed ice from a sputtering minifridge. Her face was more or less scrubbed of makeup, eyes smaller without the caked-on kohl, and her black hair hung gathered in a ponytail. Loose harem pants, flip-flops, a canary yellow Jack Daniels tank he assumed was being worn ironically.
“Sawatdee krap,” Dorian said, butchering the pronunciation on purpose. He flashed her an incredulous grin. “This is a surprise.”
Nahm looked up, surprised. “Hello,” she beamed, running her fingers through her ponytail. Then her smile dimmed by a few watts. A crease of suspicion appeared on her forehead. “What is it you want? I am no working.”
“I guessed from the flip-flops,” Dorian said. “Long night for you?”
Nahm narrowed her eyes. “You,” she said. “You put a . . . thing. To my shoe. First I think it was Ivan, but it was you.” She said something to the old woman in machine-gun Thai, too fast for Dorian to even try at, and slunk to her feet. “I am going. I don’t care you are handsome, you are crazy like Ivan.” She brushed sand off her legs and made for the street.
“Have you figured out who you’re fucking yet?” Dorian asked, dropping pretenses. “That business lady? The angry one?”
Nahm stopped, turned back.
Dorian clawed the air in front of his face as an extra reminder. “Whatever she’s paying you is shit,” he said.
“More than you pay me.”
“She’s a lot richer than me,” Dorian said. “She’s Alexis Carrow.”
Nahm’s eyes winched wide and she put a furious finger to her lips, scanning the beach as if paparazzi might burst up out of the gray sand.
Dorian grinned. “So you do know.”
“What is it you want?” Nahm repeated, raking fingers through her ponytail.
“I want to talk business,” Dorian said. “Walk with me a minute?”
He chased a few coins out of his pocket to buy a coconut milk and a bag of ice chips, then gestured down the beach. Nahm swayed, indecisive, but when Dorian started to walk she fired off another salvo of indecipherable Thai to the old woman and fell into step with him.
It was low tide and the beach was a minefield of broken glass bottles and plastic trash floating in tepid puddles. Other than a prone tourist couple baking away their hangovers, Dorian and Nahm had the place to themselves.
“You familiar with the term blackmail?” Dorian asked, handing her the coconut milk.
Nahm spun the straw between her fingers. “I watch bad movies. Yes.”
“Your client is wearing a blur for a reason.” Dorian ripped open the ice bag. “She’s not keen on the tablos finding out she took a sex trip to Thailand.”
Nahm gave an irritated shake of her head. “If she find that thing on my shoe, big fucking trouble for me, you know that?”
“Does she actually sweep you for bugs? Christ.” Dorian popped a chunk of ice into his mouth. “Pawanoia.”
“She careful.”
Dorian crunched down on the cube, eliciting a squeal and crack. “Yes. Very careful. Meaning any fuck-footage from her trip is going to be extremely valuable. Do you want to get rich, Nahm?”
“Everybody wants to get rich,” Nahm said, plumbing with her straw, not looking at him.
“Well, this is your shot. Also, my shot.” Dorian spat a piece of ice into the filmy surf. “Alexis Carrow has enough money that paying two enterprising individuals such as you and me to suppress a sex scandal is easily worth 50 000 Euros. And if she refuses to negotiate, any of the bigger tablos would pay us the same for the footage.”
Nahm’s eyes went wide and Dorian realized he probably could have halved his actual demand a second time.
“Enough money to take care of your family out in Buriram,” Dorian continued. “Get them out of the village, if you want. Definitely enough to assuage any lingering embarrassment about how their first-born financed her vaginoplasty.”
“I make good money do what I do now,” Nahm said sourly. “Enough money. I send them.”
“Not 50 000 Euros money,” Dorian said. “D’you really want to hook in Pattaya your whole life?” He packed another ice cube into his cheek. “This city is the diseased bleached asshole of Thailand. It’s disgusting.”
Nahm gave him a dirty look. “You’re here.”
“I’m disgusting,” Dorian explained.
“And this is why Pattaya is Pattaya,” Nahm said, lobbing her half-empty coconut milk into the water. “You make Pattaya be Pattaya.”
“Don’t have to litter about it.” Dorian crunched his ice. “If you help me pull this off, you can live wherever you want.”
“In London with you?” Nahm asked dryly.
“50 000 Euros,” Dorian repeated. “Split even. Fifty percent yours, fifty percent mine. I’ve got a way to short-circuit the blur projector. I’ll rig a sticky, it’s the same thing I stuck to your shoe. Tiny. You just have to put it on the collar without her noticing.”
“I told you she scan me in the car.” Nahm folded her arms. “Very careful, remember?”
“That’s why we plant it in the room beforehand, along with a little slip-in eyecam,” Dorian said, groping inside the ice bag with reddened fingertips. “Where’s she taking you tonight? Does she do fauxtels or the real thing?”
Nahm bit her lip. Dorian could practically see the tug-of-war on her creased forehead, a chance at instant wealth battling the cardinal rule of confidentiality.
“I want sixty percent,” Nahm said. “I lose my best ever client. I maybe get big fucking trouble. You are safe with your phone somewhere, no risk.”
Dorian grinned. “You’re sharper than you let on. Why the dizzy bitch act? Do clients really like it that much?”
“Sixty percent,” Nahm repeated, but with a hint of her own grin.
“Fine.” Dorian spat out his ice and stuck out his hand. “Sixty.”
Alexis Carrow had rented a suite at the Emerald Palace, a name Dorian thought a bit generous for an eight-story quickcrete façade topped by a broken-down eternity pool collecting algae. But if she was after privacy, it wasn’t a bad choice. It was far enough from the main drag to be relatively quiet, and small enough to be inconspicuous.
; Of course, gaining access was as easy as waltzing past reception wearing a drunken grin and clutching an expired keycard fished from the wastebasket outside. Dorian affected a slight stagger on his way to the lift. Once the shiny doors slid shut, he took out his tablet and called Nahm.
“How’s the timing?” he asked, as she appeared on the screen putting up her hair with a static clip.
“She’s on her way,” Nahm said, unsticking a floating tendril of dark hair from her eyelash. “Get me from Bali Hai in five minute, then take ten, twelve minute back to hotel. Over.”
“Alright.” Dorian punched the backlit eight with his knuckle. “So I’m going to put it in the back of the toilet.”
“So, how they did in The Godfather. Over.” Nahm was now applying a gloss to her lips that shimmered like broken glass and was not paying as close attention as Dorian would have liked.
“Sure,” he said. “As soon as you get in, go to the bathroom. Get some water going so she can’t hear you take the lid off. Then open the ziplock, take the eyecam out first. You ever wear contacts?”
“Yes.”
“It’s like that,” Dorian said. “Once you have the eyecam in, take the sticky out of the ziplock and hide it in your hand.”
“And put it to the blur without her knowing it,” Nahm continued, then, in a surprisingly credible imitation of Dorian’s accent: “Base of the projector if possible, over.”
“Yeah, then business as usual,” Dorian said, as the lift jittered to a halt. “She won’t notice when the projection goes down, so long as you’re being your usual distracting self and you don’t start complimenting her eyes or anything batshit like that.” The lift made to open and he jammed it shut again. “Do what you normally do,” he went on. “Let the eyecam do the work. After she pays you, come find me across the street and we’ll get the POV uploaded to a private cloud. At which point, champagne and a blowjob.”
“Who give the champagne, who give the blowjob?” Nahm asked, checking her thumbnail offscreen. “Over.”
“Both on me if you do this right,” Dorian said, knuckling the Open Door button. “Message me when you get to the hotel.” He paused, and then, because she was growing on him a bit: “Over.”
Nahm’s face lit up for the split second before he ended the call, then Dorian set off down the stucco-walled hallway. He made a quick check around the corner, then doubled back to door 811 and made short work of the electronic lock. The suite had obviously been prepped for her arrival. Freshly-laundered sheets on the bed, a sea of fluffy white towels at the foot of it. Condom sprays and lubricants arrayed brazenly on the nightstand. Minibar stocked with Tanqueray gin and Lunar vodka.
Dorian plucked a cube out of the full ice bucket and popped it in his mouth, making his way to the bathroom. He lifted the featherweight top off the back of the Western-style toilet, then reached inside his pocket where the tiny eyecam and the even smaller sticky had been lovingly double-bagged in ziplock. Neither had been cheap, and he had a feeling he wasn’t going to get the sticky back.
Setting the bag adrift in chemical-smelling water, Dorian replaced the top of the toilet and re-entered the room. He walked in a slow circle around the bed, picturing angles, trying not to get distracted imagining Nahm and a celebrity CEO fucking on it. In the end, he decided to plant his insurance cam in the far corner. It would be an uncreative wide angle shot, but with a near-zero chance of Alexis Carrow’s deblurred face failing to make an appearance.
It wasn’t that he didn’t trust Nahm to manage the eyecam, but back-ups were his cardinal rule where information storage was concerned. A healthy fear of technical difficulties went hand-in-hand with hacking for a living.
Once satisfied with the cam’s placement in a shadowy whorl of stucco, Dorian put his ear to the door to listen for footsteps. Hearing nothing, he exited the room, heart pumping with the old break-and-enter exhilaration from his teenage years.
His hand was still on the doorknob when a black-shirted employee rounded the corner in his peripheral. Dorian didn’t look up. He pretended to struggle with the door, then looked down at his keycard and made a slurred sound of realization.
“This no your room, sir. Can I help you?”
Dorian tried not to jump. The man had slunk up and stopped directly behind him, quiet as a cat, a feat made more impressive by the sheer size of him. Tall for a Thai, broad-chested and broad-shouldered, with a shaved scalp glistening in the florescent lighting and a tattoo of a cheerful cartoon snake wriggling up and down one sinewy forearm. Dorian could have sworn he’d been kicked out of a couple bars by the very same. Bouncers and hotel security tended to overlap.
“Wrong floor,” Dorian said, waving his keycard. “Hit the wrong button in the lift. One too many Changs.” He shook an imaginary beer bottle.
“Okay, sir,” the guard said, not smiling.
“Nice tattoo,” Dorian added. “Friendly-looking little bugger.”
He gave the man a bleary grin, then made for the lift as quickly as he could without looking suspicious.
Now that the rest of it was in Nahm’s hands, Dorian had nothing to do but wait. He camped out in an automated tourist bar across the way, slumping into a plastic molded seat with his tablet. Once Nahm messaged him to say they were at the hotel, he bought a gargantuan Heineken bottle and drank it slowly on ice.
Time ticked by on his tablet screen. He passed it imagining the whole thing going off flawlessly, and then by imagining himself on a small sleek yacht knifing through the blue-green waters off Ko Fangan. Maybe even with Nahm draped on his shoulder for a week or two, wearing a pair of aviators and a skanky swimsuit. Between that and the tingly insulation of a half-liter of Heineken, he barely rattled when a hand slammed down on the table in front of him.
Dorian blinked hard. Nahm was standing in front of him, shoulders trembling, clutching herself. The static clip was still in place, moving her hair in graceful black ripples around her face, but the effect wasn’t the same with her lip gloss smeared halfway across her cheek and a growing brown bruise under her bloodshot left eye. And hulking behind her, red-faced and furious, was the hotel security guard.
“Shit,” Dorian said. The buzz from the beer slipped away all at once.
“I fuck up,” Nahm said shakily. “I left the bathroom open. The blur go off, but when we switch around on the bed she see herself in the mirror.”
The security guard barked something fast and angry, from which Dorian could only extricate falang and police. He reached across the table and hauled Dorian up by the armpit, jerking his head toward the door.
“The eyecam?” Dorian demanded, trying to twist away. No go.
“She call this big motherfucker, he take it out my eye,” Nahm groaned, mascara finally starting to leak down her cheeks in inky trails. “She gets mad, she go. He says he will call the police so I tell him you have money.”
“I don’t have money,” Dorian said reflexively, looking at the guard.
“Bullshit.” Nahm’s eyes were wide and desperate. “I know you have money.”
Dorian looked around the bar, licking his lips. He’d picked it intentionally. A collection of steroid-bulky expats were cradling pints in the back, watching the situation with increasing interest. If he played ignorant right now, they looked both drunk and patriotic enough to intervene on behalf of a fellow Englishman. Nobody liked it when the locals stopped smiling.
“His cousin is police,” Nahm said, winnowing on the edge of the sob. “He says if I don’t pay he put me in the jail.”
Dorian picked up his glass and finished it; the sweat pooling in his palms nearly made it slip out of his grip. He tried to think. If Carrow had left in a hurry, that meant the insurance cam he’d hidden was still there in the hotel room. The fact she’d left furious only confirmed how valuable the footage was.
If he wanted to get back into that room before some overzealous autocleaner wiped the cam off the wall, he needed to defuse things.
“Okay, fuck,” Dorian said. “Ok
ay. I’ll come.” He gave a glance toward the back table. “Nothing to worry about, lads. Just a bit of a . . . lover’s spat.”
One of the men rubbed his bristly chin and raised his pint in Dorian’s general direction. The others ignored him. As he let himself be steered out the door, the bar chirped goodbye in Thai and then English. Nahm followed behind, pinching the torn fabric of her shirt together. Her bare feet slapped on the tile. She was biting her lip, rubbing absently at the smeared gloss.
“Sorry I fuck up,” she said miserably. Outside, the night air was warm and stank of a broken sewer line. Dorian fixed his eyes on the neon green sign of the hotel across the way. The sooner he had this dealt with, the sooner he could get the cam.
“Me too,” Dorian said, but he searched for her free hand in the dark and gave it what he figured was a comforting squeeze.
She looked down at their interlaced hands, then back up, brow furrowed. “You should have said, though. You should have said, Nahm, don’t let her see a mirror.”
Dorian took his hand back. The guard ushered them into the side alley, stopping underneath a graffitied Dokemon. Dorian crossed his arms.
“Alright,” he said. “How much does he want? And if it’s cash, we need a machine.”
“No cash,” the guard said, brandishing a phone still slick from the plastic wrap. “I do Bank.”
“Of course you do,” Dorian said. “So how much, shitface?”
“Five million Baht.”
Dorian’s exaggerated guffaw accidentally landed a speck of spit on the guard’s shoulder, but the man didn’t seem to notice and Dorian didn’t feel keen to point it out.
“Who do you think I am, the fucking king?” he demanded instead.
In reply, the guard thumbed a number into his phone. “I call cousin,” he said, seizing Nahm’s wrist. “Your ladyboy will go to jail, maybe you, too.”
Nahm gave a low groan again. Dorian made a few mental calculations. He had just over a million Banked, and the footage from the hotel had to be worth triple that, even if it wasn’t a full encounter. He would still come out of this in the black. The last thing Dorian needed was police showing up. And he didn’t like the idea of Nahm sobbing in some filthy lock-up, either.