by Jake Needham
“How did this happen?” Dr. Gupta asked.
“I ran into a door.”
“That’s not what she says.”
Dr. Gupta gestured vaguely to the other side of Tay’s hospital bed, and Tay started to roll his head in that direction. He quickly discovered what a bad idea that was and settled instead for simply shifting his eyes as far as they would go. They shifted far enough for him to see Emma standing next to Sergeant Kang, and to notice the worried looks both of them had on their faces.
“She says you were in a fight with two men,” Dr. Gupta continued, “and were struck several times in the head. Then you were knocked down and your head hit a concrete sidewalk.”
“When you put it that way, it sounds awful.”
Dr. Gupta ran his hands through Tay’s hair and probed gently at the swellings on his face and the back of his skull.
“Aren’t you getting a little old for this kind of thing, Inspector?”
“I’m getting a little old for nearly everything.”
Tay was determined not to flinch in front of Emma, but when Gupta’s hands reached his swollen jaw he flinched anyway.
“Were all of these incidents connected with you being a policeman?”
“More or less.”
“Then perhaps you should consider a safer line of work.”
“Great idea. I could always become a doctor.”
“Just don’t try to become a comedian. You clearly lack the talent for it.”
Gupta flicked on his penlight again, bent close, and examined the swelling on the side of Tay’s jaw.
“You’re going to have a hell of a headache, but it doesn’t look too serious from here,” he said.
“You should see it from this side.”
“Hummm,” Dr. Gupta said.
Tay never liked to hear a doctor say hummm. Whatever diagnosis a doctor made, whatever words he used to tell you of your condition, few of them sounded more unhappy than hummm.
“I can’t tell you how much I’m enjoying this conversation, Doctor, but when are you going to let me out of here?”
Gupta straightened up and snapped his penlight off.
“Look, Inspector, you really don’t seem to understand. You’ve had three concussions in less than a year. Any one of them could have caused permanent neurological damage.”
“But they didn’t.”
“Maybe not, but you’re not going anywhere until I have satisfied myself of that for certain. Besides, it looks to me like you could use some rest and this is as good a place as any for you to get it.”
“Rest? Here? Have you ever been in a hospital, Doctor?”
Dr. Gupta sighed and shook his head. Then he folded his arms and shifted his eyes to Emma.
“The swelling around his jaw ought to subside within twenty-four hours,” he told her. “It appears that on the whole he was lucky, although symptoms of neurological damage can manifest themselves slowly.”
“How long before he can—”
“I’ll look in on him tomorrow morning,” Gupta interrupted Emma, “and we’ll see where we are then. Please do not stay too long. He needs to sleep.”
“Can you give him medication?” Emma asked. “To sleep, I mean.”
“With a concussion like that,” Dr. Gupta chuckled, “you don’t need sleeping medication. I’d guess in less than fifteen minutes he will be dreaming amazing dreams.”
Then Dr. Gupta nodded and left the room, closing the door quietly behind him.
“What time is it?” Tay asked Emma.
“A little after nine.”
That took a moment for Tay to absorb.
“Nine?”
“Yes.”
“In the morning?”
Emma nodded.
“I’ve been out all night?”
Emma nodded again.
“You had us worried there, sir,” Kang put in.
“Exactly what are you doing here, Sergeant?”
“Emma called the police. When she told them who you were, the CID duty officer called me at home.”
“So I gather you two have now met.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And naturally you’ve been talking.”
“Yes, sir. We have.”
“Which obviously means you now know—”
“I know you’ve been helping Emma with some research into an article she’s writing about the suicide of Tyler Bartlett,” Kang interrupted. “I don’t see why that should concern anyone else.”
“Thank you, Sergeant.”
“You’re welcome, sir.”
Emma walked around to the side of the bed and placed her hand on top of Tay’s. It felt wonderful to Tay. He hoped she would leave it there. Maybe for a week or so.
“I want you to know how much I appreciate what you did, Sam.”
“What did I do?”
“You went after the man who attacked me. God knows what might have happened if you hadn’t done that.”
Tay closed his eyes and replayed what he remembered of the three men attacking them there on the sidewalk of Victoria Street.
Two men had come straight at him and the third had moved Emma out of the way and held her there. Clearly he was the target of the attack, not Emma. He doubted she had been in any real danger. Still, any man would revel in an opportunity to look heroic in Emma’s eyes, and he wasn’t about to refuse this one, even if he did feel like a bit of a fraud.
“Did you recognize any of the men, sir?” Sergeant Kang asked.
“They were all wearing balaclavas. They could have been anybody.”
“How about their van? Did you get a good look at it?”
“Not really. It was a white Toyota, I think. No windows. Just a sliding door on at least one side. I wasn’t in any condition to ask to see their registration.”
“Did they take anything?”
“Only a white plastic bag…”
Tay hesitated and glanced at Emma.
“I’ve already told him what you were carrying,” Emma said.
“Whoever it was obviously wanted Tyler’s things,” Kang said. “They must have been watching you at Raffles.”
“It’s more likely they were watching Betty Lee, Robbie.”
“They certainly weren’t after Tyler’s clothes,” Emma said. “They must have known about the disk drive somehow. There’s something on that drive that they don’t want me to see, but now I’ll never know what it was.”
“Where are my pants?” Tay asked, his voice rising. “Somebody get me my pants.”
“Sir, you’re not going anywhere. You heard what the doctor said.”
“I don’t want to put them on, Sergeant. I want to look in the pockets.”
Kang found Tay’s pants in the closet and brought them to him.
“I thought it might be safer to carry the drive in my pocket than in that plastic bag,” Tay said. “Although I wasn’t exactly thinking about being attacked on the sidewalk.”
When Tay pushed his hand into the left trouser pocket he felt nothing. His heart fell, but then he tried the right trouser pocket and his outstretched fingers touched the smooth plastic of the little drive. He pulled it out, held it up, and handed his pants back to Kang.
Tay looked at Emma. “Can you find out what’s on this?”
“I can plug it into my laptop, but that’s probably not going to do much good. It’s almost certainly encrypted.”
Tay knew what encryption was, of course, even if he didn’t know how to do it.
“There might be a hidden directory structure, too,” Emma continued, “or even an embedded routine that will erase the drive if anyone tries to access it without authorization.”
Now completely out of his depth, Tay settled for nodding gravely, looking wise, and saying nothing at all.
“I don’t want to mess anything up,” Emma added. “I’d feel better if we had a computer security guy look at the drive.”
“But we don’t have one.”
Kang cleared his th
roat, and Emma and Tay both looked at him.
“I might know somebody, sir.”
“Go on, Sergeant.”
“Well, sir, we had this case that involved a guy using an iPhone to count cards at the Marina Bay Sands. It was really amazing. The phone was set up to—”
“Get to the point, please, Sergeant.”
“Yes, sir. Anyway, this guy admitted he bought the phone from the Wangster, and he—”
“Wait… the Wangster?”
“His real name is Wang Shou Hong, but everyone calls him the Wangster. He’s a funny little guy, and he seems to know everything there is to know about computers.”
“Lives in his mother’s basement, does he, Sergeant?”
“Uh… I don’t know if his mother has a basement, sir.”
“I was kidding, Sergeant.”
“Oh yes, sir. I see.”
Kang didn’t see, but he figured there was no reason to admit that.
“Anyway, sir, the Wangster helped us find the people who were selling the iPhones he had written the card counting program for. He didn’t get any money for the program. He just wrote it to see if he could, so I didn’t see any reason to arrest him. He’s a really smart kid. I figured him owing me a favor was a good thing.”
“Would you be willing to cash in that favor for us now, Sergeant?”
“Yes, sir. It would be my pleasure.”
All at once, Tay had an overwhelming desire to go to sleep. He held out the little white disk drive and Kang had just taken it when Tay felt himself sliding under the surface. A second after that, two seconds at the very most, and he was gone.
When Tay woke again, Emma and Kang had left. He had no idea how long he had slept. It could have been a few minutes, but it could have been half a day. He thought he could see light beyond the wooden blinds closed over the room’s only window so he guessed it was probably sometime in the afternoon. But there was no clock in the room and his wristwatch was locked away so he had no way to know for sure.
He sat up, swung his feet to the floor, and pushed himself cautiously to his feet. He wobbled a little, but he felt secure enough to walk to the toilet. After he finished and washed his hands, he walked slowly over to the window and opened the blinds. He was surprised to see that it was raining. He hadn’t heard any sound of rain. He watched the water running down the window for a few minutes, and then he went back to bed and fell asleep again.
When Tay woke for the second time, he knew right away it was the middle of the night. He lay in bed for a while listening to the muted sounds of the hospital, and he felt a conviction growing within him that his mother was coming soon to tell him something important.
She didn’t come, and after a while Tay got tired of waiting for her.
He unlocked the drawer where his personal effects were stored and looked at his watch. It was just after three. He got up, put on his clothes, took his wallet and keys, and slipped on his watch. That was when he realized somebody had taken his cigarettes and matches. Bastards.
Tay poked his head into the hallway and saw no one. Moving as quietly as he could, he walked to the end of the hall where he saw two elevators. He pushed the call button and at almost the same moment the doors to one opened and he got on. On the ground floor, he headed straight out through the front door. No one stopped him.
When he got outside, he was pleased to find it had stopped raining. He took a deep breath of freshly scrubbed air and went in search of a taxi to take him home.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
TAY WOKE AT noon the next day and his first thought was of a dream he could not remember. Had his mother made one of her annoying nocturnal visits? He rummaged around for a while in his subconscious searching for clues, but he found none.
Downstairs, Tay made coffee and drank two cups while he kept his mind as empty as possible. When he finally felt up to it, he ran through an inventory of his bodily parts, gingerly probing the current state of each. His head hurt and his jaw was badly swollen, but other than that everything seemed okay. At least nothing had fallen off. Yet.
The telephone rang. Tay had no doubt quite a few people were looking for him right now, so he didn’t answer it. Instead, he walked out into his garden to get away from the sound and focused his attention on developing a plan to avoid talking to anyone for a while.
Something was very wrong here. He and Emma had stirred up a storm, that much was clear. He just didn’t understand why. Someone had been willing to use violence to prevent them from finding out… well, from finding out what? He needed a day of quiet to think everything through. He did not need to spend any part of that day discussing his physical condition with everyone who had his telephone number.
Dr. Gupta and the hospital were no doubt exhibiting all the classic signs of hysteria because of his unannounced disappearance, but they could go screw themselves. Emma and Kang were another matter. They would be worried about him, and not to reassure them he wasn’t lying dead in a ditch somewhere would be unfeeling. He was not unfeeling. He just didn’t want to talk to anybody. So what to do?
All at once a novel idea occurred to him, at least novel for Samuel Tay, and he went back inside and looked around until he found his cell phone on the bedside table. When he thumbed it on, lists of unanswered calls and unacknowledged messages popped up, but the lists were so long he deleted both without reading them.
Tay couldn’t remember the last time he had sent anyone a text message. Maybe he had never sent one. But after fiddling with his telephone for a bit, he thought he had figured out how to do it.
First, he composed a message to Sergeant Kang saying that he was fine and had left the hospital for reasons he would explain in a day or two. He had absolutely no idea what he would tell Kang then, of course, but he would think of something later. He started to write Emma a text, too, but he couldn’t think what to say to her either. Should he thank her for coming to the hospital to see him? No, of course he shouldn’t. They had been attacked together. Naturally they both went to the hospital. Tay decided a text message was no place to be personal anyway, regardless of the circumstances, so he settled for tapping out a message almost identical to the one he had sent to Kang.
When he was done, he opened the top drawer of his dresser to put away his cell phone. He certainly didn’t want to listen to it buzzing for the rest of the day. That was when his eyes came to rest on the gun lying in the front of the drawer.
The first time he was suspended because of the shooting, his boss had followed the usual procedure and required him to surrender both his warrant card and his weapon. The second time he was suspended, nothing had been said about either. He thought his boss had simply been too embarrassed to ask again, so he still had both his warrant card and his gun.
Tay seldom carried a gun even when he was on duty, but that wasn’t so much because he harbored high-minded scruples that prevented him from shooting people. Until recently he had never actually shot anyone, but he did have a long list of people he thought could use shooting so he just didn’t want to be too tempted.
Tay lifted the weapon out of the drawer, pulled it from its holster, and examined it. He had been outnumbered three to one last night. A handgun would have gone a long way toward evening the odds.
His choice of duty gun marked him as even more of an old fart than everyone already thought he was, Tay realized, which was really saying something. He still had his old-fashioned wheel gun, a Smith and Wesson .38, five shots with a two-inch barrel. The gun was practically a museum piece. Carrying it was like making telephone calls on a rotary dial phone.
Policemen these days all carried semi-automatics or perhaps one of the big Taurus revolvers chambered for a .44 magnum. Both of those were a lot more gun than Tay had any use for, so he just stuck to his old Smith and Wesson .38 and shrugged off the jokes that came along with it. That’s a great weapon if you get into a gunfight in an elevator, was Kang’s inevitable wisecrack on those rare occasions he saw Tay carrying it.
&nbs
p; Tay figured the truth was it didn’t matter all that much. He had no intention of getting into a gunfight anywhere. And if he did somehow end up in a gunfight, he was such a lousy shot one gun was about as useless to him as another.
He spun the cylinder to make certain the gun was fully loaded, slid it back into its holster, and snapped the safety strap. Maybe he should think about carrying it. Just for a few weeks. Yes, he would definitely put that on his things-to-think-about list. He closed the drawer, laid the gun on his bedside table, and went back downstairs.
Tay poured another cup of coffee, opened his front door, and stood for a while drinking it and looking through his gate at Emerald Hill Road. He lived on a quiet dead-end and not much traffic ever passed his house so there wasn’t a great deal to see. It suddenly occurred to him that he couldn’t remember when he had last emptied his mailbox so he walked out to his gate, reached through the bars, and dug out the accumulated mail and other crap. There was a lot of it. He tapped it together into a manageable stack and took it all inside.
Dropping the pile on the kitchen counter, he began halfheartedly sorting through it. There were supermarket circulars, appeals for charitable contributions, subscription offers from magazines, and other stuff that Tay couldn’t even begin to identify. Tay was on the verge of just dumping it all into the garbage when a postcard fell on the floor. He bent over and picked it up, and he was surprised to see it was an invitation to an anniversary party for a bar.
The bar wasn’t even in Singapore. It was someplace in Thailand. Why in the world, Tay asked himself, would anybody…
Then all at once he understood. And when he did, he laughed right out loud.
Baby Dolls was a go-go bar located in a sleazy Thai seaside resort called Pattaya. A man named John August presumably owned it. Tay didn’t think August really owned Baby Dolls, and he knew full well the bar was a front. He just didn’t have any idea who really did own it or what it was a front for.
John August was the other man shot that night in the shophouse in Geylang, the man whose body Kang couldn’t find when he went downstairs. John August was… well, the truth was he didn’t know for sure who John August was. August was tied into the American security establishment somehow, Tay had no doubt of that, but whatever his title and whoever he really worked for, August was clearly someone whose job it was to fix things other people didn’t want to hear about. August solved problems the old fashioned way. He killed them.Tay had to admit he genuinely liked August regardless of the things he had probably done. They didn’t have that much of a relationship, he supposed. They certainly weren’t drinking buddies, and that was just fine with Tay. But August didn’t seem to mind Tay asking for a little help now and then when justice needed a tiny nudge.