Breathing Water

by Timothy Hallinan

  “Were they really naked?” Miaow says. Her eyes are so wide he can see white all around her irises, and the evening’s excitement seems to have driven away the clouds that have been hovering over her head. “I mean, really?”

  “Close enough,” Rafferty says. “Thank you, Mrs. Pongsiri. I’ll baby-sit your bar girls some evening.”

  He gets a flirtatious smile and a disapproving shake of the head. Rafferty doubts there’s a man in the world who could mix messages like that. “You wouldn’t say that if your wife could hear you.”

  “No, I wouldn’t,” he says. “And she’s not going to hear it from anybody here either. Is she, Miaow?”

  “Why couldn’t I go with you?” The petulance returns.

  “No kids allowed. Just a bunch of rich people standing around sneering at each other. Bye, Mrs. Pongsiri.” He leads Miaow down the hall. “Anyway, it was all boring except for the two minutes you saw on television.”

  “The garden was pretty. I would have liked it.”

  “It didn’t smell as good as it looked.” He opens the door to the apartment and steps aside to allow Miaow to precede him. As he closes the door, Rose comes out of the bedroom, already in shorts and a T-shirt.

  “You should get out of that monkey outfit,” she says.

  “Miaow was just telling me that Pan’s little show was on TV.”

  “It was,” Miaow says, heading for her room.

  “That was fast.” Rose stops at the kitchen counter. “I’m going to make some Nescafé,” she says. “Want some?”

  “Have I ever wanted any?”

  “Not that I remember.”

  “But I might want it at this hour?”

  “You’ll never truly become Thai until you learn to enjoy Nescafé.”

  “Then I guess I’m locked out of paradise.”

  “I don’t know about you,” Rose says, crossing the kitchen, “but I had enough of paradise tonight. The kids were pretty, though, weren’t they?”

  “Enthusiastic, too.”

  “I could never do that,” Rose says with one hand on the handle of the cabinet. “Work naked like that. I was offered more money to move to the upstairs bar and do shows—you know, shows—but the idea made my stomach—” She pulls the door open, and there is a white blur of motion, and Rose takes an enormous, instinctive leap backward as something explodes off the shelf toward her. Packages tumble to the counter, pushed aside by whatever it is. Rose’s scream is so high that Rafferty squints against the sound, and he stands as though he has been nailed in place, staring at the thing that has landed on the floor only a few inches short of Rose, who is backing away, both hands out to fend it off.

  It raises itself to a vertical position, perhaps three feet off the floor, its hood spread wide, its tongue tasting the air.

  Rafferty later has no memory of having grabbed Rose. All he can remember is the two of them in the living room, his fingers digging into her upper arms, as Miaow charges down the hall toward them. He stops her with a single barked syllable. The cobra remains upright, swaying from side to side.

  “Miaow. Stay there. Rose, go over there, near the front door, with Miaow.” He grabs the white leather hassock from beside the coffee table with both hands and pushes it across the room to the edge of the kitchen counter. It blocks the entrance to the kitchen.

  The cobra drops flat, out of sight beneath the edge of the hassock.

  “It can get over that,” Rose says.

  “Yell if it does,” Rafferty says, already on the run. “Then go into the hallway and close the door.”

  He shoulders open the bedroom door and leaps onto the bed, belly-first. He pulls over his head the chain he wears around his neck and slides aside a panel in the headboard to reveal a locked metal door.

  “I can’t see it,” Rose calls.

  “Don’t try!” Rafferty shouts. “Don’t go near the kitchen.” He fumbles with the key dangling from the chain, trying to get it into the lock. It keeps skittering away from the slot. “Yell if it starts to come over the hassock.” He finally gets the key into the slot, cranks it to the right, and yanks the door open. His hand hits the heavy cloth bundle, and he pulls it out and unwraps it.

  The Glock is cold and oily to the touch. It takes him three attempts to ram the magazine home, and when he tries to rack a shell into the chamber, his hands slide uselessly over the slick metal. He has to dry them on the bedspread before he can snap the barrel back.

  Rose screams his name.

  He rolls off the bed and charges into the living room to see the cobra slithering over the hassock as though it were a molehill. Rose and Miaow are backing toward the door to the hall. Its attention attracted by all the movement, the cobra rises up again, and Rafferty sights down the barrel.

  “Don’t!” Miaow shouts. “Look. It hasn’t got any fangs. It’s been—”

  Her voice disappears in the roar of the gun, three fast shots, and a bullet hurls the snake backward as though it’s been yanked by an invisible wire, over the hassock and back into the kitchen. Rafferty runs to the edge of the hassock and looks down to see it writhing on the floor. He fires two more times, the first bullet digging a useless hole in the linoleum. The second goes straight through the cobra’s flat head, and the writhing slows.

  “It was defanged,” Miaow says from behind him. She sounds accusing.

  “I don’t care if it subscribed to the Ladies’ Home Journal,” Rafferty says. His legs are shaking violently. He puts a hand on the counter to steady himself. “Any cobra that comes into this apartment is snake meat.”

  “It obviously didn’t come in here,” Rose says.

  Rafferty’s cell phone rings.

  He and Rose hold each other’s eyes until Miaow says, her voice high and unsteady, “Aren’t you going to answer it?”

  “They already left their message,” Rafferty says, but he takes the phone out of his pocket, flips it open, and says, “Yes?”

  “There won’t be any story in the newspaper,” says the man who sat next to him in the Lincoln. “You won’t try anything cute again. I assume you got our present by now. If not, you might want to skip tomorrow’s breakfast cereal. The next one will be in your daughter’s bed, and it’ll have fangs.”

  “Got it,” Rafferty says, but his eyes are searching the apartment. He sidesteps Rose and Miaow and looks under the coffee table. Nothing.

  “And we’re not happy that you’re spending time with Pan.”

  “Oh, use your fucking head,” Rafferty says. “He can make a lot of trouble if he thinks I’m not writing the book he wants. This is going to be hard enough without that.” There is nothing under the counter either.

  “Just a minute,” the man on the other end says. Rafferty can hear a palm cover the mouthpiece and a muffled conversation, both voices male. “Okay,” the man says. “You can stay in touch with Pan. But don’t get fancy again, because you’re all out of warnings.”

  “One more thing,” Rafferty says, “and then you can hang up and high-five each other on scaring a little girl half to death. That skinny old guy, Porthip. The one who sells the steel. He won’t talk to me until someone calls to tell him he should. I thought you assholes were on top of details.”

  “He’ll get a call tomorrow.”

  “Now would be the time to hang up on me,” Rafferty says, “but I’m hanging up on you instead.”

  He closes the phone and looks at Rose and Miaow. More bad news to deliver. He puts his finger to his lips, then uses the same finger to make a circle that indicates the room in general, and then he touches his ear. He says, “I’ll clean this up. Miaow, go to bed.” He gestures her not toward her bedroom but toward the room he shares with Rose.

  She says, “I’m frightened.”

  Rafferty is checking the underside of his desk, but he turns and goes to Miaow. Kneeling, he wraps his arms around her. She fidgets, but then she puts an arm around his neck and presses her forehead against his chest.

  Rafferty says, “So am I.”r />
  PART II

  THE EDGE

  24

  Luck Will Have Nothing to Do with It

  At 12:42 A.M., Captain Teeth says, “They’ve got cops.”

  “I’d imagine so,” says the man who had sat next to Rafferty in the car. “He fired that thing four or five times.” He gets up from the soft black leather couch, turning back to center his drink, straw-colored liquid over ice, on a thick coaster. In this house, rings on the tables are strongly discouraged. When he is satisfied with the placement of the glass, the man noiselessly pads across the carpet to the console, where he grabs the second set of headphones. The console, just a cheap black table with the receiver on it, has been shoved up against a wall, displacing an ornate teak-and-suede sofa that is now jammed haphazardly into a corner, where it disrupts the meticulous feng shui of the room.

  The room is a home office, all dark wood-and-leather furniture and the half-hidden glint of gold on the spines of unread books. The walls are the color of strong coffee, a deeply grained mahogany that’s been varnished to a reflective luster. Three flat-screen televisions are hung on one wall in a perfect vertical, and two computer screens flicker on the console behind the desk. The desk is empty but for a small thicket of expensively framed photographs, each one showing a handsome, richly dressed man standing with other richly dressed men, mostly less handsome, who face the camera with the air of having been interrupted in the middle of something important. There is one photograph of a thickset woman in her forties, her wrinkles retouched but her disappointment intact. She is flanked by two younger women and a teenage girl, forcing the requisite smiles, who are clearly her daughters.

  The room is completely silent. The entire house has been soundproofed because its mistress does not sleep well. The men at the console press their headphones to their ears, one standing and one sitting, for several moments. The man who had spoken to Rafferty in the car drops his phones onto the console for a moment and returns to the couch, moving in and out of bright areas beneath the recessed pin spots in the ceiling. He grabs the drink and totes it over to the console, sits in the wheeled black leather office chair beside Captain Teeth, and slaps the phones back on.

  “Pretty dumb story, even if they’re telling it to cops,” he says, listening. “Wonder where they put the snake.”

  “Probably the refrigerator,” says Captain Teeth. A new bandage, pristine white, is neatly wrapped around his left thumb.

  “She’d never let him do that. Listen to her. She’s not going to have any cobras in her refrigerator.”

  “She’s extremely fine,” Captain Teeth says. “You didn’t see her.”

  “If you’re a good boy,” the other man says, “you can have her when this is over.”

  Captain Teeth shakes a cigarette out of a pack, holds it beneath his nose, and inhales the fragrance. He knows better than to light it. Only one person is allowed to smoke in this house. “I’ll never be that lucky. But I’ll tell you, if she’d be nice to me, I’d spend my life keeping snakes out of her refrigerator.”

  “I can fix it. Give you a few hours with her before we put her away.”

  “Better-looking than Eve. You didn’t get to see Eve either.”

  “I saw her on TV.”

  “Yeah?” Captain Teeth squints against a burst of static, puts down the unlit cigarette, and fiddles with the volume knob. “You see me? I was right up front. Till I had to leave, anyway.”

  “The wife’s better than Eve. And she’s yours if you want her.” The man from the car slips one of the earphones off and tucks it behind his ear. “Okay, you got the story? The kid was playing with the gun, no damage done except the holes in the cabinet and the floor. The cops went through the place, probably looking in closets and under beds to make sure nobody was dead, and everybody said good night, and they left. I leave anything important out?”

  “No.”

  “I mean, if himself decides to listen to the tape. Have I left anything out?”

  “No. That’s all of it.”

  “When they go to bed, you rewind the tape and go through it again. Just to make sure.”

  The two of them listen for a few minutes. The man from the car drains his drink. Then he asks, “Why’d you have to leave the party early?”

  “Just business,” Captain Teeth says. “Listen. They’re going to bed.” He reaches over to the other man’s glass and loops a finger through the hole in the center of one of the ice cubes. He pulls the cube out and drops it into his mouth. Around the cube he says, “You really think I can have her?”

  A voice behind them says, “It’ll be a waste if you don’t.” They turn to see the man in the photographs on the desk, wearing a dark blue silk robe. “Because no one else ever will.”

  The men at the console leap to their feet. The man in the robe goes to the desk, opens the top drawer, and pulls out a pack of cigarettes and shakes one loose. “Kai,” he says to Captain Teeth. He picks up a gold lighter and flicks it. “Have you told Ren here what you did earlier this evening, after you deserted the party?” He regards the two of them over the flame.

  “No,” Kai says.

  “Didn’t tell him how you hurt your thumb?” The man in the robe is in the darker half of the office, away from the desk lamps on the console, and the flame of the lighter brings his face out of the gloom and plants bright pinpricks in the center of his eyes. “Nothing?”

  “No, sir.”

  “How sensitive of you not to embarrass him,” the man in the robe says. “Then I’ll tell him. What Kai did tonight,” he says, his eyes on Ren, “was pick up the shit you dropped.”

  Ren licks his lips and says, “Excuse me?”

  “The elevator,” says the man in the robe. He lets the lighter go out, throwing his face back into darkness. His voice is soft, but the edges are rough enough to remove skin. “You made three mistakes, didn’t you?”

  “Three?” Ren asks. He puts a steadying hand on the console.

  “One of them was just stupid. Taking the farang up in that elevator. Stupid, but understandable. You could have used the service elevator, but that one was right there, wasn’t it? Right there in the garage.”

  “Yes, sir,” Ren says, around a swallow.

  “So you saved a few steps. You used it. And it told the farang what floor we were on. And then you made a more serious mistake.” He flicks the lighter again, puts the cigarette in his mouth, touches the flame to its tip, and takes a drag that brings the coal to life. Then he exhales a stream of smoke and flips the cigarette straight at Ren. It strikes Ren in the center of the chest, and he drops to his knees as though he’s been shot, although what he’s doing is trying frantically to retrieve the cigarette before it scorches the carpet. He scrambles after it and grasps it between thumb and forefinger. When he knows he won’t drop it, he starts to rise, but the man in the blue robe says, “Stay there.”

  Ren freezes in a crouch. His legs are bent at acute angles, and he is balanced on the balls of his feet.

  “Is that position comfortable?” the man in the blue robe asks.

  “Uh, no, sir.”

  “Well, let’s see how comfortable it is in, say, two hours.” He comes out from behind the desk and stands over Ren. Then he draws back his right hand and slaps the crouching man hard enough to snap his head around and make him put his free hand down to keep from toppling over.

  “I didn’t say you could use your hands,” says the man in the blue robe.

  “Sorry, sir,” Ren says. The left side of his face is flaming. His legs have begun to tremble from the strain.

  “Put your hands on your knees.” Ren does as he’s told. The cigarette in his left sends up a lazy filigree of smoke. The man in the blue robe slaps him again and then again, and when Ren puts a hand down, the man in the robe plants a slippered foot on it and grinds it into the carpet with the edge of the heel. “What was your second mistake?”

  “I told him…I told him not to tell you.”

  “You didn’t want
me to be angry at you,” says the man in the blue robe. “You didn’t want me to—what? Speak harshly to you? Raise my voice? Shake my finger at you? So, since you didn’t want to endure that, since you were afraid of being shouted at, I didn’t know the truth, that Rafferty had information that could bring him back to us. And then you made your third mistake. The one that’s almost impossible to forgive.”

  “Sir?” Ren’s face is running with sweat, partially from the strain of maintaining the position, but mostly from fear.

  “You lost him. And while you didn’t have him in your sights, he met with that reporter. And he told her what he knew. Do you know what that did to us?”

  “No, sir.”

  “It took this entire operation out of bounds. This was supposed to be quick and easy. Threaten the man, set him loose, see what happens, what he finds out, and then take whatever action turned out to be necessary. Maybe nothing, maybe just give him his money and forget about him. Instead, because of you, Kai had to take definitive action tonight. He had to kill that reporter.”

  “I—” Ren says, and runs out of steam.

  “And he hurt his thumb. Didn’t you, Kai?”

  “It’s okay,” Kai says.

  “No, it’s not okay. None of it’s okay. It’s not okay that Ms. Weecherat is dead. Quite apart from the fact that she had children, and no child should lose a parent like that, it means we might have to manage the police, and that means that more people will be on the edge of our little circle. Not to mention those who have already been added. The night editor at her paper, for example.”

  “He can’t—” Ren says. “He can’t know who it was who—”

  “No, he can’t. And it wouldn’t affect me personally if he did. I’m not the one who’s at risk here. You are. Kai is. A couple of people just above you in the company. Lifters and door openers. But I’m supposed to protect my people, aren’t I? So your tiny, contemptible act of cowardice puts me in the position of having to behave like a common gangster. It means that Rafferty will almost certainly have to die, since he knows perfectly well that we killed the reporter. This was not the way this was supposed to work out.” His eyes go to the cigarette in Ren’s hand. “Are you planning to smoke that?”