THE KING OF MACAU (The Jack Shepherd International Crime Novels)

by Needham, Jake

  “Oh, one more thing. I know you won’t give them any trouble when you’re leaving the hotel, will you?”

  Freddy shook his head.

  “Good. I didn’t think you would. Still, to be on the safe side, we’re going to give you a little shot to relax you. Nothing heavy duty. It will look like my friends here are helping out a buddy who had a little too much to drink.”

  Pine pointed his forefinger at one of the goons, who quickly stepped forward and produced a packaged hypodermic needle from his coat pocket. He opened the package, popped the cap off the needle, and went into the familiar ritual of turning the barrel of the hypodermic upright and tapping against it to force out any air bubbles.

  Freddy thought about resisting. How did he know what they were really shooting him up with? Perhaps this was how they intended to kill him and they were trying to keep him calm. The more he thought about it, the more he supposed it didn’t matter. Pine had been right about one thing. If his brother wanted him dead, he was going to be killed. Here, later, sometime. Whenever they wanted really. In the end, what could he do about it?

  Freddy pushed up his left sleeve and stoically stared straight ahead. If he was going to be dead, maybe this was even the best way for it to happen.

  It only took a minute before whatever was in the hypodermic to hit him. At first he felt dizzy. Then he simply fell into a black hole. The last thing he remembered was hearing the sound of Harry Pine’s voice from somewhere very far away.

  “I need a fucking drink,” Pine was saying.

  TWENTY EIGHT

  HARRY PINE WAS ALONE. I ran straight into him walking into the mezzanine bar just as I was leaving it to follow Archie to the elevators and then upstairs to the room where Freddy was presumably registered. Pine looked like a man in serious need of a drink.

  What the hell was he doing here anyway? Was he following me around Macau for some reason? No, that didn’t make any sense. Why would some guy who reads construction contracts for a living want to follow me?

  Still, it was an odd coincidence all the same that Pine kept turning up wherever I went. If coincidence was what it really was. I wouldn’t have been particularly happy to see Pine anywhere or any time, but right here and right now it was absolutely the last thing I wanted.

  ““Well, I’ll be damned,” he said. “We’re going to have to stop meeting like this, Jack. People will talk.”

  “Sorry, Harry,” I muttered. “I’m with somebody. Can’t talk.”

  “Hey, man, what’s your hurry? Who is she anyway?”

  I kept walking.

  “Slow down,” Pine called out. “Let me buy you a drink.”

  I didn’t slow down, didn’t even look back. I only lifted my right hand and wiggled it in a sort of wave that Pine could see over my shoulder. As far as I was concerned, he could interpret that wave any damn way he wanted.

  All the way to the elevators, I could feel Pine’s eyes on my back. And somehow I couldn’t shake the feeling that he was smiling at me.

  ARCHIE AND I RODE up to the eighteenth floor without speaking. When the doors opened, I saw that 1801 was all the way down at the end of the hallway. I figured that gave us a good forty-five seconds to come up with a clever plan. Maybe a whole minute. Unless of course Archie already had a clever plan he hadn’t gotten around to telling me about yet.

  “What are we going to do?” I asked as we started down the corridor.

  “Knock on the door. See if anyone answers.”

  So much for Archie having a clever plan.

  ARCHIE KNOCKED ON THE door, just like he said he was going to. In fact, he knocked twice, hard, but no one answered. Either the room was empty, or Freddy didn’t want to see anybody.

  “Now what?” I asked, ever helpful.

  Archie pulled out his wallet and extracted a silver card that looked to be made of heavy plastic. It was about the same size as a credit card, and that’s what I would have thought it was if I hadn’t noticed that it had nothing printed on either side.

  Archie slipped the silver card into the slot on the top of the electronic lock, a little light on the side turned green, and the door to room 1801 clicked open.

  “You have a key to Freddy’s room?”

  “I have a key to every room,” Archie said.

  “To every room in the Grand Lapa?”

  “To every room in every hotel in Macau.”

  “I’m not sure I want to know about that.”

  “Good choice.”

  Archie stepped to one side of the doorway. He slid a Glock 19 out of a holster nestled into the small of his back and racked the slide to chamber a round. The Glock is an ugly little gun, chunky and square and about as sexy as a plastic trash can, but very reliable.

  “Don’t shoot him,” I said.

  “Not unless he shoots me first.”

  “I don’t think Freddy’s a shooter.”

  “For your sake, you better hope not. Because if he shoots me, I’m shooting you next.”

  Archie gestured me away from the doorway, laid the palm of his left hand flat against the inside edge of the door, and gave it a little push.

  ROOMS WITHOUT HUMAN BEINGS in them feel empty. The air itself is unmarked. You sense immediately it isn’t air that has been breathed and exhaled again. Freddy was gone, if he had ever been there in the first place.

  “It’s empty,” I said.

  Archie glanced at me, but he didn’t say anything. He stepped into the room and immediately moved to one side of the door. I started to follow him, but Archie put out his hand and stopped me. With the barrel of the Glock he gestured off across the suite, and I took in the turned over table, the lamp, and the ashtray lying on the plain baize carpet. They didn’t necessarily mean anything, I told myself, but of course I knew they did. People didn’t knock over a table and simply walk out of a hotel suite; not, that is, if they are doing the walking out entirely on their own.

  “I don’t see anything else out of place,” I said. “If somebody was here and there was a struggle, there wasn’t much to it.”

  Archie didn’t reply. He stepped quickly across to the bedroom, did a head bob into it and out again, and followed the muzzle of the Glock through the doorway. A moment later he came back out and holstered his gun.

  “Bedroom, bathroom, and closet are all clear,” Archie said. “A few clothes hung up, a few more on the bathroom floor along with some dirty towels, one small bag on the luggage rack. Nothing else appears to have been disturbed.”

  “You think he was here, don’t you?”

  “Somebody was here.”

  I walked into the bedroom and quickly scanned the room. Then I went into the bathroom and looked down at the wadded up shirt and trousers lying on the tile. A glance was all it took.

  “Those are the clothes Freddy was wearing at the temple,” I told Archie when I went back out to the living room. “He was here all right.”

  Archie squatted down where the mahogany table lay on its side. I noticed his knees didn’t even crack when he did it. Bastard.

  The green ceramic lamp, its cream shade pushed lopsided across the light bulb, lay next to the table, and a glass ashtray was upside down directly between them. Archie examined the area around the turned-over table carefully, but I really couldn’t imagine what he was looking for. It didn’t seem to me that there was very much to see.

  After a moment Archie stood up and began walking slowly toward the couch. His eyes were on the carpet and he turned his head slightly side to side while he walked as if he expected to encounter a land mine. Right next to the couch he stopped and went down on one knee. He rubbed his open hand gently over the carpet and picked up something between his thumb and forefinger, although from where I was I couldn’t see what he had found. He walked back to me and held out his hand, palm up. In it lay a tiny red plastic cap. It looked like the top of a very small tube of toothpaste.

  “I give up,” I said. “What is it?”

  “I suppose it could be a lot of thing
s, but my guess is it’s the cap off a hypodermic needle.”

  “You think somebody shot Freddy up with some kind of tranquilizer and dragged him out of here, which explains why there wasn’t much of a struggle.”

  “Could be. But even if that’s what did happen and it actually was KJN, that still leaves a pretty big question.”

  “Hit me with it.”

  “How did somebody just walk in here and stick a hypodermic needle in his arm?”

  “Maybe it was somebody he knew.”

  Archie shrugged. “And maybe it was somebody who stuck a big fucking gun in his face.”

  AFTER THAT WE WENT through the whole suite carefully, checking inside and even under every drawer and cabinet, but we found nothing of any interest. We left after about twenty minutes, closing the door quietly behind us, and we didn’t speak again until we were in the elevator.

  “What do you think?” I asked as soon as the doors closed.

  Archie didn’t say anything. He just shrugged.

  When the elevator stopped at the lobby we walked out the hotel’s main doors and turned west along the Avenida da Amizade.

  “You’re sure those were Freddy’s clothes?” Archie asked.

  “Yes. And you think somebody drugged him and grabbed him?”

  “Yeah, probably.”

  “You going to help me find him again?”

  “Let’s go somewhere and have another drink,” Archie said.

  “I don’t want another drink.”

  “Well, I do, so tough shit.”

  WE WALKED UP Avenida da Amizade until we got to the Wynn Macau, went through the east entrance, and into a place called Bar Cristal that is right off the lobby of the Encore Tower. I hate Bar Cristal. There are mirrors everywhere and the place glitters with so much cut glass it would give Liberace a headache. Drinking there is like drinking inside a chandelier.

  Archie ordered another Johnny Walker, although I noticed it was only a single this time, and I had another Coke. Archie gave me a look, but he didn’t say anything about my choice of libation. In fact, he didn’t say anything at all until the waitress had returned with our drinks, set them out, and departed again. Then he cleared his throat…

  “What have you got yourself into here, Jacko?”

  “A friend asked me to talk to Freddy. That’s all I did. We’re not pals and he’s not my client.”

  “Yet you were concerned enough about him that you started looking for him when he disappeared.”

  “Yes.”

  “And now you want me to help you get him back from whoever grabbed him.”

  “Yes.”

  “You have any idea who that might be?”

  “I think we can both guess.”

  “Probably.”

  “Look, Archie, Freddy is—”

  “His name’s not Freddy. It’s Kim Jong-Nam.”

  “I prefer Freddy. It sounds a lot friendlier, don’t you think?”

  “What makes you think this guy’s friendly?”

  “He’s a big teddy bear, Archie.”

  “So, I hear, was Herman Goering.”

  “He’s not Herman Goering. He’s just a fat kid who wants to live in Hawaii.”

  We sat in silence for a while after that fiddling with our drinks. I could tell Archie had something he wanted to ask me so I sat and waited for him to get to it. Eventually he did.

  “What’s the connection between KJN and this money laundering gig you’re doing for Pansy Ho?” Archie asked.

  “None at all.”

  “You sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure. I only met Freddy because a friend of mine asked me to talk to him.”

  “And you only met Pansy Ho because a friend of yours asked you to talk to her.”

  “Different friend.”

  “And absolutely no connection between them?”

  I thought about that for a minute. The FBI in the person of Pete Logan had asked me to get to the bottom of Pansy Ho’s money laundering problem, and a Macau restaurant proprietor named Raymond had asked me to meet with his friend Freddy. I didn’t know for sure whether they had ever met, but I doubted it. Was Archie getting at something specific, or just asking questions?

  “No,” I told Archie, “there’s no connection.”

  “Well, that’s funny.”

  “I don’t see you laughing.”

  “Funny peculiar, mate, not funny ha-ha.”

  Archie had dumped the envelope with all the security pictures of the MGM smurfs onto the table when we sat down. It felt like it had been about a week since I had given it to him, but it had only been a few hours ago back in the barbershop. Archie had glanced through the pictures and put them back in the envelope, and he had been carrying them around with him ever since. Now he reached out and pushed the envelope across the table to me, and I looked at him with a puzzled expression.

  “I thought you wanted to keep the pictures for a while and show them to some other people.”

  “I don’t need to show them to anybody else anymore.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I get it now.”

  “Get what, for Christ’s sake?”

  The lights of Bar Cristal flickered over Archie’s face. He looked like a man standing under a spinning disco ball. But there was no dance floor and no disco, just a tiny bar table where two tired middle-aged guys were having a conversation that all of a sudden didn’t make any sense to me at all.

  Until Archie told me what he had seen in the security photos.

  And then everything made even less sense.

  ARCHIE REACHED OUT WITH his forefinger and tapped it slowly on the envelope that held the photos from the MGM. “You don’t know who any of these people are, do you?”

  I shook my head.

  “Neither do I,” he said, “but I can tell you at least one thing about them for sure.”

  “I’m all ears.”

  “They Koreans. Every single one of your money laundering smurfs is a Korean.”

  I grabbed the envelope, pulled out the stack of photos, and hastily thumbed through them.

  “Koreans?” I repeated stupidly.

  The pictures had been taken in a little enclave on the Chinese coast so I had just assumed the people in them were Chinese. That was about all the thought I had given to their nationality. No matter how long I lived in Asia, I still saw Asian faces like a white man. Not specifically Chinese or Indonesian or Vietnamese, just…well, Asian.

  But now that Archie said the people in the pictures were Korean, I thought I could see it, too. Sort of. They looked to me like Koreans who had had some kind of plastic surgery to make them look less Korean.

  “Fair dinkum, mate. The crew smurfing money through the MGM are all dinky-di Koreans, exactly like your new pal Freddy.” Archie cut me the biggest wink I had ever seen. “Now what do you reckon the chances are that’s only a coincidence?”

  I shuffled through the photos one more time, but I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what to say.

  TWENTY NINE

  WHEN FREDDY OPENED HIS eyes, his first conscious thought was of how completely crappy he felt. He had a headache, his stomach was rolling, and he had a taste in his mouth like he had been sucking on sweaty athletic socks. It felt like the worst hangover he had ever had. He would kill for a drink of water.

  Freddy strained to remember what he had been doing to leave him with such a massive hangover, but his mind was a complete blank. So he turned his attention instead to working out where he was and how he had gotten there. Perhaps, if he could do that, he could figure out the rest.

  His starting point was that he was lying in a bed, one that wasn’t immediately familiar to him. He was on top of the covers and he was fully dressed except for his shoes. He had woken in a strange bed more than once in his life, of course, but he had never been lying on top of the covers on any of those occasions, or fully dressed for that matter. So where in the world was he?

  Freddy rolled his head slowly to
first one side and to the other, and he examined his surroundings with as much care as he could, given his slightly tenuous connection to reality right at that moment.

  He was in a room he didn’t recognize, and he was alone. That much, at least, was clear.

  The room was a small bedroom furnished in an altogether unremarkable way. The bed he was stretched out on was very low to the floor and positioned in the center of the room’s back wall. Directly opposite it was a door. Up against the wall to the left of the bed was a small sofa upholstered in some kind of cheap looking blue fabric and up against the right wall was a beaten up dark wood table. There was a huge mirror on the wall behind the table, but there was nothing at all on any of the other walls. And there were no windows.

  Was he in an interior room in some cheap hotel? The thought of a hotel room tickled something in Freddy’s memory and he struggled to bring it into focus. Was that it? Was he staying in a hotel and had drunk too much and passed out? Surely not. He would never have checked into any hotel this cheap looking. At least not if he was doing the checking in entirely on his own.

  Freddy struggled with the thought and felt himself drawing closer and closer to something…

  Then, just like that, he remembered. The suite in the Grand Lapa. The Canadian pushing his way in. The two goons out in the hallway. And finally, the hypodermic needle, the shot, and sliding down into blackness.

  Now Freddy remembered everything.

  But he wished he couldn’t.

  FREDDY GINGERLY PUSHED HIMSELF into a sitting position and was surprised to discover he didn’t feel as bad as he had thought he did. He was pretty sure he could even stand up without vomiting, but he decided he would nevertheless wait a minute or two before he pressed his luck. He tried to stay as still as possible as he took stock of his circumstances.

  Whatever they shot him up with obviously hadn’t been meant to kill him, so maybe the Canadian didn’t want him dead. If he did, what was the point in knocking him out and bringing him to…well, to wherever he was now? To interrogate him? About what? Not only did he know nothing that his brother or anyone else in the DPRK could possibly care about, Freddy was sure the Canadian already realized he knew nothing anyone might care about. Everyone who knew him understood he wasn’t involved in politics, so what could the Canadian possibly want to interrogate him about?