PR02 - The Fourth Watcher

by Timothy Hallinan

  Ming Li says, with an edge in her voice, “So, older brother, why didn’t you just tell him where we are? If you don’t care about Frank, what kept you from handing us to him?”

  Rafferty and Arthit share a glance. “Because I agree with you. We deliver Frank and he kills them all.”

  “And that’s the only reason?” Ming Li asks.

  Rafferty shakes his head, deflecting the question. “So I told him I’d talked with Frank once but had no idea where he was and no reason in the world to want to find out. He thought that was funny.”

  “He has a keen sense of humor,” Ming Li says. “People die laughing.”

  “Wrong word,” Rafferty says. “He thought it was peculiar.”

  “Just to go on record,” Arthit says, “I’m not certain he’ll kill them. I’m only about sixty percent sure he would. If I could get that down to, say, forty percent, I’d hand Frank over like an old pair of gloves.”

  “Guanxi,” Frank finally says.

  Arthit says, “What?”

  “Connections. It’s the thing he understands most in the world. For Chu, life is just guanxi. That’s his map: who’s got the power, who doesn’t. He already knows you’re a cop. What he doesn’t know is that you’re a massively connected cop, a cop with so much guanxi in Thailand that he has no chance of getting out of this country in one piece if anything happens to your wife.”

  “I’m not,” Arthit says.

  “Yes you are,” Frank says. “You’re connected with the other police forces—all of them—and with the military. With the administration. He set a twenty-four-hour deadline. He can’t possibly learn otherwise in that amount of time. And, Poke, you tell him that the cops will turn this whole country upside down if anything happens to the hostages before the exchange.”

  They all listen to the implication in what Frank has said.

  It is Ming Li who voices it. “So then what? We scare him into not killing them, and then we give you to him?”

  “Maybe,” Frank says. “One thing at a time.”

  “I wish to shit,” Arthit says, looking like he’d enjoy kicking a hole in the wall, “that we could read Miaow’s note.”

  Frank looks up at Arthit. “What note?”

  Arthit hesitates, and Rafferty says, “Why not?” Arthit reaches into the breast pocket of his uniform and pulls out a photocopy of the note. Frank and Ming Li bend over it. For what seems like a long time, no one speaks. Ming Li is tracing the line of numbers with a graceful finger. Finally she says, “This is infuriating. It’s familiar, somehow. Like an alphabet I used to be able to read.” She squeezes her eyes closed. Rafferty can see them moving, left to right, behind her lids. “I don’t know,” she says, opening her eyes and flicking a corner of the note. “It feels so close. It feels like it’s perfectly clear but there’s a layer of dust over it, and I should just be able to blow it away and read it.”

  “It doesn’t make any sense to me at all,” Frank says. “What’s in your frame of reference that’s not in mine?”

  “Hip-hop? MTV?” Ming Li looks at her father and shakes her head. “The Internet? Can’t be Internet addresses, can’t be chess moves.”

  “I’d recognize chess moves,” Frank says. “If you’re right, if you’re close to being able to read this and I’m not, then it’s something generational. Something you do, something you know, that I don’t.”

  “I’ve been trying to reach a guy who works with codes,” Rafferty says. “I could try to phone him again.”

  Ming Li looks up. Her eyes are slightly glassy. “Phone?” she says.

  “Yeah,” Rafferty says. “You know, small object, you push a bunch of buttons and put it to your ear. Then somebody says—”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Ming Li says. She extends a hand. “Give it to me.”

  Rafferty passes her his phone. For a moment her eyes go back and forth between the phone and the note, and then her face splits into a wide grin.

  “Your little girl is really smart,” she says. “And you guys are so old.” She looks at the phone again, her lips moving. “It’s a text message,” she says. “Somebody get me a pencil.”

  “ONCE YOU SEE the pairs, it’s obvious,” Ming Li says. “There are no three-digit numbers, there’s no second number higher than four. I should have recognized it the minute I looked at it. Look. The first number in each pair is the number on the button. The second one is the number of times you push to get to the letter you want. So ‘6’ is the six button, and if you push it one time, you get M. Push it twice, you get

  N. Three times is O.” She points at the paper, isolating the one pair of numbers. “Here, the first time she writes it, it’s ‘61,’ so that’s M.” They are all gathered around her. “And the ‘4,’ the one that’s not in a pair?” Rafferty asks.

  “It’s just what it looks like, silly,” Ming Li says. “It’s a four.” She finishes writing, puts dashes between the words, and pushes the pad away so they can all see it.

  It says: 4-men-guns-mole-kl

  Tears spring to Rafferty’s eyes. He turns his head to blink them away, but he can’t do anything about the sudden catch in his throat. Miaow.

  “You should be proud of yourself,” Ming Li says. “That’s some kid.”

  He swallows, hard. “I can’t take the credit,” he says.

  “She was interrupted,” Arthit says, bent over the pad.

  Rafferty grabs a ragged breath. “She needed time to fold it, time to put it someplace, probably hide it in her hand, so she could drop it.”

  “KL,” Ming Li says. Her eyebrows are contracted so tightly they almost meet.

  “Look what she gives us,” Arthit says. “Everything is important. A count, a description. She tells us there are guns. She’s got no time. What else is that important?”

  Rafferty says, “Destination.”

  Leung speaks for the first time. “Kuala Lumpur?”

  Rafferty and Ming Li say, in unison, “No.” Then Rafferty says, “He’s here, obviously. And he’ll stay here for this swap or whatever it’s going to be.”

  “It has to be a destination,” Frank says. “Maybe . . .” His voice trails off.

  “I’m not even sure Miaow knows Kuala Lumpur is two words,” Rafferty says. “I think she probably would have started with Ku or something.”

  “I know where it is,” Frank says. “I know what she was writing.”

  “So do I,” Arthit says. “Klong Toey.”

  “Where their ships come in,” Frank says. “Where they offload everything. Illegal immigrants, illegal pharmaceuticals, endangered animals, aphrodisiacs made from endangered animals, weapons, truck parts, hijacked American cars, Korean counterfeit money. They’ve got three warehouses down there, prime position near the docks.”

  “Three,” Ming Li says. “Two too many. We could watch all week.”

  “No,” Rafferty says. “All we have to do is get some eyes on them and then pull him out.”

  “Pull him out?” Frank says. “How?”

  “He’s set it up himself.” Rafferty holds up his phone. “I call him.”

  !31

  Aurora Borealis

  hoever is in charge of the rain has turned it up and provided an enhancement in the form of random bursts of wind that send people running for cover. The rain falls

  through a pinpoint mist that diffuses the light from the neon signs above

  them and scatters it through the night like a fine, colored powder. “So what do you think of Dad?” “I think he could be useful,” Arthit says, lighting up and blowing

  smoke through his nostrils like a cartoon bull. The smoke fills the car, and Rafferty takes a surreptitious secondhand hit. “I’ll suspend further judgment until we see just how useful he is.” The rain spatters the top of Arthit’s car and sends rivulets racing each other down the windshield. The sidewalk where they are parked is deserted except for one beggar huddled under a bright blue plastic sheet, and the car smells of wet cloth. “If I’d had any idea
Noi would be in danger—” Rafferty begins.

  Arthit holds up the hand with the cigarette in it. His face is hard enough to deflect a bullet. “Stop it. It was my decision, not yours. We can either sit here and comfort each other or we can do something.

  That means focus on the data. Despite what I said to you last night, one thing cops learn is to ignore leaps of intuition and look at the data.”

  “And one thing writers learn is to ignore the data until a leap of intuition tells you what it means.”

  “So somewhere between us, we ought to be able to figure out what to do next. I just wish I shared your father’s conviction that Chu doesn’t have time to learn how connected I’m not.”

  “I suppose it depends on who he’s connected to. On the force, I mean.”

  Arthit puts two fingers on the wheel and wiggles it left and right. Cigarette ash tumbles into his lap. “These guys get a lot of protection. That’s not something you can get from a sergeant. And the cash flow is tremendous. Enough to buy a lot of weight.”

  “The three at my apartment,” Rafferty says. He has wanted to say this before but has been reluctant to do so. “They were dressed like farmers, but they moved like cops.”

  “Probably were. Probably street cops.” Arthit makes a fist and slams it against his own thigh. “In case you had any doubt about how good his connections might be, ask yourself where he got my address and the information that Rose and Miaow were there.”

  Rafferty says, “Here’s something that might matter: My father thinks Chu will have kept this whole thing a secret. Nobody’s supposed to know that he’s arranged an escape route. His colleagues would see it as a betrayal.”

  Arthit thinks about it, takes a drag, and then nods. “I guess that’s interesting.”

  “So Frank thinks Chu’s traveling solo, with no Chinese foot soldiers along. And he won’t want word to get back that he’s chasing some laowai who ripped off his retirement plan.”

  Arthit takes the two fingers from the wheel and holds them up. “Two assumptions.”

  “Here’s another one: He might not kill Noi anyway. The main reason kidnappers kill their victims is to keep from being identified. We already know who he is.”

  “Unfortunately,” Arthit says, “the other reason is revenge.”

  “Right,” Rafferty says. The cramps that have been at work in his belly since he saw Arthit’s open door pay another visit.

  “So we have to get them back.” Arthit checks the sidewalk, just a cop’s reflex. “By the way, you’re fortunate in your women.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Rose and Miaow, of course. And your sister is, as they used to say in England, crackerjack.”

  Rafferty watches Bangkok ripple through the windshield like a ghost city. “I guess so.”

  “We’ll get them,” Arthit says. “Your father is right: One thing at a time.”

  “Set up the watchers.”

  “Two cops and Ming Li,” Arthit says.

  “I still think he might recognize her.”

  “He hasn’t seen her since she was ten,” Arthit says. “And even then, your father says he didn’t pay any attention to her.” He cracks the window, gets a faceful of rain, and rolls it up again. He takes another puff in self-defense. “Anyway, half the cops I could pull aren’t as good as she is.”

  “She’s a kid.”

  “A very smart kid. And there’s one more thing to recommend her: Unlike some cops, we know she’s not on Chu’s payroll.”

  “I wish I were certain Leung isn’t.”

  Arthit shakes his head. “Doesn’t make sense. If Leung were working with Chu, none of this would be necessary. Your father would be ten feet underwater and halfway to the gulf by now.” He starts the car and slides the lever to kick up the air-conditioning. Then he stares out through the windshield and sighs deeply. “You don’t know this,” he says, “but my father was a cop.”

  Rafferty looks over at him. Arthit fiddles with the temperature controls.

  “On the take, of course.” Arthit still does not turn to face Poke. The air conditioner seems to require all his attention, and the cigarette burns forgotten in his free hand. “All Thai cops were on the take in those days. He took from everybody. He took money to keep people out of jail. The old one-two-three: Get the case, crack the case, take a bribe. Pimps, thieves, hired muscle. Twice, or at least twice that I know of, a murderer.” The rain kicks up, shaped by a sudden gust of wind into a curtain of faintly colored mist that ripples and curls in front of Rafferty’s eyes like the aurora borealis. “Of course, usually that meant other people went to jail. See, when a cop takes a payoff, the crime doesn’t go away. Somebody’s got to take a fall.”

  Poke wants to put an arm around Arthit’s shoulders but is sure it wouldn’t be appreciated. “I know.”

  “So the guilty got off and the innocent got screwed,” Arthit says. “That’s what my father did for a living. He did it practically every day. But you know what, Poke? There was always food on the table. My brother and I went to school. I wound up in England, getting a very expensive education paid for by crooks and, I suppose, by the people who were stuck in those cells for things they didn’t do.” He puts his face near the window and exhales a cloud of smoke onto the glass, then wipes it clear with his sleeve. “Because of where my father was, who he was. That was what he had to do to live, to take care of the people he loved. And he did. He took care of all of us.”

  Poke says, “I know why Noi married you.”

  “Really?” Arthit says. He stubs out the cigarette in the ashtray, so hard that sparks fly. “I wish I did.”

  IT SEEMS SILLY at this point not to go home, now that the only things worth protecting have already been taken. So when Arthit heads for the station to line up his two cops, Poke goes back to the apartment.

  The place feels immensely empty. When he first rented it, almost three years ago, it seemed like the perfect size for a man on his own. He filled it completely. He had a bedroom, a kitchen, a living room, and an office. He rattled happily from one room to another, doing his work, making his mess, and cleaning it up. He ate at the kitchen counter and drank his morning coffee on the balcony overlooking the Chinese cemetery his landlady had proudly pointed out as the source of the building’s dubiously good feng shui. Never once had it felt too big for him.

  Now it seems enormous.

  There’s nothing in it anymore that is his alone. His office is Miaow’s room. The bedroom is the secret space he shares with Rose. The living room, the kitchen, all the objects in them—they belong to his family. The pencils have Rose’s tooth marks on them. Miaow’s sneakers have left ghost marks on the carpet. The surface of the sliding glass door has reflected all of them.

  Living on that barren acreage in Lancaster, enveloped in his father’s silences, Rafferty grew used to being alone. His mother was affectionate one moment and distant the next. Frank’s attention was thousands of miles away. The solitary child who lived in the space between these adults developed into a solitary man. In many ways he had enjoyed it. Being alone gave him freedom. He did what he wanted, when he wanted. After he discovered Asia, he went where he wanted. A passport and an airline ticket were the only traveling companions he needed. Rafferty persuaded himself gradually that he had chosen to be alone, that this was the life he had created for himself, a life he filled completely. Now, standing in the center of his empty living room, he asks himself whether he could survive being alone again.

  He has things to do to prepare for the next day—one thing at a time, as the world keeps reminding him—but first he goes down the hall into Miaow’s room. The cardboard smiley face she drew to mean “Come right in” is hanging on the doorknob, its companion, the frowny face temporarily banished to one of her drawers.

  Except for the mussed bed, abandoned in the middle of the night, her room is, as always, immaculate. Her shoes are in a regimentally straight line. There are still times when Miaow sits in the center of the floor, carefully li
ning up her shoes so she can scatter them and line them up again. For most of her life, she went barefoot.

  Drawings in colored pencil are taped to the walls, along with a few older ones in crayon. Here and there he sees a version of the cheerful house below a blue sky and a fat primary-yellow sun that children everywhere draw, but most of the pictures are of the three of them: Rose, preternaturally tall and slender; Rafferty in an ugly T-shirt; and between them—always between them—Miaow, her skin darker than theirs, the part in her hair drawn with a ruler. The wall above the dresser is filled with pictures, but lower and to the left Rafferty spots a brand-new one. He leans down to take a closer look. It shows a lopsided birthday cake, candles gleaming, with three people barely visible in the darkness behind it. In the center of the cake, written in the inevitable pink, is the number 9.

  Rafferty lets out more air than he knew he had in him. The cake.

  It feels to Rafferty, at that moment, like they had baked that cake and lit those candles months ago. But they had celebrated Rose’s birthday on Friday night, and this is Sunday night. It had been only forty-eight hours.

  “I’ll bring you back,” he says to the room. “Both of you. I promise.”

  He closes the door behind him gently and goes into the living room to call Peachy.

  !32

  In the Bag

  eachy and Rafferty are watching from a stall four doors away when the two uniformed cops and Elson, looking sharp and mordantly businesslike in his black suit, enter

  the building at 8:10 on Monday morning. Peachy is perspiring as anxiously as someone waiting for a firing squad, and Poke carries a wrinkled brown supermarket shopping bag. When she sees Elson, Peachy takes a step back, and Rafferty grabs the sleeve of her blouse to make sure she won’t keep going.

  She has already been upstairs once, at 6:15, to open the more daunting of the two locks, so they wait only three minutes—enough, Rafferty is sure, for the cops to pop the easy lock—and then he more or less hauls her through the street door and up the stairs. Rafferty stands to one side and puts an encouraging hand in the small of her back. When Peachy tries to slip her key into the lock, the door swings open.