PR02 - The Fourth Watcher

by Timothy Hallinan

“I’m not sure you can either,” Rafferty says. “But I haven’t got anybody else.”

  !36

  Death Threats and a Strawberry Shake

  he little wet man’s coming toward us,” Ming Li says on the phone. “Don’t turn the corner. He looks over his shoulder all the time.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “We’re standing here. I’m a rich schoolgirl on the phone, and Leung is my faithful servant. He just took the books so I could make a call, and now he’s standing a respectful distance away, appropriate to our class difference. Ouch.”

  “What happened?” Rafferty and Peachy are stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, people parting left and right to get around them.

  “Leung pinched me.”

  “You had it coming. What I mean is, why are you with Leung? You’re supposed to be on either side of the big guy. What happened to the old tweezers?”

  “He noticed me. Looked at me a couple of times. Probably got a thing for schoolgirls. So I had to pass him. Don’t worry, he’s written me off. He’s watching your little wet man, and the little wet man keeps

  looking behind him.”

  “I need to know everything they do.”

  “Gosh,” Ming Li says. “Everything? I’m just a girl.”

  “This is the big leagues.”

  “Okay, here he comes. The big one. I think you can come around the corner now.”

  Rafferty grabs Peachy’s sleeve and hauls her behind him, with Peachy apologizing to everyone they bump into. They round the corner, and Rafferty sees the big man take the arm of the teller and drag him to the curb. There is a quick verbal exchange, the big man bending down to get his face close to the teller’s, and the teller nods eight or nine times, very fast, and then attempts some sort of argument, which is broken off when the big man shakes him like a rag mop. The teller looks like he is going to burst into tears. Then the big man reaches into his suit coat, and the teller mirrors the movement. Each comes up with a manila envelope.

  Ten or twelve yards beyond them, Ming Li chatters brightly into her phone, right foot lifted and hooked behind the white sock on the left ankle. With her free hand, she toys with her hair, rolling a wisp of it between her fingers as though nothing in the world were more urgent than split ends.

  The men exchange envelopes.

  “Ming Li. You and Leung stay with the big guy. I don’t care what it takes, don’t lose him.”

  “Big brother,” Ming Li says. “I’ve been training for this all my life.”

  “Good. Keep your phone on.”

  The big man gives the teller a shove, just enough to make him stagger back a step, and heads off down the sidewalk. He passes Ming Li and Leung without a glance but then sneaks a look back at Ming Li. The teller exhales heavily, wipes his face, and pulls out a cell phone.

  “Go, Peachy,” Rafferty says.

  Reluctantly Peachy covers the distance to the teller, as slowly as someone navigating a forest of thorns. She has lifted a hand to touch him politely on the shoulder when he looks up and sees her. The cell phone drops from his hand and hits the pavement, and the battery pops out. He takes a quick step back, mouth open, as though Peachy has fangs, claws, and a snake’s forked tongue. A second backward step brings him up against Rafferty. Rafferty has already pulled his wallet out, and when the man whirls to face him, Rafferty lets it drop open and then flips it closed again before the man can register that the shiny object inside it is a large silver cuff link.

  “Give me the envelope,” Rafferty says in Thai.

  Half a dozen emotions chase each other across the teller’s face, but the one that stakes it out and claims it is despair. He slowly closes his eyes and reaches into his jacket. Eyes still shut, he holds it out. Rafferty takes it, opens it, looks inside, sees the bright new money, and says into the phone, “You still with the big guy?”

  “He’s waiting outside another bank, half a block down,” Ming Li says. “I’m putting my hair up.”

  “Gee, that’s interesting.”

  “Well, who knew he liked schoolgirls? Probably hangs around playgrounds. Leung has a different jacket for me, too. And some glasses. I’ll look like an office lady.”

  “Good,” Rafferty says. “If he meets someone, let Leung take the one he meets, and you stay with the big guy. When Leung’s got whoever he talks to, I want him to call me. You just follow the Chinese guy—”

  “I think he’s Korean.”

  “I don’t care if he’s a Tibetan Sherpa. You stay with him. I mean this, Ming Li, you can’t lose him. He could be your father’s emergency exit.”

  “Poke?” Ming Li says.

  He brings the phone back to his ear. “What?”

  “He’s your father, too.” She hangs up.

  Rafferty stares down at the phone and then dials Arthit’s number.

  HEADLIGHTS ARE BLOSSOMING on the oncoming cars. Arthit reaches down and flips on his own.

  “There has to be more than one teller at each bank,” Arthit says. He is balancing two fat manila envelopes in his lap as he drives. “No single teller could pass a quarter of a million in one day.”

  The two envelopes, one taken from the little wet teller and the other from the teller the Korean grabbed outside the second bank, contain a total of five hundred thousand baht in brand-new counterfeit bills, plus thirty-eight thousand dollars in bogus American hundreds.

  “I was wondering about that,” Rafferty says. He has his cell phone against one ear, with Ming Li on the other end, but he is talking to Arthit. “Elson found something at the other teller’s station. Probably the distributor—the Korean weight lifter—contacts only one teller directly, and that teller gives it to the others. So Petchara handed Elson someone who has no idea where the junk money comes from. As much as that might interest Elson, I don’t give a shit. I personally don’t care about the mechanics. What I care about is what we’re going to do with the money.”

  “Which is what?” Arthit asks.

  “I’m thinking about that.”

  “Americans are so collaborative.” Arthit makes a turn against an oncoming stream of traffic, and Rafferty closes his eyes. Leung, alone in the backseat, laughs. On Rafferty’s cell phone, Ming Li says, “I’m pretty sure he’s finished.”

  “Why?”

  “He’s home, I think. A guesthouse, two stories. A light just went on, second floor right.”

  “You’re extremely good.”

  “Tell that to Frank. He’d like to hear it.”

  “I will. Where are you?”

  “Soi 38, half a block off Sukhumvit.”

  “We’ll be there in—” He looks out the window. Neon signs glow above the sidewalks now, beacons in the premature dusk. Arthit hits the switch for the wipers, and for what seems like the thousandth time since Rose and Miaow were taken, Rafferty inhales the sharp smell of newly wet dust. He locates a landmark. “Make it ten, twelve minutes.”

  “It’s a shame we couldn’t get the third teller,” Ming Li says.

  “We got two,” Rafferty says. “That’s two more than we had an hour ago.”

  “We should have had Frank with us.”

  “No. Frank needs to stay where he is. He’s out of sight, and he needs to stay out of sight.”

  “He must be going crazy.”

  “Call him,” Rafferty says. “Let him know what’s happening.”

  “I don’t know what’s happening.”

  Rafferty says, “Why should you be different?” He hangs up.

  “Where?” Arthit says.

  “Soi 38. Can you get us some help there?”

  “Cops?” Arthit’s reluctance is both visible and audible.

  “Unless you have connections with the army.”

  Arthit brakes behind a bus and drums his fingers impatiently against the wheel. “Do we think he’s alone?”

  “We don’t have the faintest idea.”

  “It’s hard to believe,” Arthit says, cutting around the bus, “but I’m slowly becoming com
fortable with that condition.” He picks up his own cell phone. “I can get three I’d trust to keep things to themselves.”

  As Arthit dials, Leung leans forward in the backseat. “What’s in the other envelopes? The ones the big guy kept.”

  Rafferty turns to him, feeling the stiffness of exhaustion in his neck and shoulders. “My guess is that it’s real money. The tellers pass the bad stuff and pocket good bills to balance it out. Say you withdraw five thousand baht. They give you five thousand in counterfeit and then pull the same amount out of the cash drawer and put it into the envelope. They’ve got the withdrawal slip, the drawer is minus the right amount of money, and they’ve passed the counterfeit. Everything adds up at the end of the day, and Mr. Korea’s envelope is full of real money.”

  “Yes, now,” Arthit says into his cell phone. “Soi 38, stay out of sight.”

  “And they keep the tellers quiet by threatening their families,” Rafferty says. “Poor schmucks.”

  “Schmucks?” Arthit says, dropping the phone onto the seat. “Is ‘schmucks’ English?”

  “English is a polyglot tongue,” Rafferty says. “A linguistic hybrid enriched by grafts from many branches of the world’s verbal tree.”

  Arthit nods gravely. “Thank you, Doctor.”

  “Anything I can do,” Rafferty says, closing his eyes and leaning back, “to illuminate the path of the ignorant with the torch of knowledge.”

  “He talk like this a lot?” Leung asks.

  “Inexhaustibly,” Arthit says. “If bullshit were oil, Poke would be OPEC.”

  Rafferty, eyes still closed, says, “I think this is going to work, Arthit.”

  “What’s going to work?”

  “I don’t know yet.” He feels himself start to drift sideways, like a boat on a tide, and forces his eyes open. He turns to Arthit. “But look what we’ve got. Half a million bad baht plus almost forty thousand counterfeit U.S., and probably more where that came from. We know where the women and Miaow are, where Chu is. We’ve got—maybe—a couple of people inside, unless those two cops get really stupid. We didn’t have any of that eight hours ago. I’ve got a door opener for Elson, if I can figure out how to use it.”

  Arthit says, “Why would you want to?”

  “Weight. Just plain old weight.”

  “A bullet weighs a lot if you put it in the right place,” Leung says. “Why not just kick the door in? Get your women. Kill Chu.”

  “We might,” Rafferty says. “But if we do, I want to make sure one more time that they’re where we think they are. And I want to know who’s holding the gun on them.”

  “There’s one thing we don’t have,” Arthit says. “Time.”

  “Yeah,” Rafferty says. His watch says they have less than three hours left. “Right now I’d trade rubies for time.”

  HALF AN HOUR LATER, Rafferty, Ming Li, Leung, and Arthit sit in Arthit’s car, around the corner from the Korean’s guesthouse. Water from Ming Li’s long hair is dripping onto the upholstery, sounding like a leak in the car’s roof. Arthit has a window cracked open so he can smoke.

  “My hair is going to stink,” Ming Li says, waving the smoke away.

  “Be glad it’s not a pipe,” Arthit says.

  “You should really quit.” She is haloed by the headlights of the police car that has pulled up to the curb behind them. The wet skin on her neck gleams. Two of Arthit’s most trusted cops sit in the second car while a third, wearing a T-shirt and jeans, sits behind the wheel of a tuk-tuk and waits in the rain outside the guesthouse, keeping an eye on the door.

  “You know, quitting is at the very top of my to-do list,” Arthit says. “Right after I get my wife back and ice Colonel Chu. Oh, and figure out what to do about this counterfeiting thing.” He looks at his wrist, flips the watch around so he can see it, and says, “He’ll call any minute now.”

  “Why don’t you buy a shorter band?” Rafferty asks.

  “It gives me character, makes me memorable,” Arthit says. “The same way some men wear bow ties.”

  “That’s kind of sad,” Ming Li says, wringing out her hair. “Why don’t you get some cowboy boots or something? Or let your eyebrows grow together above your nose?”

  “This is a carefully calculated affectation,” Arthit says. “It calls attention to the weight of my very masculine watch. It shows that I care what time it is but I’m not obsessed with it. It has a certain enviable flair.”

  “What it does,” Ming Li says, “is make you look like a kid who borrowed his father’s watch.”

  “Speak right up,” Arthit says. “No need to be deferential.”

  “It is so not the bomb,” Ming Li says. To Rafferty she says, “Did I get that right?”

  “It’s about as dated as Crosby, Stills and Nash.”

  Ming Li says, “Well, how am I supposed to know? I’m from China, for heaven’s sake.”

  Rafferty’s phone rings, and when he opens it, Chu says, “Where is he?”

  “No idea.”

  “That’s very sad. My watch says—”

  “The nice thing about watches,” Rafferty says over him, “is that you can reset them. They’ve got that little stem you can turn, right next to the three.”

  Chu’s voice is cold enough to lower the temperature in the car. “And why would I do that?”

  “Because you have to. Frank just called me. He’ll meet me at five-thirty in the morning.”

  “Where?”

  “He didn’t say.”

  “When will he say?”

  “He’ll call me at five.”

  Rafferty can almost hear Chu thinking. “It sounds like he doesn’t trust you.”

  “Probably afraid I take after him.”

  “Why so early?”

  “My guess would be he thinks it’ll be easier to tell whether anyone’s with me.”

  “I don’t like it.”

  “I’m not crazy about it either.”

  “Get him to change it.”

  “You think I didn’t try that already?”

  Chu says, “This feels wrong.” Rafferty can hear people in the background and the clatter of dishes and silverware. Chu is in a restaurant.

  “Where are you eating?”

  “McDonald’s,” Chu says.

  “You’re a regular Yank.”

  “They’re all over China. I got used to the food.”

  “Quarter Pounder or what?”

  “Big Mac and fries. Is this an attempt at friendly conversation?”

  “We’re stuck with each other,” Rafferty says. “No sense in wasting testosterone. At least not until it’s time for us to kill each other.”

  “I suppose not,” Chu says. Then he says, “Actually, since we’re being candid, I hate McDonald’s. Everything tastes like it’s fried in whale fat.”

  “Then why are you there?”

  “Takeout. Your little girl was hungry.”

  Rafferty’s heart seems to have leaped intact into his throat, where it’s hanging on for dear life. He attempts to clear it away. When he’s sure of his voice, he asks, “What did she want?”

  “Chicken McNuggets and a large order of fries. And one of those chemical milk shakes.”

  “What flavor?”

  “Is this a quiz? Strawberry.”

  “Pink,” Rafferty says. He hears the word as though from a great distance, and Arthit turns at the rasp in his voice.

  Chu says, “Excuse me?”

  “My girl,” Rafferty says. “She likes pink.”

  “She’s braver than she should be,” Chu says. “They both are. Don’t take this as a threat, please. I would hate to have to hurt them.”

  “We’ve covered this before.”

  “Just reminding you. It’s in your hands. I’ll expect to hear from you at five.” The line goes dead. Rafferty lets the phone fall into his lap. He exhales so hard that the entire windshield fogs.

  “Anything new?” Arthit says.

  “Same old stuff. Death threats and a strawbe
rry shake.” He picks up the cracked phone and closes it, opens it, and closes it again. “I can’t actually see anything. This is like putting together a puzzle without a picture on it. All we can do is grab as many pieces as we can get our mitts on.”

  Arthit puts a hand on the handle of his door. “So shall we grab another piece?”

  “We shall,” Rafferty says. He pops his own door and slides out into warm rain. Arthit is already halfway to the second car, taking long strides and waving the two cops out. At the edge of his vision, Rafferty sees Ming Li and Leung fall into step with him. The two cops meet them beside their car. The plainclothes officer from the tuk-tuk comes up behind them.

  “Front and back,” Arthit says, raising his voice over the sound of the rain. “Fast. In and straight up the stairs. Exactly”—he flips the watch around—“one minute from now. Nobody stays in sight of that window for more than a second or two.” To the plainclothes cop from the tuk-tuk, he says, “You get the door for us and stay there. Everybody got it?”

  The cops nod. One of the two from the car is young enough to give Rafferty a twinge of paternal worry—wide, anxious eyes and not a line on his face. The other has skin like an old saddle and a burning cigarette cupped against the rain. His nameplate says kosit. He looks as anxious as someone waiting for a bus.

  “Don’t take him down unless your life depends on it,” Arthit says. He checks the watch again. “Forty seconds. Go.”

  Kosit and the young cop take off at a run and slant to the right of the building; they’re going to hit the rear entrance and remain on the first floor in case the Korean makes it down the stairs. Arthit slips his gun free, looks from Ming Li to Leung, and slaps Rafferty lightly on the shoulder, saying, “Now.”

  The four of them round the corner, running full out, and the plainclothes cop angles across the street in front of them to get the door open. Arthit pauses midstreet for a second, the others stumbling to a halt behind him as a car slashes through the standing water on the road, and then he’s running again, up the steps and through the door, with the others a step behind.

  The hallway is dirty and short. A single, cobwebbed forty-watt bulb dangles by a frayed wire at the foot of the stairs, swaying back and forth in the wind coming through the door. The stairs aren’t carpeted, and Rafferty thinks, Noise. Arthit waves them to a halt as the back door opens and the other two cops come in, dripping. The swinging light makes their shadows ripple as though they’re underwater. Arthit gestures for the older one to take a position at the front door, beside the cop who let them in. His eyes meet Rafferty’s, and he jerks his head in the direction of the back door.