PR02 - The Fourth Watcher

by Timothy Hallinan

  Rafferty shakes his head.

  Arthit studies him for a moment, reading his resolve, and then points his index finger at Ming Li and flicks it toward the door. Ming Li does something that might be the first stage of a pout but cancels it and goes dutifully down the hall, the little gun dainty in her hand. The young cop looks at her, looks again, and gives her a nervous smile.

  Arthit holds up three fingers, twice for emphasis, then folds them again. He raises his hand to show one, then two, and on three, he, Rafferty, and Leung charge up the stairs. At the top they turn right and sprint to the last door on the right. In unison, Arthit and Leung lift their right legs, and Arthit whispers, “Look away.” Then the two of them snap their legs forward and kick the door in. Arthit throws something inside and leaps back.

  There is a blinding flash of light and a whump, and Rafferty sees a blur of movement inside, the big man throwing himself toward the window. The flash from the concussion grenade reveals nothing but the size of the room and the presence of the man, frozen by the flash in front of a cheap blue couch. Rafferty has no time to register anything else, other than the sweet, strident smell of cheap cologne, before Leung launches himself through the air and hits the man at the back of his knees. The Korean goes down so heavily the floor shakes, kicks back at Leung, and rolls away, coming partway up with something shiny in his hand, and time seems to slow as Rafferty sees the man—probably half blind from the flash of the grenade—bring the hand around toward Arthit, silhouetted clearly in the doorway, and then the world erupts in a roar that should have blown the windows out.

  But Leung has lashed out with a leg, knocking the big man’s gun up, and the lighting fixture in the center of the ceiling explodes, throwing the room into darkness except for the rectangle of gray that defines the window and a yellowish fall of light through the door. A chair or something slams to the floor, and Rafferty sees movement as someone rises from the tangled knot that was Leung and the Korean, and the standing man—too big to be Leung—bends at the waist and charges, taking Rafferty up and into the air with a low shoulder to the gut. Rafferty has just enough time to slam his gun against the side of the man’s head before he’s tossed to the floor, thrown as easily as a feather pillow, and the man is most of the way to the open door when Arthit blocks it with his body, lowers the barrel of his gun, and fires twice at the man’s legs. The Korean stumbles and lists to the left, but he keeps coming, and another shot bursts against Rafferty’s eardrums, and suddenly Arthit is no longer standing in the doorway, and the man is almost through it, one hand clasping his left thigh. He grabs the doorframe and starts to pull himself through, and then there is something small and white in front of him. He does a surprised stutter-step, and Ming Li brings up the little gun and shoots him from a distance of three feet.

  The Korean drops to one knee. Instantly Leung is on him, raking his eyes with clawed fingers, and as the man reflexively lifts his hands, Leung gets his own hand around the center of the gun above the trigger guard and twists violently. Even over the ringing in his ears, Rafferty can hear fingers break. The gun comes free. Leung puts both barrels— his and the Korean’s—against the man’s head, and everything goes still.

  Except for Ming Li, slowly sinking to her knees in the hallway. Behind her the older cop, Kosit, is staring down, his gun dangling forgotten in his hand. Leung says, “Cuffs here, now,” and Kosit tears his eyes away, comes into the room, and secures the Korean’s hands with flexible plastic cuffs, yanking them so tight that the Korean feels it even through the pain of his wounds, and grunts.

  Rafferty crawls on all fours to the doorway. Ming Li throws him a single terrified glance and then begins again to pump with all her weight, her hands cupped and centered over Arthit’s heart.

  !37

  He Doesn’t Deserve You

  t’s melted,” Miaow says accusingly. “So what?” Chu has three pistols partly disassembled on

  the crate beside him, and metallic fumes of machine oil compete with the deep-fried smell of the chicken and fries. The cleaning rod in his right hand slides through the barrel of the gun in his left. The cop who’d been on guard sits sulking on another crate, halfway across the warehouse. His upper lip is split and so swollen it has lifted to reveal his teeth. Every few minutes he probes the broken one with his tongue and inhales sharply at the pain.

  Chu pulls out the rod and studies the cloth it is wrapped in. Satisfied, he puts the gun down and picks up another. To Miaow he says, “Your father said you wanted strawberry because it’s pink. It’s still pink.”

  “You talked to Poke?” Rose asks.

  “We never stop talking,” Chu says, eyes on his work. “We should get a special rate from the cell-phone company.”

  “How is he?”

  “How would he be? He’s worried.”

  Miaow says, “He’ll get you.”

  Chu shakes his head but doesn’t look up from the gun. “I doubt that. Compared to some of the people who have tried to get me, he’s thin porridge.”

  Rose takes one of the chicken nuggets and feeds it to Noi, who chews it slowly, her eyes closed. She has refused to look at Chu since the moment he broke the guard’s tooth.

  “Poke’s not afraid of you,” Miaow says.

  “Neither are you.” Chu sights down the barrel of the gun. “But being brave isn’t the same thing as being smart.”

  Miaow regards him for a moment and then dredges a piece of chicken through her milk shake and eats it. She slides her eyes to Rose, waiting for a reproof.

  Giving the task all his attention, Chu serenely slides the rod into the barrel. His concentration is complete. He might be a doctor sterilizing his surgical instruments or a violinist tending to his strings. The door to the warehouse bangs open, and Pradya, the fat policeman, comes in. He’s soaked to the skin, and his wet hair has been blown stiffly to the left. It looks like something has been dropped, at an acute angle, on his head. He has to put his back to the door and push to close it against the wind.

  “Where have you been?” Chu says, irritated at the distraction. He pulls out the rod, glances at the cloth, and starts on the third gun.

  Pradya wipes his face. “All over the place. We picked him up a few blocks from the apartment, and then he sat with some woman in a restaurant. After a while a girl went in and sat with them.”

  “A girl?” Chu says. He is scraping at something on the trigger guard with the yellow fingernail on his right little finger, a nail so long it has begun to curve under.

  “A Thai schoolgirl. Young, maybe seventeen. They were watching a bank across the street.”

  Rose inhales sharply enough for Chu to hear her. He stops working on the gun.

  “A schoolgirl?” Chu asks her. “What’s he doing with a schoolgirl?”

  “How would I know?” Rose says. “I’m here.”

  Chu weighs the gun in his hand, but he is not thinking about the gun. “Is Sriyat still following them?”

  “Yes,” Pradya says, “but it’s hard. We had to do most of it with binoculars, from at least a block away. They’re all keeping their eyes open.”

  Chu turns his head an inch or two. He seems to be listening for something, perhaps in a corner of the warehouse. He says, “All?”

  Pradya shifts his weight uncomfortably. “Rafferty, the girl, and a guy they hooked up with later.”

  “Hooked up with where?” Chu glares at the cop and snaps his fingers. “This isn’t a television serial. Tell me the fucking story. What are they doing?”

  Pradya goes through it: the man from the bank, the Korean, the envelopes, the followers splitting up. He and Sriyat had split up, too. “I stayed with Rafferty, but Sriyat says the Korean guy met another guy from another bank. Same thing. They swapped envelopes, and after the Korean left, the girl followed him. The man with her grabbed the guy from the bank and took away the envelope. Then he got into a police car, with her husband”—he indicates Noi—“driving. Rafferty was in the car, too.”

  Chu th
inks for a moment. The gun comes to rest flat on his leg. “Banks,” he says. His eyes close and reopen, focused on something that isn’t there. “Nothing to do with me.” Without looking down, he slides the automatic back and forth along his thigh, polishing it, as he studies the gloom in the corner. “But maybe Rafferty doesn’t know that.”

  After a moment Pradya says, “Whatever you say.”

  Chu stops the polishing and sits still. He pushes his lower lip forward. “I don’t like it. It must be important or he wouldn’t be wasting time on it.”

  Rose says, “I know what he’s doing. It’s not about you.”

  Chu looks at her, the sharp-cut eyes hooded. Daring her to tell him a lie. “Go on.”

  Rose tells him about the counterfeit money and the visit from Elson. “He’s trying to help Peachy and me,” she says.

  Chu leans back, tilts his head up, and studies the ceiling. When the words come, they are slow and dreamy, a thought spoken to the air. “And where did he get his help?”

  Rose sits a bit straighter. “I don’t know.”

  Chu’s gaze, when it strikes her, is as fast as a lash. “Where did he get his help?”

  “I told you, I don’t—”

  “Describe them,” Chu says to Pradya, his voice garrote tight. “The girl and the man. Describe them.”

  Pradya closes his eyes for a better look. “The girl, like I said, about seventeen, Thai school uniform, Chinese-looking but got something about her.”

  “That suggests she might be a mix,” Chu says. His voice could grate stone. He clears his throat violently and spits. “And the man is wiry, medium height, and very fast.”

  Pradya nods, licks his lips, and nods again, more vigorously.

  “Your husband has a snake for a mother,” Chu says. “He’s playing with me.” In a single fluid motion, he gets to his feet, snatches up a magazine, and slaps it into the gun in his hand. The barrel of the gun is pointed at Rose’s head. “I should kill you right now,” Chu says.

  Miaow deliberately puts down her milk shake, stands, and takes two steps, placing herself between him and Rose.

  “Good idea,” Chu says. “Save me a bullet.”

  Rose puts a hand on Miaow’s arm and pushes her aside. Miaow twists away and steps in front of her again. Rose steers her away again and says, “Not the child.”

  Chu lets the gun go back and forth between them, and then he spits onto the floor. He turns and kicks the crate he’s been sitting on. “Ahhhhhh,” he says. “He doesn’t deserve you. Either of you.” His eyes drop to the gun in his hand, and he puts it on the crate, beside the others. “And what good would it do?” For a moment his body goes loose, his face slack. “The girl,” he says, as though to himself. He turns to Pradya. “Get back there. Do whatever you have to do. I don’t care if you have to shoot people. Bring me that girl. And you,” he says to the one with the broken tooth. “Move these people. I want them out of here in an hour.”

  PART IV

  !

  MILLION-DOLLAR MINUTE

  !38

  We’ve Got People to Kill

  he mask is clear plastic, more terrible because it hides nothing. It cups Arthit’s nose, his slack mouth, and his chin. A transparent tube runs into it, supplying oxygen; one of

  the medical technicians had carefully stubbed out his cigarette before turning the valve on the tank he had wheeled up behind him. The banging of the tank against the stairs is the first sound Rafferty can remember since the shot from Ming Li’s gun that put the Korean down. The ten or twelve minutes between the time he saw Arthit sprawled on the hallway floor and the bumpy progress of the tank up the stairs seem to have passed in complete silence.

  Rafferty, collapsed heavily on the couch, can’t look at Arthit’s paper-white face, can’t look at the mask. A pink froth of blood speckles the inner surface. It looks like Arthit chewed a pencil eraser and spit it out.

  “The lung,” says the medical tech who is holding the mask in place. He lifts one of Arthit’s eyelids, peers under it, and lets it drop. “The bullet hit the lung. Probably took a bounce off a rib. No exit wound, so it’s still in there somewhere. Maybe a .22, not enough velocity for a pass-through.”

  To Rafferty it seems that the tech is speaking very slowly. Everything that is happening in the tight knot of people gathered around Arthit seems to take an excruciatingly long time. He lowers his eyes again until he is looking at the suitcase between his knees. The suitcase is safe to look at.

  From Rafferty’s left, the older cop, Kosit, says, “It’s a .22.” Kosit has the Korean’s gun wrapped in a handkerchief.

  Rafferty knows he has to get up, knows he and Ming Li and Leung have to get out of there, but he can’t make himself move. Arthit going down; Arthit hitting the floor; the blood on Arthit’s shirt . . .

  “What about him?” asks the other tech, thumbing the Korean, trussed and bleeding on the floor in front of the couch.

  “Fuck him,” says the first tech. “Let the second team—”

  “Blood pressure dropping,” says the second tech. His voice is tight.

  “Up and out,” the first tech says. “Now.” The two techs and their helpers lift the stretcher and carry it down the hall, moving fast. Rafferty hears their feet on the stairs, synchronized with the flashes of red on the ceiling, thrown by the lights on the ambulance below.

  He feels the young cop’s eyes on him. “I saw what you did,” the young cop says. “I saw you take the money.”

  “I did . . . I did what Arthit would have done,” Rafferty says. In fact, he can barely remember his frenzied rush through the apartment, fueled by sheer terror at the thought of Arthit’s dying. He couldn’t help Arthit, but he had to do something. What he recalls is a blur of motion, punctuated by full-stop images: a closet filled waist-high with neatly stacked brand-new counterfeit bills, a canvas bag stuffed with loose money, dirty and well handled, a big hard-sided suitcase under the bed. He and Leung jamming money into the suitcase, Leung grabbing the canvas bag. But now that energy is gone. Now there’s nothing except the apartment, the sound of the men rushing downstairs, and the weight of his own body. He can’t lift his head to meet the cop’s stare. He remains focused on the suitcase and, beyond it, the bare feet of the wounded Korean. If he raises his eyes, he’ll see the broad smears of blood on the front of Ming Li’s white blouse, as though someone had wiped a paintbrush across it.

  Arthit’s blood.

  “You can’t just steal—” the young cop begins.

  Kosit says, “Stop it. Just shut up.”

  “You saw us together,” Rafferty says to the younger cop. He can barely form the words. “We’re friends. We did this together. I did what he would have wanted me to do.”

  “It’s true,” Kosit says. “Arthit talked about him all the time. They were friends.”

  “We are friends,” Rafferty says sharply. “He’s not dead.”

  No one replies. Kosit studies the floor.

  “Oh, dear sweet God,” Rafferty hears himself say.

  “We have to go,” Leung says from the window. “More cops will be coming.”

  “Coming?” Kosit says. “They should be here by now.”

  Rafferty says, to no one in particular, “I’m not sure I can stand up.”

  “Yes you can.” Ming Li is standing in front of him, although he isn’t aware of her having crossed the room. “You have to.”

  “What you have to do is get out of here,” Kosit says. “You’re just going to make things more complicated. Arthit is the only one who can explain why you were here in the first place. Not to mention why you’re with a couple of Chinese.” He goes to the doorway and looks down the hall. “If my colleagues find you here, they’ll take you all in. I’m not sure even Arthit could get you out of it. Even if Arthit . . .” The words hang unfinished.

  “Listen to him, Poke,” Ming Li says. “If they arrest you, if you’re not there to meet Chu at five-thirty, your wife and daughter will die. I promise you. He’ll kil
l them.”

  Kosit turns back to the room. “Whatever this is about, get moving. And use the back door. We called in more than ten minutes ago. They’ll be here any second.” He fumbles in his pocket and comes out with a card, which he extends to Leung. “Give this to him. It’s got my name and number. You,” he says to Rafferty. “Wake up. Do what you’re supposed to do. You can call me later about Arthit, about how he’s doing.”

  “Poke,” Ming Li says. She bends down, bringing her face to his. He feels the warmth of her breath. “One thing at a time, remember? Right now we need to go. The only thing that matters is getting out of here.

  You can’t help Arthit now.” He feels her hands on his arm, feels the strength flowing from them, and somehow he finds himself on his feet. Leung has come from nowhere to grasp his other arm, and Rafferty hears a grunt as Leung lifts the suitcase with his free hand. Ming Li has picked up the canvas bag. Propelled between them, Rafferty sees the straight lines of the door grow nearer, as though the wall were coming toward him in some amusement-park mystery house, and then the hallway slides past and he is on the stairs, the world tilting downward. Leung moves in front of him to catch him if he falls.

  Outside, car doors closing, men’s voices.

  “Faster,” Ming Li says, and then they’re through the back door.

  Rain slaps Rafferty in the face. His eyes sting.

  Two steps lead down to a small garden: broad-leaved palms whipping around in the wind, tall ferns blown almost flat against the ground, black water standing a few inches deep. In one corner the spirit house, made of rough wood, has toppled over. The garden ends in a low, unpainted wooden gate, and beyond and above it there’s a streetlight, a yellow flame in a halo of rain.