The guy lay on his back still as ice while Orlon slid the snake up and down his thighs. The diamondback squirmed in his hand, extremely pissed. Fucker was hard to hold even on a quiet day. But now it hissed like a pressure cooker, lashing its tail around, Orlon struggling, like trying to one-hand a firehose at full blast.
Orlon bumped the guy's dick with the rattler's nose, yanked it away just as it struck. Thorn's pecker was shriveling, cringing up inside itself, but that was about the only sign the guy was afraid. Orlon kept the snake nosing around, spitting, mouth wide.
"Look, Thorn. We got no case against you. You're a neutral party far as we're concerned. Innocent bystander. But you got one way and one way only of going on with your productive, healthy American lifestyle. That is, you tell us where the fuck she is. Am I being clear enough with you?"
The guy strained his head up from the floor, licked his lips like he was about to speak. Made a feeble sound and Orlon bent closer. Guy did that again, mumbled something under his breath, and Orlon dropped forward a few more inches.
"Nothing to fear, Thorn, old man. You can talk to us. Nobody ever has to know you told us anything. We cut the fishing line, you walk out that front door. You got my word on it. Just an address, that's all we need. You get to live out your full, rich, allotted time on earth, we go back to making an honest, decent living."
Suddenly Thorn thrust up and butted Orlon in the nose with his forehead, a rugby move. The blood began to pour from both nostrils.
Orlon mashed his eyes closed, shook his head, but nothing more than that. He didn't reach up to massage the pain. He just stood, moved up close to Thorn's head, brought the pointy toe of his black leather boots to his right cheek. Tapped the man's cheekbone lightly like a golfer lining up a drive.
"Don't do it, Orlon. There's no need to fuck with this guy. You do brain damage on him, we'll never find out where she is."
With the blood from his nose streaming down his chin, Orlon glanced once at Ray and sneered, then he looked back at Thorn, lined up his shot, cocked his stubby leg back, and punted the man's head so hard he spun over onto his stomach.
Five minutes later, the guy was conscious again and back in the cage, Orlon washing up in the office. Ray stood in front of the blond guy looking at him through the steel grid.
"Man, you must be fucking crazy," Ray said. "Head-butting him like that, it doesn't improve your position at all."
Thorn glared back at him, right cheek as red and swollen as a tomato left on the vine a month too long. He couldn't lift his head all the way because of the smallness of the cage, thick blond hair pressing into a grid of bars that was also the floor of the cage above him.
The rhesus that came in last week was moving around, exploring its space, and at that moment it had developed an interest in a tuft of blond hair sticking up into its cage. The monkey tugged on the hair, and Thorn smoothed a hand across his head and pulled it from the monkey's hands.
"Listen," Ray said. "I don't know how long we're going to have to keep you locked up in here. So I'm going to leave you a pile of food and water. I'll try to pick up a hamburger later, or something. But for now, this'll have to do."
Ray poured some monkey chow through the cage opening, filled up the plastic dish.
"And I got this for you too. Gets warm in this building sometimes, we're having trouble with the air-conditioning, so you'll probably do some sweating."
Ray opened the cage door quickly and tossed an army canteen inside. Shut the door and padlocked it. New Yale lock, impervious to orangutans or other jailbreakers.
"I got some running around to do," Ray said. "But I'll try to get back over here and check on you from time to time, bring you that Big Mac. Or maybe you'd rather have a Whopper?" Thorn kept his mouth shut.
"Wendy's?"
The monkey hung from the ceiling of its cage and let go of a stream of bright yellow piss. It missed the newspaper in the corner of his cage and came raining down on Thorn's back.
The guy didn't move, just kept staring at Ray, giving his vicious glands a workout.
"Burger King it is, then. Personally I prefer the fries at McDonald's, but I don't think you can beat that flame-broiled taste."
"It's over, Ray. It's out in the open now." Saying it in a hoarse whisper. "You'd be in a better position trying to make a deal with the police, turn your brother in. Don't let this keep going."
Ray leaned close to the cage door, taking his voice down to a whisper, "That monkey chow, it tastes better than it looks. Nutty flavor."
The rhesus monkey took a good grip on Thorn's hair again, and was now scooting around in circles on its butt while he held to the hair, twisting it into a spike of blond.
CHAPTER 32
As tired as she was, Sean couldn't sleep. Five in the afternoon, Brunei time, while her body was thirteen hours out of synch — four in the morning in Miami, but hell if she could figure out which morning. Tomorrow, yesterday?
In bra and panties, she lay on her bedspread and listened to the eerie masculine voice wailing from loudspeakers on the roof of a mosque a block away from the Sheraton. A tenor's mournful chant. He seemed to be lamenting some unbearable loss, but then again, Sean wasn't sure. She knew little about Islam. Maybe the song was about some entirely different kind of suffering. Longing, a passion unfulfilled.
She glanced around the room. From the furnishings, the rug, the bed, the paintings on the wall, she might be anywhere. Idaho, London, Mexico City. Except for the large arrow embedded in the plaster ceiling, pointing the way toward Mecca, and the complimentary Newsweek she'd leafed through a few minutes earlier while trying to make herself sleepy. Some government censor with a black Magic Marker had blotted out the breasts of a postage stamp-size photo of the Maja. Much of the accompanying article on sexual harassment was also blacked out, as well as words here and there throughout the magazine.
Though she was fatigued beyond anything she'd known, her body pulsed with a jittery energy. She twisted and stretched, rearranged the pillow, turned it over to its cooler side. Lay on her left, her back, her stomach, her right, a restless yoga. Stared up at the ceiling and took long breaths, willing her brain to be quiet. But nothing worked. A swarm of furious wasps buzzed in her veins. Something was wrong, something she couldn't name. Blood thronged behind her eyes. A wired, frantic voice seemed to be whispering to her just beyond the borders of her hearing.
At last she could stand it no longer and pushed herself to her feet, went into the marble bathroom, washed her face, brushed her teeth, took her dress from the hanger, put it on, her shoes.
Outside in the warm, musky afternoon, the daylight was dwindling, the western sky filled with a ruddy haze. Without any clear destination, Sean turned left toward the center of town, headed off. In a few seconds she was perspiring heavily.
Beside the sidewalk ran a deep open sewer, blasts of foul air rising from it as she walked. To escape the odor she angled off the walkway, cut across a dusty field toward an open-air market. As she meandered among the food stalls, old women watched her warily from behind their displays of vegetables and fruit. Children played in the dirt at their feet, and groups of young men lounging in the shade eyed Sean, her bare arms, the shape of her exposed calves.
Feet swollen from the long flight, painfully tight in her shoes. Her lower back ached, her calves quivered, on the verge of cramping. The weariness seemed to have seeped into her marrow, taken root, but she marched on, determined to have a glimpse of the Brunei she remembered, even if it meant pushing herself over the edge of exhaustion.
She left the market, went further north, past the concrete landing beside the river where a dozen boys in speedboats hooted at her in English, offering their services for a scenic tour. She circled through the cheerless main shopping district, three-and four-story buildings of prosaic architecture, the shop windows filled with standard foodstuffs and cheap, dreary clothes. She drifted toward Kampong Ayer, the water village where thousands of the city's poor lived in a labyrinth
of flimsy stilthouse shacks. It was one of the places she remembered fondly as being extravagantly colorful and exotic. Now she saw what it was, a vast slum at the city's core.
Doggedly she held her course, passed through the water village market, examined the sides of beef hanging in the sun, fish, squid, clams, squeezed through the throng of subdued shoppers bunched around the stark tables. A few yards away the speedboats roared, delivering afternoon shoppers, racing away, the river rocking with their overlapping wakes.
She wandered farther into the village, picking her way along the shaky walkways, boards loose or missing, no handrails, murky water slapping below her at every step, and into the heart of the dense cluster of ramshackle houses built of gray, weathered wood, following the rickety dock past living rooms with doors and windows flung open, exposed bedrooms and kitchens, inhaling the bitter tang of cooking, of sewage, rot, and decay. In the distance she saw the magnificent golden dome of the mosque hovering in the northern sky, and a half mile upstream in the other direction loomed the sultan's palace.
Dismal and discouraged, she retraced her steps through the market, took a narrow bridge back to the city streets, glancing down at the shoreline, which was covered by a rank layer of litter. The plastic containers, Styrofoam, oil cans, and car tires of any garbage dump in any part of the world.
On the way back to the hotel, Sean passed again through the central business district, cheap hotels, pungent restaurants, tiny Chinese-run shops, a museum whose architecture was as flat and spiritless as a hospital. Everywhere the muggy stench of open sewers.
All of it had once seemed so fantastic, so picturesque, had so completely caught the fancy of that fourteen-year-old girl, Sean Marie Farleigh. But now it seemed drab and squalid, a gloomy, oppressive town. The people listless, their conversations muted and tight-lipped. Even the markets were bland. There was no color, no hum, no sense of eagerness in the bargaining. As if the entire country were observing some somber religious observance, or commemorating a grave national disaster. Shoulders stooped, speaking in guarded whispers.
Around her, the streets were packed with new Mercedeses, BMW's, Rolls-Royces, and Jaguars. Even the boys jockeying with their speedboats for taxi fares were well dressed, and on their wrists were gaudy Rolexes and heavy gold bracelets. Their boats and outboard engines were bright and new. And maybe that was it. So much easy money had stunted their spirit. It squared with what her father had frequently said, Sean only half listening as he discoursed on the social history of Brunei.
Over half the population was employed by the government in one of the world's most bloated bureaucracies. They were well-paid civil servants with virtually nothing to do. The rest of the workforce received a minimum wage, which Harry claimed far exceeded the usefulness of their labor. No taxes, free health care, lazy money. No reason to work hard and certainly no reason to revolt. Like Communism with lots of cash.
By the time Sean made it back to the Sheraton she was drunk on gloom. Disgusted with the place, with herself. Beginning to feel that it had been a desperate mistake coming here, still driven by that giddy creation of her fourteen-year-old mind, expecting some romantic, palmy paradise. And what troubled her more was the possibility that her attraction to Patrick, her feelings for him, might be part of the same juvenile fantasy. It wouldn't be the first time that what was merely exotic had been confused for beauty, that lust had been mistaken for love.
She took the elevator to her room, called room service for a gin and tonic. No, make it a double. She was informed stiffly that alcohol was no longer allowed in the country, and in fact had not been permitted for some three or four years now.
She hung up. Lay her head against the throbbing pillow. Closed her eyes and quietly began to weep.
***
At six o'clock Allison could wait no longer. Thorn's simple task was taking far too long. She got a taxi to the Gables house, asked the driver to wait.
She went inside the house, found no sign of struggle anywhere. Upstairs in her bedroom she saw shampoo and lotion and deodorant were missing. Some clothes. As if perhaps after he'd finished here he'd taken some detour, shopping for himself, clothes, groceries. She was probably worried for nothing. He'd be back at the marina waiting for her, concerned she wasn't there.
Allison was on the front porch locking the door behind her, when she saw it. A small manila envelope balanced on the lip of her mailbox. She drew it out, opened it while she walked toward the waiting taxi.
A dog was howling down the street, as Allison stopped, shuffled hastily through the stack of color photographs. Borneo. Borneo. Coming to the bottom, where she found a dozen enlargements of a single photograph, setting them on top of the stack, angling one of them up to catch the sunlight. And Allison felt the earth lurch beneath her feet.
***
After a fitful sleep Sean woke, rolled onto her back, and lay staring up into the dark until she was fully awake. She looked over at the red numerals of the digital clock, six-ten in the morning. She struggled for a moment to calculate the true time. Her body's time. But it was hopeless. Her brain wasn't wired for such computations. It was six in the morning in Brunei. That was the only time that mattered.
Reaching over, she switched on the bedside light, and when her eyes had recovered, she picked up the phone and rang the front desk, asked for a taxi to take her to the airport. You're checking out? a woman asked her. I'm checking out, Sean said.
Somewhere as she was drifting away to sleep or waking up, she'd decided what she had to do. She'd leave Brunei this morning. From back in Miami she could sort this out, her confusion, the icy draft blowing across her feelings for Patrick. She would write him a letter, leave it at the desk, call him when she was back home. This had been a mistake. Impetuous, silly. Patrick would be angry, hurt. It would be a difficult phone call. Patrick would say she'd run away from him, and she'd have to admit it was true. She would tell him she needed sufficient distance from him to digest their situation, its seriousness, its future. He would want to join her in Miami, and she'd refuse, at least for now. It would be complicated, messy.
A few minutes later Sean was in the shower when she heard the phone. Pulling the curtain aside, she listened to it ring, seven, eight times before it stopped.
While she was toweling her hair it began to ring again. She walked over, looked down, and picked it up, said hello.
The phone line was silent for a moment. Then echoing down a long, empty corridor from the other side of the earth came her mother's voice.
"Sean? Is that you? Sean? Are you okay? Are you safe?"
***
"I'm looking at it," Allison said. "I swear to you, it's in my hand and I'm looking at it right now. A color photograph of Patrick Sagawan. An orangutan tied to his belt, his rifle aimed up at the trees. Raimondo White, the Miami animal dealer, standing next to him with a rifle too."
Sean said, "I don't believe this."
"There's a date on the photo. Printed in orange down in the right-hand corner, like all of Winslow's snapshots. October 26. The day she was murdered. This is them, Sean. This is a picture of her killers, the last one she took. I heard her camera rewind automatically. These are the men who knew my name."
"Goddamn it, Mother. What the hell are you trying to pull!"
"I'm looking at it, Sean. It's true."
"How can you invent such a thing! Because I ran off, didn't consult with you first? You trying to punish me? Is that what this is?"
"Look," she said. "I'll fax it to the hotel. You find the number for me, then go wait at the fax machine. See for yourself."
"Mother, this is stark-raving insanity. Do you hear me? Can you hear me clearly enough?"
"Find the fax number, Sean. Please, just do it. Go to the office, wait till it comes over. Please, sweetheart. Look at the photo and then call me right back."
"I'm going to hang up now, Mother. Don't try to call me again. I won't be here."
"Wait, there's more."
Allison glanced
at the other photos from the envelope. Fanned them out on the coffee table. Her hands quivering so badly, she almost scattered the pile on the floor. The taxi driver was standing in the doorway shaking his head.
"The whole roll is here. All thirty-six. When you and Winslow went off on your own exploring Kuching. Snapshots of the marketplace. A long-house, bright clothes hanging outside. There's another one of you in the swimming pool at the Holiday Inn, you're making a face at Winslow. Sticking your tongue out. Do you remember that, Sean? Do you remember doing that? It's on the same roll with Patrick and his rifle."
"Mother." Sean's voice had changed, stiff and empty. "Where did you get these?"
"I don't know."
"What do you mean you don't know!"
"I told you, Sean. Someone put them in the mailbox. I was on my way out, and there they were. No stamp, no address."
"In the mailbox. Just sitting there."
"That's right," Allison said. "Just sitting there. Now look, honey, you have to get out of there right now. You can't let Patrick suspect you're aware of any of this. It's serious. Sean, do you hear me? This is very, very serious."
In an empty voice Sean said, "Was there a note? Anything that might suggest who sent them?"
"Just a word," she said. "Someone printed a single word on the envelope."
"What?"
"Reparation."
***
A white Mercedes taxi was waiting at the front doors of the Sheraton Utama, Sean's bags in its trunk. The hotel's fax machine was streaming out documents from the New York office, weekly communiqués, page after page. One of the desk clerks, a man in his early twenties with Chinese features, stood next to the machine plucking the pages out as they appeared.
"Soon," he said. "Soon be finished. Or perhaps you want to go now, catch plane, I send fax on to you somewhere else."
"I'll wait."
Gone Wild (Thorn Series Book 4) Page 32