“I think so, too,” Wallace said.
“Little shits around here,” the other man said.
“Know we’re old. Know what days the pension checks arrive. Little fuckers. Oughta carry a gun if you’re gonna come here.”
“I won’t be back,” Wallace said.
“Smart guy. Get that arm looked at, hear?” To the woman beside him, he said, “Coming?”
“I go with you?” the woman said, doing her best to look surprised and pleased.
“Sure, sure. We talk money later, okay?”
“No problem.” She grabbed a tiny purse and darted a quick, victorious glance at the woman beside Wallace, then took the bent man’s arm, and the two of them headed for the street.
“Why you come?” asked the woman in the tight dress.
“Golden Mile,” Wallace said.
“Ah,” she said, her face softening. “Golden Mile, yes. Very good.”
“You know a girl named Jah?” Wallace asked.
He got a moment of silence as she gnawed her lower lip. “I know many Jah.”
“At Thai Heaven.”
“No,” she said. “I no work Thai Heaven. Work Tidbit Bar.”
“Mmmm,” Wallace said and knocked back half of the beer. With the bottle halfway down, he froze.
She followed his gaze and saw the three of them in a loose triangle at the edge of the lot. She pointed at them with a tilt of her chin. “Them?”
“Yes,” Wallace said.
“You stay,” the plump woman said, and faster than he would have thought possible, she was at the end of the bar and had grabbed the cleaver. Raising it high in the air, she ran toward them, small steps because of the tight dress, but a run nevertheless. The boys stepped back, and when she showed no sign of slowing, they turned and retreated out of sight, back up the street. The woman with the cleaver followed.
His hand trembled as he downed the rest of the beer.
She trotted back into sight, hair slightly disarranged, but with a smile on her face. She sank the cleaver’s edge into the side of the cutting board and said, “They go, but maybe still close. You pay, you come with me. I take you home. We go.” She waited, not sitting, until he’d put the money on the plywood, and then laced her left arm through his uninjured right and led him toward the street, in the direction opposite the one the boys had taken.
She wore a light floral perfume, something that made Wallace think of a place he and his friends had played each spring, in the hills above Carlsbad, California, slopes of blue lupine and the eye-ringing orange of California poppies tumbling down to the hard bright sun-wrinkles of the sea. Looking for the secret messages they had left there the previous fall, when the hills grew dry and prickly. Answers to questions they’d asked each other, maps to things they’d hidden.
Maps.
They were on the sidewalk now, the lights receding behind them as they moved parallel to New Petchburi Road. In the moments he’d been sitting, Wallace’s knee had stiffened, and he was limping.
He said, “How can you take me home? You don’t know where I live.”
“No problem,” she said. “I take you where you can get taxi, get tuk-tuk. Take you home.”
The shophouse, he thought. No, no, that’s not right.
“Have taxi up here,” she said. “Come little bit more.” They were beneath a street light, her face suddenly blossoming from the dark.
“Jah?” Wallace said, and then she looked over her shoulder and he heard them.
“In here.” She shoved him into a narrow space between two buildings, half-illuminated by the street light, with chunks of rubble underfoot. She pushed him in front of her, and then a blue flame ignited ahead of them—the boy with the crimp in his head—and the other two came into the space behind them, the woman backing away, looking from face to face.
He’d turned to face the two who had just come in when he heard the grit of a step behind him and then something enormously hard slammed the side of his head. His vision flared orange as the thing hit him again, banging the other side of his head against the wall of the building. He was sliding, sliding somewhere, feeling a rough surface against his arm and shoulder, and then something rose up from below, very fast, and struck him on the underside of the chin, and his head snapped back so hard he thought he heard something break.
The woman was screaming in Thai, sounding not frightened but furious, and one of the boys barked a string of syllables like rocks, and she fell silent. Someone kicked him in the ribs, but he barely felt it.
There were stars up there at the top of the narrow canyon between the buildings. He hadn’t seen stars often in Bangkok.
A hand under his head, lifting it up, putting it on something soft, her leg. The woman, looking down at him, fat and powdered, her face shining with sweat. He saw the eyes, the bones, the skin—and the fat and the years melted away, and the corners of her mouth curled up, and the lacquered hair fell loose and long, and he said, “Jah.”
“I’m here, teerak,” she said. “You okay now, I’m here.”
“I looked for you,” Wallace said. The world dipped sharply down for an instant, everything going sideways, but he forced it back the way it should have been.
“You found me,” she said. “You found me.” She wiped his face gently with her hand. “Always I wait for you.”
Someone had a hand in his pocket but when Wallace looked down the world tilted again, and this time it kept going and the street light went down like the sun. He was alone in an empty room, the walls rushing away from him, the space growing bigger and emptier and darker until the only light was him, whatever he was, a sharp point of white light, narrowing to a pinprick, and he said again, “Jah,” and the light blinked out.
“Who’s Jah?” asked the boy with the crimped head, fanning the wad of bills.
“How would I know?” the woman said. “Some teerak from a hundred years ago. Why’d you hit him so hard?”
“He hurt Beer’s leg,” said the boy with the crimped head.
“Pussy,” the woman said. “Hurt by an old man.”
She eased Wallace’s head off her leg and lowered it softly to the pavement. His eyes were open, looking straight up. “Give me a hand.”
The boy called Beer limped forward and helped her up. Instantly, she was slapping him, hard, and then she clawed his face and backed off. “All you had to do was take the money,” she said. “Make me look like a victim and take the money. You stupid boy.”
She lowered her head to look again at Wallace. She said, “I liked him.”
Thirty seconds passed in silence. No one even shuffled his feet. The woman extended her hand, and the boy with the crimped head passed her a tight crumple of bills. She tucked them into the front of her dress, brushed cement dust from the black fabric and leaned down to straighten Wallace’s shirt, which had been pulled up when he slid down the wall. Then she smoothed the long gray hair from his forehead. The boys filed out, leaving her there, her eyes on Wallace’s face.
“Long time ago,” she said to no one, not even knowing she was speaking English. “Long time ago, I think you was hansum man.”
Timothy Hallinan
Timothy Hallinan is an American thriller writer, based in Southern California and Southeast Asia. In the 1990s, Hallinan created the erudite private eye Simeon Grist, who appeared in a total of six novels, all set in Los Angeles. Since publication in 2007, his second series, set in Bangkok, has received critical acclaim.Tim has lived off and on in Thailand since the early 1980s. His Bangkok-based series features a rough-travel writer named Philip (“Poke”) Rafferty, who has settled in the Thai capital and is in the process of trying to cobble together a family comprising Rose, the former go-go dancer he loves, and a precocious street urchin named Miaow. His newest series, which begins with the 2010 novel Crashed, features a burglar named Junior Bender who moonlights as a private eye for crooks.