“I already heard it. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Whether I like it or not, he’s barged back into my life, without an invitation-”
Rose raises an arm and lets it drop. “Oh, Poke.”
“-and he’s toting a bag of threats.”
Rose turns her head enough to give him her profile. “Against who?”
“The whole hemisphere, is what it sounded like.” He hesitates, then takes the plunge. “I asked Arnold to find out what he could.”
“This is impossible,” Rose says. “Your father comes all the way to Bangkok, bringing your sister, and instead of welcoming them, instead of bringing them home so I could meet them, you. . you assign Arnold to him. Do you know what I think?”
“I already do. I’m stubborn, I don’t know anything about love-”
“I think you’re afraid of what it might mean to you. Here you are, with this opportunity. So what do you do? You go looking for facts. More facts. Like facts can tell you how to feel or what you should do. He’s your father, but you don’t want to know what that might really mean.”
“Well, how do I know what he’s up to? What’s his agenda? He’s not exactly aces in the trust department. Anyway,” he adds in English, “it takes one to know one.”
“What does that mean?” Her voice is several degrees chillier.
“It’s just the way he is. He may be my father, but he’s more like Arnold than he is like me.”
He turns to her, puts a hand on her arm. “I’m just being careful. This,” he says, “this room, you, me, Miaow-nothing can threaten this. I can’t let anything threaten this. Not my father, not Elson, not anything.”
“We’ll talk tomorrow. For now go to sleep.” She puts out her cigarette and lies down again with her back to him. Then she says, “This is silly,” and turns and puts both arms around him. He feels her breath on his cheek.
He is asleep in seconds.
He is back in the Lancaster house, in the living room, which has developed windows that look out on a Southeast Asian landscape, all palms and heat shimmer, when the phone rings.
He sits up, says “Shit” in his wake-up frog voice, and flips the phone open.
“Who’d call at this hour?” Rose asks.
Before Rafferty can say a word, he hears his father’s voice.
“Get out of there,” Frank Rafferty says. “All of you, get out of there this minute.”
22
"Get dressed and wake up Miaow.” Rafferty slips the cell phone into his hip pocket and goes to the safe hidden in the headboard of the bed. “Don’t turn on any lights.”
Rose is throwing on a T-shirt. “Who was it?” “Dear old Dad. We have to get out of here right now.” “But where can we go?” Her jeans are halfway up her thighs. “Grab your purse.” He waves a hand in a useless effort to dispel
Rose’s cigarette smoke. “I want this place to look empty.”
As Rose heads for Miaow’s room, Rafferty pulls over his head the heavy chain he wears around his neck. Dangling from it is a small key, which he uses to open the safe. From it he removes a thick stack of thousand-baht notes from the money he keeps in reserve, folds the bills once, and stuffs them into his pocket. Then he withdraws a shapeless package wrapped in oilcloth. He drops it heavily onto the bed and pulls out a couple of loaded nine-millimeter magazines, grabs a corner of the cloth and lifts, and when the Glock rolls free, he slips one of the magazines into the grip. As always, the click of it snapping into place
both reassures and frightens him.
The gun feels like dry ice against the skin of his stomach.
He barrels through the door to the living room, and in the haze of light through the glass door he sees Rose with Miaow in her arms, wearing her pink bunny pajamas. She is half awake, eyeing the room groggily. The sight fills him with fury. These people, except for his mother, are the only people in the world he loves, and now they’re in danger. Thanks, Pop.
No, he thinks. Arnold.
Rafferty surveys the room and then opens the door to the hallway. “Out.”
Cold blue fluorescent light, the color of ancient ice, the old embedded smell of cooking oil. “Go down to Mrs. Pongsiri’s,” he says.
He turns to his own door and slips the key into the lock that controls the dead bolt. He clicks the lock home and then thinks better of it and turns the key back, leaving only the flimsy Indonesian lock that he can literally pick with a bobby pin: no point inviting them to kick the door in. He hears Rose and Miaow moving down the hallway, and then the elevator, directly opposite Rafferty’s front door, groans into motion.
Heading down to the lobby. Someone coming up.
“Hurry,” he calls. “Bang on the door.” He twists the key, tries to pull it out.
It sticks in the lock.
“She’ll be asleep,” Rose says.
“Now.” He yanks at the key again. The lock won’t let it go.
It’s been giving him trouble for weeks, but not like this. The lock has been reluctant to let the key slip out, but he’s always been able to wiggle it free. He tries a wiggle or two and then puts a foot against the door and uses all his body weight. The key won’t budge. His shirt is suddenly wet beneath the arms.
He can hear Rose knocking politely on Mrs. Pongsiri’s door, halfway along the hall on the other side, and he swears aloud, lets go of the key, runs down the hallway, and slams his fist against the thin metal door, heavily enough to buckle it. The elevator is louder now, coming up, probably only three or four floors away. He raises his fist again, and the door opens to reveal Mrs. Pongsiri in a silk bathrobe, her face smeared with some kind of white cream.
“Mr. Rafferty,” she says.
“In,” Rafferty says to Rose. Miaow’s eyes are wide now. To Mrs. Pongsiri he says, “Sorry, sorry. I’ll explain later.”
Mrs. Pongsiri blinks at him as though he’s out of focus, and then something hard happens to her face beneath its mask of cream, something that tells Rafferty she knows what it is to be on the run in the middle of the night. “Of course,” she says, stepping aside. “Come in.”
Rafferty pulls the door closed behind them and sprints back to his own door. He twists the key and yanks all the way from the knees, practically wrenching his back. Nothing. Grabbing a deep breath, he forces himself to be still for a moment, then gently turns the key all the way in the other direction, brings it vertical again, and tugs.
The elevator bell rings.
The key glides free.
No time to get to Mrs. Pongsiri’s. He runs to the end of the hall, hearing the elevator doors begin to slide apart, and slips through the door to the fire stairs. At the last moment, he sticks the tongue of his belt between the latch and the doorframe to keep it from clicking shut.
Voices in the hall, speaking Thai.
Rafferty eases the door open half an inch and puts an eye to the crack.
Three of them, gathered at his door. They look like farmers, burned dark by the Thai sun, wearing loose clothes and flap sandals, but they don’t move like farmers. The one in the center motions the others away and puts his ear to the door. In a fluid movement, he lifts his shirttail and pulls out a gun.
The man nearest Rafferty also has a gun in his hand, a tiny popgun just big enough to die from. The third holds a knife, nicked and rusty in spots, but with a honed, shiny edge, an edge that has had a lot of care lavished on it. It is maybe ten inches long, a little smaller than a machete. The man in the center makes an abrupt gesture, hand toward the floor, and the one with the knife drops to his hands and knees and looks for light seeping through the crack under Rafferty’s door. He gets up again, shaking his head.