Rafferty shakes his head, and Arthit leans in. “Use some sense here,” he hisses. “There’s only so much I can do, Poke. I can’t protect you if you kill someone.”
He holds Poke’s eyes for a moment and then shifts the gun to his left hand, slips his right under the edge of the door, and slams it upward.
Two teenage boys jump to their feet, register Arthit and the gun, and put their hands on top of their heads as if they know the drill. They are covered in grease.
Rafferty scans the shop and sees six or seven motorcycles in various stages of dismemberment. The reason for the boys’ fear is obvious. This is a chop shop, where stolen motorcycles are broken up and combined into new ones.
Arthit wiggles his gun, pointing the barrel at the floor. “Sit,” he says. The boys sit at once, hugging their knees, hands in plain sight. Arthit and Poke zigzag between fragments of motorcycle until they are standing directly over the boys. Arthit studies them for a second and points his gun at the more obviously terrified of the two.
“You. Anyone upstairs?”
“Don’t know,” the boy says. The smears of black grease surrounding his eyes make them a brilliant porcelain white. “People come and go.”
Arthit glances at Rafferty, who shrugs.
“Both of you,” Arthit says. “Give me your wallets.”
The boys shift awkwardly to get their wallets out of their hip pockets and hand them over. Arthit passes them to Rafferty, who pulls out the identity cards and compares them to the faces staring up at him. Allowing for the grease, the boys’ faces match the ones on the cards.
“You’ll get these back when we come down,” Arthit says. “If you’re not here, I promise you a nice long time in the monkey house.
Clear?”
“Clear,” says the tougher of the boys.
Arthit lifts his chin toward the back of the shop, where there is a narrow flight of very steep concrete stairs. Poke follows him, and the music chases them up, echoing in the passageway.
Six feet from the top, Arthit stops and says, “Oh, no.”
By the time Poke smells it, a sharp char of flesh, Arthit is already through the door, his gun extended. He stops there as though he has run into a wall of glass, and Poke stops behind him and looks over his friend’s shoulder, looks at one of those snapshots that will stay with him forever. A single glance brands it on his brain, and he turns away, very quickly, trying to look at anything else in the world. Then he forces himself to face it again.
Arnold Prettyman is wired to a chromium-backed chair, the wire cutting deeply into his arms and shoulders. His hands, wired tightly together, rest in his lap, if “rest” is a word that can be used to describe fists. His head lists to one side at a contortionist’s angle, and the left side of his face is black. His faded blue eyes look at Poke as though Poke were a window. The stench of burned flesh is overpowering. Poke gags.
Arthit automatically looks at his watch and says, “Four-twentythree.” Then his shoulders sag and his head droops forward. “You,” he says to Poke without turning. “Get out of here.”
24
I killed him, Poke thinks. I didn’t mention the triad, and I killed him. With Prettyman’s death reverberating in his mind, the day he originally planned, a day he meant to spend dealing with the counterfeiting situation, suddenly seems irrelevant. The threat seems almost quaint. The new day’s first light is tinting the sky as he uses the key Arthit gave him to open the front door of the house. He locks it behind him and trudges into the living room, weighing several thousand pounds.
Rose is asleep on the couch. A yellow cotton blanket covers her to the shoulders. Her knees are drawn up-the couch is too short for her-and one arm is outthrown, the hand dangling at the wrist, palm up. There is something terribly vulnerable in that loose hand, with its pale palm and curled fingers.
Rose is not a light sleeper, and she doesn’t stir as he approaches her.
He kneels to examine the face he has come to love: the mouth, its upper lip high in the middle and the lower full and generous. The delicate seashell whorl of her nostrils, perhaps the most beautiful curve he has ever seen. The smooth swelling of her cheekbones. He studies her face, every detail, for at least five minutes.
She and Miaow are his life now. Nothing that concerns them is irrelevant.
Then he turns around and goes out into the paling day to hail a tuk-tuk.
Just to be on the safe side, he takes the tuk-tuk for a few blocks and gets out, waiting to see whether anyone seems to be paying attention to him. At this hour, though, there is virtually no one on the streets. He hails a cab, makes the driver circle his building three times as he looks for watchers, and then has the man drop him in the basement garage.
To avoid the noise of the elevator in case someone is waiting on his floor, he takes the stairs. He gets all the way to the fifth floor, each step a yard high, before he remembers that the doors are locked on each floor. Muttering unflattering self-appraisal, he goes back down to the lobby, crosses his fingers, and pushes the “up” button.
Not much he can do when the elevator doors open except stand as far as possible to one side with the gun out. The hallway is empty.
It takes him a couple of minutes to work the pick out of the lock and insert his own key. When he pulls the key back, it slips out as though it has been greased. He thinks briefly of kicking the door into small pieces but decides that the satisfaction isn’t worth the noise and enters the apartment with his gun in both hands.
He needn’t have bothered. The place is deserted.
It takes only a few minutes to get what he needs, a change of clothes for all of them and-as an afterthought-Miaow’s new cell phone, which she had left on top of her desk, surrounded by a circlet of browning ginger flowers like a small metallic shrine. The bag of counterfeit money, much to his relief, is still in its hiding place on the top shelf of the closet. The men last night had been looking for people, not loot. From the safe concealed in the headboard above his bed, he removes his third ammunition clip and the rest of his own reserve of money. He will need every baht of it. On the way out, he makes one more stop in the kitchen to get a jar of Nescafe for Rose, who lives on it, since he’s not sure Noi will have any in her kitchen. He throws it all into a canvas tote bag, takes a last, regretful look around, and heads for the stairs.
As he reaches the seventh floor, his cell phone rings.
“Where the hell are you?” Arthit demands.
“How nice to hear your voice.”
“Why aren’t you at my house? You’re not supposed to be out wandering around.” He can hear Noi’s voice in the background, questioning and concerned. “Tell me you haven’t gone someplace really stupid,” Arthit says. “Your apartment, for example.”
“Okay, I won’t tell you I went to my apartment.”
“There are moments, long moments, when I doubt your sanity. You’re contaminated now. There’s no way you can come back here until I can arrange something so complicated it would take a small army to track it.”
“I’ve got things to do. I won’t come back without calling you.”
“You certainly won’t.”
“Are we still on to creep Elson?”
“We are. I need some sleep first.”
“So why aren’t you getting it?”
“The chopper choppers,” Arthit says. “The boys downstairs from the apartment we visited a few hours ago.”
“Yes, Arthit? Are you going to make me ask you about them?”
“Aren’t we touchy this morning? Four guys, they said. Three of them you’ve already met, by the descriptions. The fourth was a very tall, very thin Chinese man in his seventies. Military-looking, they said.”
“Anything more? A tonsure, a third eye, or anything? Something that would distinguish him from any other very tall, very thin Chinese man in his seventies?”