“Suppose I shoot you all now,” the man says. “I’m going to have to do it sooner or later.”
Miaow says, “You won’t.”
The man inserts two fingers into his shirt pocket and comes up with a cigarette. He checks the position of the filter, puts it between his lips, and picks up the lighter that’s beside him on the packing case, next to the empty ashtray. “I don’t particularly want to,” he says, lighting up. “But I will.”
“Will not,” Miaow says.
Rose says, “Miaow.”
Miaow says, “Give my mother a cigarette.”
The man’s eyes widen, and then he chokes on smoke, and the choke becomes a laugh. “Give your mother. .” he says, and then he laughs again.
“She needs one,” Miaow says. “She smokes all the time. Even more than you.”
“She burned me,” the man says. Miaow just stands there, one hand extended. He laughs again. “Okay, come here. You take it to her.”
Miaow, still in her pink bunny pajamas, pushes herself away from the wall and goes to the man. He takes out a second cigarette and gives it to her, and Miaow puts it between her lips. The man lights it. Miaow blows the smoke out of her mouth, uses her sleeve to wipe the taste off her tongue, and eyes the coal professionally to make sure it’s alive. Then she looks up at the man.
“You won’t, you know,” she says.
“He came out of Warehouse Two,” Arthit says into the phone.
“Are Ming Li and your guys still there?” Rafferty says. “Make sure they see which one he goes back into.”
“Thank you,” Arthit says. “Are there any other routine procedures you’d like to suggest?”
“That’s the only one that occurs to me. Listen, we’ve got kind of a problem at this end.”
“Kind of a problem? And who’s ‘we’?”
“Leung and me.”
“Leung’s at your apartment?”
“Well, no.”
Something slams down on Arthit’s desk. “Poke-”
“I know, I know. I couldn’t stay there. So I went out, and two of Chu’s goons picked me up. Anyway, Leung and I have them now.”
“Leung and you have them now,” Arthit parrots.
“Yeah. Both of them.”
“And you think this is kind of a problem?” Arthit’s voice has risen into an unfamiliar tenor range. “What’s Chu going to do when they don’t come back? For all you know, they’re supposed to be checking in every half hour.”
“Okay, but in the meantime we’ve got them.”
“What a cock-up.” The British schoolboy inside Arthit occasionally surfaces in times of stress.
“That’s not really constructive,” Rafferty says.
“Fine. Constructive. Let’s think positively here. Give me your ‘ideal scenario,’ as they say in those books.”
Rafferty eyes the two men, now sitting on the floor with their fingers interlaced over their heads while Leung leans against the desk, staring at them as though they were already dead. Their police badges are on the desk. The fat one doesn’t look so merry anymore. Neither of them meets Rafferty’s eyes. He says, “Just a minute,” and goes out onto the steps and closes the door behind him. “Okay. We get them to tell us which warehouse, and then we let them go, and they hurry back to Chu and keep their mouths shut.”
“That certainly qualifies as ideal,” Arthit says.
“You asked.”
“I was hoping for something in the realm of the possible.”
“It’s possible,” Rafferty says.
“Would you like to- Wait, hang on. Call you back. My other phone’s ringing.”
Rafferty folds his own phone, goes back into the trailer, and tries to emulate Leung’s stare. He might as well be intimidating furniture, for all the reaction he gets.
“Hey,” he says. They look up at him. “It’s a funny thing,” he says. “I look at you guys and I don’t see killers.”
“We’re not,” says the fat one.
“Tell you what, then. Let’s sit here until Arnold Prettyman walks through this door.”
“That was Chu,” the fat one says. “We wired Prettyman to the chair and knocked him around some, and then Chu sent us out of the room.”
“He didn’t want us to hear anything Prettyman said,” the fat one says. “He never wants anyone to hear anything.”
Rafferty looks at the badges on the desk, which say sriyat and pradya. “Which one of you is Pradya?”
“I am,” says the fat one.
“Well, Pradya, it’s too bad nobody got that on video, because right now it looks like the nail in your coffin.”
“We didn’t know Chu was going to kill him,” says the thin one, Sriyat.
“Right.”
“He said he had questions, said it might get rough. But he never said that-”
“Fine. I’m sure it came as a total surprise.” Without looking away from the prisoners, Rafferty goes to Leung, the trailer creaking beneath him, and whispers into Leung’s ear. Leung nods and pockets the gun he took off the thinner cop. Then he straightens and gestures to Pradya, the fat cop, to go into the bathroom.
Rafferty pulls his own gun and points it at Sriyat.
Both men look confused, but Pradya gets up and reluctantly opens the bathroom door. Leung lazily trails him in.
Rafferty gazes down at the seated cop for a moment and then waves him to his feet and backs up to the far side of the trailer. Sriyat follows. Rafferty puts a finger to his lips, raises his eyebrows, and waits. Fifteen or twenty seconds creep past.
From the other side of the bathroom door, a shot. Then another.
Sriyat goes white, and his head involuntarily jerks around so he can look at the door. It remains closed.
“Sriyat,” Rafferty says. “I’m over here.” The man turns to face him. His mouth is working as though he’s trying to dry-swallow a handful of pills.
“Your friend just gave the wrong answer,” Rafferty says. “This is the question. Which warehouse are the women and the girl in?”
“Three,” the man says at once.
Rafferty raises the gun so it points directly at the man’s right eye. “Which one? And louder.”
“Three!” Sriyat shouts.
The door opens, and Leung pushes Pradya through it. Pradya looks wetter than he did when they came in from the rain, and he walks as though the trailer floor were pitching beneath his feet.
“Same answer,” Leung says.
Rafferty’s phone rings, and he flips it open.
“He went into three,” Arthit says.
“It’s three,” Rafferty says. “We’ve got confirmation here.”
“Of course,” Arthit says, “Chu will probably move them when those guys don’t come back. If he doesn’t just kill the girls and leave them there.”
“They’re going back,” Rafferty says. “That’s where you come in. Hold on. I can’t talk here.”
He goes out again through the trailer door and into the rain. “Offer them a ticket,” he says. “They’re cops, right? Badges and everything. We’ve got them dead to rights. Murder, kidnapping, practically anything you can think of. You could come here and arrest them right now, and their lives would be over. Or you can promise to let them walk if they’ll go back to Chu and keep their mouths shut.”
“I don’t know whether I can keep that promise.”
“Arthit. Who cares?”
“How do we know that they won’t-”
“We don’t.”
After a moment of silence, Arthit says, “That’s what I was looking for. Certainty.”
“If you were in their shoes, whose side would you come down on?”
“I wouldn’t be in their shoes. But I take your point. If they stick with Chu, they’re going to take a big one the minute he’s gone. If they go with us, they’ve got my promise. It doesn’t mean much, and they’ll probably suspect that, but. . If the boat is sinking, you’re going to grab anything that looks like a life vest.”
“I couldn’t put it better myself.”
“Still, it all depends on how much faith they put in my promise and how scared they are of Chu, and there’s no way for us to know any of that.”