“Um,” Kosit says, “I’m not sure I should leave here.”
“This is for Arthit. Believe me, he’d want you to do it.”
“What do you mean, it’s for Arthit?”
“It’s between you and me. Are you okay with that?”
“I might be. What is it?”
“Fine. You be the judge.” He tells Kosit about Noi, about Rose and Miaow, and about the meeting with Chu.
“Worse and worse.” Kosit sounds as drained as Rafferty feels. “What do you want me to do?”
“I’ll tell you at my place.”
Kosit says, “Somebody’s got to be coming out of Arthit’s room soon. Give me half an hour. If we don’t hear anything by then, I’ll leave. And listen, for Arthit I can get you a hundred cops, if you need them.”
“Thanks,” Rafferty says. “But I think Arthit would say we don’t need them.”
Only one jar of Nescafe this time. The color should vary. Rafferty stirs it in, examines the tint of the water in the washer’s tub, and rummages through the cabinets until he finds a tin of powdered green tea. He can hear the hair dryers whirring in the other room, broken occasionally by the sound of women laughing. Fon comes into the kitchen, lugging two very heavy-looking plastic bags from Foodland, conveniently open twenty-four hours.
“They’ve only got two left,” she says. “We’ve practically bought them out.” She grunts as she lifts the bags to the counter. “I got your glue, too.”
Rafferty adds half the green tea to the water and stirs with his hand. “What do you think?”
“I’m no expert,” Fon says. “When I see money, all I look at is the numbers.”
“Looks okay to me.” He reaches over and untwists the cap on one of the big jugs of fabric softener from Fon’s shopping bags and empties the entire bottle into the tub. “Let’s just use one this time,” he says. “Last batch got a little mushy.”
“Fine,” Fon says, looking down at the water. “Maybe there’ll be a bottle I can take home.”
“I’ll trade it for the basket.”
“Pretty expensive fabric softener,” she says. She bends down and comes up with a large plastic laundry basket, which she gives to Rafferty. He upends it into the washer. Crisp, flat money flutters down onto the surface of the water, and Rafferty pushes it under and adds more, repeating the process until it’s all in the tub. Fon takes the empty basket.
“I think we’ll use the delicate cycle,” he says, hearing the absurdity in the words. “It’s faster.” He is up to his elbows in water and money, so he says, “What time is it?”
“A little after two.”
“We need more people,” Rafferty says. He pushes “start” on the washing machine, dries his hands, and follows Fon into the living room.
Lek and three other women, all from Rose and Peachy’s agency, sit on the floor around another laundry tub. The tub is blue plastic with square holes in the sides. Two of the women reach in and toss the money like a salad while the others aim hair dryers through the holes. The floor is a snake farm of extension cords. When Rafferty went into the kitchen to start the new load, the basket looked only half full. Now, with the bills drier and not clinging to each other, they almost reach the top edge. As the dry bills are blown to the top, one of the women gathers them and carries them to the couch, which is covered from one end to the other in loose, dried money, nearly a foot thick. Rafferty goes to it, picks up a double handful, crumples them, then lets them drop.
They look and feel a lot better. Not ready yet, but better.
“We’re never going to finish at this rate,” he says. “Who else can we call?”
As if in answer, someone knocks on the door. Rafferty waves the women into the kitchen, realizes there is nothing he can do about the money everywhere, and pulls the Glock. He opens the door an inch and sees Lieutenant Kosit. “Oh.” He sticks the gun into his pants, behind his back. “It’s you.”
Kosit’s eyes are red-rimmed, his face tight enough to have been freeze-dried. He peers past Rafferty and pulls his head back a fraction of an inch in surprise. “What are you doing?”
“Laundering money,” Rafferty says. “To buy Noi back.” He pulls the door open, but Kosit stands rooted where he is, and Rafferty’s heart sinks. “News?”
“He’s in intensive care,” Kosit says. “The bullet hit the lung, but it also nicked a ventricle. If that tech hadn’t been on top of Arthit’s blood pressure, he would have bled to death internally.”
“What do the doctors say?”
“They don’t know shit. They’re talking about shock, infection, a whole list of stuff that could kill him. But I’ll get a call if anything changes.”
“Come on in.”
Across the hallway the elevator doors open, and Mrs. Pongsiri steps off, wearing a short black cocktail dress and carrying the world’s smallest handbag, on the surface of which five or six sequins jostle for space. Her eyes go to Rafferty and then travel to Kosit’s uniform, and she begins to smile. Then she sees the money spread over the couch, and the smile hardens into a mask. She says, “Oh, my.”
From behind Rafferty someone squeals “Anh!” and he turns to see Fon grinning at Mrs. Pongsiri like a long-lost sister.
“Fon,” Mrs. Pongsiri says in a voice Rafferty has never heard before: higher, softer, younger, the voice of the bars and clubs. She opens her arms like a soprano reaching for the top note. Fon shoves her way between Rafferty and Kosit, and the two women embrace. Mrs. Pongsiri kisses Fon on the cheek and squeezes her so hard that Fon lets out a little squeak. Holding Fon at arm’s length, Mrs. Pongsiri looks back to the couch full of money and says, “But what in the world-”
Now the other women reappear. Lek and one other, whose name Rafferty doesn’t know, give Mrs. Pongsiri wide, white smiles as they pick up their hair dryers and get back to work.
“You’re. . drying money?” Mrs. Pongsiri asks, the question wrinkling her forehead.
“We need to make it look old,” Rafferty says. “So we washed it.”
Mrs. Pongsiri blinks heavily, obviously sorting through, and rejecting, half a dozen questions. Finally she settles on the practical. “Don’t you have a dryer?”
“Sure,” Rafferty says, “but I think it’ll make them too stiff.”
Mrs. Pongsiri wearily shakes her head. “Softener sheets,” she says, as though speaking to a disappointing child. “Just throw them in with the money.”
Kosit and Rafferty look at each other.
“I bought a box of them today,” Mrs. Pongsiri says. “I’ll be right back.” She gets a new grip on her purse and bustles down the hall. As she unlocks her door, Rafferty hears her say, “Men.”
Kosit gives a disbelieving glance at the shirt cardboards Rafferty has glued together, looks at the suitcase and the bent coat hangers Rafferty plans to use for support, and says, “Never.”
Through the open door to the living room, Rafferty hears the women talking. He feels like his battery died and corroded days ago, but the women are fully charged. For most of them, this is the first time they’ve worked their normal hours in months.
“Why not?” He and Kosit are sitting on the bed.
Kosit picks up the shirt boards. Rafferty’s newly laundered shirts, stripped from the cardboard, litter the floor. “Too flexible,” Kosit says, bending them. “Even glued together. You need it to be rigid. This stuff is heavy. And the lever won’t work. Not enough pressure.”
“Start with the boards. What can we do?”
“Can’t add much weight,” Kosit says, thinking. “What about those books in the living room?”
“Books are heavy,” Rafferty says.
“The covers aren’t. Get a bunch of hardbacks and some sort of cutter. Look.” He frames a book cover in his hands and mimes placing them across the platform of shirt boards. “Overlap them,” he says. “Crisscrossed. Glued on both sides, so they don’t bend.”
“That leaves the lever,” Rafferty says.
“It leaves a lot of things,” Kosit says. “The hinges on the suitcase, for example. You need to oil them so they’re almost friction-free.” He opens and closes the suitcase several times. “Too much resistance,” he says.