A Nail Through the Heart

23

In his entire life, Rafferty has never met anyone who hates shopping for clothes more than he does.

Until now.

The boy barely allows himself to be dragged from store to store. The sullen face has returned, accompanied by a stubborn silence. He seems completely indifferent to the clothing Rafferty suggests, and he nods assent only when the shirt being considered is blue.

"You really are being a pain in the ass," Rafferty says in English as the third shirt is bagged. The saleswoman looks at him, startled. "Not you," Rafferty says. "Junior here."

"Boys," the saleswoman says with the ancient wisdom of her sex. "Boys no like clothes."

"I know I didn't," Rafferty says.

"Your son?" the saleswoman asks. Rafferty is surprised by how fast the boy's eyes come up to his face.

"Sort of." The boy's eyes slip away.

"Handsome boy," she says, handing him the bag.

"He's handsome when he smiles," Rafferty says. "He smiles on Tuesdays." He gives the bag to Superman. "Come on, handsome."

On the escalator down, he turns to the boy and says, in Thai, "Enough for one day?"

The boy looks away. Then he nods.

"Enough for me, too. I hate to shop."

The boy says, "But-" and then thinks better of it.

"Look, it's dark outside," Rafferty says, gesturing toward the department store's street-level picture window. Cars with their headlights on dawdle on the boulevard, waiting for the light to change. It seems to be drizzling. "You want something to eat?"

A shake of the head. The boy's eyes are everywhere except on Rafferty.

"Well, fine," Rafferty says, suppressing a surge of irritation. "We'll go home, sit around, and chat some more."

A fine mist is falling, crowding the pedestrians on the sidewalk up against the buildings. Rafferty heads for the less sparsely populated curb so they can walk faster. The boy follows silently in his wake. Within a minute they are both wet.

Rafferty stops and puts out a hand. The boy looks at it and then slowly gives him the bag with the new shirts in it, as though he does not expect to get it back. Rafferty folds it over and hands it back. "Let's keep them dry," he says. The boy nods grudgingly and tucks the folded bag beneath his arm.

A scuffling sound behind him, and something hits Rafferty in the back, low down and hard. His knees buckle. His attention is devoted to the effort to stay on his feet when he sees a boy, a little bigger than Superman, snatch the bag and take off. Superman is after him in an instant. Rafferty follows in their wake, chasing children for the second time in four days.

The running boys turn into a narrow unlighted soi, one Rafferty has not explored. There is a corner five or ten yards up, and the boys round it to the right. There is a sudden grunt-Superman? — and Rafferty accelerates around the corner.

They are on him at once.

Several pairs of hands grab him and pull him further up the soi, away from the lights and crowds of Silom. He kicks out at one of them, and hands grasp the upraised leg and hoist it skyward, and then the other leg is seized and he is grasped beneath the arms. They carry him, kicking and struggling, into the darkness. Someone slams a fist against the side of his head, and Rafferty sees an interesting pattern of lights, and then the fist lands again, more heavily this time, and it also strikes the arm supporting his left shoulder, and the arm releases him, and he begins to fall.

Four of them, he thinks before he hits the pavement. Through the legs surrounding him, he sees a blue streak: Superman running out of the soi, the recovered shopping bag flapping behind him.

They begin to kick him.

They kick his ribs, his hips, his legs, working methodically and deliberately. There seems to be no anger in it, but they're putting their backs into it. He can hear them grunt with the effort. One man lifts a heavy shoe and tries to grind it down onto Rafferty's face, but Rafferty grabs it and twists it, and the man goes down, and Rafferty rolls through the empty space the man vacated and scrambles shakily to his feet. All four are in front of him. His head is spinning and his legs are rubber, but he backs quickly away until his back comes to rest against a wall. Without a word the men form a semicircle, cutting off access to Silom, and one of them, the one farthest to the right, reaches into his back pocket and comes out with a sock. The toe, filled with sand or buckshot, bulges heavily.

Not more than a minute has passed. No one has spoken a word. Panting, Rafferty searches their faces: not Arthit's renegade cops.

Two men feint to Rafferty's left, and as he turns to meet them the sock whistles past his ear and hits his right shoulder with the weight of a falling safe. His right side goes numb and he sags, knowing with the instinctive wisdom of bone and muscle that one more of those will finish him. As the men come at him from the right, he shifts his weight, leans against the wall, and plants a foot squarely between the legs of the shortest and nearest of them. The sap streaks down again, and Rafferty twists away, feeling the wind from the sap against his face as the short man he kicked drops, gasping, to the concrete.

It is important to keep the wall at his back. Everything he knows in the world has come down to this. It is important to keep the wall at his back.

The downed man is vomiting, knees curled against his chest. The one he had been paired with feints again on Rafferty's left, but this time Rafferty absorbs the punch, moving away to soften the impact and turning to try to intercept the sap. It lands on his forearm with a detonation of pain that threatens broken bones, and the man steps back and raises it again. Rafferty knows he cannot lift his right arm. The other men are coming in on him.

A blur at the corner of his vision. Before Rafferty can even question it, it turns into the boy, hanging with both hands onto the arm with the upraised sap, sinking his teeth through the shirt and into the muscle of the shoulder. The man with the sap grunts in surprise and then screams hoarsely as the boy's teeth break the skin and invade the muscle and bones beneath. He flails wildly, staggering back and trying to shake the boy loose, but every move he makes increases the depth of the boy's bite.

The other two men are staring in disbelief as Rafferty cups his left hand and brings the palm up with all his strength beneath the nose of the one nearest him, trying to drive the cartilage all the way back into the brain. The man makes a strangled, snuffling sound and staggers back, and Rafferty goes for the fourth man's eyes.

The man is ready for him. He brings his fist down on Rafferty's right shoulder, where the sap hit it, and Rafferty goes to his knees in a shallow puddle of water. The man above him draws back his leg for a kick, and Superman is suddenly clinging to it, pulling it back, bringing the man down facefirst. Rafferty rolls and snaps an elbow into the man's ear with all his remaining strength, and the man's head rolls around loosely. Suddenly Rafferty remembers the gun beneath his shirt, and he starts to reach for it.

"That's enough," a voice says in Thai.

Rafferty looks up to see the shortest of the men, the one he kicked. He has an automatic in his hand, pointed at Rafferty's head. His other hand cups his testicles.

The man with the sap helps up the one Rafferty just elbow-punched. He seems only half conscious, his head hanging forward and his eyes unfocused. The one whom Rafferty tried to kill with the blow to the nose is bleeding heavily down his shirt and pants. Superman is sprawled on the concrete, facedown.

The man with the gun steps forward toward Rafferty, jacks a shell into the chamber, and touches the gun to Rafferty's temple. "Stop," he says. "Don't ask any more questions."

"About what?" Rafferty asks. The tip of the gun is unbelievably cold against his skin, so cold it seems to suck his body heat into it. "Are we talking about Madame Wing or-"

"That's the message," the short man says. "Don't ask any more questions." And he pulls back the gun and slams Rafferty squarely on the forehead with it.

The soi tilts and darkens, and Rafferty feels his head strike the pavement. He doesn't think he has lost consciousness, but the next thing he knows, he is staring down at wet concrete from a height of one or two inches. He puts his hands under him and pushes up, but they slide apart on the slick surface, skittering away from him, and he drops back onto the pavement. He changes strategy and gets his elbows against the pavement, forearms flat, and levers himself up to a sitting position.

The men are gone. Superman is several yards away, still facedown. He has not moved.

"Hey," Rafferty says, and then realizes he has not said it aloud. He clears his throat, swallows, and says, "Hey," again.

The boy is motionless.

Slowly, Rafferty rolls onto his hands and knees, trying not to move his head too quickly. His right arm will barely take his weight. Favoring the left, he crawls to the boy's side and puts two fingers against his throat, where a pulse should be.

The boy groans ands turns over slowly, his eyes open. He has blood on his chin and neck, and his forehead has been scraped raw against the pavement. He takes in the damage to Rafferty's face and looks directly into his eyes. Then, very deliberately, he smiles. It is a wolf's grin.

"No police on Silom," he says. There is blood on his teeth.

Rafferty finds himself smiling back. "We don't need any stinking police."

Simultaneously, the two of them begin to laugh.

Bleeding, laughing, and leaning against each other for support, they stagger toward home.