A Nail Through the Heart

34

The motorcycle hits a pothole, and Rafferty is momentarily weightless. Then, as he hits the seat, he emphatically isn't.

"We're turning," Rafferty's motorcycle driver shouts into the wind blowing over his shoulder. "Hang on."

For a long, stomach-sinking moment, Rafferty has the sensation of being almost parallel to the surface of the road as the tires squeal, slide sickeningly, and grip again. Then they are upright, and he focuses on the spots of light doing a Busby Berkeley number behind his closed eyelids. The cell phone pasted to his ear is slick with sweat.

"How far from Sukhumvit Soi 28?" Rafferty asks his driver.

"Three or four minutes."

He opens his eyes in time to see the gray iron wall of a truck's side inches from his elbow.

Rafferty has promised the driver two thousand baht for speed, an exorbitant sum, and the bike is at full throttle. Rush-hour cars and trucks hurtle by in a blur or loom massively in front of them, slipping past at the last possible second by a few slim inches. He has a vision of himself spread across the roadway like peanut butter. A blind man could follow them by listening to the horns.

He forces himself to look past the traffic and focus on a more distant blur that resolves itself into shop fronts: tailors' shops, jewelry stores, a coffin maker, a watch shop called Lovely Hours, a sign that says, in English, WE HAVE ALL KINDS GRIT. In other words, a typical Bangkok block. "Can we go any faster?"

The driver starts to turn his head and thinks better of it. "You're joking."

"He still hasn't looked back," Cho says through the cell phone.

"We're almost there," Rafferty says. "Just keep him in sight." They hurtle past a sedan, children's startled hands and faces pressed to the windows watching the crazy farang and his driver trying to kill themselves.

"Wait, wait," Cho says on the phone. "They're slowing down. They're…um, they're pulling over to the curb."

"Is he getting out?" Rafferty asks Cho.

"No. Just sitting there."

Rafferty's stomach takes an anxious dip. "Maybe he spotted you."

"I don't think so. Hold it. A motorcycle taxi stopped next to the cab. The passenger is getting off it."

"What's he look like? Does he have a bad hand?"

"Yes, the left. He's getting in the car. He's got a blue bag with him. Like a bowling bag or something. Oh, my golly," Cho says, a librarian to his fingertips. "They're moving."

"Sukhumvit coming up," says Rafferty's driver. The bike down-shifts and slows. "Hang on. Turn."

Once again the bike yaws wildly, and Rafferty is flying sideways through the air, gripping the seat between his knees with all the strength he possesses. When they are vertical again, the driver says, "Sukhumvit," as proudly as if he'd named it himself. The road stretches wide and congested in front of them, the sky crisscrossed with more electrical wires than any city would seem to need.

"What soi?"

"Thirty-two," Cho says, and Rafferty's driver says, "Sixteen."

"This is interesting," Cho says musingly. "That's really inter-"

"Cho, I swear-"

"The motorbike is staying right behind the taxi."

"Get closer. I don't want him getting back on that motorbike. Run over the goddamned thing if you have to. What color is the car, Cho?" The motorcycle is zipping between lanes of relatively slow-moving cars, their rearview mirrors whipping past like chromium hands snatching at the bike.

"Red, a red taxi with a dented…um, left back fender."

"First numbers on the plate."

"Um…three, two."

"Three-two!" Rafferty shouts to his driver. "Red taxi, license plate starts with three-two."

"Got it!" the driver calls.

"Yeah, well, remember it."

"No, I got it. Up there." And Rafferty looks ahead and sees Cho's car loafing along in front of them and, in front of that, the taxi.

Rafferty reaches into his pocket and pulls out a laundry receipt, a Kleenex, a paper clip, two stamps that have glued themselves together, a used movie ticket, one of Rose's bobby pins, and-finally-his money. When he looks up, they are directly behind the bike that is following the red cab.

He slips the open phone into his shirt pocket and waves a fan of thousand-baht bills in front of the driver for about a tenth of a second. "Get next to him."

"How close?"

"Close enough to smell him."

The bike accelerates until they are within a foot of the motorcycle taxi that brought Chouk to the payoff. Its driver glances over at them, sees how close they are, and starts to yell a caution, and Rafferty pulls the Glock out of his pants and waves it. At the same moment, a head turns in the cab's backseat, and Rafferty sees Chouk's face for the first time.

Instead of peeling off in panic and fading into traffic, the other motorcycle driver guns his engine and cuts around to the rear door of the cab, between the cab and the cars parked at the curb. Chouk is staring back at them wide-eyed. He jerks a thumb at Rafferty and shouts something at the guard, who shakes his head and raises both hands in what looks like an angry denial. Chouk continues to shout, and suddenly he reaches over with his good hand and snatches back the blue bag.

"Stay right where we are," Rafferty tells his driver. "Don't get any closer."

The other motorcycle driver is yelling at the window of the cab, some kind of urgent question, but Chouk does not seem to know he is there. The guard has lunged toward him and grabbed one of the bag's straps, and the two of them struggle back and forth in a constricted tug-of-war, slamming against the cab's doors. Chouk plants a foot high on the back of the driver's seat for leverage and brings the ruined hand down on the guard's shoulder, and the guard jerks back and drops the handle of the bag.

Chouk turns his head away to check the position of the motorcycle, and the guard reaches down and then brings his arm up, and something glints in his hand. He strikes Chouk in the right side once, pulling back quickly. Then he does it again.

Chouk's head snaps back as though he has been hit by a train. He turns slowly to look at the guard, his face a mask of astonishment-mouth open, eyes enormous, his neck corded with fear or pain, or both. Then, moving in slow motion, he turns away again and puts out his right hand. He is going to open the door of the car.

The guard reaches over and grabs the blue bag.

"Get between them," Rafferty says.

The driver's back stiffens. "You're crazy. There's not enough-"

"Get between them. I don't care if we hit the car."

"Well, I do."

Rafferty moves the gun forward so the driver can see it. "Get between them."

"Getting between them," the driver says.

He cuts to the left and aims for the sliver of daylight separating the cab and the motorcycle. Then the bike surges forward, and there is a protesting scrape of metal as the bike's handlebar digs a long gouge in the cab's rear fender. The friction pulls the front wheel around, and for an instant Rafferty thinks they are going down, but the driver reaches out with his hand and pushes them off the side of the cab, and they wobble once and then bump against the other bike.

The other driver has his lips peeled back in fury, and he reaches down into his coat pocket. Before the hand comes up, Rafferty lifts his right leg and kicks the bike's gas tank. His own driver swears, and their bike swerves again into the side of the car, but the other bike careens away, its rider struggling to right it, and then it sideswipes a parked car and the front wheel turns ninety degrees. The last thing Rafferty sees is the bike cartwheeling, its rider in midair, already tucking his knees to try to somersault when he hits the street.

"Up to the driver's door!" he shouts.

The bike leaps forward again. Rafferty's driver is still swearing, a long, unbroken string of invective. When they are opposite the front window, Rafferty reaches over and taps it with the gun. The taxi driver's head snaps around, and he sees the gun and hits the brakes so fast that the two men in the rear are thrown forward against the back of the seat in front of them. The instant the cab comes to a stop, the far door opens and the guard darts into traffic on foot, carrying the blue bag. He vanishes between cars.

Chouk does not move. He stares through the window as Rafferty approaches. He looks indifferent, even sleepy.

Rafferty pulls the door open and points the gun at him, and Chouk, who had been leaning on the door, unfolds slowly out of the car and hits the street facefirst. Rafferty steps back, then looks around and sees the staring crowd gathering on the curb, the fallen man at his feet with a pool of blood spreading beneath him, and Chouk's motorcycle driver limping toward them with a wrench in his hand.

Rafferty yanks the cell phone from his pocket. "Goddamn it, Cho," he shouts, "get up here and arrest me!"

Ninety minutes later Poke's friend Dr. Ratt comes out of the apartment bedroom with blood on his white sleeves.

"He's lucky," he says, heading for the kitchen as he peels off his latex gloves. "The knife hit the ribs. No punctured lung, no arterial damage. Just sliced muscles." He turns on the water and pours liquid dishwashing detergent on his hands. "I sewed him up. He's low on blood, ought to have a transfusion."

"What happens if he doesn't get the transfusion?"

"He'll be pretty weak."

"Weak is a good idea," Rafferty says.

"Poke," Nui scolds, emerging from the bedroom in her latest silk nurse's uniform. This one is salmon-colored.

"This isn't Albert Schweitzer, Nui. He killed a man earlier this week."

"Really?" Dr. Ratt's tone is skeptical. "He's awfully sweet to be a killer."

"He also stole a bunch of money."

"How much?" Nui handles the finances for her husband's mobile medical practice.

"Ten million baht."

Dr. Ratt whistles and Nui says happily, "Then he can pay us."

"Not exactly. He shredded it."

Dr. Ratt pauses and lifts a soapy hand. "He…"

"Shredded it. Then he sent it back."

"What was the point? The emptiness of materialism?" Nui asks. "This is an unusually spiritual attitude in a thief."

"Actually, I think he was trying to piss somebody off."

Dr. Ratt shakes water from his hands. "Who was the man he killed?"

"Paper towels are under the sink," Rafferty says. "The man who helped him in the robbery."

Dr. Ratt drops from sight beneath the counter and resurfaces with a roll of paper towels. "Let me play this back. This man, who is really extremely nice, Poke, even cultured, robs someone, kills somebody else while he's committing a robbery, and then shreds the…the…"

"Loot," Nui supplies.

"…the loot, and sends it back?"

"I know," Poke says. "It doesn't make a lot of sense to me either. He and I need to have a chat."

"You lead an interesting life, Poke," Nui says. "We don't know anybody who's shredded ten million baht. How's Miaow?"

"She's an angel."

"And Rose?" Her long, sleepy eyes come up to his. There is more than casual interest in them.

"Ah, well," Rafferty says, and realizes he is blushing.

"Whoops," Nui says. "Perhaps I'm intruding."

"Nui, when there's something to know, you'll know it. How badly injured is he?"

"Nothing life-threatening. It'll be a week to ten days before he can get around comfortably. He's going to have very limited movement in his right arm for a while. What in the world happened to his left hand?"

"One of the things he and I are going to discuss."

"What it looks like," Dr. Ratt says, "is that somebody yanked three of his fingernails with a pair of pliers and then put the hand on something flat and hit it a couple of times with a sledgehammer."

"Yikes," Rafferty says.

"Most of the bones are broken in several places. There was obviously no kind of medical attention. I've seen injuries like it-" He stops, looking embarrassed.

"Where? Where have you seen injuries like it?"

"Beggars," Dr. Ratt says. He is blushing at being caught in a good deed. "I treat beggars one day a week."

"Why would beggars-"

"They're Cambodian beggars. Old enough to have been in the Khmer Rouge prisons."

"Jesus freaking Christ," Rafferty says. He sits heavily on the couch.

"Excuse me?" Nui always wants to learn new English.

"It's an idiom Americans use when enlightenment strikes." He puts his hands to his head and massages his temples. "It's always enlightening to realize you're an idiot."