Breathing Water: A Bangkok Thriller

23

The moment the apartment door opens, Miaow pushes through, saying, “It was on television.”

“Then I guess it really happened,” Rafferty says, standing in the bluish fluorescent light of the hallway. He puts a hand on Miaow’s head. “Don’t you have something to say to Mrs. Pongsiri?”

“Thank you,” Miaow recites dutifully. “I had a very nice time.”

“It was a little holiday for me,” Mrs. Pongsiri says. She is wearing full evening makeup and a silk robe in all the hues of the rainbow, plus a few that were deleted for aesthetic reasons. Her apartment, the lamps mysteriously sheathed with colored scarves, gleams behind her like a Gypsy caravan. “This is the first night in months I haven’t gone to the bar.”

“Were they really naked?” Miaow says. Her eyes are so wide he can see white all around her irises, and the evening’s excitement seems to have driven away the clouds that have been hovering over her head. “I mean, really?”

“Close enough,” Rafferty says. “Thank you, Mrs. Pongsiri. I’ll baby-sit your bar girls some evening.”

He gets a flirtatious smile and a disapproving shake of the head. Rafferty doubts there’s a man in the world who could mix messages like that. “You wouldn’t say that if your wife could hear you.”

“No, I wouldn’t,” he says. “And she’s not going to hear it from anybody here either. Is she, Miaow?”

“Why couldn’t I go with you?” The petulance returns.

“No kids allowed. Just a bunch of rich people standing around sneering at each other. Bye, Mrs. Pongsiri.” He leads Miaow down the hall. “Anyway, it was all boring except for the two minutes you saw on television.”

“The garden was pretty. I would have liked it.”

“It didn’t smell as good as it looked.” He opens the door to the apartment and steps aside to allow Miaow to precede him. As he closes the door, Rose comes out of the bedroom, already in shorts and a T-shirt.

“You should get out of that monkey outfit,” she says.

“Miaow was just telling me that Pan’s little show was on TV.”

“It was,” Miaow says, heading for her room.

“That was fast.” Rose stops at the kitchen counter. “I’m going to make some Nescafe,” she says. “Want some?”

“Have I ever wanted any?”

“Not that I remember.”

“But I might want it at this hour?”

“You’ll never truly become Thai until you learn to enjoy Nescafe.”

“Then I guess I’m locked out of paradise.”

“I don’t know about you,” Rose says, crossing the kitchen, “but I had enough of paradise tonight. The kids were pretty, though, weren’t they?”

“Enthusiastic, too.”

“I could never do that,” Rose says with one hand on the handle of the cabinet. “Work naked like that. I was offered more money to move to the upstairs bar and do shows-you know, shows-but the idea made my stomach-” She pulls the door open, and there is a white blur of motion, and Rose takes an enormous, instinctive leap backward as something explodes off the shelf toward her. Packages tumble to the counter, pushed aside by whatever it is. Rose’s scream is so high that Rafferty squints against the sound, and he stands as though he has been nailed in place, staring at the thing that has landed on the floor only a few inches short of Rose, who is backing away, both hands out to fend it off.

It raises itself to a vertical position, perhaps three feet off the floor, its hood spread wide, its tongue tasting the air.

Rafferty later has no memory of having grabbed Rose. All he can remember is the two of them in the living room, his fingers digging into her upper arms, as Miaow charges down the hall toward them. He stops her with a single barked syllable. The cobra remains upright, swaying from side to side.

“Miaow. Stay there. Rose, go over there, near the front door, with Miaow.” He grabs the white leather hassock from beside the coffee table with both hands and pushes it across the room to the edge of the kitchen counter. It blocks the entrance to the kitchen.

The cobra drops flat, out of sight beneath the edge of the hassock.

“It can get over that,” Rose says.

“Yell if it does,” Rafferty says, already on the run. “Then go into the hallway and close the door.”

He shoulders open the bedroom door and leaps onto the bed, belly-first. He pulls over his head the chain he wears around his neck and slides aside a panel in the headboard to reveal a locked metal door.

“I can’t see it,” Rose calls.

“Don’t try!” Rafferty shouts. “Don’t go near the kitchen.” He fumbles with the key dangling from the chain, trying to get it into the lock. It keeps skittering away from the slot. “Yell if it starts to come over the hassock.” He finally gets the key into the slot, cranks it to the right, and yanks the door open. His hand hits the heavy cloth bundle, and he pulls it out and unwraps it.

The Glock is cold and oily to the touch. It takes him three attempts to ram the magazine home, and when he tries to rack a shell into the chamber, his hands slide uselessly over the slick metal. He has to dry them on the bedspread before he can snap the barrel back.

Rose screams his name.

He rolls off the bed and charges into the living room to see the cobra slithering over the hassock as though it were a molehill. Rose and Miaow are backing toward the door to the hall. Its attention attracted by all the movement, the cobra rises up again, and Rafferty sights down the barrel.

“Don’t!” Miaow shouts. “Look. It hasn’t got any fangs. It’s been-”

Her voice disappears in the roar of the gun, three fast shots, and a bullet hurls the snake backward as though it’s been yanked by an invisible wire, over the hassock and back into the kitchen. Rafferty runs to the edge of the hassock and looks down to see it writhing on the floor. He fires two more times, the first bullet digging a useless hole in the linoleum. The second goes straight through the cobra’s flat head, and the writhing slows.

“It was defanged,” Miaow says from behind him. She sounds accusing.

“I don’t care if it subscribed to the Ladies’ Home Journal,” Rafferty says. His legs are shaking violently. He puts a hand on the counter to steady himself. “Any cobra that comes into this apartment is snake meat.”

“It obviously didn’t come in here,” Rose says.

Rafferty’s cell phone rings.

He and Rose hold each other’s eyes until Miaow says, her voice high and unsteady, “Aren’t you going to answer it?”

“They already left their message,” Rafferty says, but he takes the phone out of his pocket, flips it open, and says, “Yes?”

“There won’t be any story in the newspaper,” says the man who sat next to him in the Lincoln. “You won’t try anything cute again. I assume you got our present by now. If not, you might want to skip tomorrow’s breakfast cereal. The next one will be in your daughter’s bed, and it’ll have fangs.”

“Got it,” Rafferty says, but his eyes are searching the apartment. He sidesteps Rose and Miaow and looks under the coffee table. Nothing.

“And we’re not happy that you’re spending time with Pan.”

“Oh, use your fucking head,” Rafferty says. “He can make a lot of trouble if he thinks I’m not writing the book he wants. This is going to be hard enough without that.” There is nothing under the counter either.

“Just a minute,” the man on the other end says. Rafferty can hear a palm cover the mouthpiece and a muffled conversation, both voices male. “Okay,” the man says. “You can stay in touch with Pan. But don’t get fancy again, because you’re all out of warnings.”

“One more thing,” Rafferty says, “and then you can hang up and high-five each other on scaring a little girl half to death. That skinny old guy, Porthip. The one who sells the steel. He won’t talk to me until someone calls to tell him he should. I thought you assholes were on top of details.”

“He’ll get a call tomorrow.”

“Now would be the time to hang up on me,” Rafferty says, “but I’m hanging up on you instead.”

He closes the phone and looks at Rose and Miaow. More bad news to deliver. He puts his finger to his lips, then uses the same finger to make a circle that indicates the room in general, and then he touches his ear. He says, “I’ll clean this up. Miaow, go to bed.” He gestures her not toward her bedroom but toward the room he shares with Rose.

She says, “I’m frightened.”

Rafferty is checking the underside of his desk, but he turns and goes to Miaow. Kneeling, he wraps his arms around her. She fidgets, but then she puts an arm around his neck and presses her forehead against his chest.

Rafferty says, “So am I.”