Off the Clock

Jonathan Quinn was angry and frustrated when he returned home to Los Angeles. To say the job he’d just been on hadn’t gone according to plan would have been doing the colossal disaster an injustice.

Lives had been lost, unnecessary ones, a list that could have very easily included his own name. That he got away uninjured was due purely to luck, and had nothing to do with his skill. It had been a badly planned mission right from the start, one that finished with the body Quinn was supposed to have gotten rid of still alive and well and walking around.

Not his fault, but his jerk client didn’t seem to be on the same page when Quinn called him from the airport while waiting for his flight home.

“Why should I give you the full amount when you didn’t clean anything?”

Quinn, whose specialty was making bodies disappear, held his anger in as best he could. “Terminating the target is not my job. I laid out the rules at the beginning. Whether you end up using me or not, once you hire me, you pay me.”

“You’re going to make it very hard for me to ever hire you again,” the idiot said.

“No. I’ll make it easy. You will pay me, and you will never call me again. I have no interest in working with amateurs.”

“Who the hell do you—”

“And,” Quinn said, “if you think you can just skip out on your obligation, think again. It’s not just me who will stop working for you. I’ll spread the word as quickly as possible, and once that happens, good luck getting anything done.”

“You don’t have that kind of power.”

“Go ahead and think that. There’s one way to find out, though.”

It still remained to be seen whether the guy was going to pay him or not. By the time Quinn landed in Los Angeles, the final payment of his fee had yet to be transferred into the appropriate account. He almost hoped the money wouldn’t show up. His threat wasn’t an idle one, and eventually his former client would figure that out, but by then it would be too late.

Why couldn’t all Quinn’s clients be like Peter at the Office? While Peter might be a little gruff at times, he was professional and always paid when he was supposed to. Hell, Quinn would be better off if he only took the Office’s assignments and said no to everyone else. God knew Peter had enough work.

He dumped his bags just inside the door of his Hollywood Hills home, and turned on the TV in hopes of finding something that might relax him. No such luck. He ended up pacing next to the floor-to-ceiling windows that lined the back of his house and looked out on the city. Only he wasn’t paying attention to the view.

What he really needed was to vent, and release some of his anger. But when you worked in a world of secrets, there weren’t a lot of people you could vent to.

In Quinn’s case, there really was no one.

If his old mentor Durrie hadn’t been killed at a warehouse outside Chicago on a job they’d both been on, maybe things would have been different. Not that Quinn would have talked to Durrie. His late boss was not big on chitchat. It was Durrie’s girlfriend, Orlando, who Quinn would have called.

Would have, but not now. Durrie’s death put a stop to that, driving a wedge between Quinn and Orlando that had kept them from speaking for nearly two years now. He wished he knew how to bridge that divide.

Eventually, he got in his car and drove, not sure where he was going. Or maybe he was and just didn’t realize it at the time, because as he pulled to the curb on a side street just off Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, he knew he’d come to the right place. Ahead on the corner was Taste of Siam, Quinn’s favorite restaurant in the city.

It was late, almost 10 p.m., a time when most restaurants in L.A. were closing or at least thinking about it. Not Taste of Siam. It sometimes stayed open until four or five in the morning, frequented in those later hours mainly by members of the local Thai population.

Even before he got to the front door, he could hear the karaoke machine playing a Thai pop song. He could even tell Ice was singing. She was one of his favorites, a waitress some nights, in charge of music on the others. Though her voice was a little nasal and high-pitched, she could carry a tune. Of course it helped that she was both kind and cute.

Hell, all of the waitresses at Taste of Siam were kind and cute. It was one of the reasons he liked going there so much. Beautiful, no. You had to go eat at another Thai restaurant, Chan Dara, for that. But Quinn would take cute over beautiful any day of the week.

Here he could partake in a little mindless flirting that would never amount to anything, and it worked well with his otherwise solitary existence.

The moment he opened the door, he was greeted with “Khun Jonathan! How are you?” from Natt behind the bar. Two other waitresses — Lek and Won — rushed over from the other half of the restaurant, smiling.

“Sawadee ka,” they said.

“Sawadee khrap,” he replied.

Even Ice gave him a wave as she continued to sing.

It was the kind of attention a man in his job usually shied away from. But this was the one place he allowed it. An escape from his personal reality.

Taste of Siam wasn’t large. Basically, it consisted of two rectangular rooms side by side with a half wall dividing them. Neither section was more than fourteen-feet wide. The first was home to a small bar on one side, and a few seldom used tables on the other. The back third of this rectangle was walled off and served as the kitchen. The only things walled off in the second section were the two bathrooms in the back. Otherwise, it was filled with ten tables and the elaborate karaoke set-up in the front window along Sunset.

When Quinn walked in there were two people sitting at the bar, and a dozen or so sitting at tables in the other section. Knowing if he sat at a table, he would just stew and allow his anger to escalate, he took one of the remaining two stools at the bar.

“Why you not come for a long time?” Natt asked as she filled a glass with Singha beer and set it in front of him. That’s what he liked about this place. He didn’t have to tell them what he wanted.

“Been away on business,” he said. Partially true, but mostly he knew he couldn’t afford to come here as often as he would like. Habits in his kind of life were a bad idea.

“You work too hard.”

He smiled but said nothing as he took a sip.

“You eat or just beer tonight?” she asked.

“Always eat. You know that.”

She did, but she always asked him.

“Pad kee mao?”

He shook his head. “Panang moo.”

“Okay. Panang moo. Rice, yes?”

“Yes.”

She disappeared into the kitchen.

This is exactly what I needed, he thought, feeling his tension fall away. The screwed-up job didn’t seem so important now. They happened now and again. He tended to forget that.

In the other part of the restaurant, Ice was walking around with the microphone, urging customers to join in on ABBA’s “Mamma Mia” to little success. Quinn looked over as he took another sip of the beer. When she noticed him, she held the microphone up, suggesting maybe he should try.

With a laugh, he shook his head. There was a twinkle in her eye, asking him again, almost daring him to give it a go. But before he could even respond, the front door opened, and the smile on Ice’s face vanished.

Ever the professional, Quinn casually turned back around, glancing at the new arrival as he did.

The man who had entered was five-foot-seven, Caucasian, with well-groomed hair and a salesman’s smile. He wasn’t bulky, but he had the look of a guy who went to the gym just enough so that he could admire his body in the mirror.

Just then the kitchen door opened and Natt walked out carrying a plate of chicken satay. She nearly skipped a step when she saw the man. If he noticed, he didn’t let on.

“Hi, Natt,” he said. “How’re you doing tonight?”

“Fine,” she said quickly as she scooted behind the bar.

“I see my usual table’s open.”

In the mirror on the wall, Quinn watched the man walk into the other half of the restaurant. Instead of sitting down, though, he stopped in the aisle between the two rows of tables, and looked toward the front where Ice had retreated and was now singing the song on her own.

When she finished, the man clapped and finally took a seat at the table. Ice said something in Thai into the mic, then quickly made her way through the dining area and rushed into the kitchen.

There was the clatter of a plate on the bar. Quinn looked down to see that Natt had put the dish of satay in front of him.

“I didn’t order this,” he said.

“On the house,” she said. “Maybe you not wait so long next time you come back.”

Though her words were meant to be playful, she seemed to have lost some of the enthusiasm she’d had a few minutes earlier.

“Can I get another?” The guy at the other end of the bar asked, holding up his empty beer bottle.

“Sure. No problem.” Natt headed over to the glass-doored cooler in the corner.

When she finally came back to Quinn’s end of the bar, he said, “So what’s the deal with that guy?”

She didn’t look at him. “He want beer.”

“I’m not talking about him. I’m talking about the guy who just came in and sucked all the fun out of the room.”

She started straightening the stack of takeout menus near the register, acting as if she hadn’t heard him.

“Natt, who is he?”

He could see a struggle going on in her mind. After a few seconds, her gaze flicked across the room to the table where the man was sitting, then settled on Quinn. “His name Nick. He bad man,” she whispered. “No good.”

“What do you mean, ‘bad’?”

“He come in here all the time. Act very nice at first. Make friends with all of us.” She paused.

“And then?”

Her eyes narrowed. “He ask Ice out on date. She tell him no. She have boyfriend, but he keep asking. Finally she say okay, go for coffee only.”

Quinn could feel a coldness growing just below his skin. “What happened?”

She hesitated. “I say too much already. Forget everything.” She moved down the bar to see if the other customers needed help. He decided not to push her.

Ice returned to the karaoke machine just after Natt brought Quinn his panang moo. As he ate, he kept an eye on Nick in the mirror, but the guy just sat at his table, beaming in Ice’s direction.

Once Quinn finished, he put more than enough to cover the bill and a good tip under his beer glass and headed out to his car. But once he was behind the wheel, he didn’t start the engine. He knew he should probably just go home and forget about it. But he knew he wouldn’t. He wasn’t exactly close to Ice and Natt and the others, but they were his friends.

Anything outside of work isn’t worth the risk. Durrie’s voice again. Would he ever get out of Quinn’s head?

It was nearly an hour and a half before Nick appeared. His smile was still plastered to his face as he stepped outside, but as soon as the door closed behind him, it disappeared. This new Nick looked like a smug, cocky ass.

He stood at the corner for a moment, watching the traffic on Sunset. Then he walked across the street, forcing several cars to stop quickly so as not to hit him.

Finally, Quinn started up his BMW and pulled away from the curb. At the intersection with Sunset, he stopped and watched Nick walk down the row of parked cars. The man stopped next to a Mercedes sedan.

Nice car. Definitely not what Quinn was expecting. Apparently whatever this Nick was selling, he was doing well at it.

As the Mercedes came out from the curb, Quinn turned onto Sunset and fell in behind it.

It wasn’t too much longer before they were winding their way up into Beachwood Canyon above Hollywood. As always, Quinn was careful as he followed the other car, but he sensed that even if he were right on the Mercedes’s tail, Nick wouldn’t have realized he was being followed. The self-absorbed seldom saw beyond their own reflection in the mirror.

After taking a few smaller side streets, the Mercedes slowed to a stop in the middle of the road. Quinn, still a block back, pulled to the curb and turned off his lights. On the right near the Mercedes was a house surrounded by a tall white wall. Across the driveway entrance was a seven-foot-high, solid wooden gate that was swinging open. Once it was out of the way, the sedan pulled in, and then the gate began to close again.

Quinn slipped out of his car and jogged down to the wall. The gate finished closing just as he got there, but there was enough of a gap between it and the wall it hung on for him to get a partial view of the property.

The house was a nice, two-story Spanish-style structure that was undoubtedly out of the price range of most people in the country. There was a porch light on next to the door, but the lights inside the house were off.

Quinn heard a car door open, followed by a step as someone got out, then the door slamming shut. A moment later Nick’s shadowy form walked into view, heading for the front door. When he reached it, he stuck a key into the lock, turned it, and went inside.

That was all Quinn was waiting to see. There had been the off chance that Nick was just visiting a friend. And while having a key didn’t necessarily mean he lived there, Quinn felt it was more than pretty damn likely.

He noted the address, then slowly began walking back to his car, thinking.

How much should he get involved here? Or should he even get involved at all? It really depended on what this Nick guy had done, and there was only one way to find that out.

He arrived back at Taste of Siam a little after midnight. The place was packed mostly with Thais now. The music loud, the smiles wide, everyone enjoying themselves. Even Ice, who was still in charge of the karaoke, seemed to be her old self again.

Quinn viewed all of this through the restaurant’s windows from the street, but instead of going in the front door, he headed around the side. As always, the kitchen entrance was open, covered only by a flimsy screen door.

Quinn slipped inside.

The main cooks were an older Thai couple Quinn had exchanged greetings with on occasion. There were also three Hispanic men in the kitchen, doing the prep work and washing the dishes.

The old man was the first to notice Quinn and started saying something to him in Thai.

“I need to talk to Natt,” Quinn said.

The man looked at him for a moment, then recognition dawned on his face. “Ah, Khun Jonathan. You eat?”

“No, thank you,” Quinn said. “I’d just like to talk to Natt.”

The old man looked confused, obviously not fully understanding what Quinn wanted.

Quinn was about to repeat his request when the door to the dining area opened, and Lek came in. She looked surprised to see Quinn.

“Khun Jonathan. You’re back?”

“Lek, could you get Natt for me, please? I just need to talk with her for a moment.”

“Okay. Sure.”

He pointed toward the screen door. “I’ll wait for her outside.”

A minute later, Natt came out.

“Something wrong?” she asked.

“Natt, what did that guy do to Ice?”

A worried look passed over her face, but she looked unsure about what to say.

“Listen to me,” Quinn said. “If you tell me, I can help.”

“What can you do?” she asked, clearly wanting help, but unable to believe he could provide it.

“I can make sure he never bothers her again.”

“How?”

“Just trust me. I can.”

“Maybe you make it worse. Maybe he do what he say before and hurt her next time.”

Quinn tensed. “You need to tell me what he said. I will take care of this problem. I promise.”

She looked over at the kitchen entrance, then back at him. “She not want me to tell you.”

“Only because she’s scared.”

“Yes.”

“When I’m done, she’ll never have to be scared of him again.”

She hesitated for a moment. “You sure?”

“Yes. I’m sure.”

More silence, then, “Okay.”

Forty-five minutes after Natt finished telling the story, Quinn had climbed over the wall around Nick’s property and was standing in the front yard. He did a quick outside tour of the house, and came to the conclusion that whoever had designed it was an idiot. While it might have been aesthetically pleasing, and Nick had gone to the extra effort of having a security system installed, the building was just waiting to be broken into.

Before Quinn had returned to Beachwood Canyon, he’d made a stop at his house, and picked up a few items he knew would come in handy. Now, kneeling next to the side of the house, he pulled off his backpack and removed a small kit that contained — among other things — wires, a pair of cutters, and a bypass box. The last item was about the same size as a rubber eraser, and designed to melt into an unrecognizable plastic lump two hours after it was activated.

He stuck the items into the pockets of his black windbreaker. Then, with little effort, he used the poor layout of the house to climb onto the roof.

Less than ninety seconds later, he had disabled the phone service, and set up a loop that would make the security firm monitoring the house think that everything was fine. Now, if the alarm did go off, the only thing he’d have to worry about was Nick’s neighbors hearing it. But Quinn wasn’t planning on having it go off.

Back on the ground, he donned his backpack again and headed over to the sliding glass door that led from the house to the backyard. It would be the easiest way in. While he knew there would be an alarm contact along the jamb where the door met the frame, there was nothing monitoring the glass itself.

Using a suction holder in one hand and a glass cutter in the other, Quinn cut a large oval out of the door, set it carefully on the grass, and stepped inside.

There was an alarm panel a few feet to the left of the door. All the indicator lights were glowing green, and displayed on the tiny screen at the top were the words: HOUSE SECURE. He’d deal with the alarm later. His immediate goal was to discover Nick’s location.

He checked all the rooms on the first floor: kitchen, dining room, living room, two bathrooms, and a den. As expected, no one was in any of them. Upstairs he found four bedrooms, and a common bathroom. The asshole was in the master bedroom at the end of the hall, snoring away. Quinn was pleased to see he was alone.

Quinn spotted a cell phone on the nightstand next to the bed. He silently walked over, and put it in his pocket. Carefully, he then pulled out the nightstand drawer. Lying on the bottom was a little plastic box that looked kind of like a thin garage door opener. This was the alarm system panic button. Quinn slipped it in his pocket with the phone.

He thought it was probably a good bet the guy had a weapon stashed away somewhere close. His kind always did. It took Quinn less than a minute to find a Beretta in a box, under the nightstand on the opposite side of the bed. Instead of taking it, Quinn removed the bullets from the magazine and the chamber, made sure there were no other ones in the box, then put the pistol back.

Quietly, he moved back into the hallway, and began a more thorough search of the house. The downstairs den proved to be the jackpot.

Quinn had to admit that when he first saw the guy at the restaurant, and was told by Natt that Nick was a “bad man,” he’d assumed Nick lived in a one-bedroom apartment somewhere, probably in Hollywood, worked as a salesman at an electronics store or someplace similar, and spent his free time trolling the Internet or hassling women like Ice.

The first crack in that theory had been when Nick drove off in the Mercedes. The second had been the house itself. By then, Quinn’s theory had evolved into Nick having a trust fund and living off the money of others. It turned out he was both right and wrong.

Not a trust fund. A wife.

Dr. Carol Meyers. She was apparently some kind of vascular specialist. There were plenty of diplomas and certificates of honor and the like hanging on the den’s walls. There were also pictures. Quinn assumed the woman in each was Dr. Meyers. Nick was in many of them, too, smiling beside her. The others in the shots were probably dignitaries. There was even one or two Quinn recognized.

He sat down at the desk and woke up the computer, pleased to see there was no security screen he’d have to hack. He wasn’t the best computer wiz in the world, but simple civilian password protection? Easy.

He opened the calendar first and noted that Dr. Meyers seemed to be on the road a lot. Before he got too far, he found a pad of paper in a drawer, ripped off the top sheet, and started jotting down pertinent dates, account numbers, the doctor’s cell phone number and email address, and anything else he thought might be of use.

According to the calendar, Nick’s wife was nearing the end of a trip that had kept her away for two weeks. Which meant she’d been gone the night Ice found the doctor’s husband nude and in her small apartment kitchen, cooking her dinner. According to Natt, he didn’t touch Ice that night, telling her they still needed to get to know each other before they could be intimate. That was the word Natt used. She said she and Ice could only guess what it meant at first, and had to ask an American friend to confirm it. Since the night of Nick’s visit, Ice had stayed at Natt’s place, not once going back after she had left.

Quinn didn’t ask Natt why her friend hadn’t called the police. He knew Ice was in the country on a student visa and was taking language classes down on Wilshire Boulevard. But a student visa meant she wasn’t supposed to be working. She was probably worried that if she called the police, they would find out somehow, kick her out of the country, and do nothing about her stalker.

Whether that would have actually happened didn’t matter. It’s what Ice believed.

Quinn heard footsteps in the upstairs hallway. He reached into his backpack, pulled out a black stocking cap, and pulled it over his head until the built-in mask covered his face. This was his hometown, after all, no sense in taking any chances of being identified. He then continued looking through the computer.

In the Recently Viewed list of the machine’s photo software, he found several files that didn’t seem to link to anything on the hard drive. He leaned back and thought for a second, then gave the room another look. He identified eleven spots that would be decent-to-excellent hiding places. The five best he discounted as ones Nick would have never thought of, then began checking the other six.

He found the small, portable drive in the fourth spot, tucked inside a folding chess set sitting on top of a bookcase. As he inserted the drive into the computer, he could hear the careful steps upstairs retreating to the bedroom. It wouldn’t be long now, he knew.

The drive was password protected. Not a surprise. Fortunately, the software used was the weak, off-the-shelf variety. Something more robust might have been beyond Quinn’s abilities, but this he could hack into in his sleep.

The drive’s directory opened as the steps returned and headed slowly down the stairs. There were two dozen folders, but only one — marked “Old Reports”—contained actual files. Forty-three to be exact. Quinn opened them all together, then the muscles across his cheeks tensed, and his eyes narrowed.

Nick was the only one in the pictures. They appeared to be taken in bedrooms, no two the same. The bed, fully made, was always behind him, and he was always nude. None were taken in Nick and his wife’s house. From the way they were composed, Quinn guessed they were self-timed shots, taken before whoever lived in the home knew Nick was paying them a visit.

So Ice wasn’t his first.

Quinn thought it was a pretty good guess, though, that the others were women who’d balk at calling the police, too. Immigrants or others in compromising positions. He quickly accessed one of his anonymous servers over the Internet and began uploading the files.

He was watching the status bar when Nick rushed through the door, his gun held out in front of him.

“Don’t move!” Nick shouted.

Quinn stared at him a moment, then returned his gaze to the computer. “You going to shoot me?”

“What are you doing in my house?”

“Checking a few things.”

Quinn’s obvious distain seemed to confuse Nick. He hesitated, then said, “Get away from my computer.”

Quinn held up a finger, still looking at the screen. “Hold on.”

“Get away from my computer!”

Quinn held his position. A few more seconds passed, then the computer dinged.

“There. Done,” Quinn said as he smiled and leaned back. “What was it you wanted?”

“What did you just do?”

“Copy some files.”

Nick’s face started to turn red. “What files?”

“A few old reports.”

“I’m calling the po—” He stopped in mid-sentence, the reality of what Quinn just said sinking in. “What old reports?”

“Didn’t you say you were going to call the police?”

“What old reports?”

Quinn stood up.

“Stay where you are!” Nick told him.

Quinn moved around the desk, forcing Nick to back toward the door.

“Stop!” Nick shouted as he wrapped both hands around the gun.

“That’s good,” Quinn told him, not doing what he was told. “Get a steadier shot that way.”

“Don’t think I won’t pull the trigger.”

Quinn kept coming forward until he was just a few feet beyond Nick’s reach, then finally halted. “Then do it.”

Nick looked at him, his eyes wide and scared, his nose flaring with each breath.

“You’re brave enough to break into women’s homes and make yourself comfortable,” Quinn said. “Here, in your own place, pulling the trigger should be a snap.”

Nick’s mouth dropped open. “Wha…wha…what did you say?”

Quinn’s hands shot forward, grabbed the gun, and twisted it out of Nick’s grasp before the guy even knew what was going on. Two steps forward and Quinn was standing nearly chest to chest with Nick, the muzzle of the gun now pressed against Nick’s temple.

“Should we see if I’m willing to take the shot?” Quinn asked.

“No,” Nick said, trembling.

“Good.”

Quinn paused for a moment. He had been thinking a nice, intimidating chat would keep Nick from paying Ice a return visit. The pictures changed everything. These unclothed visits were obviously a pattern, something not easily broken no matter how much Nick might promise never to do it again. Something that, if it hadn’t happened yet, would one day cross into a potentially deadly area.

Quinn pulled the gun away, flipped it around in his hand, then whacked it solidly against the side of Nick’s face.

“Hey! Hey! Help! I need help!”

The asshole’s screams meant he’d finally regained consciousness.

“Help!” Nick yelled again, repeating it over and over.

Quinn waited for the last item to finish printing from the computer, then carried the small stack of papers through the house to the central bathroom.

Nick was right where Quinn had left him — standing in the shower, his hands bound together with duct tape and secured over the top of the shower nozzle. Quinn had stripped him down to his underwear and wrapped his ankles together, too.

As soon as Nick saw Quinn, he stopped yelling and squirmed against the wall as if he were trying to push himself through the tiles.

“How you doing, Nicky?” Quinn said.

“What do you want?” Nick asked, terror oozing out of every pore. “Money? I don’t have a lot of cash in the house, but you can have my ATM card. I’ll give you the code. Or take anything you want. Okay? I won’t call the police, I swear.”

Quinn stared at him blankly for a moment. “Are you done?”

“What do you want?”

Quinn turned away from him and set the stack of papers on the sink counter, then one by one began taping them to the mirror. These were the ten best shots — if you could call them that — of Nick’s trophy photos. The eleventh printout was a photo of Nick and his wife.

“Does Dr. Meyers know about your hobby?”

The shock in the man’s eyes confirmed that she didn’t.

“Well,” Quinn said, “she’s going to now.”

“No,” Nick blurted out. “Please. I promise…I promise I won’t do it again.”

“Save your breath. I know you won’t.”

Nick looked confused. “Okay, um, then, uh, then there’s no problem, right? You’ll just let me go, and won’t tell my wife. Yes?”

“Sure, Nick. That sounds like a great idea. Then in a couple weeks you’ll convince yourself that I was just here to scare you, and won’t be coming back. You’ll start up again right where you left off. The problem with that is, I would come back. And I would be as mad at myself for giving you a break as I would be at you. So, I figure, why not do now what I would have to do then?”

“What do you mean, ‘have to do then’?”

Quinn smiled sympathetically. “I’m not here to scare you. I’m here to take care of the problem.”

He walked out of the room.

“Wait!” Nick called out. “What does that mean?”

Quinn didn’t answer.

“Hey! What does that mean?”

Back in the den, Quinn printed out the last item, then removed the thumb drive and slipped it into his pocket. In the kitchen, he helped himself to a bottle of water, and leaned against the counter, waiting.

Forty-two minutes later, just a little over an hour after he’d made his calls, his phone buzzed with a text.

2 minutes away

He took another sip of the water, then headed for the front door. The first thing he’d done after Nick had fallen unconscious on the den floor was to completely disable the alarm. So opening the front door now was not an issue.

He crossed the yard to the Mercedes and used Nick’s keys to unlock it. Inside he found a remote, pushed the button, then watched as the gate across the driveway swung open.

Thirty-seconds later a van pulled in. There were no windows along the sides, only a large logo advertising a local plumber who didn’t exist.

Steve Howard and Ivan Donahue climbed out of the front. Quinn had worked with both of them several times in the past. When he’d called to tell them he had a little off-the-clock work for them, neither had even hesitated to say they were in.

They nodded their hellos, but everyone remained quiet until they were inside.

“Hey! You can’t leave me like this!” Nick yelled from the back as Quinn closed the front door.

“I take it that’s the package,” Howard said.

Quinn nodded. “You have the stuff?”

Howard pulled a plastic box from his pocket, and handed it to Quinn.

“Come on. I’ll introduce you,” Quinn said. He led them to the bathroom. “Gentlemen, this is Nick Meyers.”

“What the hell?” Nick said, his eyes growing as wide as they could go at the sight of the two new arrivals. “Jesus. Please, just let me go.”

Howard and Donahue took a quick look, and both noticed the pictures on the bathroom mirror.

“Whoa, dude,” Donahue said. “Not your best angle.”

“I take it his visits to these places were not exactly welcome,” Howard said.

“No, they weren’t,” Quinn confirmed. “And these aren’t all of them.”

Howard looked back at Nick. “You’re a sick son of a bitch, aren’t you?”

“What are you guys going to do to me?” Nick asked.

“Go ahead and cut him down,” Quinn said to Howard. “I’ll be right back.”

He returned to the den, grabbed a pen off the desk, and retrieved the final printout from the printer. When he got back to the bathroom, Nick was sitting on the closed toilet lid, his wrists and ankles still restrained.

Quinn set the printout on the counter. “You’re going to sign this,” he told Nick, then held the pen out to him.

“What is it?” Nick asked.

“Does it matter?”

Nick’s gaze flicked from Quinn to the other men and back, then he took the pen awkwardly in his hand. “I don’t know if I can write like this,” he said. “Maybe if you take this tape off.”

“I think you’ll do just fine.”

Donahue heaved Nick to his feet and helped him get to the counter. The printout was a letter to Nick’s wife.

Carol,

By now you’ve seen the pictures, so there is no need to explain why I left. You don’t have to worry about me coming back, either. I won’t. The only thing I’m taking with me is some clothes. I’m sorry. I’m very sick, and can no longer pretend that I am not. The last thing I want is to hurt you any further. You will never hear from me again. I promise you that.

Nick read the letter, then looked at Quinn. “You’re going to show her the pictures?”

“No,” Quinn said. “You are. I was never here. Now sign it.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me. I’m not going to—”

Quinn pulled Nick’s gun out of his jacket pocket. “Sign it.”

Looking like he was about to cry, Nick signed the letter.

“Good,” Quinn said.

He took a piece of tape from the dispenser he’d brought in for the pictures, and hung the letter on the mirror below the gallery of Nick’s exploits. He then removed the picture of Nick and his wife, folded it, and put it in his pocket. The doctor probably wouldn’t want a visual reminder of her mistake hanging there with the other shots.

“Time to go,” Quinn said.

“Go where? Where are you taking me?” Nick asked.

“Away.”

Quinn opened the box Howard had given him. Inside was a preloaded hypodermic.

Nick seemed to be stunned into silence.

“This is a little something we call IRBD,” Quinn said.

“No. Please. I’ll do whatever—”

“That’s short for ‘I’d Rather Be Dead,’ ” Quinn went on. “See, this is going to paralyze you for the next thirty-six hours. During that time, you’ll be aware of everything that’s going on, but unable to do anything about it. The unfortunate side effect is, you’ll permanently lose your voice.”

“Oh God! Why?”

“It’ll make traveling a little easier for you.”

“Where are you taking me?”

“Someplace where others will deal with you.”

Before Nick could say another word, Quinn plunged the needle into his arm. After that, it was only a few seconds before the drug took effect.

For the second night in a row, Quinn went to Taste of Siam for dinner. This time, when he came in, Natt eyed him warily from the bar.

“Sawadee khrap,” he said to her as he sat down.

“Sawadee ka,” she replied somewhat reluctantly.

“Singha, please. And I’ll go for the pad kee mao tonight. Extra spicy.”

“Okay, Khun Jonathan. Whatever you want.”

As she retreated to the kitchen, Quinn looked around the restaurant. It was a little earlier in the evening than it had been the previous night, so there were fewer customers. The karaoke hadn’t started up, and he didn’t see Ice anywhere. For a few minutes he wondered if maybe she had the night off or had decided not to come in at all, worried that Nick might return. Then he heard the restroom door open at the back of the other half of the restaurant, and a few seconds later, she walked down the aisle to the karaoke machine.

He watched as she started setting everything up. When she finally noticed him, she froze, a worried look on her face. Apparently Natt had told her about their conversation outside the kitchen. He waved her to come over, but she stayed where she was.

“It’s okay,” he said. “Just for a minute.”

Natt came out of the kitchen, grabbed a beer out of the cooler and carried it over to Quinn. Seeing her friend behind the bar seemed to break Ice’s resistance, and she came over and joined them.

He looked at Ice. “You can go back to your apartment now.”

“No,” she said. “Cannot. He might—”

“He won’t.”

She stared at him, her look telling him she wanted to believe what he said, but unsure if she could.

“Never?” Natt asked.

“Never. Neither of you will ever see him again.”

“He move away?” Ice asked, still confused.

“Yes. He moved away.”

Finally, he could feel some of Ice’s tension dissipate.

“You sure?” she asked.

“One hundred percent.”

The corner of her mouth curled up just a bit. “Okay,” she said, her tone still cautious. “I believe you.”

He glanced at Natt. She looked relieved. No doubt she’d been worried about whether she should have talked to him at all. “I believe you, too,” she said.

Later, when Ice was back at the karaoke machine, singing and smiling and laughing, Natt leaned across the bar and whispered, “You not just say that to make Ice happy, are you?”

“No. I said it because it’s true.”

She was silent for a moment. “What kind of man are you?”

He shrugged.

She locked eyes with his, her gaze boring deep into him. Finally, the trace of smile began to form on her face. “I know answer. You good man,” she said, then wandered off.

Once he’d finished eating and drained the last of his beer, Quinn said, “Check, please.”

“No check,” Natt said.

He looked at her, confused. “What do you mean?”

“You no pay.”

“That’s not necessary. I want to.”

“Nick really gone?”

“He’s gone.”

“Then you no pay.”

Knowing he would never change her mind, he pulled a twenty out of his pocket and put it by his plate.

“I tell you, you no pay,” Natt said, picking up the twenty and holding it out to him.

“Tip,” he said.

She frowned for a moment. “You sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“Okay,” she said, her frown turning playful. “Khob khun ka.”

A curious thing happened as he stood up. The two other waitresses ran over, put their hands together and bowed their heads in a traditional wai, and said, “Thank you for coming.”

As this was going on, Ice handed the karaoke mic to a customer and hurried over.

“You leaving?” she asked.

“Yes,” he told her.

“Come back soon, okay?”

“I will,” he said.

She gave him a deep, respectful wai. “Khob khun ka, Khun Jonathan.”

He retuned the wai, then headed outside. If his mentor Durrie had still been around and known what he’d just done, he would have been shaking his head. “Didn’t you listen to anything I taught you?” he would have said. “Never use your training to help someone on the outside! What do you say to that?”

But as much as Durrie had taught him, there were some rules Quinn discovered he could only use as guidelines. This one, it turned out, was one of those.

“Khun Jonathan.”

Quinn looked back. Natt had just come out the front door.

“I told you it’s a tip,” he said.

“I know is tip. I keep tip, no problem.”

He waited, seeing there was something else she wanted to say.

“Where he go?” she asked. “Where he go that he not come back?”

Quinn looked west down Sunset Boulevard. By the time Natt and Ice got off work at four in the morning, Nick would be at his destination. It seemed fitting that Quinn had sent him to Thailand. An hour after Nick was set up in a hotel room in Bangkok, just about the time his paralysis would begin to wear off, the police would come knocking at his door.

Well, not knocking. Barging in. That’s what they did when they got a tip that a major foreign drug smuggler was in town. In Nick’s luggage, they’d find the drugs planted by Quinn’s contacts in Thailand, more than enough to put Nick in a Thai prison for the rest of his life. Which seemed like a fair trade-off for the life he had been leading.

Quinn looked back at Natt, gave her a smile and a wai, then walked down the street toward his car.