The Fourth Watcher

14

She is taking her time. She can afford to dawdle. She has a half-block head start.

Rafferty had to negotiate his way between the tables of the restaurant, had to explain to the woman at the front that he’d left the money on the table. He’s walking fast but not running.

She makes a turn into an elbow-shaped soi that Rafferty knows is a dead end. As she rounds the corner, she glances back at him. The smile is a little fuller this time.

When he enters the soi, she has vanished.

Nothing. An empty sidewalk, some parked vehicles. A few shops, closed early for Saturday. Rafferty picks up the pace, trying to avoid looking at any one thing, taking in as much of the picture as possible. Prettyman’s Third Law: It’s not coming from the direction you expect.

Studying the street, he feels another pang of regret for his abandoned book. This is exactly the kind of episode he enjoys writing. Except, in the final draft, he wouldn’t have lost her.

And then, halfway down the short block, he sees it.

A van, sitting at the curb. With the passenger door wide open. He steps off the curb and approaches it from the traffic side, only to find the girl gazing at him through the open window.

“You’re not very good at this,” she says. She is sitting sideways on the backseat, looking over her shoulder, legs curled comfortably under her. On her lap is a purse large enough to satisfy Rose.

“You speak English,” Rafferty says.

Her eyes widen. “I do?” She reaches up and scratches her head in mock amazement. “How about that?”

“Listen,” he says, “you can leave me alone now.”

“I’m just getting started,” she says. “If you want to talk, come around to the other side. I’m getting a stiff neck.” Her English is pure American.

“No, I mean it’s off,” Rafferty says through the window. “Wait a minute.” He goes around to the other side of the van. He can see her better this way, and he is struck once again by her beauty. “I meant to tell Arnold, but I forgot. I’m not going to write the book.”

She shakes her head. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Just tell Arnold,” Rafferty says. “And you’ve got quite an arm.”

“Years of practice. The old inner-tube-hanging-from-the-tree technique.”

“Very impressive. Anyway, good-bye. Go back to Little League or whatever it is.”

“Stop,” she says, and her hand comes out of the big purse with a gun in it. “Don’t take a step. And put your hands about chest-high. Nothing obvious, just away from your belt.” If she’s nervous about holding a gun on him, it doesn’t show. Her hand is as steady as a photograph, and her eyes are calm.

“This is silly,” Rafferty says. “Arnold never-”

“I don’t know who Arnold is,” the girl says. “And I don’t want to use this.” She produces an apologetic smile. “But I will.” She slides further across the seat, away from him. “Slowly, now. Get in.”

Rafferty’s cell phone rings. He reaches automatically toward his shirt pocket, but she says, “Uh-uh.”

Rafferty says, “So shoot me.” He pulls out the phone and looks at it. Sees rose and peachy, opens it, and puts it to his ear. “Hello?”

“Poke,” someone wails. “Poke, it’s Peachy. I need- I need to talk to you. Now. Now, can you come?”

The girl extends the hand with the gun in it and lifts her eyebrows. There is no way she can miss at this distance.

“I’m a little tied up at the moment.”

The girl says, “You certainly are.”

“You have to,” Peachy says, and then she starts to sob. “It’s-it’s the end of the world.”

“Hang on, hang on,” Rafferty says. “Just get hold of yourself and tell me-” He sees the girl’s eyes go past him, sees the shadow of the man behind him, actually feels the warmth of the man’s body, and then his head explodes.

Somewhere in the fog, his mother and father are arguing.

This is unusual. They rarely speak enough to argue.

Poke has grown up with his father’s silence. It fills the house they share, the small stone house Poke’s father built with his own hands. No other house is visible, and the unpaved driveway washes out in the infrequent winter rains to make their isolation complete. The desert is silent, the house is silent. His mother communicates mostly by banging pots and pans. Most of the time, the only conversations are the ones in Poke’s mind. But now his mother and father are arguing.

“. . fucking idiotic thing to do,” his father is saying.

“There was no other choice,” his mother says. Then there is silence again.

“. . a thug’s grab,” his father says. “Leung should have known better.”

Leung, Poke knows, is a Chinese name. Knowing this, knowing that he knows it, brings him back to himself.

His head hurts.

Sandals slap a hard floor.

He is cold. It seems to him it has been a long time since he was cold. His clothes are still damp from the rain, and he is lying on a cold floor, probably cement. Something is beating at the back of his head, even though the back of his head seems to be resting on the floor. He wants to touch his head, but he cannot move his hands.

There had been a cement floor in the old Shanghai apartment house where he’d finally found the woman his father had run to. She was short and almost spherically fat. She held her arm at an oblique angle where it had been broken in some Chinese upheaval or other, and her cheeks were painted with spots of bright red, round and hard-edged as coins. Her lipstick shrank her mouth by half, turning it into the flower of some poisonous fruit. She had been distantly kind to him but had said nothing about his father, redirecting his questions into paths of her own. She had neither denied nor admitted that Frank was there, but Poke knew. The air in the apartment had been sweet with the aroma of his father’s pipe.

“Give him the blanket,” says the woman’s voice, and something soft settles over him. Poke opens his eyes.

A large room: maybe a garage or a warehouse. The ceiling is high enough to be dark beyond the two bare bulbs that dangle from wires above him. He has a vague impression of metal beams, more the shadows than the beams themselves, and then a head comes into his field of vision. He cannot see the face against the bright lights above it, but it is surrounded by straight dark hair.

“How are you?” It is the female voice he has been hearing.

“Nice of you to ask.” He wants to reach behind him and lift himself up, even though his head is swimming, but his hands are fastened together in front of him.

“Oh, great,” says the young woman from the van, giving the irony back to him. “Now everybody’s mad at me.”

“ ‘When all men are arrayed against you,’ ” Rafferty misquotes, “ ‘maybe you’re the problem.’ What’s with my hands?”

“They’re cuffed,” she says. “Just to make sure you’ll sit still long enough to realize we have to talk.”

“We could have talked in the street.”

“We thought you had watchers. You’ve been quite extravagantly tailed the last few days. Did you know that?”

Poke does not reply.

“Who are they? Who’s Arnold? Who was the guy with the police last night?”

“None of your fucking business.” He shifts his back on the floor to see her better. Still beautiful. “Okay, we’re talking. Do something about my hands.”

“Let me give you some information first, and then some rules. The information is that nobody wants to hurt you. Not any more than we already have, I mean, and that was sort of an accident. We’re actually here to try to help you.”

“Maybe a greeting card,” Poke suggests. “With a perfume strip. Or a phone call. Something casual, something that doesn’t involve brain injury.”

She continues as though he has not spoken. “The rules are that you’re not going to do anything stupid, at least not while we’re talking You’re going to listen to us until we’re finished, and then it’s up to you. You can do anything you want. If you decide to ignore what we tell you, it’ll be your own fault. You can walk right out of here. We felt obliged to warn you, but we’re not your guardians.”

“I don’t need guardians.”

“You have no idea.” She holds up her right index finger. “Humor me for a second. Can you see this?”

“Of course.”

“Only one? No ghosting, no double vision?”

“No.”

“Follow it with your eyes.” She moves it slowly from side to side, and Poke tracks it. Then she moves it toward the bridge of his nose until his eyes cross, and she laughs. The merriness of the laugh makes him even angrier. “You’ll live. If we take off the cuffs, will you behave?”

“I’ll listen. After that, it’s anybody’s call.” The word “call” brings back Peachy’s anguished voice. “But I need my phone. Now.”

“Afterward,” she says. “And we’re not concerned with what you do after we talk.” She looks over her shoulder. “Or at least I’m not. Leung.”

A man peers into the circle of light above Poke’s head. A cigarette dangles from one corner of his mouth. “Feeling better?” His English is heavily accented.

“Who the hell are you?”

“Say hi to Leung,” the young woman says. “He’s been following you. Actually, we’ve all been following you. If you didn’t spot us, it’s because we were lost in the crowd of other people who were following you. You want to tell us what that’s about?”

“Just get the cuffs, okay?”

The blanket is whisked back, and the man called Leung bends down and busies himself with Poke’s hands. Needles drill them as the circulation rushes back in. Poke gets both hands on the floor behind him and pushes himself to a sitting position.

It seems to be a garage, the floor irregularly spotted with pools of dark oil. The light is cast entirely by the two bulbs overhead, leaving the rest of the space in darkness. Either there are no windows or the sun has gone down. The van lurks in the gloom at the near end, ticking as the engine cools.

The back of his head hurts badly enough to be dented.

“Here’s a chair,” the girl says, pushing one forward. It’s a cheap folding chair, made of battered gray metal. “Get off that cold floor.”

His damp clothes feel heavy as he works himself up-first to his hands and knees and then, grasping the back of the chair, to a posture that makes him feel like Rumpelstiltskin. His head begins to spin a warning, and he eases himself sideways onto the chair without rising further.

“Better?” she asks.

“What about an aspirin?”

“Aspirin’s bad for you.” She gives him the almost-smile he had seen in the street.

“Aspirin is an anti-inflammatory,” Rafferty says. “Getting hit on the head is bad for you.”

“I’m no nurse. My job was to see whether you were still being followed and then to get you here. I’m essentially finished.”

“I thought you wanted to talk.”

“Not me,” she says. “He wants to talk.”

“He.”

“Him.” She steps aside, and Poke sees an old man shuffle around the end of the van, his feet in cheap carpet slippers. The edge of the light hits his knees, and then, as he moves forward, his waist, and then his shoulders, and then his face, and Poke looks at the face twice before he launches himself from the chair, shaking off Leung’s hand, and does his level best to break his father’s nose.