The Fourth Watcher

34

"She needs her medicine,” Rose says. “She should have told us that at the house,” says the man with the gun.

Noi moans again, this time at a higher pitch. Her eyes are clamped closed, her face sheened with sweat that glues her bangs to her forehead. Her arms are drawn in as though she is chilled, and bent at acute angles, bringing the knotted hands to the level of her heart. Fine vertical lines edge her mouth. Rose had piled up ten or twelve empty burlap sacks to make a bed for her, but Noi has twisted herself halfway off them, so that her legs are bare against the cold concrete floor.

“Are you human?” Rose says. “Look at her. She’s in pain you can’t even imagine.”

“Probably not,” the man says. “Although that hot water hurt.” He looks at an irregular red patch on his forearm.

“I can go get it,” Miaow says. “I can take a taxi.”

“Listen to you,” the man says. The rain rattles on the tin roof like a handful of tacks. In places water has seeped in beneath the walls. The man is sitting on a wooden packing crate, the gun dangling lazily between spread knees. A dozen cigarette butts lie at his feet, folded over and smashed flat in a light snowfall of ash.

“I can go now,” Miaow says. She stands up, and the gun comes to life, the barrel lifting six inches, a snake poising to strike.

“No you can’t,” the man says. “Sit down or I’ll shoot you.”

“You will not,” Miaow says. “I’m a little girl.”

“And I’ve got one at home,” the man says. He hitches up his left trouser leg to preserve the crease and gives it a critical glance. “But I’ll shoot you anyway. Sit.” Miaow steps back, so she is flat against the wall, but she remains standing.

“That means you have a wife,” Rose says. “Suppose Noi was your wife. Suppose your wife was in this kind of pain.”

“Suppose I shoot you all now,” the man says. “I’m going to have to do it sooner or later.”

Miaow says, “You won’t.”

The man inserts two fingers into his shirt pocket and comes up with a cigarette. He checks the position of the filter, puts it between his lips, and picks up the lighter that’s beside him on the packing case, next to the empty ashtray. “I don’t particularly want to,” he says, lighting up. “But I will.”

“Will not,” Miaow says.

Rose says, “Miaow.”

Miaow says, “Give my mother a cigarette.”

The man’s eyes widen, and then he chokes on smoke, and the choke becomes a laugh. “Give your mother. .” he says, and then he laughs again.

“She needs one,” Miaow says. “She smokes all the time. Even more than you.”

“She burned me,” the man says. Miaow just stands there, one hand extended. He laughs again. “Okay, come here. You take it to her.”

Miaow, still in her pink bunny pajamas, pushes herself away from the wall and goes to the man. He takes out a second cigarette and gives it to her, and Miaow puts it between her lips. The man lights it. Miaow blows the smoke out of her mouth, uses her sleeve to wipe the taste off her tongue, and eyes the coal professionally to make sure it’s alive. Then she looks up at the man.

“You won’t, you know,” she says.

“He came out of Warehouse Two,” Arthit says into the phone.

“Are Ming Li and your guys still there?” Rafferty says. “Make sure they see which one he goes back into.”

“Thank you,” Arthit says. “Are there any other routine procedures you’d like to suggest?”

“That’s the only one that occurs to me. Listen, we’ve got kind of a problem at this end.”

“Kind of a problem? And who’s ‘we’?”

“Leung and me.”

“Leung’s at your apartment?”

“Well, no.”

Something slams down on Arthit’s desk. “Poke-”

“I know, I know. I couldn’t stay there. So I went out, and two of Chu’s goons picked me up. Anyway, Leung and I have them now.”

“Leung and you have them now,” Arthit parrots.

“Yeah. Both of them.”

“And you think this is kind of a problem?” Arthit’s voice has risen into an unfamiliar tenor range. “What’s Chu going to do when they don’t come back? For all you know, they’re supposed to be checking in every half hour.”

“Okay, but in the meantime we’ve got them.”

“What a cock-up.” The British schoolboy inside Arthit occasionally surfaces in times of stress.

“That’s not really constructive,” Rafferty says.

“Fine. Constructive. Let’s think positively here. Give me your ‘ideal scenario,’ as they say in those books.”

Rafferty eyes the two men, now sitting on the floor with their fingers interlaced over their heads while Leung leans against the desk, staring at them as though they were already dead. Their police badges are on the desk. The fat one doesn’t look so merry anymore. Neither of them meets Rafferty’s eyes. He says, “Just a minute,” and goes out onto the steps and closes the door behind him. “Okay. We get them to tell us which warehouse, and then we let them go, and they hurry back to Chu and keep their mouths shut.”

“That certainly qualifies as ideal,” Arthit says.

“You asked.”

“I was hoping for something in the realm of the possible.”

“It’s possible,” Rafferty says.

“Would you like to- Wait, hang on. Call you back. My other phone’s ringing.”

Rafferty folds his own phone, goes back into the trailer, and tries to emulate Leung’s stare. He might as well be intimidating furniture, for all the reaction he gets.

“Hey,” he says. They look up at him. “It’s a funny thing,” he says. “I look at you guys and I don’t see killers.”

“We’re not,” says the fat one.

“Tell you what, then. Let’s sit here until Arnold Prettyman walks through this door.”

“That was Chu,” the fat one says. “We wired Prettyman to the chair and knocked him around some, and then Chu sent us out of the room.”

“He didn’t want us to hear anything Prettyman said,” the fat one says. “He never wants anyone to hear anything.”

Rafferty looks at the badges on the desk, which say sriyat and pradya. “Which one of you is Pradya?”

“I am,” says the fat one.

“Well, Pradya, it’s too bad nobody got that on video, because right now it looks like the nail in your coffin.”

“We didn’t know Chu was going to kill him,” says the thin one, Sriyat.

“Right.”

“He said he had questions, said it might get rough. But he never said that-”

“Fine. I’m sure it came as a total surprise.” Without looking away from the prisoners, Rafferty goes to Leung, the trailer creaking beneath him, and whispers into Leung’s ear. Leung nods and pockets the gun he took off the thinner cop. Then he straightens and gestures to Pradya, the fat cop, to go into the bathroom.

Rafferty pulls his own gun and points it at Sriyat.

Both men look confused, but Pradya gets up and reluctantly opens the bathroom door. Leung lazily trails him in.

Rafferty gazes down at the seated cop for a moment and then waves him to his feet and backs up to the far side of the trailer. Sriyat follows. Rafferty puts a finger to his lips, raises his eyebrows, and waits. Fifteen or twenty seconds creep past.

From the other side of the bathroom door, a shot. Then another.

Sriyat goes white, and his head involuntarily jerks around so he can look at the door. It remains closed.

“Sriyat,” Rafferty says. “I’m over here.” The man turns to face him. His mouth is working as though he’s trying to dry-swallow a handful of pills.

“Your friend just gave the wrong answer,” Rafferty says. “This is the question. Which warehouse are the women and the girl in?”

“Three,” the man says at once.

Rafferty raises the gun so it points directly at the man’s right eye. “Which one? And louder.”

“Three!” Sriyat shouts.

The door opens, and Leung pushes Pradya through it. Pradya looks wetter than he did when they came in from the rain, and he walks as though the trailer floor were pitching beneath his feet.

“Same answer,” Leung says.

Rafferty’s phone rings, and he flips it open.

“He went into three,” Arthit says.

“It’s three,” Rafferty says. “We’ve got confirmation here.”

“Of course,” Arthit says, “Chu will probably move them when those guys don’t come back. If he doesn’t just kill the girls and leave them there.”

“They’re going back,” Rafferty says. “That’s where you come in. Hold on. I can’t talk here.”

He goes out again through the trailer door and into the rain. “Offer them a ticket,” he says. “They’re cops, right? Badges and everything. We’ve got them dead to rights. Murder, kidnapping, practically anything you can think of. You could come here and arrest them right now, and their lives would be over. Or you can promise to let them walk if they’ll go back to Chu and keep their mouths shut.”

“I don’t know whether I can keep that promise.”

“Arthit. Who cares?”

“How do we know that they won’t-”

“We don’t.”

After a moment of silence, Arthit says, “That’s what I was looking for. Certainty.”

“If you were in their shoes, whose side would you come down on?”

“I wouldn’t be in their shoes. But I take your point. If they stick with Chu, they’re going to take a big one the minute he’s gone. If they go with us, they’ve got my promise. It doesn’t mean much, and they’ll probably suspect that, but. . If the boat is sinking, you’re going to grab anything that looks like a life vest.”

“I couldn’t put it better myself.”

“Still, it all depends on how much faith they put in my promise and how scared they are of Chu, and there’s no way for us to know any of that.”

“So we’re back where we started.”

“Let me think about it.”

“When Chu called, I gave him a line about you, one that might be tough for him to check.” He tells Arthit the story he sold Chu.

“It’s not bad at all,” Arthit says. “That counterterrorism stuff, they keep all that pretty close. I doubt that Chu could get a line to anyone who could contradict that.” He pauses. “But it only works for Noi. The goal has to be to get all three of them.”

“Look, Arthit, you can put these guys away forever. They’ve probably got families to worry about. And cops in prison have a short life expectancy. When they finally get out, if they ever do, they’ll still have to worry about Chu. We have to persuade them that if they play with us, the whole thing goes away.”

“We could make them promise to try to protect Rose and Miaow.”

“We could try.” Poke hopes Arthit can’t hear the doubt in his voice. He looks out over the mud-smeared desolation of the building site. All it lacks to mirror his emotional state is a dead dog. “So will you talk to them?”

“Oh, well,” Arthit says. “Let’s give it a go.”

Rafferty climbs back up the stairs, feeling like he’s done it a hundred times, and opens the door. The two men on the floor follow him with their eyes, trying to read his face. He puts the cell phone on the desk and presses the “speaker” button. Into the phone he says, “Arthit, meet Pradya and Sriyat.” He points at the two cops. “You’re going to talk to someone. He’s a police colonel, and he’s the only guy in the world who can get you out of this.”

“Your shirt is yellow,” Miaow says.

Noi, her head in Rose’s lap, opens her eyes and looks, startled, at Miaow.

The man with the gun glances down at himself, as though checking. “And?”

“That means you love the king.”

The man squints at her, puzzled. “Everybody loves the king.”

“And you have a bracelet,” Miaow says. “Can I look at it?”

“Why not?” The man transfers the gun to his left hand and extends his right. Miaow comes up to him and slips a finger under the yellow rubber bracelet. “ ‘Long live the king,’” she reads aloud. Like yellow clothing, the bracelets are everywhere in Thailand since King Bhumibol entered the fiftieth year of his reign.

“The king is everyone’s father,” the man says.

Miaow tugs the bracelet and lets go, so it snaps lightly against the man’s arm, and brings her eyes up to his. “Would the king be proud of you now?”

The man straightens as though he has been struck, and the muscles in his face go rigid as plaster. He brings his right hand up, across his chest and all the way to his left shoulder, and he backhands Miaow across the face.

The blow knocks Miaow sideways. She lands on her right arm, her elbow making a cracking sound as it strikes the cement. A line of blood threads down from one nostril, but she ignores it and raises herself on the injured elbow to look the man in the eyes.

Rose has started to rise, but Noi’s weight holds her down. “You,” Rose spits. “You would make the king weep.”

The man gets up very quickly and holds the gun out, his arm shaking and his face tight enough to crack. He racks a shell into the chamber.

The rain grows louder as the door to the warehouse opens, and Colonel Chu comes in, peeling off a raincoat. He stops at the tableau in front of him and hisses like a snake. The man with the gun snaps his head around to see Chu’s eyes blowing holes in him.

“Lower the gun,” Chu says quietly, almost a whisper.

The man does so, looking down at the floor. He is suddenly perspiring.

Chu crosses the floor and extends a hand. After a one-heartbeat pause, the man holds out the gun. Without looking at it, Chu pushes the magazine release. The magazine snicks out into his waiting hand. He ejects the shell in the chamber and flips the gun so he’s holding it by the barrel. He says, “Show me your teeth.”

The man glances around the room as though he hopes there is help there somewhere, and says, “My teeth?”

“Now,” Chu says. “Show them to me now.”

The man peels back his lips to reveal two crooked lines of teeth, and Chu lifts the automatic and snaps it forward precisely, using a corner of the grip to break one of the man’s incisors. The man chokes off a scream and drops to one knee, a hand clapped over his bleeding mouth.

“You have thirty-one left,” Chu says, “and I’ll break every one of them.” His face is as calm as that of someone who is reading an uninteresting book. “These people are my currency,” he says. “Shoot them and you’re stealing from me. People who steal from me have short, unhappy lives, although I’m sure that many of them would like to die long before they’re allowed to.” His eyes slide over to Miaow, still on the floor, and he says, “You. If you want to grow up, wipe your face and get back over there, where you belong.”