Breathing Water (27 page)

“I owe Boo a favor. So I guess the question is whether you can do anything, considering that you used to be buddies with Wichat, to get him to let go of Da and Peep, just stop searching for them.”

Pan surveys the room, not really looking at anything. “I suppose what he really wants is the baby. Why not return it to him?”

Da says immediately, “No.”

“Right,” Pan says. “Of course not. Well, you say he’s for sale, right? If it’s just about money, if Wichat just doesn’t want to lose his profit, then I can probably do something, maybe compensate him. How much is he getting?”

“Thirty to fifty thousand U.S.”

“You’re joking.”

“That’s my best guess,” Rafferty says.

“Still,” Pan says, “even if I bought Peep for Miss…Miss Da here, Wichat might be more worried about what she could tell people. Especially if he’s making that much money.”

“I think he is,” Boo says. “Both making that much money and worried about Da talking to people.”

Pan’s eyes flick to Boo as though he’s surprised at the certainty in the boy’s voice. “So, you see, it’s a little awkward. If I talk to Wichat, let’s say to offer to buy Peep, then he knows that I’m in touch with these kids. It opens up a raft of questions. That’s awkward. He and I aren’t friends anymore.”

“If you say so,” Rafferty says.

“Let me think about it,” Pan says. “They’re safe for the moment, I suppose?”

“I think so.”

“Would they be safer here?”

“I don’t know,” Rafferty says, watching Pan’s eyes. “Maybe.”

“Well, where are they staying now?”

“In my apartment house. An empty unit, down on the fourth floor.”

“Do you have security? Is there a doorman or anything?”

“It’s not that kind of apartment house,” Rafferty says.

“Maybe here, then,” Pan says. “If there’s one thing I have a lot of, it’s guards.”

Rafferty says, “What do you guys think?”

“I like it at your place,” Boo says. It’s what Rafferty told him to say if the question came up. “We don’t get in anybody’s way.” He looks at Da, who nods.

“Fine,” Pan says. “I’ll think about Wichat. I’m sure something will come to me.”

“That’s all we can ask,” Rafferty says. He pushes himself away from the wall. “You kids mind waiting for me outside? You can walk down to the village. I’ll be out in a minute.” He turns to Pan. “That okay with you?”

“Sure. Just don’t get too close to the pigs. Shinawatra can be aggressive.”

Da says, “I know all about pigs.” Then she says, “Shinawatra? Like the prime minister?”

“I’ll explain it later.” Rafferty turns his back to Pan and opens the door to let them out. With his left hand, he pulls the automatic from his pants, and as Boo passes him, Rafferty glances down at it. Boo follows Rafferty’s eyes and takes the gun without missing a step. When Rafferty closes the door and turns back to Pan, nothing in the big man’s face suggests that he registered the transfer.

“So?” Pan says. He turns and goes behind his desk. He sits and pulls a drawer open.

“Da tell you about how they turned off her town’s river?”

“Actually, the boy told me. Terrible, terrible.” He takes the tube of lip balm out of the drawer and applies it. “The sort of thing that should never be allowed to happen.”

“What can you do about it?”

“Me?” Pan drops the tube back into the drawer. “I have no formal power.”

“And if you did?”

“Oh, well. If we’re going to be hypothetical, then hypothetically, I’d prevent it.”

“Would you give them their river back?”

Pan shakes his head in irritation. “It’s done. It’s over. What I’d do is make sure it never happens again.”

“What do you mean, over? A few bulldozers, an afternoon’s work, they’d have their river back. And how long could it take, how much could it cost, to rebuild a few shacks like the ones you put up in that postcard village in your front yard?”

“That’s not the point. The money’s been spent, the golf course has been built, probably a hotel put up. The people who did this are powerful. They’re not going to let go of it. They’ve got clout.”

“In short,” Rafferty says, “it wouldn’t be expedient.”

“You’re oversimplifying, and you know it. The point is to prevent it next time.”

Rafferty gives it a minute, turns and takes a circuit of the office. When he’s facing Pan again, he says, “So. How’d you burn your hands?”

“Sooner or later,” Pan says. He sounds weary. “I knew you’d bump up against that sooner or later. I told you I was in protection, right?”

“Right. With Wichat’s boss, Chai.”

“Chai,” Pan says. “
That
was a guy. Balls of steel. That was when we had real gangsters, not store dummies like Wichat.”

“Wichat means business.”

“Yeah? You talk to him?”

“Sure. I’ve talked to half a dozen people on the yellow list. A lot of them have wondered how you got burned.”

“Right, the burns. One of the women I was protecting had a three-wok restaurant on the curb, and some guys who had wandered onto the wrong block tried to rob her. I was just down the street. Protection, right? If I’m extorting money for protection, the least I can do is protect them. So I…um, got involved, and while I was taking care of the first guy, the second guy threw a wok at me. Full of hot oil.” Pan opens the top two buttons of his shirt and shows Rafferty an expanse of shiny, hairless flesh. “So naturally, like a total idiot, I reached out and tried to catch it. Not just my hands, but all the way up my arms and across my chest. Hurt like nothing else in my whole life.”

“So,” Rafferty says, “it happened back when you were working with Wichat. Before the Mounds of Venus.”

“That’s right.” Rafferty holds Pan’s gaze until Pan looks down at his shirtfront. He rebuttons the shirt and pulls a cigar out of his pocket.
He centers it in the moist-looking mouth and fires up the smoke.

When Rafferty feels as if the silence has been stretched far enough to snap, he says, “Uh-huh.”

Pan drags on the cigar with every evidence of being completely absorbed in it, but when he finally looks up at Rafferty, he has the eyes of someone who suspects that the guy across the card table has just filled the holes in his straight. “You asked Ravi about Snakeskin,” he says.

“Actually, I didn’t. I just said the word to see whether it would persuade him to let me in. And it did.”

“How interesting,” Pan says. “You know, I’m beginning to wonder whose side you’re on.”

“What a coincidence,” Rafferty says. “So am I.”

H
ang on to the gun,” Rafferty says. “Just in case. I’ll get it later.”

The three of them are walking the curving path to the front gate, since no swans were volunteered. Da carries Peep in both arms, staring openmouthed at the garden gleaming in the sun to her right. Boo has the gun wedged into the pocket of his too-large jeans, covered by the tail of his shirt.

“Why do I want a gun?” Boo says. “We’re leaving.”

“I’m leaving first, and you’re waiting about five minutes. There’s someone watching me, and I don’t want him seeing you. I don’t want anyone to see you.”

“Why not?”

“Tell you later.”

Instead of answering, Boo reaches over and slides a fingertip down the side of Da’s neck. She shrugs as though there’s a spider crawling on her, but the smile gives her away. “But the gun?” Boo asks.

“In case they try to keep you here.”

Da turns away from the ruby light of the Tree of the Knowledge of
Good and Evil and looks across Boo at Rafferty. “Do you think they will?”

“No,” Rafferty says. “But right now I can’t come up with a single thing that would surprise me.”

CAPTAIN TEETH SAYS,
“He’s at Pan’s.”

“That’s not a problem, not now.” Ton’s Saturday-morning outfit is a splendid pair of beige slacks with an almost invisible herringbone weave and a navy silk blazer that sports gold buttons. From his seat at the console, Ren figures they’re probably real gold. Ton checks his cuffs and tugs the left one another tenth of a millimeter out of the jacket sleeve. “Where are the females?”

“At home,” Ren says, holding up the earphones. “Being boring.”

“I’ll be at the club,” Ton says. “I’ve got the cell, but don’t call unless it’s important. I’ll be back in a few hours.”

A cell phone rings, and Captain Teeth fishes his from his pocket and listens for a moment. “He’s coming out of Pan’s. Flagging a cab.”

“Who’s following him?” Ton asks.

“Nobody you know.”

“Good,” Ton says. He pushes the door open. “I’m off.”

When it has swung completely closed, Ren says, “Off to
brunch
.”

“It’s Saturday,” Captain Teeth says. “Tell me you wouldn’t rather be at brunch.”

“Me?” Ren drops the headset onto the console, leans forward, and rests his head on his crossed arms. “Would I rather be at brunch? I’d rather be anywhere. I’d rather be in a Burmese prison.”

“FLOYD,” RAFFERT SAYS,
the phone squeezed between ear and shoulder. “Got another question for you.”

“You got some money that belongs to me, too,” Floyd Preece says. “Shoulda paid me by now.”

“Coming right up. Listen, this is a very important question, and you don’t give me the answer until I hand you the money, okay?”

Preece pauses, probably looking for the catch. “Let’s hear it,” he says at last.

“What’s being done with the factory right now?”

“That’s it? I mean, that’s the big question?”

“You want something harder?”

“No, no. Happy to get paid for nothing. I could answer you right now. I won’t, not till I’m a little richer, but I could.”

“Yeah, well, save it until I give you the money.”

“And when will that be?”

Rafferty looks up and down the street to make sure he’s still unaccompanied. “Well, next stop is the bank.”

“ALL OF IT,”
he says.

The teller takes the withdrawal slip. The amount to be withdrawn is blank, since Rafferty has no idea how big the “advance” was. The teller says, “You’re closing the account?”

“If emptying will close it, I guess so.” It’s nearly 1:00
P.M.
, closing time on Saturday, and he’s one of the last customers in the bank. He’d like the place to be much more thickly populated, absolutely jammed with potential witnesses. This is the stop that worries him most.

Punching keys with bright orange nails, the teller says, “Has our service been unsatisfactory in some way?”

“Excuse me?” Rafferty had been looking back, through the picture window that shows him a long, hot-looking rectangle of Silom. The sun is in full beam now, showing off to a world that was already hot enough. Lots of people, a normal crowd for the weekend, sweat their way past the window, going in both directions. “No, no. You’ve all been great. Seriously. I’d live here, if I could.”

“Live here?” The teller has the beginning of a smile on her lips.

“Right in the lobby,” Rafferty says, checking the sidewalk again. “Nice and quiet, good class of people. Put an easy chair over there, get a key to the restroom, have meals sent in.”

“All by yourself?” the teller asks, glancing sideways at him. She’s in her early thirties, tailored, with every hair in place, but something in the way she looks at him makes it easy for Rafferty to imagine her barefoot in some green field, a little perspiration gleaming on her face.

“Oh, no,” Rafferty says, banishing the image. “With my money.”

The teller leans forward and peers at the screen.

“Problem?” Rafferty says.

She comes up at him with a bright bad-news smile. “I’m sorry,” she says, “but I have to talk to my supervisor.”

“Something wrong?”

“Oh, no. Just…um, big withdrawal. It has to be authorized.” She gets up.

“Fine.” Rafferty feels the lightness where the Glock used to be and wishes he owned a spare. He turns back to the window, puts his hand into his pants pocket, and finds the 3 on the touch pad of his phone, which he’s assigned to Kosit. He presses it down and counts to five to activate the speed-dial function. After ten seconds or so, long enough for one ring, he hopes, on Kosit’s phone, he disconnects and goes back to scanning the sidewalk. He doesn’t recognize anyone on the street.

Yet.

The teller is in a rear office, visible through a window, talking to a fat man at a desk. The fat man scrabbles at the keyboard of his computer, studies the screen, and then picks up a telephone. The teller stands there for a moment, waiting for another instruction, then turns and comes back through the door.

“It won’t be much longer,” she says. She sits down, takes a strand of hair, wraps it around her finger, and checks the ends. “Sorry to make you wait.”

Rafferty is now the only customer in the bank. The other tellers are counting out, snapping rubber bands around stacks of currency, and slipping dust covers over their terminals. He’d known that the withdrawal would attract attention eventually, but he hadn’t figured it would happen in real time.

“I’m going to be late,” he says. “Either let’s wrap this up in a minute or two or let’s forget it and I’ll come back on Monday.”

“I’m so sorry. Let me go talk to him.” And she’s up again, on her way back to the fat man’s office.

The guys at the apartment, Rafferty thinks. They’re three minutes away. They’ve got phones. But Rose and Miaow are talking in the apartment, and he doesn’t think Ton’s controllers would move the watchers while they’re hearing—

It feels as if his stomach plummets two feet.

Did he plug in the tape recorder?

R
ose’s voice has dropped several tones, abandoning its normal alto in favor of something that’s beginning to sound like a drug-wobbled baritone. She finishes her sentence, and there is a long pause. When Miaow answers, her voice is almost as low as Rose’s, and her words have a kind of ripple, like something seen underwater.

“Hey,” Captain Teeth says to Ren. “Listen to this.”

Ren puts on his own headset, squints at the sound for a second, turns up the volume, closes his eyes, opens them again, yanks his headset off, throws it onto the console, and says, with considerable vehemence, “Shit.” He meets Captain Teeth’s gaze. “Brunch or no brunch,” he says, “he’s gotta know about this.” He reaches for his phone, and it rings. He grabs it.

“Yes?” he says.

“I just got a call,” Ton says. “Rafferty’s withdrawing all the money. It’s the Thai Fisherman’s Bank on Silom, around the corner from the apartment. I think he’s going to run. Get the other two guys over there right now.”

“The conversation in the apartment,” Ren says. “It’s a tape.”

Ton says nothing for long enough that Ren asks, “Are you there?”

“I’m here. That means the woman and the girl are gone. He’s the only one we’ve got. I’ll have them stall him in the bank. I want those men there
right now
. They should try to take him.”

Ren says carefully, “Take him.”

“
Take
him,” Ton says, as though he’s talking to an idiot. “Get him under control. Take him somewhere. Are we speaking different languages?”

“And if they can’t? I mean, if he resists? Or if he goes nuts? What happens when they get him where they’re—”

“Just make me happy,” Ton says, and disconnects.

“He wants us to make him happy,” Ren says, tossing his phone onto the console. “Who’s making us happy?” He gets up and goes behind Ton’s desk and sits in the big chair. “If Rafferty’s dead, the man doesn’t need us. We could be hanging in the breeze.”

“You worry too much,” Captain Teeth says. He gets up. “Where is he? I’ll go over there myself.”

“Thai Fisherman’s Bank, Silom.”

Captain Teeth checks the holster in the middle of his back. When he’s satisfied, he slips into a sport coat and heads for the door. As he goes through it, he says, without looking over his shoulder, “If he catches you in that chair, you’ll need a new ass next time you sit down.”

THE SWEAT POPS
on Rafferty’s upper lip in less than a heartbeat. He’d been timing himself in the apartment, staying within his ten-minute limit, hurrying to get to Pan’s early enough to let him come here so he could walk into a trap. And he hadn’t done the most important thing. He’d left the tape recorder running on batteries. He hadn’t plugged it in.

He turns to face the sidewalk. Still busy, still full of people he doesn’t recognize.

And then he sees one he
does
recognize, the man who was driving the car behind him all the way to Pan’s. He’s leaning against a parked truck, doing nothing. Looking everywhere except at the window.

“Umm,” says the teller, and Rafferty turns to her.

“You’ve been banking here a long time, right?” Her face is full of uncertainty.

“Years.”

“I see you in here sometimes,” she says. “With a little girl?”

“My daughter.”

“That’s what I thought.” She picks up a pad of old photocopies that have been turned blank side up and stapled together to create a scratch pad. She begins to draw a girl’s face, all big eyes and long curling hair. She inks a heart above the girl’s head, then several more, a little cloud of hearts floating in midair. Without looking up, she says, “It’s a police hold.”

“Police.”

“That’s who he’s talking to. It was on the computer. A police number to call for any withdrawal from your account for more than two thousand U.S.”

“It’s a mistake of some kind,” Rafferty says. He needs to mop his forehead, but he doesn’t want to draw the attention of the man in the office. “Was there a name?”

“No,” she says. “But I’m sure you’re right. It’s a mistake.”

“Of course it is.” The teller’s station is behind a plate of glass, and by taking a step to his left, Rafferty can see a reflection of the window that opens onto the street, but not clearly enough to identify any individuals. He looks instead for quick movement. “You draw well,” he says, his eyes on the reflection.

“I draw like every other girl in Thailand,” the teller says. “We all imitate Japanese anime.”

“I like the heart.” Someone hurries past the window, head down.

“Which heart? There are five of them.”

Rafferty focuses through the glass at the drawing. “The first one,” he says. “The big one. I like big hearts.” He has nothing he can use as a weapon.

“We all do,” the teller says. “But try to find one. Ah, here he comes.”

And the fat man has come out of his office, wearing a smile that looks like it was crimped into his face with a vise. Circles of sweat turn his white shirt translucent beneath the arms.

“Sorry, sorry,” he says. “Just a bit of delay.” He looks down at the scratch pad, at the girl’s face with the hearts around it, and winces. “Do you have enough in your drawer?”

The teller says, “No,” in a tone that makes it clear that the answer was obvious.

“I’ll get the rest from the vault,” the fat man says. “Get started. Give the man his money.”

“Yes, sir.” She slides the cash drawer open, pulls out a three-inch stack of thousand-baht bills, and drops it into the counting machine. The bills flip by as the total on the readout increases. “That’s five hundred twenty thousand baht,” she says. “We need another seven hundred thousand. How are you going to carry all this?”

“Carefully,” Rafferty says. It’s more money than he’d expected—about forty thousand dollars.

“You’ll never get it into your pockets,” she says. “I’ll lend you a bag, okay?” She lifts an inexpensive nylon bag above the counter. “It’s my shopping bag. I’m going to buy groceries after I punch out here.”

Reflected in the glass partition, two men peer through the window behind him. “I’ll buy it from you.”

She gives him a smile. “Just bring it back.” The fat man returns, a banded stack of bills in each hand.

“If it’s humanly possible,” Rafferty says. He turns around, and the men at the window separate quickly. One of them turns away to show the back of his head, and the other slides out of sight to the right. The first one he saw, the one who had been following him, is still leaning against the car, so there are at least three of them—the one who was behind him, and the two who were supposed to be watching Rose and Miaow, which certainly means that the tape recorder ran out of juice and wound down.

Which, in turn, means that it’s open season.

And there might be more out there. He hears the bills snapping through the machine behind him.

“Here we are,” the teller says. She holds up the nylon bag, which has what look like coffee stains on it. “I’ll go around to the door and give it to you,” she says. “It’s too thick to slip under the partition.”

“Thanks,” he says. He follows her, and she buzzes the door open and hands him the bag, which is heavy enough to tug his uninjured hand downward.

She says, “Take care.”

“I’ll try,” Rafferty says. “It’s murder out there.”

“I think the door’s locked,” she says. She precedes him, rattles the door once, and slips a key into the lock. Pulling it open, she steps aside and gives him a little back-and-forth wave.

Rafferty smiles, fills his lungs with air, and goes through the door.

The day is even brighter than it had seemed through the tinted win
dows of the bank. It takes him a second to adjust to the glare and scan the sidewalk. The man leaning against the car turns away as Rafferty’s eyes find him. Rafferty looks left and sees one of the men who had been waiting outside the apartment building coming toward him, one hand in his pocket. This one doesn’t look away. His eyes drift beyond Rafferty, who turns to see a third man coming from the other direction. The third man doesn’t have a hand hidden in a pocket, so Rafferty heads toward him, moving briskly, and then something catches his eye from the left, and he sees Captain Teeth getting out of a cab.

Captain Teeth is shorter than Rafferty remembers him, and wider. He’s got the chest and shoulders of someone who bench-presses Chevrolets. All that overdeveloped muscle tissue has been wrapped in a sport coat, and in this heat he might just as well be wearing a sandwich board that says
HEAVILY ARMED
. He throws some bills at the cabdriver and makes for the curb.

Rafferty carefully slips the bag over the bandaged hand, slides it up his arm, and crooks his elbow so the money dangles from his forearm. He puts his good hand under his shirt and leaves it there, at waistband level, and strides forward purposefully. The man who is coming toward him falters, his eyes on the concealed hand. The question is clear in his face: keep moving toward Rafferty and maybe get shot now or back off and maybe get shot later by his friends? Getting shot later wins, and the man veers off to his right, toward the parked cars.

That leaves the other two and Captain Teeth, and Rafferty doesn’t think Captain Teeth is going to be so easy to bluff.

When in doubt, take the offensive.

Rafferty moves left, on a course to intercept the man who chose being shot later. The man works farther to his right, his eyes flicking side to side, until he’s almost brushing a parked car, and then Rafferty cuts behind him and steps up against him, circling the man’s neck with the arm that has the bag hanging from it and pushing the index finger of his good hand hard into the man’s back. The man throws his hands into the air spasmodically, striking a glancing blow off Rafferty’s bandaged left, and Rafferty emits a hiss of pain that loosens the other man’s knees. Rafferty has to hold him up until the man can get his feet under him again. Captain Teeth is closing fast, reaching back beneath his sport coat, undoubtedly for a gun.

“Stop there,” Rafferty says.

Captain Teeth comes to a halt about five feet away. He keeps his hand hidden. “You think I care if he dies? Shoot him. When he falls, I’ll have a target.”

“Move that hand,” Rafferty says, “and I’ll shoot you instead.”

Captain Teeth bares his awful incisors in a grin and says, “Watch the hand move,” and then his eyes lift and widen, focused behind Rafferty, the teeth disappear, and his hand comes out empty and open. He takes a few steps back. Something cold noses the nape of Rafferty’s neck.

“Drop the gun.” The tone is businesslike.

“Love to,” Rafferty says. “But I haven’t got one.”

“Hands behind you.” The gun is pushed half an inch forward. “
Now
.”

“Okay, okay.” He lets go of the man he’s been holding, who stumbles away and then turns to face him. Whatever he sees over Rafferty’s shoulder, it freezes him.

“Don’t move,” says the man behind Rafferty. The bag is lifted from his arm, and something circles his wrists, and he hears a sharp
click
. The cuff is tight around the bandages on his left wrist. “You two,” the man says, “go.” Captain Teeth and the man Rafferty has been holding pivot in unison and retreat down the sidewalk without a backward glance.

“You’re going to turn around, and I’m going to stay behind you,” the man says. “Don’t do anything stupid. Don’t do anything I might
think
is stupid.”

A sharp tug yanks Rafferty’s cuffed hands to one side, and he turns, the other man pivoting with him so the gun never loses contact with the back of Rafferty’s neck. A circle of people has gathered around them, a safe five or six paces away, their eyes wide. “Walk now. Toward the van.”

Rafferty heads for a vehicle that’s double-parked in the first traffic lane. It’s a police van, its windows covered in a silvery reflective coating. The rear door has been slid open. Another man in a police uniform comes around the front end of the van. It takes Rafferty a moment to recognize him as Kosit.

“Hey,” Rafferty says, and the gun probes the back of his neck as though it’s looking for a path between the vertebrae.

“
That’s
stupid,” the man says.

The face Kosit turns to Rafferty as he approaches the van is all cop. Without a glimmer of recognition, he yanks hold of Rafferty’s shirt and pulls him toward the open door, and Rafferty sees another man in the van, hunched down on the floor behind the driver’s seat. He tries to stop, but the man behind him adds a shove to Kosit’s pull, and with his wrists cuffed, all Rafferty can manage is a stagger-step to keep from falling forward. Kosit grabs his shoulders, puts an expert hand on top of his head, and pushes him down onto the seat of the van, and as the door slams shut, the man crouched behind the driver’s seat brings his head up and regards Rafferty.

It’s Arthit.