LONTAR issue #2 (13 page)

Salee supposed she'd be forced to bring over Uncle Tikka and his five sons: the Muay Thai boxing side of the family up in Isaan where they practiced getting kicked in the face from the age of eight and ended up hard as rocks with no brains. She'd taken the trouble to bribe someone in the American embassy on Wireless Road to get them visas, so they were all excited and ready to go. But she really didn't want to bring them over, it was going to be one almighty headache until the minute they got on the plane back to Thailand. Maybe it was already too late anyway? They would have to cancel a whole bunch of boxing engagements. She wondered, with a smile, how the Achan planned to fix it for her?

*

The doorbell rang. She didn't have any customers today, so who could it be? Nobody in New York showed up at someone's home without calling first; that was the best way to get yourself shot. She kicked off her slippers so she wouldn't make any noise walking down the corridor. When she got to the door and looked through the spy hole she saw it was a man in a black wool balaclava holding one of those combat rifles she wasn't allowed to buy. Good thing she'd taken her slippers off; if he'd heard her coming down the corridor all he had to do was spray the door and she'd have been duck curry. She walked back to the kitchen to collect the guns and some knives and a chopper from the knife block then found she needed a bag or something to put them in, so she grabbed her big handbag and returned silently down the corridor, hauling the knives and guns. The bell rang again. When she reached the spy hole, though, he'd gone. Well, he hadn't really, had he? He was pressed hard against the wall next to the door, with his rifle pointed at the ceiling, ready to rush her. Or something like that. The only good thing about the situation was that Somchai wasn't going to know for a few days if she was dead or not, so you could say Achan Po was using an early warning system here.
 

What she needed was a ghost. Well, she didn't have one but she did have the shrine, so she left the bag next to the door and walked all the way to the shrine and stood on a chair to unplug the Achan and take him to the hall, where she put him on another chair and pointed him at the door and plugged him in so he was sending purple rays all the way to the front door. When she looked through the spy hole again she saw the thug in the mask was back with a skeleton key, which he was using to try to pick the lock. With maximum stealth Salee slipped the latch to make it easy for him. Too easy; when he put his shoulder against the door it flew open and there he was with his rifle and mask getting rayed by the Achan while she aimed the plastic bullet gun at his ear and pulled the trigger.

Now he was deaf but not dead, holding his head with both hands, having dropped the rifle, wondering what the heck happened, staring with pop eyes at the purple-flashing Achan, certain he'd landed in one of the killers' hells already. She thought he was probably too tough to go down if she hit him with the gun the way the clerk at the gun shop had recommended, so she shot him in the head with one of the pistols at the same time as kicking the door shut, and now there he was, a corpse on the floor with a hole just behind his right ear and an exit wound coming out of his left eye. Bit of a mess; she'd have to clear it up later, after she'd thought about what to do.
 

*

Next evening, Salee lay on an Italian leather sofa in one of the lounges, reading a comic book in Thai, when the door bell rang. Who could it be? She wasn't expecting any more attacks until Wednesday and today was Monday, so she didn't bother to take her slippers off when she padded down the hall, which was now all spick and span, or
riap roy
as they said in Thailand: ship shape and ready to sail. When she looked through the spy hole, she saw it was Kline. When she opened the door she saw that he was standing bolt upright, all six foot seven of him, rigid, with a bunch of roses in his right hand. The roses, also, were held rigidly upright and Kline wasn't saying anything. It was like he was turned to stone.
Not another zombie
, Salee thought. She reached out and with the tips of her fingers stroked the massive fist that was holding the roses.
 

"I, I, I," Kline said.

"It's okay," she whispered, "it's just stage fright. Won't you please come in?"

Even inside the flat he was still uptight. Salee was prepared to bet he hadn't done anything like this since he got engaged to his wife; probably not even then. To him she was a lady and he didn't have a clue what to do about her. She took the roses from him and led him down the hall to the kitchen so she could put them in a vase. "You okay, Kline?"

"Can I have some water?"

She poured him some Evian from a bottle in the fridge and he drank it all without stopping. "Just let me get it off my chest," Kline said.

"Okay," Salee said.

"I love you so frigging much it's like muscular dystrophy," Kline said.

"Like what?"

"I can't work, I can't sleep, I can't even watch baseball. It's been like that since the day I clapped eyes on you, but it's gotten one hell of a lot worse since you called me."

"Muscular dystrophy is like that?"

"I don't know."

"Take off your shirt and pants. Keep your shorts on, we're not fooling around. We'll go into the lounge so you can lie face down on the sofa. No, wait, I'll get a towel and you can lie face down on the carpet. I'm going to give you a massage, move your
chi
to a better place. Okay?"

"Okay," Kline said.

"Forget the lounge, I want to take you to the shrine, so I can treat you in front of the Achan."

"Okay," Kline said.

She wanted to keep his
chi
out of his crotch for the moment, but she didn't want to open up the heart chakra and have to deal with all that dark emotion that was paralyzing him, which didn't leave much except the third eye, which was really all about smarts and Kline didn't seem to have too many of those. Probably he'd get a headache, which would be easier to deal with than the story of his disastrous marriage, his ridiculous kids or his lust for women other than the one he'd married: all the standard stuff.

"How do you feel now?" she said when she'd finished.

"A lot better. I'm hungry, though. You got anything to eat?"

So the
chi
had got stuck in his gut. That was okay. "Want to order some pizza?"

"Sure," Kline said.

While they were waiting for the pizza boy to arrive, Salee said: "Kline, there's something I have to tell you."

"A rival? I'll fight any duel for you. If you're telling me you're in love with another man, don't tell me who he is, I don't want to do time for murder."

"This one's already dead," she said. "Want to see him?"

She took him to the fifth bedroom, which she had locked. When she opened the door she realized she'd been so exhausted by all the cleaning she'd had to do the night before she'd not gotten around to taking the corpse's balaclava off. She let Kline do it while she was explaining, or half explaining, what had happened. She cut out the trafficking side of the story, and the laundering side of the story, and the scam she and Bethany had going to steal the apartment, which left vague hints about the Bangkok underworld and how once you get mixed up with those guys they just never let up, not even if you move to Manhattan. With the mask off, and minus an eye, the cadaver could have been any Thai man between the ages of thirty and forty. Probably a Muay Thai boxer, to judge from the rocky face and the scars.

"What are the knives for?" Kline asked. "And the chopper?"

She'd forgotten about them, too. "I was thinking about chopping him up small enough to throw the pieces down the mashing machine."

"No way," Kline said. "Next thing you know someone's noticing an awful smell coming from somewhere. Every New Yorker who watches the evening news knows what that stench means. Then the FBI are on our backs with a whole truckload of forensics that can detect a single molecule of blood in a million gallons of water. Better than a shark."

"You watch Discovery Channel?" Salee said, "They had that thing about sharks and molecules, I saw it last week."

"Best," Kline said, "is to hurl him over the balcony. Make it look like suicide."

Salee frowned and scratched her head. "How can it look like suicide with that gunshot wound? I mean, even if he could have shot himself in the back of the head, which he couldn't, how would he have gotten to the balcony to jump off, with a hole through his head and only one eye?"

"Trust me," Kline said, "one of my brothers is a cop. They see a bum like this with a gun at the bottom of a thirty story apartment block, which with four apartments per floor makes a total of one hundred and twenty apartments with an average of, say, very conservatively, four people per apartment, that's four hundred and eighty suspects to interview, for a bum everybody would want dead if he wasn't already. Of course they're gonna say
suicide
and close the file. Or maybe they'll say it was a gang fight and the body was brought over from Brooklyn. You dump him in a public place, it gives the cops room to maneuver. Who's to argue?"

She revised her opinion upwards. This guy had plenty of smarts. Or maybe some of the
chi
had reached his third eye after all? She watched him pick the corpse up without any visible effort and hold it under one arm while he stooped to collect the rifle and took the dead Thai to the balcony where the city blazed in the night like a billion stars and threw him off with the rifle stuffed down his pants. The ground was too far away for them to be able to hear the thud. Salee thought that even if Kline was wrong about the cops, how would anyone know which floor the guy came from? Could forensics look at a dead body and say: "Yep, fifteenth floor, no doubt about it?" She didn't think so.

The pizza boy arrived with three family-size pizzas for Kline and a kid's one for her. The giant sat in his boxer shorts on a stool at the kitchen island munching his way through the pizzas, while she thought about what to do next. When Kline had finished the pizzas he went to the bathroom to wash his hands and came back with an erection. He placed one of his massive paws on her shoulder and it felt no heavier than a baby's foot. She put one of her own tiny hands on top of it and said: "Kline, can you come back Wednesday?"

"Sure," Kline said.
 

"Bring some assault rifles?"

"Okay."

"And your brother the cop, if he's not on duty."

"When I tell him how I feel about you, he ain't going to be on duty."

"I'm not going to forget what you've done for me tonight, Kline."

"Done what? I ain't done a damn thing yet, except throw a dead man off a balcony."

*

Kline came back Wednesday afternoon with his brother, who wasn't as tall as Kline, but almost. Salee felt like a monkey between two water buffalo; the huge kitchen started to feel small. When Kline's brother told her he was part of a SWAT team and no way the rest of the guys were going to let him have all the fun, so she could expect a few reinforcements by and by, she went straight to the Achan and with tears in her eyes thanked him for taking such great care of her. But when her kitchen was full with twelve big cops plus the giant Kline, and more and more weapons started to arrive, including grenades, disorientation devices, pump action shot guns and some gadget they told her could fire five hundred rounds in a second, she got nervous. Taking Kline to one side she gave him firm instructions: the bad guys had to open fire first and she didn't want to see any dead thugs who had been shot from behind. Kline was surprised, so she had to explain a little more about how she was in the process of acquiring the apartment with the Achan's help and although under her system you were allowed to kill in self-defense, any unprovoked aggression could piss the Achan off and lose her the apartment. Kline got the message and spread the word.
 

Salee got alarmed all over again when huge cardboard boxes started to arrive, but the boys explained they were coveralls, flak jackets and industrial vacuum cleaners that could suck up liquids and squirt cleaning fluids at so many pounds of pressure per square inch; these guys were professionals. "Hell, cleaning up after a fire fight is one half of what we do," Kline's brother explained. Now Salee realized the Achan was handling things perfectly, so it didn't bother her at all when Security downstairs called up and just managed to say something about
armed men
, when, she supposed, one of the said armed men grabbed the phone and cut the line.

*

She needn't have worried. When Somchai's army arrived five minutes later they were all so wired on meths, so hungry for battle, they started shooting even before they got through the door.
There goes the paintwork
, Salee thought. But her boys were ready for them and the battle was so one-sided she felt secure enough to leave the field with all the smoke and guns popping and Somchai's boys screaming obscenities in Thai and her boys yelling war cries like "my
cock's
bigger'n that peashooter, you brain dead piece of frog shit," to go
wai
the Achan and thank him at the same time as promising a ton of eggs as soon as she could get hold of her kid sister.
 

By the end of fifteen minutes, the apartment included nineteen dead Thai gangsters laid out side-by-side in the second lounge, heads pointed toward the park, all
riap roy
and good to go. She hoped not over the balcony, though; you could only land so many bodies on the same spot, even in New York. No fatalities on her side, not even a scratch. Kline took her to show that all the entry wounds were at the front of the bodies, exit wounds at the back. Salee decided to dedicate three hog's heads and two thousand dollars worth of gold foil along with the eggs, but she knew she had to reward these brave boys before she did anything else. She marvelled at the way the Achan arranged everything: thirteen men and thirteen bedrooms. In the kitchen the boys all watched and listened in a state of enchantment while she made about twenty calls on her cell phone and spoke in rapid, authoritative Thai. Then she ordered pizzas and beer for everyone and watched them eat, drink and talk about baseball until the doorbell started ringing.