Thai Horse (50 page)

‘This man moves very fast. This i
s
his kind of game.’

‘If he is connected to Sloan and you kill him, they’ll send somebody else.’

‘Not if it’s done right.’

The Honorable leaned back and smiled. ‘That’s all I’m suggesting, dear friend,’ he said with a wave of his hand. ‘Whatever you do, do it properly. As you pointed out, it is a dangerous game and he’s very good at it.’

‘Very good doesn’t cut it. He’s an expert.’

As Earp spoke a boxy man in tennis shorts and a white T-shirt got up from the poker table and approached a portly gentleman in white. He drew up a chair and sat down facing the white-haired gentleman, who put aside his book and took a sip from the wineglass as the dark-haired man leaned forward and spoke to him in whispered tones. The older man nodded sagely as the other spoke and pointed to the card game behind the glass-beaded curtain.

Earp turned on his barstool, facing the main room, took out his .357 with the special barrel and laid it casually on the corner of the bar. Hatcher watched the ritual with more than mild interest.

‘That’s Eddie Riker, the ice cream parlor, remember? talking to the Honorable,’ Prop
h
ett rambled on to Hatcher, nodding toward the older man. ‘The Honorable is the official banker of Tombstone.’ His nose began to run and he sniffed, then began scratching his side. ‘Kind of sets his interest on what the loan’s for, a little less for eating money until payday than, say, to cover a turn of the cards at the poker game up there in the Hole in the Wall.’

‘And the guy with the cannon is the Brink’s man?’

Prophett laughed. “Brink’s man,” that’s slick. The Brink’s man is Wyatt T. Earp,
k
nown to us as W.T. He kind of covers the money box, case somebody should take a notion to heist it. Him and that piece he calls his Buntline Special.’

‘Looks like he can handle the j
o
b.’

‘The Thai police leave us alone, they let old W.T. keep things quiet.’

‘That’s a helluva weapon,’ said Hatcher, nodding toward the Magnum. ‘You could walk to Milwaukee on the barrel.’

Prophett started to laugh again. Up above, the Honorable opened the strongbox: and took out what appeared to be a loan note. He scribbled on it and slid it to Riker, who scribbled on it, and then the Honorable counted out five purples and slid them across the table. Riker nodded his thanks and went back to the game.

‘Riker is have a bad day,’ said Prophett.

Wilkie ambled back up the bar.

‘How we doing here?’ he asked.

‘I’ll have a beer,’ Hatcher said. ‘Wouldn’t mind turning a few cards, either.’

Wilkie stared at him for a moment and then said, ‘They’re kind of funny about wh
o
plays in the game. But if you hang around long en
o
ugh and they get to know you, they’ll invite you.’

‘Kind of a closed corporation,’ Hatcher suggested.

‘Kind of.’ Wilkie went back down the bar and started talking to a customer.

‘Was Sweets who started Tombstone,’ Prophett said, and his words began to run together. ‘Sweets and Wyatt. Sweets was an English professor at Tuskegee Institute, got his master’s with honors from Atlanta University, what’d they do? They drafted him. A teacher, a
teacher,
man, and they dumped him in Nam and the teacher became Sergeant ‘Wilkie and he looked around at what was happening and he never went home. Opened the Longhorn, then Eddie Riker started up Pike’s Peak
—‘

Wilkie’s eyes cut toward Prophett. He was smiling at his bar trade, but Hatcher could tell he was listening to Prophett ramble on about Tombstone and the Longhorn. Suddenly he turned and went to the end of the bar and said something to Corkscrew. The black man got up without looking down the bar and went behind the beads.

‘—
and Corkscrew and Potter opened Yosemite Sam’s. Wonderboy opened the Stagecoach,’ Prophett mumbled on, staring down at the bar. ‘Max, he couldn’t stand anyplace dark, closed up, he went down south to do some farming. And Kilhanney, poor fuckin’ K
il
—
that goddamn Taisung.

Hatcher, lulled by the low, rambling conversation, was suddenly jerked awake. He tried not to show his surprise when Prophett said the name.
Taisung!
Wol Pot’s real name.

Before he could continue, Prophett was cut off. ‘Hey!’ Wilkie called from down the bar and Prophett looked up, startled. Wilkie moved quickly back up to them. ‘Easy, kid,’ he said, rather sternly. ‘Save it for the book.’

Hatcher looked around at the Hole in the Wall. Vaguely, behind the veil of beads, he could make out a woman among the seven players
at
the table.

The woman playing poker got up and left the game, standing just behind the curtai
n
s for a moment while she counted a handful of bahts, then proceeding into the main room. She was a hands
o
me woman, big-boned and broad-shouldered, with hardly any waist at all. Her blond hair was turning white, belying her features, which placed her under forty. She was wearing a loose-fitting white cotton blouse and a skirt of turquoise Thai silk and thong sandals.

Hatcher remembered her from pictures as being smaller, more delicate, a woman dwarfed by the camera equipment and canvas bag slung over her shoulder. Saigon, toward the end. Melinda Prewett had won a Pulitzer Prize for her pictures of destruction, fear, hatred and pain. When the war ended, she had left a lucrative job with
Life
magazine and vanished. ‘My camera has nothing else to say,’ was her swan song.

She walked directly toward him, stuffing the fistful of bahts in her skirt pocket and stopped when she got to Johnny Prophett. She put her arm around his shoulder and whispered, ‘Hi,’ in his ear. His face lit up and he laid his cheek against the back of her hand.

‘Howdja do?’ he asked.

‘Made midgets of ‘em all,’ she said softly in his ear. ‘Time for your medicine.’

‘Right,’ he said, his speech beginning to get worse. ‘Meet Hatch. He’s on vacation from the world.’

‘That’s nice,’ she said. She stared hard at Hatcher for several moments, then smiled and said, ‘Welcome to Tombstone, Mr Hatch. Enjoy your stay.’

LEG WORK

Taisung!

The mention of the prison camp commandant by Prophett was definitely a break, but how did it fit in? Obviously Prophett had known the commandant of the Huie-kui prison camp before he had changed his name to Wol Pot. That could mean only one thing to Hatcher

—
Prophett had been in the camp or knew people who were.

Several questions troubled Hatcher. Did Prophett know where Taisung/Wol Pot was now? Did any of the other regulars know him? Did any of them know Cody? And who or what was Thai Horse and did he
—
or it
—
fit into this picture anywhere?

Hatcher took an ice-cold shower to kill the effects of the afternoon of beer drinking. H
e
thought about Ron Pelletier. They had worked in the brigade together many times. Sloan had told him Pelletier was working immigration out of Chuang Mai,
w
hich was in the hill country 430 miles to the north of Bangkok. Pelletier had been in Thailand for two years. Perhaps he knew something, anything, that would help unravel the riddle of Murphy Cody. Pelletier was an old friend and a man he could trust. He made a call to the night number of the Immigration Service and left a message for Pelletier, knowing it was a long shot.

He stretched out on the floor, naked under the ceiling fan, watching the shadows whirling above him as images galloped through his brain: the painted face of Wonderboy as he sat in the cor
n
er singing; one-legged Johnny Prophett, reeling around the bar; Gallagher hot-footing it across the room; the Honorable sitting in the corner dipping his finger in wine and turning the pages of his book while Earp
with
his cannon watched over everyone.

His thoughts kept going bac
k
to Prophett and he opened his
ch’uang tzu-chi,
picturing the emaciated writer as he tried to remember where he had heard that name. All he really knew about him was that he was a writer and had lost a leg in a jeep accident.

Then suddenly he sat up.

Paget!

It wasn’t the
name
that was familiar, it was the
face.
But it didn’t fit the name Johnny Prophett. His name was James Paget. He had seen Paget’s byline and picture many times during the wa
r
.

Why had he changed his name
to
Prophett? And if he had changed his name, had others among the regulars changed theirs? And why? Hatcher decided to take another long shot. It was
9 P.M., 9A.M.
in Washington. Flitcraft would be in the office by now. He put in the call and went through the security drill.

‘I’ve got some names I’d like you to check on,’ he told his Washington contact. ‘I don’t have much else, but let’s see just how good you really are. One of them is a civilian. James Paget. A journalist
. .

He dictated the other names of the regulars he had committed to memory: Max Early, who had been attacked in a tunnel by bats and now lived on a farm because he couldn’t stand closed-in places; Potter, who, with Corkscrew, had held off a whole company of Vietnamese but lost Corkscrew’s brother while they were at it; Eddie Riker, who was the best damn slick pilot in Nam; Gerald Gallagher, w
h
o walked like a man on hot coals; and Wyatt Earp, a great-grandson of the real Wyatt Earp, who had been a full colonel in CRIP and had done four tours back to back. Bits and pieces.

‘I’ve also got two nicknames
—
real long shots,’ Hatcher said, giving Flitcraft Wonderboy and Corkscrew.

‘I’ll get back to you,’ said Flitc
r
aft, unfazed by the skimpy information Hatcher provided on these men.

Hatcher ordered a salad and coffee to the room. As he was eating, the phone rang. He snatched it up, thinking perhaps it was Flitcraft.

‘Hello?’

‘Hatch?’

‘Yeah?’

‘Pelletier
. .

The big man sat hunched over the corner of the bar. He was well over six five, with the beefy shoulders and chest of a professional football player. His right sleeve was tucked in the pocket of his field jacket. His remaining hand was enormous and his wrist was the size of a hawser. Time and duty had ravaged and scarred his face. His gray-flecked mustache was trimmed below the corners of his mouth, and his black hair was balding at the temples and turning white around the edges. Dark brown eyes glared unflinchingly from behind slightly tinted, gold-rimmed glasses. A mean- and dangerous-looking man, he did not smile easily, nor was he prone to casual conversation. When he did have something to say, he said it in a deep, flat, clipped monotone.

Hatcher had worked with Pelletier many times and in many places through the years arid knew him to be a staunch and loyal ally and a relentless enemy. Before joining the brigade, Pelletier had been a career marine and had once carried two wounded men at the same time for a mile through the South Asian jungle. Big men. Pelletier looked up as Hatche
r
entered the bar, and what might have passed for a smile crossed his lips. He offered the enormous hand.

‘Original bad penny,’ he said, ‘Good t’see you, mate.’

‘And you,’ Hatcher’s ruined voice answered sincerely.

‘Glad you’re alive. Heard all kinds of rumors,’ Pelletier said, his eyes boring in fr
o
m behind the glasses.

‘Like what?’

‘You were dead,’ said Pelletier. ‘Knew that was shit.’

‘What else?’

‘Sloan dumped on you. Did a bad stretch in Los Boxes. He sprang you. You did a
J
udge Crater.’

‘That’s pretty accurate.’ Hatcher nodded.

‘That son of a bitch. ‘N’you’re still in bed with him?’

‘Not really, I’m doing a little
free
lance involving an old friend.’

‘Anybody I know?’

‘I don’t think so,’ Hatcher answered, and the big man dropped the subject immediately. Years in the brigade had taught both men not to ask too much about any mission unless they were personally involved. ‘You look pretty rough yourself, Ron. What happened to the arm?’ Hatcher asked.

‘Gangrene. Crunched it in the field, couldn’t find a saw-bones.’

‘Where?’

‘Afgo.
. .
‘Bout you?’ he nodded toward Hatcher’s throat.

‘They don’t permit talking in t
h
e Boxes. I cleared my throat at the wrong time.’

‘Jesus.’

‘Whatever you’ve heard about that place, it wasn’t bad enough.’

Pelletier drained his glass and held the empty up to the waitress.

‘Lotta good guys went across, hatch,’ he said.

‘Yeah.’

They sat silent for a few moments while the girl brought their drinks.

‘Keeping busy here?’ Pelletier asked, making conversation.

Hatcher shrugged. ‘Been hanging out in a place called the Longhorn.’

‘Sure, down in Tombstone,’ Pelletier said.

‘What do you think of the place?’

Pelletier shrugged. ‘Good American food down there. Bunch of expatriate Americans turning a buck.’

‘Know any of them?’

Pelletier shook his head. ‘Ain’t been down there in a couple months. Place called Yosemite Sam’s has good ribs.’

‘What’ve they got you doing?’ Hatcher asked.

‘Sloan got me a berth with immigration. Got six months t’go on my thirty years. Finish my time, keep my retirement.’

‘I suppose he has his moments.’

‘Suppose. Chicken-shit job, checking locals looking to emigrate.’

‘What else?’ Hatcher asked casually.

Pelletier hesitated long enough t
o
swallow half his drink and wipe his mouth with the back of his hand. He stared at Hatcher for several seco
n
ds, thinking the question over, then he chuckled. ‘Been keeping an eye on the hill tribes, see who’s big in 999.’

‘What’s the word?’

‘Your old pal Tollie Fong’s real
b
usy. Still on your case?’

Hatcher nodded. ‘Remember Joe Lung?’

‘That pig sticker.’

‘He tried to dust me in Hong Kong a couple of nights ago. He won’t be sticking any more pigs.’

Pelletier smiled. ‘Good riddance.’

‘I’m sure Fong intends to honor his
ch’u-tiao
against me.’

‘Maybe too busy right now... Chiu Chaos cornered a lot of this year’s crop.’

‘How much?’

Pelletier shrugged. ‘The DEA thinks Fong’s got two, three tons of pure, stashed.’

‘In Bangkok?’

Pelletier nodded, finished his drink and ordered another, then said, ‘Having trouble moving it. Feds’re looking for a big shipment. A
big
shipment.’

‘When?’

‘Any day. Concern you?’

‘I’m not sure,’ Hatcher answered. ‘Have you heard any talk about an outfit called Thai Horse?’

Pelletier’s eyebrows rose. ‘Heard that one too, huh? You don’t miss a trick.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Street rumors. Jerry Cramer in the DEA says the word is around that a bunch called Thai Horse has been clipping Fong’s couriers. That’s all it is, rumors.’

‘Know anything about them, any details?’ Hatcher asked.

Pelletier shook his head. ‘A mean bunch, what I hear. Knocked off three of Fong’s couriers. As I get it, a couple months ago they were buying babies off the street here, killing ‘em, stuffing ‘em with skag.’

‘My God!’

‘They got dumped down on the Malay border. Driver got away.’

‘They’re worse than the Chiu-Chaos.’

‘Suppose. Fong’s done worse.’ He shrugged. ‘So far they only took Fong for maybe a hundred keys. Drop in the bucket.’

Hatcher’s mind did some fast arithmetic.

‘That’s four million dollars’ worth of White
before
it hits the street,’ he said.

‘What’s two hundred twenty pounds against three tons?’

‘Bad
face for
Fong, makes him look bad. Others might try.’

This time Pelletier’s smile broadened. ‘Be a shame, huh? You take that fucker out, Hatch, they’ll give you downtown Chicago.’

‘I’m just looking for a guy, not looking for trouble.’

‘You’ve changed,’ Pelletier said.

‘Time’ll do it to us all.’

‘If you need any help
. . .
‘Pelletier said, letting the offer hang in mid-sentence.

‘Thanks,’ Hatcher said. ‘If I get in trouble there’s nobody I’d rather have back me up than you.’

‘Yeah,’ Pelletier said without a hint of emotion, ‘same with me.’

When Hatcher left the bar an Hour later, he was unaware of movement in the dark shadows of a closed shop across the street. Glittering eyes watched him hail a taxi. As it pulled away a tall Chinese man stepped from the shadows, entered a car that was waiting nearby. It followed Hatcher all the way back to the hotel.