Vulture Peak (21 page)

I let him stare out to sea for five minutes, then say softly, “Tell me what goes on at the house. What happens at Vulture Peak, Sally-O?” I’m afraid my use of his stage name might be too dramatic, too obvious. Tears appear at the corners of his eyes, but he seems to have regained some control.

“You’re right, she was using me all along, wasn’t she? Not a word, not a gesture, not a single second when she was not working me like a cheap whistle, right?” He gives a great heaving sigh. “I know you think I’m just the biggest sucker in the world, a total loser who let a female demon persuade him to have his dick cut off, but it’s not that simple. There was something else.”

“Tell me.”

“She can divide herself in two.”

“Huh?”

“Just like some Himalayan mystic, she can be in two places at the same time. She only did it to me once. I’ll never forget it if I live to be a thousand.”

“Tell me.”

“It was very soon after the operation. She invited me up to Vulture Peak. She had the opium pipe already laid out. Maybe you can understand what that means to a smoker. You enter a room where there is a pipe laid out with opium—that means you enter a sacred place, a temple, an Aladdin’s cave in which anything can happen. I was still very weak, and of course there was that hole between my legs that threatened to totally destroy my mind. And we smoked.” He chokes for a moment, coughs, looks away.

When he looks back his eyes are streaming. “She’d already had it embalmed. Cock and balls, the whole set. Somehow she’d made my poor cock twice the size it used to be when erect. I wouldn’t have believed it was mine if not for the birthmark on the tip. I guess she injected some clever embalming solution that set like stiff plastic.” He suddenly looks directly into my eyes. “She took it out of a special case she’d had made for it, like a jewelry case. She said, ‘Look, I can enjoy you whenever I want now. Your flesh has become my flesh. We are one.’ ”

I blink. “She used it?”

“Yes. She used it in front of me,” he sobs. “Even though I was high on the opium, I knew she was doing that. I mean I knew I wasn’t dreaming it. Then she left me, took my cock with her. I’m not sure what happened next. I found myself wandering around the house, looking for my cock and balls. I went into one of the bedrooms and found two of them sharing my dick. I mean there were
two identical Lilly Yips
. They were naked and both looked up at me at the same time. She—they—had a look in her eyes of a woman bloated on lust, as if she and her double intended to grind away at my poor cock for days on end, like hyenas with a kill. That blew me away forever. I knew I was her slave from then on. She even said it, after we fell out: ‘So long as I have your dick, I have you.’ ”

“You fell out?”

He shrugs. “She grew bored with me. I had a tantrum, threatened to tell all I knew.” He stops, searches my face. “I thought she was going to have me snuffed. I’m sure she thought about it. Then she changed her mind. We have an arrangement. I keep my mouth shut, she supplies me with opium. She’s very regular. That boat boy you used, he brings it. That’s how he knew to charge five hundred baht for a short trip across the water. She’s got me under control. I guess I always was. You could say I’m a prisoner on parole with a location device. I’m allowed to be on the boat, at work, or with Freddie.” He shrugs. “But when I call her, she tells me I’m the luckiest man in the world, I get the best painkiller on the planet free of charge for life. I think she really doesn’t understand how I miss her. She is so exotic, so superior. No matter how she treats me, I know my fantasy life is safe with her.
I’m a
katoey
, after all. A snob. And I find it difficult to keep my mouth shut when someone like you shows up and wants to talk.”

I am thinking, as I am sure you are, DFR,
Well, you’re not keeping your mouth shut now, are you?
when I see the first boat moving from the jetty in the early light. I glance at the clerk.

“Don’t worry. It’s just the boat boy, bringing me my
fin
. I sent an SMS this morning, after I saw you’d smoked the last of it.”

“That’s a very efficient boat boy.”

“He works for her, of course. She has that effect on anyone she employs. She pays double and expects one hundred percent loyalty and efficiency.” We stand and watch as the boy rows toward us. He has about three hundred yards to cover, and he rows with steady, manly strokes that extract the maximum efficiency from each pull. As he comes nearer, though, I’m reminded of the wide innocence of those young eyes, the flawless flesh of youth, the unwrinkled face, the bloom in both cheeks. He was an undemonstrative young fellow when he rowed me out last night; this morning finds him quite lively as he ships the oars and glides toward us.

I’m surprised he seems to be aiming for the bow, though, where the clerk and I are standing, instead of the stern, where there is the platform to climb aboard. I guess he must get on well with the clerk, because he holds up a package in a black plastic bag and waves it. When I check the clerk’s face, though, it is incomprehending, as if the boy is behaving in some way eccentrically. I’m still too distracted by the remains of the opium dream to react quickly. The clerk understands quicker than I, but not quickly enough. The boy drops the black bag to reveal a big handgun, some kind of Magnum, which he points directly at the clerk.

I did not detect a moment when those big innocent eyes lost their innocence; he simply aimed the way he had been trained to do; no doubt he telephoned Hong Kong for instructions after he brought me out last night. Lilly must have supplied him with some exotic bullets, because the one that hits the clerk in the throat causes his neck to explode. The bullet—I guess of the soft-nose exploding type—rips through his vertebrae; body and head hit the deck separately; the head rolls until it is stopped by the guardrail.

The kid is so shocked that he has decapitated a man with one shot, he is experiencing a kind of extreme ecstasy that could go either way: he can no more come to terms with the headless corpse—or the separated head—than I can. I’m so absorbed by the transformation that is taking place before my eyes (a million years of torment before this boy gets another chance at the human form, and on some level he knows it) that I fail to consider that Lilly might have had plans for me too. After all, I’m the one he was talking to.

The boy is recovering quickly, switching paranoid glances now, between me and the clerk’s remains; but I’m like a blinded deer: I do not see it coming until it’s too late. I watch in a paralysis of will while he raises the gun again and takes aim. There is nowhere to flee, the stairs that lead below are about six feet behind me. I know that if I panic and dash for cover, he will blow me away with that miniature cannon. And I left my gun downstairs with the opium pipe. But suppose I made it below, what then? I’d simply be a fish in a barrel for him to slaughter.

The moment freezes. Vikorn was right when he said I’m a steady hand in a firefight, but this is different. I’m mesmerized. The kid’s reckless waste of his chance of personal evolution has totally thrown me. What, exactly, does a soul do when it has just condemned itself to hell? I’m locking eyes with the clerk and in some way his terror, confusion, pride, loss, and iron determination are penetrating my heart.

Then something goes wrong with the kid’s body. He jerks, seems to experience a stab of unendurable pain, then jerks twice more before collapsing into the rowboat. I can see a pulsating fountain of blood spraying from his chest—pink, fresh from the lungs. Without thinking, I dive into the water. When I reach the rowboat, the kid has all but bled out. The best I can do is row back to the yacht, which I’m now sharing with two cadavers. Good morning, Phuket!

Back at the bow I search the bay with my eyes, paying special attention to a stand of trees somewhat to the south, not far from the road or the clubhouse. My heart thumping, my head raging with poisoned monologues by demons who stayed behind after the opium dream, I take out my cell phone and look for Chan’s number.

He answers on the first ring. “Hi, Third-World Cop. Still alive, huh?”

“Thanks to you.”

“Don’t worry about it. Let’s say I know the Yips. What happened just now could not be prevented—or it could have been if you’d let me into your investigation a little more deeply. But you didn’t, so it had to be Plan B.”

“You must be one hell of a shot.”

“Not really. Modern technology, you know, a child could have done it.”

“What d’you want to do now?”

“I want to go for a jolly on a yacht in sunny Phuket,” Chan says in his best British accent. “D’yah think you could sail it as far as the jetty, old chap?”

“I’m not doing a damned thing till you tell me how you knew where I was.”

“Cell phone. When it comes to women, you are truly pathetic. That was a woman you broke cover for, wasn’t it? You just had to call her, didn’t you?
She who has you by the balls
. There is only one transmission tower in the part of Phuket where you are. When the backroom boys in Hong Kong told me you were in the vicinity of a yacht club, I just knew you had to be under Yip surveillance. Funny how that popular holiday destination keeps cropping up in this investigation, no?”

“It’s where the original victims were butchered.”

“Exactly.”

As it happens, I know motorboats (Florida Keys; the john saw it in his interest to teach me how to work the controls on his sixty-foot floating knocking shop, so he could take Mum down below for
boom-boom
). The clerk left the keys in the ignition, so I fire up the twin turbo-charged diesel engines, roar across the bay, and (I blame the opium) nearly forget the most important lesson of all: boats don’t have brakes. I manage to steer away from the jetty just in time to avoid staving in
the bow, although I deliver quite an impressive sideswipe by the stern before I’m able to slow everything down by reversing the engines. Call me Captain Pugwash. To recover dignity I jump onto the boards like a pro, with a line in my hand, which I slip over a bollard before sitting on it.

Chan is wearing a short-sleeve shirt with tropical fruit all over, long walking shorts, and sandals. He is taller, slimmer, and fitter than I remember. In fact, he looks like an athlete as he strolls down the jetty with a large sports bag hanging from one shoulder.

“I tied the rowboat up to the buoy with the kid’s cadaver still in it,” I explain. “I had to put the clerk’s head in the sink in the galley because it kept rolling around on deck, but I didn’t move the trunk except to shift it out of the way of the anchor chain.”

Chan skips lightly aboard to check out the headless clerk. “I saved your life,” he says. “I’m not looking for credit, but isn’t there a word for that in your culture?”

“Gatdanyu,”
I say.

“Meaning?”

“Roughly speaking, ‘I owe you one all the way to death.’ ”

“Good,” Chan says. “So let’s go pick up the kid and do some serious evidence destruction. Otherwise the cops on this island will hold you for a year, until their owners tell them to let you go.”

“Owners?”

“The Yips are big here, but the cops are controlled by some army general. I bet you can tell me the name.”

“Zinna. How did you know?”

He seems to consider the question. “Fanaticism. One day very soon it will overtake you. Then you’ll want to know every tiny thing about Vulture Peak. Just like me.”

We hook up the rowboat to the stern and head out to sea. I feel dirty about what we are doing—in my own way I have always honored the deeper rules of law enforcement—but Chan is right: Zinna and the Yips would never let me off the island if they could find an excuse to
keep me here. When we’re about a mile out to sea, I watch him drag the clerk’s body into the rowboat. He finds an adjustable wrench in the wheelhouse and unscrews the bolt at the winch that holds the anchor chain. He drags the chain and anchor across the teak deck to the rowboat and ties up the two cadavers with it, including the anchor. He is sweating from the effort, but won’t let me help. The clerk’s head is a problem, though. Chan solves it by putting it into a bin liner, then making a skein out of some rope to keep it from bloating and floating. Now he ties the skein to the anchor chain.

I jump into the rowboat and together we haul the corpses and chain overboard. Back on the swimming platform, Chan empties the Magnum’s chamber into the bottom of the rowboat. Seawater floods in as if from spigots, and soon the boat also sinks. Chan jerks his head at the wheelhouse and tells me to make way.

“Where to?”

“Any position that gives a view of Vulture Peak.”

Boats are very slow compared to cars. It takes more than three hours to round the various headlands until the mountain with the mansion comes into view. It’s hot now. Chan and I are both stripped to our shorts, glistening with sweat. Whether out of some kind of respect for the dead, or a need to suffer, or because we are on serious business, is hard to say, but neither of us thinks of turning on the air-conditioning.

I drop anchor at the spot that Chan indicates and watch while he empties the contents of his sports bag onto a table. The main items are three light, hardened aluminum pipes that screw into one another. When put together with a few more parts, they transform into a singleshot rifle with an exceptionally long barrel, a high-tech scope, and a clever way of calibrating the angle of the shot to the finest tolerances.

“It takes time to aim. You were lucky the kid was so blown away by his first kill that he stood motionless for over a minute. Otherwise you’d be dead.”

“You brought that from Hong Kong? I thought you were on vacation.”

“Of course I didn’t bring it from Hong Kong. Don’t you know you can buy anything in Bangkok?”

We go out on deck, where Chan uses the sight from his gun to examine Vulture Peak. He seems fascinated.

“Don’t you want to go up there to have a look?” I ask.

He shakes his head. “It’s too soon. If anyone even suspects I’m here, we could blow the whole operation.”

“What operation?”

He scratches his head. “If I’m right, then probably one of the biggest in the history of crime detection. But there’s no way you would believe me at this moment. You might not appreciate it, but I’ve been working on your education since the night we met.” He gives me a patronizing smile, then turns back to his scope. “And there’s still a way to go. You examined the whole house up there on top of the hill?”