Salty (12 page)

Turk composed himself; he wasn't going to get in a fight now.

“I'm not going home until I get Sheila back.”

With that, Turk jerked the suitcase out of Ben's hands and turned to walk away.

“Turk Henry. You're under arrest for violating the Patriot Act.”

Turk turned to face him. “All I've done is withdraw some money from the bank.”

“With the intent of giving aid and financial support to terrorists. That's conspiracy.”

“You can't prove that. Maybe I'm just going down the road to a whorehouse.”

Several locals stopped to watch the two
farangs
. A young woman with a cartful of fresh fruit offered them some.

“Don't make me do anything you'll regret. I'm well trained in the martial arts.”

Turk couldn't believe his ears. First Sheila is kidnapped, and now a man from ICE is threatening to kung fu him. Turk said the first thing that popped into his head.

“Do you know who I am?”

Ben nodded. “Of course.”

“Then you know beating up a celebrity is not something you want to do.”

“You're not above the law.”

“I'm not breaking any law. It's my money, and if I want to take it out of the bank and buy enough beer to fill the Andaman Sea, I can.”

Ben narrowed his eyes. “You have a history of drug problems.”

Turk looked at Ben with disgust. “You can't be serious.”

Ben adjusted his stance, standing in a way that said he'd seen a few Bruce Lee movies.

“Listen, Mr. Henry, and listen good. I could arrest you right now and ship you off to a secret detention center in Romania. You wouldn't have the right to an attorney; you wouldn't get to make a phone call. You'd be thrown into a dank fucking pit and visited by nongovernmental contractors
who could do whatever they wanted to you. No one would know where you were or what happened to you.”

Turk swallowed. He remembered something his shrink had told him. A technique he'd used when Steve had started ranting and screaming.

“I hear what you're saying.”

“Good. Now get your ass in the car.”

…

Turk didn't say anything in the car; with the threat of extraordinary rendition hanging over him, he wasn't sure if he should. It was probably better to just keep quiet until he was out of this asshole's sight.

As they pulled into the long circular drive leading to the front door of the resort, Ben finally spoke.

“I told you I would look into this. All you had to do was lay low.”

Turk pouted.

“Sorry.”

“Consider yourself under house arrest. You can't leave the resort without my permission.”

“How long's that going to be?”

“I have to talk to my station chief.”

Ben pulled up in front of the hotel, got out, then helped Turk from the car.

“What about my suitcase?”

“Consider it impounded until I consult with Washington.”

With that, Ben climbed back in the car and slammed the door shut.

“Can I get a fucking receipt for that?”

But Ben didn't hear him. He was already driving away.

…

Somporn stood over the American woman's corpse and shook his head. It hadn't gone exactly as he'd planned. She wasn't supposed to die on him. But that's what happened. Sometime during the night, she'd succumbed to her fever. Somporn realized that he should've paid a little more attention to her; she had looked pretty sick. But then, Americans were notorious whiners, complainers, big overfed babies always demanding special treatment, so he'd ignored her condition. Besides, he'd been busy with Sheila.

Somporn didn't want his men to think he'd gotten sloppy, carelessly letting one of the hostages die, but he had to admit that his attention had been elsewhere, his mind not as on the ball as usual. But no matter how hard he tried to act the part of ferocious pirate captain, he couldn't help himself. Watching Sheila shower had become a compulsion. It was all he thought about.

Not that he was doing anything to her. He was just looking at her, marveling at her incredible white skin. She'd let him touch her last night, smoothing coconut oil on her back. Somporn felt a shiver of delight zip up his spine as he remembered how soft and clean she was. He couldn't explain why he was so attracted to her milky skin; he just was. It touched something deep in him, her beauty almost moving him to tears. Not that he thought the dark brown skin of his fellow Thais wasn't beautiful; it was, but it didn't move some powerful and mysterious thing in him. Who knew why anyone
preferred one thing over another? Some people loved chocolate. Somporn preferred the sharp-sour flavor of ripe mangoes. The Buddha would say that he was predisposed to alabaster white skin because of something that had happened in a past life. The attraction was imprinted on his mind stream; it was part of his karma that would follow him from life to life to life until he finally broke the cycle of suffering and rebirth and attained nirvana.

There were, Somporn realized, worse fetishes to have. There were people who liked to be wrapped up like mummies, women who liked to wear dog collars and eat out of bowls on the floor, men who enjoyed being hog-tied and pissed on by beautiful librarians. He had once met a man who was turned on by watching Japanese women pick their noses. The man had collected hundreds of videos and DVDs of schoolgirls in
Sailor Moon
outfits, businesswomen, even geishas, all stuffing fingers up their nostrils and pulling out a variety of boogers and stringy mucus.

The dead woman from Seattle was not a pretty sight. Her body had become a festering bug buffet. Somporn's first instinct was to take her out past the reef and drop her body into the ocean. The tides, sharks, sea turtles, and gulls would take care of the rest. But that wasn't the best strategic move. Better would be to make an example out of her, get the rock star really freaked out, maybe up the ransom to two million.

Somporn decided on a two-pronged approach. He'd release the British couple in town and dump the body in a bay near one of the fancy resorts. It would be a message to the American rock star: There was only one hostage left, and he should expect to pay top dollar for her safe return. Captain Somporn wanted Turk to know he was serious.

…

Turk walked through the hotel lobby in a daze. Something was wrong. He could feel it. How did the ICE agent asshole know he was picking up the money? Was his room bugged? His phone tapped? Did someone rat him out?

Turk went to the hotel bar and plopped into a cushy chair. A waitress scurried over to take his order.

“Gimme a beer. Please.”

“Thai beer?”

Turk nodded and she went off to get his drink. He stared off, out the giant open doorway, at the ocean. Turk realized that he was in over his head. He needed some advice, a reality check. Turk normally trusted his instincts, his intuition, and right now his instincts told him that the agent was full of shit. Terrorists don't kidnap tourists on an elephant ride. There's nothing terrorizing about that. Terrorists blew up trains in Madrid or buildings in Nairobi. They got their money from exporting Afghan opium and Kashmiri hash. Sheila's kidnapping seemed like your typical criminal enterprise. Snatch a rich guy's wife and make him fork over some dough. It's a crime, pure and simple, not the clash of civilizations.

Turk didn't think they'd send him to a secret prison somewhere. He was a rock star. But he wasn't sure he wanted to press his luck either. Who knew what these bureaucratic zealots were thinking?

Turk needed to talk to Heidegger. He needed advice, pronto. But it was a risk. If he met Heidegger in the resort, the ICE agent would overhear everything. Turk needed neutral ground. He needed to get out of the resort. Turk didn't
want to violate the Patriot Act, but it wasn't like he had a choice. Sheila was out there.

He thought about what his mom used to say: “You want scrambled eggs, you gotta break 'em first.”

The waitress came back with the beer. Turk thanked her, picked up the Singha, and headed toward the manager's office.

Turk entered without knocking. The Frenchwoman looked up at him and offered a sympathetic, concerned smile.

“Ah! Mr. Henry. How are you?”

“I need to use your phone. And I want to be moved to another room.”

The manager nodded. “Of course.” She stood up and offered her desk to Turk.

“Thanks.”

Turk sat down and dialed. The manger gave Turk an apologetic look as she knotted her long brown hair into a ponytail.

“Do you require privacy?”

“What's the best hotel in Bangkok?”

The manager thought about it for a second.

“I would stay at the Oriental.”

Turk waited until he heard Heidegger answer on the other end, then spoke into the phone.

“Bangkok. Oriental. Tomorrow night.”

Turk hung up the phone and looked at Carole.

“You didn't hear that.”

“Of course.”

There was an awkward pause.

“Will you be leaving us?”

Turk shook his head.

“I'm keeping a room here until I get my wife back.”

…

Jon Heidegger looked at his cell phone like he'd just gotten a transmission from Mars. What the fuck was that about? It was obviously Turk's voice, but why the code, the cloak and dagger?
Bangkok
. All right. That was the city in Thailand.
Oriental
. Yeah. It was in the Orient. So? But
tomorrow night?
Was he nuts? Heidegger couldn't just drop everything and go see what Turk wanted halfway around the world. He'd sent him the money. What was the problem?

Even though it was ten o'clock at night, Heidegger decided he needed to do a little research. He called Karl at home and learned that the money had been sent and that Turk had received it and signed for it earlier that day. Then he got out his laptop and Googled the words “Bangkok” and “Oriental.” The Bangkok Oriental hotel popped up as the first answer.

It occurred to him that perhaps Turk wasn't very good at the cloak-and-dagger stuff. He wouldn't be able to get to Bangkok tomorrow; that was for sure, not with the launch of Rocketside's new CD. But that didn't mean he wouldn't be represented. Jon Heidegger prided himself on being a good manager, the kind who takes care of his clients even if they've gone crazy and talked in spy code. He flipped open his cell phone and dialed Marybeth.

…

Ben should have taken the money back to the bank and had it secured in the vault. That would have been the official protocol. But he was tired and didn't feel like going to the bank. Besides, he was curious.

He dragged Turk's suitcase into his hotel room. He bolted the door behind him, plopped the suitcase on his bed, and unzipped it. He gasped when he saw the money; his legs got wobbly and he had to sit down. There was so much of it. A pile of greenbacks; a huge block of Benjamins. Ben had never seen anything like it. As he gawked at the cash, his awe and amazement only served to harden his resentment of Turk.

That fucking rock star. How did he get to be so rich? What had he done to earn it? He played electric bass—only four strings—and wore tight pants. He pranced around a stage waving his long hair. He married a model. It was a useless life, and for it he was rewarded with riches beyond imagine. Where was the justice in that? What kind of world were we living in where bass players became millionaires? It was wrong. Just plain wrong.

Ben Harding had paid his dues. Hadn't he? Wasn't he the guy who busted his ass keeping helicopters in the air in Afghanistan and Iraq? Wasn't he the guy who joined Immigration and Customs Enforcement to protect freedom and spread democracy? Wasn't he on the front lines in the war on terror? He was a red-blooded, freedom-lovin' American man, a first responder. At the last election, he'd voted for the candidate who promised to bring America back to greatness. He did everything the way it was supposed to be done and he paid his taxes on time. So how come some pudgy middle-aged rock star got to be a millionaire while Ben scraped by on his meager paycheck? It just wasn't fair. It wasn't just. Ben
got paid about the same as your average elementary school principal in Asslick, Kansas. Better than the teachers, sure, but not really what a man who's protecting freedom deserves.

It irritated him even more to think that this wasn't even all of Turk's money. It was like pocket change. The rock star had millions more. He could just phone his banker and have another million sent over by tomorrow afternoon.

Ben stood up and zipped the suitcase shut. He didn't want to look at it. He squirted some sanitizing hand gel on his palm and rubbed his hands together. He grabbed a bottle of cold water from the minibar—some French brand, not the local stuff—and drank it as he paced back and forth. He didn't want to think about the money, but he couldn't think about anything else, so he forced himself to not think about anything even as he thought about everything.

Eventually he lay down on the bed next to the suitcase and stared at the ceiling. He couldn't believe it. A million bucks lying on the bed right next to him. One million dollars. A one followed by six zeros. Seven figures. He could buy a house in the mountains. Live in the woods away from all the people and pollution, the germs and the noise. He wouldn't have to work again. Not unless he wanted to. With a million dollars he could live in Hawaii. He could play golf every day.

As Ben daydreamed about all the things he could do with a million dollars—maybe he should've been a rock star—his hand reached out to the suitcase next to him and gently caressed it. It was a well-made piece of luggage. Manufactured with some kind of high-tech ballistic nylon, it was lightweight yet durable, practical yet fashionable. The kind he'd buy if he had a million dollars.

Ben considered the traveling he might do with that kind of money. Maybe he'd go to Alaska. He'd heard it was clean up there. Fresh air, pure water. For sure he wouldn't go anywhere in Southeast Asia. The hot and humid viral breeding grounds of Thailand, Vietnam, and Malaysia were too much for him. Way too many people; way too much weird stuff. Where else in the world could SARS, the avian flu, and God knows what next come from? With a million dollars Ben could avoid all that. He could get the hell out of Thailand and its festering melting pot of virulent disease. A million dollars could save his life.