Read The Queen of Patpong Online
Authors: Timothy Hallinan
Rafferty is at the center island by then, and he realizes that Kosit is standing beside him, panting with his jaw hanging open. John is crumpled across the asphalt, his silhouette so broken he looks like clothes draped over a scattering of rocks. A wide pool of dark liquid surrounds his head.
Rafferty snatches at Kosit’s sleeve and says, “Come on.”
“But,” Kosit says, “he’s—”
“If you’re a cop for sixty years,” Rafferty says, “you’ll never see anyone any deader. Let’s get out of here.”
He tows Kosit back through traffic that has come to a total stop as drivers gape at the accident on the other side. “Horner?” he asks.
“Gone. The cab was waiting for him.”
“Well, hell.” They jog over toward Miaow and Anand.
Kosit says, “When you tell Arthit about this, make something up. Something where Anand and I come out looking good.”
“Horner’s a pro,” Rafferty says. “This is what he does for a living. There’s one down anyway.” Miaow sees him coming and drops Anand’s hand. She runs to Rafferty and throws both arms around him. He hugs her so tightly she squeaks. “Are you all right?”
She wriggles free. “I have a headache.”
“We’ll get you to a doctor.”
Miaow steps back to get a better look at his face. “It’s a
headache.
I don’t need a doctor.”
“Well, you’re going to get one.”
“What’s he going to say? ‘Looks like you bumped your head’?” Then, with no transition, she’s crying, and Rafferty kneels in front of her, his hands on her shoulders.
Anand comes up to them, seeming younger than ever. “Sorry, sorry. I looked at the one who ran first, and my guy clobbered me.” He glances across the street, eyebrows raised in a question.
Rafferty says, “Over there.”
“I heard the brakes. Dead?”
“By a broad margin.” Rafferty rises, a hand on Miaow’s shoulder. “Come on.”
“We’re cops,” Kosit says. “We should—”
“You do what you want. I’m leaving. Although maybe Anand should stay and take care of having the SUV towed, get somebody tracing its papers. Anand, you don’t know anything about the guy across the street, okay?”
Kosit and Anand exchange glances.
Rafferty says, “There’s no way to explain this without bringing it all down on Arthit’s head.”
Kosit nods. “You didn’t see anything,” he tells Anand. He starts toward his car and says over his shoulder, “You’ll both ride with me.”
“Fine,” Rafferty says. “Now.”
Anand says, following, “Both of those guys, when we first saw them, did you notice?”
“Thanks for helping Miaow,” Rafferty says, rubbing a circle in the center of her back.
“She was helping herself,” Anand says. “Did you notice their clothes?”
“No. There wasn’t time to—”
Anand looks questioningly at Kosit, who’s opening the door of an unmarked car. Kosit says, “I didn’t notice anything either.”
“I did,” Miaow says. She sniffles and wipes her face with her forearm. “The man who pulled me out of the car had blood all over him.”
T
hey’re down to three now—Rafferty, Miaow, and Kosit, since Anand is waiting for the tow truck. Miaow takes Rafferty’s hand as they cross the apartment-house lobby toward the elevator. After everything that’s happened, he’s not sure which of them the gesture is meant to comfort.
“Don’t call Arthit yet,” he says to Kosit. “I don’t want him making a fuss.”
“What’s the problem?” Kosit says. “These guys should get caught, and fast, and we—I mean, the cops—are better at that than you are.”
“I’ll tell you and Arthit at the same time.” The elevator doors slide open. “I know that your people can probably catch him. What I’m worried about is whether they’ll hold him.”
“What does that mean?”
“Later. I need to talk to someone first anyway.”
“Who?” The elevator does its usual pre-ascent shudder of dread, and Miaow squeezes Rafferty’s hand, a sure sign that she’s still off balance. She’s ridden this elevator hundreds of times since he and Rose adopted her off the street. He squeezes back in what he hopes is a reassuring manner.
“A guy with the American government, here in Bangkok.”
“That little squeaker from the Secret Service?” Kosit has met Richard Elson and wasn’t impressed.
“The very one.”
“Why? What can he tell you?”
“I don’t know. Right now let’s just go into the apartment, get Rose’s camera, and get out again. We need those pictures more than we need anything else.”
Without looking up, Miaow says, “It’s nice to be back.”
“We’ll be back for keeps in a few days,” Rafferty says.
Miaow says, “How do you know?” and Kosit looks away to hide a smile.
“Good question,” Rafferty says.
“Don’t do that. I’m not a baby.”
“Well,” Rafferty says, “you’re
my
baby.”
Miaow says, “Ick.” The elevator stops and the doors open, and she drops his hand and bolts through, into the corridor, where she stops like someone who’s run into a punch. She says, “Oh, no.”
Rafferty and Kosit shoulder each other getting off. They halt in unison behind Miaow.
The apartment door has been split down the middle. It sags inward crookedly, hanging by one hinge.
Miaow says, “The
floor.
”
Rafferty looks down and sees a trail of bloody footprints coming out of the apartment, leading to the emergency stairwell.
He grabs Miaow by the shoulders and shoves her at Kosit, then reaches past him to stop the elevator doors from closing. “Get her downstairs,” he says.
Miaow pulls away, but Rafferty pushes her back, not gently, and Kosit gets a grip on her this time. He says, “Take my gun.”
“You keep it. You’ve got her with you. Go, go.”
The elevator doors close, and Rafferty can hear Miaow protesting all the way down. Not until the elevator stops moving does he turn back to the shattered door.
He follows the bloody tracks with his eyes.
Blood all over him,
Miaow had said. There are two doors he needs to look through, but the one that terrifies him is the one leading into his apartment, so, moving parallel to the bloody footprints, he makes his way to the door to the emergency stairs. He yanks his T-shirt away from his belly and puts his hand inside it to turn the doorknob.
Footprints lead down, two pair, undoubtedly Horner’s and dead John’s, fading as they go. He lets the door sigh closed and turns back around and almost chokes on his breath. The door to Mrs. Pongsiri’s apartment is wide open.
He feels enormously heavy, nailed to the floor by his weight. He can see it all. Horner and John kicking in the door, Mrs. Pongsiri—already alerted by having found the red X—hearing the noise and going to investigate. She comes down the hall and into the apartment. They’re inside, knives in hand, ready to kill anyone who’s there. She’s seen them.
He can’t face this. After everything that’s happened in the past few days, he can’t face this. He reaches for the phone in his pocket, thinking to call Kosit. Kosit’s a cop. He knows how to deal with these things.
But Kosit’s with Miaow, and he can’t have Miaow up here. And then a wave of heat flows through him, and he thinks, S
he might be alive.
He’s running without even knowing it, and he plunges through the door and sees the small figure dead center in the continent of red that’s been mapped onto the far end of his carpet. She’s facing away from him as though she’s reclining on the floor, idly looking out through the cracked sliding glass door. Her wig—he never knew she wore a wig—has been wrenched sideways, and the hair beneath it is steel gray and cropped as short as a Buddhist nun’s. Her neck looks slender enough to break with a pencil.
She’s not moving.
He tracks his way around the blood. She’s so tiny. She’s wearing a loose, flowery print dress that’s multicolored on the top of her body but a rusty brownish red beneath. It’s been torn, he sees, the hem ripped right off it.
When he’s in front of her, he drops to his knees, trying to make sense of what he’s looking at: The strip of cloth from her dress, wrapped around her arm, the arm outstretched on the carpet. The broom, which he had left standing beside the balcony door, protruding through the cloth, which has been twisted tight. The long gash in her arm.
It’s a tourniquet. She made a tourniquet. It’s held tight by the weight of her arm on top of the rigid broomstick. She made a tourniquet that wouldn’t loosen even if she passed out. He leans in and sees her nostrils flare.
He jumps up, dialing the phone as he goes. In the bedroom he rips a blanket from the bed and drags it behind him into the living room, doubles it for extra warmth, and throws it over her, seeing the other cuts, five or six of them, as he does so. When the emergency response service answers, he gives them the address and the apartment number and then hangs up and dials Kosit.
“Get up here. Don’t let Miaow come in.”
He hangs up and runs to the closet, sweeps everything from the front of the top shelf, and stretches for the box. He’s got the little yellow camera in his hand by the time Kosit comes in and freezes at the sight of the draped blanket in the circle of blood, the little head sticking out of it.
“My neighbor,” Rafferty says. “They cut her a few times and slashed her wrist, but she’s alive. Anything you can do?”
“I can call for an ambulance.”
“I’ve done that.” He hands Kosit the camera. “Take Miaow and get to Arthit’s as fast as you can. I need the pictures from this thing now, whatever it takes. And tell Rose I need the women from her agency there, as many as possible, around six-thirty. Go on, go on, get out of here.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Stay with her. Wait for the ambulance.”
“What are you going to tell the cops?”
Rafferty says, “Go.”
He hears a gasp from the doorway and turns to see Miaow, holding on to the jamb as though she’s about to go down. She says, “Who . . . who . . . ?”
“Mrs. Pongsiri. She’s alive. Kosit, please get out of here. Miaow, you’re going with him.”
“Where?” She’s staring at the blanket, at the broadening stain on the carpet.
“Arthit’s. I’ll be there in a little bit.” Neither of them moves. “Miaow, I need you to go with Kosit. Both of you, get out of here.”
He turns his back on them and goes to sit in front of Mrs. Pongsiri. He puts his hand on top of her outstretched arm. When he looks up, they’re both gone.
He stays there, holding the warm, smooth hand and willing life into her, until he hears the siren growl to a stop in the street below. Then he says to Mrs. Pongsiri, “They’ll take care of you,” and gets up. Being careful not to step in the blood, he goes back into the corridor and through the door into the stairwell. When he hears the elevator doors open, followed by the emergency medical technicians’ voices, he climbs the stairs to the ninth floor and then takes the elevator down. He passes through the glass doors of the apartment house without a glance at the waiting ambulance and fades down the street, into the thickening dusk.
A
rthit says, “You’re putting me in an impossible position.”
Rafferty has dried blood on his hand from when he pushed himself up from the carpet beside Mrs. Pongsiri. The sight of it makes him dizzy with anger. “Well, I’m sorry about that, but I don’t know what else I can do.”
“What
else
you can do? You’re leaving a trail of bodies across Bangkok, and you won’t even talk to the cops.”
“Body,” Rafferty snaps. “
One
body. Mrs. Pongsiri is alive. And the other one, John, fuck him. Anybody disagree with that?” He gets up from the armchair, too rattled to sit. “And would you like to tell me what I’ve done? Did I kill someone? Seriously, Arthit, you want to tell me how I’m responsible? And where are those pictures?”
He, Arthit, and Rose are in Arthit’s living room, Arthit on the couch and Rose in the armchair that matches the one Rafferty just vacated. There’s a clatter from the kitchen, where Miaow and Pim are unpacking take-out food and laying out plates and utensils. It’s quarter past six.
“I only got them an hour ago.” Arthit stands, too, unwilling to give Rafferty the height advantage. “They’re on rush, they’ll be ready soon. But I don’t know whether I’ll let you have them.”
“Whether you’ll—”
“This can’t continue. It’s time for the cops.”
Several responses go through Rafferty’s mind, all of them hurtful. He says, “Let me call Elson.”
“Poke.” Arthit stops, breathes deeply, and continues. “What in the world does an American Secret Service agent have to do with any of this?”
Rafferty says, “I want this guy to go down. Forever.”
“And I don’t? Every time the phone rings, there’s another dead girl in those records in Phuket.”
“They found Oom,” Rose tells Rafferty. “The right time, the tattoo.”
Arthit says, “You don’t trust the police? The Thai justice system?”
Rafferty doesn’t even think about it. “No.”
His face reddening, Arthit says, “You’re slandering a lot of good people.”
“If the police are such crackerjacks, tell me how a dozen bodies, or however many it is, all killed the same way, can just wash up in Phuket, like Japanese glass fishing floats, with nobody hearing about it?”
Arthit’s shaking his head by the time Rafferty is halfway through the sentence. “That’s different.”
“How? How is it—”
“Phuket is a tourist destination. It’s still recovering from the tsunami. They’re not going to publicize a serial—”
“Oh, well, that inspires confidence. Let the girls die, but, please, no bad PR.”
“They were working the case,” Arthit says, barely moving his lips. “But quietly.”
“And look at all the progress.”
Arthit holds up both hands. “You can argue with me until the sun comes up. The police are getting involved. Now.”
“If you bring the cops into this, you’ll regret it until you die.”
“This country is not completely corrupt, no matter what you believe.”
“If it makes you feel any better,” Rafferty says, “I don’t trust my government either.”
Rose says, “He should be dead.”
They both look at her. Arthit is expressionless, wearing what Rafferty thinks of as his cop face. “Obviously, I can’t guarantee that,” Arthit tells her. “But what are you saying, Poke? That if the police aren’t involved, you’re going to kill him?”
“Here’s what I’m saying: Your colleagues may catch him, but they won’t keep him. Where are you going?”
Halfway to the dining room, Arthit says, “You dodged my question. That’s another reason for me to do what I should have done this afternoon.”
“He’ll never see a Thai courtroom,” Rafferty says.
“I’m not a judge,” Arthit says. He picks up his cell phone from the dining-room table. “I don’t try them, I just arrest them.”
Rafferty raises his voice, knowing it means he’s losing the argument. “He killed four women— Wait, how many is it now?”
Rose says, “Five.”
“All cut?”
“Just like Oom,” Rose says.
“Okay, then,
five
women. Five that we know of. And you said it yourself, Arthit, there are going to be more. He tried to kill Rose. He and the other one cut and beat a woman in her sixties just because she came down the hall to see what the noise was.”
Arthit says, “All the more reason to catch him.”
“They tried to steal my daughter so she could lead them to Rose. What would they have done to Rose? What do you think they would have done with Miaow afterward? Buy her candy?” Rafferty hears the stridency in his voice but can’t modulate it. “She’s a
kid
, Arthit.”
Arthit lowers the phone. “Listen to yourself. Look at the case against Horner, the one you’ve just laid out. Look at the witnesses: Rose, about both her and Oom. You and
two cops,
about what happened to you and Miaow today. Mrs. Pongsiri, since the doctors seem to think she’ll make it. He’ll never see daylight again.”
“He’ll never stand trial,” Rafferty says. “He’ll get sold.”
Arthit says, “Sold?”
“Like the cheapest car on the lot.”
“To whom, Poke?” Arthit’s mouth is pinched tight. “Think about it for a minute. Even if my colleagues were corrupt enough, or stupid enough, to sell a serial killer after all the publicity this case will get, who’d have enough money? Because for that kind of corruption, we’re talking seven figures, and I don’t mean baht.”
Rose says, “He only killed bar girls. That’s not the same as killing
people.
”
Rafferty says, “Let me call Elson.”
Arthit starts to reply to Rose and then looks from her to Rafferty. Something seems to unfold behind his eyes. He puts the cell phone on the polished table and spins it with his forefinger. Glances down at it and then back over at Rafferty. He says, “You’re shitting me.”
“Let me make the call.”
Arthit spins the phone again, giving it all his attention. “You can’t mean what I think you mean. But even if you do, it’s not going to change anything.”
“Then there’s no reason not to call.”
“This is your government we’re talking about.”
“Times have changed,” Rafferty says. “My government has changed with them.” He pulls out his own cell phone just as Pim and Miaow come into the room, each carrying a big tray full of take-out containers, plates, and glasses. Miaow has cleaned herself up from the scuffle of the afternoon and is once again the kind of shiny-faced immaculate that Rafferty always associates with her, but her eyes are a little too quick, a little too skittish. She looks as if a loud noise would send her diving through the window. Pim has discarded her garish street clothes in favor of one of Arthit’s T-shirts as a dress, belted with a necktie. The shirt comes down almost to her knees.
Rafferty looks at the necktie and tries to lower the room’s temperature by asking, “Are those snakes?”
“Cobras,” Arthit says. “Thanom gave it to me for Christmas. I think there was some sort of threat implied.”
“Can you make room on the table?” Miaow asks. “These are heavy.”
Arthit says, from the dining room, “Over here.”
“Listen,” Rafferty says. “I need everybody to be quiet. I’m putting this call on speaker, but I’m not going to tell the guy I’m talking to. He’d have a heart attack.”
He waits until Miaow and Pim have put down the trays, and then he waves everyone quiet again and dials. On the third ring, he checks his watch—6:21
P.M.
—but then Elson picks up.
Rafferty raises the phone to his lips so he won’t sound like he’s on speaker. “Richard. Poke Rafferty.”
Elson says, “Yeah?” He sounds like someone who expects to be asked for a loan.
“And a big hi to you, too.”
“You’re calling after hours. Means you don’t want to talk on an office phone. How’d you get my cell number?”
“You gave it to me. Back when Frank—my father—was here.”
“You should have torn it up.”
“You should have changed it. But how’s this? I’ll erase it after this call.”
Elson sighs into the phone. “What is it, then?”
“It’s a hypothetical.”
“I’ve been waiting all day for a hypothetical.”
“Good. Then I’ll lay it out and you tell me how probable or improbable it is.”
There’s a pause, and then Elson says, “Do you need a prompt to get started?”
“No. Okay, a guy working for a defense contractor, let’s say Grayhawk or one of those, he’s engaged on missions for the U.S. in . . . oh, I don’t know, the Middle East, and while he’s in a third country—”
“Third?”
“Neither the U.S. nor the country his mission is in.”
“Okay.”
“So in this third country he gets into very serious trouble. Let’s say he kills several people. Kills them ugly. Let’s say they’re defenseless women. Let’s say there are more than
several.
”
In the silence that follows, Rafferty can hear Elson doing something that sounds like jingling the change in his pocket. “Is this public knowledge? In your hypothetical, I mean.”
“No. Nobody’s heard a word about it except the people who are directly involved. And then let’s say he’s arrested in the third country and the American embassy is contacted as a courtesy, as they always are.”
For a moment Rafferty thinks Elson has hung up. But then he says, “Yes?”
“How improbable is it that the U.S. would make a secret arrangement to spirit him out?”
“As opposed, for instance, to having a sensational trial that they can’t control.”
“Exactly.”
“All right, let me make sure I have this straight. An employee of an American contractor, on a mission in, hypothetically, Afghanistan, does something horrific in another country, hypothetically Thailand, and the issue is whether, either in the State Department or in the Department of Defense, there might be a black-ops budget with minimum oversight, so nobody with any rank would be involved if the situation blew up in their faces, and whether that hypothetical budget has money in it that could be used to yank that contractor out of the third country before the media circus makes the U.S. look like bloodthirsty savages and the Senate starts demanding hearings into the war effort and secret budgets and the impeachment of the president. Umm, let’s see, and that there are also people in the right places who have access to that budget and would be willing to spend it. Is that about it?”
“Very good.”
“And also reopen the whole basic issue about contractors.”
“Which issue?”
“About how they’re not there because they were drafted. About how they volunteered and even competed for a slot where their basic job is to kill people. And about how there are always going to be psychopaths among them, no matter how stridently the people in charge deny it.”
Arthit’s eyes meet Rafferty’s.
“Yeah,” Rafferty says. “All those issues.”
“And you want to know what, exactly?”
“How improbable it is that the government would spring a guy like that.”
“Hmmm.” Rafferty can envision the reflection on Elson’s glasses as he lifts his chin, the man’s thin lips tightening as he thinks. “Tell you what. There’s no commonly accepted index for improbability that I know about. So why don’t you give me an example of something improbable, and I’ll tell you whether your scenario is less or more improbable than that.”
Rafferty looks up to find Arthit’s eyes still on him. Arthit mouths one word:
Frank.
Rafferty nods and says, “Off the top of my head, okay? Let’s say a U.S. government agency takes an Anglo man who needs to hide out for the rest of his life and assigns him a false identity that was originally set up for a Chinese man, without even changing the Chinese man’s name, although the guy hiding out isn’t Chinese. As improbable as that?”
“It’s exactly that improbable. And you wouldn’t believe how improbably large that budget would be, if there were such a budget.”
“Improbable as it is, what would happen to the contractor after he was returned to the States?”
“Whatever it would be,” Elson says, “you’d never hear about it. Are you finished?”
Rafferty says, “Am I ever,” and hangs up.
From the dining room, Miaow says, “But that’s what he did with your father. He gave him—”
“That’s right,” Rafferty says.
Arthit says, “I need to think about this.”
“Think about it fast,” Rose says, getting up and going into the dining room. “The girls will be here any minute. Miaow, we need more glasses and things.”
Arthit says, “The girls?”
“I really need those pictures, Arthit,” Rafferty says.
Arthit shakes his head as though he needs to clear it. “What girls?”
“From my agency,” Rose says. “At least eight more glasses, Miaow. And, Pim, could you please make some tea?”
“How come you say please to Pim but not to me?” Miaow asks, heading for the kitchen.
Rose says, “Because I like her better.”
Miaow makes a rude noise as she leaves the room.
“I don’t need a maid,” Arthit says. “I told Poke I don’t—”
“You certainly do need a maid,” Rose says. “This place is ‘man clean,’ but that’s not the same as clean. Why don’t you hire Pim?”
“Pim, Pim, Pim,” Miaow says from the kitchen. Scarlet-faced, Pim flees the room.
Arthit says, quite loudly, “Everybody.
Stop.
”
Everybody stops except Pim, who runs all the way to the kitchen. The moment stretches out, totally silent. Arthit blinks in surprise.
Rafferty says, “What now, Arthit? Can we start again?”
“At least with the food and the glasses,” Rose says.
There’s a knock at the door. Rafferty pulls out his Glock, which has been tucked into his waistband ever since he got there.
Rose says, “What? You’re going to shoot Fon?”
“You stay where you are. I’ll answer the door.” Rafferty puts the gun hand behind his back and crosses the room, and he finds Arthit beside him, his own gun in hand. When they get to the door, Arthit waves Rafferty aside so he’ll be right behind the door when it opens, turns sideways to hide his gun and present a smaller target, and, with a nod to Rafferty, yanks the door open.
Fon takes a surprised step back and says, “Hi.”