World of Trouble (9786167611136) (14 page)

Shepherd knew he and the two women had to get
out of the way, but he couldn’t see exactly how they were going to
do that. They had no chance to get back onto the sidewalk or into
the buildings that lined Silom since some of the demonstrators were
already slugging it out behind them. The pickup trucks leading both
marches had stopped nose-to-nose right in front of them and the
only safety seemed to lie in moving further into the street, toward
the trucks. Shepherd put his hands on the two women’s backs and
herded them forward.

At that moment, the main mass of the red
shirts gave a terrifying roar, broke ranks, and swarmed toward the
yellows. Both groups had now armed themselves. Metal bars, paving
stones, wooden planks, and homemade clubs were everywhere. One man
even swung a golf club overhead. Shepherd thought it was a four
iron.

At the front of the attacking reds was a man
hefting a wide, flat board a little longer than a baseball bat. The
yellow-shirted woman closest to him carried a Thai flag on a long
staff. Neither the man nor the woman was young and they were
ordinary enough looking people. Later, what Shepherd remembered
most about both of them was the rage that contorted their faces as
they charged toward each other.

The woman attempted to bring the flag down
and use its staff as a lance to spear the onrushing man, but she
was too slow. The man caught the flagpole on his upper arm and
swatted it aside. Then he lifted the board above his shoulders and
swung from the hips, putting all of his weight behind it.

The flat of the board smashed into the side
of the woman’s head and Shepherd saw her skull buckle. Her face
bulged on one side like a rubber ball pounded by a mallet. It
contorted into something that looked more like a Halloween mask
than a human head and a spray of blood burst in the air like red
fireworks. The woman dropped to the pavement; then the two mobs
surged together and she disappeared under a hundred pairs of
feet.

That was when the screams started in earnest.
The two girls were beginning to panic so Shepherd kept them moving.
He slipped his arms around them and hauled them toward the green
pickup truck that had stopped directly in front of them. By the
time they got to it, they were directly in the eye of a full-scale
battle.

“Crawl under!” he shouted at the women.

They stood there motionless, too frightened
to move.

“Get under the goddamned truck!” he shouted
again and shoved them both toward it.

The taller girl suddenly snapped to her
senses. She dropped her pack, went down on her belly, and tugged
the other girl after her. Both of them squirmed underneath the
pickup.

Shepherd crouched down and pressed his back
to the truck. He watched the battle as it swirled around him.

A yellow-shirted man to his left was scything
a golf club back and forth, whipping it through the air like he was
clearing brush with a machete. A red-shirted man ducked under the
golf club and drove his shoulder into the yellow shirt’s stomach.
Yellow shirt lost his balance and went down, then red shirt jerked
the golf club away and kicked him in the head.

Shepherd still wasn’t particularly worried.
This was a Thai fight and foreigners had nothing to do with it.
Still, Thais didn’t really like foreigners all that much and he
knew that having a free shot at one who happened to be in the wrong
place at the wrong time might be appealing to some of them. Just to
be on the safe side, he stayed low and tried not to look too
white.

For a while, that worked fine and the
combatants ignored Shepherd. Then one didn’t.

Out of the corner of his eye Shepherd caught
a glimpse of an iron bar coming straight at his head. He ducked and
the bar whistled by just above him. It came so close he felt the
breeze from its passage riffle his hair. When the bar crunched into
the truck cab with a sickening thud, he thought about what it would
have done to his skull if it had connected.

But Shepherd only thought about it for an
instant. Then he jumped to his feet and grabbed the bar with both
hands. He jerked it down and to the side and tried to twist it
away. When his head came up, Shepherd looked directly into the eyes
of his assailant.

He was just a boy, one no more than fourteen
years old Shepherd judged. But the boy was strong and seemed
desperate to do Shepherd serious bodily harm. He couldn’t imagine
why, but there didn’t seem to be any point in asking right
then.

Because of the boy’s strength, Shepherd gave
up trying to twist the bar away from him and instead gave it a
sudden jerk directly toward his midsection. The boy stumbled
forward, momentarily off balance, and Shepherd swung his right foot
upward like a field goal kicker going for a sixty-yarder. When his
toe connected with the boy’s crotch, he felt a soft, squishing
sensation and the boy lifted completely off the ground. Screaming
in agony, he lurched away. Then he fell to his knees and started to
vomit.

Shepherd scooped up the iron bar and pushed
his back against the truck again. He had just kicked a teenage kid
in the balls as hard as he could and the truth was that he damn
well hoped he had hurt him. The little shit was trying to take his
head off with that iron bar. Shepherd wasn’t a bit sorry for what
he had done. Not really.

But he was thinking about it anyway. And that
was why he didn’t see the woman coming.

She was small and middle-aged and didn’t look
very strong. She held a folding chair by its legs, one she had
probably liberated from a trashed street vendor’s stand. Still, she
was young enough and strong enough to swing it, and that was
exactly what she did.

Because of her height she had to swing the
chair in an upward trajectory to get a shot at Shepherd’s head and
that took most of the momentum out of her swing. Even then, the
blow glanced off his ear and rocked him to his knees. He went down,
breaking his fall with his hands. He had the presence of mind to
pull up his knees and twist his body to ward off what he assumed
would be another blow, but when he looked up from where he lay on
the pavement, the woman was gone.

The green pickup was right next to him and he
tried desperately to pull himself underneath it. He clawed at the
roadway with his hands like a swimmer doing the breaststroke. His
palms scraped over the concrete and they hurt like hell, but he
kept stroking. Shepherd’s head throbbed and nausea hit him in
waves. Bright lights began to spin behind his eyes. He closed them,
which really didn’t help much, and kept swimming.

He was starting to black out, he knew. That
didn’t seem all that bad really, since at least then the pain would
stop, but he had to get underneath the truck before it happened or
he would be trampled. His right hand came down on something soft
and a dozen unpleasant possibilities as to what it might be passed
through his mind all at once. Then he opened his eyes and saw his
hand had only landed on a woman’s shoe. He kept going.

Somehow Shepherd made it to the truck and
pulled himself underneath. The two hippie chicks were gone and he
wondered briefly what had happened to them.

Then all at once the pain stopped, and he was
gone, too.

“JACK, CAN YOU hear me?”

It was a man’s voice. Shepherd was pretty
sure of that much at least.

“Are you okay, Jack?”

Slowly Shepherd opened his eyes. He struggled
to make sense out of the flashing colors and flickering shapes that
were all he could see.

“How many fingers?” the voice asked.

What the hell is this guy talking about?

Shepherd closed his eyes and then opened them
again. That helped a little, but not much.

Finally a man’s face swam into focus. He was
bending over and holding three fingers about a foot in front of
Shepherd’s eyes. It took another moment or two, but then Shepherd
worked out who the man was. He was a Canadian doctor who drank at
the Duke. At least he said he was a doctor. In Bangkok, you could
never be absolutely certain about claims like that. Still, to give
the guy the benefit of the doubt, everybody called him Dr.
Mike.

“How may fingers?” Dr. Mike repeated.

“Three.”

“What day is it?”

“Tuesday.”

“What city are you in?”

“Bangkok.”

“What were those people outside rioting
about?”

“I don’t have any idea.”

Dr. Mike snapped his fingers and gave
Shepherd a thumbs-up.

“Not a fucking thing wrong with you, boy,” he
grinned.

Shepherd sat up gingerly. Looking around, he
realized he was sitting on the floor at the Duke of Wellington.

“How did I get here?”

“Two cops carried you in,” Dr. Mike said. “I
guess they figured the logical place to take a white guy in Bangkok
is to the nearest bar.”

Shepherd would have nodded in agreement, but
he couldn’t even imagine moving his head.

“You were lucky,” Dr. Mike added. “I just
happened to be here.”

“That’s not luck. Where else would you
be?”

Dr. Mike squatted back down and took a closer
look at Shepherd.

“The skin’s not broken,” he said. He gently
probed at the edges of the swelling. “But you’re going to look like
you’ve got an egg stuck to your head for a few weeks.”

Dr. Mike methodically worked his way over the
rest of Shepherd’s body checking for other damage. He didn’t find
any until he came to Shepherd’s hands. He examined his scraped and
battered palms carefully, twisting them first one way and then the
other to catch the light.

“What the hell is this?” Dr. Mike asked.

“A swimming injury.”

Dr. Mike just nodded as if that made complete
sense to him.

“I could put you in for a neurological work
up,” he said, “but the local quacks would drive you crazy doing it
and it probably wouldn’t be of much use anyway. Instead, I
prescribe two large whiskeys and an hour at Titty Twister A-Go-Go
and you’ll be right as rain.”

“Good enough, doc,” Shepherd said. “Help me
up, huh?”

Mike stood up and Shepherd took his hands and
pulled himself to his feet. A wave of dizziness briefly swept over
him, but then the room resumed its customary place beneath his feet
and he decided he was going to survive. A waitress rushed out from
behind the bar, pushed a chair under him, and held out a large
glass filled with what appeared to be whiskey. Shepherd accepted
both the chair and the glass. He sat down. The chair was fine, but
the glass turned out to be filled with ginger ale. He drank it
anyway.

“How bad?” he asked Dr. Mike.

“Scrapes, bruises, and a minor concussion,”
Mike said.

That was disappointing to Shepherd. As lousy
as he felt, he figured he at least deserved a major concussion.
Finding out it was only a minor concussion somehow diminished the
worth of his suffering. Still, that wasn’t what he had been asking
Mike about.

“I didn’t mean me,” he said and pointed
toward Silom Road. “I meant out there. How bad is it out
there?”

“Bad,” Dr. Mike said. “Really bad.”

“Casualties?”

“Some. It will be worse next time.”

Shepherd knew Mike was right. He had seen
their faces as they tore into each other.

Dr. Mike went to the bar and came back with
his own glass filled with amber-colored liquid. Shepherd was pretty
certain it wasn’t ginger ale. Mike pulled up a chair and sat down
beside him.

“What do you think is going to happen to this
place, Jack?”

This time Shepherd did shake his head,
although he did it carefully.

“Do you think foreigners are in any
danger?”

Shepherd reached up slowly with one hand and
pointed to the lump on his head.

“Good point,” Mike nodded. “You think the
army will come in?”

“The army
is
in,” Shepherd said.
“They’re just letting the red shirts do their fighting for them. It
looks better that way.”

“The army’s killing Muslims in the south. Why
not just kill the yellow shirts in Bangkok, too?”

“Because nobody in the whole world gives a
shit about the Muslims in the south of Thailand. The army’s been
burning and butchering them for years and nobody anywhere has
noticed or cared. But if the Thai army starts shooting people in
the shopping malls of Bangkok, all of a sudden they’re going to be
the lead on CNN and the tourists will get scared and go someplace
else.”

Mike nodded and Shepherd could see him
thinking about what that might mean to him. He was right in the
midst of an upheaval that was beginning to look very much like a
civil war, and he wasn’t weighing the great principles of human
rights and self-government that the talking heads on TV went on
about. Instead, Shepherd figured Mike probably had a bag packed and
a route to the airport mapped out, and he was thinking about how
much longer he would risk getting his ass shot off before he
decided to run.

“I’ve got to get to the hospital,” Dr. Mike
said after a while and slugged back the rest of whatever was in his
glass. For the sake of his patients, Shepherd really hoped it
was
ginger ale, but somehow he still doubted it.

“Don’t worry about me, Mike. I’m fine.”

“If the dizziness continues or if you have
any feeling of nausea, I want you to call me right away. You hear?
You got that?”

Automatically Shepherd started to nod, but he
stopped when a wave of pain swept over him.

“Got it,” he murmured instead, keeping his
head as still as he could. “Thanks, doc.”

Shepherd stayed in that chair for quite a
while after Dr. Mike left, sipping his ginger ale and wondering
what it was like out on Silom Road right then. As soon as he was
certain he could walk to the door without falling down, he got up
and went outside to find out.