Timothy Hallinan - The Fourth Watcher

“Let me give you some information first, and then some rules. The information is that nobody wants to hurt you. Not any more than we already have, I mean, and that was sort of an accident. We’re actually here to try to help you.”

“Maybe a greeting card,” Poke suggests. “With a perfume strip. Or a phone call. Something casual, something that doesn’t involve brain injury.”

She continues as though he has not spoken. “The rules are that you’re not going to do anything stupid, at least not while we’re talking You’re going to listen to us until we’re finished, and then it’s up to you. You can do anything you want. If you decide to ignore what we tell you, it’ll be your own fault. You can walk right out of here. We felt obliged to warn you, but we’re not your guardians.”

“I don’t need guardians.”

“You have no idea.” She holds up her right index finger. “Humor me for a second. Can you see this?”

“Of course.”

“Only one? No ghosting, no double vision?”

“No.”

“Follow it with your eyes.” She moves it slowly from side to side, and Poke tracks it. Then she moves it toward the bridge of his nose until his eyes cross, and she laughs. The merriness of the laugh makes him even angrier. “You’ll live. If we take off the cuffs, will you behave?”

“I’ll listen. After that, it’s anybody’s call.” The word “call” brings back Peachy’s anguished voice. “But I need my phone. Now.”

“Afterward,” she says. “And we’re not concerned with what you do after we talk.” She looks over her shoulder. “Or at least I’m not. Leung.”

A man peers into the circle of light above Poke’s head. A cigarette dangles from one corner of his mouth. “Feeling better?” His English is heavily accented.

“Who the hell are you ?”

“Say hi to Leung,” the young woman says. “He’s been following you. Actually, we’ve all been following you. If you didn’t spot us, it’s because we were lost in the crowd of other people who were following you. You want to tell us what that’s about?”

“Just get the cuffs, okay?”

The blanket is whisked back, and the man called Leung bends down and busies himself with Poke’s hands. Needles drill them as the circulation rushes back in. Poke gets both hands on the floor behind him and pushes himself to a sitting position.

It seems to be a garage, the floor irregularly spotted with pools of dark oil. The light is cast entirely by the two bulbs overhead, leaving the rest of the space in darkness. Either there are no windows or the sun has gone down. The van lurks in the gloom at the near end, ticking as the engine cools.

The back of his head hurts badly enough to be dented.

“Here’s a chair,” the girl says, pushing one forward. It’s a cheap folding chair, made of battered gray metal. “Get off that cold floor.”

His damp clothes feel heavy as he works himself up-first to his hands and knees and then, grasping the back of the chair, to a posture that makes him feel like Rumpelstiltskin. His head begins to spin a warning, and he eases himself sideways onto the chair without rising further.

“Better?” she asks.

“What about an aspirin?”

“Aspirin’s bad for you.” She gives him the almost-smile he had seen in the street.

“Aspirin is an anti-inflammatory,” Rafferty says. “Getting hit on the head is bad for you.”

“I’m no nurse. My job was to see whether you were still being followed and then to get you here. I’m essentially finished.”

“I thought you wanted to talk.”

“Not me,” she says. “ He wants to talk.”

“He.”

“Him.” She steps aside, and Poke sees an old man shuffle around the end of the van, his feet in cheap carpet slippers. The edge of the light hits his knees, and then, as he moves forward, his waist, and then his shoulders, and then his face, and Poke looks at the face twice before he launches himself from the chair, shaking off Leung’s hand, and does his level best to break his father’s nose.

Miaow’s ice cream is melting. For the past minute or two, she’s been remorselessly stirring it into a soup, following the movement of the spoon with her eyes as though she

expects some spectacular chemical reaction. The silence between her and Rose stretches uncomfortably, measured by the circular movement of the spoon.

The brown of the chocolate and the chemical pink of the strawberry make a particularly unpleasant-looking swirl. Rose raises her eyes from the bowl, telling herself she’s not really rolling them, and waits.

“Why him not talk me?” Miaow says at last, in the defensive pidgin she has been using since the conversation began.

Privately Rose thinks this is an excellent question. As happy as she has been with Rafferty since his proposal the previous evening, if he were here right now, she’d haul off and kick him in the shins. “He should have talked to you,” she says in Thai. “He made a mistake. Maybe he was nervous or something.”

Tired of making circles, Miaow scrabbles the spoon back and forth through the thinning slop in a hard, straight zigzag. Rose finds herself counting silently to ten.

The Haagen-Dazs on Silom, where they went to dodge the rain, is empty. The downpour had stopped practically the moment the door closed behind them, but Rose knew there was no escape, so she bought both of them a post-happybirthday ice cream. They had settled at a table, and the moment Rose picked up her spoon, Miaow had seen the ring.

For the past twenty minutes, Rose has been trying to explain to a girl of eight-no, make that nine-that the upcoming marriage is nothing for her to worry about.

“Everything will be the same, but better,” she says for the third time.

Miaow continues to slash through the spirals, giving Rose a first-class view of the knife-straight part she imposes on her hair.

Rose fights an impulse to grab the spoon. “It’s like when Poke told you he wanted to adopt you. You didn’t want that at first either.”

“Did too,” Miaow says in English.

Rose briefly toys with saying, Did not, but rejects it. There are conversations Miaow literally cannot lose, and that’s the opening gambit to one of them. “Miaow,” she says. “Poke and I love each other. We’re grown-ups. We should be married.”

“Not married before,” Miaow says. She is sticking with English because she knows it gives her an edge.

Rose sticks with Thai for the same reason. “Poke adopted you because he wanted you to really be his daughter. He’s marrying me so I can really be your mama.”

Miaow’s spoon stops. She regards the mess in her bowl as though she hopes an answer will float to the top. When she speaks, directly to her ice cream, Rose has to lean forward to hear her. What she says is, “You already my mama.”

In the eighteen months Rose has known her, Miaow has never said this before. Even as a mist springs directly from Rose’s heart to her eyes, her mind recognizes a master manipulator at work. Rose honed serious manipulative skills working in the bar, and she automatically awards Miaow a B-plus, even as she blinks away a tear. “But not really, ” she says. “Not one hundred percent. ”

The words fail to make a dent. Rose reaches over and takes the spoon from Miaow’s hand. The child’s eyes follow the spoon, and Rose realizes she might just have committed a tactical error, so she licks the spoon and hands it back, trying not to make a face at the mixture of flavors. She dips her own spoon into her scoop of coconut sherbet and holds it out. Miaow examines it as though it might contain tiny frogs, then opens her mouth. Rose feeds her, and as she tilts the spoon up, the thought breaks over her: My baby . “Miaow,” she says without thinking. “Do you know how much I love you?”