Timothy Hallinan - The Fourth Watcher

Rafferty’s cell phone rings.

All three heads swivel toward the end of the hall, and Rafferty lets the door slip closed, already halfway up the first flight of stairs, the shoes in his hand hampering him as he punches at the phone to turn it off-it’s his father calling, he sees. He takes the steps three at a time, as lightly as possible, hearing the door on his landing open and the sharp whisper of commands ricocheting up the stairwell. They don’t know whether he’s gone up or down; they’ll have to split up, so the only question is whether one or two of them will be coming after him. The one thing he’s halfway sure of is that they won’t send the man with the knife on his own; the man in charge will want a gun in both directions.

Rafferty lives on the eighth floor of twelve. The door to the roof is kept bolted from inside as a burglary precaution, but there’s no way to know whether the padlock on the bolt will be hanging open, as it often is, or whether Mrs. Song, his landlady, will have secured it on her rounds. That gives him four floors to maneuver in, and he doesn’t know a soul on any of them.

He hears shoes echoing on the stairs, but there’s no way to sort them out, to see how many are going up or down. A grunt from below, something clattering, metal on metal: a ring on the handrail or a gun in someone’s hand. He can hear labored breathing-the fat man coming up? Then there’s a burst of argument from below: Something’s wrong.

He doesn’t remember having passed the tenth floor, but he tries the door to the eleventh, hoping to distract them by slipping out and calling for the elevator, and realizes what they were arguing about. The door is locked. It can be opened only from the inside.

That almost certainly means they’re all locked, including the door to the roof. The only open door will be the one leading into the lobby. He’s in a vertical dead end.

The feet below him have slowed, their owner probably listening to the discussion farther down the stairs: two voices, which means they decided that Rafferty was trying to get down to the street, and sent the weight in that direction. Only one coming after him, then. One with a gun.

On the other hand, Rafferty thinks, maybe not, registering the heft of his own gun in his hand. He sights the Glock down the stairs, aiming for the concrete wall at a thirty-degree angle, hoping for a nice, lethal series of caroms, and pulls the trigger.

A shout of surprise from the man just below him, then a sharp command from farther down. The shot is ringing in his ears, but he can hear the voices over it.

He fires again, twice, aiming obliquely at the wall. The bullets spang off it and hit several other walls before one of them bangs into the metal stairs with a sound like the Bell at the Center of the World.

The man below him gives a panicky grunt, then calls a question, but Rafferty can’t make out the words. Then there is silence.

He leans back against the wall, waiting, watching the stairs. If it was the fat man he heard panting, his pursuer is armed only with a knife. He has no doubt he can gut-shoot the man; it’s a big gut, and its owner will have a whole flight of stairs to climb between the time he comes into shooting range and the point at which he’ll be able to do Rafferty any harm. That’ll leave two, both carrying automatics.

Not the best odds.

He edges his way across the landing, tasting salt in his mouth. He’s bitten through his lower lip. When he can see the corner of the stairs, the few inches that will give him the most time to aim, he raises the Glock in both hands and waits.

Nothing.

Then a scuffle of movement, fast, and he feels the muscles in his legs loosen in panic, and he jams his back against the wall for support, but no one appears on the stairs below him, no fat man with a knife, no one ducking into view for a quick look. Just feet on the stairs.

Going down.

Months later, when Rafferty looks back on the three days that followed their abandonment of the apartment, what he will remember is the blur of movement, the weight of exhaustion, and the smell of rain. Bits and pieces of what happened will stay with him, hard and flashbulb bright, sharp-edged and fragmentary as reflections in bits of a broken mirror.

Snapshots in a loose pile, random and unsequenced.

Maybe, he will think, it is better that he remembers it that way. Better he doesn’t have to carry with him the fear and the fury, the desperation and the moments of soul-sinking hopelessness when he knew for a certainty that everything he cared about in the world was about to be destroyed, scattered, irretrievably lost.

He doesn’t remember the call he placed to Arthit after his shots chased the three intruders away, but he retains a vivid mental image of the blinking cherry lights on the police cars, four of them, that Arthit dispatched to the basement parking area beneath his building. Cars that took him in one direction and Rose, with Miaow bundled in her arms, in another, the two cars without passengers screeching up the driveway and vanishing aimlessly into the night. He wasn’t there to see it, but he knows that the car carrying Miaow and Rose disappeared into the parking lot of Arthit’s police station. Five minutes later three cars came out again, each taking a different direction. When the driver of the car with Rose and Miaow in it had done enough figure eights to be satisfied that any possible watchers were following the other cars, he took them to Arthit’s house, where Noi let them in, and she and Rose put Miaow to bed.

Rose said it took more than an hour, with both her and Noi sitting at Miaow’s bedside, for the child to fall asleep.

Rafferty remembers very clearly how he felt when Rose told him that. He wanted, slowly and creatively, to kill Arnold Prettyman.

Another detail: the pouches of weariness beneath Arthit’s eyes, shaded a poisonous green by the fluorescent lights bouncing off the walls in the interrogation room where he and Rafferty talked after Rose and Miaow had been safely tucked away. The room is painted that peculiar shade of spoiled pea soup that’s been sold by the millions of gallons to government institutions around the world. Rafferty, whose mind is searching desperately for something neutral to focus on for a moment, finds himself wondering what the salesman’s pitch might possibly be: “It starts ugly and gets worse”?

“He was terrified,” Rafferty says.

Arthit slides a big cop shoe over the scuffed linoleum, producing a gritty sound that makes Rafferty’s teeth itch. “You don’t actually know that, do you? He was a medium-level spook, Poke, delusions of grandeur aside. They’re good actors. Their critics kill them if they’re not convincing.”

“No,” Rafferty says. “He was sweating like a pig.”

“Do pigs sweat?” This is the kind of thing that interests Arthit.

Rafferty makes a show of pulling out his notebook. “That’s a fascinating question, Arthit, one I plan to look into as soon as I have the time.” He writes it down in large letters.

“Curiosity is an essential part of the good policeman’s armament,” Arthit says sententiously, and Rafferty realizes that his friend is trying to calm him. “Almost as important as a strong bladder.”

“So yes, I believe him. I think he was frightened enough to sell me.”

Arthit closes his eyes. He is clearly exhausted. “Before we go shoot him through the head, run it past me again. Just the high points.”

Rafferty begins to check off his fingers, starting with his thumb. “My sainted father emerges from the mists of time-”

“A coelacanth dredged from the depths,” Arthit suggests through a yawn. “The alluvial ancestor of the pangolin.”