Timothy Hallinan - The Fourth Watcher

“And you said. .?”

“Oh, well. This time I didn’t have the heart to say no. He was terrified. He’d had it in his pocket for hours, patting it every fifteen seconds like he was hoping it had disappeared. I had to take pity on him. As Miaow says, he tries so hard.”

“They don’t deserve us,” Noi says. “Except when they do.”

“The first time I knew he was going to ask, I did everything I could to chase him away, short of shooting him,” Rose says. “I was awful. I talked for hours. I trotted out my mother and my father, their money problems, my infinite number of younger sisters, my past, other men- anything I could think of to scare him off. It’s no wonder he looked so frightened.”

“Has it changed the way you feel?”

Without thinking about it, Rose runs her fingers over the three stones. “The ring is us,” she says. “It’s a picture of us, Poke’s way of trying to make the three of us permanent. It makes me feel-I guess the word is ‘fierce.’ It makes me believe I’d do anything to protect him and Miaow.” She does not add what she thinks, which is, The way you protect Arthit.

“We all know that children need protection,” Noi says, “but we’re supposed to keep it a secret that men do.” She feels the draft again and rubs her neck. “Well,” she says, “come here.”

Noi opens her arms, and Rose gets up and embraces her. Noi’s nose barely comes to her breastbone, but the heat flows from her in waves, and Rose’s breath catches, and she suddenly realizes she is crying.

“It’s not so terrible,” Noi says, patting her. And then she starts to laugh, and the laugh turns into a sob, and the two women stand there hugging each other and weeping until Noi says, “This is silly,” and dries her eyes on the lapel of the awful green robe. “What a pair,” she says, turning back to the stove. “Do you like it strong?”

“Strong enough to dissolve the cup,” Rose says. “Has Poke said anything to Arthit?”

“If Arthit knows, he hasn’t said a word to me. I’ve barely seen him since this morning,” Noi adds, pouring.

“I thought maybe he just told you.” Rose feels a vague disappointment and realizes she should know better.

“ Just told me? When?” Noi stirs the cup, which contains a liquid black enough to be a petroleum derivative.

“Fifteen, twenty minutes ago. When he came home.”

Noi turns to her and hands her the cup, which Rose half drains. “Arthit came home?”

“I didn’t see him, but I heard him as I was waking up. He was walking in the hall.”

Noi feels a prickling low in her back and then, again, the draft on her neck, and she turns to look across the kitchen at the back door. It is ajar.

Suddenly the heat inside her is gone, and she is freezing. She goes to the door and tries to pull it closed.

Instead it is pulled outward.

The man standing there-tall, thin, with an enormous mole on his cheek-gives her a grandfatherly smile and comes in as though he’s been invited.

Miaow has been curled up in bed, listening to the women talking. Their voices give her a warm, comfortable feeling, softer than the quilt Rose threw over her. Then, abruptly, the talk stops. She turns her head to the open door and hears something new: quick movement, a gasp, a man’s voice.

It takes her a moment to get off the bed, slowly enough for it not to creak, and to throw the quilt over it. She slips through the door and tiptoes down the hall. The hallway is dim, but the kitchen is a warm, buttery yellow, and she can see them.

Four men. Two of them holding Noi. And then Rose comes into sight, at a run, and grabs a teapot from the stove and hurls it at the nearest man. Hot water-Miaow can see it steam-arcs from the pot and splashes on the man as the teapot hits him in the chest, and the man cries out. Suddenly there are guns, and Rose is backing away.

Miaow steps back. No one has looked toward her. Moving slowly, afraid to take her eyes off them, she reaches the room where she slept, where she thinks her cell phone might be.

But when she looks, it’s not there.

She hears a burst of protest from Rose, followed by a slap and then silence. Miaow is looking everywhere in the room for something, anything, she can use as a weapon, and then she hears voices again. The men are moving through the house now, talking in low voices. The house is not big; it’s only a matter of moments before they find her. The fear she feels is a familiar companion from her years on the street, the same fear she felt in back alleys when she was hiding from one of the men who liked to hurt children.

The important thing, she knows, is to think clearly.

They are in the living room now. One man is giving orders. He mentions a place that Miaow knows, because Rafferty took her there, and Miaow makes herself memorize the name, afraid the fear will chase it out of her mind. If they are in the living room, how much time does she have? Her mental map of the house is vague. She was very drowsy when they carried her in. She is sure, though, there are only one or two rooms to go. She forces herself to continue to survey the room without rushing, looking for anything that might be useful. On the bookshelf, she sees it. It’s not a weapon, but she can use it.

A children’s book, full of bright animals and easy words in big print, the kind of thing Rafferty used to buy her. She grabs it, snatches a pen from the desk, and creeps into the closet. The closet will give her an extra minute.

She has to leave something for Poke. It can’t be anything the men can read.

If only she had her phone.

The idea sweeps over her. She closes her eyes for a moment, trying to visualize. As she hears them coming nearer, she rips a page out of the book and begins to write, just numbers. She writes them fast, almost without thinking.

By the time they open the closet door and she looks up at them, she has shoved the book and the pen into the far corner of the closet and folded the note into a tight square in her palm. There are two of them.

Miaow keeps her face calm. At least she can deny them the satisfaction of her fear.

The tall man with the mole says something to the fat man behind him, and the fat man bends down and picks her up as though she were a bagful of happybirthday presents, slinging her over his shoulder with her arms trailing down his back.

The man with the mole is walking ahead of them, so he can’t see. Miaow holds her breath and drops the square of paper.

"Sounds to me like you’ve got a partner,” Arthit is saying. He is a terrible driver even when he’s paying attention. When he drives and talks at the same time, Rafferty would gener

ally prefer to be running alongside the car.

The wheels stray blithely over the centerline in the road.

“Forget it,” Rafferty says, looking for the inevitable oncoming truck. “You’ve got to trust a partner.”

“You’re rigid,” Arthit says. “I think it’s an American trait.”

“Would you like it if I suddenly started to list Thai traits?”

“But listen to yourself.” Arthit launches into a left turn from the right-hand lane, and Rafferty hears a peeved little “Hallelujah Chorus” of brakes and horns behind them. “You haven’t seen the man in more than twenty years. He could be completely different by now, all the way to his core. And you’re behaving like he’s been gone fifteen minutes, like he just got back from a trip to the store. Like he hasn’t even changed his shirt.”

“What he’s told me about how he spent that twenty years isn’t very reassuring.”

“That’s exactly why he can help you,” Arthit says. He accelerates out of sheer enthusiasm. “He’s right. The triads and the North Koreans do business. When they’re not trying to kill each other. Who knows? Maybe this is a chance for you to put your relationship back together.”