Timothy Hallinan - The Fourth Watcher

Rose takes one of the chicken nuggets and feeds it to Noi, who chews it slowly, her eyes closed. She has refused to look at Chu since the moment he broke the guard’s tooth.

“Poke’s not afraid of you,” Miaow says.

“Neither are you.” Chu sights down the barrel of the gun. “But being brave isn’t the same thing as being smart.”

Miaow regards him for a moment and then dredges a piece of chicken through her milk shake and eats it. She slides her eyes to Rose, waiting for a reproof.

Giving the task all his attention, Chu serenely slides the rod into the barrel. His concentration is complete. He might be a doctor sterilizing his surgical instruments or a violinist tending to his strings. The door to the warehouse bangs open, and Pradya, the fat policeman, comes in. He’s soaked to the skin, and his wet hair has been blown stiffly to the left. It looks like something has been dropped, at an acute angle, on his head. He has to put his back to the door and push to close it against the wind.

“Where have you been?” Chu says, irritated at the distraction. He pulls out the rod, glances at the cloth, and starts on the third gun.

Pradya wipes his face. “All over the place. We picked him up a few blocks from the apartment, and then he sat with some woman in a restaurant. After a while a girl went in and sat with them.”

“A girl?” Chu says. He is scraping at something on the trigger guard with the yellow fingernail on his right little finger, a nail so long it has begun to curve under.

“A Thai schoolgirl. Young, maybe seventeen. They were watching a bank across the street.”

Rose inhales sharply enough for Chu to hear her. He stops working on the gun.

“A schoolgirl?” Chu asks her. “What’s he doing with a schoolgirl?”

“How would I know?” Rose says. “I’m here.”

Chu weighs the gun in his hand, but he is not thinking about the gun. “Is Sriyat still following them?”

“Yes,” Pradya says, “but it’s hard. We had to do most of it with binoculars, from at least a block away. They’re all keeping their eyes open.”

Chu turns his head an inch or two. He seems to be listening for something, perhaps in a corner of the warehouse. He says, “All?”

Pradya shifts his weight uncomfortably. “Rafferty, the girl, and a guy they hooked up with later.”

“Hooked up with where?” Chu glares at the cop and snaps his fingers. “This isn’t a television serial. Tell me the fucking story. What are they doing ?”

Pradya goes through it: the man from the bank, the Korean, the envelopes, the followers splitting up. He and Sriyat had split up, too. “I stayed with Rafferty, but Sriyat says the Korean guy met another guy from another bank. Same thing. They swapped envelopes, and after the Korean left, the girl followed him. The man with her grabbed the guy from the bank and took away the envelope. Then he got into a police car, with her husband”-he indicates Noi-“driving. Rafferty was in the car, too.”

Chu thinks for a moment. The gun comes to rest flat on his leg. “Banks,” he says. His eyes close and reopen, focused on something that isn’t there. “Nothing to do with me.” Without looking down, he slides the automatic back and forth along his thigh, polishing it, as he studies the gloom in the corner. “But maybe Rafferty doesn’t know that.”

After a moment Pradya says, “Whatever you say.”

Chu stops the polishing and sits still. He pushes his lower lip forward. “I don’t like it. It must be important or he wouldn’t be wasting time on it.”

Rose says, “I know what he’s doing. It’s not about you.”

Chu looks at her, the sharp-cut eyes hooded. Daring her to tell him a lie. “Go on.”

Rose tells him about the counterfeit money and the visit from Elson. “He’s trying to help Peachy and me,” she says.

Chu leans back, tilts his head up, and studies the ceiling. When the words come, they are slow and dreamy, a thought spoken to the air. “And where did he get his help?”

Rose sits a bit straighter. “I don’t know.”

Chu’s gaze, when it strikes her, is as fast as a lash. “Where did he get his help?”

“I told you, I don’t-”

“Describe them,” Chu says to Pradya, his voice garrote tight. “The girl and the man. Describe them.”

Pradya closes his eyes for a better look. “The girl, like I said, about seventeen, Thai school uniform, Chinese-looking but got something about her.”

“That suggests she might be a mix ,” Chu says. His voice could grate stone. He clears his throat violently and spits. “And the man is wiry, medium height, and very fast.”

Pradya nods, licks his lips, and nods again, more vigorously.

“Your husband has a snake for a mother,” Chu says. “He’s playing with me.” In a single fluid motion, he gets to his feet, snatches up a magazine, and slaps it into the gun in his hand. The barrel of the gun is pointed at Rose’s head. “I should kill you right now,” Chu says.

Miaow deliberately puts down her milk shake, stands, and takes two steps, placing herself between him and Rose.

“Good idea,” Chu says. “Save me a bullet.”

Rose puts a hand on Miaow’s arm and pushes her aside. Miaow twists away and steps in front of her again. Rose steers her away again and says, “Not the child.”

Chu lets the gun go back and forth between them, and then he spits onto the floor. He turns and kicks the crate he’s been sitting on. “Ahhhhhh,” he says. “He doesn’t deserve you. Either of you.” His eyes drop to the gun in his hand, and he puts it on the crate, beside the others. “And what good would it do?” For a moment his body goes loose, his face slack. “The girl,” he says, as though to himself. He turns to Pradya. “Get back there. Do whatever you have to do. I don’t care if you have to shoot people. Bring me that girl. And you,” he says to the one with the broken tooth. “Move these people. I want them out of here in an hour.”

The mask is clear plastic, more terrible because it hides nothing. It cups Arthit’s nose, his slack mouth, and his chin. A transparent tube runs into it, supplying oxygen; one of

the medical technicians had carefully stubbed out his cigarette before turning the valve on the tank he had wheeled up behind him. The banging of the tank against the stairs is the first sound Rafferty can remember since the shot from Ming Li’s gun that put the Korean down. The ten or twelve minutes between the time he saw Arthit sprawled on the hallway floor and the bumpy progress of the tank up the stairs seem to have passed in complete silence.

Rafferty, collapsed heavily on the couch, can’t look at Arthit’s paper-white face, can’t look at the mask. A pink froth of blood speckles the inner surface. It looks like Arthit chewed a pencil eraser and spit it out.

“The lung,” says the medical tech who is holding the mask in place. He lifts one of Arthit’s eyelids, peers under it, and lets it drop. “The bullet hit the lung. Probably took a bounce off a rib. No exit wound, so it’s still in there somewhere. Maybe a.22, not enough velocity for a pass-through.”

To Rafferty it seems that the tech is speaking very slowly. Everything that is happening in the tight knot of people gathered around Arthit seems to take an excruciatingly long time. He lowers his eyes again until he is looking at the suitcase between his knees. The suitcase is safe to look at.

From Rafferty’s left, the older cop, Kosit, says, “It’s a.22.” Kosit has the Korean’s gun wrapped in a handkerchief.