Timothy Hallinan - The Fourth Watcher

“We’re almost there,” Ming Li says.

Rafferty shakes himself, the way he sometimes does when he wakes from a dream gone wrong. A dream Rose would want to hear every detail of, looking for the scraps of meaning that might help them avert disaster. The movement brings him back to himself, in a tuk-tuk, on a wet night, next to his new sister, in a world where disaster has already struck. He leans down to peer beneath the tuk-tuk’ s sloping roof. “Twice around,” he says. “I need to see if we’ve got watchers.”

“No one following!” Leung shouts over his shoulder.

“That’s not going to help if they’re already here. Do the block twice, like I said.”

“What now?” Ming Li says as Leung makes the turn.

“What now? Damned if I know.” His eyes are on the sidewalks. “But I think you should drop me and then get back to Frank. Talk it over with him, see what you come up with. What I’ve got barely qualifies as an idea.”

“Fine,” Ming Li says. “We’ll call you in a couple of hours.”

“Chu’s not going to give me any more time. Whatever the hell we’re doing, we need to be ready.”

“We’ve been ready for years,” Ming Li says. “Now we’re down to details.”

Rafferty says, “Frank did a good job with you.”

“He did some of it,” Ming Li says, watching the other sidewalk. “Some of it is talent.”

The money he grabbed from the closet and packed into the suitcase is stiff as starch, the greens and browns too green and brown, the whites too white, the paper too clean. It stacks in perfect rectangular towers, each bill flat enough to have been ironed.

In a quantity this large, it wouldn’t fool a blind man.

On the other hand, the money jammed into the canvas bag is soft, worn, dog-eared, soiled from use. The oil and grime from a thousand hands have given it a smudged patina like a layer of dirt on an old painting. It’s seen wallets, purses, bar spills, hot coffee, knife fights, crowded cash drawers. It smells of sweat and dirt and face powder. It has notes written on it: phone numbers, prayers, aimless chains of obscenity. It’s been exchanged for drinks, drugs, food, a dry room, a doctor’s care, sex, a lover’s gift, perhaps a murder or two. Hearts have been drawn here and there, stick figures, arrows, candles, teardrops, interlinking squares, the marginalia of idle minds.

In short, Rafferty thinks, it’s money . The stuff in the suitcase is printing.

The new bills in the suitcase are what the Korean was circulating. The bills in the canvas bag were taken from the banks by the tellers and then passed on in those manila envelopes.

Rafferty keeps seeing Arthit’s face, the colorlessness of Arthit’s face.

Halfway through a distracted count, he heaves a stack of bills across the room. They separate and flutter to the floor, covering the carpet and the coffee table. A wad with a rubber band around it lands on the hassock. He stares at it. It’s real money, taken from the envelopes the Korean grabbed from the tellers, and the rubber band compresses it in the center, leaving the ends loose and soft. It looks almost. . fluffy.

The paper-banded stacks of counterfeit look like bricks.

He thinks, Fluffy.

The word galvanizes him. This is something he believes he knows how to do. And then, in an instant, he sees the rest of it, or at least a possible sequence, as though, during the hour or more of paralysis, it’s been quietly assembling itself, waiting for him to notice. For a moment he sits perfectly still, staring at the money and seeing none of it, trying to sequence the stepping-stones that might lead them out of this cataclysm. Looking for the surprise, the wrong turn, the ankle breaker, the gate that won’t open, the twig that will snap in the night, the stone that’s poised over a hole a hundred feet deep.

He knows he can’t see it all. So small steps first. Things he knows how to do.

He goes to the kitchen and checks the cabinet beneath the sink, where they keep the laundry supplies. Straightening up, he realizes that the sound he just heard was his own laughter. He leaves the cabinet yawning open and goes to the living-room desk, where he takes Rose’s phone book out of the drawer she uses. He finds the numbers he wants and makes four short calls.

When he leaves the apartment, he leaves the door ajar. His helpers may arrive before he returns.

Rafferty covers the peephole with his thumb and then knocks again.

The door opens only two or three inches, and the chain is secured, but Rafferty’s kick yanks the entire assembly out of the wooden doorframe, and the door snaps back, cracking Elson on the forehead. Rafferty catches it on the rebound and pushes it open, and Elson retreats automatically, one hand pressed to his head. Rafferty follows him in and closes the door with his foot.

“My turn to visit,” he says. “Nice pj’s.”

Elson’s face is naked, defenseless, and even narrower without the rimless glasses. He hasn’t shaved since morning, and he is a man who should shave twice a day. The stubble holds shadows, accentuating the high, nervous bone structure of his face. He wears loose white pajamas in what appears to be light cotton, patterned with little blue clocks, a theme that is repeated on the buttons. He rubs his forehead and checks his fingers for blood. With the hand still in front of him, he says, “You’re looking at jail.”

“I’m looking at you,” Rafferty says. “I’m looking at someone who hasn’t done one thing right since he arrived in Bangkok. You’ve stumbled around like someone using a map that was printed on April Fools’ Day. You’ll be lucky if you don’t wind up on library patrol.”

Elson glances toward the low dresser, where his holstered gun sits next to his computer, and says, “Get out of here.” His lips have vanished completely, baring the thumb sucker’s dent in his front teeth.

Rafferty comes farther into the room, pushing into the man’s space and shifting to his right, toward the dresser. “Don’t like it much, do you? I didn’t either. There’s a difference, though. You came to cause me trouble. I came to save your ass.”

Elson seems to realize how he looks and gives the shirt of his pajamas a downward tug, straightening it as though that could turn it into something else. “I’m not going to engage in a dialogue with you, Rafferty. I came in the discharge of my lawful duty.”

“And you wrong-footed it, didn’t you? Chasing a couple of women who haven’t got fifty thousand baht in the bank. Grabbing the wrong teller out of the bank. Letting Petchara lead you around like a pony in a ring. Petchara’s crooked. I own inanimate objects that could have seen that. My fucking toaster could have seen it.”

“I’m calling security,” Elson says, taking a step toward the phone on the table between the beds.

“Wrong,” Rafferty says, and Elson glances back and stops, off balance, in midstride at the sight of the gun Rafferty has pulled from the tote bag hanging from his shoulder. It takes a quick little shuffle for Elson to remain upright, and he looks furious that it was necessary. “Here’s what you’re doing,” Rafferty says. “You’re sitting on the end of that bed. I’m sitting on this one. We’re going to talk, just a couple of Americans in a confusing foreign country. And I’m going to be generous, by way of an apology for what a jerk I’ve been. I’m going to show you mine first, and then you can decide whether you want to continue the conversation.”

Elson sits slowly, as though he thinks the bed might be wet. The bed is low and his legs are long, forcing his knees to fold in acute, storklike angles. He shifts his legs to the left for balance and starts to lean right, toward the table, then stops. He says, “I need my glasses.”