Timothy Hallinan - The Fourth Watcher

“He’s got a broken arm,” Rafferty says.

“That’s a terrible shame,” Kosit says, grabbing it. Chu emits a high-pitched shriek as Kosit twists the arm behind him and fastens the cuffs.

“Jesus,” Elson says, looking around. “We’ve got to pick up this money.”

Kosit is still bent over Chu, and Rafferty tugs his sleeve. “Get some cops into Arthit’s room,” he says. He nudges Chu with the tip of his shoe. “This murderous old shit has sent some guys after him. And choose your men wisely, because the thugs he sent are cops.”

Kosit gives Chu a look that does not suggest that the coming interrogation will be gentle. Then he moves a few feet away and pulls out his cell phone.

Elson shoves a hand under Rafferty’s nose. There are eight or nine red stones in his palm, and his brow is wrinkled. “What the hell are these?”

“They’re rubies, and they’re all over the place,” Rafferty says. “And just to keep things straight, they’re not counterfeit and they belong to my father.”

For a second, Elson is wearing his old face. “How does your father come to have a bucket of rubies?”

“Same as Peachy,” Rafferty says. “He won them in a horse race.”

In the middle of the wettest, warmest tangle of arms, legs, and hearts of his entire life, Rafferty is barely aware of the torrent of Thai coming from Miaow, perhaps two hundred

words a minute, far too fast for him to catch more than a phrase or a name or two: Ping, Rose, milk shake, tooth, gun . All he can do is hold on, Rose on his right and Miaow on his left, but now they’re a circle, and so Miaow is, as always, in the middle. Where she needs to be.

The circle opens to absorb Fon and Lek, both of them crying like children, and closes again. With the rain hammering down, the five of them squeeze together even more tightly, the two half-naked women no longer feeling the cold, and then the arms open a second time, and there is someone there who feels new, someone who smells new to Rafferty’s heightened senses, and they wrap themselves around Ming Li. The sky cracks, a fork of lightning fingering its way down, followed by a sound like someone crumpling iron.

With the thunder, Poke feels Rose straighten, remove her arm from his shoulder, and pull away. He looks at her. With her other arm still around Miaow, she is gazing beyond him. Rafferty turns his head to see Frank. His father stands sideways to the group, not even sheltering from the rain. He faces back down the alley between the warehouses, where it all happened.

Something warm fills Rafferty’s chest, and suddenly there are words in his mouth. And then he looks again at his father’s profile, so familiar and so strange, a face he had thought was permanently turned away, and he can’t say them. He swallows, so hard it feels as though he is forcing the words down.

Rose says, “Mr. Rafferty?”

Frank turns, and Rose raises the arm that had been around Rafferty, inviting him in. Frank stands there, not moving, until Rafferty steps aside, closer to Fon, expanding the space between him and Rose. Rafferty lifts his arm exactly as Rose has, the space between them wide and welcoming, and he hears something catch and break in Ming Li’s throat. Slowly, like a man approaching a door he thinks will be locked, Frank joins the circle. It closes around him.

The car is even more crowded on the way out: Fon sits in Lek’s lap and Ming Li in Frank’s. Miaow has spread herself across both Rafferty’s and Rose’s laps, dead weight against them. She fell asleep the moment the car door slammed shut.

Leung is at the wheel. Noi is slumped against the front passenger door, next to Frank. Rafferty can hear her breath whistling in her throat.

With a last look back, Leung puts the car in gear and heads for the gates.

The silence in the car is a kind of warmth, a comforting insulation that makes the events of the last hour seem very distant, perhaps not even real. What’s real now is a car jammed with people, bunched up against each other as though by choice, the steam of breath on window glass, the walls of the warehouses as they slide by in the headlights.

Frank suddenly sits upright and looks back, and Rafferty cranes his neck around, expecting the nightmare to reemerge: men with guns, Chu free somehow, looming out of the darkness with his slicker flapping around him, but he sees nothing. And then Frank begins to laugh.

“What?” Ming Li asks. “What is it?”

“Nothing important,” Frank says, and then he laughs again. “I forgot my rubies.”

He has been underground a long time. Stones push down on his chest. Some of them have been sharpened to points. Every time he breathes, he has to push the stones up with

his chest to make room for the air. The air smells surprisingly of linoleum, alcohol, something unidentifiable that’s as sweet and heavy as syrup, and, floating on top of all the other smells, a razor-sharp note of fresh linen.

The light comes closer. It seems to be finding its way by touch, spreading pale tendrils in all directions: forward, left and right, up and down, but always moving toward him. He waits, pushing up the stones with every half breath, watching the light extend itself toward him, now not so much smoke as a shining vine. When the vine reaches him, it will wrap itself around him, put down microscopic roots, fill him with light. Once he is charged with light, feels it surging tidally through his body until he is radiant with it, he will be able to lift the stones.

The bum-BUM noise has increased in frequency, faster now, and then faster still, until it begins to vibrate inside him, not unpleasantly but with the urgency of an indecipherable message. Bum-BUM, he thinks, pairs; what’s so important about pairs? Pairs of drumbeats, pairs of breaths, pairs of people, pairs of numbers.

Pairs of numbers?

Something dims the light. Whatever it is, it’s not between him and the light; it seems to be behind it somehow, throwing a shadow that travels down the vine like dirty water in a clear stream, and as the light thins and clouds, the stones feel heavier and sharper, and they grate against one another, a sand-gritty sound, less like stones than like. . what? A room, he sees a room, and it’s a terrible shade of green. It, too, smells of linoleum. Someone is with him, someone who doesn’t like the sound of a shoe scraping over dirty-

A shoe. On linoleum.

Then the vine brightens again, blooming with light, and he opens one eye, just a crack, narrow as a blind drawn against the massed brightness of the day, to see a world of white. Close to him, only a foot or two away, is a white shape, white without outlines but brighter than the white beyond it, and it is moving. Moving parallel to him, away from his feet and toward his head, and he hears the scraping sound again, and then a whisper.

There is a second figure, this one brown, a brown he knows very well. A brown that makes him think for a second or half a second that he is looking at himself; he is out of his own body and looking at it as it moves across this white room, following the figure in white. He closes the eye, but the urgency of the tom-tom sound warns him to open it again, and he forces the lid up. The light floods into him and strengthens him, and he can focus.

A hospital room. White but for a darker rectangle where black is in the slow act of giving itself over to blue, with a note of orange bleeding upward, warming it from below. A window. Dawn? What dawn? How long has-

A doctor, dressed in white. Masked in white. Behind him a Bangkok policeman. Dawn through the window, the sharp pain of the stones on his chest, the smells, the sound of shoes on linoleum, a brilliantly clear sudden memory of a dark room, a big man, some kind of enormous, rib-caving punch to the chest, a slow fall. A girl in white.