Timothy Hallinan - The Queen of Patpong

Horner's friend, John.

Rafferty throws forty baht at the driver, says, "Go away." He steps into traffic with his arm upraised and his palm down. A motorcycle taxi swerves sharply, barely missing him. Before the bike is fully stopped, Rafferty passes the driver a hundred baht, picks Miaow up-not even feeling her weight-and plops her onto the backseat, facing back. He takes her hands and puts them behind her on the grab bar between her and the driver's seat, and says, "Face this way. If you see anything you shouldn't see, any car or bike that's back there too long, have him take you to Arthit at the Lumphini police station. Got it?"

Miaow nods, her eyes on the opposite sidewalk. Rafferty slaps the driver's helmet and says, "Take her to Soi Pipat, unless she tells you to go to Lumphini. As fast as you can." The teenager on the bike looks down at the bill, shoves it into his shirt pocket, and jams the throttle. The bike does a little wheelie and lurches into traffic.

Rafferty dives into traffic himself, pushing his way across the street, trying to get there before John disappears.

He jumps when it becomes inescapably clear that he can't possibly run fast enough, and that the truck driver has no intention of slowing. His leap carries him to the center island, the truck's wind on the back of his neck and traffic screaming by in front of him and behind him, and he stutter-steps to keep from pitching face-first onto the pavement. When he's got his forward momentum under control, he stands there gasping carbon monoxide and heat from the pavement, and he checks the far sidewalk. Fifteen yards to the right, an old man is down on his knees and elbows on the sidewalk, crumpled like a swatted spider above a spill of groceries. A knot of Samaritans is beginning to form around him, and one man is shouting up the street, hurling curses after John.

Who has to be running. Rafferty lets his eyes roam right, and there he is, about two-thirds of the way down the boulevard to Soi 10: John, hauling ass at a good clip, running effortlessly, as though it were something he could do all day. Rafferty checks the traffic and plunges into the stream of vehicles, zigzagging through the moving maze to the curb and then loping along in the street, right at the edge, jumping up onto the sidewalk whenever a car comes too close. He's gaining on John, who looks to be in much better shape but is forcing his way through the inevitable Sukhumvit pedestrian throng.

On the other side of the boulevard, the side Rafferty just left, the vendors have already built their brightly lighted obstacle course, selling flick knives, pornography, Buddha images, and brass knuckles, the everyday Bangkok mix of veneration and violence. John obviously chose this side of the road, which is relatively vendor-free, in case he had to run, since it's impossible to maintain even a brisk walk on the other side. So he'd thought he might have to run. Or maybe he'd set it up so he would have to run and so Rafferty would chase along after him, a good little lemming, into whatever snare Horner has prepared.

But what's the alternative? Rafferty picks up his pace.

Ahead of him, John bulls his way to the curb and steps into the street, looking left-an American's most dangerous Bangkok mistake-and just barely misses getting run down by a motorcycle, which swerves around him with only inches to spare. John does a little "can't stop" dance, windmilling his arms and turning his head the other way to see what's going to kill him, but he catches sight of Rafferty before his head has whipped all the way around, and the sight makes him pause just long enough for another bike to tear by, the driver giving him a gravelly horn. Then he looks in the correct direction, assesses the traffic, and dives in.

He's not even breathing hard. Where Rafferty feels as though the asphalt is jumping up to meet him, jamming his joints and making his teeth click like castanets, John seems to glide, running beside a car occasionally to get the speed he needs to slip between it and the one behind, and then he's made it to the median divider, which has a thigh-high fence running down the center of it. He vaults the fence effortlessly, and a horn screams in Rafferty's ear, moving up the scale as the source approaches in a lethal-sounding Doppler effect, and something clips his elbow-a Jeep, he sees, as it speeds past-and leaves him cradling an arm that's suddenly gone numb, not a good sign, and as he plows toward the divider he cups the elbow in his hand and feels something wet and warm.

Also not a good sign.

Well, sure it's blood-what did he expect? — but there's no time to stop and survey the damage now, because John is off the divider, running with the traffic instead of through it, sticking to the edge of the divider and heading for Soi 9 and the lower numbers beyond. Rafferty gets to the island without knowing how he did it and runs on his side of it, watching John and leaving to the oncoming drivers the challenge of not running over him. He gets a lot of horns and some shouts, but everyone manages to avoid damaging their paint jobs, and Rafferty is feeling a burning under his lungs by the time John angles off to his right and into traffic, heading for the far side of the street.

And the numbness in his arm is wearing off. It hurts significantly.

But there's nothing he can do about it, and he speeds up. John will have to slow for the vendors' stands, but Rafferty continues his accelerated plod on his side of the road divider as John charts a course on toward the booths. John's made another Bangkok duffer's mistake, though, because he doesn't know, until his ignorance almost kills him, that traffic in the curbside lane of Sukhumvit goes in the opposite direction from all the other traffic on that side of Sukhumvit, and a taxi misses by a couple of inches the opportunity to spread him over the pavement. John stumbles into the rear of a stand and nearly goes down.

And Rafferty's up on the divider, clearing the low fence without difficulty, figuring that John's misstep has got to be good for five or ten yards. But the other man is already up and lengthening his stride. Rafferty figures he's lucky if he gained ten feet.

And now he has to keep up.

The knot under his heart and the cramp in his side remind him that he hasn't been going to the gym, but he discovers he can forget the cramp and the knot in his chest if he just concentrates on his arm, which hurts like hell. He risks a glance down and sees lots of blood running along the underside of his forearm and making a red octopus over the back of his hand. For a moment his head goes kind of bubbly and light and the day seems to brighten at the edges.

Well, there isn't time to faint, so he concentrates on his breathing-suck big gulps of air in, empty his lungs completely on the out breath-and he feels the weight returning to his body, and he registers again the solidity of the street beneath his feet. The elbow hurts like a newly orphaned son of a bitch, and he focuses on the long train of pain running up his arm and uses it to push him forward.

He stumbles along for two more blocks, his breath in tatters and the clot of pain beneath his heart gradually narrowing into something focused and hot. Just as he thinks he'll never catch the man, he sees John charge the curb and head to his right, into Soi 7.

Rafferty knows Soi 7 from his earliest days in Bangkok, pre-Rose, when he occasionally browsed the city's meat markets for temporary companionship. He's at the mouth of the soi less than a minute after John entered it.

But there's no John in sight. Rafferty stands there gasping at the day, while he orients himself. Just behind the first row of buildings and shops, an alley angles off to the left, leading into a warren of little streets that are perfect for getting lost in. Directly ahead the soi stretches into a straightaway, and John's not in it. To the immediate right is a large outdoor restaurant. A couple of billiards bars face the street through darkened windows, one on each side of the soi, and halfway down the block on the left is the Beer Garden.