Timothy Hallinan: The Fear Artist

Backing away as fast as he can from the flaming house, he hears breaking glass, and Treasure suddenly goes so limp he thinks she might have passed out. He bounces on the balls of his feet once or twice to jostle her and says, “Treasure? Treasure?” but she’s dead weight.

He backs farther away, curling his other arm around her and taking her off his shoulder so he can look down at her face. Cradled in his arms, her fists clenched together at the center of her chest, she’s looking at the right side of the house, her mouth half open and her eyes as luminous as those of a nocturnal animal.

And her mouth closes, and she begins to hum again, that same broken, disjointed “Mmmmmm mmmmm mmmmmm,” tracing a melody as random as someone throwing stones at a keyboard. He looks away from her to follow her gaze, and something whines past him, and he hears the shot.

Bent half over, but holding the arm with the gun in it raised high, Murphy lumbers around the side of the house, firing twice more as he comes, but Rafferty can’t hear the shots over the scream that’s coming from Treasure, who shrills a single, glass-shattering note and somehow jerks herself upright, a convulsion seemingly involving every muscle in her body, and slips through Rafferty’s arms, running for the wall behind him. She stops a few feet from it, staring at the barrier, and her arms go straight into the air, fingers spread wide. Then she wheels around and splashes toward the still-opening gate.

Murphy fires again, but Rafferty is barely paying attention. At the edge of the driveway, Treasure stops, shoulders heaving, looking out at the world beyond the walls. Rafferty hears a ragged, almost-imploring shout from Murphy, and Treasure stiffens, turns, and emits that piercing unbroken scream again, and as she runs, it trails away behind her like a wake. At the last moment, Rafferty sees where she’s going and starts to follow, but Ming Li is suddenly there, with a foot hooked behind his, bringing him down into the mud. He watches, up on his elbows in the water, as Treasure runs directly toward the front door and through it, into the burning house.

Murphy stops his agonized shuffle, his mouth wide, the gun hand dangling down, and then he bellows “ Treasure! ” and breaks into a run. Seconds later he’s a dark silhouette against the flames in the hallway, and then Rafferty, up on his feet, feels a drop in air pressure as though the planet has taken a breath, and the flames increase in brilliance for a blink’s worth of time, and the house shudders and blows, sending pieces of burning wood and broken glass twenty and thirty feet into the air, deafening Rafferty and stunning him motionless as bits of fire arc lazily down through the limbs of the trees, and he sees the entire structure reflected upside down, the spirit house of the water gods afire on the surface of a lake.

For the first few miles, Neeni’s sobs supply the soundtrack. Every now and then, she says, “Baby baby baby baby.” She never says, Treasure .

Then the crying softens and gradually dies away, and Rafferty looks in his rearview mirror to see her lying on the backseat, her knees drawn up and her head in the maid’s-Hwa’s-lap. Hwa’s eyes are on his in the mirror.

Ming Li is sitting as close as she can get to the passenger door, hugging her knees. Her eyes are partly closed, and she seems to be memorizing the dashboard.

The rain has let up again, but water is inches deep in the streets, masking the potholes, and he has to go slowly to avoid mishap. He doesn’t think he could endure a mechanical breakdown right now; he has an image of himself disappearing screaming into the night, leaving all of them behind.

A tiny snore comes from the backseat. He looks in the mirror again and meets Hwa’s eyes.

“You like her,” he says. “At least you said you did.”

“She’s never hurt anybody.”

“She’s in for a rough time. Do you want to help her?”

No answer. Hwa turns and looks out the window. She says, “Help how?”

“Say yes and I’ll give you two thousand U.S. tonight, when we get where we’re going. Just for agreeing to try.”

“Help how?” Hwa says again.

“She needs to get over this, and she needs to get well. Tomorrow I’ll give you six thousand dollars, and you go out and find a nice two-bedroom apartment in the Silom area and rent it. Furnished, so you don’t have to waste a day shopping for furniture.”

“I like shopping for furniture.”

“Then you can look for it after you move in, replace things if you want, but you need to find something you can move into right away, because I don’t have room for you, and I think she needs to be someplace that will eventually feel like home. I’ll pay the rent and expenses and give you two thousand U.S. every month. And I’ll get you a doctor, a good doctor who’s a friend of mine, to help with her. She needs to get off the codeine. I’ll keep this up as long as he says she’s making progress and as long as I think she’s being taken care of. And the day the doctor tells me Neeni is over it, that she can live without it, I’ll give you fifty thousand dollars.”

Hwa strokes Neeni’s hair. Without looking up, she says, “You must be rich.”

“I’ve come into some money,” Rafferty says.

“Fifty thousand is a lot,” Hwa says. “Why don’t we see what happens first?”

“You’ll do it?”

“Why not?” Hwa says. “Poor thing. He took everything away from her. He took her out of her village, he took her away from her family, he took her daughter. Yes, I’ll help her.”

Rafferty says, “Thank you.”

For a few slow, waterlogged miles, he drives to the sound of Neeni’s snoring. He says, “She’s going to want a drink when she wakes up.”

“She’s going to want a drink every moment of the day for months,” Hwa says.

Rafferty makes the turn onto Silom, feeling the nearness of the apartment ease the tightness in his chest. To Ming Li he says, “What is it? What are you thinking about?”

“Vladimir,” she says.

Some of the strain immediately comes back. “Yeah. Me, too.”

“At first I thought he was just waiting for a chance to sell you out, but then he … he changed somehow, and I thought, well, maybe I was wrong.”

“He likes you,” Rafferty says. “He’s got an eye for talent. And it doesn’t hurt that you’re beautiful.”

“Whatever it was. I thought he was with us. But somebody told Murphy we were at his house, and I don’t know who else-”

“Oh,” Hwa says. “That was me. I did it.”

Ming Li turns to her. “How?”

“I was worried about Neeni,” she says. “I didn’t know what you really wanted.”

“The phone button,” Rafferty says.

“And I lied about it.” Hwa looks again at Rafferty in the rearview mirror. “I’m sorry.”

“No problem,” he says. “Keep taking care of her that well and everything will be fine.”

Ming Li pushes past him and stops, surveying the room. “God. No wonder you’ve been sleeping in hotels.”

“Oh, no,” Rafferty says, exhausted at the sight of the place. “I’d forgotten how bad it was. At least it doesn’t still stink of paint.” Feeling like he weighs a thousand pounds, he steps aside and lets Hwa in, leading a blinking, confused-looking Neeni by the hand. “Take her to the couch,” he says. His voice sounds ragged, and his throat is raw. “It’s the one thing you can get to. Beer?” he says to Ming Li without thinking, and then says, “Of course not.”

“Of course yes,” she says. “I’ve got it coming, after tonight.”

“As long as we’re breaking rules,” Rafferty says to Hwa, “do you think a drink would help her? We’ve got some Crown Royal someone gave us a few years ago, but I don’t think it spoils. And would you like something?”