Harlan Wolff - Bangkok Rules

Anthony Inman had been CIA in Vietnam so there were most likely drugs somewhere in his past as well. He had made his fortune torturing people and then executing them if they couldn’t afford to pay him and his cronies. He must have enjoyed it because he took it up as a hobby and then made it part of his sex life. He had been involved in various criminal activities since his arrival in Thailand. Gun running Carl was aware of and he could guess at the rest. Inman had become Carl’s nemesis through serendipity and his own foolishness. Carl’s enemy was the worst foreigner in Thailand. He had never done things by halves.

Carl retrieved his old Blackberry from the bedroom and took it out to the deck where he placed it on the table and lit a cigar. After an hour of pondering the pungent smoke and the communication device he stubbed out the cigar and turned the Blackberry on. He watched it booting and downloading messages and emails. Then having confirmed it was working properly he took it into the bedroom and put it on the bedside table.

Carl went book hunting again and selected Burmese Days by George Orwell. He went back to the bedroom and lay down on the bed, having taken the gun from the small of his back and placed it on the bedside table. After an hour of reading he realized how little South-East Asia had changed in the last hundred years. Orwell’s world of drunken expatriates and venal bureaucrats rang lots of bells. He put the book on the side table and did something very uncharacteristic — he took a nap.

The Cat and The Rat came after midnight pushing their motorcycle the last half-kilometre so as not to be heard. They hid the bike in the bushes not far from the large wooden gate and paused to take a smoky hit of speed burnt on tin foil. Since having to leave the army they had developed a taste for yah bah, crazy pills in English, and had both developed the sunken cheeks and vacant eyes of the habitual user. They checked their automatic pistols and military knives before climbing over the gate into the darkness.

They both landed quietly on the driveway, legs bent like springs as they had been taught by a stern sergeant major prior to being pushed out of an airplane during their military training. Having read the terrain they both went left into the orchard and hid amongst its trees while their eyes became acclimatized to the pitch black provided by the canopy of branches and leaves that kept out the light from the moon and the stars.

In the distance they were relieved to see lights on at the house telling them that he was there. They slowly made their way through the orchard. When they got close to the house they saw there was an open lawn between them and the side of the house. This open area was well lit by the moon and the lights coming from the windows of the house.

“We must cross it,” the Cat told the Rat.

“Together and quickly,” the Rat whispered.

They both moved rapidly carrying the top half of their bodies low until they reached the teak house. They stood with their backs to the house listening for any tell-tale sound that would mean they had been seen crossing the open lawn. No sound came.

“Look how this farang lives, like a prince. I will enjoy killing him,” the Rat whispered in the Cat’s ear. The Cat smiled.

They made their way slowly around the house to the back where the pond was and slid along the wall under the deck to the back door, which they were pleased to find was open. The Cat looked through the crack at the side of the door and signalled that Carl wasn’t downstairs. They entered the house with the stealth that had become their second nature. After checking there was nobody in the kitchen they slowly began to creep up the wooden stairs.

The second floor was well lit and there was a half-finished whiskey bottle and an empty glass on a round table at the centre of the landing between the three bedroom doors. Only one of the bedrooms had lights on but they quietly checked the two dark bedrooms as they had been trained. Having confirmed they were empty they took up positions on each side of the occupied bedroom door.

They communicated by hand signals then opened the door and went in together, one high one low, with guns drawn as they had been taught. The room was empty. There was the Blackberry with its signal that had led them to the house and an open book lying face down on the bedside table and there were clothes strewn on the floor but no Carl. The Cat and The Rat sat on the bed, guns casually on their laps but pointed at the door, and evaluated their situation.

“Do you think he’s in the garden?” the Cat asked the Rat.

“We would have seen or heard him.”

“What do you think is going on?” the Cat asked.

“Who knows what these farangs do?”

“Let’s get out of here and kill him on the street tomorrow when he goes out.”

“Do we have enough stuff for a stakeout?”

“I have six pills.”

“OK. Then we will kill him tomorrow in daylight. Maybe the ghosts are protecting him here and that is why we can’t see him.”

“That is probably it. Only a stupid farang would live in a haunted house.”

Under their dark green military combat jackets and T-shirts they were both covered in the religious black ink tattoos that they believed protected them from all of the dangers of their chosen profession, the most important two of which were ghosts and bullets. The tattoos ran from their waists to their necks both front and back and had taken years of enduring pain from hand-tapped needles to complete. Their protective tattoos were the reason they had reluctantly agreed to enter the haunted house that had been made famous on television.

They slowly retraced their steps back down through the house and across the lawn to the orchard. They sat for a while and watched the house for any movement but there wasn’t any so they made their way through the orchard and climbed back over the gate.

“Where’re the pills?” the Rat asked. “I hate ghosts.”

“In the bike. I’ll get one for you.”

The Cat went to the bushes where they had stashed the bike and Carl walked out from the dense foliage and shot him in the chest. Carl kept walking forward firing at the Rat. He knew he wasn’t a great shot so he made sure he got closer every time he fired. He saw two out of three bullets hit him in the middle of his body and saw him drop like a stone. When he turned around he saw that the Cat was still alive, breathing bubbling red foam but trying to stand up. He walked back to where the Cat was trying to use the bike to pull himself up from the ground.

“Who are you? They said you were an ordinary person. How come you shot us?”

Carl put the gun to his head and said, “I’m very ordinary until people start killing my friends.” Then he shot him with his last bullet, point blank, and saw the brains vomited out of the back of his head.

Carl had spent the late evening digging a hole in the far corner of the orchard by the beam from a torch. It was back-breaking work and he hurt all over from it. He opened the gate and dragged the bodies one at a time and dumped them in the hole. Then he went and got the torch that he had placed on the ground behind their motorcycle, where he had been waiting for them to give up the hunt and do what was inevitable and return to their means of transportation. He closed the gate and walked back to the corner of the orchard and buried them by torchlight. Two hours later he patted down the earth and carried the shovel back to the house. He needed a drink badly but for a change the drink he craved was water.

He sat under the deck watching the swans and the fireflies and drank a litter of cold water straight from the bottle. The gun was on the round marble table beside him and he picked it up and threw it in the pond, much to the disapproval of the two swans. He had no more bullets and so the pistol was of no further use to him. The colonel had said it was untraceable so it would make no difference if it was found one day and linked to the bodies in the grave in the corner of the orchard.