Jake Needham - Killing Plato

We passed the entrance to the Sheraton Grande and a well-manicured golf course appeared on our right. A conga line of middle-aged Japanese in funny clothes was making its way down a gently rolling fairway with a crowd of young Thai women trailing behind them. Some of the women carried the golfers’ heavy bags, while others carried brightly striped umbrellas to shade the Japanese from the sun.

“He misses her more than he would ever admit to you.” Mia spoke to the window rather than to me. “Zoe, I mean. His daughter.”

I said nothing.

“He wants to go home, Mr. Shepherd.” Mia turned from the window and fixed me with a stare so desolate I could not return it. “All he wants to do is to go home.”

There were many things I could ings I chave said, but none of them seemed worth the hurt they would no doubt inflict on this woman. So I tried to come up with something innocuous.

“Your husband has asked me to lodge a pardon application on his behalf, Mrs. Karsarkis, and I am considering it. But please understand I have not yet made any commitment to him.”

That sounded ridiculously tight-assed, and almost as soon as I had spoken I wished I had said nothing at all. Regardless, Mia just nodded as if that was what she had expected me to say, and then she went back to staring out the window.

We left the main highway, turned directly into the full glare of the midday sun, and followed a narrow, humpbacked road toward the rocky promontory where Amanpuri perched. I watched a column of smoke from a trash fire rise up in ripples so perfectly formed that they looked as if they had been painted on the blue background of the sky. A few hundred feet above the ground unseen air currents bent the smoke and spread it across the highway in front of us, a beige-colored cloud stuck to the earth on an otherwise cloudless day.

A motorcycle roared by. It was a big bike and noisy, although not knowing one kind of motorcycle from another the model didn’t register on me. All I could remember later was that it had been purple with a lot of chrome and that it had a steeply swept-back windshield with two huge rear-view mirrors sticking out from its sides.

The rider, like most motorcycle riders in Thailand, wore a helmet with an opaque visor that entirely obscured his features. He also wore jeans and a dark, nondescript jacket zipped up in front. It was one of those free jackets that companies gave to motorcycle taxi drivers for the advertising. Later, thinking back, I realized I had seen yellow lettering on the back of the jacket that said The Wall Street Journal Asia .

After passing us the bike pulled into the lane directly in front of the Jag and almost immediately started slowing down. Our driver tapped his brake and I saw Plaid Shirt’s shoulders stiffen as he sat up straighter, his eyes on the motorcycle. I glanced at Mia, but she was still staring out the side window. She was either entirely unaware of the motorcycle or perhaps just disinterested in it.

I bent forward and looked through the gap between Plaid Shirt and the driver. The motorcycle slowed down some more and our driver blipped his horn. The cyclist turned his head back toward us pointing to the bike’s engine, and for a moment I saw the leaping chrome Jaguar at the tip of the car’s hood reflected in the black mirror of his visor. Our driver lifted both hands from the steering wheel, wheeling them impatiently, a gesture that struck me for some reason as more Italian than Irish.

The motorcycle coughed and choked, then all of a sudden caught again with a loud growl and the cyclist roared away. Barely fifty yards later, it stalled again and the rider turned sharply as if he were trying to get clear of us and off the road to the shoulder. But when he was squarely in front of us, the big bike came to an abrupt halt.

The rider kicked at the starter as we rolled toward him, his helmeted head rotating back and forth between his bike and our Jaguar. Our driver cursed and braked sharply, and he banged the horn again. I saw Plaid Shirt and the driver exchange a look. I couldn’t see what kind of a look it was, but I could guess.

I leaned further forward, lowering my head and keeping my voice down in order not to alarm Mia.

“Don’t stop,” I said.

“Huh?” The driver glanced back at me.

“They use motorcycles here,” I said.

“Who does?” Plaid Shirt asked.

“Hired gunmen. Hitters. They do business from bikes. They…”

But my words were lost in the roar of another powerful motorcycle closing on the Jaguar from behind.

At the same instant we heard it coming, the motorcyclist in front of us started his bike and in one smooth movement turned it directly toward us. He jerked a weapon from inside his jacket- I think it was a MAC-10, but I couldn’t be sure — and pointed it directly into the windshield. The other bike slid to a stop next to the rear window where Mia sat.

Realizing now what was happening, both Plaid Shirt and the driver produced handguns from somewhere. Before they could bring them into play, the motorcyclist in front of us fired two brief bursts from his rifle. The first blew out the Jaguar’s windscreen. The second caught both Plaid Shirt and the driver in the faces, shattering their skulls like two eggshells. A fine mist of blood and tissue filled the car, swirling through it as if a tiny storm of pink rain had just passed over us.

In his death convulsions, the driver must have pushed the Jaguar’s accelerator to the floor because the car leaped forward, smashing straight into the surprised motorcyclist in front of us. The heavy car plowed over the man and his bike, grinding them both into the road. In a shower of sparks, the gunman, his motorcycle, and the heavy Jaguar grated along the asphalt until the whole mass crashed off the road and down into a narrow drainage ditch, pinning the gunman and his wildly roaring bike underneath the weight of the engine block. The impact dislodged the driver’s foot from the accelerator and the pile of wreckage stopped there, tilting nose-down into the ditch.

The force of smashing into the shooter and then toppling down into the drainage ditch threw me forward and to the left, leaving me more in the front seat than the back. I could feel a sting as if a knife had slashed my cheek and the unmistakable warm wetness of blood. I knew I hadn’t been hit. I must have caught a ricochet from somewhere.

The front passenger door hung open and instinctively I hauled myself further forward to get to it. Twisting around to pull my legs under me, I looked back at Mia who was strangely silent. Then I saw why. The second motorcyclist must have fired, too, although I didn’t remember hearing any gunfire other than from the front.

Mia sat almost straight upright in spite of the list of the car, but there was a neat crescent of entry wounds stitched high into her chest. Her mouth hung open and her eyes stared through the empty space where the car’s side window had been not so very long before.

Struggling for purchase in the blood soaking Plaid Shirt’s body, I grunted as something dug into my stomach. Pushing my hand under me, I felt a heavy automatic, a.45 that either Plaid Shirt or the driver had dropped. I wrapped my hand around its grip.

I slid downward and toward the open door, skidding through the blood as if I were belly down on ice. My elbow hit the ground first, then my shoulder, but I held onto the.45 and rolled, pulling my legs free of the car and curling them under me.

The Jaguar’s sudden lurch forward had caught the second motorcyclist by surprise, but now he roared up on the side of the car opposite me and raked it efficiently with short bursts. Glass shattered and popped and bullets pinged into the metal skin of the car with a sound like bells gone mad.lls gone When the shooter’s magazine was empty, a silence fell that was more terrible than the noise of the crash, worse even than the glass and metal of the Jaguar ripping open in a storm of bullets.