Рич Ларсон - Tomorrow Factory - Collected Fiction

“The eyecam?” Dorian demanded, trying to twist away. No go.

“She call this big motherfucker, he take it out my eye,” Nahm groaned, mascara finally starting to leak down her cheeks in inky trails. “She gets mad, she go. He says he will call the police so I tell him you have money.”

“I don’t have money,” Dorian said reflexively, looking at the guard.

“Bullshit.” Nahm’s eyes were wide and desperate. “I know you have money.”

Dorian looked around the bar, licking his lips. He’d picked it intentionally. A collection of steroid-bulky expats were cradling pints in the back, watching the situation with increasing interest. If he played ignorant right now, they looked both drunk and patriotic enough to intervene on behalf of a fellow Englishman. Nobody liked it when the locals stopped smiling.

“His cousin is police,” Nahm said, winnowing on the edge of the sob. “He says if I don’t pay he put me in the jail.”

Dorian picked up his glass and finished it; the sweat pooling in his palms nearly made it slip out of his grip. He tried to think. If Carrow had left in a hurry, that meant the insurance cam he’d hidden was still there in the hotel room. The fact she’d left furious only confirmed how valuable the footage was.

If he wanted to get back into that room before some overzealous autocleaner wiped the cam off the wall, he needed to defuse things.

“Okay, fuck,” Dorian said. “Okay. I’ll come.” He gave a glance toward the back table. “Nothing to worry about, lads. Just a bit of a… lover’s spat.”

One of the men rubbed his bristly chin and raised his pint in Dorian’s general direction. The others ignored him. As he let himself be steered out the door, the bar chirped goodbye in Thai and then English. Nahm followed behind, pinching the torn fabric of her shirt together. Her bare feet slapped on the tile. She was biting her lip, rubbing absently at the smeared gloss.

“Sorry I fuck up,” she said miserably. Outside, the night air was warm and stank of a broken sewer line. Dorian fixed his eyes on the neon green sign of the hotel across the way. The sooner he had this dealt with, the sooner he could get the cam.

“Me too,” Dorian said, but he searched for her free hand in the dark and gave it what he figured was a comforting squeeze.

She looked down at their interlaced hands, then back up, brow furrowed. “You should have said, though. You should have said, Nahm, don’t let her see a mirror.”

Dorian took his hand back. The guard ushered them into the side alley, stopping underneath a graffitied Dokemon. Dorian crossed his arms.

“Alright,” he said. “How much does he want? And if it’s cash, we need a machine.”

“No cash,” the guard said, brandishing a phone still slick from the plastic wrap. “I do Bank.”

“Of course you do,” Dorian said. “So how much, shitface?”

“Five million Baht.”

Dorian’s exaggerated guffaw accidentally landed a speck of spit on the guard’s shoulder, but the man didn’t seem to notice and Dorian didn’t feel keen to point it out.

“Who do you think I am, the fucking king?” he demanded instead.

In reply, the guard thumbed a number into his phone. “I call cousin,” he said, seizing Nahm’s wrist. “Your ladyboy will go to jail, maybe you, too.”

Nahm gave a low groan again. Dorian made a few mental calculations. He had just over a million Banked, and the footage from the hotel had to be worth triple that, even if it wasn’t a full encounter. He would still come out of this in the black. The last thing Dorian needed was police showing up. And he didn’t like the idea of Nahm sobbing in some filthy lock-up, either.

“Half a million,” Dorian said. “All I got.”

The guard’s ringtone bleated into the night air. He shook his shaved head. Nahm started cursing at him in Thai.

Dorian clenched his jaw. “A million,” he snapped. “I can show it to you. It’s really all I’ve got.”

The guard stared at him, black eyes gleaming in the blurry orange streetlight. The ringtone sounded again. Then, just as the click and a guttural hallo answered, he thumbed his phone off.

“Show me.”

Dorian dug out his tablet and drained his account while the guard watched, dumping all of it to a specified address and waiting the thirty seconds for transaction confirmation. Nahm shifted nervously from foot to foot, mascara-streaked face bleached by the glowing screen, until it finally went through with an electronic chime. Dorian’s stomach churned at the sight of the zeroes blinking in his Bank. He reminded himself it was temporary. Very, very temporary.

Once the transaction was through, the guard bustled out of the alley without so much as a korpun krap , leaving Dorian alone with Nahm. He was formulating the best way to get back into the hotel room without running into the guard again when she threw her arms around his neck and pulled him into a furious bruising kiss. Her fingers on his scalp and her tongue in his mouth made it difficult.

“Thank you,” she panted. “For not letting him call.” She hooked her thumb into the catch of Dorian’s trousers, giving him her smeared smile. “No champagne. But…”

With her right hand working his cock, he nearly didn’t feel her left slipping something into his pocket. He clamped over it on reflex. Nahm looked vaguely sheepish as the sound of a sputtering motor approached.

“I still am working on my hands,” she said, wriggling her fingers out of his grip, leaving a small cold cylinder in their place. “Bye.” She stepped away as a battered scooter whined its way into the alley, sliding to a halt in front of them. Dorian watched Nahm climb on to straddle a helmeted rider with a cartoon snake on one thick forearm. He lost his half-chub.

As the scooter darted back out into traffic, Dorian looked down at the insurance cam in his palm and grimaced.

It took another oversized bottle of beer before he could bring himself to watch the cam footage. Finally, slouched protectively over the table, he plugged the cam into his tablet and fast-forwarded through the empty hotel room until the door opened. Nahm glided inside on her pencil-thin heels, but instead of Alexis Carrow coming in behind her, it was the security guard, furtively checking the hallway before locking the door.

And instead of fucking, they sat on the edge of the bed and had a fairly business-like discussion in Thai. At one point Nahm departed for the bathroom and returned with the ziplock in hand. Dorian narrowed his eyes as she tossed it casually to her partner in crime, who stuffed it into a black duffel bag. The man paused, gesticulating at the bed and walls, then, with Nahm’s approval, dug a scanner bar out of the duffel.

Dorian fast-forwarded through an impressively thorough search until the cam was spotted, plucked off the wall, and carried back to Nahm. She flashed a very un-vapid smile into the lens. The screen went black for a moment, then cleared again in the bathroom, pointing towards the mirror where Nahm was now painting a bruise under her eye.

Dorian swilled beer in his mouth, letting the carbonation sting his tongue while he listened to Nahm explain, in her roundabout way, how her “little” brother had caught him running a scam in a bar where he bounced. How Dorian had drunkenly bragged about his takings. How Nahm had shopped photos from Alexis Carrow’s vacation in Malaysia six months ago and slipped the fake news report into the mirror for him to watch.

Her brother, working as a valet at the Emerald Palace, had gotten the imposing black ute out of the garage for a quick spin. She’d worked on her Cockney accent for a few weeks and done up a voice synthesizer. And from there, Dorian realized his overactive imagination had done the rest of the work.