Paying Back Jack (7 page)

“I want a .308 for city work.” Tracer hadn't discussed a backup rifle as part of the shopping list with Waters. The fine details were left to him and Jarrett to work out with Mooney.

Jarrett looked away from the stage. The ex-football player might have passed for a Samoan in the half-darkness of the bar. “How do we get the weapon?” Tracer smiled, shaking his head.

“He's got it worked out with Mooney.”

“Cobra Gold Mooney.”

“Mooney is Waters's man. Six months and he'll be working for LRAS.”

“Tell Waters I want a night scope, too.”

Tracer nodded. “I already did that. And a silencer. And a tripod. Twenty rounds should do it.”

“One shot, one kill,” said Jarrett.

Jarrett stared straight ahead, his eyes no longer focusing on the yings. He said nothing through two songs. This was Jarrett's way of thinking through his options and deciding there weren't any real ones on the table—or on the stage, for that matter, or just about anywhere one looked in the world. Tracer understood this about his partner. The man was giving himself some thinking time. Staring at the yings without looking at them, as if some Zen answer could be found in the way they moved onstage.

“He can find one, for sure?”

“They've come as part of Cobra Gold. Mooney delivers the rifle, and then three days later we do the job, return the rifle, and go back to Kabul. And everyone's happy.”

Jarrett nodded. “Who's the target?”

Tracer shrugged. “The asshole who murdered Casey's son a couple of years back.”

“I thought Casey'd taken care of that himself,” said Jarrett.

“Casey's working in Bangkok. He can't do something where he works.”

“We do that all the time,” said Jarrett.

“That's different. What we do in Baghdad, Kabul, or the other shitholes doesn't necessarily work in places like Bangkok. There are political considerations.”

“That sounds like Waters talking.”

Jarrett had nailed it straight through. Those had been Colonel Waters's words. Casey had been transferred to Bangkok a couple of years earlier. Everyone in Baghdad who knew Casey thought he'd kill the man who'd murdered his son. When the weeks drifted into months and the months into a year, it looked like Casey had gone soft and had become meek, Christian-like in his forgiveness. Casey had been assigned along with six other private security contractors to work in a prison in Baghdad. The transfer was a promotion and more money. Everyone who knew him, including Jarrett and Tracer, thought Casey had thrown himself into his work and was working his way through his son's death.

“Waters couldn't say much on the phone. He was in Bogotá.”

Jarrett shot him a frown.

“Hand on my heart,” said Tracer.

“Man, you ain't got no heart. Everyone who knows you knows that. And I thought he hated Colombia.”

“It ain't written anywhere they send you to the place you wanna go.”

That much Jarrett agreed with. Even legends like the Colonel had bosses who cut them orders on the basis of certain skills in the field. Waters once said he'd rather be surrounded by Taliban than a squad of MBAs. He worked for LRAS, but he wasn't the typical company man; he was a holdover from the old corporate culture, when veterans had run the management. Waters blamed himself for not having the right business skills to make the transition as a corporate team player. He said he'd wasted his time learning to speak fluent Spanish rather than balance sheets. It made him an asset in Latin America but a liability to the bottom line. Once during the Gulf War, Colonel Waters, then a captain, had told Tracer that his one regret was that he hadn't studied Swedish. Six-foot blue-eyed blondes with legs as long as the New Jersey Turnpike had a powerful pull on him.

WHO WAS THE WOMAN who fell to her death from the hotel? What was your relationship with her? How long have you known her? Why did she come to your room? Did you have a fight?

That was the string of questions asked by a couple of cops, though one officer did most of the talking. The interrogation started at the front desk of the hotel. It continued in the lobby, out into the street where they showed him the body, and back in his room. Maybe they thought they could find an inconsistency in his answers. They pounded away as if he were guilty of a crime. The main policeman interrogating Calvino spoke good English. He wrote notes as Calvino gave the same answers to the same questions he'd been asked over and over until his phone rang again. Colonel Pratt was on the line. It was his turn to ask the questions.

“Who was she, Vincent?” asked Colonel Pratt.

“She didn't tell me her name.”

“But you knew her?”

“She was lighting incense sticks in front of the spirit house outside the hotel when I arrived. A seagull startled her and she looked around and smiled. I smiled back. Does that sound like an intimate relationship?”

“Vincent, what happened is disturbing.”

“I'm not real happy about it either. I'm supposed to be relaxing, having fun. The idea was to keep away from Apichart's backup team.”

The thought had crossed Colonel Pratt's mind that Apichart might have had something to do with the woman falling off a balcony, but as hard as he tried, he couldn't make the connection work. Apichart would have had no idea where Calvino had gone. Only the General and Ratana had known the name of the hotel.

“I'll drive to Pattaya tomorrow morning.”

“Pratt, the cops are talking about putting me in jail. Someone whispered fifty thousand baht would keep me out.”

There was a moment of silence. Someone had put the squeeze on Calvino, and the Colonel took that as a direct slap in his face and in the General's as well. “Don't pay anyone anything,” he said.

“What happened has got nothing to do with Apichart and nothing to do with me,” Calvino said. “People fall off balconies all the time in Pattaya. You read the newspapers.” He looked around the room filled with uniformed cops.

“Those are depressed farangs, Vincent. Not young Thai women.”

The Colonel had a point. The ying Calvino had seen at the spirit house had been in her prime. She'd had everything to live for.

“I don't want to spend the night in jail. I wanna pay the fifty grand.”

Colonel Pratt hadn't had time to phone General Yosaporn about what had happened in Pattaya. The General's friend, after all, owned the hotel. He'd have to tell him before the owner phoned.

Ratana had warned Calvino about the danger of using a coffin to collect the rent, and now her words rang in his ears:
This is bad luck
. With the body count already at three, he was starting to doubt himself.

“You're not going to jail. Let me work on it,” said Pratt, ending the call. He had sounded weary, upset, and yet resigned to figuring out how to keep Calvino out of jail and in his room. It couldn't be the farang way; that never worked. It had to be a middle path, a compromise. Fifty thousand was a starting position, leaving room for negotiations. After questioning Calvino, they'd think he would understand that the figure was the opening bid. It was now Pratt's turn to negotiate a reduction, closer to the price reserved for Thais. But a farang, now and again, given the right connections, had ways of approaching the same results.

In the hours after the woman's death, Calvino's Pattaya vacation had ended with all the warning of a sunburn on an overcast day.
Sitting in his room, waiting for Pratt to make a deal, he was stuck between the world of freedom and the world of jail. None of the police had been able to decide what to do with him. That was a good sign; they were cautious, firm, and suspicious. After they'd found out General Yosaporn had personally paid for Calvino's room, their mood changed. The thermostat of their belligerence toward a farang started to drop. An hour later, one of the officers informed Calvino that he was to remain in his room, and a couple of police guards would be posted outside the door. “I wanna go out for a walk on the beach. I need some fresh air, you know what I'm saying?”

The senior officer shot him an angry look. “If I had my way you'd already be in jail.” He'd obviously heard that Calvino had turned down the request for 50,000 baht.

“No beach walk,” said Calvino, closing the door, resting his head against it, banging softly, once, twice, three times. Then he turned around and looked at the cops in his room. “Careful with that jacket,” he said, moving across the room. One of them was going through the pockets of his new jacket. The cop put it to his nose and made a face. “Smells of smoke.” He smelled it again. “And gas.”

This wasn't the time to explain how the sports jacket had taken on those smells. It wouldn't help his situation. If anything, the fifty grand would suddenly rise to a hundred grand. Instead Calvino decided to go on the offensive.

“What you're doing isn't kosher,” he said. They stared blankly at him. “It's illegal. You can't keep me under house arrest. You know what I'm saying? So if you would leave my room now, I'd like to drink whiskey and read my book.”

The cops yawned and went back to their own conversation, passing Calvino's jacket around for a sniff. One of the cops took out a hanky and blew his nose. He said he had an allergy to gas fumes. They'll be laying other charges, Calvino thought. Interfering in a powerful way with the tiny follicles lining the policeman's nose. He sneezed a couple of times, his face flushing red. He cursed and handed the jacket to another cop. The last place to make a stink was in Thailand; the Thais hated any smell that fell within their expansive definition of “bad,” and the constant tropical heat supplied a range of foul, decaying odors that often sent a Thai fainting or running. The last cop handed it to Calvino. He smelled his own jacket and then
put it on. “Smells okay to me. Maybe bad smells are a cultural thing,” he said. “Have I told you guys that I'd like you to leave so I can start my vacation? I can translate that into Thai if you want. But I think you've got the basic idea.”

He understood that while he wasn't free to leave his room, this was no small concession. Some creative, face-saving, promotion-preserving compromise was being made. It took about forty minutes before the senior cop came back into the room, smiling. That smile is a good thing, or it could be a good thing, Calvino thought. It means they got the deal together—or else they're going to get the fifty grand off me or lock me up. It never came to that. The final deal bore the earmarks of Colonel Pratt's influence; he would have phoned General Yosaporn as well as the commanding officer in Pattaya, an old friend from the academy—or the friend of a friend from the academy—and they would have worked out the compromise. The hotel owner would have called the commanding officer, and General Yosaporn would also have phoned his remaining friends in the police force.

The phone on the desk of the commanding officer in Pattaya would have rung off the hook as he heard from three or four high-ranking officers, a politician, a military general, an admiral, and maybe influential figures in the province. If he had graphed the strands of influence, he would have seen a spider's web with Calvino caught in the center. After the second or third call, the commanding officer would have got the message: Calvino wasn't just another farang. The police had to be careful.

Calvino figured the press would be all over the lobby and hotel grounds, interviewing people as they walked out of the elevators. The nude body of a young woman was guaranteed to keep viewers glued to the TV. In the morning, images of her crumpled body would be splashed on the front pages of the Thai newspapers. The Pattaya police would want to duck any political problems that might arise if they just let Calvino go. There was no denying that Calvino was a material witness, and with an election coming up, a couple of veteran politicians had been banging away on the problem of farangs. How farangs were committing crimes. The image of farangs—never lofty at the best of times—had plummeted with the recent arrest of a crop of foreign
pedophiles, con men, drunks, crazies, and dopeheads. Politicians sensed a chance to strike, an irresistible opportunity to pander to the worst instincts of voters. The cops had no stomach for crossing politicians this close to an election. Farangs were on a kind of probation, watched with suspicion, as if they might be secretly planning to skip out with containers of yings, corporate profits, rice, and gold. Many Thais assumed most farangs who lived in Thailand were up to no good; otherwise, why would they be in Thailand and not back in farangland?

Two witnesses on the ground—a motorcycle driver and a vendor on the beach—had said they'd seen Calvino at his railing as the woman had fallen from the building. That made him a suspect. After a few more questions the witnesses had convinced themselves that the farang on the balcony had had something to do with it. The cops told Calvino that there were witnesses who put him at the scene of the crime. Calvino told the cops once again that his room was below the scene of the crime. He'd looked over the balcony only after the woman had fallen from one of the rooms situated above his. They looked at him like they didn't believe him. He assumed that as the night wore on, the descriptions of the witnesses would become more and more detailed, and other witnesses would step forward and corroborate what the first two Thais had said.

It was a gathering storm. It's a good time, thought Calvino, for the fish to close his mouth, dive deep, and wait on the bottom until Colonel Pratt shows up in the morning. He sat in his chair, looking out at the sky and sea, thinking maybe it would have been better after all if he hadn't used the coffin to extract the rent money for General Yosaporn. The police stood in a semicircle around him. His back was to the balcony. If he wanted to do the right thing and join the woman below right then, he was being told, no one would stop him. A couple of the officers had spotted the case of whiskey and pulled out and examined the bottles.