The Fourth Watcher (23 page)

“Where are you eating?”

“McDonald's,” Chu says.

“You're a regular Yank.”

“They're all over China. I got used to the food.”

“Quarter Pounder or what?”

“Big Mac and fries. Is this an attempt at friendly conversation?”

“We're stuck with each other,” Rafferty says. “No sense in wasting testosterone. At least not until it's time for us to kill each other.”

“I suppose not,” Chu says. Then he says, “Actually, since we're being candid, I hate McDonald's. Everything tastes like it's fried in whale fat.”

“Then why are you there?”

“Takeout. Your little girl was hungry.”

Rafferty's heart seems to have leaped intact into his throat, where it's hanging on for dear life. He attempts to clear it away. When he's sure of his voice, he asks, “What did she want?”

“Chicken McNuggets and a large order of fries. And one of those chemical milk shakes.”

“What flavor?”

“Is this a quiz? Strawberry.”

“Pink,” Rafferty says. He hears the word as though from a great distance, and Arthit turns at the rasp in his voice.

Chu says, “Excuse me?”

“My girl,” Rafferty says. “She likes pink.”

“She's braver than she should be,” Chu says. “They both are. Don't take this as a threat, please. I would hate to have to hurt them.”

“We've covered this before.”

“Just reminding you. It's in your hands. I'll expect to hear from you at five.” The line goes dead. Rafferty lets the phone fall into his lap. He exhales so hard that the entire windshield fogs.

“Anything new?” Arthit says.

“Same old stuff. Death threats and a strawberry shake.” He picks up the cracked phone and closes it, opens it, and closes it again. “I can't actually
see
anything. This is like putting together a puzzle without a picture on it. All we can do is grab as many pieces as we can get our mitts on.”

Arthit puts a hand on the handle of his door. “So shall we grab another piece?”

“We shall,” Rafferty says. He pops his own door and slides out into warm rain. Arthit is already halfway to the second car, taking long strides and waving the two cops out. At the edge of his vision, Rafferty sees Ming Li and Leung fall into step with him. The two cops meet them beside their car. The plainclothes officer from the
tuk-tuk
comes up behind them.

“Front and back,” Arthit says, raising his voice over the sound of the rain. “Fast. In and straight up the stairs. Exactly”—he flips the watch around—“one minute from now. Nobody stays in sight of that window for more than a second or two.” To the plainclothes cop from the
tuk-tuk,
he says, “You get the door for us and stay there. Everybody got it?”

The cops nod. One of the two from the car is young enough to give Rafferty a twinge of paternal worry—wide, anxious eyes and not a line on his face. The other has skin like an old saddle and a burning cigarette cupped against the rain. His nameplate says
KOSIT.
He looks as anxious as someone waiting for a bus.

“Don't take him down unless your life depends on it,” Arthit says. He checks the watch again. “Forty seconds.
Go.
”

Kosit and the young cop take off at a run and slant to the right of the building; they're going to hit the rear entrance and remain on the first floor in case the Korean makes it down the stairs. Arthit slips his gun free, looks from Ming Li to Leung, and slaps Rafferty lightly on the shoulder, saying, “Now.”

The four of them round the corner, running full out, and the plainclothes cop angles across the street in front of them to get the door
open. Arthit pauses midstreet for a second, the others stumbling to a halt behind him as a car slashes through the standing water on the road, and then he's running again, up the steps and through the door, with the others a step behind.

The hallway is dirty and short. A single, cobwebbed forty-watt bulb dangles by a frayed wire at the foot of the stairs, swaying back and forth in the wind coming through the door. The stairs aren't carpeted, and Rafferty thinks,
Noise
. Arthit waves them to a halt as the back door opens and the other two cops come in, dripping. The swinging light makes their shadows ripple as though they're underwater. Arthit gestures for the older one to take a position at the front door, beside the cop who let them in. His eyes meet Rafferty's, and he jerks his head in the direction of the back door.

Rafferty shakes his head.

Arthit studies him for a moment, reading his resolve, and then points his index finger at Ming Li and flicks it toward the door. Ming Li does something that might be the first stage of a pout but cancels it and goes dutifully down the hall, the little gun dainty in her hand. The young cop looks at her, looks again, and gives her a nervous smile.

Arthit holds up three fingers, twice for emphasis, then folds them again. He raises his hand to show one, then two, and on
three,
he, Rafferty, and Leung charge up the stairs. At the top they turn right and sprint to the last door on the right. In unison, Arthit and Leung lift their right legs, and Arthit whispers, “Look away.” Then the two of them snap their legs forward and kick the door in. Arthit throws something inside and leaps back.

There is a blinding flash of light and a
whump,
and Rafferty sees a blur of movement inside, the big man throwing himself toward the window. The flash from the concussion grenade reveals nothing but the size of the room and the presence of the man, frozen by the flash in front of a cheap blue couch. Rafferty has no time to register anything else, other than the sweet, strident smell of cheap cologne, before Leung launches himself through the air and hits the man at the back of his knees. The Korean goes down so heavily the floor shakes, kicks back at Leung, and rolls away, coming partway up with something shiny in his hand, and time seems to slow as Rafferty sees the man—probably half blind from the flash of the grenade—bring the hand around toward
Arthit, silhouetted clearly in the doorway, and then the world erupts in a roar that should have blown the windows out.

But Leung has lashed out with a leg, knocking the big man's gun up, and the lighting fixture in the center of the ceiling explodes, throwing the room into darkness except for the rectangle of gray that defines the window and a yellowish fall of light through the door. A chair or something slams to the floor, and Rafferty sees movement as someone rises from the tangled knot that was Leung and the Korean, and the standing man—too big to be Leung—bends at the waist and charges, taking Rafferty up and into the air with a low shoulder to the gut. Rafferty has just enough time to slam his gun against the side of the man's head before he's tossed to the floor, thrown as easily as a feather pillow, and the man is most of the way to the open door when Arthit blocks it with his body, lowers the barrel of his gun, and fires twice at the man's legs. The Korean stumbles and lists to the left, but he keeps coming, and another shot bursts against Rafferty's eardrums, and suddenly Arthit is no longer standing in the doorway, and the man is almost through it, one hand clasping his left thigh. He grabs the doorframe and starts to pull himself through, and then there is something small and white in front of him. He does a surprised stutter-step, and Ming Li brings up the little gun and shoots him from a distance of three feet.

The Korean drops to one knee. Instantly Leung is on him, raking his eyes with clawed fingers, and as the man reflexively lifts his hands, Leung gets his own hand around the center of the gun above the trigger guard and twists violently. Even over the ringing in his ears, Rafferty can hear fingers break. The gun comes free. Leung puts both barrels—his and the Korean's—against the man's head, and everything goes still.

Except for Ming Li, slowly sinking to her knees in the hallway. Behind her the older cop, Kosit, is staring down, his gun dangling forgotten in his hand. Leung says, “Cuffs here,
now,
” and Kosit tears his eyes away, comes into the room, and secures the Korean's hands with flexible plastic cuffs, yanking them so tight that the Korean feels it even through the pain of his wounds, and grunts.

Rafferty crawls on all fours to the doorway. Ming Li throws him a single terrified glance and then begins again to pump with all her weight, her hands cupped and centered over Arthit's heart.

I
t's melted,” Miaow says accusingly.

“So what?” Chu has three pistols partly disassembled on the crate beside him, and metallic fumes of machine oil compete with the deep-fried smell of the chicken and fries. The cleaning rod in his right hand slides through the barrel of the gun in his left. The cop who'd been on guard sits sulking on another crate, halfway across the warehouse. His upper lip is split and so swollen it has lifted to reveal his teeth. Every few minutes he probes the broken one with his tongue and inhales sharply at the pain.

Chu pulls out the rod and studies the cloth it is wrapped in. Satisfied, he puts the gun down and picks up another. To Miaow he says, “Your father said you wanted strawberry because it's pink. It's still pink.”

“You talked to Poke?” Rose asks.

“We never stop talking,” Chu says, eyes on his work. “We should get a special rate from the cell-phone company.”

“How is he?”

“How would he be? He's worried.”

Miaow says, “He'll get you.”

Chu shakes his head but doesn't look up from the gun. “I doubt that. Compared to some of the people who have tried to get me, he's thin porridge.”

Rose takes one of the chicken nuggets and feeds it to Noi, who chews it slowly, her eyes closed. She has refused to look at Chu since the moment he broke the guard's tooth.

“Poke's not afraid of you,” Miaow says.

“Neither are you.” Chu sights down the barrel of the gun. “But being brave isn't the same thing as being smart.”

Miaow regards him for a moment and then dredges a piece of chicken through her milk shake and eats it. She slides her eyes to Rose, waiting for a reproof.

Giving the task all his attention, Chu serenely slides the rod into the barrel. His concentration is complete. He might be a doctor sterilizing his surgical instruments or a violinist tending to his strings. The door to the warehouse bangs open, and Pradya, the fat policeman, comes in. He's soaked to the skin, and his wet hair has been blown stiffly to the left. It looks like something has been dropped, at an acute angle, on his head. He has to put his back to the door and push to close it against the wind.

“Where have you been?” Chu says, irritated at the distraction. He pulls out the rod, glances at the cloth, and starts on the third gun.

Pradya wipes his face. “All over the place. We picked him up a few blocks from the apartment, and then he sat with some woman in a restaurant. After a while a girl went in and sat with them.”

“A girl?” Chu says. He is scraping at something on the trigger guard with the yellow fingernail on his right little finger, a nail so long it has begun to curve under.

“A Thai schoolgirl. Young, maybe seventeen. They were watching a bank across the street.”

Rose inhales sharply enough for Chu to hear her. He stops working on the gun.

“A schoolgirl?” Chu asks her. “What's he doing with a schoolgirl?”

“How would I know?” Rose says. “I'm here.”

Chu weighs the gun in his hand, but he is not thinking about the gun. “Is Sriyat still following them?”

“Yes,” Pradya says, “but it's hard. We had to do most of it with binoculars, from at least a block away. They're all keeping their eyes open.”

Chu turns his head an inch or two. He seems to be listening for something, perhaps in a corner of the warehouse. He says, “All?”

Pradya shifts his weight uncomfortably. “Rafferty, the girl, and a guy they hooked up with later.”

“Hooked up with where?” Chu glares at the cop and snaps his fingers. “This isn't a television serial. Tell me the fucking story. What are they
doing
?”

Pradya goes through it: the man from the bank, the Korean, the envelopes, the followers splitting up. He and Sriyat had split up, too. “I stayed with Rafferty, but Sriyat says the Korean guy met another guy from another bank. Same thing. They swapped envelopes, and after the Korean left, the girl followed him. The man with her grabbed the guy from the bank and took away the envelope. Then he got into a police car, with her husband”—he indicates Noi—“driving. Rafferty was in the car, too.”

Chu thinks for a moment. The gun comes to rest flat on his leg. “Banks,” he says. His eyes close and reopen, focused on something that isn't there. “Nothing to do with me.” Without looking down, he slides the automatic back and forth along his thigh, polishing it, as he studies the gloom in the corner. “But maybe Rafferty doesn't know that.”

After a moment Pradya says, “Whatever you say.”

Chu stops the polishing and sits still. He pushes his lower lip forward. “I don't like it. It must be important or he wouldn't be wasting time on it.”

Rose says, “I know what he's doing. It's not about you.”

Chu looks at her, the sharp-cut eyes hooded. Daring her to tell him a lie. “Go on.”

Rose tells him about the counterfeit money and the visit from Elson. “He's trying to help Peachy and me,” she says.

Chu leans back, tilts his head up, and studies the ceiling. When the words come, they are slow and dreamy, a thought spoken to the air. “And where did he get his help?”

Rose sits a bit straighter. “I don't know.”

Chu's gaze, when it strikes her, is as fast as a lash.
“Where did he get his help?”

“I told you, I don't—”

“Describe them,” Chu says to Pradya, his voice garrote tight. “The girl and the man. Describe them.”

Pradya closes his eyes for a better look. “The girl, like I said, about seventeen, Thai school uniform, Chinese-looking but got something about her.”

“That suggests she might be a
mix
,” Chu says. His voice could grate stone. He clears his throat violently and spits. “And the man is wiry, medium height, and very fast.”

Pradya nods, licks his lips, and nods again, more vigorously.

“Your husband has a snake for a mother,” Chu says. “He's
playing
with me.” In a single fluid motion, he gets to his feet, snatches up a magazine, and slaps it into the gun in his hand. The barrel of the gun is pointed at Rose's head. “I should kill you right now,” Chu says.

Miaow deliberately puts down her milk shake, stands, and takes two steps, placing herself between him and Rose.

“Good idea,” Chu says. “Save me a bullet.”

Rose puts a hand on Miaow's arm and pushes her aside. Miaow twists away and steps in front of her again. Rose steers her away again and says, “Not the child.”

Chu lets the gun go back and forth between them, and then he spits onto the floor. He turns and kicks the crate he's been sitting on. “Ahhhhhh,” he says. “He doesn't deserve you. Either of you.” His eyes drop to the gun in his hand, and he puts it on the crate, beside the others. “And what good would it do?” For a moment his body goes loose, his face slack. “The girl,” he says, as though to himself. He turns to Pradya. “Get back there. Do whatever you have to do. I don't care if you have to shoot people. Bring me that girl. And you,” he says to the one with the broken tooth. “Move these people. I want them out of here in an hour.”