THE GIRL IN THE WINDOW (The Inspector Samuel Tay Novels Book 4) (31 page)

No, that didn’t make any sense. If he called out August’s troops, they would get Suparman, he had no doubt they would, but Suparman would still kill Linda. Suparman wasn’t going to turn her loose just because a bunch of armed men showed up. He must have anticipated already that might happen and he had to be prepared for it.

Tay could only look at this one way: he was responsible for Linda being tied to that chair and he had to get her out of that chair unharmed. Whatever the risk to him. Whatever it might cost him. It was as simple as that. The only choices he could consider were ones that made that possible.

Which meant he was going. And he was going alone.

Anyway, what did he have to lose? Everybody he had ever been close to was already dead: his father, his mother, Robbie Kang. It was a short list, but they had all left him. He was at the front of the line now. His turn to leave would come soon enough. Why did it matter exactly when it came?

Tay knew he could make it to Joo Chiat Avenue in thirty minutes, a little more if traffic was bad. He ran for the elevator.

He would figure out what to do when he got there while he was driving.

Probably.

Down in the garage where they kept the pool vehicles, Tay found a fast response car that had been left for repairs and not yet returned to New Phoenix Park. It was a white Toyota Altis equipped with lights and siren.

Unlike most cars imported to Singapore, fast response cars had no speed governor, which made the fast response car exactly the right vehicle for the job. Tay was not a particularly good driver, but he had long ago discovered the faster he went the less that seemed to matter.

It took Tay fifteen minutes to get to Joo Chiat Avenue.

When he reached the general area, he cut the siren and lights and pulled to the curb to take a closer look at the map on his telephone. Joo Chiat Avenue and Joo Chiat Place formed a rectangular cul-de-sac in front of Telok Kurau Park. Both of the streets dead-ended into the park, but a narrow alleyway that ran along the front edge of the park connected the two streets and formed the base of the rectangle.

Tay punched in the house number he got from the CID operations center. Linda’s house was right at the end of the street. It was just across the alleyway from the Telok Kurau Park.

He switched to Google Street View and took a look around.

Joo Chiat Avenue and Joo Chiat Place were both narrow streets that appeared to carry very little traffic since they didn’t go through to anywhere. Linda’s house was the last unit on the end of a group of two-story row houses set back about twenty feet off the road. There must have been at least a dozen separate houses, but they were all joined in a straight line by common walls and a common red-tiled roof.

The houses were small and most had whitewashed front walls and narrow casement windows on both floors. Fences separated front parking areas from the houses on both sides and gates separated them from the road. The fences and gates were mostly made of open iron railings in various styles and provided no privacy for the houses. Worse, from Tay’s point of view, they exposed anyone on the street to full view from inside the house.

Telok Kurau Park was fairly large, but it didn’t amount to much. Some clumps of scrubby trees and a little scruffy grass were about all it offered. On the opposite side of the park from Joo Chiat Avenue was some kind of canal or drainage ditch. Tay didn’t recall having seen it before so he wasn’t sure what it really was, but it looked fairly wide on the map. Nothing in the area crossed it other than a single pedestrian bridge. Suparman had chosen well. Vehicles could only approach Linda’s house from one direction.

Tay was momentarily stumped. He could hardly drive up and park right out front of Linda’s house. A fast response car with POLICE painted in blue on both sides would announce his presence long before he wanted it announced. So what to do?

He took a closer look at the park. That was a possibility. He could leave the car somewhere and approach the house on foot across the park. That would make his appearance about as stealthly as he could hope for it to be.

He worked out a route on the map he could drive to get to the other side of the park, one that would keep the fast response car out of sight of Linda’s house, and then he pulled away from the curb.

Lor Telok Kurau was a residential roadway that ran along the south side of Telok Kurau Park all the way down to the canal. Tay drove to the end and stopped. The canal turned out to be a twenty-foot wide stream with cemented walls and a chain-link fence on both sides. Other than the water being a surprisingly rich and cooling shade of blue, it looked like a miniature version of the Singapore River.

The park was walled with an ornamental iron fence painted in a shade of green that was apparently meant to blend in with its surroundings, but the park’s vegetation wasn’t up to the challenge. There were several small groves of twenty or thirty foot gum trees, although most of the park was bare other than for some scruffy looking grass burned brown by the relentless Singapore sun. Here and there small trees and bushes had been planted in what looked like an effort to increase the density of the vegetation, but the effort had clearly been a failure.

Tay turned the car around and drove away from the canal until he came to an entrance to the park. He pulled the wheels of the car up on the sidewalk and got out.

He followed a brick walkway through a break in the iron fence and into a stand of gum trees that sheltered a tiny playground. Two red-painted slides, a yellow swing set, and a green teeter-totter were arranged in the shade of the trees and all of them were empty. When he walked through the trees, he found himself looking straight at the end wall of Linda’s house no more than a hundred feet in front of him.

The wall was completely exposed to Singapore’s blistering sun so the white paint was washed out and yellowed. It looked more like a bad case of jaundice than a coat of paint. There were only two windows, one on the bottom floor and one on the top, and they were both small and covered with drapes or shades.

There wasn’t much open space in Singapore and Tay couldn’t imagine why a house right next to a park wouldn’t have big windows through which the view could be enjoyed, but he was glad this one didn’t. At least now he had found an inconspicuous way to approach the house. He just didn’t have a clue what he was going to do when he got there.

Tay stepped back into the trees, went over to the yellow swing set, and sat down in one of the swings. It hung very low and he had to hold his feet straight out in front of him to keep them from dragging on the ground. Without thinking, he began to push with his heels and he drifted back and forth in the swing while he considered what to do.

If he simply knocked on the front door and went inside, Suparman would surely shoot him and then shoot Linda. That made no sense at all. Linda would still be dead and then he would be dead as well. What would that accomplish? On the other hand, staging some kind of an assault on the house made just as little sense as walking up and knocking on the door. Suparman would no doubt shoot Linda then, too.

Tay glanced around him to make certain he was still alone, and then he lifted his shirt and slid his Smith & Wesson .38 into his lap. He opened the cylinder, made sure it was fully loaded, and snapped it shut again. He had five rounds. He wasn’t going do much assaulting with that, was he? As lousy a shot as he was, he wasn’t going to do much of anything with five rounds. He pushed his old .38 back into its holster and smoothed his shirt down over it.

Tay sat swinging gently back and forth and turning the problem over in his mind. He was missing something here. He could feel it. He just couldn’t figure out what it was.

What was Suparman trying to accomplish?

The answer appeared obvious. Suparman wanted to keep his sweet deal with ISD intact and he wanted to be free to keep operating like he was now. Tay and Linda could blow all that up. As long as either one of them was alive to talk about what happened at the Fortuna Hotel, Suparman had a problem. That was why he wanted them both dead. It was the only outcome that guaranteed the continuation of his collusion with ISD.

And that was when Tay realized what he was missing.

Suparman might want them dead, but he certainly didn’t want himself dead. He had a way out of this.

He didn’t know Tay and he couldn’t be certain what Tay would do when he saw that picture. Maybe Tay would show up just as he asked, but maybe Tay would be willing to sacrifice Linda to take Suparman down. Maybe Tay would have just called in a Special Tactics and Rescue team and let them hit the house.

Suparman had to have a way out if Tay did something like that. Anything else would amount to suicide.

But what was his way out?

Tay was still pondering that when he felt rather than saw someone walk up from behind him and sit in the other swing facing the opposite direction.

When he glanced over, Claire smiled at him.

“What the fuck are you doing here, Sam?”

“YOU TOLD ME you weren’t watching me when I was at work,” Tay said.

Claire gave a little push with her feet and began swinging in a slow counterpoint to Tay.

“I lied. So sue me.”

Tay said nothing.

“I figured you might try some kind of crazy shit,” Claire went on. “I didn’t know what, but I thought keeping an eye on you at the Cantonment Complex would be worth doing.”

She spread both her arms to encompass the playground and the rest of the park beyond.

“So here we sit, gliding back and forth together on a children’s swing set in one of the dreariest parks I’ve ever seen, and I’ve got no idea at all what’s going on. Are you going to tell me, Sam, or do I need to torture you a little first?”

“That sounds like it might be fun.”

Claire didn’t smile. “It wouldn’t be. Trust me on that, pal, it wouldn’t be.”

Tay looked at his watch. He had less than half an hour to meet Suparman’s deadline. Not nearly enough time to get rid of Claire and still somehow pull off a miracle. It looked like Claire was part of this now whether he wanted her to be or not.

Tay took out his telephone, opened the message app, and showed Claire the picture of Linda duct-taped to a chair.

“Who’s that?”

“It’s Sergeant Lee. She was with me at the Fortuna Hotel when Robbie was shot.”

Tay beckoned to Claire. He pushed himself out of the swing, walked to the edge of the grove of gum trees, and pointed across the park to the house at the end of Joo Chiat Avenue.

“That’s her house. I thought she was in Malaysia, but she must have come home without telling me. Suparman has her. They’re in there. Suparman sent me that picture and some text messages. He said if I’m not there a half hour from now, he’ll kill her.”

Claire looked from Tay to the house and then back to Tay again.

“And if you
are
there a half hour from now, he’ll kill both of you. That doesn’t do anybody any good, Sam.”

Tay nodded, but he didn’t say anything.

“John warned me you were a loner, but it doesn’t make any sense for you to take
this
on by yourself.”

“Sure it does.”

“Look, Sam, no matter how much—”

“I’m not going to leave her in there. I’m not going to let Suparman kill her. I’m already responsible for one sergeant being killed and I’m not going to lose another one.”

“That’s ridiculous, Sam. You’re not responsible for—”

“Look, could we debate this some other time? I’ve got things to do right now.”

“Who else knows about this?” Claire asked.

“Nobody.”

“You could have called me.”

“I could have. But I didn’t. Anyway, you’re here now. How many of your people are with you?”

“None.”

“Seriously?
None?
”

“Yeah, it’s just me.”

Tay turned around and walked back into the grove of gum trees. He stopped at the swing set, but he didn’t sit down. Instead, he folded his arms, leaned back against the frame, and focused his eyes somewhere off in the distance.

Claire stood patiently next to him for a while, but eventually she broke the silence.

“If you’d called me, I could have brought out half a dozen guys and—”

“Do what? Surround the house? Kick in both doors? And what do you think would happen then?”

“I understand. He’d kill her. But, Sam, Suparman is going to kill her anyway. At least then we’d have him, too.”

“I don’t think so.”

Claire cocked her head, looked at Tay, and waited.

“When Suparman set all this up, he had no idea what I would do. He doesn’t know anything about me. He would have to believe there was at least a pretty good chance I’d just call out Special Tactics and Rescue. Then he would have looked outside and found fifty heavily armed men surrounding the house.”

Claire nodded and waited some more.

“He’s not suicidal, Claire. Killing Linda or me or both of us serves no purpose if he gets killed at the same time.”

“Unless he wants to go out in a wave of what he considers glory.”

“Yes…” Tay thought about that for a moment. “Unless that.”

“Even if you’re right, Sam, how does that help us?”

“Because now we know he’s got a way out. If we attack the house, he kills Linda, and he’s got a way out.”

Claire looked in the direction of the house, although it wasn’t visible from where they were.

“All I saw was a front door and a back door. What did I miss?”

Tay shrugged.

“So what’s his way out, Sam?”

“I have no idea. But he has one. We attack the house, he kills Linda, and he’s gone. You can make book on it.”

Tay fished his cigarettes out of the front pocket of his shirt and automatically held the pack out to Claire. When she shook her head, Tay lit one for himself and pushed the pack back in his pocket. He stood smoking quietly and saying nothing. Claire sat back down in one of the swings.

“Linda only has one chance of walking out of there,” Tay said without looking at Claire. “I have to go in and get her.”