The Hot Countries (20 page)

“Never have what?” Dok says, the broom
skritch-skritching
beneath his voice.

“Played with anybody,” she says, feeling her face redden in the darkness.

“I used to play,” Chalee says, just making conversation. “In the village.”

“What did you do?”

“We ran through the woods. Hid from each other. We jumped into the water in the paddies. We raced buffalo.”

“I raced buffalo, too,” Dok says.

Treasure says, “Is it exciting?”

“No,” Chalee says. “It's funny, because buffalo are so slow. Everybody's jumping up and down and cheering, and it's like they're walking in their sleep.”

“Then who wins?” Treasure asks.

“Nobody cares,” Chalee says. “It's just fun.”

Treasure says, “Oh.” She thinks for a second about fun.

The dim rectangle marking the end of the passage is only a meter or two away, and Dok says, “Stay here while I look.”

Treasure says, “Give me the broom.”

“I need it,” Dok says. “I'm not walking without it.”

The broom makes its
skritching
noise as Dok moves slowly forward. As narrow as the passage is, he's slender enough to hug one wall so he can look out at an angle and then change walls to check the other side. Finally he stands in the center, waits for the space of a breath or two, and pokes his head out of the opening. He looks left and right, then steps all the way out. Then he turns and waves them forward.

Chalee lets out a rush of breath, and Treasure realizes that her friend has been frightened. Both she and Dok have been frightened. Who else had ever been frightened on her behalf? she asks herself, and instantly answers the question:
Poke
.

Coming through the mouth of the passageway, Treasure sees a narrow, sloping street running down to the river. It's a canyon, warehouses rising on either side, and she thinks,
Hard to get out of
, but Dok says, “This way,” and turns left to lead them downhill.

Chalee gives Treasure her warm hand and says, “Let him be the boss. He likes it.”

With Dok in the lead, they move down the street like people with a purpose. Treasure has seen hundreds of Thai girls holding hands with their friends, but she's never done it before, and the feel of Chalee's hand in hers makes her feel light-footed, almost giddy. The three of them, she thinks, with a little of her money and a whole country to play, or rather,
hide
in. She can't remember ever before visualizing a life she would actually like to live. With the money she could be free of Paul.

Except that what Paul really wants, of course, is the money.

After a few minutes of drifting downhill, they cross a street that Dok says is the same one their alley begins at, and Treasure tries to visualize it all: run this way, turn that way, and get back to the shelter. Just as she thinks she has it mapped in her mind, she hears something behind her. She whirls so fast that she yanks her hand out of Chalee's, but the street is empty.

“What?” Dok whispers.

She shakes her head. “Nothing. I just—”

Dok goes past her at a quick walk, all the way back to the cross street. He cranes his neck around and stands there, his hip thrown out and his weight on his right leg as though he thinks he might have to lift the left to run. But instead he evens his stance, takes a final look around, and ambles back down, shaking his head.

“The narrow alley,” he says to Treasure as though continuing a discussion, “is the escape route, and it can be a hiding place, too. Most grown-ups don't even see it. And if they do, you can get out the other end.” They start walking again. “Once you're out, you can run along down here, cross that street back there, and—come down just a little more—you can go in
there
.”

Across the way there's a partially collapsed building, obviously once a warehouse, with a large word in Thai that translates to “
P
rince,” painted in graying letters. The rough surface of the wood has pushed its way through the paint, and Treasure has to squint to make out the word.

At that moment it begins to rain.

“Wait here,” Chalee says. “Sometimes it's not empty.” Treasure and Dok crowd back against the building behind them, sheltering from the slant of the rain, and Chalee runs across the street and does something to the building's door and steps back. She says a bad word that startles Treasure, not so much by the profanity as by the way her voice carries. The street is narrow and hedged by high walls, and sound travels even through the hiss of the rain.

Chalee goes at the door again and yanks outward, using both the iron bar and her free hand on the door. It emits a sustained bass note, like a sound played at half speed, that bounces back and forth across the street. By the time it fades, Chalee is standing beside the open door, leaning forward to peer in.

Treasure says, “What's she looking for?”

“People,” Dok says. “It's a trick to get the door open, but some other people have figured it out.”

Across the way, Chalee disappears into the darkness. A tiny flame flickers, throwing a rectangle of pale light onto the wet surface of the street. She reappears, a disposable lighter in one hand, and waves them in.

For reassurance Treasure taps her palm against the napkin-wrapped bundle at her waist and follows Dok.

The place reeks of mold and urine. They're in some kind of office, a small room, with a door in the right-hand wall that opens into a deeper darkness that suggests a much larger space beyond. Dok pulls the front door closed and secures it with a loop of heavy wire. To Chalee he says, “Back empty?”

Chalee holds out the lighter. “It looked empty to me.”

“Okay,” Dok says. He takes the lighter and holds it high, looking around. The floor is thick with dust and rat droppings and black termite sand. A couple of fallen roof beams, two-by-fours from the look of them, lean against the rear wall. There's a window to the left of the front door, but it's been boarded up. “They're as afraid of us as we are of them.”

“Who?” Treasure whispers. She wants to go back into the street.

“If it's anybody, it's streeties,” Dok says. “Like us, but some big ones.”

“There's nobody there,” Chalee says. “But if it makes you feel better
 . . .
” She pushes the door to the dark area closed and wedges a fallen two-by-four against it at an acute angle.

A rusted metal desk with a missing front leg sags despondently in the middle of the room. Dok sits on it, bringing the legless corner all the way down to the floor with a bang. “This is another hiding place,” he says, indicating the space with an open hand, like someone showing a room for rent. “If you want, Chalee can open that door to the storage area again and we'll show you how to get out that way. There's a wide alley back there, because they used to bring trucks right up to the rear doors to unload stuff.”

The rain is making dull stuttering sounds against the wooden front of the building. From a corner comes the drip of a leak. Chalee sits next to Dok on the desk, and Treasure turns to face them, her back to the front door.

“Is there anyplace else?” she asks.

“Near here, one more,” Dok says. “Near the docks. I think about hiding places in steps, nearest to farthest. The first step is the passageway next to our building. This is the second step, and there are a couple of places here in the back where you can get up, pretty high above the floor, and hide. People almost never look up. You can get out of here through the front and the back. Ow.” He lets the lighter go out, giving his thumb a rest from the heat, and says, in the warm darkness, “And the third place is near the docks.”

“How do you know about them?”

“The first thing I do,” Dok says, “when I go anyplace, is be sure I know how to get out of it.”

“You'll learn,” Chalee says. “You'll have to if you don't go with Mrs. Anna.”

Treasure says, “Could you light that thing again?”

“I don't know,” Dok says. He tilts his chin at the wall behind her. “The boards over the window let a little light out.”

“It's the middle of the night,” Chalee says. “It's raining. No one's out there.”

“Okay.” The lighter sparks back into life, throwing Dok and Chalee's wavering shadows against the barricaded door.

After a moment's pause, Treasure says, “I have money, if I could figure out how to get it.”

Neither Dok nor Chalee replies, but they're regarding her with interest.

“My, my father had a lot of money.”

“You can tell,” Chalee says. “All the kids can tell.”

“How?”

Dok says, “Even when you were dirty, you were a different kind of dirty.”

Chalee says, “And you're half-and-half, so there must have been someone with money sometime.”

“But what I'm saying, what I'm trying to say, is that if I could get some of it
 . . .
” Brought out into the light like this, her vision feels thin and implausible, a fairy tale or a pirate story.

“Then what?” Chalee says. Dok is looking at her, but he seems to have retreated to a point behind his eyes, as though he's regarding her through a mask a foot in front of his face.

“Then we could be together,” Treasure says in a rush. “We could go where we want, we'd have food and clothes—not too much, but enough. We could go places. We could
 . . .
we could be friends forever.” She runs out of breath, almost seeing the words hanging in the air, waiting for a shaking head, a snicker. She grabs a new breath and says, “We could hide.
Together.
”

Chalee leans forward to speak but freezes. Treasure's head has whipped around, and her body follows until her back is to them, and then they hear her sniff the air, three or four sharp inhalations, and she retreats a step and moans,
“Noooo,”
and with a screech of nails pulling free from wood, the entire front door is yanked upward and away, and the lighter blows out, and the wet, shining, heavyset man standing where the door had been says, “
Treasure
. What a surprise.”

23

There's Still the Gas

Rafferty's cell phone
buzzes, bringing him out of deep sleep, and he reaches up and back, toward the headboard, but instead of finding the phone, he barks his knuckles on a wall covered in something that feels like fabric. Half conscious, he flails for a familiar surface, encountering instead mountains of pillows.

The hotel.

There's enough light through the window to let him make out the bedside table with the heavy crystal lamp on it and, blinking away at the lamp's base, his phone. He'd gone to sleep with it within reach, but he and Rose seem to have changed places during the night, as they sometimes do. He lifts himself on one elbow and leans across her to get his hand around the phone. Rose says something, but it takes more than a ringing phone and someone leaning on her to wake Rose up.

“Yeah.”

“Poke,” Arthit says, “Treasure is missing, definitely gone.” In the background Rafferty can hear a stream of sound from Anna. “She left the shelter with Chalee and that boy—”

“Dok. What time?”

“Don't know exactly. My cop was at the mouth of the alley, and he swears they never came out. But about twenty minutes ago, a little girl woke Boo up. She said Treasure and the others left ten or fifteen minutes before that.”

“Nobody came to get them? Nobody took them away?”

“Not according to her. She says Treasure told her they were going out looking for things to sell.”

“She wouldn't, not with Varney out there somewhere.”

Anna's voice scales up, and Arthit says to her, “One more minute.”

“Where's my guy?” Rafferty says. “Sriyat?”

Arthit says, coolly, “I have no idea.”

“It's been less than an hour. Maybe we should—”

“Up to you, but I'm going out to look for them now. Anna will wait here.”

“Give me a little time. I'll meet you there.” Awake at last, Rose sits up and yawns, and he leans over and kisses her and says, “I'll be back. Sometime.”

Treasure laughs, a low, harsh rasp that brings Dok's gaze to her. She closes her eyes and laughs some more.

“What's funny?” the man says. He's produced a small penlight and trained it on them.

“Thought you were—” She starts to laugh again and then, abruptly, stops. “Thought you were somebody else.”

The man in the doorway tilts his head back, surveying the room, and Treasure recognizes him. It's Sriyat or something like that, the man Rafferty hired to watch her. He says, “Glad you're happy to see me.”

Dok says, “What are you doing here?”

“Shut up.” Sriyat's voice is still soft, as it had been at Arthit's house, but there's force behind it. “Girl,” he says to Chalee, “sit closer to your boyfriend.”

Dok puts one foot on the floor, and the man says, “Don't do anything stupid, sonny.”

“You're supposed to be protecting me,” Treasure says. Now that the initial relief has worn off, her voice sounds childish in her ears.

“I've been thinking about that,” Sriyat says. “You've got two men on you twenty-four hours a day, which costs a bundle. They're moving you back and forth, between nice houses and a slum, all very secret. What that says to me is that there's money somewhere. Who wants you, and why? Is the money yours? Is someone trying to get to it through you? And how
much
money?”

“I'm going to tell Poke.”

“No, you're going to answer my question. And fast, or I'm going to shoot one of your friends.” He reaches inside his coat and comes out with an automatic. “Which one?” he says. He points it at Chalee, and the penlight swivels with it.

“You wouldn't shoot her,” Treasure says.

“No? You want to see me do it? Answer my questions. How much? Who has it?”

“My, my father. I don't know how much—”

“Not good enough. I need to know everything.” He points the gun at Dok and waggles it side to side. “You might want to move away from her, kid, or your clothes'll get dirty.”

“There's a
 . . .
there's a letter,” Treasure says. “It's from my
 . . .
um, my father.” She pushes herself past the word and keeps talking. Her eyes are lifted to the ceiling, but now she brings them back down to look at Sriyat. “He wants me back, and I don't want to go, and Poke is hiding me.”

“Is your father rich?”

Treasure says, “Very.”

“Why don't you want to go?”

“I hate him.”

“Why is Rafferty involved?”

“I don't know exactly,” Treasure says. “But I think everything is in the letter. I stole it from Poke.”

Sriyat says, as though weighing it, “A letter. What's in it?”

“I can't read,” Treasure says. “My father didn't send me to school. None of us went to school. We're just learning how to read now.” She can feel Chalee's eyes on her.

“Where's the letter?”

“I have it.” She widens her eyes. “Maybe
you
can read it.”

“Is it in Thai?”

“I guess so.”

“Give it to me.”

“Will you give it back?” Treasure asks.

Sriyat smiles at her. “Sure, sure. It's your letter, right? Give it to me.”

Treasure says, “I don't know.”

Dok says to Treasure, “Don't give him anything. When he's got it, he'll kill Chalee and me and take you with him.”

“Why would I hurt you?” Sriyat says. “It's not like you could do anything to me. Only reason I'd shoot you is if she won't give me that fucking
letter
.” He takes a step farther into the room, ducking his head to avoid hitting it on top of the doorjamb. His smell, sweat and meat and tobacco, envelops Treasure, and she thinks she might choke. “This is how it goes,” Sriyat says. “You hand me the letter, sweetie, and then we lock your friends in here to get a head start, and I take the letter to your father. You and me, we split the money. How's that sound?”

“She's not stupid,” Dok says.

Treasure says, “You'll sell me to my father.”

“No, I won't. And don't argue with me. Give me the letter.”

Treasure takes a step toward him, glancing up for a second at the doorjamb behind Sriyat's head. “You promise you won't give me to my father?”

“I already said so. Give it.
Now
, or else your friends here
will
get hurt.”

“All right,” Treasure says, unfolding the white rectangle. She takes a step toward him and stops. “Will you read it out loud so I can hear it?”

“Whatever you want.”

“That's what I want,” Treasure says. “Please read it out loud,” and she closes her hand around the wooden handle wrapped in the napkin, yanks it free, and lunges at Sriyat, lifting her right hand high and then dragging the edge of Noi's prized Japanese carving knife down on a diagonal, across the man's forehead and face, slicing into the side of his neck and continuing down as the blood rains around her, across his chest and stomach, opening his shirt and the skin beneath it, and at the same time Chalee leaps from the desk and brings the iron bar down on the wrist of the man's gun hand.

Sriyat yelps, spouting blood from his forehead and nose as the gun clatters to the floor, and he stretches both hands toward Treasure, reaching for her the way Paul had in her dream, and she shrills a high, taut-string sound and brings the knife's edge down again, over his left arm and hand this time, as Chalee swings the iron bar against his right elbow. Sriyat backs up fast and hits his
head against the doorjamb. He can retreat no farther without turning around or bending down, and as he begins to fold himself at the waist, Dok comes at him through the air, feetfirst. Both feet slam into Sriyat's left kneecap, and Treasure, who has been screaming that same single note ever since Sriyat reached for her, takes the knife to her left, extending her right arm all the way across her chest, and then swings the blade right, slicing Sriyat across the abdomen. The man turns a quarter of the way around, dragging one useless leg, and goes down, so heavily that the floor shakes. He curls himself into a ball, whimpering.

The three children stand there gasping, looking down at him as the blood pools around him. Chalee kicks the gun away, toward the desk. After a few false starts, she manages to say, “Will he
 . . .
will he die?”

“Maybe, maybe not.” Dok says. “But he's bleeding pretty bad.”

Treasure stares down at the man, her face slack and her mouth half open, and then she steps forward and kicks him with all her strength. Sriyat makes a sound like
whuff
and begins to moan again, and Treasure kicks him a second time and then a third. She's drawing back her leg again when Chalee puts her arm around Treasure's shoulders. Instantly all the force drains out of her body, and she sways as though she's going to collapse.

“You've been cut,” Dok says. He and Chalee pull Treasure, as gently as possible, to the desk and sit her down.

“It's his,” Treasure says, her voice a single rough edge. “All of it.”

“Are you sure?”

“I'm not hurt.” She nods toward the gun on the floor. “Take that,” she says.

“For what? We can't keep it.”

“I want it!”
she screams, and she's halfway up before Dok grabs her arm and she sits back on the desk, hard, as Chalee goes and picks up the gun.

Sriyat says, “Help me.”

Treasure bends forward at the waist, both hands gripping the edge of the desk, and says, “I'm going to watch you die.”

“No you're not,” Dok says. “We're getting out of here.”

Treasure turns to look at him, and Dok realizes she has to reprocess his words to understand their meaning. In a moment she says, “Where?”

“You're covered in blood. You can't go anywhere except back to the shelter to clean up. Then we'll figure something out.”

Chalee, her eyes wide, says,
“Ummm
 . . .
”

Sriyat has one arm up against the doorjamb, and he appears to be trying to pull himself upright. Treasure snatches the bar from Chalee's hand, crosses the office, and swings it into the back of Sriyat's hand, smashing bone and even denting the wood on the corner of the jamb. Sriyat screams hoarsely and snatches his hand back down to the floor. Lying on his side with his knees raised, he begins to rock back and forth, cradling the hand. He seems to be weeping.

Treasure clears her throat and spits on him.

“You don't know whether that story is true,” Arthit says, with a glance at Anna. “Varney has lots of reasons to lie to you about her.” Arthit looks weary, and the fluorescents put deep greenish circles beneath his eyes. To his left, leaning back against the desk in Boo's office as though she'd tip over backward without it, Anna watches Arthit's lips, her own lips the perfect circle of
no
. Crumpled in her hand is the note Hofstedler gave Poke. Although the boys in the other room are all awake, the three of them have been talking in whispers, trying to keep the news in the room.

Rafferty says, “I looked it up online. C-4 can't be detonated by fire.”

“That doesn't—” Arthit stops, and his eyes go back to Anna, who is shaking her head in what could be disagreement or defeat. Behind her, on the whiteboard, is her last assignment of the day.

“I think it's true,” Rafferty says. Anna looks like someone who has anticipated the worst possible news and is hearing it at last. “I know she lit the fire. It's not all that hard to see her turning on the gas, too.”

Arthit says, “But
you
were in there.” Anna squints with effort as she follows his words.

“So were her mother and Ming Li,” Rafferty says. “But Treasure didn't have any affection for her mother, didn't know Ming Li. Didn't really know me either.”

Anna raises the hand with the note in it. “Her
mother
—”

“Her mother was a zombie.” He can't hold back a yawn, but it's nerves, not sleepiness. “Murphy had been abusing the girl for years, and her mother just sucked up the codeine. All I can say is, even if Treasure did it, which I think she did, you weren't in that house. It was a torture chamber. You have no idea how bad it was.”

Turning away, Arthit draws an enormous breath, lets it out slowly, and says, “But I do know what murder is.”

Anna springs from the desk, grabs his shoulders, and twists him to her. Says, “
Face
me when you talk.”

“I said,” Arthit says, and then he cups his face in his hands and rubs. When he takes his hands away, he says, “I said I know what murder is.”