Killing Rain Part 17

I smiled. "Maybe you would have enjoyed it."

"Stop it."

"I mean, if she'd only given you a b.l.o.w. .j.o.b, you would never even have known. You'd just think it was the best head you'd ever gotten. It would have become one of your most cherished memories." I started to laugh. I couldn't help it. "You never would have stopped telling me about it."

"Do you want another drink?" he asked. "I think I need one."

"How many, Dox? That's the question. How many times before."

He signaled the waitress for two more, then shuddered. "d.a.m.n, that was a near thing. I'd thank you, if you'd stepped in a little sooner and were enjoying yourself a little less."

"Enjoying?"

"Yeah, yeah. Very funny." He drained his Stoli and shuddered again.

I thought about going on, something about how, with all his local expertise, he had still almost unintentionally gone off with a lady-boy. Or presumably unintentionally. But he looked so glum that I decided to give it a rest.

The band started up again. A few minutes later, Dox leaned over to me and said, "If you don't mind, I'm ready to try something different. You're welcome to join me, but I don't know that where I'm going is apt to be your kind of place."

"Topless girls with numbers attached to their bikini bottoms?"

"I'd say that's likely, yes."

"Good. If they're undressed, you'll have a better chance of making sure . . . you know."

He scowled. "Are you coming?"

"No, I'd better let you go alone. I wouldn't want to interfere with a man's quest to recover his masculinity. On the other hand, who's going to warn you if you run into another . . ."

"I'll be fine alone, you Yankee degenerate."

I smiled and held out my hand. "All right then. We'll talk in the morning?"

"In the morning," he said, and we shook. He got up, tossed a few hundred baht on the table, and headed for the door.

I chuckled to myself. It was going to be good to have something in my a.r.s.enal that I could bring up anytime Dox gave me grief.

I chuckled again, a little more softly. It was odd that she'd been in here, though. She seemed to have been on the make, and Brown Sugar was the wrong place for that. Sure, she could have come here to enjoy the music, to take a break, whatever, but the way she'd been looking around right away, the way she'd immediately zeroed in on Dox . . .

Maybe that was opportunistic.

Didn't feel opportunistic. It felt focused.

I chewed on that. Then, in a sort of semiconscious shorthand that was more suddenly present in its entirety than deduced piece by piece, I realized: If someone wanted to get to you and Dox, the first thing he'd look to do would be to separate you. To do that, if he were smart, he would employ some means that could distract, at least temporarily, your sensitivity to disparities in the local environment. Give you something you could focus on. A katoey, for example. Make you say, that's what was bothering me-she's not really a woman! Or, if you didn't spot it, and one of you went off with her . . . boom, there you go, you've found your way to divide us.

Maybe it would have been easier, more straightforward, to use a real woman as the bait. But a katoey would have certain advantages. A lady-boy could take better care of himself in a sc.r.a.pe. And he'd be used to acting, to pa.s.sing himself off as something he wasn't, to fooling people, lulling them.

I felt the blood draining from my face, my heart begin to pound as an adrenaline dump kicked in. If Dox had still been at the table, he would have laughed at me. I didn't care. There were certain things I would try to change about myself to accommodate our partners.h.i.+p. The way I go with my gut would never be one of them.

I stood up and walked briskly to the door, as fast as I could move without being obvious. I was hoping I was wrong, but I knew I was right.

FOURTEEN.

FOR AN INSTANT after exiting the bar, I didn't focus on any one particular thing. I let it all in: the placement of the sidewalk tables and patrons, the parked cars, the pedestrians.

Movement straight in front of me: a muscular Thai man in a black tee-s.h.i.+rt, mid-twenties, leaning against a cab at the curb, coming to his feet. "You need taxi?" he asked, in a thick Thai accent. He started moving toward me. "I give you ride. Use meter. Very good."

His hands were empty and he was still more than three meters away. I did a quick scan for Dox. He had walked out less than half a minute before me; he might still be in the area. I didn't see him. But I didn't have time to look further, or to worry about what might have happened to him.

I checked my flanks.

Left flank: Caucasian male, late forties, alone at one of the sidewalk tables.

Right flank: two Thai men, mid-twenties and in shape like the first guy, watching me with a certain intensity, and getting up smoothly from their table.

Would any of this ever stand up in court? Your Honor, my partner left after an encounter with a lady-boy. I stepped outside. Someone asked me if I needed a cab, and the men to my right were watching me with "that look," if you know what I mean. That's why I killed them all.

Of course it wouldn't stand up. But one of the things that separates people like me from live civilians and dead operators is an absolute ability and an absolute willingness to act decisively on evidence that in polite society would get you laughed at and that in court would get you thrown in jail. When you know, you know. You don't wait for more evidence. You act. If you act wrong, you live with the consequences. You act wrong the other way, you don't live at all.

The man in front of me was now two meters away. "You need taxi?" he asked again. His right hand was out, motioning in a "Come this way" gesture.

"Sure," I said. I stepped toward him as though I intended to move past him on his right. He smiled, a smile that was supposed to look friendly but that to me was at least half-predatory.

I smiled myself, an "Aren't you kind to help me, I'm so clueless" kind of smile. He nodded, rea.s.sured that this was going to be easy.

But it wasn't going to be easy. It wasn't going to be easy at all.

Just before I pulled alongside him, I s.n.a.t.c.hed his right wrist in my left hand and fed his arm over to my right. I hooked his tricep and dragged him past me. My weight on his arm pulled him forward, and as I circled clockwise behind him, I saw his mouth dropping open in surprise. Apparently my reaction wasn't part of the rehearsal.

I reached around his waist with my left hand and caught his right wrist. I cinched him in close and he grunted as some of the breath was driven from his lungs. We were both facing the bar now. The two men who had gotten up were two meters away to our left. I saw their faces hardening. Their hands were empty and I realized this was supposed to be a s.n.a.t.c.h, not a kill. Otherwise they would have had weapons and would already have used them.

I sucked in a breath and bellowed, "Dox!" in the loudest voice I could muster, half to warn him if he was there, half to call for his help.

The two men to the left started to charge forward.

The guy I was holding took a wider stance and dropped his weight to create a more stable base, and I realized from the reaction he was trained. He tried to snap a head b.u.t.t back at me, but my face was too far to the right and pressed up close against his shoulder. I reached down to my right front pocket where the knife was clipped in place. In one motion I cleared it, opened it, and thrust it forward from behind his spread legs into his perineum and b.a.l.l.s.

There's a certain pitch of human scream that's impossible to ignore, that drills directly into the most primitive parts of the brain. The kind that makes your hair stand up, your s.c.r.o.t.u.m retract, your feet freeze dead in their tracks. That's the scream that tore loose from this guy when my knife hit home, and it was exactly the scream I wanted. His partners moving in from the left were involuntarily stopped by it. Their conscious minds were thinking, What the f.u.c.k was that? Their unconscious minds were shouting, Who cares what it was! Run! They both pulled up short about a meter away from me.

I didn't wait for them to get the circuits clear. I shoved the man I'd been holding into them and turned to my right, ready to bug out. But another Thai man was coming from that direction, fast enough to have already closed the distance. He must have moved out from the alley to the right of the bar. The scream that had frozen his comrades hadn't had the same effect on him. Either he was very brave, very stupid, or very hard of hearing. Regardless of the explanation, he was now in my way.

I had already flipped the knife around in my hand to a reverse grip so that the blade was concealed along my wrist and lower forearm. Even so, Mr. Hearing Impaired must not have been paying proper attention, or he would have put two and two together: I was holding something in my hand, something that had just caused his partner to shriek like the eunuch he now was, and that something was probably sharp and pointy. Or the explanation for his failure to hesitate as his comrades had was indeed stupidity, because there is nothing quite so stupid as showing up for a knife fight unarmed.

He paused a meter in front of me and raised his fists as though we were about to box. I noted, half-consciously, scars around his eyebrows and the b.u.mp of a previously broken nose, and realized, Muay Thai, these guys are Thai boxers.

I detected a slight s.h.i.+ft in his weight, a grounding of the left leg, and then his right s.h.i.+n was whipping in toward my left thigh. Thai boxing s.h.i.+n kicks can hit like baseball bats, and if I hadn't seen it coming and so hadn't had a fraction of a second to prepare, he would have blasted my leg out from under me and then I would have been fighting three men, or maybe more, from the ground.

But I had that fraction of a second. I used it to move closer, just inside the sweet spot of the kick, and to drop my weight so my hip would take the main impact. I caught his leg as it hit, wrapping my left arm around his calf. He reacted instantly: he grabbed my head, braced himself on the captured leg, and leaped upward and toward me, his left knee coming around for my face, just as he had doubtless done countless times in the ring.

But they don't let knives in the ring. The sport wouldn't be the same if they did.

I raised my right arm and turtled my head in. The knee hit my forearm. It hurt, especially with the bruises Delilah had given me, but it beat a broken jaw. He started to return to the ground. I moved the knife out from along my forearm so that I was gripping it ice pick style, edge in, and plunged it into his right inner thigh where it connected to the pelvis. In the heat of the moment and pumped full of adrenaline, he seemed not to notice what had happened. But then I ripped down and back, tearing open his femoral artery and a lot of other real estate, too, and that seemed to get his attention. He howled and jerked convulsively away from me. I swept his good leg out from under him in modified ouchi-gari, a judo throw, and let him go as he fell, not wanting to take a chance on getting tangled up with him on the ground.

I turned back to the other two guys, and was gratified to see them backing away. There was no doubt now that a knife was in play, and no doubt that it was being used by someone for more than just show. Apparently this was all more trouble than they wanted or had been led to expect. They turned and ran.

I looked the other way. The white guy who had been sitting outside the bar had stood up. "Are you all right?" he asked, in American-accented English.

I glanced all around. The people who had been sitting at the other tables outside were frozen in place, in shock. The men on the ground were moaning and writhing. From the wounds I had given them and the amount of blood spreading out on the pavement, I expected they would be dead in just a few more seconds.

"I saw everything," the white guy was saying. He started moving toward me. "They attacked you. It was self-defense. I'm a lawyer, I can help."

I thought, crazily, Great, just what I need, a lawyer.

And then something came into focus. Maybe it was intuition. Maybe it was my unconscious sifting data that was invisible to my conscious mind, items like the way he'd been sitting at that table, with his feet firmly on the ground as though ready for quick action; or his position, in what had been one of my blind spots as I exited the bar; or his calm and forthcoming expression of concern just now, when all the other onlookers were frozen or fleeing.

He never gave off the vibe, none at all. I'd even overlooked him to start with. Maybe that was part of the plan: I was looking for more Thais, not a white guy. Maybe it was just that, whoever Perry Mason here was, he was definitely very good.

He continued to move toward me. His hands were empty . . . or was that something in his left? I wasn't sure. I shouted, "Stop right there!"

He shook his head and said, "What are you talking about? I just want to help." And kept moving in.

When you tell someone who's moving toward you to come no closer, with the appropriate air of gravity and command in your voice, and particularly when that air is augmented by the presence of a knife with which you've just killed two people, and the guy keeps coming anyway, you are not dealing with someone who needs a light for a cigarette, or directions, or the time of day, or whatever else was his ostensible excuse for invading your s.p.a.ce. You are dealing with someone intent on taking something that you would prefer not to part with, up to and including your life, and his failure to heed your command is more than adequate proof of this, and of how you must now handle it.

I did a quick perimeter check. Other than the shocked onlookers, some of whom were now coming to their senses and scurrying away, it looked like it was just the two of us. I started to move toward him.

Suddenly, Perry Mason changed his tune. He started backing up. But it wasn't a retreat, just a tactical pause. Because, as he moved smoothly backward, his free hand dropped equally smoothly to his right front pocket and pulled free a folding knife. It was opening even as it cleared his pants, and I could tell from the liquid ease with which he withdrew it that this man was no knife dilettante, but rather someone who had trained long, hard, and seriously to develop the proficiency and confidence I had just witnessed.

I paused. I wasn't sure if the display was to warn me off, or if he intended to close. Maybe killing me was the backup plan if s.n.a.t.c.hing me didn't work out. No way to know. Regardless, I didn't want to fight him. I just wanted to get away. I would have been happy to kill him to make that happen, but obviously if he was armed, killing him might no longer be the easiest means of exit here.

He started circling, moving closer. His footwork was smooth and balanced. He was just inside the distance that I would have judged safe for turning and running. I moved with him, conscious of my flanks in case the two who had run off reconsidered. I held my knife in my right hand with a saber grip, close to my waist, with my left hand open and partially extended to block and trap if we closed. If we did, I didn't know if I would make it. What I did know is that he surely would not.

I heard a voice booming from behind me. "Partner, get down!"

It was Dox. I dropped into a squat, keeping the knife close to my body, and glanced over to see the giant sniper moving in with a wooden chair raised over his head. I ducked down lower. He lunged forward and let the chair go like it was an F-14 being catapulted off the deck of an aircraft carrier.

When a man of Dox's size and strength throws a chair, there are many places you might want to be. In front of the chair is not one of them. In this sense, Perry Mason was unlucky. The chair caught him full in the chest and blasted him to the ground.

Dox and I were on him in an instant. Dox grabbed his knife and something else, whatever it was that I thought I had seen in his left hand, both of which had clattered onto the sidewalk next to him. I knelt across his chest and almost cut his throat to finish him, but then I saw that he was already helpless. He was grunting and starting to cough blood.

I did another perimeter check. Still okay. Returning my eyes to Perry Mason, I said to Dox, "Quick, give me a hand."

Dox knelt next to me. I saw that he was scanning the street and sidewalk, and I was gratified to know that, this time, the behavior had nothing to do with s.e.x and everything to do with survival.

"What do you want to do with him?" he asked.

I inclined my head in the direction of the alley, about twenty feet away. "Pull him over there. The dark."

We grabbed him under the arms and hauled him up and over. He tried to resist, but the chair had broken him up inside and he didn't have much fight in him.

There were no streetlights over this stretch of sidewalk, as is the case throughout most of Bangkok's lesser thoroughfares, and once we had moved off to the side of Brown Sugar we were enveloped by darkness. In the alley, just in from the sidewalk, someone had parked a white Toyota van. The sliding door on the van's pa.s.senger side was open, facing the clubs to the left. I saw this and instantly understood that their plan had been to drag me into the vehicle, then drive away and interrogate me at their leisure.

We shoved Perry Mason up against the front pa.s.senger-side door and patted him down. He had a Fred Perrin La Griffe with a two-inch spear point blade hanging from a neck sheath-obviously backup for the folder. I cut the neck cord and Dox pocketed the knife and rig. In his front pants pocket, we found a Toyota car key and a magnetic key card for the Holiday Inn Silom Bangkok. I pressed the "open" b.u.t.ton on the car key and the van chirped in response. Yeah, the vehicle was definitely his. Beyond all this, and a Casio G-Shock wrist.w.a.tch, he was traveling sterile.

I pocketed the keys and looked in his eyes. Blood was flowing steadily from the sides of his mouth. He was still conscious, though, still with us. Good.

"How did you find us?" I asked.

He shook his head and looked away.

Dox grabbed his face and forced him to look at me. "How did you find us?" I said again.

He gritted his teeth and remained silent.

I reached down and started probing his abdomen. He winced when I got to his ribs. Either they were broken, or there was some damage underneath, or both. I pressed hard and he grunted.

"We can do this easy or we can do it hard," I said. "Answer a few questions and we'll be gone. That's all there is to it."

He looked away again. He was trying to focus on something else, to let his imagination carry him away from here.

I knew the technique. There are ways of resisting interrogation. I've been schooled in them, and so, I had a feeling, had this guy. What they teach you is that you have to accept that you are in a position you can't survive. Your life is over. There will be some hours of pain first, yes. Your body is going to be broken and ruined. But then death will deliver you. Concentrate on that coming deliverance, let your imagination go forth to meet it, and use the antic.i.p.ation of that impending rendezvous to hold out for as long as you can. If you can do this, you can detach yourself from what's happening to your body and make your mind much harder to reach.

I had to interrupt his reverie. Shake his confidence that his acceptance of death had put him in paradoxical control of the situation. Shock him out of his a.s.sumption that we were playing a binary game of live or die, life or death, with no other possibilities in between.

I pulled out my folder with my right hand and flipped it open. I grabbed his face with my left and forced him to look at me.

"No matter what happens here," I said to him, "you are not going to die. We're not going to kill you. You are going to live."

I pressed the knife against his cheek, so that the point was resting just below the bottom edge of his left eye. "But if you don't answer my questions," I said, "I'm going to blind you. One eye, then the other. Now. How did you find us?"

The guy didn't answer, but I could tell from his increased respiration that I had his attention, that I had hauled him back some distance from the relatively safe place to which he had tried to flee.

"Your choice," I said, and started slowly driving the knife upward.

He squeezed his eyes tightly shut and tried to jerk away. Dox shoved his head against the side of the van and I kept the knife slowly going north.

The guy's breathing worsened, approaching the cadences of panic. His eyeball was moving upward ahead of the knife. Another millimeter and it would reach the limits of its give and be skewered.

"Cell phone," he said suddenly, panting. "We tracked a cell phone."

I paused the knife but didn't lower it. "Whose cell phone?"