Breathing Water: A Bangkok Thriller

“Come on. We’ve got to talk. You walk next to me, okay? And Mr. Left and Mr. Right will follow us so they can shoot you and disappear quickly if they have to.” He puts a hand on Rafferty’s arm, which Rafferty shrugs off, but to no effect-the man grabs him again.

Rafferty says, “I am so fucking sick of this.”

“You’ve been making me look bad,” the man says. He’s average height for a Thai, maybe five foot nine, a little meaty, with a receding hairline that gives him a thinker’s forehead. A pair of round, black, resolutely opaque sunglasses straddles a shapeless, fleshy nose. A few hairs straggle despairingly across his upper lip as though they’ve slowed to wait for the others to catch up.

“Hard to believe anyone could make you look bad,” Rafferty says. “Where are we going?”

“Right here.” The man opens the door to a large black SUV that Rafferty recognizes, his stomach clenching like a fist, as the one that had been idling in front of Pan’s Mesopotamian wall. “Get in,” Yellow Shirt says, holding wide the rear door.

“I’d rather not.”

“Okay, then, we’ll kill you.”

“And if I get in?”

The man in the yellow shirt smiles. “Wait and see.”

Rafferty climbs up onto the step that will take him into the SUV’s backseat, and his cell phone vibrates in his pocket. “Hold it,” he says, pulling it out.

The man’s hand is immediately on Rafferty’s wrist. “Put that back. Now.”

The readout says ARTHIT.

“Whoever it is,” the man in the yellow shirt says, “you can talk to him later.” And he plucks the phone out of Rafferty’s hand. It’s a very fast, very precise move.

Rafferty says, “Hey,” but someone pushes him hard, between the shoulder blades, and he lurches face-first through the door, cracking his shins on the second step. He lands on the leather backseat and is pushing himself up when the man in the yellow shirt, who is now in the front seat, points a small silvery automatic at him over the seat back.

“Just sit up,” he says. Rafferty sees his own face reflected in the dark glasses. He looks frightened. “In the middle. Don’t do anything stupid.”

Rafferty does as he’s told, and seconds later Mr. Left and Mr. Right climb into the car on either side of him. For a moment they sit there in silence, and Rafferty listens to the engine ticking as it cools. The tinted windows make them invisible from the sidewalk, but he doesn’t think they’d have shut down the engine if the plan called for them to shove a dead man out of the car and peel off into traffic.

“You’re not taking us seriously,” says Yellow Shirt. He looks at the phone. “Who’s Arthit?”

“A friend.”

“If he’s a friend, he’ll wait. I’m running out of patience with you. We called to tell you not to write the book. We did that little show outside Pan’s place. But here you are, running around and talking to people. As I said, it makes me look bad. So here we are again.” He waits.

Rafferty feels like the slowest person in the car. It hadn’t occurred to him that he was dealing with the other side. He’d half figured that the ones who warned him away from the book had been Pan’s guys, despite Pan’s denial, and that they’d be put on hold after he and Pan had their little talk. “What do you want me to say?” he asks.

“Nothing. And I want you to do nothing, and I mean nothing. No more meetings, no more conversations, no more research. This is the third time we’ve had to interact. The fourth time you’ll die. Understand?”

“Yes.”

“Are you right-handed or left?”

There is no way to know how to answer this question. Rafferty makes a blind choice. “Left.”

“See how you are?” Yellow Shirt says sadly. “I’ve been watching you, remember? Look at this gun.” He lifts it from the seat back and moves it slowly to Rafferty’s right. Rafferty is tracking it with his eyes, watching the light through the front windshield glint off the barrel, when Mr. Left shifts his weight, and then something cracks down onto the muscle between Rafferty’s neck and his left shoulder. His arm goes numb, and as his head jerks toward Mr. Left and he registers the blackjack in the man’s hand, the same thing happens to his right shoulder.

He makes a sound that’s all U’s and H’s, a sound someone might make as a bull plows into his midsection, and he realizes he can barely lift his arms. Through the roaring in his ears, he hears Yellow Shirt.

“You’re right-handed, and you should have realized I’d know it. But to show you that we can get along if you’ll drop the project, we’ll leave your right hand alone.”

As though from a spot four or five feet above his own head, Rafferty watches his limp, numb left hand as Mr. Left picks it up and puts it on the back of the front seat. He holds it there as Mr. Right brings his blackjack up and then down onto the intricate latticework of bones in the back of the hand, and Rafferty’s scream tears his throat ragged.

“You should see a doctor,” Yellow Shirt says. “Probably a couple of fractures, and hands need to be looked at fast.” He waves the gun back and forth again. “This will take hours to treat. You’ll be out of circulation for the rest of the day, and then you’re going to stop, right? I’m going to tell my principal that you’re quitting, and you’re not going to make me look bad again.”

“No,” Rafferty says, through a windpipe that feels narrower than a pencil. “I mean, yes. I’m quitting.”

Yellow Shirt nods. “Good, good. You can get out now. Wasn’t this better than getting shot?” He leans over the seat and drops the cell phone into Rafferty’s shirt pocket. “You can call your friend back,” he says. “Although it may be a while before you can dial.”

34

You’ll Probably Be Sterile

This is for teeth,” Dr. Pumchang says. From the speaker in the corner of the room, the Carpenters are singing “Rainy Days and Mondays,” a song Rafferty had hoped never to hear again.

“It’ll do,” Rafferty says, between jaws tight enough to have been wired together. “I just need to know whether it’s broken.”

He sits with his left hand throbbing in a steel bowl of ice water while his dentist, with doubt animating every muscle in her face, lines up small pieces of dental X-ray film to create a rectangular area a little bigger than Rafferty’s hand. Out in the waiting room are the pumpkin-colored chairs where he and Elora Weecherat had talked.

“The machine can only photograph a small area at a time,” Dr. Pumchang says. “I’m going to have to take a dozen pictures. Why can’t you be like everyone else and go see a real doctor?”

“It’s not like I play the piano,” Rafferty says, and then grabs a breath and holds it as the nerves in his arm stand up and do the wave to pass a burst of pain along to the part of his brain that keeps track of such things. When he can talk, he says, “I use this hand mainly to comb my hair.”

“How did this happen?” Dr. Pumchang puts the last piece of film in place and studies the quiltlike rectangle she has created. With a long, meticulously lacquered fingernail, she pushes one edge piece half a millimeter toward the center. The picture painted on the nail is Hokusai’s famous ocean wave.

“I closed a car door on it.”

Dr. Pumchang makes a noise Rafferty’s mother would have called a raspberry. “Single point of impact,” she says. “Not a straight line of force, like a car door. No abrasions, no broken skin. If you’re not going to tell me the truth, don’t tell me anything.”

“Fine,” Rafferty says. “Don’t ask me questions.”

“What it looks like,” she says, “is that someone slammed it with something small and heavy.”