Breathing Water: A Bangkok Thriller

the slot.

Put it together with what he already has and what Kosit gave him, and he’s got twenty-three thousand baht. Not enough, not when he has no idea how long he’ll be on the run.

On the run. Considering who he’s running from, tonight may be the last time he’ll be able to do this without sending skyrockets through the computer system. By tomorrow he probably won’t even get his card back.

He wants to try the credit card again, but someone is waiting behind him, and he doesn’t want anyone looking at him for long. He’s pulled his shirt free of his trousers to hide the gun and opened his collar, but he’s still unmistakably in uniform.

A police car speeds by, lights blinking, going in the direction of his house. Time to move.

At the curb he flags a motorcycle taxi, and the driver fishtails to a stop with an alacrity that makes it obvious he’s registered that Arthit’s a cop, loose shirttails or no loose shirttails. This does not make Arthit any happier than he is already.

“Pratunam,” he says, and wraps his hands around the coward’s grab bar on the rear of the rider’s seat as the bike leaps forward.

And finds himself looking at the denim landscape of the driver’s back and seeing his wife’s eyes. Noi, he thinks.

In self-defense he conjures up Thanom’s monkey face and waits for the surge of good, cold, cleansing fury. But instead something hollow and dark spins in a widening whirlpool beneath his heart, and he thinks again, Noi.

“They dug a new river,” Da is saying in the fourth-floor apartment, “and then they built a dam just below where they dug, so all the water went into the new riverbed and our river dried up.” She tilts a plastic baby bottle, bought at Foodland that morning, into Peep’s mouth. “They were smart,” she says. “They did it toward the end of the summer, when the river always got low anyway. When the water stopped, we all thought it would start again by the time the rains came. But it didn’t.”

“Where did it go?” Rafferty says.

She is studying the baby’s face. “To a golf course. When we went and looked, everybody was Japanese. All the golfers, I mean. The people who chased us away were Thai.”

“You went and looked?”

“Well, sure,” she says, meeting his eyes. “We wondered where our river had gone, so we followed the new one.”

Boo is watching her as she talks. She glances over at him, and he holds his arms out to take the baby. She hands Peep to him without a moment’s hesitation. When the child is comfortable in Boo’s lap, he slips the nipple of the bottle between Peep’s lips. Da watches long enough to make sure Peep is drinking before she returns her gaze to Rafferty. For a moment she seems to have forgotten where she is in her story, and Rafferty wonders for the third or fourth time about the relationship between them.

“They chased you away,” he prompts.

“They didn’t want us there. The place was so green and pretty and full of important people, and we were all dusty and had holes in our clothes. About a week later, they brought the big machines and knocked our houses down.”

“Where did everyone go?”

She shakes her head. “Wherever they could. My mom and dad took my sisters and went to live with my mother’s parents. But my grandfather doesn’t have any money, so I came here.” She flicks her eyes toward Boo. “To beg.”

“Was there any kind of piece of paper? Did anyone ever show you anything that said they had the right to take the river? Or knock down the houses?”

She slips her index finger into the hole above the knee of her jeans and tugs at its edge. “The policemen who came with the machines had something, some piece of paper a lot of the people in the village had signed.”

“What, a deed? Did someone pay you all something?”

“My father said it was something they were told to sign so they could vote. All the people who signed it were old enough to vote.”

“Did it say anything about voting? Did it say anything about-I don’t know-a bill of sale or anything?” He stops because she is looking down, working the finger in the hole in her jeans, and her face is darkening.

After a moment she says, “I don’t know.”

Rafferty says, “I see.” He should have known she couldn’t read.

“But that’s not why we’re here anyway,” Boo says into the silence. “It’s about the baby. It’s about Peep.”

He blows out in relief as the machine yields five thousand baht more. That’s twenty-eight thousand, roughly eight hundred American dollars. The credit card worked again, but he’s hit the limit for twenty-four hours, and by then the cards will be dead anyway. Thanom has the clout for that, and the people who are screwing with Rafferty have enough power, and probably enough foot soldiers, to put a man on every ATM in Bangkok.

His shirt is soaked through, the sweat turning the chocolate brown material almost black. It’s still hot out, but this is the sweat of fury. When he thinks of Thanom, his hands involuntarily clench at his sides. The man has deprived Arthit of his time to mourn.

What would Noi want Arthit to do now? The answer comes as clearly as if she were standing beside him, whispering in his ear. He should take care of himself.

He briefly asks himself whether the best way to take care of himself would be to turn himself in, then dismisses it. The two cops who came to his door had removed their name plates. If only one of them hadn’t been wearing his name, Arthit might have chalked it up to sloppiness or a memory lapse. But both of them? Something very wrong there. Kosit was the one who had called in the death, so whoever took the call knew there was another cop in Arthit’s house. The two who came to the door didn’t want Kosit to know their names.

He doesn’t think Thanom would have him killed. But something was going on, something outside the normal course of official detention and questioning. Maybe it was just a stall for time; maybe he was going to be lost in the system for a while, stuck in some cell somewhere with no way out until he could be “discovered” and apologized to, maybe even given some sort of token, a raise or something. But that could be weeks from now, after whatever it is Thanom thinks Arthit knows will no longer have value.

And that something has to be connected with Pan. This all began with Pan.

He catches a whiff of his own sweat and glances down at his shirt.

Right, clothes. The booths that crowd the sidewalks of Pratunam are beginning to shut-there’s a dark spot here and there where the spotlights have already been doused-but the sellers who are active are eager to accommodate a policeman. Within twenty minutes he has bags containing three anonymous plaid shirts, a couple of generic T-shirts, and two pairs of preshrunk, precreased, totally indestructible and wholly synthetic pants that will probably be the last man-made objects on earth. His shoes are a dead giveaway, cop from soles to laces, but they fit well, and if anyone gets close enough to look at them, he’s finished anyway. He makes a final stop at a booth that sells toiletry articles and buys a razor, some shaving foam, a comb, and a toothbrush. The woman studies him as she puts them into the bag, wondering why a cop needs to buy the stuff for a night out and concluding that he’s got some action lined up somewhere. She practically winks at him as she hands him his purchases.

She’ll remember him, too.

So far, he thinks, tucking the bag under his arm with the others, I might as well be fluorescent, leaving glowing footprints everywhere I go. How the hell did crooks manage?

Still, with the change of clothes in a bag and the night stretching out around him in all directions, he can feel a sort of click inside, a hardening of purpose and sharpening of focus he has come to regard as his cop mode. When he feels like this, he occasionally visualizes himself as a human flashlight, pointed forward, sharp-eyed, able to ignore the irrelevant and cut through the fog of confusion. This is when he does his best work.

But the lift in his spirits doesn’t last long. He’s looking for someplace he can change clothes when he sees the blinking lights. Regular, steady, red flashes, coming from the intersection half a block in front of him. He turns around to put some distance between himself and the police van, then halts. There are red lights in the street