Breathing Water: A Bangkok Thriller

Did he plug in the tape recorder?

42

Open Season

Rose’s voice has dropped several tones, abandoning its normal alto in favor of something that’s beginning to sound like a drug-wobbled baritone. She finishes her sentence, and there is a long pause. When Miaow answers, her voice is almost as low as Rose’s, and her words have a kind of ripple, like something seen underwater.

“Hey,” Captain Teeth says to Ren. “Listen to this.”

Ren puts on his own headset, squints at the sound for a second, turns up the volume, closes his eyes, opens them again, yanks his headset off, throws it onto the console, and says, with considerable vehemence, “Shit.” He meets Captain Teeth’s gaze. “Brunch or no brunch,” he says, “he’s gotta know about this.” He reaches for his phone, and it rings. He grabs it.

“Yes?” he says.

“I just got a call,” Ton says. “Rafferty’s withdrawing all the money. It’s the Thai Fisherman’s Bank on Silom, around the corner from the apartment. I think he’s going to run. Get the other two guys over there right now.”

“The conversation in the apartment,” Ren says. “It’s a tape.”

Ton says nothing for long enough that Ren asks, “Are you there?”

“I’m here. That means the woman and the girl are gone. He’s the only one we’ve got. I’ll have them stall him in the bank. I want those men there right now. They should try to take him.”

Ren says carefully, “Take him.”

“Take him,” Ton says, as though he’s talking to an idiot. “Get him under control. Take him somewhere. Are we speaking different languages?”

“And if they can’t? I mean, if he resists? Or if he goes nuts? What happens when they get him where they’re-”

“Just make me happy,” Ton says, and disconnects.

“He wants us to make him happy,” Ren says, tossing his phone onto the console. “Who’s making us happy?” He gets up and goes behind Ton’s desk and sits in the big chair. “If Rafferty’s dead, the man doesn’t need us. We could be hanging in the breeze.”

“You worry too much,” Captain Teeth says. He gets up. “Where is he? I’ll go over there myself.”

“Thai Fisherman’s Bank, Silom.”

Captain Teeth checks the holster in the middle of his back. When he’s satisfied, he slips into a sport coat and heads for the door. As he goes through it, he says, without looking over his shoulder, “If he catches you in that chair, you’ll need a new ass next time you sit down.”

The sweat pops on Rafferty’s upper lip in less than a heartbeat. He’d been timing himself in the apartment, staying within his ten-minute limit, hurrying to get to Pan’s early enough to let him come here so he could walk into a trap. And he hadn’t done the most important thing. He’d left the tape recorder running on batteries. He hadn’t plugged it in.

He turns to face the sidewalk. Still busy, still full of people he doesn’t recognize.

And then he sees one he does recognize, the man who was driving the car behind him all the way to Pan’s. He’s leaning against a parked truck, doing nothing. Looking everywhere except at the window.

“Umm,” says the teller, and Rafferty turns to her.

“You’ve been banking here a long time, right?” Her face is full of uncertainty.

“Years.”

“I see you in here sometimes,” she says. “With a little girl?”

“My daughter.”

“That’s what I thought.” She picks up a pad of old photocopies that have been turned blank side up and stapled together to create a scratch pad. She begins to draw a girl’s face, all big eyes and long curling hair. She inks a heart above the girl’s head, then several more, a little cloud of hearts floating in midair. Without looking up, she says, “It’s a police hold.”

“Police.”

“That’s who he’s talking to. It was on the computer. A police number to call for any withdrawal from your account for more than two thousand U.S.”

“It’s a mistake of some kind,” Rafferty says. He needs to mop his forehead, but he doesn’t want to draw the attention of the man in the office. “Was there a name?”

“No,” she says. “But I’m sure you’re right. It’s a mistake.”

“Of course it is.” The teller’s station is behind a plate of glass, and by taking a step to his left, Rafferty can see a reflection of the window that opens onto the street, but not clearly enough to identify any individuals. He looks instead for quick movement. “You draw well,” he says, his eyes on the reflection.

“I draw like every other girl in Thailand,” the teller says. “We all imitate Japanese anime.”

“I like the heart.” Someone hurries past the window, head down.

“Which heart? There are five of them.”

Rafferty focuses through the glass at the drawing. “The first one,” he says. “The big one. I like big hearts.” He has nothing he can use as a weapon.

“We all do,” the teller says. “But try to find one. Ah, here he comes.”

And the fat man has come out of his office, wearing a smile that looks like it was crimped into his face with a vise. Circles of sweat turn his white shirt translucent beneath the arms.

“Sorry, sorry,” he says. “Just a bit of delay.” He looks down at the scratch pad, at the girl’s face with the hearts around it, and winces. “Do you have enough in your drawer?”

The teller says, “No,” in a tone that makes it clear that the answer was obvious.

“I’ll get the rest from the vault,” the fat man says. “Get started. Give the man his money.”

“Yes, sir.” She slides the cash drawer open, pulls out a three-inch stack of thousand-baht bills, and drops it into the counting machine. The bills flip by as the total on the readout increases. “That’s five hundred twenty thousand baht,” she says. “We need another seven hundred thousand. How are you going to carry all this?”

“Carefully,” Rafferty says. It’s more money than he’d expected-about forty thousand dollars.

“You’ll never get it into your pockets,” she says. “I’ll lend you a bag, okay?” She lifts an inexpensive nylon bag above the counter. “It’s my shopping bag. I’m going to buy groceries after I punch out here.”

Reflected in the glass partition, two men peer through the window behind him. “I’ll buy it from you.”

She gives him a smile. “Just bring it back.” The fat man returns, a banded stack of bills in each hand.

“If it’s humanly possible,” Rafferty says. He turns around, and the men at the window separate quickly. One of them turns away to show the back of his head, and the other slides out of sight to the right. The first one he saw, the one who had been following him, is still leaning against the car, so there are at least three of them-the one who was behind him, and the two who were supposed to be watching Rose and Miaow, which certainly means that the tape recorder ran out of juice and wound down.

Which, in turn, means that it’s open season.

And there might be more out there. He hears the bills snapping through the machine behind him.

“Here we are,” the teller says. She holds up the nylon bag, which has what look like coffee stains on it. “I’ll go around to the door and give it to you,” she says. “It’s too thick to slip under the partition.”

“Thanks,” he says. He follows her, and she buzzes the door open and hands him the bag, which is heavy enough to tug his uninjured hand downward.

She says, “Take care.”

“I’ll try,” Rafferty says. “It’s murder out there.”

“I think the door’s locked,” she says. She precedes him, rattles the door once, and slips a key into the lock. Pulling it open, she steps aside and gives him a little back-and-forth wave.