“He’s been at the Four Seasons, but I called there and they said he checked out.”
“Well, I can promise you he’s not sleeping with me.”
I let the silence that fell after that stretch on a bit.
“What is it you’re not telling me here, Dollar?”
I could hear him take a deep breath.
“If Howard hasn’t called you, Jack, why did he have your cell phone number written across the top of his notes?”
“I don’t understand.”
“What’s not to understand?” Dollar sounded annoyed. “Yesterday afternoon in the office I was looking at some notes Howard had about this deal he’s working on. Your cell phone number was written on the top of the first page.”
That stopped me. I had never given Howard my number. I was absolutely certain of that. As far as I knew, it was pretty tough to get anybody’s local cell phone number unless they gave it to you, at least not legitimately.
“I don’t know how Howard got my number, Dollar. I haven’t heard from him. Other than that I just don’t know what to tell you.”
“You sure?”
“Goddamn it, Dollar, I’m tired of all this crap!”
“Yeah,” Dollar sighed, “me, too. Sorry, Jack. Rough night.”
Then the obvious occurred to me.
“Are you asking me all this because you think those guys were after Howard? Is that why he took off?”
“Who knows? Who the fuck knows why that silly little shit does anything.”
“Well, it seems to me that a guy gets-”
“So you’ll be at the office on Saturday?” Dollar interrupted.
His voice rose to make a question out of it, but of course it wasn’t a question since I’d already told him I’d be there.
“Eleven,” he said. “Okay?”
It was clear that Dollar wanted to put an end to our conversation about Howard the Roach before it got any more specific, and I had had more than enough of Howard for the moment myself so I let him.
For several decades Dollar had worked the territory around the Pacific Rim, a place that was a mystery as dark as the creation for most westerners, and as far as I knew he had always done it with confidence, style, and not a little grace in spite of the high wire I suspected he might have been walking from time to time. I had never known Dollar to be rattled. Until now. Something had him pretty well shaken up. That was impossible to miss, even on the telephone.
I was suddenly glad I was flying to Hong Kong the next day. Getting away from Bangkok would be a deliverance.
First Barry Gale drops out of the sky wanting to pull me into the same scheme that had him on the run. Then Dollar gets involved in some kind of a mess with our old client Howard the Roach and doesn’t want to come clean with me as to what it is. The horseshit was all around me and rising quickly.
Screw it, I decided, enough time wasted on these clowns. Time to do something worthwhile. I took the elevator down to the parking garage and was still thinking about where to go to lunch when the elevator lurched to a stop and the door slid open.
I saw the man immediately. The way he was bending into my Volvo, I could hardly have missed him. Still, he was such an unexpected sight it took me a moment to react.
I had left the top of the Volvo down as I usually did when it was parked in the faculty garage and the man was taking full advantage of that. His back was to me and he was leaning over the driver’s door, reaching into the car with both hands. I couldn’t see what he was doing, but it seemed unlikely he was leaving me a winning lottery ticket.
The man was a westerner, and when I thought about it later it seemed to me that his appearance must have been average in every respect because absolutely nothing about it came back to me except for one thing. He was wearing a suit and tie. It was a dark blue business suit, and it would have been unexceptional anywhere else, but it made him pretty conspicuous in Bangkok where the heat made shirtsleeves the usual style for men.
When I stepped out of the elevator and started toward the Volvo, the man must have heard my footsteps on the concrete. He immediately straightened up, and without turning, began to walk quickly away.
“Hey! Excuse me!”
The man didn’t answer. Instead he quickened his pace and angled off toward a stairwell on the opposite side of the building.
“Hey!” I shouted as I broke into a trot.
The sound of my feet echoed loudly in the garage and the man bolted.
The door to the stairwell had been propped open with a concrete block, and in a dozen quick strides he reached it and shoved the block away with his foot. The man disappeared through the door and it clanged shut behind him. I knew from the click it made that it would be locked.
It was of course, and I could only stand and listen as the man’s footsteps clicked down metal steps to street level. Then I heard another door open somewhere below, and after a moment, close.
When I got back to my car I looked it over cautiously but saw nothing unusual. I felt foolish letting the idea of a bomb even cross my mind, but the thought was there and I couldn’t make it go away by pretending it wasn’t.
Seeing nothing obvious in the car’s open interior, I swung back first the driver’s door and then the passenger door. I felt carefully under the front seats, then folded them forward and checked just as carefully in the back seat and on the floor. Finally, I bent down and looked underneath the car like I’d seen people do in the movies. As far as I could tell everything seemed normal enough there, too, so I pushed myself to my feet again, reached in, and popped the Volvo’s hood release.
I stood with my hands on my hips and stared into the engine compartment wondering exactly what I thought I was looking for. I put my hand on a couple of cables and hoses and jiggled them and gave a tentative shake to a black, circular thing on top of the motor that I was reasonably sure was the air filter. I was certainly no mechanic and probably hadn’t had the hood open more than twice since I had bought the car, but I thought everything looked pretty much as it should. At the very least I was certain that there wasn’t a bundle of dynamite hanging off anything. When I started to feel foolish enough, I closed the hood quietly and leaned on it until the catch clicked shut.
Just because some pretty strange things had been happening to me recently it didn’t mean that I had to turn some ordinary-looking guy poking around my Volvo into a car bomber. Probably it was just somebody who liked convertibles, I told myself, and no doubt I scared the crap out of him when I bellowed like a madman as soon as the elevator door opened. Why had I jumped immediately to the conclusion that the guy was up to no good without even giving him the chance to explain?
Jesus, I thought to myself, if I’d thought before that I needed to get out of town for a while, I was absolutely certain of it now.
FOURTEEN
I went into the office late Wednesday morning to collect the stuff I needed for the board meeting in Hong Kong. My Cathay Pacific flight didn’t leave until four in the afternoon and I had nothing pressing to do so when Jello pushed the door open and stuck his head in I had my feet on the desk and was reading the
“Hey, Jack,” he said. “You don’t look very busy.”
“I’m not,” I said, lowering the paper. “Just killing time. I’ve got a flight to Hong Kong later this afternoon.”
“You hungry?”
