table to me.
“Call the marshals service in Washington, Mr. Shepherd. They’ll vouch for me.”
I pushed back from the table without picking up the card and folded my arms.
The fellow looked ex-military, like a noncom who had put in his twenty, retired to Florida, and let himself go slightly to seed; but he still looked a little dangerous, too, mostly around his eyes, which were hard and black and weren’t smiling even though the rest of his face was. His hair was close-c sr wmostropped and badly cut above his receding forehead, and while his upper body appeared fit and muscular his khaki shirt stretched where it buttoned over his belly. I thought I glimpsed the thin purple ghost of a tattoo on the back of his left hand, but he kept it turned slightly away from me and I couldn’t be certain. He had a smoker’s face, heavily lined and with a pattern of sharp ridges and clefts that looked like a topographical map of the Grand Canyon, and his leather-toned skin suggested exposure to a lot of sunlight without the use of FDA-approved creams.
The man sat there saying nothing while I studied him, smiling unblinkingly at me and twirling a pair of aviator-style sunglasses between his thumb and forefinger.
“What do you want?” I asked.
“To talk to you.”
“About what?”
“Oh, I think you know.”
“Just in case I have the wrong idea, why don’t you spell it out for me?”
The man unbuttoned the flap on one of his shirt pockets, reached in with two fingers, and pulled out something that looked like a thin stack of photographs. He put them on the table on top of his business card, but the pictures, if that’s what they were, were face down. When I reached to turn them over, he covered them with a big hand that was hard and callused.
“You know where the Paradise Bar is?”
“The one here in Patong?” I asked, puzzled, not seeing why he wanted to know.
The man nodded.
“Sure,” I said. “It’s just up the road from here, but-”
“Nine o’clock tonight. Be there or be square.”
“
The man pushed himself out of his chair. He picked up his Stetson and when he put it on he carefully adjusted the angle of the brim, bending it slightly between his fingers until he seemed to be satisfied it was sitting exactly right on his head.
“Well, Slick, if I was you I wouldn’t worry about it none. You’ve got a whole shit load of better things than that to think about right now.”
Then the man slipped on his sunglasses, tossed me a little salute, and walked away. As I watched him thread his way among the tables crowded with Chinese tourists wolfing down their set-price lunches, I reached over and picked up the small stack of photographs he had left on the table.
There were three of them. The images were blurred and grainy as if they had been taken from a great distance and they had an odd green cast to them. My guess was that they had been taken through some kind of high-powered night vision equipment, although I was certainly no expert in such things and couldn’t be sure. Nevertheless, the contents of the photos were unmistakable.
In the first, I was getting out of our rented jeep in front of Karsarkis’ house. In the second, Anita and I were standing at the front door waiting for someone to open it. In the third, I was standing at the top of the steps to Karsarkis’ house waving idiotically into the night. When I had done that on the night of Karsarkis’ dinner party and Anita had asked me why, I told her something about wanting to be certain I hadn’t missed anybody who might be out there watching us. At the time I thought I was joking. Apparently I wasn’t.
I glanced up ju sglahinst in time to see Deputy United States Marshal Clovis Ward reach the sidewalk. I followed him with my eyes as he turned left down Beach Road and walked toward the Holiday Inn. Even when I could no longer distinguish him in the crowd of tourists that filled the sidewalk, I could still see that damned Stetson bobbing just above the flowing mass of bodies. Then I lost sight of it, too, and the man was gone.
ELEVEN
I didn’t intend to tell Anita about this guy bracing me after she had left the restaurant, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to tell her about the photographs. I thought the idea of being watched and photographed by the United States Marshals Service might frighten her, particularly since it scared the crap out of me.
Still, not telling her might be a problem, too. Driving back to the hotel in the jeep, we would be together in awfully close quarters and Anita had eerie radar. I wasn’t absolutely sure I could get away with keeping it from her.
I needn’t have worried. Anita had made arrangements with some real estate agent she had found in Patong to look at a house on our way back to the hotel and she talked on and on about the place while we drove. I let her, because it kept me off the hook.
“And guess the best part,” she concluded breathlessly. “Go ahead. Guess.”
“They’re going to give the house to you for nothing.”
“Be serious.”
“I was.”
“Jack, it has a tennis court.”
That gave me pause. I’d always wanted a house with a tennis court and Anita knew it.
“What kind of court?” I asked, trying to keep my voice as disinterested as possible.
“I don’t know. The usual kind, I guess. You know, with a net.”
“I meant what kind of surface does it have, Anita? Hard court? Clay? Grass?”
“I know what you meant. I was just joking. The woman didn’t say.”
“Woman?”
“The agent,” Anita said and gave me a big wink. “I think you’re going to like her as much as you’ll like the tennis court.”
That naturally enough tickled my curiosity and shut me up for a while, exactly as Anita had probably intended it to. The woman had given Anita a map and was going to meet us at the house. I could hardly wait.
Following the route marked on the map in yellow ink, we went south from Patong past the Le Meridien Hotel complex to Karon Beach and then further south to Kata Beach. Just beyond a huge Club Med complex that bore a remarkable resemblance to an abandoned POW camp, the main road turned east, tracing a route over the coastal hills and back to Phuket Town.
According to the map, instead of turning there we were supposed to go straight ahead and follow a smaller road that continued south until we saw a sign just beyond Little Kata Beach that read No drive beyond this point by police order. At that sign, according to the instructions the woman had given Anita, we were to drive straight on. Naturally. Welcome to Thailand.
We located the sign without difficulty and then, about a quarter mile beyond it, we found ourselves on a winding asphalt road that climbed steeply up from the coast into a lush, tropical jungle. It was not long before we were completely engulfed in a jungle vglahid that cliof giant ferns, banana trees, oversize cattails, and coconut palms. Everywhere bougainvillea grew wild, etching red and white veins in the tangle of the rain forest. The temperature dropped so abruptly it felt like someone had turned on a huge air conditioner.
The house we were looking for was at the end of a driveway off the road to the right. The entry was marked with twin rows of rubber trees, their white-splotched trunks glowing like runway lights in the deeply saturated green of the forest. The two rows were so perfect, every tree so flawlessly aligned and utterly identical in height and growth, they looked like a cartoon. I half expected to see Jiminy Cricket skipping along just ahead of us, whistling happily as he showed the way.
The agent’s silver Range Rover was parked at the end of the driveway, right in front of the house. As we pulled up the woman got out and stood waiting, smiling in that particularly servile yet obviously artificial way real
