I searched her body and the area near it as efficiently as I was able in the darkness; I couldn’t take the chance of putting on a light, or even of striking a match. There was nothing for me to find-nothing that linked me with Marla King’s death, nothing that Dinessen had planted there. I felt a return of the impotent rage I had known earlier. It looked now as if the bastard had been planning to frame me for his murder, all right, but only after he had finally killed me too. He hadn’t planted any evidence to link me originally, he had simply gone foxy on me in the office in an attempt to pry loose the location of the Burong Chabak. Well, I’d let him convince me it was the truth, but in one way I wasn’t sorry I had come here to find out it was a lie. There was still the problem of Marla King’s body, and I knew that I had to try to get her out and hidden somewhere, buried somewhere. That would buy me more hope and continued freedom and time to figure a way out from under once and for all; otherwise, Tiong would have me jailed, and the possibility existed that he’d find some way to put the murder on my neck despite previous co-operation and lack of evidence…
I ran into the kitchen again, caught up a dishtowel, wet it in the sink, and took it back into the front room. I spent a precious minute cleaning the blood off the floor. Maria King’s skin was cold when I touched her, and her limbs had stiffened in rigor mortis. I pulled at her, sweating, cursing my flopping right arm, and finally managed to get her into a sitting position. Her face was flaccid in death, and yet she looked sixty years old and completely ugly.
I wrapped the bloodied towel around her head, and then struggled with her body, maneuvering her and myself so that I could get her up onto my shoulder. My eyes stung with inpouring sweat, but I could see the dial of my wristwatch; it was 8:48. I got her onto my shoulder at last, gathered strength, and heaved up, staggering under the deadweight, sidestepping a chair. I regained my balance, turned, started for the archway.
And froze.
There were footsteps outside, footsteps on the gravel path leading up to the porch, footsteps on the wooden stairs and on the floor of the porch. Two sets, maybe three. For some reason of his own, Tiong had decided not to wait for Van Rijk at all. He was moving in early, without taking any chances; he’d had whatever cars he’d brought parked down the street, and he and his men had come up silently on foot.
Fists hammered against the wood paneling of the door.
Tiong’s voice, demanding and officious, called out, “Open this door. We are the polis.”
I stood there with the body of Maria King draped across my shoulder, motionless, trapped. Time had finally and abruptly run out, and there was no way I could get free with the dead girl. The panic came in a spiraling rush, and before I could fight it off with cold reason, it had taken me beyond the point of commitment. I dumped Marla King brutally onto the settee, heard her stiffened form hit the back, heard the settee tilt up and crash over backward under her weight-and I was running.
Chapter Fourteen
Voices rose in excited shouts on the porch outside, and I heard Tiong yell something in Malay. A heavy shoulder thudded against the wood of the front door. I fled down the hall, through the kitchen, and out onto the rear porch. The wind bells tinkled like crazed laughter as I hit the screen door head on, sent it wobbling and banging open, and tumbled down the steps onto the spongy ground beneath the willow tree.
A khaki-uniformed, white-turbaned Sikh constable came running around the side corner of the bungalow. He had a riot club in one hand, and when he saw me he came on in a rush, the club upraised, blowing shrill blasts on a police whistle. I ran toward him instead of away, and the movement surprised him enough to throw him off-stride. He swung the club awkwardly at my head, but I ducked under it and hit him across the chest with the stiffened edge of my left arm. Air spilled out of his mouth and nose in a muffled gasp of pain, and he went over on his back with his legs kicking like a beached sea turtle.
I veered away from him, under the drooping branches of the willow toward the rear perimeter of the property, my right arm fluttering at my side and as worthless as the dangling sleeve of a coat. A low stone wall stretched out in front of me, dividing the rear yard of the bungalow from another yard on the opposite side. I jumped it without breaking stride, but when I came down I lost my footing, staggered to one knee, and sprawled out face down on a cushion of leaves and grass.
I heaved up onto my knees, my feet. The rear door of the cottage facing me burst open, and a half-naked Chinese stood momentarily silhouetted against an oblong scintilla of yellow light. Then he shouted something in an angry, unintelligible dialect-Hokkein or Cantonese-and hurried down his rear steps. I pivoted away from him to the left, toward Jalan Tenah, but he was either one of these heroic types or drunk on rice wine.
He tried to head me off as I threaded my way between several canted chamadora palms, still yelling at me in Chinese. I let him get in front of me, stepped up beside him before he could contain his momentum and set himself, and kicked his legs out from under him. He went to his knees, bawling. I swiped at the back of his thick neck with the edge of my palm and left him face down in the weeds, his hands scrabbling at the earth like fat spiders.
The whistles seemed closer, louder, as I stumbled out onto Jalan Tenah. I took a step to my left, looking for the Citroen. It was fifty or sixty yards away, and a constable was abreast of it on the roadway, running toward me, blowing his goddam whistle. I reversed direction and went across the street in a diagonal trajectory, and each breath was the sharp jab of a needle in my lungs as I ran.
Before I reached the far side, headlamps made a wide turn onto Jalan Tenah from Tampines Road, sweeping cones of light. I heard the accelerated whine of the car’s engine, and I knew Tiong, or one of his constables, had gone back for pursuit wheels. The headlights stabbed brilliance at me as the car bore down. I gained the edge of the road, dodged into another yard and the protective shadows cast by a casuarina tree.
Western rock music pummeled the night with dissonant fists from within the bungalow there, and yellow illumination shone behind two of its windows. I ran parallel to its near side, looped around the rear corner and across the width of the cottage to where a woven bamboo fence blocked the way. The fence was too high to climb, but slender wooden stakes set at five-foot intervals held it in an upright position and it was not otherwise anchored to the ground. I hit it with my left shoulder, felt it yield, and ran over it infantry-style.
The music ceased abruptly inside the bungalow, and I could hear the police whistles again, the distant ululation of sirens. There were more excited shouts in Malay, footfalls somewhere behind me in the first yard. I angled left and battered down a second woven bamboo fence. A dog began barking loudly in a nearby enclosure. I started along the side of a cottage with a kind of attap-roofed porte cochere attached, and a woman wearing a Malayan kebaya darted out in front of me, waving her arms like a signalman.
There was no time to stop or to go around her. I hit her full on and knocked her sprawling into a bed of ferns. She began to scream in high-pitched tones, more in anger than pain or fear. Other dogs set up a barking in the area, creating with the whistles and the cries a cacophony of noise that battered at my head like the slash of surf against a rocky coastline.
A thin scarecrow of a man came racing past the screaming woman, shouting, “Bini saya; bini saya!” (“My wife, my wife!”) and plucked with curled fingers at my right arm. One of his nails raked across the wound there, and pain flashed through the numbness in a jagged blaze. I swung around savagely and clubbed him across the side of the head with my left fist. He staggered away, and I staggered away-two negative magnetic poles repelling each other.
I came out on another street, crossed it at a diagonal run, and pushed through a gate in a stone wall. Beyond it, and beyond a row of mangosteens laden with fruit, was an old Malayan villa with a sharply peaked tile roof over a lower tile-roofed porch. It was built on short wooden stilts set into white marble base blocks, and an ornate marble-framed set of stairs on the near side gleamed palely in the darkness.
I started toward it. A heavy, deep-throated growl came from the shadows of a mango before I had taken three steps, and a dark, blurred form came hurtling at me out of the blackness. I tried to turn, but heavy forepaws struck me in the chest. I staggered and went down, rolling immediately, dragging my left arm up to protect my face. The dog was big-a langsat mongrel-and its eyes glittered yellowly in the dark. Sharp fangs closed over my left wrist, bit into the flesh, and began shaking me like a bone or a stick. Fetid breath and flecks of saliva spattered my face. I locked my elbow and heaved the animal across my body, kicking at it, missing, kicking again, missing again, kicking a third time.
My shoe scraped across lean ribs, and the snarl transformed into a howl of pain. The jaws released their hold
