‘No! You said you would deliver Hatcher to me.’
‘I said I’d have him find out if Cody was Thai Horse. If you weren’t good enough to keep a finger on him, that’s your problem.’
‘You said he would kill Cody for us.’
Sloan shook his head. ‘Never said that,’ he said. ‘You said he would kill Cody’ Fong insisted. ‘I said he’d find him if he was alive,’ Sloan said emphatically without raising his voice.
‘Sloan, the deal was you would bring him in and he would find this Cody, if Cody indeed was Thai Horse, and he would kill him.’
‘Well then, I was wrong about that,’ Sloan said. The smile lingered on his swollen lips.
‘You were wrong about a lot of things. This man of yours killed my number one on Hong Kong, tore up the Ts’e K’am Men Ti. He killed Batal and Billy Death — men we were training for you! And no-w he has vanished like clouds in the wind.’
‘There’s an old Swedish hymn that goes, “Nought is given ‘neath the sun; nought is had that is not won.”
‘I do not understand the meaning of that,’ said Fong.
‘Well, it is a little subtle for your pea brain,’ Sloan said, wiping the blood from his split lips and staring numbly at it.
The pupils in Fong’s eyes dilated with hate, his mouth remained a thin slash in his face. But he held his temper, his voice a whispered threat. ‘We did our part of the bargain. Billy Kot killed the terrorist, took care of the bombing, killed the South American.’
Sloan looked up at the Chinese mobster, the usual smile on his face, his voice still soft as down.
‘You idiot,’ he said with a sneer.
The infuriated Fong pulled out his pistol. He held it an inch from the bridge of Sloan’s nose. ‘No
Sloan chuckled. He leaned his head forward until the muzzle of the gun rested against his forehead. ‘Go ahead, shoot,’ he said.
He stared past the gun, past Fong’s arm and into his eyes. ‘You need me,’ Sloan said with an edge in his voice. ‘You’re sitting on dynamite. It’s only a matter of time before the DEA tumbles on to your whole stash. They already know you got the stuff. They’ll squash you like a bug. Without me, you’ll be just another dumb Chinaman floating in the river.’
With a growl like an animal’s, Fong slashed his pistol down on Sloan’s skull, and the big man groaned and rolled over on his face.
‘You are a dead soldier,’ Fong hissed in his ear.
On the port side of the junk Hatcher worked his way up a pile of discarded produce and felt the surface of the boat, looking for chinks in its teak wood armor. He got a finger hold in a split in its side, pulled himself up and searched for another, then another, inching his way up the ancient side of the craft split by split, chink by chink, like the old free-climbing days.
Unlike the regulars, he was too well known among the Chiu Chaos to walk brazenly aboard the produce boat. His face had been memorized by every one of Fong’s assassins and he knew it. It was the way they operated. Like the FBI. Ten Most Wanted.
Earp, however, strolled the deck in a cowboy hat, a tan safari jacket tied loosely at the waist by a cloth belt. He lit a cigar, stared down through the latticework hatch into the hold below, lie saw Billy Kot and two henchmen lounging in the booth, drinking. There was no sign of Fong.
Hatcher clung tenaciously to the side of the junk, his hand sliding quietly and expertly across its smooth teakwood hull. He felt a splinter, worked at it with his free hand, his sturdy fingers digging at the chink until he could get four fingertips into the slit. He pulled himself up slowly, let go with his other hand and groped for another slot.
On the deck of the junk, Earp thumped the watermelons, peeled back leaves of lettuce and smelled them, tried to look as if he knew what he was doing.
‘Okay?’ one of the Thai salesmen said.
‘Yeah, not bad,’ Earp answered. ‘How much for the lot?’ He swept his arm around the deck.
‘All of it?’ the astonished Thai answered.
‘Yeah. What’ve you got below, any more stuff?’
‘More of the same.’
‘I’ll just take a look.’
The Thai produce man, anxious to please Earp, led him toward the hatch that led below-decks. Two Chinese gunmen leaned against the railing, watching them casually.
Sy swung a snaketail boat alongside and started chattering with one of the off-loaders. Corkscrew, his shotgun tucked under his arm, pulled himself up on the lip of the boat and entered the hold. He saw Earp coming down the stairs.
Hatcher continued to inch his way up the side of the junk. Behind the guards he grasped the rail with one hand, then with the other, and then he peered over the side. He searched the people on deck for Potter but couldn’t see him. Then he saw a stooped old Chinese walk over to one of the guards.
‘A light, please?’ the old man asked.
‘No smoke.’
My God, it’s Potter, Hatcher realized.
