'Attention of Lieutenant Rafferty.'
'I think that should be 'Leftenant,'' Arthit says.
'The missing maid was a setup. Paid her way into Madame Wing's employ.'
'Do you think she was involved in what happened at Klong Toey?'
'I don't know. Somebody was inside, because they knew where to dig for the safe. One neat hole, no false starts. I'm pretty sure it was the guard, though. I don't think Doughnut was there long enough to know anything about it. Also, anyone can see that the guard had something to do with it.'
'Why is that?'
'One look will tell you. There's no way this happened the way he said it did.'
'Noted, Leftenant.' Arthit hangs up.
The tuk-tuk makes a two-wheeled left into a little soi and slows as Rafferty reads addresses. The building he wants is featureless gray concrete, six stories high, with windows no wider than archery slits. Washing hangs on poles protruding from the windows. One look tells Rafferty the building will not have an elevator. 'Wait here,' he says to the tuk-tuk driver, handing him two hundred baht. 'I'll be out in ten, fifteen minutes.'
The fired guard lives on the fifth floor. Rafferty is winded and sweating when he comes out of the stairwell into a narrow, uncarpeted hallway featuring grime-gray walls patterned with the prints of dirty hands. A single fluorescent bulb sheds light the color of skim milk. The veins on the back of Rafferty's hand stand out like a map of blue highways as he knocks on the door.
Nothing. He knocks, waits some more. No response, no sound from inside. No telltale darkening of the peephole positioned at eye level. He knocks a third time, just for form's sake, and then tears a page from his notebook and writes on it in a child's Thai, handwriting that Miaow would ridicule. What he writes is, 'Talk to me or I'll tell Madame Wing about the rock.' He puts his name and phone number at the bottom of the page, folds it in half, and slips it between the door and the jamb, at eye level so it will be seen by anyone who opens the door.
The tuk-tuk is at the curb, the driver asleep at the wheel. The shift in the vehicle's weight as Rafferty climbs in wakes him, and he blinks a couple of times and says, 'Where?'
Rafferty pages through his notebook, finds the record of his talk with Madame Wing. There it is: the maid's sister's address, for whatever it's worth. But it's too late to go all the way to Banglamphoo. 'Silom,' Rafferty says. 'Around Soi 8.'
'You go all over,' the driver observes conversationally, pulling away from the curb.
'I am a stone,' Rafferty says mystically. 'I go where I am kicked.' He settles back. 'Right now I'm being kicked to a department store.'
23
In his entire life, Rafferty has never met anyone who hates shopping for clothes more than he does.
Until now.
The boy barely allows himself to be dragged from store to store. The sullen face has returned, accompanied by a stubborn silence. He seems completely indifferent to the clothing Rafferty suggests, and he nods assent only when the shirt being considered is blue.
'You really are being a pain in the ass,' Rafferty says in English as the third shirt is bagged. The saleswoman looks at him, startled. 'Not you,' Rafferty says. 'Junior here.'
'Boys,' the saleswoman says with the ancient wisdom of her sex. 'Boys no like clothes.'
'I know I didn't,' Rafferty says.
'Your son?' the saleswoman asks. Rafferty is surprised by how fast the boy's eyes come up to his face.
'Sort of.' The boy's eyes slip away.
'Handsome boy,' she says, handing him the bag.
'He's handsome when he smiles,' Rafferty says. 'He smiles on Tuesdays.' He gives the bag to Superman. 'Come on, handsome.'
On the escalator down, he turns to the boy and says, in Thai, 'Enough for one day?'
The boy looks away. Then he nods.
'Enough for me, too. I hate to shop.'
The boy says, 'But-' and then thinks better of it.
'Look, it's dark outside,' Rafferty says, gesturing toward the department store's street-level picture window. Cars with their headlights on dawdle on the boulevard, waiting for the light to change. It seems to be drizzling. 'You want something to eat?'
A shake of the head. The boy's eyes are everywhere except on Rafferty.
'Well, fine,' Rafferty says, suppressing a surge of irritation. 'We'll go home, sit around, and chat some more.'
A fine mist is falling, crowding the pedestrians on the sidewalk up against the buildings. Rafferty heads for the less sparsely populated curb so they can walk faster. The boy follows silently in his wake. Within a minute they are both wet.
Rafferty stops and puts out a hand. The boy looks at it and then slowly gives him the bag with the new shirts in it, as though he does not expect to get it back. Rafferty folds it over and hands it back. 'Let's keep them dry,' he says. The boy nods grudgingly and tucks the folded bag beneath his arm.
A scuffling sound behind him, and something hits Rafferty in the back, low down and hard. His knees buckle. His attention is devoted to the effort to stay on his feet when he sees a boy, a little bigger than Superman, snatch the bag and take off. Superman is after him in an instant. Rafferty follows in their wake, chasing children for the second time in four days.
The running boys turn into a narrow unlighted soi, one Rafferty has not explored. There is a corner five or ten yards up, and the boys round it to the right. There is a sudden grunt-Superman? — and Rafferty accelerates around the corner.
They are on him at once.
Several pairs of hands grab him and pull him further up the soi, away from the lights and crowds of Silom. He kicks out at one of them, and hands grasp the upraised leg and hoist it skyward, and then the other leg is seized and he is grasped beneath the arms. They carry him, kicking and struggling, into the darkness. Someone slams a fist against the side of his head, and Rafferty sees an interesting pattern of lights, and then the fist lands again, more heavily this time, and it also strikes the arm supporting his left shoulder, and the arm releases him, and he begins to fall.
Four of them, he thinks before he hits the pavement. Through the legs surrounding him, he sees a blue streak: Superman running out of the soi, the recovered shopping bag flapping behind him.
They begin to kick him.
They kick his ribs, his hips, his legs, working methodically and deliberately. There seems to be no anger in it, but they're putting their backs into it. He can hear them grunt with the effort. One man lifts a heavy shoe and tries to grind it down onto Rafferty's face, but Rafferty grabs it and twists it, and the man goes down, and Rafferty rolls through the empty space the man vacated and scrambles shakily to his feet. All four are in front of him. His head is spinning and his legs are rubber, but he backs quickly away until his back comes to rest against a wall. Without a word the men form a semicircle, cutting off access to Silom, and one of them, the one farthest to the right, reaches into his back pocket and comes out with a sock. The toe, filled with sand or buckshot, bulges heavily.
Not more than a minute has passed. No one has spoken a word. Panting, Rafferty searches their faces: not Arthit's renegade cops.
Two men feint to Rafferty's left, and as he turns to meet them the sock whistles past his ear and hits his right shoulder with the weight of a falling safe. His right side goes numb and he sags, knowing with the instinctive wisdom of bone and muscle that one more of those will finish him. As the men come at him from the right, he shifts his weight, leans against the wall, and plants a foot squarely between the legs of the shortest and nearest of them. The sap streaks down again, and Rafferty twists away, feeling the wind from the sap against his face as the short
