her.
Horner watches her go and sits well forward on the bench. He surveys his surroundings, slowly and meticulously, and then he looks at his watch. Ten-twelve. In three minutes he'll know they got John.
He lifts his eyes from the watch and, one at a time, examines every face in the room. There is no one who seems familiar. The customers are the invariable ragtag assortment of big-gut assholes, most of them half tanked. Almost all of the women are now assiduously avoiding his face, as though some telepathic public-address system has just made an announcement. When he feels eyes on him and looks to check, the woman turns away.
The skin on the back of his neck prickles.
Outside, the waitress who took his order barrels out of the King's Corner and fights her way through the crowd to run into a bar across the street. She's followed a moment later by a girl and a ladyboy, who have left the King's Corner so fast they haven't even pulled on the wraps they usually wear over their dancing costumes. They split up, one running toward Surawong and the other heading toward Silom. People in the street jump aside and watch them go.
A song by Hall and Oates, an act Horner detests, blares through the speakers. Keeping his face expressionless, he pulls his feet, which he'd extended beneath the table, toward him and watches the women's eyes go to the movement. He stretches out an arm and feels the weight of gazes from all over the room. Then, very deliberately, he bends his elbow and looks at his watch again.
Ten-fourteen.
Slowly and loosely, keeping his gaze wide and unfocused to see anything that moves, he stands.
Once, years ago, Horner had been on a plane that was struck by lighting, and an actual bolt of electricity had rocketed through the cabin. That's what the bar feels like right now. He can almost smell the ozone. Some of the girls on the stage stop dancing, just hang on their poles and stare at him.
Hall and Oates give way to a snarl of static, and then a woman's voice, louder than the music, says something in Thai on the disc jockey's microphone. Two girls jump off their customers' laps and go out the door, moving fast.
Horner lets his eyes wander the room behind the sunglasses, without turning his head. There's movement everywhere. A dozen women stream toward the door and through it. Another eight or ten stop at the curtain. They turn to face him, avoiding his eyes, clearly terrified, but sharing a kind of group bravado.
Not good. And no John.
He takes two steps, and half the girls on the stage jump down and scoot past him to join the women at the door. They stand there, maybe twenty-five of them, five or six deep, blocking his way.
The disc jockey kills the music.
For a moment the silence seems even stranger to Horner than the band of women between him and the sidewalk. He's never been in a go-go bar when the music wasn't blaring. Somehow its absence makes the place smaller and shabbier, brings into sharp relief the cracks in the mirrors and the cobwebs above the speakers, the pieces of tape covering the rips in the fake leather upholstery on the benches.
The other customers are looking around as though they're not sure what has changed. One by one they turn their gazes to Horner, the only man standing in the bar. He dismisses them; there's no one there who worries him, but there are too many pairs of eyes. He says to the women at the door, his voice the sole sound in the room, 'Get out of my way.'
None of them move. A few of them raise their eyes to his face.
He takes a step forward, and they step back in time with him, forcing the ones farthest from him through the curtain and onto the sidewalk. Two more steps push more of them out of the bar until there are only five in front of him, in an arc only one girl deep and all of them looking at him, and when he makes his final move, those melt away outside, too, and no one is between him and the door.
He goes to the curtain. For a moment he fingers the cloth, and then he takes one final look at his watch. Ten-fifteen. Good-bye, John.
As he steps through, Horner looks behind him to make sure no one in the bar is coming at his back. When he's through the door, he drops the curtain and turns to the street. He has to blink to make sense of what he sees.
At least sixty girls stand there, shoulder to shoulder, looking silently at him. They've cleared a half circle with a radius of about six feet around the door to the Kit-Kat, so they're all just out of arm's length. He stands there, weighing options for a moment, and over their heads he sees a girl run into a bar three or four doors down. Twenty seconds later she comes out at the head of a stream of girls, maybe another twenty or twenty-five.
The Kit-Kat's door is opposite one of the little passages between the night-market booths that make it possible for customers to cross the street without having to go all the way down the block A large group of bar girls, all in their dancing costumes, are running through the passage, shoving their way toward him through the tourists.
Maybe forty of them. In all, he thinks a hundred and ten, a hundred and twenty.
The shortest way out is to his right, back to the stub road and then through that to Patpong 2. It's a distance of thirty or forty yards. He looks right and sees the sidewalk packed solid with women, with more of them pushing their way out of the two clubs he'd passed. Neon light bounces off bare shoulders and shining hair, glinting from the spangles and sequins on their costumes. He smells perfume, hair spray, dance sweat.
He can hear them breathe.
There are fewer girls in front of him, between him and the vendors' booths, so he takes a step in that direction, and the girls fade back, toward the booths. He grins, feeling the sharp tug of pain from the stitch in his lip, and takes two more steps, the women moving with him, maintaining their distance, and the fourth or fifth step takes him off the sidewalk and into the street.
Piece of cake. All he has to do is walk at them.
And he hears the curtains over the Kit-Kat's entrance rustle behind him, and he turns his head to see the remaining girls from the Kit-Kat come through it. Sees still more women from both sides of the entrance close in to join them until they're six or eight deep. He is at the center of a circle of women, and the circle continues to thicken in all directions.
Nobody says a word.
But he can hear the tourists complaining, their way blocked, until the oddness of the sight strikes them and they, too, fall silent. He sees a hand go up beyond the circle, now at least twenty women thick, and hold up a cell phone. It flashes as the tourist snaps his picture.
Horner stands absolutely still, his eyes roving over the crowd. He takes off the sunglasses to show them his eyes, drops them to the road, and steps on them.
In the silence the crunch of glass and plastic underfoot seems amplified.
When he's surveyed the women in front of him and on either side, he lets his head fall forward and he studies the surface of the road. He lifts his foot and looks at the shards and the twisted frame of his sunglasses for a long moment, seeing the tips of the dancing shoes and boots less than three yards away. He counts to eight, takes a long slow breath, and jumps.
He covers the ground to the nearest girls before anyone can make a sound. He slaps his hands on the shoulders of the woman directly in front of him and starts to pivot her so he can get an arm around her throat, but she reaches up and backhands his broken nose and then balls up a fist and hits him square on the stitched lip. His eyes fill with tears, and he lets go of her and brings both hands to his bleeding face, bending forward against the pain, and a searing flash of heat erupts in his lower back. When he grabs at it, he feels the hard shape of a knife. He tries to yank it out, but it's already being pulled away, and his fingers close on the moving blade.
He straightens, amazed, and stares at the ribbon of blood flowing from his hand. Fury seizes him and twists him around to find the woman with the knife, but he doesn't see a knife, just women backing away from him, stone-faced, and then something slams against the base of his skull, hard enough to jolt his vision, and he whirls to see a woman dressed like an idiot's erotic dream of a cowgirl backpedaling, with a set of brass knuckles on her right fist.
His lunge in her direction is brought up short by a stab in the back of his right thigh, and then a long burning river of pain down his back, a long swipe with the edge of a blade. When he turns this time, the woman with the knife is right there, and he wraps his fingers around her throat, ignoring her slashes to the backs of his hands, but then he feels a deep slice behind his right knee, severing one of the tendons, and he sags to the right and lets go of
