“Thank you,” Carl said. “I need a safe place to get my breath back.”
“Should you tell me about it?”
“Better give me a while to get my head together. Then I’ll tell you what I can.”
“If that’s what you want. You don’t have to tell me.”
“That’s what I want. A moment.”
“Pim! Carl needs a whiskey. He is white as a ghost,” he bellowed.
Carl gratefully drank the neat whiskey in silence. His brain was still not functioning properly. He needed to give it a little time and a little more alcohol. Carl wanted to call George on his new safe phone. The trouble was he couldn’t remember if it was actually safe. Carl drank some more whiskey and tried to think it through. Yes, it was safe. He took the phone from his pocket and made the call.
“It’s me,” he told George. “Mad Mike’s dead and it wasn’t a heart attack. Do you know the Dutchman’s house? I am holed up here until I work out what to do next.”
“I’m on my way,” he said and hung up.
“Mad Mike is dead?” the Dutchman asked.
Carl nodded. “He’s gone.”
“Oh, my God!” the Dutchman yelled. “He was the funniest man I ever met. A dreadful drunk but a brilliantly intelligent and entertaining man.”
It wasn’t much of a secret after all, Carl thought to himself. He immediately looked for something to divert his attention away from the mourning process. He could do all that later. Carl walked over to the sideboard and poured himself another shot of whiskey and lit a cigarette. It was what Mike would have expected him to do.
“George will be here in a couple of hours,” Carl told The Dutchman.
“Where the hell is he coming from? Pattaya?”
“No, Dutchman, he is close by, but he’ll take the long way here.”
“Jacqueline stopped by late last night, after Brown Sugar closed. She said she was worried about you and thought you were in trouble. She said you had that look about you. When I asked her what look she meant, she said, your scared look. She really knows you Carl, I’ve known you forever and I have never seen you look scared.”
“Everybody gets scared, it’s the price for being alive, she told me once. Jacqueline was always right about most things.” She knew Carl far too well for his liking. He didn’t let people get too close. Maybe that was the root of their problem, he thought.
George arrived slightly less than two hours later. He brought news from the old man.
“Carl, the old man says he lost the target. He gave them the slip by jumping on a long-tail boat at the Oriental Pier. He had dinner at the Oriental Hotel and then came out of the hotel around 10 p.m. He went next door to the public pier and took the only boat there at that time. They watched him go up-river but had no way of following him. He hasn’t gone home and he has not been to his office.”
“So he gave the order to hit Mike and then disappeared the night before it was due to happen,” Carl said.
“You don’t think he was there, do you? Shook off the surveillance so he could be there for the kill,” George asked Carl.
“He is certainly evil enough and sadistic enough so it would certainly be a possibility.”
“Shit!” George said.
‘Shit’ was right. Inman may have been in the garden watching his men murdering Mike while Carl was upstairs in the shower. If that was the case he had missed his chance to win the war. Carl decided he would make sure Inman lived to regret that oversight.
The thought that he probably planned to be there to watch him die as well, the same way he had probably watched Mike die, somehow made Carl feel worse about the danger he was in. Imagining somebody killing him for money was one thing. Picturing somebody getting extreme pleasure or sexual gratification from watching him die made him feel like throwing up. Carl’s world had lost its charm and all he felt was darkness.
The Dutchman looked up at them from his sofa and said, “I have heard enough to know how much trouble you are in. Hide out here until you have a way back to safety. But do try to avoid getting me killed if you can. I like my life.” The Dutchman’s face was happy and serene. Not because he liked the situation but because he was stoned out of his skull. He looked down and started to roll another joint.
George looked at Carl and asked, “So what’re you planning to do?”
“I’m planning to get angry.”
“It’s about time.”
Chapter 20
Three heavyset men with New York accents sat in a stolen car watching the offices of Las Vegas Real Estate on Silom Road. They hadn’t shaved, showered, or checked into a hotel, and all three of them were bad tempered and tired. The floor of the car had the debris of breakfast cheeseburgers and coffee. The air inside the car reeked of cigarettes, BO and fried food. They had arrived in Bangkok early that morning and making their flight had been a last-minute rush after receiving emergency instructions by long distance phone call. There was a recent photograph of Anthony Inman taped to the dashboard under the air conditioner.
An old man matching their photograph came out of the Las Vegas office building and walked with characteristic short quick steps along the pavement of Silom Road towards New Road where he was planning to have lunch followed by a cigar beside the river at the Oriental Hotel, as was his daily habit. He was in a fairly good mood; his stupid ex-partner was dead and the unexpected joker Carl Engel would also be as soon as he showed his face. The Cat and The Rat had dispatched Victor Boyle and Mad Mike with excellent efficiency and he looked forward to when they would catch up with his final annoyance.
The meddling private detective had proved to be a bigger problem than anticipated so he wanted him dealt with sooner rather than later. The sooner the better as he had recently ceased web communication with a wonderful prospect with round breasts and milky skin. Voluntarily letting his prey escape was not something he enjoyed doing but there were times when being prudent outranked all other requirements.
The thought of the man that had caused his recent setbacks altered his mood; Victor had always been a loser. In Vietnam he had become a hanger-on who did what he was told but always got overly excited by the blood and the screams of the victims, which was an embarrassment. He was such a weakling that he didn’t know how to find girls on his own so had followed Inman around like a starving puppy waiting for him to drop him some leftover meat. When Inman had become totally bored with him and left Nevada with all of their money he hadn’t expected Victor to be able to find him though he knew he would try. How had they found him? They never could before. Yes, watching Carl Engel die was going to bring him great pleasure.
Two men got out of the car and walked briskly along Silom Road until they caught up with their quarry. As the third man drove the car slowly along the road beside them they zapped the slick-haired old man with a stun gun that they had purchased from a street vendor’s stall on lower Silom that morning. They had been pleasantly surprised to find that a full array of weapons was openly available for purchase from the street vendors in the tourist area of Bangkok. One of the men opened the back door of the car and the other man bundled the body onto the back seat. It was over in a moment and none of the local people showed any interest in the car or the foreigners as they sped away.
The old man regained consciousness in a room without daylight. He had been injected with something to put him to sleep in the car. Then later he’d been injected with something to wake him up. His mouth was dry and his head was frustratingly fuzzy. He was tied to a chair and saw there were three men in masks standing in front of him. The masks were the rubber Halloween kind that can be found in the toy sections of department stores. As the fuzziness in his head began to clear Anthony Inman realized he was completely immobile and naked. The man with the grey hair, he assumed the oldest of the three, leant forward and said, “You shouldn’t have killed the fat man. He promised us a lot of money.”
Anthony Inman looked at the grey-haired man and said nothing. The masked man with the fully grey head of shoulder-length hair pulled a chair across the floor from the other side of the room and sat down facing the
