Off the Clock

“You no pay.”

“That’s not necessary. I want to.”

“Nick really gone?”

“He’s gone.”

“Then you no pay.”

Knowing he would never change her mind, he pulled a twenty out of his pocket and put it by his plate.

“I tell you, you no pay,” Natt said, picking up the twenty and holding it out to him.

“Tip,” he said.

She frowned for a moment. “You sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“Okay,” she said, her frown turning playful. “Khob khun ka.”

A curious thing happened as he stood up. The two other waitresses ran over, put their hands together and bowed their heads in a traditional wai, and said, “Thank you for coming.”

As this was going on, Ice handed the karaoke mic to a customer and hurried over.

“You leaving?” she asked.

“Yes,” he told her.

“Come back soon, okay?”

“I will,” he said.

She gave him a deep, respectful wai. “Khob khun ka, Khun Jonathan.”

He retuned the wai, then headed outside. If his mentor Durrie had still been around and known what he’d just done, he would have been shaking his head. “Didn’t you listen to anything I taught you?” he would have said. “Never use your training to help someone on the outside! What do you say to that?”

But as much as Durrie had taught him, there were some rules Quinn discovered he could only use as guidelines. This one, it turned out, was one of those.

“Khun Jonathan.”

Quinn looked back. Natt had just come out the front door.

“I told you it’s a tip,” he said.

“I know is tip. I keep tip, no problem.”

He waited, seeing there was something else she wanted to say.

“Where he go?” she asked. “Where he go that he not come back?”

Quinn looked west down Sunset Boulevard. By the time Natt and Ice got off work at four in the morning, Nick would be at his destination. It seemed fitting that Quinn had sent him to Thailand. An hour after Nick was set up in a hotel room in Bangkok, just about the time his paralysis would begin to wear off, the police would come knocking at his door.

Well, not knocking. Barging in. That’s what they did when they got a tip that a major foreign drug smuggler was in town. In Nick’s luggage, they’d find the drugs planted by Quinn’s contacts in Thailand, more than enough to put Nick in a Thai prison for the rest of his life. Which seemed like a fair trade-off for the life he had been leading.

Quinn looked back at Natt, gave her a smile and a wai, then walked down the street toward his car.