but bled out. The best I can do is row back to the yacht, which I’m now sharing with two cadavers. Good morning, Phuket!
Back at the bow I search the bay with my eyes, paying special attention to a stand of trees somewhat to the south, not far from the road or the clubhouse. My heart thumping, my head raging with poisoned monologues by demons who stayed behind after the opium dream, I take out my cell phone and look for Chan’s number.
He answers on the first ring. “Hi, Third-World Cop. Still alive, huh?”
“Thanks to you.”
“Don’t worry about it. Let’s say I know the Yips. What happened just now could not be prevented-or it could have been if you’d let me into your investigation a little more deeply. But you didn’t, so it had to be Plan B.”
“You must be one hell of a shot.”
“Not really. Modern technology, you know, a child could have done it.”
“What d’you want to do now?”
“I want to go for a jolly on a yacht in sunny Phuket,” Chan says in his best British accent. “D’yah think you could sail it as far as the jetty, old chap?”
“I’m not doing a damned thing till you tell me how you knew where I was.”
“Cell phone. When it comes to women, you are truly pathetic. That was a woman you broke cover for, wasn’t it? You just had to call her, didn’t you? She who has you by the balls. There is only one transmission tower in the part of Phuket where you are. When the backroom boys in Hong Kong told me you were in the vicinity of a yacht club, I just knew you had to be under Yip surveillance. Funny how that popular holiday destination keeps cropping up in this investigation, no?”
“It’s where the original victims were butchered.”
“Exactly.”
As it happens, I know motorboats (Florida Keys; the john saw it in his interest to teach me how to work the controls on his sixty-foot floating knocking shop, so he could take Mum down below for boom-boom). The clerk left the keys in the ignition, so I fire up the twin turbo-charged diesel engines, roar across the bay, and (I blame the opium) nearly forget the most important lesson of all: boats don’t have brakes. I manage to steer away from the jetty just in time to avoid staving in the bow, although I deliver quite an impressive sideswipe by the stern before I’m able to slow everything down by reversing the engines. Call me Captain Pugwash. To recover dignity I jump onto the boards like a pro, with a line in my hand, which I slip over a bollard before sitting on it.
Chan is wearing a short-sleeve shirt with tropical fruit all over, long walking shorts, and sandals. He is taller, slimmer, and fitter than I remember. In fact, he looks like an athlete as he strolls down the jetty with a large sports bag hanging from one shoulder.
“I tied the rowboat up to the buoy with the kid’s cadaver still in it,” I explain. “I had to put the clerk’s head in the sink in the galley because it kept rolling around on deck, but I didn’t move the trunk except to shift it out of the way of the anchor chain.”
Chan skips lightly aboard to check out the headless clerk. “I saved your life,” he says. “I’m not looking for credit, but isn’t there a word for that in your culture?”
“Gatdanyu,” I say.
“Meaning?”
“Roughly speaking, ‘I owe you one all the way to death.’ ”
“Good,” Chan says. “So let’s go pick up the kid and do some serious evidence destruction. Otherwise the cops on this island will hold you for a year, until their owners tell them to let you go.”
“Owners?”
“The Yips are big here, but the cops are controlled by some army general. I bet you can tell me the name.”
“Zinna. How did you know?”
He seems to consider the question. “Fanaticism. One day very soon it will overtake you. Then you’ll want to know every tiny thing about Vulture Peak. Just like me.”
We hook up the rowboat to the stern and head out to sea. I feel dirty about what we are doing-in my own way I have always honored the deeper rules of law enforcement-but Chan is right: Zinna and the Yips would never let me off the island if they could find an excuse to keep me here. When we’re about a mile out to sea, I watch him drag the clerk’s body into the rowboat. He finds an adjustable wrench in the wheelhouse and unscrews the bolt at the winch that holds the anchor chain. He drags the chain and anchor across the teak deck to the rowboat and ties up the two cadavers with it, including the anchor. He is sweating from the effort, but won’t let me help. The clerk’s head is a problem, though. Chan solves it by putting it into a bin liner, then making a skein out of some rope to keep it from bloating and floating. Now he ties the skein to the anchor chain.
I jump into the rowboat and together we haul the corpses and chain overboard. Back on the swimming platform, Chan empties the Magnum’s chamber into the bottom of the rowboat. Seawater floods in as if from spigots, and soon the boat also sinks. Chan jerks his head at the wheelhouse and tells me to make way.
“Where to?”
“Any position that gives a view of Vulture Peak.”
Boats are very slow compared to cars. It takes more than three hours to round the various headlands until the mountain with the mansion comes into view. It’s hot now. Chan and I are both stripped to our shorts, glistening with sweat. Whether out of some kind of respect for the dead, or a need to suffer, or because we are on serious business, is hard to say, but neither of us thinks of turning on the air-conditioning.
I drop anchor at the spot that Chan indicates and watch while he empties the contents of his sports bag onto a table. The main items are three light, hardened aluminum pipes that screw into one another. When put together with a few more parts, they transform into a singleshot rifle with an exceptionally long barrel, a high-tech scope, and a clever way of calibrating the angle of the shot to the finest tolerances.
“It takes time to aim. You were lucky the kid was so blown away by his first kill that he stood motionless for over a minute. Otherwise you’d be dead.”
“You brought that from Hong Kong? I thought you were on vacation.”
“Of course I didn’t bring it from Hong Kong. Don’t you know you can buy anything in Bangkok?”
We go out on deck, where Chan uses the sight from his gun to examine Vulture Peak. He seems fascinated.
“Don’t you want to go up there to have a look?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “It’s too soon. If anyone even suspects I’m here, we could blow the whole operation.”
“What operation?”
He scratches his head. “If I’m right, then probably one of the biggest in the history of crime detection. But there’s no way you would believe me at this moment. You might not appreciate it, but I’ve been working on your education since the night we met.” He gives me a patronizing smile, then turns back to his scope. “And there’s still a way to go. You examined the whole house up there on top of the hill?”
“Well, I took a look at it the day I was put on the case.”
“And it’s just a big house with bedrooms, a side lounge, deck, et cetera”
“Basically, yes, just that. Very fancy, but in the end just a house.”
“Garage? There must be a garage.”
“Yes, a big one carved into the rock. It would take at least three limos.”
“And how was it?”
“Empty.”
He nods.
I leave him to roast in the sun with his telescope while I retreat into the wheelhouse. It’s been more than twenty-four hours since I was last in the world, so I switch on the radio. The story of the day is the Sukhumvit Rapist again, but with a difference. It seems he followed a maichi, a Buddhist nun, to her family home, where she was visiting, and tried to rape her. The maichi, though, had other ideas:
“He took all his clothes off and made signs for me to undress in front of him,” the maichi is telling a press conference.
“Was he aroused?”
“Well, I’m not an expert, but I certainly got that impression.”
