Paying Back Jack (22 page)

“If that's what she wants.”

The bar owner rolled his eyes. “Man, what she wants is fucking money. And unless she works in the bar, then she ain't gonna have squat. You guys are tourists, so you don't understand anything about these girls. They ain't got anything that you would call an education, but they understand better than most what they need to do to get ahead. Some of these girls make more money in a month than you do. That's the reality. And you want to take away her prime earning years so she can look after bees? How fucking crazy is that?”

Tracer leaned forward. “I've known Jarrett a lot of years. And nothing about him is crazy. He's careful about what he does. He plans and thinks things out before he acts. If he says the girl wants to go home, then she wants to go home. Cash isn't always the line drive that wins the game.”

“For you, money is the only game,” said Jarrett.

“Yeah, yeah, and that makes me shallow and materialistic,” said Reno. “Don't believe me? Wait a couple of weeks. She'll be back with bee stings on her ass, asking for her old job back.”

“You wouldn't want to put some money on that?” asked Jarrett.

“How about a hundred dollars?” asked Reno, raising an eyebrow, balancing against the countertop, his weight placed on one elbow. It was a good position for observing the customers and the stage.

“Why not make it interesting? Let's call it a grand. If she's not back in a month, you pay me; if she's back, I'll bring in the money and lay it on the table.”

Reno's eyes bulged, his lower lip disappearing beneath his moustache. “I like interesting but I don't like extremely interesting. Keep it at a hundred dollars. Maybe you're right. She might become the honey queen of Isan, export the shit to America, and make the Forbes list next year.”

A young woman's head poked out from the beaded curtain and then disappeared. Like a forward scout, one of the yings had been detailed to check on Jarrett and Tracer. But in the ying army the loyalties were never certain. As she stared into the bar, she looked for a soft opening, wondering if she could add Jarrett to her dance card, or whether he was fully committed to Wan. That could only be established after beekeeper's daughter walked back into the bar with the backpack strapped to her back and Jarrett acknowledged her. Until that moment, technically, under the rules of engagement Jarrett was hers to lose.

As Jarrett leaned forward to get up, the bar owner pressed his hand on Jarrett's shoulder. “Before you go, I have to ask you something.”

Jarrett stared hard at the bar owner. “And what would that be?”

“When you get tired of each other, send her back. She's a good kid. Works well with the other girls. I hate to see her go.”

Jarrett stared at him in the half darkness. “You'll find someone else.”

Reno laughed. “And so will you.”

Jarrett slid out of his seat, crossed the bar, and pushed back the beaded curtains. Inside the backroom, half-naked girls smoked, chatted, put on makeup, read comic books.

Framed in the doorway, Jarrett thought he'd seen this scene before—in a counting room in Cali, Colombia. His skin let him pass as a Latino. His Spanish was good enough to carry on a conversation. He froze; for an instant, it was really as if he were in the Cali counting room. Same people, smells, nakedness; it was happening all over again.

In an old warehouse on a side street was a room lined with gym lockers. Wooden benches with initials carved into the side were stacked with shoes, socks, and ashtrays spilling over. Showers were located behind the lockers, and a solid metal door stood on the opposite side. On the other side of that door had been fifteen naked men and women. The scene had shocked him—so much flesh, like a slaughterhouse. They worked at tables. Some sat on chairs in front of tables; others worked standing up, lifting and stacking. But what at first blush seemed like an orgy had nothing to do with sex.

The naked workers were assigned various tasks in the counting of hundred-dollar bills. They counted one hundred at a time, slipped a band around the stack, put it on a pile, and then counted another hundred notes. When they had a hundred stacks, they loaded them into a box. That was a million dollars. The workroom was piled with boxes. They worked eight-hour shifts, and there were three shifts, twenty-four hours a day. Working naked, they had nowhere to hide a stolen stack of notes. A woman employee had once tried to hide a bundle of hundreds inside her vagina. She'd been caught. They'd marched her into the shower and shot her in the head. No one ever tried to do that again.

The counting room had been on the second floor of a four-story building sheltered behind a fence and trees. Guards watched the entrance, and anyone who didn't belong there was ordered to turn back. Jarrett had ridden in with an operative. The guard looked in, saw his companion, and waved them through. They entered the building from the side and walked up the stairs to the second floor. To the left was a long corridor where security guards in jeans and T-shirts frisked them, took away belts, shoes, trousers, and shirts, and gave them each a paper surgical gown. They dressed in silence.

When they finished each shift, the workers returned to these lockers. That made sense. They'd worked naked together for eight hours; it would be crazy to go all shy about showering and dressing in the same room. The ceiling was one solid mirror, and upstairs, people worked on the other side of the mirror watching, recording on video. The obviousness of the surveillance was likely the point; they wanted people below to know they were being clocked.

The local operative, a thin man not quite thirty, with a goatee and gray eyes, said nothing and walked ahead, opening a door and holding it for Jarrett. He waited until Jarrett was inside and then closed it hard, sealing him inside as if he were in a vault. Fifteen naked men and women kept their heads down. They worked like drones or robots. The workers had mastered a mechanical, precise system, one that could be done in a twilight state of consciousness. All of them were busy working at two long tables. What they were counting had everything to do with sex, but sex had nothing to do with their jobs.

When the big boss came in the door, everyone stopped counting and looked up.

“Mr. Lopez, welcome to our house. This is the money that you will be investing for us. I think gold is good. American currency is not worth keeping, you agree? And oil is good. Oil is the new gold. The rest should be put in Euro bonds. We must keep up with inflation. Of course, you have your plan. You work for us, and we only want the best and brightest bean counters—that's a good name—on the payroll. Each and every dollar is precious. No leakage is permitted. Not a single bill goes uncounted, unrecorded.”

That had been his cover. In reality, his intensive one-week training in banking and accounting had summarized key phrases. He'd
tried to remember information from a week of tutorials. There'd been material and lectures about cost principle, revenue principle, audits, and GAAP. They'd given him sufficient background so long as the conversation didn't turn too technical. If that happened, he was told to repeat the necessity for following the consistency principle; this principle appealed to the conservative interests of drug dealers who actually knew a great deal about the subject.

The workers had returned to their methodical counting of notes, straightening them, unfolding the corners, smoothing them out the way a mother touches the cheek of a baby. He'd been briefed on Ruis, a low-key, under-the-radar drug lord with a reputation for brutality. The first time he met Jarrett, he asked, “Remind me, is an Accounting Principles Board Opinion Category A or Category B?”

Jarrett drew in a deep breath and recalled a chart from his lectures.

“APB's opinions are Category A,” he said.

Ruis smiled with welcome to the backroom and slapped him on the back. He squeezed his shoulder. “Let's get started.”

Ruis's smile faded and Jarrett felt Wan's hand on his shoulder, standing on her toes, sniffing his neck. The Cali counting room had vanished. He found himself where the counting was being done on fingers and toes in the back of a Bangkok bar.

Jarrett emerged from the backroom with Wan dressed in jeans, sneakers, and a T-shirt, her backpack strapped on her back. The yings on the stage, who had been barely moving, squatted down and called for her to come back soon. They didn't want her to forget them. Wan stopped along the way, saying her goodbyes as the bar owner lit a cigar and blew smoke, shaking his head, eyebrows raised. Tracer sat on the opposite side of the stage, watching Jarrett's reaction. It was as if he had locked onto a target and was about to squeeze the trigger. His whole being was focused on the girl and on getting her out of the bar.

“Come on, Wan, you sweet girl, let me buy you one more before you leave,” said Reno.

The beekeeper's daughter put her fingers together as if in prayer and waied him, her head slightly bowed in an act of respect. He had selected a blues song and the singer's voice wailed through the speakers, “I'm going home.” In the blues someone was always about to go
home. But something or someone stood in the way. And everyone in a Bangkok bar, customer and ying alike, listening to the blues had a familiarity with being homesick and accepted that what life delivered up was the promise of hard times.

As she ended her wai, she went around to the side of the bar where Jarrett and Tracer always sat. She turned and smiled at Tracer. The wai to the bar owner was still stuck in Jarrett's throat, fishbone-like. He couldn't swallow it, couldn't cough it up. Her wai had been the kind of deference that Jarrett hated. The same kind that had led her to the bar in the first place, and the last act before she could leave. If she wants to square that circle, let her try, he thought.

Just as there is no easy shot in the field, there is no easy way to get a ying out of her bar. All the conditions had to be right, or the attempt would fail. Failure had consequences that were almost never good. There was rarely a second chance once the first shot had missed the target. Jarrett listened to the music, holding Wan's hand. She squeezed his fingers, looked him in the eye, waiting with eternal patience for him to lead her out of the world of misery, loss, and cruelty. She looked at him as if he were her hero. But he was, he told himself, just another customer listening to a tenor sax hitting a high note.

Tomorrow Jarrett and Tracer would return to the rented condo unit. Their intelligence source had promised Somporn would be visiting his mia noi. Same-place-same-time kind of guy, thought Jarrett. Waters had run every special operation they'd been sent on. Harry Jarrett, Jarrett's father, liked him, and said Waters had something that reminded him of Jack Malone.

While Jarrett had been in his fuguelike state at the back of the bar, Tracer had gone outside and called Mooney, who was bitching like an angry husband about not having Kate back. Tracer promised that the rifle was safe and sound. There had been an unscheduled delay, nothing serious. A blip on the screen, Tracer had told him. He'd seen Jarrett go into one of his haunted states, but he'd always come out and got the job done. Tracer had drunk his beer and wondered whether his partner might open up a little and talk about what was bothering him, but it was easier to get a brass drum out of a metal bucket than to get a closed man to open himself up. Tracer glanced at his watch, getting enough light from the strobes over the dance
stage to read the time. He wanted to get back to the condo and turn in for a good night's rest.

Colonel Waters had said they could count on Somporn being at the condo in the morning. “Be there. Take the target as you find the target. If someone is in the way, take it. Under all circumstances, take the target down.” That was good enough for Jarrett.

In straight talk, if the mistress is in the line of fire and there is no other shot, take the shot.

“Am I clear?” asked Waters.

“Roger that,” said Jarrett.

Paying back Jack sometimes meant going through Jill.

CALVINO EMERGED from the subway and rode the escalator up to the Skytrain station. Ratana had touched up his new sports jacket so he'd been saved the expense of the dry cleaner. It was a night out and anyway, dressing up was on his New Year's resolution list, along with doing some meditation exercises passed along by General Yosaporn. His new look and new mental state were supposed to bring about an overall improvement in his life. Just in case self-improvement didn't work out, the self-help alternative underneath the sports jacket in the form of a .38 police service revolver might prove useful.

Apichart had denied any connection with Birdman or Nongluck, but that was to be expected. He'd also denied any knowledge of the hit team he'd sent to kill the General. Pictures of the two fried assassins, the jazz musician, and the dead ying hadn't improved Apichart's memory. “Never seen them before,” said Apichart with his lawyer at his side. “Don't know them.” He was in advertising and told lies for a living; his training had come in handy during the police investigation.

At the top of the escalator, stairs led to the platform. It was jammed with passengers who had been disgorged from the train in a single knot of humanity a moment before. Office workers, the Bangkok middle-class, swarmed as if someone had knocked over their hive. Bodies briefly stalled and clotted into a large immovable mass as each passenger waited his turn to pass through the exit stalls, using an electronic plastic card or a small, black, poker-like chip—one at a time,
slipping through as the barrier flipped back for a couple of seconds. The passengers, like the Skytrain tokens, looked used and recycled after a long day at work. The women had touched up their makeup, applied fresh lipstick, and sprayed on a whiff of perfume to create an appearance of freshness. There was one woman who hadn't bothered. She was a
mem
-farang who was almost beautiful.