Paying Back Jack (34 page)

Casey laughed but was clutching his fists into balls at the same time.

“Something happens to Somporn,” Casey said, “and I'm one of the first people they'd pull in to question. And they know where I live.”

“He killed your son. A man might take some risk to put that right.”

Casey didn't blink. In the years that had passed since his son's death, Casey would have had other opportunities to kill Somporn. He hadn't done so. Why not? Calvino had to look him in the eye as he answered. There was an old Chinese saying about how the wise man waits until the dust settles and the emotions cool, and then takes revenge.

“There's more than one way to destroy a man,” Casey replied. “Ruin him in ways far more painful than killing. Somporn's running
for election. Your idea of pinning the Pattaya murder on him is good. I want you to run with that.” Casey smiled and looked away from the photo of his dead son. He'd seen a lot of photographs with the faces of anguished men who'd been tortured. He'd taken some himself. But when the man photographed was his son, all the professional detachment vanished. He'd stared at his dead son's body in the photograph many times; it was an image he carried around in his head day and night.

“I don't want to work for you after today,” said Calvino.

“Now you're starting to fuck with me. I strongly suggest you don't.”

“Here's the report on Cat.” He handed Casey an envelope.

“You'll regret this,” said Casey.

“My only regret is not doing it before.”

“You'd be wise, and your colonel friend would be wise too, to not get too close to things that don't concern you.” Casey had an eerie way of flaring up into a white heat then pulling back a second before he exploded. Signaling his return to self-control with a knowing smile, Casey shook his head, slipped on his aviator glasses, smacking his lips before breathing out in a long sigh. “We all need to pull back a couple of steps. Give each other space. You and your colonel go back to your corner because my fight's got nothing to do with you. Don't ever get into a fight unless you have to. That's my advice.”

Before Calvino had arrived at his office, Colonel Pratt had stopped in and shown Ratana a set of cards like the ones they had found in Nongluck's hotel room in Pattaya. He asked her if she had any opinion about them. Pratt bounced her baby on his knee, keeping him happy with another hand puppet—a penguin with large black button eyes—that he'd found in the kids' department at the Emporium. Gifts for the baby, question for the mother. It was the Thai way of doing things: sweet, informal, and polite.

Ratana thought about the cards. “Was she a gambler?” she asked. Women who gambled sometimes ran up large debts with the wrong people, the kind of people who might finally push the indebted gambler off a high place.

“They were held together with a rubber band.”

He laid the cards down in the order in which they'd been found. “That's how the Pattaya police found the cards,” he said.

“These are Nongluck's cards?”

The Colonel shook his head. “I bought these cards, but they're identical to the ones found in her handbag. I've been wondering why she only had eight cards. Unless it was a poker game and that was the last losing hand she'd been dealt.”

Ratana slipped off the rubber band and turned over the first card: the ace of hearts. The next card was the eight of diamonds, followed by the six of clubs and the six of spades. The last four cards were the queen of hearts, the six of hearts, the five of hearts, and the nine of spades.

“Doesn't look like she won anything with this hand,” she said. “But I can't think of a poker game played with eight cards.”

The Colonel nodded, slowly moving the penguin up and down in front of the baby. “It must have been some other card game.”

“You didn't find the rest of the deck?” Ratana asked.

“It hasn't turned up.” Colonel Pratt lifted the baby back into the playpen and put the penguin beside him. The baby started to cry for his mother. “Tell Vincent I stopped by. Nothing urgent. I just wanted to drop in and see if everything was okay.”

“I'll tell him about the cards. Maybe he can figure it out. Farangs know a lot about cards,” she said. Her baby was half-farang, but it didn't stop her from thinking there were things that farangs knew that Thais didn't know, and that it worked the other way around too.

Colonel Pratt had restrained himself from saying that inside the skull the basic raw material was pretty much same; there was no farang brain or Thai brain, just brains that absorbed what they found in the environment. Like a penguin puppet. “Keep the cards. I've memorized them. You might want to show them to Vincent.”

By the time Calvino had arrived back from the beauty shop, Ratana had stared at the cards for some time, as if they might speak to her. Ratana thought that a man who finds eight playing cards in a woman's handbag would assume that she wasn't playing with a full deck. A man would get sidetracked wondering about the rest of the cards. But a woman would understand that a deck doesn't have to be complete, that eight cards could mean something apart from a card game. She played with the new penguin hand puppet, turning its
head to her son, speaking through the penguin: “I am a funny bird. I am black and I am white. I am two things. But I am also one thing. A bird that loves water. And I live in a colony, which is like a playpen for penguins. Sometimes we play, sometimes we fight. But we never play cards.” She glanced at the cards side by side on her desk. She tried to get inside Nongluck's mind. What had she wanted?

By then, Casey was on the other side of the partition talking to her boss. She could hear them arguing. Casey's bluster and temper echoed around the small office. Then it hit her, the way Thai women feel when under threat. They need to get to a safe haven, to someone who will protect them. Who would Nongluck have phoned if she had been in a life-and-death situation? She stared at the cards and then dialed the sequence of numbers they corresponded to, 1–866–7659, and waited. On the other side of the partition Ratana heard a cell phone ringing.

On the third ring, Casey looked at his cell phone and stared at the caller ID. He recognized the number.

He hesitated, the blood draining from his face, and punched the reject button. Ratana dialed the number again. On the third attempt, with Calvino watching him, he looked like a cornered Doberman and answered. “Can I speak to Vincent Calvino?” Ratana said.

Casey, like a good soldier, handed the phone to Calvino.

“Vinny,” said Ratana, “Do you mind if I bring in some playing cards?”

Calvino stared at Casey, who rubbed his three-day growth of beard like a man trying to start a fire in a rainstorm. “Bring them in.”

“What are you trying to pull, Calvino?”

Ratana came into the office and laid the cards on her boss's desk. “Khun Nongluck had eight cards in her handbag the night she died. The police found them. I wondered if they might be a phone number of someone close to her, in case she got in trouble.”

“With a secretary like Ratana, I don't need any qualifications,” Calvino said. “You might want to explain how she got your cellphone number.”

Casey shook his head and sighed like a racehorse kicked in the guts by a jockey bringing him around the back stretch. “Yeah, Nongluck had my number. I gave it to her. She had it in case of an emergency.”

“You lied to me about her.”

“She had a thing with my son. They had lived together for a while. Then broke up, got back together, broke up. She wasn't living with him when he was murdered. But that didn't stop her from coming to his cremation. She came with a friend and stood in the back crying. There weren't a lot of people shedding tears over Joel's death. It got to me. She said she had really loved Joel and she wanted me to know that he was a good man. And I told her if she ever needed anything to call me on this number. It's a private number. Not many people have it. She was one of them.”

Casey was so convincing, it was nearly impossible not to believe him, though everything about the man said such an attitude was an essential part of his prison job.

“You're saying she would have called you if she were in trouble.”

“That's exactly what I am saying.”

“Only this time, when you expected her to call, she didn't get around to it.”

He shook his head. “I said, she didn't call.”

“Any idea who'd have used her to get me a hotel-room upgrade? Not just any upgrade but one for a suite straight below hers? That takes some planning.”

“There must be someone who doesn't like you,” said Casey. “My guess is that there's a pretty long list of people.” He got up from his chair. “You're right. We shouldn't be working together.”

“I get the feeling we were never working together, Casey.”

The only fact to support Casey's story was Nongluck's actions. She'd carried around eight cards that spelled out his private cellphone number. She must have had some high degree of confidence that this man was someone she could rely on if things ever came to a flashpoint. Assuming she could reach for the phone before getting pushed off the balcony. She left behind a private code for the rainy day when Casey would ride to the rescue. It rained; Casey didn't rescue her. There was another possibility that had nothing to do with a backup rescue plan. Nongluck had left the cards in hotel room as a way to identify her killer.

JARRETT SAT BEHIND the rifle, elbows on the table, listening to a blues song about women, guns, and Baton Rouge. Tracer sat on the edge of the pool table, slowly rolled the cue ball down the length of the table, waited until it rolled back, and started over again. When he listened to the blues he could go on playing catch with himself for hours. Jarrett had no complaints about staying hunkered down waiting out the time until the job was finished. Slipping into Soi Cowboy had been a mistake. The lure of a quiet drink, a platform of yings, and the blues had proved too much. Jarrett had put his money where his mouth was. He couldn't resist having a last look at his investment. It was the kind of thing any man would understand.

The two of them had gone fishing only to find they'd been hooked. It was a hazard in Bangkok, but knowing that was one thing and not falling into the open manhole was another. Harry had always taught him that the major decisions in life were about how and where a man chooses to take a stand and enter the game, whether it was love, pool, or an ambush. The stakes were never the same. A man needed to know those stakes before playing the game. “Choose carefully, son,” Harry had said. “In your line of work you don't get to choose wrong more than once.” The odds always favored the house; that was a given. But on Cowboy the odds favored the punters by a wide margin. Cowboy was one of the few places on the planet where even a habitual sexual loser couldn't lose. The pull of the place had sucked them out of the condo. Jarrett had rationalized going out, forgetting
what his daddy had taught him, and Tracer had showed himself to be the true friend he'd always been by not calling him on it. They'd both known Jarrett had been determined to see Wan one last time, and they had gotten tired of playing pool, so Tracer had no serious argument. They hadn't so much abandoned their position as taken a small side diversion to stretch their legs and let Jarrett make his final play in the game with Wan.

“You had to see her,” said Tracer, breaking the silence. He caught the cue ball, flipping it in the air behind his back, and making a one-handed catch. “So it had to be done.”

“How do you do that?”

Tracer grinned. “Do what?”

“Catch the ball behind your back?”

“I got eyes in the back of my head.”

Jarrett grinned, watching as Tracer repeated the trick. “Rack 'em up.”

Tracer tossed him the cue ball. “You go first.”

No question going to Reno's bar had been a fuck-up, and Jarrett appreciated that Tracer had let it slide. Jarrett pushed back from his chair and walked over to the pool table, picked up his cue and made a good break. He had a look of satisfaction as he chalked his cue stick.

“Man, not being a hedonist in Bangkok is like not being a gambler in Las Vegas,” said Tracer, watching as Jarrett concentrated on his next shot. “There just isn't much else to do.” Waters had come up with that piece of wisdom the day before they'd flown to Bangkok.

Jarrett smiled, sinking the yellow number-one ball in the corner pocket right as Tracer pursed his lips and whistled. “When you're hot, you're hot.”

“This guy Somporn, you think he's famous?” asked Jarrett. “Because I never heard of him.”

“Your not hearing of him isn't the definition of famous. There's probably a lot of famous people you never heard of. Think about it.”

“I am thinking about it. And I don't think anyone in America's ever heard of him. Unless they can spell your name in Fargo, North Dakota, then you ain't famous. You're just a wannabe.”

Tracer lined up on the red-striped eleven ball and nudged it into the side pocket. He'd never known anyone from North Dakota. It
made him think about what kind of people lived there with all the responsibility for determining fame. He twirled the blue chalk cube between his fingers, then caught Jarrett's eye. “We gotta concentrate on the facts that make this a Jack kinda of case.”

Jarrett nodded.

“The man ordered Casey's son to be murdered. He left a trail of evidence right to his doorstep, and what happened? The authorities said they had insufficient evidence to charge him. You follow a trail of white feathers to an old hound's doghouse, find him inside grinning with feathers all around his mouth, but you don't believe that old Rex eats chickens. It must've been some other dog that got into the chicken house. You gotta be a famous dog to have that kind of influence.”