THE DEAD AMERICAN (The Inspector Samuel Tay Novels Book 3) (13 page)

“I thought you might think I was crazy.”

“Tell me about your mother, Sam. Was she a good mother?”

“I don’t know. I never really thought about that. She was just my mother. You only get one.”

“Were you close?”

“Not really. I talk to her more now that she’s dead than I ever did when she was alive.”

“And I’ll bet you take her advice a lot more now than you did when she was alive.”

Tay nodded. How did Emma know that? he wondered. He wanted to ask her, but he had said far too much already.

“Whatever your mother said, Sam, I’m grateful to her. I really needed your help.”

“That’s what she said.”

“That I needed your help?”

“Yes, but she also said it was something I needed, too. That I needed to do this for myself as much as for you.”

Emma considered that. “Do you? Need to help me?”

“Yes, I think I probably do.”

“Then we’ve made a good bargain, Sam. No one can ask for more than that.”

Tay tried to read Emma’s expression out of the corner of his eye. It would be humiliating if she were just humoring him until she could flee into the night.

“I’m not humoring you, Sam,” Emma said suddenly as if she could hear him thinking. “I don’t humor people. I say what I mean. You should know that by now.”

Tay nodded, but he didn’t say anything.

They walked on, and a companionable silence enveloped them. The intimacy of it both exhilarated and frightened Tay at the same time.

EMMA AND TAY
walked on through the nearly silent city until they arrived at what Tay thought surely had to be the ugliest building in Singapore. He would be the first to admit the competition for that title was intense and that there were a great many deserving candidates for the honor, but he had always thought this building stood pretty much in a class by itself.

It was a massive, full-block office tower sheathed in undulating waves of aluminum so shiny it glittered even at midnight. What really bothered Tay was that the building’s skin was entirely covered in giant, metallic blotches. He supposed it was possible to describe the gleaming eruptions as resembling rows of silver Christmas tree ornaments jammed up together. At least it would have been if he had been feeling charitable, but
he wasn’t feeling
charitable. What they really looked like were skin lesions. They made the building look like it was suffering from leprosy.

A little north of that monstrosity, they came to a narrow, one-way lane called Cheng Yan Place that was lined with small shophouses jammed tightly along both sides. It was one of the few places in that part of Singapore that hadn’t yet been bulldozed to make room for one more soulless office tower. Tay wondered how long it could hold out before it too succumbed to what the government insisting on calling progress.

When Tay heard a vehicle coming toward them, he looked left up Cheng Yan Place and saw a white Toyota van moving way too fast for the confined space of the little lane. It was coming hard, and he threw out his left arm to prevent Emma from stepping off the curb. For a moment he felt like a hero.

Then the van reached the corner and the driver slammed to an abrupt stop. The sliding door in the side of the van flew open and three men leaped out. Tay barely had time to register that they all were dressed in black and wearing black balaclavas over their faces before the men were upon them.

Two of them went for Tay, and the third man got behind Emma and hooked her arms to prevent her from moving. One of the two men on Tay tried to hook his arms the same way while the other man tried to grab the plastic bag Tay was carrying.

“Get the fuck off me, you asshole,” Tay heard Emma scream.

He twisted toward her and saw her stamp down with the heel of her right shoe into the right foot of the man trying to hold her.

“You bitch!” the man howled.

Turning loose of her arms, he spun Emma toward him and hit her hard across the side of the head with his open hand. The hollow
thunk
of his hand against her skull echoed in the silence like a bat on a ball. Emma staggered, but she didn’t go down.

The slap moved the man close to Tay, and Tay lashed out with his foot. He got lucky and the toe of his shoe caught the man squarely in the balls. He bent nearly double and Tay kicked again, aiming for his head. But he missed completely.

The man yelled and straightened up enough to launch a flurry of wild swings at Tay’s face. The first few punches ricocheted off Tay’s head without doing much damage, but then a punch caught Tay on the side of his jaw and he tumbled headfirst into a swirling snowstorm of flashing white lights.

Stunned, Tay staggered and his feet got tangled with the feet of the man trying to hold him. Both men lost their balance and fell against a tall rubber garbage bin standing at the curb. The bin was loaded to the top and for a moment it resisted the weight of the men, but the man behind Tay shifted his feet to try and get a better grip and his hips swung into the bin. It went over, and Tay and his attacker went over with it.

The man holding Tay’s arms landed on top of the rubber bin, but Tay was less fortunate. His shoulder crunched into the sidewalk and the jolt of pain that coursed through his body was so severe it brought him to the edge of nausea. Then his head hit the concrete even harder than his shoulder had, so hard that he heard the
thunk
and felt his neck snap as it rebounded like a badly kicked soccer ball.

Tay was done. His vision narrowed abruptly into two tiny tunnels, and then the tunnels closed and he could see nothing at all.

“Get the fucking bag and let’s get out of here!” Tay heard somebody scream.

He tried to look around to see who had screamed, but nothing worked. He told his head to turn, yet his head remained exactly where it was. Tay was just starting to get annoyed about that when the darkness came and he stopped thinking altogether.

The last thing he remembered was feeling the plastic bag that held Tyler’s things being ripped out of his hand. After that, he remembered nothing at all.

Many people say the first thought they have when they wake up in a hospital is to wonder where they are. Tay didn’t have to wonder. The face of the man bending over him swam into focus and he knew all too well where he was.

“Hello again, Dr. Gupta.”

“Good day, Inspector.”

“We’re going to have to stop meeting like this.”

Tay thought that might have been a whisper of a smile cross Dr. Gupta’s face, but he was probably mistaken. He had never actually seen Dr. Gupta smile and doubted he would recognize it if he did.

Dr. Gupta pulled up Tay’s left eyelid and pointed the beam of a silver-barreled penlight into his left eye. Then he did the same with his right eyelid and his right eye.

“Is this the third time you’ve been brought in with a concussion, or is it the fourth?” he asked.

“Third. Don’t make it worse than it is.”

“I
can’t make it worse than it is. Do you understand how serious a concussion is? And you’ve had three in… what? Less than a year?”

Tay automatically started to nod, but then he thought better of it and kept his head still.

“None of them were my fault,” he said.

“And what difference does that make?”

“None, of course. I was just trying to be funny again.”

“Again? You were never funny.”

Tay said nothing. Engaging in witty banter with a doctor was near the bottom of Tay’s personal list of preferred pastimes. It ranked somewhere just above golf.

“How did this happen?” Dr. Gupta asked.

“I ran into a door.”

“That’s not what she says.”

Dr. Gupta gestured vaguely to the other side of Tay’s hospital bed, and Tay started to roll his head in that direction. He quickly discovered what a bad idea that was and settled instead for simply shifting his eyes as far as they would go. They shifted far enough for him to see Emma standing next to Sergeant Kang, and to notice the worried looks both of them had on their faces.

“She says you were in a fight with two men,” Dr. Gupta continued, “and were struck several times in the head. Then you were knocked down and your head hit a concrete sidewalk.”

“When you put it that way, it sounds awful.”

Dr. Gupta ran his hands through Tay’s hair and probed gently at the swellings on his face and the back of his skull.

“Aren’t you getting a little old for this kind of thing, Inspector?”

“I’m getting a little old for nearly everything.”

Tay was determined not to flinch in front of Emma, but when Gupta’s hands reached his swollen jaw he flinched anyway.

“Were all of these incidents connected with you being a policeman?”

“More or less.”

“Then perhaps you should consider a safer line of work.”

“Great idea. I could always become a doctor.”

“Just don’t try to become a comedian. You clearly lack the talent for it.”

Gupta flicked on his penlight again, bent close, and examined the swelling on the side of Tay’s jaw.

“You’re going to have a hell of a headache, but it doesn’t look too serious from here,” he said.

“You should see it from this side.”

“Hummm,” Dr. Gupta said.

Tay never liked to hear a doctor say
hummm
. Whatever diagnosis a doctor made, whatever words he used to tell you of your condition, few of them sounded more unhappy than
hummm
.

“I can’t tell you how much I’m enjoying this conversation, Doctor, but when are you going to let me out of here?”

Gupta straightened up and snapped his penlight off.

“Look, Inspector, you really don’t seem to understand. You’ve had three concussions in less than a year. Any one of them could have caused permanent neurological damage.”

“But they didn’t.”

“Maybe not, but you’re not going anywhere until I have satisfied myself of that for certain. Besides, it looks to me like you could use some rest and this is as good a place as any for you to get it.”

“Rest? Here? Have you ever been in a hospital, Doctor?”

Dr. Gupta sighed and shook his head. Then he folded his arms and shifted his eyes to Emma.

“The swelling around his jaw ought to subside within twenty-four hours,” he told her. “It appears that on the whole he was lucky, although symptoms of neurological damage can manifest themselves slowly.”

“How long before he can—”

“I’ll look in on him tomorrow morning,” Gupta interrupted Emma, “and we’ll see where we are then. Please do not stay too long. He needs to sleep.”

“Can you give him medication?” Emma asked. “To sleep, I mean.”

“With a concussion like that,” Dr. Gupta chuckled, “you don’t need sleeping medication. I’d guess in less than fifteen minutes he will be dreaming amazing dreams.”

Then Dr. Gupta nodded and left the room, closing the door quietly behind him.

“What time is it?” Tay asked Emma.

“A little after nine.”

That took a moment for Tay to absorb.

“Nine?”

“Yes.”

“In the morning?”

Emma nodded.

“I’ve been out all night?”

Emma nodded again.

“You had us worried there, sir,” Kang put in.

“Exactly what are you doing here, Sergeant?”

“Emma called the police. When she told them who you were, the CID duty officer called me at home.”

“So I gather you two have now met.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And naturally you’ve been talking.”

“Yes, sir. We have.”

“Which obviously means you now know—”

“I know you’ve been helping Emma with some research into an article she’s writing about the suicide of Tyler Bartlett,” Kang interrupted. “I don’t see why that should concern anyone else.”

“Thank you, Sergeant.”

“You’re welcome, sir.”

Emma walked around to the side of the bed and placed her hand on top of Tay’s. It felt wonderful to Tay. He hoped she would leave it there. Maybe for a week or so.

“I want you to know how much I appreciate what you did, Sam.”

“What did I do?”

“You went after the man who attacked me. God knows what might have happened if you hadn’t done that.”

Tay closed his eyes and replayed what he remembered of the three men attacking them there on the sidewalk of Victoria Street.

Two men had come straight at him and the third had moved Emma out of the way and held her there. Clearly he was the target of the attack, not Emma. He doubted she had been in any real danger. Still, any man would revel in an opportunity to look heroic in Emma’s eyes, and he wasn’t about to refuse this one, even if he did feel like a bit of a fraud.

“Did you recognize any of the men, sir?” Sergeant Kang asked.

“They were all wearing balaclavas. They could have been anybody.”

“How about their van? Did you get a good look at it?”

“Not really. It was a white Toyota, I think. No windows. Just a sliding door on at least one side. I wasn’t in any condition to ask to see their registration.”

“Did they take anything?”

“Only a white plastic bag…”

Tay hesitated and glanced at Emma.

“I’ve already told him what you were carrying,” Emma said.

“Whoever it was obviously wanted Tyler’s things,” Kang said. “They must have been watching you at Raffles.”

“It’s more likely they were watching Betty Lee, Robbie.”

“They certainly weren’t after Tyler’s clothes,” Emma said. “They must have known about the disk drive somehow. There’s something on that drive that they don’t want me to see, but now I’ll never know what it was.”

“Where are my pants?” Tay asked, his voice rising. “Somebody get me my pants.”

“Sir, you’re not going anywhere. You heard what the doctor said.”

“I don’t want to put them on, Sergeant. I want to look in the pockets.”

Kang found Tay’s pants in the closet and brought them to him.

“I thought it might be safer to carry the drive in my pocket than in that plastic bag,” Tay said. “Although I wasn’t exactly thinking about being attacked on the sidewalk.”

When Tay pushed his hand into the left trouser pocket he felt nothing. His heart fell, but then he tried the right trouser pocket and his outstretched fingers touched the smooth plastic of the little drive. He pulled it out, held it up, and handed his pants back to Kang.

Tay looked at Emma. “Can you find out what’s on this?”

“I can plug it into my laptop, but that’s probably not going to do much good. It’s almost certainly encrypted.”

Tay knew what encryption was, of course, even if he didn’t know how to do it.

“There might be a hidden directory structure, too,” Emma continued, “or even an embedded routine that will erase the drive if anyone tries to access it without authorization.”

Now completely out of his depth, Tay settled for nodding gravely, looking wise, and saying nothing at all.

“I don’t want to mess anything up,” Emma added. “I’d feel better if we had a computer security guy look at the drive.”

“But we don’t have one.”

Kang cleared his throat, and Emma and Tay both looked at him.

“I might know somebody, sir.”

“Go on, Sergeant.”

“Well, sir, we had this case that involved a guy using an iPhone to count cards at the Marina Bay Sands. It was really amazing. The phone was set up to—”

“Get to the point, please, Sergeant.”

“Yes, sir. Anyway, this guy admitted he bought the phone from the Wangster, and he—”

“Wait… the
Wangster
?”

“His real name is Wang Shou Hong, but everyone calls him the Wangster. He’s a funny little guy, and he seems to know everything there is to know about computers.”