The Fear Artist (18 page)

T
HE KID AT
the desk, who looks all of seventeen years old, barely glances at him.

Rafferty briefly considers the elevator, which is tiny, slow, and noisy. He’s pretty sure no one has been here asking for him—the kid is totally absorbed in the Korean soap opera on the little television behind the counter. He’s got no telltale jumpiness; in fact, his eyes are drooping a little.

Still, the elevator takes too much time, and he has a sudden vision of being trapped in it between floors. So he pushes the button to open the doors and steps in just long enough to punch the button that sends it to the top floor, the eighth, taking it out of action for three or four minutes as far as anyone down here in the lobby is concerned. With a last look at the kid, who has paid no attention to him at all, Rafferty walks in a leisurely fashion to the door to the stairs, and the moment the door closes behind him, he goes into a sprint, three steps at a time, as fast as he can manage it.

He’s winded by the time he slows, halfway between the third and fourth floors. The steps haven’t been swept in years, and the grit scraping underfoot echoes in the stairwell, so he tries to lift his feet as vertically as possible to eliminate the noise. After a few slightly-less-noisy steps, he just pulls his shoes off and lets them dangle in his left hand.

Not for the first time, he wishes he had his Glock.

Shooting anyone from Shen’s outfit feels like a bad career
move, but at least he could threaten them with it. He’s never wanted a gun so badly, even if he knows it’s mostly psychological.

At the fifth floor, he pushes the door open a couple of inches and puts his eye to the crack. Same dim hallway, same luxuriantly greasy carpet, same sad reek of ancient cigarettes, same flickering fluorescent light. He counts to ten, and as he’s counting, the elevator lumbers its way past, groaning toward the eighth floor at its usual funereal pace.

Nothing for it but to go in. He slips into his shoes and steadies his breathing.

Directly above the door he’s looking through, he knows, a security camera points down the hall. He’s 90 percent sure that whatever piece of equipment it’s connected to either died or was stolen years ago, but to be on the safe side, he works up some saliva, spits on his fingers, reaches up, and swipes the lens. Then he slips through the door, eases it closed, and moves quickly down the hall. The key fights him, snagging on everything, as he pulls it from his pocket.

It’s an old-fashioned key, and the lock is gummy inside, probably with nicotine. He has to wiggle it noisily to get the tumblers to move. If anyone is in there, they know he’s coming, so he offers a two-word prayer and goes in.

The only light in the room falls through the window on the far wall, and he registers for the first time that there’s a fire escape going past it. It eases the fist around his heart a little, although God only knows how rusted it is or how badly corroded the bolts holding it to the building are. It has to be fifty, maybe sixty years old.

Still, it’s there. He goes to the window, gets his palms under the sill, and shoves up. It almost breaks his back. The window is painted shut, or possibly glued closed with the oil from a trillion cigarettes. He tries again and doesn’t even get a creak of acknowledgment. He leans his forehead on the cool glass and looks down at the narrow alley, far below.

Time to move. Without turning the light on, he grabs everything that’s his and stuffs it into the bag, which has its zipper stuck half open and is also beginning to give at the seams. With the
strap over his shoulder, he goes into the bathroom and begins to feel around for his toiletries. He has a sudden vision of knocking the water glass to the floor and breaking it, so he turns on the light over the mirror.

And immediately hears a key being inserted into the lock of the room door.

He snaps off the light and pulls the door to the bathroom closed, not letting the tongue click into place. At almost exactly the same time, the door to the hallway opens and whoever it is turns on the light in the room, creating a bluish ribbon of light beneath the door.

Rafferty looks around frantically for something he can use as a weapon.

Whoever is out there, he or she says nothing, but Rafferty can hear the floor creaking under the person’s weight. There might be only one person. A drawer is opened and closed.

So … one or two? And what does it matter? There will be at least one gun out there, and he’s got—what? An imitation-leather bag with a stuck zipper. If he could open the zipper, he could use it as a cutting edge—shove it hard against a forehead, maybe, and saw with it. Might cause some bleeding, if nothing else. But, of course, even as pathetic as that is, the fucking zipper is fucking stuck. So scratch the zipper. And that leaves—

The intruder is walking. Coming toward the bathroom? Rafferty backs up a step and puts out a hand to steady himself, in case he has to jump in one direction or the other, and feels something bulbous and vaguely pear-shaped on the wall, just to the right of the sink. A cheap liquid-soap dispenser, probably from the 1950s.

That’s what I’ve got
, he thinks.
If I live through this, it will all have come down to a hotel too stingy to give me—

The person is definitely coming toward the door. Rafferty pumps the dispenser five or six times into his cupped hand, and it makes a tiny noise. The person on the other side of the door stops, and the two of them stand there, with half an inch of wood between them, breathing at each other.

The moment stretches until Rafferty thinks it might snap. And then his cell phone rings.

The phone is still in the middle of its first ring when Rafferty kicks the bathroom door open.

It swings about two feet and bounces off the forehead of the man who is standing there, an automatic pistol in one hand and a two-way radio in the other. He stumbles back a couple of steps, and then Rafferty is on top of him, slapping the open palm filled with liquid soap across the man’s eyes and scrubbing at them as the man brings the hand holding the radio sideways, into Rafferty’s shoulder, and then the pain from the soap registers, and both of the man’s hands come automatically up to his eyes, and Rafferty knits his fingers together, lifts his hands straight up, and puts all his weight into bringing them down on top of the man’s head.

The man goes straight down, as though his legs are boneless, and his gun goes off, spraying half a dozen bullets across the room. Without really registering it, Rafferty sees the diagonal line of holes open up in the wall like stitches from some giant’s needle, and then the man is all the way down, huddling against further attack and screaming. The gun is underneath him, and Rafferty’s afraid to try to get to it. Even blind, the man could hit him dead center at arm’s length.

Someone is yelling questions into the radio, and Rafferty takes that as his cue to leave. He kicks the man in the head, hoping for a few minutes’ worth of unconsciousness, and opens the door to the hall.

The elevator groans past on its way down. It would take two minutes for it to make its way back up. He heads for the stairs.

As he starts to climb, he hears the first-floor door bang open, so once again he yanks his shoes off and takes the stairs up, as fast as he can without making too much noise. There’s only one hope in his mind: that the fire escape goes all the way to the roof, or at least to the eighth-floor window so he can drop the single story from the roof to the landing.

Of course it does
, he tells himself, topping the first flight and cutting it tight across the switchback.
Why wouldn’t it? Even in Thailand, why wouldn’t it? What sense would it make for it not to reach the top floor?

Sixth floor. The bag over his shoulder makes a slapping sound
as it bounces off his side, and he puts a hand over it to keep it still. Two steps at a time, no room for a stumble, the muscles of his thighs hot with strain. Seventh floor. Only the eighth and the final flight up to the roof to go. He finds energy somewhere, although he feels as though his lungs are tiny and he can’t fill them often enough. Eighth floor, and past it, and halfway up the last flight now—and the door to the roof is in sight. It’s steel, chipped and battered, and his heart leaps as he sees that it’s ajar, open about an inch, just one inch of rainy darkness beckoning him into the wide, wet night beyond, with all of Bangkok to hide in.

He misses a step and almost falls forward, grunting with the effort to remain upright, and below him the hurrying feet stop. With all the strength he can summon, he hurls himself up the last four or five steps and slams a shoulder into the door.

And finds himself sitting on the filthy landing, looking up at the loop of padlocked chain around the pressure bar. The chain had allowed the door to open about six inches before stopping it, and Rafferty, dead.

Below him a man shouts in Thai for him to stop, and once again heavy-sounding shoes scrape against the gritty stairs, coming faster now. Rafferty gets up, pulls the door closed as far as he can without engaging the latch, puts the bag of clothes high on his arm to protect his shoulder, and runs at the door, which opens about ten inches and snaps back again, with a deafening sound.

The man below him fires a shot, the noise banging from one side of the stairwell to another. Rafferty grabs the door, yanks it toward him, then shoulders it again, and then again and again. He is rewarded by bits of cement falling into the opening. He manages it two more times, and on the second try the old screws securing the lock to the exterior wall pull free, and he falls through the door onto his side.

He hurts, he’s gasping for breath, and there’s a man chasing him with a gun, but he’s on the roof.

It takes him a second to orient himself. The window in his room—which wall was it in? A fast survey shows him a wide street to the right, alleyways to the left and in front and behind. There was a switchback between each pair of floors, so it’s behind him.

The roof is smaller than he imagined, just black tar ringed by a knee-high barrier with nothing beyond it but gasoline-saturated air all the way to the sidewalks. Behind him, about eight feet high and nine feet square, is the housing for the stairs. The door yawns open now, the chain with the padlock dangling from it, still connected to the anchor plate he’d yanked from the wall. Someone has put a small round metal table and a lightweight aluminum folding chair just beyond the door. Rising through the center of the table is an ancient umbrella, its cloth covering dissolved by the toxins in the air, its naked ribs tucked in protectively. It is anchored by a cylinder of cement that he can tell at first glance is too heavy to lift.

Useless. All useless. Even the chair, it’s as light and flimsy as a flyswatter.

It’s
windy
up here. The rain stings his face.

He can hear the man climbing toward him. He hears the feet on the stairs and the crackle of his radio, and then the man is calling for backup, trying to get someone up to the roof with him.

Is he coming all the way up or not?

Poke doesn’t even have time to get to the edge of the roof to see whether the fire escape comes all the way up. If the man comes through that door, he’s going to have his gun in his hand, and Rafferty, crawling carefully over the low wall and onto the fire escape, will look as big as a bus.

He pulls the door all the way open, tugging it against the wind, and positions himself behind it, holding his breath as he listens, becoming more certain with every moment that the man won’t come onto the roof until he’s got a whole posse with him. But then he hears the scrape of a shoe, and in the cold, milky fall of light through the door he sees a shadow: shoulders and a head. The shadow stops, and so does Rafferty’s heart.

Radio static. The scratch of grit underfoot. The shadow gets a little longer.

Rafferty can hear the man breathe.

There’s a distant boom, the door to the stairs being thrown open again on the ground floor, and shouting voices from below, echoes of unintelligible questions. The man standing only a few
feet from Rafferty apparently draws courage from them; he calls out in response, and the shadow lengthens again. Almost the entire silhouette is visible.

Rafferty shoves the heavy door, using all his strength and all its weight to flatten the man standing on the other side of it. The door bounces back toward him, and he sees that the man has gone down outside the housing for the stairs. He’s rolling away toward the front edge to escape Rafferty, the hand with the gun in it coming up, and Rafferty jumps as high as he can and comes down with both feet on the man’s rib cage.

The momentum pitches him forward, and he lands on both knees, hard, as something skitters past him across the roof—the man’s gun. He makes a despairing leap for it as it slides toward the low wall, and then the man’s fingers are in his hair, yanking him back. As Rafferty topples backward into a pool of water, he recognizes that it’s the smaller of the two men who took him from his apartment to Major Shen’s interrogation room, the one he thought of as Smiley.

The man pulls himself to his feet and launches a kick, but Rafferty scrabbles back and it misses him by an inch. The man grunts, off-balance, and his momentum carries him backward, toward the gun and the roof’s edge. Rafferty throws out a foot and hooks the man’s ankle, and the man pitches back, falling, and makes a wild swoop with his arms to turn and stop himself. He takes one more automatic stumble back, and then his feet slip out from under him on the wet surface. The top of the low wall hits him at the waist, his chest and arms and shoulders and head hanging over it with nothing beneath him but concrete eight stories down, and he screams and his legs scissor and flail, and it’s obvious that he’s going over.

The next thing Rafferty knows, he has the man’s shirt in his fists, and it tears away in his hands, and the man grabs at Rafferty’s wrists and misses. Somehow Rafferty gets his fingers under the broad leather belt of the man’s uniform. But the man is struggling frantically, every motion taking him farther over the side until Rafferty wedges both feet against the base of the wall, both his hands around the belt, and pulls until he hears another scream and recognizes it
as his own as he wrenches the man back, over the wall, and then he’s flat on his back with the man facedown across his legs.