THE DEAD AMERICAN (The Inspector Samuel Tay Novels Book 3) (14 page)

“Lives in his mother’s basement, does he, Sergeant?”

“Uh… I don’t know if his mother has a basement, sir.”

“I was kidding, Sergeant.”

“Oh yes, sir. I see.”

Kang didn’t see, but he figured there was no reason to admit that.

“Anyway, sir, the Wangster helped us find the people who were selling the iPhones he had written the card counting program for. He didn’t get any money for the program. He just wrote it to see if he could, so I didn’t see any reason to arrest him. He’s a really smart kid. I figured him owing me a favor was a good thing.”

“Would you be willing to cash in that favor for us now, Sergeant?”

“Yes, sir. It would be my pleasure.”

All at once, Tay had an overwhelming desire to go to sleep. He held out the little white disk drive and Kang had just taken it when Tay felt himself sliding under the surface. A second after that, two seconds at the very most, and he was gone.

When Tay woke again, Emma and Kang had left. He had no idea how long he had slept. It could have been a few minutes, but it could have been half a day. He thought he could see light beyond the wooden blinds closed over the room’s only window so he guessed it was probably sometime in the afternoon. But there was no clock in the room and his wristwatch was locked away so he had no way to know for sure.

He sat up, swung his feet to the floor, and pushed himself cautiously to his feet. He wobbled a little, but he felt secure enough to walk to the toilet. After he finished and washed his hands, he walked slowly over to the window and opened the blinds. He was surprised to see that it was raining. He hadn’t heard any sound of rain. He watched the water running down the window for a few minutes, and then he went back to bed and fell asleep again.

When Tay woke for the second time, he knew right away it was the middle of the night. He lay in bed for a while listening to the muted sounds of the hospital, and he felt a conviction growing within him that his mother was coming soon to tell him something important.

She didn’t come, and after a while Tay got tired of waiting for her.

He unlocked the drawer where his personal effects were stored and looked at his watch. It was just after three. He got up, put on his clothes, took his wallet and keys, and slipped on his watch. That was when he realized somebody had taken his cigarettes and matches. Bastards.

Tay poked his head into the hallway and saw no one. Moving as quietly as he could, he walked to the end of the hall where he saw two elevators. He pushed the call button and at almost the same moment the doors to one opened and he got on. On the ground floor, he headed straight out through the front door. No one stopped him.

When he got outside, he was pleased to find it had stopped raining. He took a deep breath of freshly scrubbed air and went in search of a taxi to take him home.

TAY WOKE AT
noon t
he next day and hi
s first thought was of a dream he could not remember. Had his mother made one of her annoying nocturnal visits? He rummaged around for a while in his subconscious searching for clues, but he found none.

Downstairs, Tay made coffee and drank two cups while he kept his mind as empty as possible. When he finally felt up to it, he ran through an inventory of his bodily parts, gingerly probing the current state of each. His head hurt and his jaw was badly swollen, but other than that everything seemed okay. At least nothing had fallen off. Yet.

The telephone rang. Tay had no doubt quite a few people were looking for him right now, so he didn’t answer it. Instead, he walked out into his garden to get away from the sound and focused his attention on developing a plan to avoid talking to anyone for a while.

Something was very wrong here. He and Emma had stirred up a storm, that much was clear. He just didn’t understand why. Someone had been willing to use violence to prevent them from finding out… well, from finding out
what
? He needed a day of quiet to think everything through. He did
not
need to spend any part of that day discussing his physical condition with everyone who had his telephone number.

Dr. Gupta and the hospital were no doubt exhibiting all the classic signs of hysteria because of his unannounced disappearance, but they could go screw themselves. Emma and Kang were another matter. They would be worried about him, and not to reassure them he wasn’t lying dead in a ditch somewhere would be unfeeling. He was not unfeeling. He just didn’t want to talk to anybody. So what to do?

All at once a novel idea occurred to him, at least novel for Samuel Tay, and he went back inside and looked around until he found his cell phone on the bedside table. When he thumbed it on, lists of unanswered calls and unacknowledged messages popped up, but the lists were so long he deleted both without reading them.

Tay couldn’t remember the last time he had sent anyone a text message. Maybe he had never sent one. But after fiddling with his telephone for a bit, he thought he had figured out how to do it.

First, he composed a message to Sergeant Kang saying that he was fine and had left the hospital for reasons he would explain in a day or two. He had absolutely no idea what he would tell Kang then, of course, but he would think of something later. He started to write Emma a text, too, but he couldn’t think what to say to her either. Should he thank her for coming to the hospital to see him? No, of course he shouldn’t. They had been attacked together. Naturally they both went to the hospital. Tay decided a text message was no place to be personal anyway, regardless of the circumstances, so he settled for tapping out a message almost identical to the one he had sent to Kang.

When he was done, he opened the top drawer of his dresser to put away his cell phone. He certainly didn’t want to listen to it buzzing for the rest of the day. That was when his eyes came to rest on the gun lying in the front of the drawer.

The first time he was suspended because of the shooting, his boss had followed the usual procedure and required him to surrender both his warrant card and his weapon. The second time he was suspended, nothing had been said about either. He thought his boss had simply been too embarrassed to ask again, so he still had both his warrant card and his gun.

Tay seldom carried a gun even when he was on duty, but that wasn’t so much because he harbored high-minded scruples that prevented him from shooting people. Until recently he had never actually shot anyone, but he did have a long list of people he thought could
u
s
e
shooting so he just didn’t want to be too tempted.

Tay lifted the weapon out of the drawer, pulled it from its holster, and examined it. He had been outnumbered three to one last night. A handgun would have gone a long way toward evening the odds.

His choice of duty gun marked him as even more of an old fart than everyone already thought he was, Tay realized, which was really saying something. He still had his old-fashioned wheel gun, a Smith and Wesson .38, five shots with a two-inch barrel. The gun was practically a museum piece. Carrying it was like making telephone calls on a rotary dial phone.

Policemen these days all carried semi-automatics or perhaps one of the big Taurus revolvers chambered for a .44 magnum. Both of those were a lot more gun than Tay had any use for, so he just stuck to his old Smith and Wesson .38 and shrugged off the jokes that came along with it.
That’s
a great
w
eapon
i
f
y
o
u
get
i
n
t
o
a gunf
i
ght
i
n an e
l
eva
t
or,
was Kang’s inevitable wisecrack on those rare occasions he saw Tay carrying it.

Tay figured the truth was it didn’t matter all that much. He had no intention of getting into a gunfight anywhere. And if he did somehow end up in a gunfight, he was such a lousy shot one gun was about as useless to him as another.

He spun the cylinder to make certain the gun was fully loaded, slid it back into its holster, and snapped the safety strap. Maybe he should think about carrying it. Just for a few weeks. Yes, he would definitely put that on his things-to-think-about list. He closed the drawer, laid the gun on his bedside table, and went back downstairs.

Tay poured another cup of coffee, opened his front
door, and stood for a while drinking it and looking through his gate at Emerald Hill Road. He lived on a quiet dead-end and not much traffic ever passed his house so there wasn’t a great deal to see. It suddenly occurred to him that he couldn’t remember when he had last emptied his mailbox so he walked out to his gate, reached through the bars, and dug out the accumulated mail and other crap. There was a lot of it. He tapped it together into a manageable stack and took it all inside.

Dropping the pile on the kitchen counter, he began halfheartedly sorting through it. There were supermarket circulars, appeals for charitable contributions, subscription offers from magazines, and other stuff that Tay couldn’t even begin to identify. Tay was on the verge of just dumping it all into the garbage when a postcard fell on the floor. He bent over and picked it up, and he was surprised to see it was an invitation to an anniversary party for a bar.

The bar wasn’t even in Singapore. It was someplace in Thailand. Why in the world, Tay asked himself, would anybody…

Then all at once he understood. And when he did, he laughed right out loud.

Baby Dolls was a go-go bar located in a sleazy Thai seaside resort called Pattaya. A man named John August presumably owned it. Tay didn’t think August really owned Baby Dolls, and he knew full well the bar was
a front. He just didn’t have any idea who really did own it or what it was a front
for
.

John August was the other man shot that night in the shophouse in Geylang, the man whose body Kang couldn’t find when he went downstairs. John August was… well, the truth was he didn’t know for sure
who
John August was. August was tied into the American security establishment somehow, Tay had no doubt of that, but whatever his title and whoever he really worked for, August was clearly someone whose job it was to fix things other people didn’t want to hear about. August solved problems the old fashioned way. He killed them.Tay had to admit he genuinely liked August regardless of the things he had probably done. They didn’t have that much of a relationship, he supposed. They certainly weren’t drinking buddies, and that was just fine with Tay. But August didn’t seem to mind Tay asking for a little help now and then when justice needed a tiny nudge.

Justice might be blind, but it didn’t have to be stupid.

Tay took the postcard over to the kitchen table and examined it carefully.

The back of the card was nothing more than a picture of the garish red, blue, and yellow neon sign Tay remembered from the front of Baby Dolls. The other side of the card was hand-addressed to him in blue ink. On the left, where there was space for a message, was written in the same hand,
Come to Baby Dolls’ Third Anniversary Party!
Below that was the address of the place, and a date and time.

The postcard was no doubt John August’s way of telling Tay he was alive and well. Tay had never really doubted that, even if he couldn’t understand how it could be. Tay knew that August had been badly wounded that night in Geylang. He had checked quickly for a pulse and found none. That was why Tay had taken August’s backup gun. And that gun had saved both his life and Sergeant Kang’s.

Tay looked again at the date on the postcard and then squinted at the date window on his wristwatch. The party was today. My God, Tay wondered, how long had it been since he looked in his mailbox?

It was a little after noon and it was a two-hour flight to Bangkok and another two hours or so from the airport to P
attaya by taxi. There were flights from Singapore to Bangkok every couple of hours. He could still make it to Pattaya by the time of the party tonight if he really wanted to.

Damn right he did. He didn’t care about the party, but he wanted to see John August and hear how he had managed to get out of that Geylang shophouse that night and make it all the way back to Bangkok with at least three bullets in him.

Tay went upstairs to get his cell phone and call Singapore Airlines.

TAY ARRIVED IN
Pattaya a little after seven and checked
in at the Marrio
tt. He didn’t want to stay at the Marriott, Marriotts were just too American for him, but it was the only hotel in Pattaya he had ever heard of and he knew how to walk to Baby Dolls from there so that’s where he stayed.

He showered and changed his shirt, but it was still early for a place like Baby Dolls so he went downstairs and walked around a small shopping mall that was connected to the hotel. He found a coffee shop and ordered a cappuccino and a grilled cheese sandwich, and he sat and ate the sandwich and drank the cappuccino at a little table out front where he could watch the passing parade.

And in Pattaya, the passing parade was better than Mardi Gras.

Tay had always thought there had to be some kind of international network devoted to coaxing social rejects and dropout cases worldwide into coming to Pattaya because come they did by the thousands. They walked away from third-shift jobs in places like Manchester, Berlin, Toronto, and Seattle, bought the cheapest airline ticket they could find, and made their way to the Land of Smiles. They were all there: the lonely, the frightened, the guilty, the depressed, and the psychotic. Soaked with sweat, they rushed from one bar to another, reeking of that peculiarly sour odor given off by the overmatched and underachieving. Most of these refugees from reality couldn’t have located Pattaya on a map before they decided it was the place for them, maybe they still couldn’t, but now Pattaya had become their last, maybe their only hope.

If you were a guy like John August, running a bar in Pattaya was the perfect gig. It was the kind of a place where, if you were foolish enough to ask anyone who they were or what they did, the only thing you could be certain of was that they would lie to you. Even if it didn’t matter, and it almost never did, they would still lie to you. Pattaya just did that to people.

Tay glanced at his watch. Nine o’clock was still early for Baby Dolls, but he decided to walk on over anyway. After all, it wasn’t often you got to talk to a guy shot dead in Singapore who was still running a go-go bar in Thailand.

Tay hadn’t gone a hundred yards before the sweat was running down his face and
his shirt was stuck to his body. Pattaya, God help it, was even hotter and more humid than Singapore. How did people live here? He tried to walk more slowly, but it didn’t help. Within five minutes he was as wet as if he had been walking in the rain.

There wasn’t any haze, at least, but Tay wasn’t sure which was worse: breathing smoke, or breathing water. Tay told himself there had to be at least one place on planet Earth where the environment wasn’t trying to kill him, and he resolved for what was probably the hundredth time to find that place before he got too old to care anymore.

Baby Dolls wasn’t far from the Marriott, but to get to it Tay had to walk right through the carnival that was Pattaya. There were tourists on the prowl, hookers on the stroll, cops on the take, and criminals on the lam. There were bar touts, flower peddlers, cigarette sellers, and vendors of genuine Rolexes for only five dollars. There was everything Tay had ever imagined, and a great many things he hadn’t. He wiped the sweat from his eyes and shouldered on through the crowds to Baby Dolls.

But when he got there, the flashing neon tubing that outlined the blue two-story building was turned off, the red neon sign was dark, and not a single tout was at the front door hustling horny tourists inside. Was he in the wrong place? Tay looked around and thought about the last time he had been here. No, he was certain he had the right building. Had Baby Dolls moved? No, that couldn’t be the explanation either. This was the address on the card he received.

Tay tried the door. It was locked. Of course it was.

He turned away, not certain what to do. He had come all the way to Pattaya because of the invitation he assumed was from John August, and now John August wasn’t here. Nobody was here, in point of fact, except for Tay and a lot of weirdoes walking up and down the street behind him.

Tay’s eyes drifted to an open-front shophouse just across the way. He recognized it as the place August had taken him for coffee the first time they had met. The music in Baby Dolls had been so loud that conversation was impossible so they had come out here. He remembered sitting and smoking in one of the big cane chairs that faced outward toward the street, talking to August, and watching the circus.

Tay stopped and cocked his head. It took him a moment to register what he was looking at and, even when he did, his first thought was that he was imagining it. Was that really John August sitting in the last chair on the end and smiling at him?

The man was very tall. His face was deeply tanned and he wore round eyeglasses with steel frames. His dark brown hair was flecked with gray and he wore it quite long, brushed straight back against his head in a way that made him appear a bit old-fashioned. The man might have been a university professor on vacation, but he wasn’t. The man was John August.

Tay raised a hand in greeting, but August didn’t acknowledge him. Instead, he stood and walked away. Tay had no idea what was going on, but he could think of only one way to find out.

He pushed into the crowd and followed August.

At the 7-Eleven, August turned off Walking Street and slipped through a gaggle of food vendors. He strolled fifty yards up a narrow, dimly lit alleyway and went into a building on the right.

It was a neat little two-story shophouse, yellow with green trim, but it didn’t look like a go-go bar, at least none Tay had ever seen. There were no garish neon lights, no neon lights at all really. Just a doorway covered with a heavy black drape and a simple lighted sign above it with what Tay supposed was the name of the place.

SECRETS

Perfect.

Tay parted the black drape with his hands and opened the door.

Secrets was a bar all right, but it was probably the only one in Pattaya without even a single go-go girl bumping and grinding on a platform. The place was dark and woody with a clubby feel to it, and from loudspeakers Tay couldn’t see drifted the sound of a string quartet playing something classical deep in the background. Bach, Tay thought, although he wasn’t certain.

On the right-hand side was a small bar with four stools, but most of the room was taken up with battered but comfortable looking dark-brown leather chairs grouped around low tables. The bartender was a Caucasian, which was an oddity in Pattaya, and he looked Tay over with undisguised suspicion as he stood there in the doorway.

Tay glanced around quickly. It didn’t look like the place had any customers at all.

“Where the fuck’s my gun?” a voice called out.

Tay had no doubt it was August’s voice he heard, but he couldn’t find him in the low light.

“Over here,” August said. “In the back.”

The bartender lost interest in Tay and went back to washing glasses. Tay closed the door and followed the sound of August’s voice into the dim room.

“Did you bring my gun back, Sam?”

“No.”

“Oh man, that was a Baby Glock. I loved that thing. It’s the only backup gun I trust.”

Tay shrugged. “So get another one.”

“I want
that
one. I had it all broken in just right.”

“You really expected me to get on an airplane in Singapore carrying a gun and deliver it to you here in Thailand?”

“Jesus, Sam, I thought you were connected. That shouldn’t have been a big problem for you.”

“I don’t have it anyway. I couldn’t give it back to you if I wanted to. CID is holding it as evidence in my suspension.”

“Yeah, I heard about that. I’m glad you shot the bastard. He had no business shooting me.”

“But you were there to shoot
him
, weren’t you?”

August said nothing. He just pointed to the chair opposite him and Tay sat down.

The bartender crossed the room and placed tall glasses of draft beer on the table in front of both of them. Tay hadn’t heard August order the beer or he would have stopped him and asked for something else. Still, this was Pattaya after all. Tay supposed it was possible the bar didn’t have anything
except
beer.

Tay took out his Marlboros. “Can I smoke in here?”

August just laughed.

Tay took that as a yes so he shook out a cigarette and automatically offered it to August. August shook his head, as Tay had known he would, and Tay took the cigarette and lit it for himself. He blew out the match and looked around for an ashtray. August pointed at the floor. Tay dropped the match and settled back in the deep leather chair.

“The last time I saw you, you didn’t look so good, John.”

“So naturally you looted the body.”

“I couldn’t find a pulse. I thought you were dead.”

“So did I.”

August picked up his beer and sipped at it tentatively. Apparently finding it to his liking, he took a long pull and put the glass back on the table.

“How did you get out of there?” Tay asked.

“I got up and walked. It’s amazing what you can do when you have no choice.”

Tay understood that all too well. He thought back to when he had pulled the trigger of August’s backup gun over and over and watched a man’s body slump to the floor. That was exactly how he had felt then, too.

“Where did you go?” Tay asked. “You needed a hospital.”

“It wasn’t as bad as it looked.”

“So you didn’t go to a hospital?”

August shrugged. “I’ve got a few friends here and there.”

Tay knew that. He had often wondered exactly who those friends were, but August had never told him and he had always been afraid to ask.

“You okay now, John?”

“Right as rain, fit as a fiddle, bold as brass. Take your pick.”

Tay drew on his cigarette and let the silence stretch out, but August didn’t say anything else. Tay pretty much knew he wouldn’t.

“Is Baby Dolls closed permanently,” Tay asked after a while, “or just temporarily?”

“We haven’t decided. I’m…”

August hesitated and looked off into the gloom.

“We’re reorganizing a few things,” he eventually finished.

“Who’s this
we
you keep mentioning?”

August didn’t respond to that. Of course he didn’t.

“Do I have anything to do with this reorganization?” Tay asked after a moment.

August looked genuinely puzzled. “Why would you think that?”

“You sent me that invitation to an anniversary party, and I get here and—”

“Oh that,” August waved a hand around dismissively. “There’s no party. Never was. I just needed to talk to you.”

“Couldn’t you use the telephone like everybody else?”

“No.”

Tay smoked quietly and waited for August to go on, but August waited longer. And Tay ran out of patience.

“Look, John, I love a meaningful silence as much as the next man, but are you going to tell me why I’m here?”

August seemed to think about that while he finished off his beer, but finally he put down the glass and folded his arms.

“I need your help,” he said.

“My dance card’s pretty open these days.”

“Your name came up.”

“I guess it’s good to be remembered.”

“I need to ask you a few questions first, Sam, but I can’t tell you why I’m asking them.”

“Do you know how ridiculous that sounds?”

August shrugged and looked away.

Tay took a final puff on his cigarette, dropped it on the floor, and ground it out with the heel of his shoe.

“I guess you better tell me what we’re really talking about here, John,” he said.

So August did.