THE GIRL IN THE WINDOW (The Inspector Samuel Tay Novels Book 4) (29 page)

“Hobbes. Thomas Hobbes.”

“What?”

“That was written by the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes in the seventeenth century. 'The life of man: solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short'
."

“What in the world are you on about, Samuel? Who cares? It’s just something I heard somewhere.”

“Look, Mother, let’s stop arguing about this. I’m going back to sleep.”

At that Tay’s mother levitated about three feet over the end of his bed and began shaking her finger at him.

“Do not mess this up, Samuel. Do not try to arrest this man. Let August kill him if he gets the chance. And if he doesn’t, you kill him.”

“I already told you, Mother, I’m not killing anybody unless I have to.”

“Don’t you want revenge for Robbie’s murder?”

“I want justice for his killer, Mother. Justice is civilized. Revenge isn’t.”

“Oh, that is the way you see it, is it? Are you really that naive?”

“It’s not naïve, it’s—”

“Justice is nothing but revenge dressed up in a nice suit so we can pretend it’s not what it really is.”

Tay said nothing. He knew there was a lot of truth to what his mother was saying, but he certainly wasn’t going to admit that to her. Not right now, anyway.

“Maybe you should just toddle off and have a cup of tea, Samuel, and leave protecting the world to real men like August.”

Tay felt a pulse of anger in spite of himself, but he pushed it away.

“I don’t drink tea, Mother.”

“No? I would have thought coffee might be too strong for you.”

“May I go back to sleep now?”

“Do whatever you want. I’m leaving.”

“Thank heaven,” Tay muttered.

“What did you say?”

“I thought you heard everything, Mother.”

Tay’s mother waved one hand at him in a gesture of dismissal.

“Honestly, I don’t know why I bother. I came here tonight to tell you I was proud of you for standing up for what is right—”

“I
am
standing up for what is right.”

“—and now I am leaving here filled with disappointment. You are a dinosaur, Samuel. You belong in a museum.”

“Good night, Mother. Don’t be a stranger.”

As Tay watched, the image of his mother begin to fade away until all that remained was a single point of light that quivered like a candle flame in the darkness. After a few moments the point of light disappeared, too, and Tay was left sitting in his bed with a pillow behind him wondering if he was asleep or awake.

As usual, he decided he was asleep, and almost at once he was.

TAY CLOSED THE door behind him and was halfway down his front walk when an unsettling thought crossed his mind. Shouldn’t he be carrying his service weapon?

He almost never carried a gun. In fact, he couldn’t remember the last time he even looked at his old Smith & Wesson .38. Was it still in the drawer in his nightstand next to his bed? Unless someone had stolen it, he supposed it had to be.

There wasn’t really much point in him carrying it, he supposed. He was such a terrible shot that the gun wouldn’t be much use to him even if he had it with him. Did other people know what an awful shot he was? His mother seemed to, which was pretty embarrassing.

Still, if there was ever a sensible time for him to carry a gun, this was probably it. He didn’t really want to haul the thing around with him, but he didn’t want to be surprised by Suparman somewhere and have no way to defend himself either. Whether he could defend himself successfully even if he did have his gun was another question altogether. He supposed he would find out if the time came when he had to try.

Tay turned around, took out his key, and let himself back into the house.

He sat on the side of his bed and lifted the .38 and its leather holster out of the drawer. Sliding it out, he spun the cylinder and saw it was fully loaded. When had he loaded it? He couldn’t remember. He couldn’t even remember the last time he had fired it or, worse, the last time he had cleaned it.

It didn’t seem very wise to entrust his life to a dirty handgun so Tay fumbled around in the back of the drawer until he found his cleaning kit. It was a black zippered pouch that held several brushes of various sizes, a sack of cotton patches, and plastic squeeze bottles of lubricating oil and gun solvent.

Downstairs at the table in the garden, Tay opened the cylinder and tipped the gun up. The five rounds slid out of the cylinder and he caught them in his palm and stuck them in his pocket. At least he remembered that much about cleaning a weapon: to do it, you had to unload it first.

He unzipped the cleaning kit and took out one of the brushes. He squeezed a little Hoppe’s Number 9 solvent on it and pushed it through the bore. After that he wiped the brush through each of the five chambers in the cylinder. When he was done with the Hoppe’s, he wrapped one of the cotton patches around the brush and repeated the entire procedure, checking the cotton patch after it passed through the bore to confirm it was reasonably clean.

He fished the five rounds out of his pocket and looked at them. Did ammunition get old? Should he reload with fresh rounds? Did he even have a box of ammunition at home?

Screw it
, he thought.
They’ll either go bang or they won’t
. He pushed a round into each of the chambers, spun the cylinder, and slapped it shut. Then he holstered the gun, stood up, and reached underneath his shirt to slip the paddle holster over his belt at the two o’clock position.

He sat down, testing the holster position for comfort. Somehow the shirt felt a little snug over the holster. He didn’t remember it being snug the last time he carried a gun. He would have liked to tell himself that this was a bigger gun than he had carried before, but it wasn’t. It was exactly the same gun. What was bigger was the stomach against which it rested.

Tay set that depressing thought aside, shoved all the cleaning gear back into the kit, and zipped it closed. Back inside the house, he dropped the kit on a chair and headed for the front door. Thinking about his stomach had made him hungry. He would stop for breakfast before he went to the office.

Tay stood for a moment outside his front gate and looked around. The sun had disappeared behind a shelf of low-hanging clouds and there was a scent of rain in the air.

Were John August’s people out there somewhere watching him right now? He could see no suspicious vehicles parked on Emerald Hill Road nor was anyone loitering on the sidewalks. It was a quiet residential street and August’s people could hardly be standing around pretending to read newspapers. If they were there, they had to be behind one of his neighbors’ windows. That didn’t make a lot of sense to Tay either, but he couldn’t think of anywhere else they might be.

Tay turned right and walked toward Orchard Road. There was a Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf where he sometimes went for breakfast when he was in a hurry. Coffee and a roll was all he needed this morning. The Coffee Bean would do just fine.

He ordered a drip coffee and examined the breakfast offerings in the glass case next to the cash register. The muffins looked awful and the cinnamon roll looked worse, so he settled for a toasted cinnamon bagel with cream cheese. When it was ready, he took it and the coffee to an empty table in the corner and sat down. His holster dug uncomfortably into his belly and he shot a look around the room. It was almost empty and no one was paying any attention to him so he half rose from his chair, pushed the holster a little further around to the front of his belt, and sat down again. Better.

As Tay sipped his coffee and chewed at his bagel his thoughts drifted back to the dream he had the night before and the conversation he had, or imagined he had, with his mother. Dream or not, his mother probably had the right idea. He ought to let John August’s people shoot Suparman and be done with it.

He understood that really did make sense, but there was still a problem: he simply couldn’t bring himself to do it. He arrested the people who ought to be arrested and let the justice system sort them out. That was what he had done for twenty-five years or more. He didn’t set people up to be killed just because they were poor excuses for human beings, even if sometimes he arrested people he thought deserved killing.

A chair scraped the floor table right behind him and reflexively Tay scooted his own chair a bit closer to his table to make room for whoever just sat down. But he didn’t look at them. People in Singapore seldom acknowledged strangers unless they absolutely had to.

“How can you drink hot coffee in weather like this?” the woman behind him said.

Tay glanced over his shoulder and his surprise must have shown on his face because Claire giggled slightly.

“Look straight ahead and drink your coffee,” Claire said. “We can hear each other fine. Don’t make it too obvious we’re having a conversation.”

“You don’t think our lips moving might give that away?”

“I can talk without moving my lips. Can’t you?”

Tay didn’t know what to say to that, so he said nothing at all. After a moment Claire went on.

“I’m kidding, Sam. You’ve got to lighten up a little.”

“Everyone tells me that.”

“Everyone’s right.”

Tay cleared his throat. “Could you at least tell me what we’re not having this conversation about?”

“I saw you looking for us this morning.”

“I didn’t see you.”

“Well, Sam, you do understand that’s really the whole idea, don’t you?”

Tay nodded, but immediately realized that was pretty pointless since Claire had her back to him.

“So relax,” she added. “We’ve got you covered. We’re there. Don’t worry about it.”

“Easy for you to say.”

“Not really. I’m responsible for you. If anything happens to you, I’m dead.”

Claire paused. Tay said nothing.

“Okay,” she went on, “maybe that was a bad way to put it, but you know what I mean.”

“That’s the best you can do? Tell me not to worry?”

“Look, Sam, we’ve got your house zipped up so tight a roach can’t get in there without me knowing it.”

“What if Suparman shows up somewhere else?”

“Like where? When you’re in the Cantonment Complex surrounded by about five hundred armed cops?”

“I guess that’s not likely.”

“And where else do you go?”

“Gee, you make me sound so dull.”

“Dull is good. Dull makes you easy to cover.”

“You know, I’m on the street sometimes. I do have to go back and forth between places. I even eat in cafes and restaurants occasionally. Like now, for instance.”

“It wouldn’t make any sense for him to try to take you on the street or in a public place like this coffee shop. Why would he take a risk like that in front of a ton of witnesses? No, Sam, that’s not the way Suparman works. He wants you static and in a nice quiet place where no one else is around. And that’s at your house right here on Emerald Hill Road.”

“You’re sure of that?”

“You bet your life.” Claire giggled slightly in what sounded to Tay like genuine embarrassment. “Another poor choice of words, I guess.”

Tay chewed his bagel without tasting it. He took the napkin that came with it and wiped the crumbs off his lips.

“What if something unanticipated happens? I mean, what if I have to go someplace unexpected?”

“Like where?”

“How the hell should I know?” Tay snapped. “I’m a cop. I investigate crimes. I don’t just sit around and shuffle papers all day.”

“That’s not what John says.”

Tay had only been talking to this woman for a few minutes and already he wasn’t sure he liked her. Fortunately, she started talking again before Tay could say something he would no doubt later regret.

“Look, Sam, have you got your cell phone with you?”

“Yes.”

“I’m going to send you a text in a few minutes. If something happens to disrupt your routine, text me at that number and we’ll figure it out. Stay cool, Sam. We’ve got this.”

Before Tay had decided what to say, he heard the chair behind him scrape and he felt rather than saw Claire standing up and moving away. He didn’t look back at her.

Tay finished his bagel and coffee and had just wiped his mouth and wadded up the napkin when his phone buzzed in his pocket.

He took it out and looked at the screen.

Buzz.

Funny. Very goddamned funny.

TAY HAD BEEN at his desk for nearly an hour trying to think of something to do other than sit at his desk when there was a knock at the door. A patrolman he didn’t know leaned in.

“Inspector Tay?”

Tay acknowledged with a nod that he was.

“You’re wanted upstairs, sir. The SAC ask if you would come up right away.”

Tay nodded again and the patrolman closed the door.

He sat drumming his fingers and wondering what this could be about. What he and August needed right now were routine days without surprises. A sudden assignment to some case would only screw things up. Maybe he would plead he was suffering from traumatic stress and beg off from any new assignments. The SAC already thought he was a little crazy so he figured he wouldn’t have any difficulty selling that.

With a sigh Tay stood up and headed upstairs to the SAC’s office. He would take the stairs. He needed the exercise. And it would take longer to get there.

“How are you feeling, Sam?”

“Fine, sir. Just fine.”

“Good. Ah, good.”

Tay waited with his features arranged in an expression of polite interest, but nothing more was immediately forthcoming. Tay’s patience quickly ran out.

“What was it you wanted to see me about, sir?”

The SAC pursed his lips and hesitated, but then he cleared his throat. “Well, Sam…have you thought about that conversation we had?”

Tay was baffled. What in the world was the SAC talking about? What conversation? He tried to keep his face empty, but his puzzlement must have been apparent because the SAC started talking again.

“I meant a few days ago when I asked you to consider the possibility of retirement, Sam. Have you thought about that?”