She does not look back up. "He lifted me off the floor and sat me on the edge of the tub, and I shot him in the leg. Then I shot him in the other leg."
"You were close to him."
"I wanted to be close. I would have liked to have been inside him, so I could know how much it hurt. After he fell down, I shot him again, very low in the stomach."
"Ouch," Rafferty says.
"I stood in the tub, waiting to make sure he couldn't move. His eyes were open, looking at me like I was something he'd never seen before. Something he'd never imagined. I suppose I was. A girl hurting him. I suppose it was something new."
Rafferty thinks for a moment about what he wants to say. "You can live a long time with a stomach wound."
"And I let him. I told him all about it. Everything he had done to me." For a moment she seems puzzled, and she looks back up at him with something like an appeal in her eyes. "He didn't remember me. He had me confused with another girl. I'd thought about him every day for years, and he didn't remember me. But when I talked about Toom, about us being sisters, then he remembered. You know what he said?"
Rafferty discovers that he doesn't really want to know. He lifts a palm.
"He said, 'Those were good pictures.' So I shot him in the head."
She slumps back in her seat. "I was tired," she says. "I didn't mean to let him go that fast."
Rafferty reaches across the table, picks up the cigarette she dropped, and lights it. Feels the good poison course through him, killing him a little but not quite enough. "Have you ever cried about all this?"
Her chin comes up and her lips thin, and for a second Rafferty thinks he is seeing the face Ulrich must have seen in his last minutes. "About what happened to you, what happened to Toom. Did you ever take the time to cry over it?"
"Toom cried," she says flatly. "One of us had to be the dry one. One of us had to do something about it."
"Then what do you feel? Now that it's over."
She stretches across, takes the cigarette from his mouth, and puts it between her lips. "I feel like I made a mistake."
It is not the answer he expects. "You do?"
"I should have waited. I should have let him lose some more weight on his diet. Take it from me. If you're going to shoot somebody and you have to get rid of the body, choose someone thin."
"I'll keep it in mind."
"But I couldn't wait. Do you want to know why?"
"I think I do," Rafferty says. "He had packed a bag. He was going somewhere, wasn't he? Somewhere where he could get hold of some kids."
"I'm impressed," she says, not sounding particularly impressed. She looks down at the cigarette. "I miss him, in a way," she says thoughtfully. "He gave me something to do."
"Can I have the cigarette back?"
She passes it over to him, shaking her head. "I didn't know I'd taken it."
"Anybody left?" he asks. She glances up at him, eyebrows raised. "Are you at the end of your list, Doughnut, or is somebody left?"
Another shake of the head, without much behind it. "Finished."
"What about the lady who brought you to Bangkok?"
"That was only business. If I kill everybody who does business, there won't be anybody left. No. They were different. They needed to die."
Rafferty sucks deeply on the cigarette, replaying the remark in his head. Then he hands the cigarette back to her. He gets up, feeling light-headed and profoundly doubtful about what he is going to do. "Okay."
She looks startled, something he didn't know she had left in her. "Okay?"
"Okay. That's it. I asked, you told me. The end."
She studies his face. "Do you mean that? No police?"
"The way I look at it," he says, "this wasn't murder. It was self-defense. It was just a little late." She sits there, immobile, and her eyes drop again, and some of the rigidity leaves her shoulders.
He goes to the door behind her and turns back, looking at that perfectly controlled hair. "Doughnut," he says, and she brings her head around and gazes up at him, looking younger and more open from this perspective. "You swear you're finished, yes?"
She nods. "Yes," she says. She touches her heart with her index finger. "Promise." Then she smiles at him. "If I weren't finished, you'd be carried out of here with the dead flowers."
40
Clarissa Ulrich says, "I'm going home."
"I'm sorry, Clarissa," he says. The telephone is slippery in his hand. Superman turned off the air-conditioning while Rafferty was gone, and the apartment is stifling. He has been home half an hour, too exhausted to get up from the couch and start the air flowing.
"Sorry about what?"
"Sorry I couldn't do anything that helped. Sorry about what I did do. The filing cabinet." He hasn't told her about Doughnut, and he can't imagine that he will.
"I suppose I had to find out about him sooner or later," she says bravely. She sounds to Rafferty like a child who has survived a trip to the dentist, although he knows the comparison's not fair, that she has been permanently damaged, to use Rose's word, by what has happened to her in Bangkok. "Not much point in believing he was a good man if he wasn't."
The urge to offer comfort is overwhelming. "He was good to you. That counts for something."
"He was a man." Her voice seems to sour and curl at the edges. "That's about all he was."
There is a silence, which Rafferty uses to get to his feet and turn on the air-conditioning unit. It belches once and starts spewing hot air, rich with Bangkok exhaust. He stands in front of it, letting it hit him in the face. It smells better to him than the flowers. He never wants to smell another flower.
"I'm not necessarily finished, Clarissa," he says, although up to that moment he had figured he was.
"Please," she says. "You've been very sweet, but I don't need anything more. He's dead, or he might as well be. And I'm alive, and I have to figure out what to do about that. He's not coming home, not ever." Her voice is thin as a ribbon. "I shouldn't have come in the first place."
"You had to. You owed him that."
He can almost hear her shrug, see the expression on her face. "I guess."
"When do you go?"
"Tomorrow night. I couldn't get on a flight any sooner. Apparently there are lots of people who want to get out of here." A short laugh, more like a cough. "Can't imagine why."
"Well, maybe I can do something by then. Don't leave without calling me, okay?"
"What? What could you possibly do?"
Good question. "I'm still checking on a couple of things." One possibility occurs to him as he says the words, but it will require yet another favor of Arthit. At least this one won't threaten Arthit's career.
"I'll call," Clarissa says, "even if it's just to say thanks," and she hangs up.
Rafferty throws the telephone at the couch, harder than he means to, and then has to go pick it up and make sure it still has a dial tone. It does, but that doesn't make him feel any better. He puts the phone on the table and goes into the kitchen for a beer. It's still early for a drink, but what the hell. He's just let a triple murderer walk away without so much as a slap on the wrist and allowed her only innocent victim, Clarissa, to go home with her life shattered. He's about to put a good man in jail. He's inveigled his best friend into something that could endanger both his job and his wife. He's sending a woman-a dreadful, unforgivable woman, but a human being nonetheless-to her death. A beer sounds right. Give him a little perspective.
Chouk looks around when Rafferty stalks into the bedroom. The television is on, the screen full of writhing snakes. The Discovery Channel has come to Bangkok. He downs the beer in four long gulps, picks up the remote, and kills the TV, wishing there were a button that would make it explode. "Today," he says.