“They can use voice mail!”
“All right, I get the point! I made a mistake, I admit it, okay? What more do you want from me?”
I started to say something, then got a grip on myself. He was right, there was no point in playing I-told-you-so. And then I felt bad. He had just saved my ass back there with that chair.
I closed my eyes and exhaled. “I’m sorry. Shit like what just happened makes me cranky, okay? Usually there’s no one around for me to take it out on.”
There was a pause. Then he said, “I’m sorry, too. It was a dumb mistake. You were right.”
“What happened, anyway? Where did you go? I thought something had happened to you.”
He grinned, obviously coming back to himself. “Is that your way of telling me you care? ’Cause it gives me a warm feeling, it really does.”
I looked at him. “I think I liked it better when you were puking.”
He chuckled. “I just walked across the street to Lumpini to take a leak. I heard you shout, but it still took me a minute to cut off the stream and get Nessie put away.”
Before I could think better of it, I asked, “ ‘Nessie’?”
“You know, the Loch Ness Monster. I had a girlfriend once who named my…”
“I get it, I get it.”
“Anyway, I came running as fast as I could. Why’d you follow me out, anyway?”
I told him about the feeling I’d gotten about “Tiara” being a set-up.
“Damn, son,” he said, “you are good. I have to admit, that whole thing went right by me. I promise I’ll never call you paranoid again.”
The cab pulled up in front of Chong Nonsi station. We got out and watched it pull away. “You see a sewer?” I asked, looking around. “We need to dump the knives. And the handkerchief.”
“Dump them?”
“Yeah. We don’t want to be carrying anything that would connect us with a recent multiple homicide, do we?”
“Partner, I’ll have you know that the knives in question are a Benchmade AFCK and a Fred Perrin La Griffe. These are high-quality instruments of destruction and not so easy to come by. It would be wasteful in the extreme to ‘dump’ them.”
I looked at him. “It would be ‘wasteful in the extreme’ to have the prosecution use them as evidence of why we should spend the rest of our lives in a Thai prison.”
“All right, I understand where you’re coming from. Tell you what, how about if I sterilize them? Alcohol, bleach, whatever. You tell me how and I’ll do it. Plus you can have either one you want.”
I paused for a moment. If we cleaned them, I supposed, the risk would be manageable. It would have been safer, more thorough, to get rid of them entirely, but maybe this was one of the many battles with Dox that wasn’t worth fighting.
I said, “I’ll take the La Griffe.”
He looked crestfallen. “Shit, man, I want the La Griffe. It ’s so cool.”
I rolled my eyes. “All right, whatever. I’ll take the AFCK.”
He brightened. “Thanks, partner. You’re a good man.”
“Since you’re feeling so magnanimous,” I said, “let’s keep moving for a while. I want to do a few more things to break the connection between us and what just happened in front of the club.”
He shook his head. “I don’t have a problem with that.”
See? You get a little by giving a little, I thought.
We found a street sewer that worked nicely for the handkerchief and the knife I had used on Perry Mason and friends. As I was dumping them in, Dox said, “Wait, there’s this, too.” He reached into a pocket. “Here. I think it’s some kind of hypodermic.”
I looked at it and nodded. “That’s exactly what it is.”
The device was flesh-colored and looked vaguely like a plastic joy-buzzer. Where the button would be on a joy-buzzer, though, was a short, thick needle, maybe 16-gauge. The needle was covered in some kind of wax that was hard enough to protect the user from an accidental stick, but soft enough to give way under strong pressure. The back of it was sticky, and I realized it had been adhered to Perry Mason’s palm as he approached me.
“Slick,” I said, musing. “I’ve never seen something like this before. It must be custom. Look.” I stuck it to my palm and turned my hand upward so he could see it. “I thought what was going on back there was supposed to be a snatch. I was right. The four Thai guys grab me. The white guy moves in and hits me in the leg with an open-hand strike, or just grabs me and squeezes, whatever. Then what’s in this thing-I’m betting a veterinary anesthetic, something with fentanyl, droperidol, whatever-gets injected, just like a snakebite. They’ve probably got a dose in here that could put down a Clydesdale. I’m unconscious in seconds and they drag me into the van. Yeah, that’s why they had the atropine and naloxone in the glove compartment-to immediately reverse cardiac and respiratory suppression, make sure they don’t accidentally lose the patient. That was the plan, anyway.”
“What about me?”
I thought for a minute. “I’m not sure. But I would guess I was the main target. First they want to separate us. If they can pick me up, they could always deal with you later. Remember, they were tracking your cell phone.”
“I doubt that you’ll let me forget.”
“Or if you’d actually gone off with Tiara, they’d have that. She probably would have suggested her apartment, told you she had a hot roommate and they had this fantasy about a threesome with a big, strong, white man. Not that you would fall for something like that.”
“No, not me, I’m immune to that kind of thing.”
“If you go to the apartment, you get ambushed there. If you take her back to your hotel room instead, she makes a call and lets them know where to go and how to proceed.”
“Who were they all, do you think?”
I considered for a moment. “I don’t know. The Thais were tough, but they weren’t professionals. They felt like street muscle. The white guy, though, he was impressive. He was an operator, and I guarantee you this wasn’t the first time he’d done a snatch.”
“Company man, you think?”
“Definitely a possibility. But then why the Thais?”
He shrugged. “Maybe he was working on the fly. Didn’t have time to assemble a proper team.”
“Yeah, could be that.”
I looked at the syringe for another moment, then slipped it into my shirt pocket, needle-side out. “We’re keeping the knives,” I said. “I guess this might come in handy, too.”
We went up the stairs, bought tickets, then headed to the platform. Dox said, “Where are we going, anyway?”
“To his hotel. The Silom Holiday Inn. He had a room key on him. I took it.”
“What, are we going to try every door in the hotel? I know that place. It used to be the Crowne Plaza. They probably have seven hundred rooms.”
I thought about Perry Mason. About the lack of identifying pocket litter, even in the van. About how smooth his approach had been, and how confident he’d been when we faced off.
He was a careful man, I could see that. A survivor. Yeah, look at his everyday carry, the quality knives, the Casio G-Shock watch. He was a good Boy Scout. He minded the details, looked for small advantages.
The kind of guy who knew to park a van so that the cargo could be loaded from the side it was being carried in from, because doing so would save a few seconds if he had to bug out. That kind of guy.
The kind who would insist on a hotel room on a low floor and next to a stairwell for the same reason.
“How many floors is the hotel?” I asked.
“I don’t know exactly. It’s got two towers. One is maybe fifteen floors, the other about twenty-five.”
“You want to bet that this guy’s room will be on one of the first five floors and adjacent to a stairwell? Figure two stairwells per tower, three rooms either right next to or directly across from each stairwell. Total of sixty doors to check. Fewer if we’re lucky.”
He grinned. “No, I wouldn’t take that bet.”