For the Dead Read online

  Also by Timothy Hallinan

  The Poke Rafferty Series

  A Nail Through the Heart

  The Fourth Watcher

  Breathing Water

  The Queen of Patpong

  The Fear Artist

  The Junior Bender Series

  Crashed

  Little Elvises

  The Fame Thief

  Herbie’s Game

  The Simeon Grist Series

  The Four Last Things

  Everything but the Squeal

  Skin Deep

  Incinerator

  The Man With No Time

  The Bone Polisher

  Copyright © 2014 by Timothy Hallinan

  All rights reserved.

  Published by

  Soho Press, Inc.

  853 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hallinan, Timothy.

  For the dead / Timothy Hallinan.

  pages ; cm

  HC ISBN 978-1-61695-114-6

  PB ISBN 978-1-61695-616-5

  eISBN 978-1-61695-115-3

  1. Travel writers—Fiction. 2. Murder—Investigation—Fiction. 3. Police corruption—Thailand—Fiction. 4. Bangkok (Thailand)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3558.A3923F67 2014

  813’.54—dc23

  2014019052

  v3.1

  FOR MUNYIN CHOY, ONE MORE TIME

  AND TO RALPHIE, WITH THANKS

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part One: We All Float …

  Chapter 1: The River

  Chapter 2: Exquisite Politeness

  Chapter 3: The Forest

  Chapter 4: Goop Is Uninformative

  Chapter 5: One Hundred Twelve Grams

  Chapter 6: Going Down

  Chapter 7: If You Are Me, Maybe Four Thousand Seven Hundred

  Chapter 8: You Can’t Live for the Dead

  Chapter 9: Flat as Buttons

  Chapter 10: I Feel Like We Should Take Care of Her

  Chapter 11: Human Fractals

  Chapter 12: Home

  Chapter 13: Door Number Two

  Chapter 14: Fifty Inches Is a Swimming Pool

  Chapter 15: Something Outside Herself

  Part Two:… Until We Sink

  Chapter 16: Allergic

  Chapter 17: You Can Come Back Now

  Chapter 18: The Fence

  Chapter 19: An Empty Envelope

  Chapter 20: And a Few Who Want to See It Worked Out Wrong

  Chapter 21: You Don’t Know Anything

  Chapter 22: The Opposite of a Cover-up

  Chapter 23: Sunday

  Part Three: Drowning Girls

  Chapter 24: One Girl Down There Somewhere

  Chapter 25: I’ve Changed, But I Haven’t Changed Into Anything

  Chapter 26: Her Mother Was Beautiful

  Chapter 27: Some Sort of Long-term Solution

  Chapter 28: The Cord

  Chapter 29: Adrift

  Chapter 30: Question Time

  Chapter 31: Hooked and Landed

  Chapter 32: Teams

  Chapter 33: Lighter Than Air and Apparently Combustible

  Chapter 34: Reading the Night

  Chapter 35: They Repaired His Moral Compass

  Part Four: Aim and Ignite

  Chapter 36: There’s No Way They’ve Been Allowed to Go Anywhere

  Chapter 37: I Don’t Care If It’s a Zebra

  Chapter 38: It’ll Have Holes Worn in It in Twenty-four Hours

  Chapter 39: The One Wearing Hand-Me-Downs

  Chapter 40: Overcoat of Rage

  Chapter 41: The Best Scene in the Play

  Chapter 42: A Different Magnitude of Darkness

  Chapter 43: Gravel in a Clothes Dryer

  Chapter 44: He Can’t Shelter Them Indefinitely

  Chapter 45: The Light in the Window

  Chapter 46: A Lot Here We Wouldn’t Want to Lose

  Afterword

  Part One

  WE ALL FLOAT …

  1

  The River

  THE RIVER IS wider than it should be and it’s the wrong color. Instead of its usual reddish brown, a gift of the topsoil it steals from the rice farmers upstream, it’s a cold, metallic gray-green, the color of the sea beneath clouds. And it runs faster than it should, fast enough to whip up curving rills of white foam where the water quickens over the tops of stones.

  Although the sky is a bottomless, unblemished blue, the girl can’t find the sun. She sits on the green bank, shadowless, watching the river’s flow, not knowing her name and not very bothered by it. Several names come to her, and they all seem to be hers, but she knows she only has one. If she could see her face, she thinks, if she knew how old she is, she’d know which name to accept.

  The landscape offers no clues or indications. There’s nothing but the stunted forest with its ragged, disorderly trees and waist-high scrub, and the wide gray-green river, flowing swiftly toward her and then past her, leaving her here, a stationary dot on its passage to the sea.

  A pale distance away, the river bends to the right and disappears behind a faded green treeline. All that water rounding the bend, resolutely silent, unaware of her. But why shouldn’t it be unaware of her? She’s barely aware of herself.

  Experimentally, she examines her right hand, holding it just above the ground with its tangled green cover. Her hand is so sharp that it seems closer than it is, and she can see the faint blue map of veins beneath her skin pulse with each heartbeat. She feels the blood rushing through them, a tiny river within her, and that thought draws her eyes back to the larger river, and then upstream to the bend where it vanishes.

  And she knows—with no feeling of discovery, but as though she has always known—that up there, out of sight, on the far side of the bend, the river is bringing something to her. Bearing it, whatever it is, on its unstoppable flow.

  And it’s something enormous.

  She thinks, “I need to talk to my mother.” And then the day dims and the girl shivers and realizes that she’s grown suddenly cold.

  FOR THE THOUSANDTH time since they began to live together, Rose wakes up shivering and asks herself why Poke puts the air-con on high every night, turning their bedroom into a refrigerator, and then steals every blanket on the bed so he can build a fort against the cold he has created.

  My mother? she thinks as a tiny scrap of her dream surfaces like a fragment of mosaic and then sinks again. Why would my mother come to me? Or did she? Mostly, it seems, mostly, it was the river.

  Rose never knowingly ignores a dream. Automatically, she checks the time, which is announced in the sleepy-blue numerals of the bedside clock as 2:46. Too late to call. If something is wrong, there’s nothing she can do now. She’ll call first thing in the morning, make Poke bring her the phone while his silly, fancy coffee is dripping and the water is heating for her Nescafé.

  Still. The dream.

  She stretches her arms and her legs and then sits up and reaches for the pack of Marlboro Golds parked permanently on the table, just in front of her big glass ashtray, with this week’s disposable lighter lying obediently on top of it. She knows the smoke will wake Poke, so she makes a silent deal with herself. She won’t hold the lighter in place when she picks up the pack, and if the lighter falls off she’ll put the pack back and go to sleep.

  When the pack is in front of her, the lighter is dead center on top.

  She palms the lighter and flips open the top of the box, inhaling the rich brown aroma. Even in the dark, the precise white cylinders of the filters are comfortingly clean a
nd—unused. They promise hours of solitary pleasure. For so many years, the years when she was dancing in the bars on Patpong, being dragged night after night to hotels by sodden, besotted customers, the moment when it was finally over and she was once again alone—free to breathe again, free to light up a cigarette that belonged to no one but her, to pay attention to no one’s pleasure but her own—had gleamed in front of her like a lantern seen through dark trees. It said, Here you are. Here you can be safe again. Here you can be you again.

  She flicks the lighter and looks down at the cigarette, so secure, so snug, so right between her long fingers. There’s been one there for so long that she can barely feel it; in fact, sometimes when she lights one it’s just because she’s become aware of its absence. Smoking this one now is just a matter of inches: inches to put the filter between her lips, inches to bring the flame to the tip. But instead of putting it in her mouth, she thinks, I need to talk to my mother, and sees briefly and vividly the river in her dream, broad and gray-green. Breathes in the clean air of the forest.

  She lets the lighter go dark and puts the cigarette back in the pack, replaces both objects on the table. The cold presses itself against her. She can feel Poke to her right, can feel, with a mother’s ability to penetrate walls, Miaow breathing safely, asleep in her own room. The city outside pulls at her like a tide in her veins, its straight streets deceptively orderly, a reassuring grid imposed on chaos: need, fear, desire, envy, desolation, hopelessness, the invisible web woven by those on both sides of the karmic wheel, those who curse it and the fortunate ones who accept it as their due.

  But up here, in the rooms the three of them share, everything is where it should be. Nothing rolls around. The lines between them are straight and strong. Sometimes when she’s sitting in her spot on the couch in the living room, she imagines them, each lost in whatever he or she is doing but connected nonetheless by a pale, transparent yellow line, like concentrated light. She can walk through the line between Poke and Miaow and feel it go straight through her, warm as the sun.

  Poke, she thinks. Warm, she thinks.

  She bends down and touches first her left foot and then her right, which may at the moment be the coldest foot in all of Southeast Asia. Poke has his back to her, knees drawn up, the human core of a mountain range of blankets. He sleeps naked, and it’s easy, as she slips the foot beneath the blankets, to target the warm bare skin on the small of his back.

  The mountain erupts, blankets flying everywhere, and whatever he says, the English is too fast for her to follow it. He sits there wild-eyed, blankets pooled down around his hips, breathing like he’s just run a mile, and before he can say anything else, she wraps both arms around his warm neck and pulls him down to her. Says, her mouth inches from his, “Pay attention to me.”

  FOR WHAT SEEMS like the second time in an instant, Miaow sits up. The coolness of her forehead tells her she’s been perspiring in spite of the single lightweight sheet that covers her.

  She hears herself panting. Her heart sounds a quicker-than-normal rhythm in her ears, muffled as a drum in a distant room. But everything she’s looking for right now is here, it’s all here, after all: her dresser, her closet door framing the pale ghosts of her clothes, the rectangular blotches that represent her paintings and drawings. So even though the room is so dark she hates it, hates the paint she made Poke choose nine weeks ago, still, she is in her room, which means that she was only dreaming that she woke up before.

  When her bed was on the sidewalk. Crowded, like most Bangkok sidewalks, dusk but not yet dark: bat-time, mosquito-time, evening crowd-time, people pushing their way around the bed without noticing what it was, without seeing her as she sat bolt upright with the sheet clutched to her chest. Trying to hide the dirty T-shirt, the ragged shorts, the blackened feet and scabby knees, the grimy nails, dark skin, snotty upper lip, and tangled hair of a street child.

  They flowed around her like water around a stone, as though she were something of no value, not worth a glance. But dirty. A few women tugged at their skirts or moved their purses from one arm to another, as though they were afraid something might hop on them from the filthy child, lost in the bed in the middle of the sidewalk.

  The filthy child. The impoverished, lice-ridden, terrified child she has tried so frantically to leave behind. The child no one at her fancy school knows she ever was.

  Miaow realizes she’s clenching the bottom sheet in her hand, so hard her forearm is cramping. She releases the cloth, flexes her fingers, and picks up her pillow. She stands it on end in her lap and puts both arms around it, hugging it to her. It’s not enough. She thinks about going into the other room to crawl in between Poke and Rose as they mumble permission they won’t remember in the morning.

  She hasn’t done that in years.

  But she hasn’t had this dream in years, either. It’s been five years now since she was seven or eight and couldn’t read and didn’t know her full name, and they took her off the sidewalk and put her in this safe little box eight stories up. Wrapped a life around her, a life she hadn’t even known how to imagine.

  Why dream it now?

  She could talk about it tomorrow at school with Andrew, she thinks, except that Andrew doesn’t know she was ever a street child, and anyway he’s so boy. Dreams and feelings don’t interest him. He lives in that strange boy world where the only things that matter are the things you can see in hard light, the things you can bump into and measure and argue about: “It’s not yellow, it’s green, and if it were yellow, it would be a statistical improbability.” If you said, “It feels green,” he’d snort. Her least favorite thing about Andrew is his snort.

  She has to learn to manage him, she thinks, the way Rose manages Poke. Rose has gotten Poke, well, maybe not to accept that everything she believes in is real, but at least to acknowledge that it’s all in the room with them—the wonderful Rose-cloud of feelings and hopes and memories and beliefs and dreams. The maybes, the what-ifs, the wouldn’t-it-be-fines, the ghosts and the spirits of place. If Poke were to draw a map of their apartment, he’d probably find a way to put it in.

  And Rose would tell him he got the color wrong.

  The same way she did, Miaow did, in this room. Picked a color so dark she can barely see her own feet. So here she is, wide awake in a room that’s way too dark, and they’re in there, sound asleep.

  But still, there are walls around them, keeping out everything that’s not-them. In a few hours it’ll be light and they’ll all say hello to one another again and pass one another in the rooms and the hallway, surrounded by the smell of Poke’s stupid coffee, and—and—they’ll fuel up from one another before they go out into the day.

  She hugs the pillow closer. Everything is fine. She’s here to stay. They’re here to stay. She’s got school, she’s got a few friends, she’s got Andrew, such as he is. The filthy child has been left far, far behind. Everything is fine.

  So why did she have that dream again? Without thinking, she glances at the clock. It’s 2:51 A.M.

  2

  Exquisite Politeness

  TWO FIFTY-ONE A.M.

  The clouds, lighted pearl from beneath, are impaled like a tent on the tall buildings.

  Soft rain creates misty orange halos around street lamps. The narrow soi gleams almost empty at this hour except for the two black SUVs following the shining path laid down by their headlights. The leading SUV brakes in preparation for a turn, and almost simultaneously the brake lights blink red on its twin, following three meters behind.

  Half a block ahead, to their left, a driveway slopes downward beneath one of Bangkok’s newest and most architecturally wrongheaded condominium extravaganzas, an exercise in eccentric, asymmetrical solid geometry clad in a hammer-dimpled shell of titanium. This reflective surface, more than a vertical acre of it, bounces the heat and light from the afternoon sun directly into the shops, offices, and dwellings across the street, making them blindingly bright and raising temperatures into the nineties on the Fa
hrenheit scale, despite aggressive air conditioning. That entire side of the street had banded together to complain.

  That entire side of the street had been told, with exquisite politeness, to stop complaining

  As the lead SUV nears the building, a heavy steel accordion gate at the bottom of the sloping driveway clatters into motion and begins to slide aside. Neither driver signals a turn.

  The first SUV slows to a creep, the driver trying to avoid scraping the vehicle’s undercarriage as it starts its descent. The man in the backseat does not like to hear the undercarriage scrape.

  As the vehicle glides into the garage, the lights carve ten thousand ice-blue diamonds from the beads of rain on the polished black surfaces of the roof and hood. The driver has already turned off the windshield wipers, it having been forcefully stated by the man in the backseat that running the wipers inside the garage, when there’s no water to remove, creates unsightly streaks of black rubber on the windshield, made of a very expensive polycarbonate compound that can repel slugs fired from a handgun, up to and including a .44 magnum.

  The two vehicles coast to a stop near a brightly lighted polished-concrete pillar the size of the average studio apartment that houses two steel-doored elevators beneath multiple security cameras. Upstairs, in the reinforced security bunker behind the door at the rear of the lobby, the SUVs have been visible on wall-mounted flatscreens since they made their turn into the driveway, although neither of the uniformed men in the room has said anything. Now the front passenger door of the second SUV opens, and a man climbs out and moves around the car, glancing in all directions. Another man gets out of the first SUV, dressed, like the first, all in black. They separate, circling the vehicles to survey the garage. Each wears a low-slung holster on his hip, his right hand resting on the grip of an automatic pistol. In thirty seconds, they’re back in position, beside the SUVs.

  The first man out of the car goes to the elevator and pushes the call button. Behind him, a third black-clad man descends from the backseat of the lead SUV and does yet another visual check of the garage before he joins the others.