Ma gasps, tries to strip the watch from his wrist. "Take it. Here. Please. Take it."
"It's not yours to give, yellow card."
"Not . . . yellow card," Ma gasps. "Please. Not your Ministry." His hands fumble for his pockets, frantic under the white shirt's gaze. He pulls out his papers and waves them in the hot night air.
Suttipong takes the papers, glances at them. Leans close. "You think our countrymen don't fear us, too?"
He throws the papers on the ground, then quick as a cobra he strikes. One, two, three, the blows rain down. He is very fast. Very methodical. Ma curls into a ball, trying to ward off the blows. Suttipong steps back, breathing heavily. He waves at the other two. "Teach him respect." The other two glance at each other doubtfully, but under Suttipong's urging, they are soon beating Ma, shouting encouragement to one another.
A few men come down from the pleasure bars and stumble into the streets, but when they see white uniforms they flee back inside. The white shirts are alone. And if there are other watching eyes, they do not show themselves. Finally, Suttipong seems satisfied. He kneels and strips the antique Rolex from Ma's wrist, spits on Ma's face, and motions his peers to join him. They turn away, striding close past Tranh's hiding place.
The one called Thongchai looks back. "He might complain."
Suttipong shakes his head, his attention on the Rolex in his hand. "He's learned his lesson."
Their footsteps fade into the darkness. Music filters down from the highrise clubs. The street itself is silent. Tranh watches for a long time, looking for other hunters. Nothing moves. It is as if the entire city has turned its back on the broken Malay-Chinese lying in the street. Finally, Tranh limps out of the shadows and approaches Ma Ping.
Ma catches sight of him and holds up a weak hand. "Help." He tries the words in Thai, again in farang English, finally in Malay, as though he has returned to his childhood. Then he seems to recognize Tranh. His eyes widen. He smiles weakly, through split bloody lips. Speaks Mandarin, their trade language of brotherhood. "Lao pengyou. What are you doing here?"
Tranh squats beside him, studying his cracked face. "I saw your windup girl."
Ma closes his eyes, tries to smile. "You believe me, then?" His eyes are nearly swollen shut, blood runs down from a cut in his brow, trickling freely.
"Yes."
"I think they broke my leg." He tries to pull himself upright, gasps and collapses. He probes his ribs, runs his hand down to his shin. "I can't walk." He sucks air as he prods another broken bone. "You were right about the white shirts."
"A nail that stands up gets pounded down."
Something in Tranh's tone makes Ma look up. He studies Tranh's face. "Please. I gave you food. Find me a rickshaw." One hand strays to his wrist, fumbling for the timepiece that is no longer his, trying to offer it. Trying to bargain.
Is this fate? Tranh wonders. Or luck? Tranh purses his lips, considering. Was it fate that his own shiny wristwatch drew the white shirts and their wicked black batons? Was it luck that he arrived to see Ma fall? Do he and Ma Ping still have some larger karmic business?
Tranh watches Ma beg and remembers firing a young clerk so many lifetimes ago, sending him packing with a thrashing and a warning never to return. But that was when he was a great man. And now he is such a small one. As small as the clerk he thrashed so long ago. Perhaps smaller. He slides his hands under Ma's back, lifts.
"Thank you," Ma gasps. "Thank you."
Tranh runs his fingers into Ma's pockets, working through them methodically, checking for baht the white shirts have left. Ma groans, forces out a curse as Tranh jostles him. Tranh counts his scavenge, the dregs of Ma's pockets that still look like wealth to him. He stuffs the coins into his own pocket.
Ma's breathing comes in short panting gasps. "Please. A rickshaw. That's all." He barely manages to exhale the words.
Tranh cocks his head, considering, his instincts warring with themselves. He sighs and shakes his head. "A man makes his own luck, isn't that what you told me?" He smiles tightly. "My own arrogant words, coming from a brash young mouth." He shakes his head again, astounded at his previously fat ego, and smashes his whiskey bottle on the cobbles. Glass sprays. Shards glint green in the methane light.
"If I were still a great man . . . " Tranh grimaces. "But then, I suppose we're both past such illusions. I'm very sorry about this." With one last glance around the darkened street, he drives the broken bottle into Ma's throat. Ma jerks and blood spills out around Tranh's hand. Tranh scuttles back, keeping this new welling of blood off his Hwang Brothers fabrics. Ma's lungs bubble and his hands reach up for the bottle lodged in his neck, then fall away. His wet breathing stops.
Tranh is trembling. His hands shake with an electric palsy. He has seen so much death, and dealt so little. And now Ma lies before him, another Malay-Chinese dead, with only himself to blame. Again. He stifles an urge to be sick.
He turns and crawls into the protective shadows of the alley and pulls himself upright. He tests his weak leg. It seems to hold him. Beyond the shadows, the street is silent. Ma's body lies like a heap of garbage in its center. Nothing moves.
Tranh turns and limps down the street, keeping to the walls, bracing himself when his knee threatens to give way. After a few blocks, the methane lamps start to go out. One by one, as though a great hand is moving down the street snuffing them, they gutter into silence as the Public Works Ministry cuts off the gas. The street settles into complete darkness.
When Tranh finally arrives at Surawong Road, its wide black thoroughfare is nearly empty of traffic. A pair of ancient water buffalo placidly haul a rubber-wheeled wagon under starlight. A shadow farmer rides behind them, muttering softly. The yowls of mating devil cats scrape the hot night air, but that is all.
And then, from behind, the creak of bicycle chains. The rattle of wheels on cobbles. Tranh turns, half-expecting avenging white shirts, but it is only a cycle rickshaw, chattering down the darkened street. Tranh raises a hand, flashing newfound baht. The rickshaw slows. A man's ropey limbs gleam with moonlit sweat. Twin earrings decorate his lobes, gobs of silver in the night. "Where you going?"
Tranh scans the rickshaw man's broad face for hints of betrayal, for hints that he is a hunter, but the man is only looking at the baht in Tranh's hand. Tranh forces down his paranoia and climbs into the rickshaw's seat. "The farang factories. By the river."
The rickshaw man glances over his shoulder, surprised. "All the factories will be closed. Too much energy to run at night. It's all black night down there."
"It doesn't matter. There's a job opening. There will be interviews."
The man stands on his pedals. "At night?"
"Tomorrow." Tranh settles deeper into his seat. "I don't want to be late."
Softer
Jonathan Lilly slumped in hot water up to his neck and studied his dead wife. She half-floated at the far end of the bath, soap bubbles wreathing her Nordic face. Blond hair clung to bloodless skin. Her half-lidded eyes stared at the ceiling. Jonathan rearranged his position, shoving Pia's tangling legs aside to make more room for himself and wondered if this peaceful moment between crime and confession would make any difference in his sentencing.
He knew he should turn himself in. Let someone know that the day had gone wrong in Denver's Congress Park Neighborhood. Maybe it wouldn't be that bad. He might not even be in prison for so very long. He'd read somewhere that pot growers got more prison time than murderers, and he vaguely remembered that murder laws might provide leeway for unintended deaths like this one. Was it manslaughter? Murder in the second degree? He stirred soap suds, considering.
He'd have to Google it.
When he first jammed the pillow over Pia's face she hadn't fought at all. She might have even laughed. Might have mumbled something from under the pillow's cotton swaddle: "Cut it out," maybe, or "Get off." Or perhaps she told him he wasn't getting out of dish duty. That was what they'd been arguing about: the dishes in the sink from the night be
fore.
She rolled over and said, "You forgot to do the dishes last night," and gave him a little nudge with her elbow. A little push to get him moving. The words. The elbow. And then he jammed the pillow over her face and her hands had come up and gently pushed against him, coaxing him to let her go, and it was all a joke.
Even he thought so.
He'd meant to lift the pillow and laugh and go start scrubbing dishes. And for one fragile crystal moment that had seemed possible. Purple lilac scent had slipped in through the half-opened windows and bees buzzed outside and lazy Sunday morning sunshine streamed in between shade slats. They lived lifetimes inside that moment. They laughed off the incident and went out for eggs Benedict at Le Central; they got a divorce after another fifteen years of marriage; they had four children and argued over whether Milo was a better baby name than Alistair; Pia turned out to be gay, but they worked it out; he had an affair, but they worked it out; she planted sunflowers and tomatoes and zucchini in their back-yard garden and he went to work on Monday and got a promotion.
He meant to take the pillow off her face.
But then Pia started struggling and screaming and beating on him with her fists and children and tomato plants and Le Central and a hundred other futures blew away like dandelion seeds and Jonathan suddenly couldn't bear to let her up. He couldn't stand to see the hurt and horror in her gray eyes when he lifted the pillow, the rancid version of himself that he knew he'd find reflected there, so he threw all his weight onto her struggling body and jammed the pillow hard over her face and rode her down to Hell.
She twisted and flailed. Her nails slashed his cheek. Her body bucked. She almost squeezed out from under him, twisting like an eel, but he pinned her again and buried her screams in the pillow as her hands scrabbled at his eyes. He turned his face away and let her rip at his neck. She thrashed like a fish but she couldn't force him off and suddenly he wanted to laugh. He was winning. For once in his life he was really winning.
Her hands whipped from his face to the pillow and back, an animal's panicked thoughtless movements. Gasping coughs filtered through the down. Her chest pumped convulsively, striving to suck air through the pillow. Her nails nicked his ear. She was losing coordination. She'd stopped bucking. Her body still writhed, but now it was easy to keep her trapped. It was only the muscle memories of struggle. He pressed harder with the pillow, putting his entire weight into killing her.
Her hands stopped scratching. They returned to the smothering pillow and touched it gently. A querying caress. As if they were a pair of creatures utterly separate from her, pale butterflies trying to discover the cause of their owner's distress. Two dumb insects trying to understand the nature of an airway obstruction.
Outside, a lawn mower buzzed to life, cutting back spring greenery. A meadowlark sang. Pia's body went slack and her hands fell away. Bright sunlight traced lazily across her blond hair where it tangled in the pillow and spread across the sheets. Slowly he became aware of wetness, the warmth of her releasing bladder.
Another lawnmower buzzed alive.
White soapsuds swirled, revealing one of Pia's pink nipples. Jonathan scooped up a blob of crackling bubbles and laid it gently over the breast, covering her again. He'd used half a bottle of moisturizing bath liquid, but still the bubbles kept fading, revealing her body and its increasing paleness as the blood settled deeper into her limbs. Her eyes stared away into the ceiling distance, at whatever things dead people saw.
Gray eyes. He'd thought they were creepy when he first met her. By the time he married her, he liked them. And now they were creepy again, half-lidded, staring at nothing. He wanted to lean over and close them, but hated the thought that rigor mortis might make them spring wide again. That he might find her staring at him, after he had pressed them closed. He shivered. He knew it was morbid to soak in the bathtub with his dead wife, but he didn't want to leave her. He still wanted to be close. He'd been washing her death-soiled body, and suddenly it had seemed so right, so appropriate, that he should climb in with her. That he should mutter an apology and climb into the overfilled tub and join her in a final soak. And so here he was in a cooling bath with a cooling corpse and all the consequences of his repressed angers settling heavy upon him.
He blamed spring sunshine.
If it had been a cloudy day, Pia would now be drawing up grocery lists instead of squeezed into the bath with her killer husband, her stiffening legs shoved to one side.
She'd never liked taking baths together. Didn't like having her space imposed on. It was her quiet time. A time to forget the irritations of a purchasing department that could never get its sourcing priorities in order. A time to close her eyes and relax completely. He'd respected that. Just like he respected her predilection for Amish quilts on their bed and her affection for wildlife photos on the walls and her pathological hatred of avocado. But now here they both were, sharing a tub that she'd never liked sharing, with her blood pooling into her ass and her face slipping under water every so often so that he had to shove her upright again, shove her up out of the suds like a whale surfacing, and every time her face came out of the water he expected her to gasp for air and ask what the fuck he'd been thinking keeping her down so long.
Sunshine. After months of winter gray and drizzling spring it had suddenly turned warm. That was the cause. The elms had budded green and the lilacs had bloomed purple and after years of gritted-teeth dutiful attendance to work and marriage and home ownership and oil changes, he woke to a day permeated with electric possibility. He woke up smiling.
The last time he remembered feeling so alive he'd been in fifth grade with a beat-up blue BMX that he'd raced through subdivision streets—jumping curbs and stealing chromie caps all the way—to pour his entire allowance into Three Musketeers, Nerds, and Bubblicious at a 7-Eleven.
And then Pia had rolled over and poked him with her elbow and reminded him that he'd forgotten to do the dishes.
Jonathan stirred the bath water. Their naked bodies rippled under the thinning suds: his pink, hers increasingly pale. He leaned out of the tub, jostling Pia's body and almost immersing her before he got hold of the bubble bath. He held the bottle high and let soap spill into the water, a viscous emerald tangle that trailed over her legs. He upended the bottle completely. Green Tea Essence: Skin Revitalizing. Aloe, Cucumber and Green Tea extracts. Soaks away Tension, Softens and Moisturizes Skin, Revitalizes Spirit. He tossed the empty bottle on the floor and turned on the water again. Scalding heat poured over his shoulders, filling the tub and gurgling down its overflow spout. He leaned back and closed his eyes.
He supposed this fit some pattern of domestic violence, some statistical map of human behavior. The FBI kept statistics: a murder every twenty minutes, a rape every fifteen, a shoplifting every thirty seconds. Someone had to kill their wife every so often to make the statistics work. It just turned out to be him. Statistical duty. In his job, he expected a certain amount of instability from the servers, from the hardware and software that hosted the applications he wrote. He planned for it. Just like the FBI did. Shit happens. While his friends were catching the last of Colorado spring skiing, or running to Home Depot for renovation projects, he was fulfilling statistical requirements.
From where he lay, he could just make out blue sky through the high bathroom window. The optimistic blue, infused with gaudy unrestrained sunshine. All he'd wanted was to do something nice with that sunshine. To go for a jog. Or a bike ride. Or go for brunch and read the paper. And then Pia said there were dishes to do and all he could think about was that: the scabby lasagna pan, the stained sauce pots, the filmy wine glasses, the bread board crumbs, and the dishwasher that he'd also forgotten to run so he'd have to do more dishes by hand. And dishes led to taxes, April 15 bearing down on him like a tank. He should have talked to his investment advisor about his 401(k) but now it was Sunday and there wasn't anything he could do, and he'd probably forget again on Monday. And that led to the electric and phone bills that he'd forgo
tten to mail and that he should have set up for direct deposit but he kept blowing it off and now there was probably going to be a service fee and then there was his laptop lying on the living room floor where he'd dumped it, a beartrap of billable hours just waiting to get its jaws latched onto his leg. The Astai Networks project kept refusing to compile and his demo was set for eleven on Monday and he had no idea why the program was suddenly so completely screwed.
Lately, he'd been looking at Starbucks baristas and wishing he had their jobs. Tall, grande, latte, cappuccino, skinny, whatever. Not much complexity there. And when you left work at the end of the day you didn't have to think about a fucking thing. Who cared if they made shit for money? At least they wouldn't have to pay much in tax.
Taxes. Did murderers even do taxes? What was the IRS going to do? Arrest him now?
Jonathan frowned at the thought of arrest. He should call the police. Or Pia's mother, at least. Maybe 911? But that was for emergencies. And while the murder had been an emergency, this slow, soaking aftermath wasn't. He stared at Pia's dead body. He should cry. He should feel bad for her. Or at least for himself. He put wet fists in his eyes and waited for tears, but they didn't come.