A Chinatown reunion with the Lexus driver wasn’t what Calvino had expected. He’d clipped the driver on the head and dragged him out and dropped him in the road. But something in the back of Calvino’s mind had told him the driver must have seen him approaching in the rearview mirror. Getting hammered on the head with the Walther hadn’t blurred his memory, apparently. Three of the men started after Calvino, who had already pushed through the passengers and headed for the entrance.
The men left the cold pill boxes behind along with some paperwork. Colonel Pratt backtracked and grabbed the papers. A young man with his arm around the waist of his girlfriend stared at him, shaking his head. An awkward moment passed as the two men locked eyes. The young man broke the solemn spell with a wide smile and wink. His girlfriend nudged him and nodded. One of the workers turned just before the entrance, looked back at the train and huddled for a split second with another worker. Someone must have remembered there was no one to prevent people from stealing the whole lot. One worker ran toward the trolley, shouting at people to back away or there would be trouble. Colonel Pratt noticed a detail in the warning. The man wasn’t threatening to call the police. No need for that. Everyone knew that “trouble” was a word expandable to cover most kinds of suffering. They backed away.
Colonel Pratt joined several people who passed through the entrance and back into the street alongside the market. When he looked up at the balcony, the Colonel didn’t see Khin Myat, who was supposed to be keeping a lookout. He scanned the street and a laneway that disappeared inside the central market but saw no sign of Calvino.
It hadn’t been an ordinary delivery. The men and the shipment had nothing to do with Udom, Pratt realized. The driver of the Lexus worked for Thiri Pyan Chi. Colonel Pratt had assumed Thiri Pyan Chi was Udom’s man, an assumption that Udom likely shared. While there was a connection between the covered market stall owner and the two Thai men Calvino had killed in Chinatown, it wasn’t clear how Udom’s smuggling business fit in.
Calvino made his getaway from the train station as the driver and two of the other men gave chase. They ran straight into a couple of foreign businessmen, who walked in front of them, absorbed in conversation. They looked the foreigners over before pushing them out of the way. Calvino had a head start.
Colonel Pratt emerged as the men ran after Calvino. He followed them, thinking one of them might be in a position to “spit” some answers. Or were they just hired hands, knowing nothing?
As the men pursued Calvino into the market, the Colonel entered a tea shop and took a seat near a window overlooking the street. Eventually, after the thugs had failed to catch Calvino, they returned to pushing the trolley down the road. Two of the men, sweating from the sprint after Calvino, walked alongside the trolley, steadying the boxes. The trolley needed three men to navigate the uneven brick road. They pulled it to the back of a Lexus, and the men loaded the boxes of cold pills inside. After one of them closed the back hatch, two of the men climbed inside, and the man who had spotted Calvino got into the driver’s seat and pulled the Lexus into the road. They left a fourth man behind with the trolley to return it to the covered market. They worked like a team who had the drill down. Hard-handed men working with armed-unit efficiency. Not one slacker. Men like that never came cheap.
Five minutes later Colonel Pratt looked outside the tea shop and saw the back door of a parked Toyota open and Calvino roll out, squatting down low and holding his cell phone. Slowly turning around, he smiled at Pratt.
“Nothing better than a little rest in the back seat of Toyota Camry.”
“Your 10K run whipped you into shape,” said Colonel Pratt as Calvino took the seat next to him.
“That guy was behind the wheel of the Lexus in Chinatown. I clipped him pretty good.”
“Not something a man forgets.”
“Apparently not,” said Calvino.
Colonel Pratt pulled out the invoice he’d nicked from the cold pill shipment and smoothed it out on the table. He put on his reading glasses, read, turned it over and read some more before looking up at Calvino.
“This confirms a theory I’ve had about Yadanar. He’s Udom’s middleman, and he uses Thiri Pyan Chi for the heavy lifting. It turns out that Thiri Pyan Chi has another partner, whom I suspect Yadanar doesn’t know about.”
When ROI—return on investment—motivates violent men to do business together, Calvino thought, it’s only a matter of time before the battlefield is marked, the landmines are set out and the ambush zones are patrolled.
“You know this secret partner?” said Calvino.
“I had a call from Bangkok.”
“While we were on the platform,” said Calvino.
Colonel Pratt had run a background check with the department on the two dead Thais in Chinatown, expecting to turn up a link to Udom or one of his companies. They’d drawn a blank. There was no connection. But the investigator in the department had found out something interesting.
“The two men in the Lexus were on the payroll of Somchai Rungsukal.”
“Who’s he?”
“An upcountry man of influence,” said Colonel Pratt.
“What were Somchai’s men doing in the back of the Thiri Pyan Chi’s Lexus, working over Rob Osborne?” asked Calvino.
“You might want to ask Rob that question.”
“This sounds like a heart is about to be broken,” said Calvino, reaching over and pouring tea into a cup. “God, I got thirsty in the back of that car. I’m still sweating.”
Sweat dripped off the end of his nose and onto the table.
“Kati wants to join you on the 10K run on Sunday,” said Pratt.
“Join me?”
“She brags to her friends that she has a date with Kiss My Trash.”