Killing Rain

did you spot that stuff about her hands and her neck? You let that go on for an awfully long time there, partner.”
    “Dox, I thought you knew. It was so obvious.”
    “It was not obvious. No, sir.”
    “You sure you don’t want to take her back to the hotel? If you hurry . . .”
    “Hell, yes, I’m sure.”
    “Because, c’mon, you had to know. At some level.”
    “No, I didn’t know at any level, not until you told me.”
    “Really? I mean, you pointed out that she was a little flat-chested. And I don’t know how you could have missed the hands and the Adam’s apple. Dox, she might as well have been wearing a sign.”
    “No, she was definitely not wearing a sign, man. Although I think she ought to.”

    I smiled. “Maybe you would have enjoyed it.”
    “Stop it.”
    “I mean, if she’d only given you a blow job, you would never even have known. You’d just think it was the best head you’d ever gotten. It would have become one of your most cherished memories.” I started to laugh. I couldn’t help it. “You never would have stopped telling me about it.”
    “Do you want another drink?” he asked. “I think I need one.”
    “How many, Dox? That’s the question. How many times before.”
    He signaled the waitress for two more, then shuddered. “Damn, that was a near thing. I’d thank you, if you’d stepped in a little sooner and were enjoying yourself a little less.”
    “Enjoying?”
    “Yeah, yeah. Very funny.” He drained his Stoli and shuddered again.
    I thought about going on, something about how, with all his local expertise, he had still almost unintentionally gone off with a lady-boy. Or presumably unintentionally. But he looked so glum that I decided to give it a rest.
    The band started up again. A few minutes later, Dox leaned over to me and said, “If you don’t mind, I’m ready to try something different. You’re welcome to join me, but I don’t know that where I’m going is apt to be your kind of place.”
    “Topless girls with numbers attached to their bikini bottoms?”
    “I’d say that’s likely, yes.”
    “Good. If they’re undressed, you’ll have a better chance of making sure . . . you know.”
    He scowled. “Are you coming?”
    “No, I’d better let you go alone. I wouldn’t want to interfere with a man’s quest to recover his masculinity. On the other hand, who’s going to warn you if you run into another . . .”

    “I’ll be fine alone, you Yankee degenerate.”
    I smiled and held out my hand. “All right then. We’ll talk in the morning?”
    “In the morning,” he said, and we shook. He got up, tossed a few hundred baht on the table, and headed for the door.
    I chuckled to myself. It was going to be good to have something in my arsenal that I could bring up anytime Dox gave me grief.
    I chuckled again, a little more softly. It was odd that she’d been in here, though. She seemed to have been on the make, and Brown Sugar was the wrong place for that. Sure, she could have come here to enjoy the music, to take a break, whatever, but the way she’d been looking around right away, the way she’d immediately zeroed in on Dox . . .
    Maybe that was opportunistic.
    Didn’t feel opportunistic. It felt focused.
    I chewed on that. Then, in a sort of semiconscious shorthand that was more suddenly present in its entirety than deduced piece by piece, I realized:
    If someone wanted to get to you and Dox, the first thing he’d look to do would be to separate you. To do that, if he were smart, he would employ some means that could distract, at least temporarily, your sensitivity to disparities in the local environment. Give you something you could focus on. A katoey, for example. Make you say, that’s what was bothering me—she’s not really a woman! Or, if you didn’t spot it, and one of you went off with her . . . boom, there you go, you’ve found your way to divide us.
    Maybe it would have been easier, more straightforward, to use a real woman as the bait. But a katoey would have certain advantages. A lady-boy could take better care of himself in a scrape. And he’d be used to acting, to passing himself off as something he wasn’t, to fooling people, lulling them.

    I felt the blood draining from my face, my heart begin to pound as an adrenaline dump kicked in. If Dox had still been at the table, he would have laughed at me. I didn’t care. There were certain things I would try to change about myself to accommodate our partnership. The