Killing Rain

in him.
    There were no streetlights over this stretch of sidewalk, as is the case throughout most of Bangkok’s lesser thoroughfares, and once we had moved off to the side of Brown Sugar we were enveloped by darkness. In the alley, just in from the sidewalk, someone had parked a white Toyota van. The sliding door on the van’s passenger side was open, facing the clubs to the left. I saw this and instantly understood that their plan had been to drag me into the vehicle, then drive away and interrogate me at their leisure.
    We shoved Perry Mason up against the front passenger-side door and patted him down. He had a Fred Perrin La Griffe with a two-inch spear point blade hanging from a neck sheath—obviously backup for the folder. I cut the neck cord and Dox pocketed the knife and rig. In his front pants pocket, we found a Toyota car key and a magnetic key card for the Holiday InnSilom Bangkok. I pressed the “open” button on the car key and the van chirped in response. Yeah, the vehicle was definitely his. Beyond all this, and a Casio G-Shock wristwatch, he was traveling sterile.
    I pocketed the keys and looked in his eyes. Blood was flowing steadily from the sides of his mouth. He was still conscious, though, still with us. Good.
    “How did you find us?” I asked.
    He shook his head and looked away.
    Dox grabbed his face and forced him to look at me. “How did you find us?” I said again.
    He gritted his teeth and remained silent.
    I reached down and started probing his abdomen. He winced when I got to his ribs. Either they were broken, or there was some damage underneath, or both. I pressed hard and he grunted.
    “We can do this easy or we can do it hard,” I said. “Answer a few questions and we’ll be gone. That’s all there is to it.”
    He looked away again. He was trying to focus on something else, to let his imagination carry him away from here.
    I knew the technique. There are ways of resisting interrogation. I’ve been schooled in them, and so, I had a feeling, had this guy. What they teach you is that you have to accept that you are in a position you can’t survive. Your life is over. There will be some hours of pain first, yes. Your body is going to be broken and ruined. But then death will deliver you. Concentrate on that coming deliverance, let your imagination go forth to meet it, and use the anticipation of that impending rendezvous to hold out for as long as you can. If you can do this, you can detach yourself from what’s happening to your body and make your mind much harder to reach.
    I had to interrupt his reverie. Shake his confidence that his acceptance of death had put him in paradoxical control of the situation. Shock him out of his assumption that we were playinga binary game of live or die, life or death, with no other possibilities in between.
    I pulled out my folder with my right hand and flipped it open. I grabbed his face with my left and forced him to look at me.
    “No matter what happens here,” I said to him, “you are not going to die. We’re not going to kill you. You are going to live.”
    I pressed the knife against his cheek, so that the point was resting just below the bottom edge of his left eye. “But if you don’t answer my questions,” I said, “I’m going to blind you. One eye, then the other. Now. How did you find us?”
    The guy didn’t answer, but I could tell from his increased respiration that I had his attention, that I had hauled him back some distance from the relatively safe place to which he had tried to flee.
    “Your choice,” I said, and started slowly driving the knife upward.
    He squeezed his eyes tightly shut and tried to jerk away. Dox shoved his head against the side of the van and I kept the knife slowly going north.
    The guy’s breathing worsened, approaching the cadences of panic. His eyeball was moving upward ahead of the knife. Another millimeter and it would reach the limits of its give and be skewered.
    “Cell phone,” he said suddenly, panting. “We tracked a cell phone.”
    I paused the knife but didn’t lower it. “Whose cell phone?”
    “His. Dox’s.”
    Goddamnit, I thought, I told him to keep that fucking thing off. Then: Not now. Deal with that later.
    Dox said, “Hey, asshole, how do you know my name?”
    I shot him a murderous shut the fuck up this is my show glance, then looked back at Perry Mason. “How did you get the number?”
    “I don’t know. It was just given to me.”

    Bullshit it was just