Black Cat Weekly #86

Chapter 5-2

I looked at Sam. He looked at me.

“They find something maybe?” Sam asked.

I took a pull of my beer. “What would they find?”

“Bet it’s a body,” said Glen, and scratched his arms. “There’re always bodies being found in Bangkok. They just don’t do much with them aside from bury them.”

“A lot of hooey, if you ask me,” Titus Sloan said and unwound himself from his bottle. He looked up at the cloud and the downpour. “Think I’ll call it a night.” With nary a nod he stepped from under the bar awning, into the rain.

Sam eyed Titus, then Sam’s gaze slid to me. “What you think, Fletcher? A body, maybe?”

I studied the bottle my beer came in. The only thing in English was “beer.”

“Maybe? Who’s to know?” I said with a shrug. “The Royson was old. But they’ve got the old lady almost down to the foundations. Surely if there was anything to find they’d have found it by now.” But that wasn’t the truth. The way the girls massed inside the garden fence said so.

Sam grunted disbelief and went to serve another regular. Poo, his wife, came up beside me. “You been here long time, Fletcher. You see a lot. Maybe it time to do more than see.” She looked me in the eye, but apparently whatever she saw didn’t give her confidence. She shook her head and turned away from me.

The girls, though, they were here, so many the picket fence was bulging. I should move, damn it. I knew what to do.

But after all these years the inertia of watching and waiting and no substantiation made it hard to unearth myself. All the years of concealing myself had eroded what I was.

I set the beer down and stepped out from under the awning. Rain stripped the sweat from my body. Rain congealed on my flowered shirt and tan khaki shorts that had so long been my disguise.

On Sukhumvit at the end of Soi Eleven the red strobes of the police painted the sleeting rain. The glass-fronted buildings sluiced b****y water onto the sidewalk for the people to wade through. Go talk to the cops, was my first inclination. Confirm our conjectures.

If it was a body, I knew what to do. Where to go, who to blame.

But I already knew. The girls strained at the garden gate like faithful hunting dogs, waiting for me to decide. They were avenging angels. They were hungry ghosts and all they needed was my permission to let them go.

Down Soi Eleven Titus’s white shirt gleamed through the darkness and rain as he walked away.

“What you going to do, Fletcher? Do the right thing?” Poo appeared beside me again, a part of the rain. “You a good man. I can tell. Maybe it time?”

I took a deep breath. Maybe she wasn’t so pinched and surly after all. Maybe it was years of pain I saw. And anger.

A parent’s anger. It was an emotion I knew well.

Nodding, I stepped past the garden fence.

The girls’ howl went up, louder than sirens, louder than the rain. A rising wail like the wind in the trees. Like the force of a river freed from a dam.

They spun me around and I staggered down the street into darkness. At least I think it was them. It may have been the Thai beer.

The Sukhumvit neon fell behind. The tiki lights winked out as if they’d never been and there was only a tunnel of dark and Titus’s gleaming white shirt.

Rainwater filled the street and my shoes. I wondered about snakes, because the rains brought them up from the sewers. The rain could bring other things as well and I figured that I knew what had happened at the Royson. The construction broke through an old sewer line or some seemingly abandoned space under the hotel. What they’d found brought up by the rains had brought the police running.

Titus’s white shirt snapped out of existence, and I was running, too.

Soi Eleven narrowed and then the pavement ended. Out of the darkness came two glimmers of light. I ran toward them and almost collided headlong into the pathetic local tourist elephant. The creature’s old patient eyes met mine like a kindred spirit. The creature of the jungle had been imprisoned here for many years, paraded up the sidewalks for tourists to pose with for pictures. His trunk came up and touched my face like a benediction.

I stumbled and the animal’s handler poked him with a stick. There was no human kindness here. Not in this city of emerald Buddhas and monks. Not when it was the norm for girls to go visiting old men, to take whatever the old men gave them, to give whatever the old men wanted.

I shuddered as the elephant passed and disappeared into the dark, no more than a silhouette travelling toward the destruction of Sukhumvit Road, a shadow of its former self.

And me? Was Titus looking back and seeing only a silhouette of a man? Had he recognized the man I used to be, or had I melted so far into the city that my past self no longer existed?

But the girls remembered, when no one else did. They howled when the files were locked away and the bodies buried. Hell, after five years’ worth of new bodies settled like sediment over police officers’ memories, it was unlikely that anyone back home remembered Marcie or Renata or Bernice.

It was why I left—to escape the layers of so many faceless bodies. I’d tracked the man across a continent. Across an ocean to here to try to find the proof to get a conviction and instead, in this city, I’d found myself drowning in the shoals of so many girls.

What remained of me? Only silhouette and shadow? Or was I a man, a cop?

I stepped into deeper darkness. The soil underfoot had turned to sewage and mud. To either side of Soi Eleven shoulder-high walls of concrete blocks were topped with broken glass and barbed wire. Beyond them were apartment blocks, rain-blackened behemoths rising into the clouds.

Somewhere here, Titus had disappeared just as he’d done in Philadelphia, Queens and LA. The wall on the right-hand side of the street stopped and a narrow alley arrowed into the dark, a river of water running down its center in the roar of the rain.

The girls pressed in around me in a gust of perfume. Incense, patchouli, baby shampoo. Cold fingers pressed my shoulders. Whispers filled my ears. “Find him. Find him.”

I stumbled on pop bottles. Plastic bags and condoms tangled my legs. The critch-critch-critch of insects filled the night—or was it the girls’ voices? Ahead a lamp glimmered off a ten-foot-wide fetid khlong—one of the system of old canals that kept the city afloat in its sea of mud. Along the khlong banks sat raised wooden walkways connecting rain-darkened traditional, stilted, teak houses. The house on my right had a lamp lit within.

This was it. The girls’ whispers turned to moans that drowned out the insects and rain. The sound pulled me into the Buddhist hell of the hungry ghosts.

I climbed the stairs to the covered walkway and the absence of rain was a sudden release. My sodden clothes turned cold in the humid breeze, and I shivered as I stepped up to the gate of the house. I toed my shoes off, leaving them in a tangle of women’s flip-flops, then silently stepped through the gate.

Khlong water gurgled under my feet. The scent of sewage rose from the mud. Ahead, the lamp light glowed blue in the single room. I stepped into the doorway just outside of the pooling light.

A mattress and low pillow lay against the far wall. A window with louvered shutters yawned wide to the night and the sheeting rain thundering on the khlong. The bluish light sat on a scarred wood table, layering shadows onto the teak walls and floor where a man knelt beside a n***d girl.

She was young, young as Marcie had been. Young as the world had been when I had a life and a wife and a child.

My Marcie. With the same straight, dark hair and wide-set eyes. The same shattered trust Marcie must have had in her gaze. She was tied, just as they had all been tied. A red bandanna smoothly folded and gagged her mouth. A length of blue nylon rope tied her feet and hands together so that her back was arched, exposing her nascent breasts to the air.

This girl was on her knees before the man who held her by her hair. One hand smoothed down to her chin and I knew what was coming—he was finished with her. One quick jerk of his hands and the slim neck would break, and this body would float along the khlong, lost amongst the tangle of house stilts and purple water hyacinth.

I stepped into the light and the girl must have seen. Her eyes widened and Titus checked behind him. He dropped the girl on the mattress.

“So, you finally found the balls to come after me.”

“You know who I am?” I couldn’t hide my surprise. Not after I’d drunk beside him all these years.

He chuckled. “I can smell a cop from thirty paces, Fletcher—especially one that’s got a hard-on for me. I spotted you at the Royson just after you arrived. I wasn’t sure at first, but I was the first time you walked into Sam’s. Always coincidentally hanging around. You and your story of researching a book.” He chuckled and tipped his head at my hands. They had the swollen knuckles of an old street fighter. “Those aren’t the hands of an artist, and you don’t look like a man who understands happy endings. Besides, I saw your impassioned pleas way back when—for the first one, I think.”

My fists curled as I tensed. “That was my daughter. Her name was Marcie.”

His lips curled up. “Well, Marcie just whetted my appetite, but she died real pretty.” He looked down at the girl, his gaze violating her flesh. “Course this one will be every bit as pretty, ’cept I’m guessing you’re not going to let me get her all arranged just right.”

I remembered the pose. Marcie and the others had been found n***d and flayed, their skin splayed like confetti around them, except for their faces. Their preadolescent bodies forever defiled. The only saving grace had been the fact that the flaying had occurred after they were dead. If I hadn’t come, this girl’s golden skin would be spread around her just the same.

“Let the girl go, Titus. The police are just down the street and I’m betting that they found your other girls in the drainpipes or an old, submerged cistern. It’s over. Now let’s go turn you in.”

He outright laughed. “You think you can convince me to turn myself in? Or maybe you’re going to use that g*n you carry—yeah, I know about that, too. But that’s not what you really want, is it Fletcher? You’ve been stalking me for too many years. Think of how many more girls have died in the meantime. Doesn’t that weigh on you sometime? Whaddaya think the cops are going to say when they figure it out? Hell, you’re practically an accomplice. That is the word, isn’t it? Aiding and abetting—or maybe it’s just a sin of omission. Bad job, Fletcher, bad job all around.”

He hiked the girl up off the mattress again, his hands on her chin and the back of her head. I yanked my g*n from my waistband and aimed.

“Let her go. Now.” It was just so right, and I’d waited so long.

Titus’s gaze met mine and for a moment I recognized myself in him, and what I’d become. Both of us hungry ghosts living in the shadows, hungry for the good of what once was. Hungry for the living.

Then he shoved the girl at me and dove for the khlong. But I was ready, and so were the girls. The g*n went off. The room filled with the raging figures of all the girls: soft flesh and faces painted with pain. Flayed flesh flew about them like lace dresses, long hair flying and the cloying scent of death and perfume. They leapt for him and maybe he saw, for he screamed as he fell before my bullet caught him dead center.

Then he was gone, and I knelt for the girl, untied her hands and stood, the g*n shaking in my fist.

The girls still pulsed in the room. Some shifted like protective curtains around the girl. Others kept their reproving gazes on me, and I knew. Titus’s latest prisoner stripped off her red gag, untied the blue cord at her ankles and then she was up, grabbing a sarong off the floor as she edged to the door.

She left in a scatter of slapping feet and screams for help, out into the little rain and darkness and flood. I turned back to the room, and it felt like—I belonged. After all these years I understood.

The girls pulsed in the room, their whispers, their fingers poking and prodding as if I were a chicken, their hunger and anger unsated. Yes, I’d found the killer and killed him, but I’d waited too long, and my soul had wandered too far away.

I brought up the g*n one last time as they came for me, wailing. Fingers in my eyes, my ears. Fingers tearing the flesh from my bones as I went to my knees begging forgiveness. All these years I’d said I didn’t have enough evidence and so I’d never acted. And had hated myself.

I’d fallen into a drunken stupor and known my failure to act was every bit as heinous as Titus’s crimes. Every bit as hurtful to my daughter.

And now Marcie came for me, her bright eyes shining.

Author of the police procedural Detective Kazakov Mysteries and the amateur sleuth Phoebe Clay Mysteries, K. L. Abrahamson’s short fiction can be found in various anthologies, as well as Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Mystery Magazine, and Black Cat Mystery Magazine. Trapped on Cedar Trails, the fourth Phoebe Clay novel, was released in November 2022. When she isn’t writing she can be found with a camera and backpack in fabulous locations around the world.

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