TAY ALMOST NEVER carried a gun. He had never been much of a shot anyway so he figured it didn’t much matter.
But for the first time in years, he found himself rethinking his policy as he took the elevator downstairs. Going into a dark shophouse looking for Vincent Ferrero without any kind of a weapon wasn’t a particularly appealing proposition, but what else was he going to do? Kang was armed, but Kang was covering the rear. Tay could hardly ask him to give up his weapon. No, he would just have to make the best of it.
The elevator doors opened and he crossed the lobby, but just as he passed the reception desk he had a thought.
“Do you have a flashlight?” he asked the clerk on duty.
The clerk was a young man with a high forehead and a square, Chinese face. He seemed to find the idea of a policeman using the hotel for surveillance exciting. Obviously, Tay thought, he had no idea how boring surveillance really was.
The clerk bent down and fished around under the counter. When he straightened up he was holding a black five-cell Maglite.
“Will this work for you, sir?”
The irony of being handed a flashlight just like the one Dr. Hoi theorized had felled Johnny the Mover and started this whole mess wasn’t lost on Tay. Maybe it was even an omen.
He flicked the Maglite on and off just to make sure it worked, and then hefted it in one hand. It wouldn’t trump a gun, of course, but in the right circumstances, it was a fine weapon all the same.
“Thanks,” Tay said. “I’ll take good care of it.”
The young man snapped to attention and saluted. He actually saluted. Tay felt ridiculous doing it, but he offered a half-hearted salute in return and hurried into the night.
***
Tay moved away from the hotel entrance and slid into the shadows. Across the street, number 38 was still and dark. Had he been mistaken about seeing a brief glow of light? No, he didn’t think he had been.
Taking a deep breath he walked quickly across the street and took cover behind a silver Toyota van parked at the curb about twenty feet away from the entrance to number 38. He could see the red door reasonably well from where he was, and it appeared to be closed, but the interior of the carport was in such deep shadow he could make out nothing there at all.
Tay briefly considered what to do next, but nothing occurred to him other than the obvious. He could either check the building to see if anyone had gone into number 38, or not. Lurking in the street behind the Toyota van wasn’t going to get him anywhere.
Stepping up onto the sidewalk, Tay moved as quietly as he could up to the red front door of number 38 and tried the handle. It was locked. He flicked on the Maglite and examined the doorframe paying special attention to the area around the lock, but then it occurred to him he had no idea what he was looking for and flicked it off again.
Then Tay checked the gates in front of the carport to see if they were locked, too.
They weren’t.
The right-hand gate was open a few inches, but in the darkness Tay hadn’t been able to see that until he was right in front of it. He pushed gently at the gate and it drifted back another foot. Tay slipped inside the carport through the narrow opening.
***
Moving to the back of the carport where he was certain he had seen the dim light, he found nothing except a concrete wall painted the same faded yellow as the rest of the shophouse. He flicked on the Maglite and examined the wall for some kind of an opening through which he might have seen a light.
Nothing.
Sweeping the light to the left, he realized the entry to the shophouse protruded beyond the back wall of the carport and in the wall of the protrusion there was a narrow door. It was a way to enter the shophouse directly from the carport without going back out through the gates to the street and then in through the front door.
Moving as silently as he could, Tay crossed the carport to the door and shifted the light onto the lock and handle. He bent forward to study them holding the Maglite out in front of him. He focused all of his attention on the scratched gold doorknob with a single keyhole in the center of it.
When the door suddenly swung inward and the handle flew out of the circle of illumination, for a second Tay was too surprised to move.
And a second was all it took.
Tay had a momentary awareness that the beam from the Maglite was now resting on a leg wearing blue jeans when the flashlight was suddenly wrenched from his grasp and his arm was jerked forward into the darkness of the shophouse. He felt the heavy Maglite crash down on the back of his neck, and after that he was aware of nothing at all.
***
When Tay came to, he was lying on a concrete floor. His head hurt like hell and his mouth was dry. His first thought was to wonder how long he had been out.
“Only a few minutes,” a voice told him in a tone so low it was almost a whisper.
For a moment Tay wasn’t certain anyone had spoken at all. Perhaps he had only imagined an answer to the question he was asking himself. He pushed himself up into a sitting position.
“I didn’t hit you very hard, Sam. I didn’t want to hurt you. I just wanted to shut you up until you were inside.”
Then Tay knew what he was hearing wasn’t just in his imagination. And he knew who it was talking to him.
“August?”
“Your humble servant, Inspector.”
It was too dim wherever they were for Tay to see clearly, but he had no trouble expressing himself clearly.
“What the fuck is going on here?”
“Shhhhhh. Keep your voice down.”
“Why should I?” Tay asked, but he lowered his voice to a whisper anyway.
“We’re in a storage area with concrete walls and the door behind us is steel, so I’m pretty sure we can’t be heard inside, but you never know.”
“Who’s inside to hear us?”
“Vince Ferrero.”
“How do you know?”
“Because he was asked by a man he trusts to meet me here. Well…not me exactly. He thinks he’s meeting somebody who has a job for his company.”
“Do you have a job for his company?”
“Of course not.”
“Then why are you meeting him?”
“So I can kill him.”
The silence that followed seemed to Tay to last an hour or so, but of course he knew it was only a few seconds. August squatted close to Tay so they could talk without raising their voices.
“The thing is, Sam, I thought I needed to keep you in the game when I was looking for him. You’re a better detective than I am and I figured you’d find Vince pretty quick if I goosed you up a little bit.”
“But you found him without me.”
“Yeah…I like to have several things working when I’m trying to solve a problem. Eggs, baskets, like that.”
“So why did you keep warning me off?”
“Because I know you, Sam. The harder I pushed you to give up, the harder you’d work not to. I needed you to find Ferrero. Or for Ferrero to find you.”
“You mean I was your bait?”
“No, you…well, yeah, I guess you were.”
Tay thought about that as he shifted himself into a more comfortable position.
“I can’t just sit here while you kill him, John.”
“So…what would you do if I gave Ferrero to you? Arrest him?”
“Yes.”
“And put him on trial for Johnny’s murder.”
“That’s not my call, but I’m sure. Yes.”
“You have the evidence to convict him?”
Tay said nothing.
“I didn’t think so.”
“I’ll get it.”
“You know, of course, the US would ask for extradition. They’d call it a terrorist act against a US citizen or something.”
Tay shrugged.
“Could be a nasty jurisdictional tussle. The result is hard to predict.”
Tay said nothing.
“Here’s my thought, Sam. A bullet in the brain brings absolute certainty.”
“I can’t let you do that, John.”
August cleared his throat and consulted a spot on the floor somewhere between them.
“That makes it sound like you’re part of my problem now, Sam. Another detail I’m going to have to take care of.”
If Tay had heard that from anybody other than John August, he would have taken it as a threat. But surely August meant something else, Tay thought. Didn’t he?
“I can’t let you mess this up, Sam.”
Maybe he didn’t mean something else.
“We can’t take a chance that Vince starts shooting off his mouth,” August said. “And if you jam him up for killing Johnny, he might do that.”
“Who’s this we you’re talking about?”
August didn’t answer, but then Tay hadn’t really expected him to.
“I can’t sit here and let you commit a murder in Singapore, John.”
“As I remember—”
“I don’t want to talk about that. I’m not proud of it. It’s not going to happen again. It’s not going to happen tonight.”
August exhaled heavily. “You sure about that?”
“Absolutely sure about that.”
“Then I guess there’s nothing else for us to talk about.”
Before Tay could react, August launched himself forward and pinned him against the floor on his back.
From somewhere August produced a piece of what felt like duct tape and pasted it over Tay’s mouth. Then from somewhere else he came up with a pair of handcuffs, jerked Tay over against the wall, and cuffed both of his hands around a pipe that ran up the wall and into the floor above.
“I’m sorry, Sam. But Vince needs to be dead or we’ll have all kinds of problems you don’t even want to know about. I can’t let you get in the way.”
August pulled himself into a standing position. Then he bent down and shifted Tay’s body around and made him as comfortable as he could under the circumstances.
“I’m going upstairs now and getting this done. Then I’ll come back and release you if you promise to stay quiet until I’m gone. If you don’t promise, I’ll have to leave you like this until somebody else comes around and releases you, and I really don’t want to do that.” August gave Tay a tired-looking smile. “Think about it while I’m gone.”
Tay tried to say something, but all he could manage behind the duct tape was a kind of strangled gargling sound so he stayed quiet.
“There you go, Sam,” August said. “You’ve got the idea now. No need to waste a lot of breath over nothing.”
***
August turned around and knelt in front of the steel door. Tay watched him take something from his pocket and work it in the keyhole until the sound of a click was clearly audible in the small room. Then August pushed himself to his feet and returned whatever he had used on the lock to his pocket. Tay continued to watch as August reached under his shirt and produced a handgun which Tay recognized it as a Glock 9mm. August worked the slide slowly and deliberately, chambering a round.
Slowly turning the handle of the steel door and pushing it open about a foot, August slipped through. The door swung closed behind August, but not completely. Tay strained his ears to focus on the tiny crack it left, listening for any sound from behind the door.
***
At first Tay heard nothing at all, not even footsteps.
Then he did hear something. He just wasn’t sure what it was.
It sounded like August had stumbled into something, making contact with whatever it was twice and causing two separate noises from the two impacts. After that, there had been a metallic clicking sound followed by a muffled thump as if August had shoved the obstruction out of the way. Had August stumbled over a table with first one leg then the other and shoved it aside? No, he wouldn’t have been nearly that clumsy.
Tay suddenly realized what the metallic clicking noise had been. It was the cycling sound of the action of an automatic pistol.
Then, all in a rush, he knew exactly what he had heard.
Two shots had been fired from a handgun with a noise suppressor on its muzzle and a body had hit the floor. And Tay knew whose body it had been.
He had gotten a clear look at August’s Glock when he had pulled it from under his shirt just before he went through the steel door.
There hadn’t been a noise suppressor on it.