TRACER REALIZED THAT it felt good to be back in Bangkok. He stretched his arms and turned up the music as he glided through the early morning traffic on Sukhumvit Road. The rain slanted against the windscreen, the wipers working overtime. The city roads were wet and slick, and traffic from the motorway had started to build. He passed the Emporium Shopping Mall and Benjasiri Park, then turned into Washington Square. Taking a parking ticket, he drove on until he eased the S-Class Mercedes in a parking space in front of the Bourbon Street Restaurant. He sat in the car, leaving the air conditioner on, listening to Muddy Waters’s “Got My Mojo Workin’” and keeping the beat on the steering wheel. He touched the small leather pouch he wore under his shirt. He didn’t go anywhere without his mojo bag with the pinch of spices, herbs, a snake tooth, and the dead body of a mean motherfucker of a black widow spider.
He didn’t object when his friend and fellow LRAS employee Alan Jarrett had suggested the restaurant in Washington Square because it was a good place to sit, wait, let the power rise up inside, get strong. And it was around the corner from a short time hotel where Jarrett had planned to spend the night. Time stops when a man is in touch with his mojo. Six in the morning and Tracer was ready to go to work. Mooney’s men had stored the .308 in the trunk. And Jarrett was all set, he thought.
He sat in the car as the security guard came around with an umbrella and opened his door. Tracer got out of the car, locked the door, ducked his head under the umbrella, and walked up the steps to the front door. The girls behind the counter gave him the early-in-the-morning once-over. A man at that time of the morning was in the neighborhood to order himself some coffee, bacon, and eggs. The security guard, who had folded up the umbrella, followed Tracer through the door and told the waitresses that the black man had arrived in a Benz with embassy plates. The yings looked at Tracer, thinking he was a diplomat, someone they had to treat real nice. Not many African diplomats rolled into Washington Square at six in the morning on a rainy day, or, for that matter, any time, any day, rain or shine. Tracer turned right, walked over to the bar, dropped the car keys on the counter, and ordered a coffee.
“Bring it black, bring it strong,” said Tracer.
The waitress stared long and hard, like she had some problem.
“The man wants a coffee,” said Jarrett. “Is there any part of that message you don’t understand?”
She turned away and walked over to the coffee pot.
“You’re in a good mood.” Tracer slid onto the stool next to Jarrett. “Rain got you down?”
“How was Waters?”
“He didn’t make his flight.”
“You didn’t expect him to,” said Jarrett.
“Mooney had all the details. There wasn’t much for Waters to do. Shake hands and calm down Mooney.”
“And you could do that?”
“Got that right. Mooney had me meet him in a bar with two of the most movement-challenged dancers I’ve ever seen. Looked like they were made of stone. Mooney was their only customer. Apparently he owned the place, so he wasn’t exactly a customer.”
“That’s the point. You control the perimeter. An ideal place. I can see why Mooney chose it. No one coming in or out in the middle of your business. Just the two of you talking about the old times.”
The waitress delivered Tracer’s mug of coffee.
“Mooney said we’ve got three days before he comes personally to get his weapons.”
“You scared, Tracer? I don’t find myself in fear of Mooney.”
Tracer blew on his coffee before taking a sip.
Jarrett was in a work phase, and when he worked he avoided coffee, tea, and alcohol. Chemicals cause a reaction in the human body, change the reflexes, vision, depth perception. A drunk doesn’t last long in combat. Jarrett’s military training kicked in, and he told himself he didn’t miss the coffee—until, of course, he saw Tracer enjoying a cup, smacking his lips. Jarrett promised himself a pot of fresh brew once the job was done. He liked giving himself a reward for completing a mission.
While waiting for Tracer, Jarrett had been watching a middle-aged farang with a young woman at a table in the back. The woman looked like an office worker. The farang had eaten wolfishly, downing his bacon and eggs in big gulps, soaking his toast in the egg yolk. The ying had slowly sipped Chinese tea. He wore a suit and a tie, and she wore a short skirt and a blouse with creases on the sleeve sharp enough to cut butter, and she showed a bit of style with a pair of pearl earrings large enough to indicate she had experience in prying open large oysters. Not too much makeup—but who wore makeup at 6:00 a.m.?—and she had that self-confident, determined way of sitting, listening to the farang rattle on but not committing her expression to one emotion or another. Jarrett glanced at the time.
“We’ve got lots of time,” said Tracer.
“Time is the one thing no one has lots of.”
Tracer nodded as if to concede the point. “Just let me finish my coffee. I’ve had a long drive. Tell me, how did it go with Miss Honey Bee last night?”
“It was all milk and honey.” As they’d lain together in bed, Wan had told him how she’d sneak up on the hives, sit down, and watch the bees for hours. She watched them dance. In the darkness of the room she’d stroked his bare chest and said that when you understand the meaning of their dance, you learn something about nature. All the dancing was communicating important information: the distance to food, the direction, the force of the prevailing winds. At the bar, she’d watch the yings dance, looking for some pattern, some directional indicator toward the honey. She’d said there was a lot to learn from watching bees dance.
“She seemed different from the others,” said Tracer.
“I never met anyone in a bar like her.”
Tracer ordered him another orange juice. “You have any idea how much orange juice I drank in Pattaya?”
Jarrett shrugged. The pained expression on Tracer’s face made Jarrett smile.
“A gallon and a half at least,” said Tracer.
“Your eyeballs must be floating.”
“Don’t worry. There’s nothing wrong with either my bladder or my eyes.”
Jarrett needed to have his spotter’s eyes sharp and focused, checking out the target and the perimeter around it. He needed Tracer at the top of his form, and Tracer was giving his usual reassurances. “No problems in Pattaya?”
“The only hiccup was driving in yesterday on Beach Road—the traffic. If you’d have told me the cars were backed up to the Cambodian border, I’d have not called you a liar. Nothing was moving. I edged along for half an hour until I finally saw the problem. There were cops and reporters and a dead Thai woman on the driveway in front of a hotel. They had a sheet over her. But people kept pulling it back for the TV cameras. I rolled down my window and asked someone what had happened. Young Thai guy says a woman’s done killed herself. I say to myself, baby, if I’d been there two hours earlier and we’d had a drink, listened to the blues, I could’ve talked you into living.”
“Life doesn’t always let you choose your dance partners,” said Jarrett.
“Where’d you read that?”
Jarrett cracked a smile. “Miss Honey Bee said that.”
Tracer raised an eyebrow. “That girl’s workin’ her mojo on you.”
The smile on Jarrett’s face widened. “Yeah, that crossed my mind.”
More than once, Tracer’s Louisiana gris-gris, a homegrown mojo, had shown some power to defeat an enemy or to entice a friend.
He glanced over at the ying at the table with her farang boyfriend. It occurred to him that if Wan had the tailoring and makeup, she wouldn’t look much different. Where was the dividing line between the ying who watched bees dancing and an office worker sipping tea at six in the morning? Weren’t they both harvesting as much honey as they could while the flowers bloomed?