Free The Fourth Watcher by Timothy Hallinan

think about what the money could buy. I just saw the bills as pictures.”
    Her gaze is warm on his cheek. “Of what?”
    â€œClouds. Trees. Buildings with roofs that tilted up at the corners like a prayer. Lakes with bridges over them, and the bridges looked like…I don’t know, lace or something. Everything seemed to float. In Lancaster the rocks were heavy and the buildings were like bigger, heavier rocks. And I unfolded that money, and I was looking at a different world, a world where everything was light enough to float. Some of the bills had faces on them, mostly old men, but they had something in their eyes, something that said they knew who they were. There weren’t many Asians near us. My mother’s family had Filipino blood, and there were a few Chinese and Koreans who ran restaurants, but they all looked like everybody else, like they were waiting for something to happen. The people on the money, though—whatever they had been waiting for, it had happened.” He puts his hand over her long fingers, touching the ring. “So there were two new worlds, one in the places and the buildings, and one in those guys’ eyes. And they both looked a lot better than Lancaster.”
    â€œAnd hiding behind one of those buildings,” Rose says, putting her head on his shoulder, “was me.”
    â€œIf I’d been able to see around that corner,” Rafferty says, “I would have come here at fifteen, too.”
    â€œSweet mouth.” She yawns. Then she says, “Poke, I love my ring.”
    â€œAnd I love you.” He picks up the ashtray and puts it on the table. “We’ll work this out, Rose. Don’t worry about it.”
    â€œI’m all right. But I’d feel better if I knew more about it. Right now the only thing I know is that the money was bad and we’re in the middle of it, Peachy and I. Is there someone you can talk to? Someone who could tell you more?”
    â€œI don’t even have to think about it,” he says. “When the government is causing you trouble, you go to the government.”

10
Better Than the Real Thing
    Y oung or old?” Arnold Prettyman asks.
    â€œYoungish,” Rafferty says. “He’s like what someone said about Richard Nixon: He’s an old man’s idea of a young man.”
    â€œNixon got a bum rap,” Prettyman says, toying with an eighteen-inch-long tube of rolled paper on the table between them. He has eyes the color of faded denim, as remote as the eyes of a stuffed animal. Rafferty always half expects to see dust on them. His features have bunched for company in the center of his square face, below wavy, rapidly receding, light-colored hair he brushes unpersuasively forward. Lately he has cultivated a pointed little goatee apparently inspired by Ming the Merciless. Before he sprouted the chin spinach, people occasionally told him he resembled the singer Phil Collins, but to Rafferty he’s always looked like what he is, or was: a spy. He spends way too much time staring people directly in the eyes when he’s talking, a trait Rafferty associates with Scientologists and liars, such as spies. He’s fairly sure Prettyman isn’t a Scientologist.
    â€œAs hard as it may be to believe, Arnold,” Rafferty says, “I didn’t come halfway across Bangkok to reopen the file on Nixon.”
    â€œJust taking a stand,” Prettyman says. “Anyway, the young ones are the worst. They all think they’re Eliot Ness. Probably carries a pearl-handled gun and is dying to put a notch in it.”
    â€œBut you don’t know him.”
    â€œRichard Elson,” Prettyman says, without much interest. He pulls the tube of paper toward him and raps out a quick three-finger rhythm on one of the rolled edges. “Nope. Never heard the name. Not that I really hung with the Seekies. The Service keeps to itself.”
    â€œJust out of curiosity,”