Free The Fear Artist by Timothy Hallinan

Fuchsia or Infected-Piercing Scarlet. He comes back out into the drizzle, toting the familiar weight of the paint, focusing on the task at hand, and finds himself standing dead center in the splash he’d made when the first cans burst open. It’s dappled now by a confused pattern of footprints, a diagram of some impossible dance step. Surrounded by a wash of Apricot Cream, he thinks,
The man died in my arms
. Then he thinks,
And there’s nothing I can do about it
. He goes home.
    The paint rolls on smoothly, and for a while Rafferty is able to submerge his simmer of uneasiness in the well-being that comes only with mindless work where progress is obvious:
A larger area is Apricot Cream now, and a smaller area is white
. More of life, he tries to convince himself, should be like this.
    In between stretches of precariously maintained well-being, he misses Rose and Miaow. He goes back to worrying about Major Shen and worrying more sharply about the Americans. He feels—like an old bruise he can’t do anything about except wait for it to fade—a sense of unfulfilled responsibility toward the man who died.
    He had used his last breath to tell Rafferty something and his last burst of energy to give him something. What was Rafferty supposed to do about that?
    Paint these fucking walls?
    W ITH PART OF the longest wall in the living room done and the apartment’s air gelatinous with the smell of paint, he begins to feel twinges of a new anxiety, a tiny and unpleasant electrical charge fizzling its way up his spinal column. What will he do with himself when he runs out of walls? The hallway immediately presents itself as a solution. It’s white, and there’s no reason for it
not
to be white, but he hasn’t got any white paint. He grabs his wallet and Rose’s umbrella and locks the door behind him.
    White paint is simple—no mixing needed, so he can buy it anywhere. Also, he can use the errand as a way to take the situation’s temperature. Maybe’s he’s got delusions of grandeur, maybe he’s not on anyone’s watch-and-report list. He walks a couple of blocks toward a hardware store, doing his best not to look like he’s checking reflections in shop windows, scoping the sidewalk, stealing glances at slow-moving cars, which on this stretch of Silom, especially in this weather, is all of them.
    A few years earlier—doing research for a book—he’d taken lessons in tailing people and in spotting people who might be tailing him. His instructor had been a possibly-retired, possibly-not-retired CIA guy named Arnold Prettyman. Prettyman had
claimed
he was retired, but the likelihood of any statement’s being true declined the moment Arnold said it was. Rafferty always figured Prettyman was on some sort of string, like so many of Bangkok’s substantial population of old spooks. Arnold, unfortunately, has gone into Permanent Deep Cover, but his lessons still ring true. Arnold didn’t eat it because he failed to pick up a tail.
    So Rafferty does as he was taught. He’s got an advantage because people aren’t out wandering in the rain unless they have to be, so the sidewalks, usually thronged, are thinly populated. He goes into a few stores he doesn’t need anything from and buys something cheap and plausible. Once or twice he turns around, the image of a man who should make lists but doesn’t, and goes back to a store he passed a minute or two before, looking for scrambling, for stalling, for people suddenly turning to study the traffic. Twice he comes out of a store and does Bangkok’s distinctive dodge-the-traffic dance to cross the boulevard and go into a shop on the other side, looking through the new store’s window to see whether anyone goes into the shop he just vacated.
    The second time someone does. It’s a young, short-haired woman wearing reflective aviator shades on a rainy day. He’d seen her when he first hit Silom. She’s inside just long enough, he figures, to present some identification, ask a