Free The Fear Artist by Timothy Hallinan Page B

lets it fall open, and looks down at the big, doubled Ziploc bag that’s been jammed full of coins and rubber-banded into a semblance of solidity. His gun is gone.
    T HINKING IS PREFERABLE to panicking, but harder to do.
    It’s early for a beer, only about four-thirty. Given the thorniness of the mental list he’s making, though, he decides to pretend that his watch and the sun are both slow. He sits at the counter with a Singha sweating in front of him, and he draws a crude map, a diagram of his situation. He writes so much that he knows he can accidentally mislead himself with narrative, working instinctivelyto create plausibility. But he lacks spatial imagination, so diagrams force him to stick to the facts.
    In the first rough draft, he puts himself in the center of the horizontal page, with a line leading to the fallen
farang. F
rom the
farang
other lines lead, like spokes, to Major Shen, Richard Elson, the red-haired man, Cheyenne, Helen Eckersley. Whoever or whatever Helen Eckersley might actually be.
    He looks at it and pushes it aside. The beer waves at him, so he pays it a little attention.
    The second draft puts the
farang
in the center and transforms Rafferty into one of a planetary system of satellites that include Shen, the red-haired man, Elson, Cheyenne, and a little black circle for Helen Eckersley. Even as he adds the dry-cleaning shop to the little solar system, he realizes that the image is wildly unbalanced in favor of nations other than Thailand. That reminds him of the Growing Younger Man saying that one of the factors in the current political situation is the pressure that comes from other countries—to contain the Muslim situation, to maintain a profitable peace.
    He studies his diagram for a moment, assigning countries of origins to its components. Then he crumples it up and takes another sheet of paper.
    America, America, America, America: The third diagram presents a situation in which Thailand is almost marginal, represented by Shen and his grand-opera thugs, whom Rafferty suddenly visualizes as hand puppets. Outnumbering them, overwhelming them, possibly providing the hands that animate them, are the fallen
farang
, Elson, American multinational companies and their governmental and diplomatic shills, Cheyenne, Helen Eckersley, and the kind of organization that mounts a four- or five-person tail. Even Shen has a connecting line to America: years spent there before his return to the kingdom as a sort of semi-indigenous American spook. A hand puppet.
    It’s a very American diagram.
    And in the center of the third diagram—the diagram he thinks is closest to the truth—he places a malicious caricature, all big belly and flaring, tufted nostrils: the red-haired man.

6

Hiding Behind a Woman
    M RS . P ONGSIRI IS partly made up for her night’s work in the bar she either runs or owns; her hair is pulled back and her face powdered ghost white, awaiting the application of a foundation of some kind. There’s a snowy little sifting of powder on the tip of her nose and on her red T-shirt, and a new scar, a fine reddish line, on the side of her slender neck. A little less than a year ago, she’d been hurt quite badly when she tried to prevent two knife-wielding men, each of whom was probably double her weight, from breaking up Rafferty and Rose’s apartment. Rafferty’s been waiting ever since for a change in attitude, a telltale wince that says she’s become wary of him, and he’s never caught a glimpse of it.
    Working in a bar for a few decades is a toughening experience.
    Of
course
Rafferty can use her phone, she says, she says, sorry to come to the door looking like a monster in the movies; you know where the phone is, please excuse me while I turn myself into someone not so scary. Have you heard any more about the flooding?
    And would he like a glass of water?
    Rafferty declines the water and waits until she’s gone back into the bathroom. Her apartment is pretty much a duplicate of his,