Free Paying Back Jack by Christopher G. Moore Page A

weighed the options at his disposal and went back to consulting with his officers. A moment later he vanished.
    The Thai way was an unofficial house arrest. It amounted to face-saving through babysitting. It could be worse, Calvino told himself. It could be jail. He sat back on the bed and resigned himself to the reality: a chain of events had started with the death of a woman, and no one, not even Colonel Pratt or his mentor, could fully control what would happen now. Pratt had said nothing about the duration. Thinking about the two cops left behind as a security detail, he felt depressed. They could hold him until after the election, or he could even be kept for years. The cops outside might grow old and retire and gradually be replaced by fresh recruits from the academy: young policemen who would have only a vague idea why the farang inside the ninth floor wasn’t authorized to leave his room. They would only know that his confinement had something to do with a woman who’d died a long time ago and that no one had ever decided how or why she died. No one would ever question the decision to keep Calvino in the room since it’s easier for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven than for a Thai to step forward and reverse a decision.

SIX
    IN THAILAND, it didn’t take long to figure out that you didn’t have to outlive anyone to know you were alone. House arrest in Pattaya wasn’t much different from a no-show funeral with a couple of attendants looking after the body.
    The two cops left behind to guard Calvino were the same two officers who had taken an extraordinary interest in the case of whiskey. Having failed to score a bottle, they’d decided that their assignment had the hallmarks of a punishment detail. In other words, they’d been left behind because they’d been volunteered, until a further order was given allowing them to leave. Neither one showed any emotion; it was swallowed back like nasty medicine. But after the other police had gone, they made it clear to Calvino that he had caused them a big problem. When a Thai says you’ve caused him a big problem, he’s using an English expression to signal that the time has arrived to collect your passport and take the first taxi to the airport. Asian problem-solving techniques have a certain finality to them. Calvino said nothing, knowing it wasn’t a good time to be blowing bubbles their way. With no reaction from the farang, the anger slowly cooled. Calvino had been demoted to a pain in the ass with a smelly sports jacket. In private, they whispered that the farang had done it. The two cops who pulled guard detail glared at Calvino. He smiled; they frowned. Then one cop snarled and the other cursed. They were like a bad nightclub routine.
    Calvino had decided he wanted information from the cops: Who else had they been talking to, which rooms besides his own had they searched, and what had they found?
    From the bed, his hands still cuffed behind his back, Calvino watched his guards walk around the room. He sized them up. Each wore a brown uniform as tight as a scuba diver’s wetsuit, holstered nines, handcuffs (minus the pair on Calvino’s wrists), and radios on their hips. Vests covered their chests with POLICE written in illuminated white on fluorescent orange. Both had short-cropped black hair.
    One of the cops had pockmarked skin carpeting his cheeks and neck, as if a massive acne glacier had once rumbled over his body. A couple of those old scars had left craters as deep as the dimples of a smile in full bloom. He was a dead ringer for the deposed Panama dictator Manuel Antonio Noriega. Calvino started thinking of this cop as Noriega. Though the officer was in his early thirties, he looked older and tougher; a no-nonsense veteran who could line up men against a wall, knee them in the balls, slap them around, and then order them shot. He stared at Calvino with a mixture of hostility and