Cold Hit
Cold Hit
Cold Hit
A Novel by
CHRISTOPHER G. MOORE
Heaven Lake Press
Cold Hit
Christopher G. Moore
Smashword Edition 2012
Cold Hit is published by Heaven Lake Press at Smashwords.
Copyright © 2004 Christopher G. Moore
Author’s web site: http://www.cgmoore.com/
Author’s e-mail: chris@cgmoore.com
Jacket design: K. Jiamsomboon
License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Special thanks to Four’s Studio Co.,Ltd. for granting permission to use the lyrics to the song “Hello, Hia.” The song was popularized by the Tahi singer Yui during the time this story takes place.
Also special thanks to the following people:
Darrell K. Woolley was an excellent guide to the City of Los Angeles, California and assisted in making arrangements with LAPD on my behalf.
Pete Phermsangngam, LAPD Police Officer, was generous with his time and shared his knowledge about policing in Los Angeles.
Father Joe Maier, whose courage and compassion shows what one man dedicated to doing good can accomplish against all the odds.
Richard Diran’s insight into expat life was helpful and he was a good guide to Washington Square.
Norman Smith and Fred Wunderlich acted as explosive and gun advisers.
Introduction
BIG MONEY, BIG CRIME
BIG MONEY AND crime have always been cozy bedfellows in literature. Writers long ago discovered that exploring the complexity in this connection yields a powerful combination of passion, adventure, intrigue, betrayal, and danger. Crime fiction is a literary form where the story revolves around the motives and intentions of the players in the big money dramas. Crime operates as it has always done: as another market force allocating resources. What makes money and crime so beguiling is the interface between the police, judges, lawyers, private eyes, and others. On one side is the machinery of law enforcement and on the other are those who profit from breaking the law. Not all law-breakers are treated equally. Not all murderers are put behind bars. These are truths we know that exist. They are part of our history, part of our literature. We measure our progress by looking how well crime is contained to the margins.
Move the equation of big money and crime from the West to Southeast Asia and some of the fundamental premises change. The rule of law is fragile. Powerful forces operate above the law and the machinery of law enforcement is weaker, less developed and more easily intimidated in a showdown. There are many reasons to explain these cultural differences: the borders are less defined, less under the control of authorities allowing criminal elements to run guns, women, drugs, logs with less chance of getting caught. The pay of the police is low and this is one reason for corruption. Feudal structures of powerful clans and warlords continue to influence those will be punished and for what crimes. There is an absence of a large educated middle-class and instead one finds large gaps between the very rich and the mass of extremely poor landless farmers.
How do the very rich obtain that wealth, protect it, hold it, and defend themselves against forces seeking to ambush them? That is a question anywhere. In Southeast Asia, where the rich often have obtained their wealth from monopoly licenses, dubious deals, and from the illegal world of gambling, drugs, and prostitution, the crucial elements of crime fiction are found in abundance.
Prior to the launch of the Vincent Calvino private-eye series in 1992 with Spirit House, no writer had set an English language crime series in Southeast Asia. One obstacle to writing such a crime series has been to adjust the characters and stories to an environment where the shades of complexity between good and evil blurred beyond recognition. Also, there was a problem with the language learning Thai is not an easy task and there is the issue of access to the inside of the machinery of law enforcement. There were (and remain) many barriers to overcome. There is little history of crime literature in this part of the world (General Vasit Dejkhunjorn has written many outstanding books on crime but unfortunately his books are not translated into English). Thailand among all the countries in Southeast Asia is the one of the few countries (the Philippines being the other) with a tradition of freedom of expression, which allows a writer to undertake a series of books about big money and big crime. Other less tolerant regimes would have stopped the progress, pulled the plug on the computer, and asked the writer to leave or write something far less controversial or threatening. The thing about criminals is they fear exposure. In a culture where losing face is one of the most terrible of consequences, any crime writer walks a fine line between the truth of the fiction and bringing down a brick wall on his head.
As a former law professor, who has lived in Vancouver, New York and London before arriving in Thailand to live more than 15 years ago, I had spent time with law enforcement officers in big urban centers. I spent time in with NYPD officers in Manhattan, Harlem and Brooklyn and saw from the inside what that kind of life was. In Thailand through good friends I was able to meet a number of good, honest Thai cops who sought to enforce the law as professionally as any cops elsewhere in the world. If anything, the obstacles to law enforcement provided a far more interesting environment, as I was able to chronicle a particularly important decade of development in Thailand through the Calvino series.
Crime literature is more than recording basic elements of criminal activity. There should be a highly developed sense of place. One of the major characters in the Calvino series is the city of Bangkok. A geographically sprawl, with canals the color of dead batteries, traffic snarls where the roads turn into parking lots, motorcycle hit men, slums, Patpong, Nana Plaza, Soi Cowboy the comfort zone that many tourists already know. During the boom years of the 90s fast money was made. The crash of 1997 brought many changes. Hundreds of new buildings were left remain unoccupied if finished, and the work stopped on many others. Bangkok is a city of ten million. The renewal started in 2002 and gathered speed in 2003 only to find a new set of troubles looming large in 2004. The educated Thai-Chinese middle-class bought new luxury cars. The peasants from the Northeast again began arriving in buses and trains looking for work. The foreigners began to return. The old energy and vitality has gradually re-emerged. But people are cautious along with increased fears of slipping back into old ways.
Bangkok is a place where cultures clash: urban and rural, urban and rural, Chinese and Thai, the second-class citizens like the hill tribe and illegal migrants and first-class Thai citizens, and the farangs and the Thais, the farangs are represented by many tribes English, Americans, Canadians, Germans, French, Italian, Dutch, Danish, Finnish and Russians. Also there are the non-farang foreigners such as the Chinese, Japanese, Koreans an others from Asia.
They are all living in Thailand. Some have been here for more than one generation. They are businessmen, diplomats, journalists, ex-military, chefs, hotel owners, engineers, lawyers, bankers, gangsters, felons, and retirees. Many find it difficult to leave Bangkok despite the drawbacks. Some fall into crime. Others are like the lotus-eaters of the past who were lulled by a siren song of strong desires.
In the eight Calvino novels I draw upon the diversity of these cultures, following the characters who attempt to retain a sense of their old identity as it slowly peels away like a snake s skin yielding a new
expat identity underneath. In Cold Hit, the adversary is not the criminal; it is the City, the difference of cultural expectations, and surviving on a social terrain where personal conflicts flash quickly and understanding shatter into pieces, sometimes leaving a trail of blood. Readers often say they see themselves and their own experiences in the novels. The best crime novels, like the best of any kind of literature, raise a mirror to a world and make it more recognizable. In novels set in our own culture, most of the internal workings of inter-relationships, people s expectations, and their dreams come from a common base. Working in another culture as a fiction writer, it is wise not to make such assumptions. Part of the challenge of the Calvino series has been to create a sense of coherence in a number of sub-cultures: of crime, of expat life, of class, and of law enforcement.
Ultimately, a crime novel is a reflection of the complexity of law enforcement. In the case of the Vincent Calvino novels, it is also a reflection of how these forces of law enforcement have developed over time; that is, finding the courage and means to apply the law to the untouchable class of the rich. This is happening. It is also a continuing story. There is yet no end, only a beginning but it is at the beginning of the universe that we learn so much about how everything ended up the way it did.
Christopher G. Moore
Bangkok
June 2004
ONE
THE RUSH WAS like an orgasm stretched out to infinity, gaining speed and altitude, like crashing through the sunset, spinning and coming out of the clouds into a perfectly blue sky. He had swallowed the pills. But only after watching his friend go first. Only then did he feel safe, confident in swallowing the blue tablets. His friend said that the pills were Viagra and the Goddess liked what that pill did to men. He wouldn’t be disappointed. That had been thirty minutes ago, though he had lost track of the time. But the movement of time didn’t seem to matter all that much inside the room. He was no longer afraid or anxious; he was more relaxed than he had ever been.
Closing his eyes, he saw shock waves of light, joining, uncoupling, exploding. It was hard to do so but he opened his eyes wide enough to find his friend’s face. The friend winked and then smiled. Reassured, he closed his eyes once again. A brother whose cause-member nickname was Moondance.
He was a fellow member of the Cause. Sitting in the same room with Moondance made him feel that a miracle had happened; he felt how lucky he was to have someone waiting for him on his very first trip to Thailand. After all those months of planning, logging on, going through all the photographs, knowing he was about to enter a new, powerful, easier universe, his expectations had grown to enormous size.
The drugs were part of the experience, Moondance had said.
He watched as Moondance tapped the vein in his outstretched arm. At first he tried to pull his arm away but all resistance was gone. He kept thinking how beautiful the lights and colors and music were so he hardly noticed when Moondance slid the needle into the blue, blue vein. Moondance slowly pressed the plunger. Funny, he thought, the needle is still in the vein. He registered no panic over the needle. He had been punctured. This suddenly seemed perfectly normal. He laid his head back, listening to the music. Moondance had turned up some music on his portable CD player. It was New Age music. One of the song tracks from Enigma helped him go outside his body, let him drift, let him fly over the city at the speed of light.
Moondance had promised that she would be showing up at any moment. The Goddess. The one he had chosen from the web. Eighteen years old, doll-sized, long, dark hair and shy, soft eyes, and in the jpeg her hand was raised, combing her hair. Smiling one of those fifty-foot smiles, she was suspended on his computer screen, a screensaver, each day staring back with those eyes, that smile. Moondance had helped her send e-mails in English.
She was waiting for him, to please him, to love him and to be with him for as long as he wanted. This was his dream.
This was the turning point. This was the point of no return.
TWO
BANGKOK. A COAL black night, nine o’clock, with the rain blowing into a fine gray mist. Some of the smaller sois were filled ankle-deep in sludge water. Several cars had flooded and stalled near the Din Daeng intersection. It was a miserable night to search for a birthday girl. She was an upscale hooker who worked in one of the Dead Artist bars on Soi 33. Her farang lover paid the freight, and he wanted her to—no, he demanded that she receive the birthday card, not tomorrow or the day after, but tonight, on her birthday. Hormones made a man in Bangkok hot, half-crazed, in a desperate hurry; and money made other men swim through sewers to find an angel who had vanished without a word.
Vincent Calvino wasn’t on the streets just to find a woman gone missing in action, but to hand her a birthday card. Even in his world this added up to a twisted, strange assignment that he had taken against his best instincts, heading out into flooded streets with the card in his pocket. He drove through streets that had become sewer canals; all the underground filth rising to the surface, roaring out to the sea. Most of the world was lost or missing; only a small fraction ever had anyone looking for them, let alone someone with enough money for a private eye instructed to track them down on a rainy night. At any cost. The client obviously had the sickness—this wasn’t to put him down—after all, farangs with the sickness had paid more than one private-eye bill.
Calvino glanced in the rear-view mirror to find it filled with a neon sign reading: HELL. Large, bold letters. The letters should have been backwards, thought Calvino. But there was a bright red HELL spelled out in the rear view the way ambulance gets properly spelled out for drivers checking their mirrors as they hear a siren and glance up at the mirror. Mirrors. All kinds of things were found on their surface. He turned, hooking an arm over the seat. Sure enough HELL on the building was LLEH. To the left of the main sign was a smaller cold blue neon with two words: THE CAUSE. This had been showing up on clubs, bars, and restaurants. The members of the Cause mostly confined their drinking and eating to the Causeway. Others wanted a cut of the market and started displaying the CAUSE sign. They were spreading out, advancing.
Net talk: the Cause, the Causeway, MF, GTF, and these farangs brought in a whole new line of business. The URL had become a legend in cyberspace—www.thecause.com—and the site was a powerful communication nerve center for members of the Cause. Members joined by paying a hundred bucks a year, got a password and a user-ID, and unlimited access to advice, comments, information, the basic tricks of where to find yings, hongs, bars—general advice on how things worked, how life was organized, and a one year subscription to yingzines—the ultimate ying insiders’ guide to the Philippines, Cuba, Indonesia, Thailand. Each country had its own Causeway. But this hole-in-the-wall bar was off the beaten track. There was gold in Cause business. Calvino wondered if any farang had found this place. Had a member profiled it in his ten-day personal journal of conquest posted on the Cause bulletin board? He doubted it. HELL wasn’t doing much business but then it was raining and early in the evening. HELL looked like the place people ended up in, having started somewhere else. The main parking lot was under water.
It was about breakfast time for the night stalkers who kept vampire hours. The people who lived in this kind of place.
He had several clients who were Cause members; they land at Don Muang, check into the Dynasty, Nana, Brandy, or one of dozens of other Causeway hotels, a base for drinking and playing at the Nana Entertainment Plaza, eating from food vendor carts or one of the hundreds of restaurants on the sois off Sukhumvit Road. They knew before they got off the plane where to get a massage, where the freelancers hung out, the full menu listing the price of every pleasure. The entire territory that the members traveled half way across the earth to find was only a few kilometres long: Soi 1 through 33, Sukhumvit Road. The members networked sharing their experiences, their pleasures, disappointments, heartaches, often in the form of a daily diary post. Most of the communication was about yings: descriptions, photographs in various stages of
undress, dimensions, shapes, performances, positions, short-time or all-night, and the ever important economic factor of cost, sometimes broken down in bar-charts, colored graphics illustrating the math equations so dollar-to-minute performance ratios could be compared, analyzed, discussed, and debated along with betrayals and love and disappointment.
A member of the Cause had paid for this stakeout. A typical Calvino end-of-the-century client. A couple of decades ago the same guy would have sought magic in a different path; then it was the surfer who wandered the earth’s surface in search of the perfect wave. Well, all of the surfers got old, fat, divorced, forced out of jobs at age fifty, so a new magic was invented, a new map for expression and experience which led the seekers to Bangkok, Manila, Angeles, Phnom Penh, Jakarta; a sexual circuit for adventurers in search of the Monster Fuck, or the Great Tsunami Fuck. Some used the initials “MF”; others liked to call the experience “GTF”. Language was shifting, the landscape of meaning was up for grabs and there was no clear indication who would win the word war or who the men inventing the new language were. Of course, it wasn’t only men; there were yings, too. The Cause was not actually one thing, one nationality or ethnic group, but many different factions seeking shelter in the same Monster Fuck dream: sex addicts, divorced, separated, widowed men, politically correct drop-outs, vegetarians, ex-cons, soldiers of fortune, homeopaths, psychopaths, warmongers, nerds, drunks, terrorists, scholars, skinheads, bankers, punks, men numbed from years at the front lines of women’s liberation trench warfare, the obese, the bald, the rejected, bruised, abused, frustrated, disappointed, and bewildered in romance, Viagra reborn Jurassics—old guys, old women, the Dorian Grays, the Peter Pans, bikers, truckers, cripples, and thrill-seekers. That was the short-list. The agenda was never closed and no matter how much Calvino tried to imagine every class of member, the task was doomed to failure. The Cause was an open-ended, porous, ever-changing mass which no one could ever nail down.