Chapter Ten

Ten

Toy drove her tiny convertible roadster as if the traffic clogged streets were wide open and she was exempt from the laws of both man and nature. She talked on her phone and adjusted the stereo and steered with the edge of her shapely thigh and then shouted and laughed each time she down shifted hard and stomped the brakes to avoid causing multiple car pile ups.

Lonny sat trying to make himself small in the passenger’s seat. He jammed his bulk against the door but still he over-flowed. Whenever toy reached for the gears her hand and forearm pressed into the side of his gut causing him to reflexively inhale and her to giggle.

He would have been more aware and embarrassed by his size but Toy had handed him the papers she took from Ed’s room to read as soon as they were in the car. A history of printed email exchanges between Eddy and Jerry spelling out in barely coded language the plan and Lonny’s place in it.

Ed and Jerry were involved in some sort of pyramid scheme that went tits up to the extent that Jerry had to turn over control of Air Port Cartage to the kind of investors who refused the idea of a loss and had the influence to ensure remuneration. The kind of investors that could convince Jerry to replace his drivers with Slavic men who had no English, with a small percentage of their salary going into his own pocket. Lonny was a problem though, he was older than the rest of the drivers and had been paying the maximum into his 401 since the day he started and Jerry didn’t have the cash to pay him off so they moved him down to the spray pit, knowing he wouldn’t quit and force them to pay out no matter what. That he was the kind of man who valued routine over dignity.

Jerry had taken the brunt of the financial hit but Eddy got the public and legal blame and fled here into hiding. Eddy was broke and tried to leverage some money out of Jerry, and Jerry was willing to help him provided he do him one favor. Have Tanner killed.

They had set up the woman’s health NGO front themselves using Eddy’s dubious religious contacts and lured in Tanner with the sweetest volunteer offer ever, along with a few righteous young women who actually wanted to do good in order to give the thing some credibility.

Eddy wanted a scapegoat though, in case there was an actual investigation and so Jerry got Lonny, who he thought would never do the job but could easily be fit to a frame by Eddy who would have access to his hotel room. Lonny in a Thai jail forever was an easy answer to a bunch of problems. He was a loner, a known weirdo who led a dubious lifestyle. No one would miss him and it would save Jerry the pension fight he knew would be coming in a couple of years.

It would be Lonny who was obsessed with the idea that Tanner had killed Jenny. Had come to Jerry many times telling him the kid was guilty. He had somehow found out Tanner was in Bangkok and took his vacation and gone all that way to seek vengeance for the life of his boss’s daughter. Maybe he was secretly in love with her, he was the kind who would be obsessed with an untouchable young girl. Jerry could pour all of his own hatred for the boy into a profile of Lonny the police could use.

There was no question as to who was who in the messages. There was the lout, the geek and sometimes the jerk; Lonny. The reverend, Eddy. Big guy, Jerry. The kid, Tanner. All referred to in the third person. Money was gravy, killing was action, Thailand the playground. Some others Lonny couldn’t piece together. The Event could have been Jenny’s death or could have been the failed business deal. The American people was maybe Eddy’s family or even Jerry’s. One mention of the Tank Lady Lonny figured was his own Ma because of the oxygen she took on a little cart every where she went.

He read and re-read the fine blue printing across the pages. There was nothing to interpret or piece together, everything was clear as crystal but he continued to look it over in disbelief.

Lonny had never actually liked Jerry; he was a spoiled rich kid who became a show off as an adult and everyone knew he ran APC into a hole because he thought he was better than the business. Even after the meeting in his office and the crazy proposition that Lonny had taken without much thought and no real intention of acting on, did he think Jerry or anyone he knew actually capable of this kind of scheming.

Ed’s part in it was less of a surprise. He had the presence of a cheat-thief, a self-righteous bigot and though nobody deserved what was happening to him right that minute he probably didn’t deserve much better.

He had begun mumbling strings of profanity under his breath cursing Jerry; his company, his friends, his class of people and finally himself.

Toy was occupied driving and chatting, ever changing the soundtrack of pop music to her manic maneuvering of the car but she was checking Lonny with her peripheral vision as he read through the emails.

‘Where’d you get all this?’ Lonny finally asked crumpling the emails in his hand.

Toy laughed while making a daring cut across lanes between a minivan and the swinging rear of a double trailer rig.

‘It was on Eddy table, just on the top. You know when have something like this you need to get rid, throw it and burn. Not to keep it staying you know?’

Toy turned the car off the elevated highway and ran it through a number of complicated intersections before steering into a small street that in comparison made where Eddy lived look prosperous and respectable. She pulled the car up to a group of chopped motorcycles leaning heavily on side stands, hung with leather tassels. Fantastic scenes of running horses, sword wielding dragons, skulls and fighting Indian braves air brushed on their tanks in gaudy colors.

‘Who is Jerry and why he wanted you to kill Tanner?’ Toy asked in a cold, sober, nearly accent free tone, much different from the lilting almost childish mock she had been speaking to him with before.

‘Jerry’s my boss in New York.’

‘Boss, for like what kind of job?’

‘ I used to be a truck driver for his company.’

‘He have the big company?’

‘Pretty big, but it’s all messed up now, he’s got serious money trouble.’

‘So he want to kill Tanner for money?’

‘No, he… well he thinks Tanner killed his daughter.’

‘His daughter die?’

‘Yeah, real bad, raped and killed, beat up. Real bad.’

Toy’s face drooped; she frowned and shook her head. ‘That so terrible, that the trouble Tanner have in New York before he came here, but Tanner didn’t could do that?’

‘No he didn’t.’ Lonny said

‘And you know Tanner in New York, you know he family?’

‘I don’t know them, I read about them, read about him, when Jerry’s daughter was killed.’

‘They rich?’

‘Sounds like they got money, maybe not rich but upper middle class I guess.’ Lonny 
shrugged.

‘You come here to kill him for you boss?’

‘I don’t know why I came here, but I wasn’t ever gonna' kill Tanner. He’s just a kid and 
Jerry’s crazy.’

They sat side by side in the tiny cock pit of the sports car, each thinking the situation over to their own advantage.

‘Ok, so now we are like best friends right, we know everything about each other, no more secrets.’ Toy held her perfectly manicured index finger against her lips as she said this.

Lonny simply nodded.

‘I need to go in there and do something; you stay in the car Ok, this area not so safe for you.’

Toy spun out and shut the door with a whoosh. Lonny watched her walk past the hood and on to the crumbled sidewalk and disappear into the shadowed opening of a shop front. Her tight jeans seamless over her long shapely legs and her ink black hair brushing the top of her ass in a gentle sway. She walked past a couple of hard looking men standing guard at the front of the shop as if blessed against all harm and mortality.

Lonny studied the squalor of the street and realized for the first time that the areas he had been in up until now were the moneyed parts of the city despite the cracked and potholed sidewalks, the congestion of street hawkers and strong smell of rot and sewage. This street revealed a level of poverty he had never been exposed to. The houses were constructed adhoc from all manner of materials. Wood shacks leaned at acute angles and were fortified with low brick and mortar walls. The corrugated metal roofs as far as he could see were patched with scrap fiber glass and pieces of advertisements; billboards’ or banners cut up so that only an inkling of their original message was discernible. The only real evidence of modernity were the small red satellite dishes that clung to the sides of each building. They were totems of hope, of desire for an elevation to the kind of beautiful lives that the signal beamed into the ravaged homes.

Toy emerged from the shadowed store front onto the sun blasted sidewalk swinging a shoulder bag in her hand like a little girl. Some kind of leering comment was called out by one of four men squatting around a bottle in the shade of a tarpaulin constructed from a political campaign sign attached to four thin pieces of bamboo.

Lonny recognized the aggression in the men as the same he had encountered so often from the idle and unemployed who occupied street corners in New York. A jealous hatred they held for anyone with a job to do or a place to go, to mock and punish any active member of society. Toy faced them easily and spoke as if addressing children even wagging her extended index finger. Three of the four were cowed by her audacity but one lashed out, flinging his arm and cackling. His wide grin showed haphazard, stained teeth for a second but turned to a hollow circle just before he fell forward, doubling up. Toy bagged the sap as quickly as she had deployed it. The three others turned their heads, ignoring the violence in front of them.

Watching from the car Lonny went from puzzled to shocked and then found himself giggling at the reverse attack

Toy walked around the back of the car, tossed the bag in the trunk and slid in through the door taking her place behind the wheel. She turned the key and gunned the engine reversing the entire length of the side street and onto the main road without ever checking her mirrors.

‘What happened there?’

‘That man too impolite,’ She said with a smile teasing the corners of her mouth.

Back on the elevated expressway Toy drove in her easy near suicidal style and questioned Lonny about Great Beach, Long Island - New York and America. Most of the questions Lonny had no answers for as they involved woman’s fashions, pop music, actors and actresses he had never heard of but whom Toy claimed to be superstars.

Amused and disgusted by Lonny’s ignorance of all things she found important Toy gave up on him. Instead she made a series of phone calls, conversing in what to Lonny sounded like the death knell of some strangled woodland creature, distractedly navigating the tiny car amongst the impossible traffic.

Again she directed her coupe off the expressway and into congested local traffic at high speeds and barely avoided several fatal crashes before cutting into the parking lot of what looked like a four star hotel. A building right of out of Washington D.C. Lonny thought.

A squat neo- Roman structure with white marble columns supporting a frieze decorated with dancing harlots feeding bunches of grapes to a fat man with a wreath around his head lain out on a sedan chair beneath an overhanging cornice and pediments. Rows of arched windows lined the wings stretching to either edge of the parking lot which was packed with Mercedes, BMW’s, Porsche’s and all manner of high-moneyed automobile.

Toy brought her car to the entrance and hopped out, engine running and door open. ‘You can come in here,’ she called to Lonny as she retrieved the bag from her trunk.

He eased himself from his contorted position and felt pins and needles from his calf muscles down; the car wasn’t made for a man who topped six foot and enjoyed beer and lasagna. Toy headed for the double doors set deep in the portico over which hung a brass sign engraved with the word paradise. An attendant opened one of the doors for her while a valet drove the car off, but she waited for Lonny to catch up before entering.

They walked side by side into a lobby reminiscent of a mens club from the 19^th century. Chandeliers hung from the ceiling over leather arm chairs and couches and long stemmed ashtrays stood in front of low tables. Marble topped commodes held candelabras beneath life size oil paintings of wanton young women in attitudes of languor painted wet on wet.

In a corner of the lobby a miniature wooden house on a pillar was set with fruits and shot glasses of various colored drinks. Toy wafted her hands through the smoke burning from a dozen sticks of incense and combed it over her forehead into her long black hair. She put her hands up to her nose in a praying motion for a second and then continued on without any mention of the rite.

‘This is my father’s massage club, have massage and steam and sauna and bar and can play card and have many lady for you to choose.’

Toy spoke to one of the uniformed flunkies roaming the room empty handed in a way that set the boy on edge so that he stepped up his pace and rushed back soon enough with a leather bound menu.

‘Lonny take-a-seat, you can choose any type of program you like it’s-my-treat. I need to talk with my father, after we can eat our lunch OK?’

Toy walked off followed by the flunky, her bag of loot flung over her shoulder, deliberately twisting her ass in the tight jeans, owning the image.

Another of the attendants guided Lonny to a niche with a cushioned seat and hand him a tablet computer with the photo's of about twenty young women on the screen. Each was wearing some type of costume, lingerie or bikini and stiking wanton or vulnerable poses. The images looked nothing like the people Lonny saw out on the street. The girls on the computer were light skinned some nearly white. Most of them had tinted or completely died hair in shades ranging from ginger to blonde. Many of them had had nose jobs that seemed to pinch their faces and a few even had blue eyes.

The overall effect was alien looking. They seemed a whole other race, like some kind of genetic hybrid of the near future. Whatever they were Lonny had no interest in any of them. 'Look, I just want a massage alright, no funny business.' He told the boy who was quietly awaiting his choice.

The boy nodded and then indicated the screen again. Lonny could tell from his face he hadn't been understood and so he imitated with his hands performing massage, while the kid shook his head and said 'Massage massage'. Lonny made the classic school boys finger screwing motion and shook his head and said 'no.' The boy imitated Lonny's pantomime and nodded saying 'yes, yes'.

*

Lonny was guided to the dining room by another flunky feeling like a somnambulist after an herbal sauna and an hour of massage that cracked and snapped his joints, freeing his muscles of the tension and pain manifest by his terrifying week long stay in the capital of Thailand.

Toy sat at a table set for two with numerous utensils and three sizes of cut crystal stem ware. She had changed her clothers and now sit looking very business like in a coral colored suit. Then he noticed that the hem line of the skirt clinging to her crossed legs rose nearly to her waist and showed an expanse of tapered leg covered in fence net stockings. Dangling from the toes of her free foot was a spike heeled pump with a savage looking metal tip.

Lonny was seated across from her in a low backed modern leather and steel chair and saw immediately the visible cleavage of her modest breasts ran almost to the edge of her aureola through the transparent blouse she had changed into. ‘You feeling better.’

‘I do, for sure, that was real great.’

‘Steam, massage...something else?’

Lonny shrugged, his face heating up, mentally recounting the acts and specialties available on the menu under each one of the girl's photos.

‘You get some half-half? Some rimmer? No? No three one one? Two in the pink and one in the stink? Some Cos play? Any ATM?’ Toy recounted laughing.

Lonny stared at his plate, his cheeks burning. ‘I ain't into that stuff.’

‘Why you shy? I know everything here, my father own here for a long time. I coming here even when I was like twelve or thirteen.’ Toy laughed again and added, ‘Never mind, this not your kind of thing, right?’

He looked at her, waiting for more but she was reading over the lunch menu.

‘So let’s eat, Ok.’

Toy ordered a table full of food that could never be consumed by two people. Seafood and noodle salads and curries and omelets and other plates that couldn’t be recognized or understood by Lonny. Toy gave a little talk about each one. Explaining the ingredients and pedigree to the best of her knowledge. It was becoming obvious to him that their food was a common passion among Thai people.

When they had eaten all they could and Lonny drank two beers and Toy a half carafe of white wine she lit a thin cigarette with a gold lighter. The table was cleared and two small glasses of cloudy strong smelling liquor set in front of them. Toy leaned forward and spoke; the normal playfulness that usually animated her English was gone.

‘I talk to my father already and he agree that you are going to work with us.’

Lonny started to speak but Toy cut him off. ‘Listen first. Here we work with police to make our job happen. No problem like this. They get something, we get something everyone happy. You know this already, they still have you passport. It’s OK,I can get it when we finish. What you come here for is finish already. Eddy gone. I don’t know Jerry, but Tanner I know.’

‘Tanner? I thought, I mean I thought this was all because Tanner is your friend, you’re trying to protect him.’

Toy looked away, seemed to search the room before meeting Lonny's eye again and almost shouting.

‘Tanner was my boyfriend! But he broke my heart. He say that I too old already.’ Her face squirmed through expressions of hurt and rage then as quickly settled back to her business gaze.

‘Now we take him for money.’

'Kidnapping,' Lonny said.

'Kidnap, chai'.

Toy would have her boys abduct Tanner in collusion with the police then have her contacts at the US consulate find Lonny to help assure the family. A familiar voice from home who just happened to be in the city whom the police located through immigration. Toy handed him a prepaid cell phone telling him the CID special police would contact him in the morning and request that he come to the station. All he would have to do is talk to the family; add some legitimacy to the kidnapping. It would be kept out of the papers. Tanner's family would pay the ransom and Lonny was free to leave the country. Tanner would be set free once everything was settled. She finished speaking and lifted her glass of liquor, a toast to seal the contract. Lonny lifted his and then lowered it.

‘You let Tanner go but he’s already seen me. He knows that I talked to his family and he’s going to ID me to the cops, maybe not here but at home and then I’m gonna have a lot to explain..’

‘You leave Thailand first OK, we keep Tanner until you go.’

‘This is going to sound real funny to the family.' Lonny thought for a minute about the logistics and then realized this was an answer to his own problem.

'I’ll do it but I need something from you.’

‘You demand?’

‘Asking a favor.’

‘Ok, I can do a favor, like what.’

‘No big deal, I just need to send something back to New York, a big box, but quietly, no customs checks or export inspections.’

Toy raised her glass again and Lonny clinked it, put it to his lips and drank down the hot, chemical tasting liquor.