An Angel with a Gun Page 12

  We drove to a part of the city not far from the river. It was a series of narrow concrete streets edged on both sides by long terraced rows of one room houses that looked a lot older than they really were, because they were dirty with grime. The Thais who lived in them and worked in the city were from everywhere in Thailand except Bangkok. These little housing estates had turned into little towns with all sorts of businesses growing outside the front of many of the houses. The estate that we drove into was behind a Big C and not far from the Sukhumvit Road. Just to the east of us was a sprawling slum that amazingly seemed to be built on two levels. Slum houses and walkways sat on top of the first layer of slum houses and walkways. Corrugated tin sheets and plastic advertising banners made homes in every available space. It was a city within a city.

  Angel parked in the only available space that we could find and we walked back along the Soi that we had just driven down. It was unusual for a farang to be in these streets, but I was greeted with nods and warm smiles from the people watching me walk along with Angel. Other than the numbers on the doors the houses were identical. Most were using the small terraced space at the front of each house as a kitchen/motorbike parking space/laundrette/shop area. A very tall ladyboy suddenly came running out screaming from the open door of a house further down the street. She was waving her arms around and tottering towards us on high heels. Angel started screaming and running towards her friend. They embraced each other and swung each other around. They laughed and screamed and kissed and hugged. The ladyboy greeted me with a very respectful wai and Angel introduced me to Som.

  “Very nice to meet you, Sa-teven” said Som, as she squeezed me into her huge silicone breasts with a bear hug that I was never going to get out of until she had finished shaking me around and decided to let me go. Som had a nice smile and an attractive face that was coated in a lot of make-up. She had the longest false eye lashes that I had ever seen. She seemed like a very nice person and I couldn’t help but like her friendly and warm personality. We walked the rest of the way to her house with Som walking between me and Angel, holding our hands. Som’s house was tiny. It was just one main room and a small bathroom. There was nothing in the room except a TV, a wardrobe and some bedding in a pile on the floor. Both Angel and Som were soon busy on their mobile phones. Before long, girls were arriving with food and beer and a party just happened. A lot of the girls were ladyboys, but not all of them. There were also a few gay Thai men and a motorbike taxi man who was driving past, saw the party and decided to drop in for a while. It is always lovely to see a group of friends getting together after a long time and I felt happy and privileged to witness this reunion.

  Angel was busy telling everyone about our adventure and I think she told them far more than she should have done, but they were all very interested and everyone wanted to know what we were going to do. Angel told them that we had a plan. The plan was to go to the address that Mr. Sparrow had given to me and see what happened. She told them all about the murdered drug dealer in the boot of the car. She intended to ask Jack Sparrow for some payment for delivering the drugs and for disposing of the body. She thought that it was only right that we should get paid for our time and efforts. Everyone seemed to agree, so I did too. I heard a few people asking her if I was her boyfriend and I heard Angel tell them that she liked me a lot, but I was in love with someone else and that she was going to take me to her. I was very happy that Angel didn’t have cancer and I was also happy that she understood my position. If I wasn’t in love with Pom then I would almost certainly be in love with Angel. I liked her more every day. She was the sort of girl who was very easy to fall in love with. With no hair she looked sort of tough and I found myself thinking what she would look like with hair. I don’t mean on her lady garden, I mean on her head. I was getting good at drinking beer and I drank quite a lot of it. I don’t know what time the party finished because I must have fallen asleep. It was dark outside when I briefly opened my eyes and I knew that it was still the middle of the night. Angel was asleep next to me on the floor. She was wrapped tightly around me and I liked it. I could tell from the snoring that there were other people asleep on the floor. I hugged Angel and drifted off to sleep again to the sound of a whirring fan. Somewhere outside the house I heard a dog barking. Then more dogs joined in and barked a lot. The Thais say that when the dogs bark like that in the night it is because they see the spirits of ghosts walking the earth looking for their loved ones. I don’t know if that is true, but I believe it. I have met a ghost, so I know that they do exist. I just don’t know if dogs can see them!

  Breakfast time was busy at Som’s little town house. Somebody had gone out to buy noodles, chicken and sticky rice. Som was making coffee and topless ladyboys were going in and out of the bathroom or sat on the floor applying make-up with one hand and holding compact mirrors with the other. The place smelled of perfume and body spay. We all sat around on the floor to share the food when it arrived, before everyone said ‘Goodbye’ and went their separate ways. Finally there was just me, Angel and Som. Som told us that she couldn’t find out anything about the address that we had given her for Jack Sparrow. She had been to check the address out and told us that it seemed to be some sort of warehouse at the end of a cul-de-sac on the other side of the river. She told us that the area was a bit run down and seemed to be made up of old warehouses and shops. I wasn’t expecting it to be a warehouse. In my mind’s eye I had pictured a nice little house with a garden. Oh well!

  I hadn’t been nervous about going to visit my friend Mr. Sparrow until I listened to Angel and Som talking about how dangerous it was. Angel told Som that she had a gun and Som insisted on coming along with us. She showed us a flick knife that she was going to take with her, just in case. I didn’t have a weapon, but I hoped that Buddha would look after me, even though I wasn’t working for him anymore.

  The three of us got in our stolen car and headed south to cross the Chao Phraya River. Som had told us that it was only about 15 kilometres from Som’s house, but the Bangkok traffic made it into nearly an hour’s drive. It was still early, but the city was in full swing. The pavements were packed with people buying, selling, eating or walking. Everyone seemed to have a plan for the day. Our plan was to go and see Jack Sparrow and ask him for some money as payment for moving the drugs and disposing of the murdered drug dealer. I couldn’t help thinking that I might have got myself involved in something a bit shady. I think it was thinking about a murdered drug dealer, huge amounts of cocaine, stolen cars, knives and guns. When you thought of everything together it made it seem bad, even though I didn’t think that me or Angel had done anything wrong.

  We decided to park around the corner and walk along the cul-de-sac to the abandoned warehouse. I didn’t really know why we decided to walk along the cul-de-sac, but Angel suggested it as a safety measure and Som agreed. I just nodded. I was the only one without a weapon, so I didn’t think I had much of a say in things. We got out of the car and suddenly my heart started pounding. With each and every step along the street my heart was pounding in my chest until I thought that it was going to burst. I kept looking around to see if anyone was following us, or at least watching us from some window somewhere or a parked car, which were parked all along the road on both sides. I was relieved when I didn’t see anyone. There was a green painted wooden door and a metal shutter door to the warehouse. The paint was mostly peeled off the door from years of tropical sunshine and monsoon rains. The door was locked but it didn’t look very strong. The roller shutter door had a heavy padlock so Angel raised her leg and fired a carefully aimed kick at the door. It flew open and banged against the grey breeze block wall behind it. The noise was louder than I expected it to be and it echoed back from the empty building. I looked around the cul-de-sac again, but there was nobody there to pay us any attention. I think the street was just used by people who worked in the city to park their cars up in the morning. The air coming out of the buil
ding felt warm and tasted dusty. I think that the place had been empty for a long time. We went inside and closed the door behind us. The warehouse was huge and a lot bigger than it looked from the outside. The rows of steel pillars that held up the high asbestos roof were numbered with red paint from the days when the warehouse was used to house goods. The few crushed empty boxes that lay on the grey cement floor gave no clue as to what the building may have housed, unless you could read Chinese. At the far end of the building were a row of closed wooden doors leading into partitioned rooms. A single black metal staircase led up to an office and a metal walkway that ran all the way around the building above our heads. There was an eerie feel to the place.

  “Hello” I shouted out, in my loudest whisper.

  “Sshhh!” said Angel and Som in unison.

  We all stood in our tracks and waited with baited breath, but nothing moved and nobody answered. We walked to the partitioned rooms and looked inside. They were mostly small offices, but there was a toilet and a kitchen area. I couldn’t understand why a warehouse in such a good location was empty. I found myself thinking about what business I could have ran from there. Now that I wasn’t a monk anymore I was going to have to do something and being a businessman seemed like a good idea. Angel and Som held their weapons out in front of them as we entered the first room. I picked up a staple gun from the desk in that first room and held it out in front of myself. It did feel better being armed.

  “Tee rak, what you do?”

  “Don’t worry” I whispered. “It’s not loaded.”

  There was nothing in the rooms of any value - just some desks, tables and chairs. We finished checking the rooms before we went up the black metal staircase to the upstairs office. There was a window on each side of the wooden door but they were blacked out. Som opened the door. She screamed and ran back out waving her arms around. I could tell by the smell that somebody was dead inside the room and that they had been dead for a few days, rotting in the humid heat. I followed Angel into the room, but Som stayed outside talking about ghosts. Even in a severely decomposed state I recognized my friend Jack Sparrow. He had been chained up to an overhead beam by his arms and legs. There were some bloodied tools of torture on the desk. A hammer, a knife and some long skewers.

  Mr. Sparrow had been tortured, but his body was too decomposed to see how much he had suffered. Now the flies and maggots had moved in. I had smelt death before, but nothing as bad as that day.

  “Tee rak, do you think this is Jack Sparrow?”

  “Yes. That’s him. Somebody has killed him.”

  “I not think is suicide, tee rak. Murder for sure.”

  “I think this might be something to do with the boot full of drugs and the dead body in the car.”

  Angel looked at me, but she didn’t say anything. She just rolled her eyes up to the ceiling and shook her head.

  “Now the trail go cold, Sa-teven. I think now we just sell drugs and forget everything.”

  “There might be a clue on the mobile phone he gave me.”

  “He give you phone! Why you not tell me this before?”

  “I forgot about it and you didn’t ask me. He gave me a phone when he gave me the address on the paper. He told me only to use the phone to ring him and nobody else, but I turned it off and put it in the suitcase and forgot about it. Well, until now. Do you think we should turn it on and see if there is anything on it?”

  “Yes, tee rak. Of course. Where is it?”

  “It’s in my suitcase, in the car.”

  “Come on. Let’s get out of here. It smells. We’ll go back to Som’s house and have a coffee and look at the phone.”

  The hot humid air outside the warehouse smelled sweeter than any Thai air I had ever smelt. We drove back to Som’s house. Som was convinced that the ghost of Jack Sparrow was going to haunt her forever now and she announced that she was going to conduct a special service when we got back to her house so that he would leave her alone. We stopped to buy a cooked pig’s head and some fruit to offer to Jack Sparrow. In Thailand that is usually all it would take to placate a ghost - offerings of food and alcohol, candles and incense sticks and, of course, a prayer. When we got back to the little house Som dusted off the little Buddha shrine that was sat in one corner of the room. The service was undertaken and everyone including the ghost of Mr. Sparrow seemed satisfied.

  I opened the ancient leather suitcase and fished inside for the mobile phone that Jack had given to me. I was happy because it wasn’t a ‘Smart phone’, so even someone like me could operate it. I turned the Nokia on, but, before I could start looking through phone numbers and text messages, it started bleeping as each text message could finally arrive now that the phone was turned on. It bleeped a lot so we just waited for about five minutes until the phone stopped bleeping. There was going to be a lot of stuff to go through. Text messages sent and received, phone calls sent and received. We were like real detectives. Both Angel and I were excited about any new clues we would find, but Som was convinced that Jack Sparrow would be watching us from somewhere and he was going to be angry with her. We decided to risk it. Well, me and Angel did.

  There were no names on the phone. Only the one number showed up in both calls made and received and all the text messages that had been made. Some of the earlier messages were to Jack Sparrow, although he wasn’t addressed by any name. The messages just gave directions and details of collections and payments and contacts. Angel said that they all referred to drug buys, but I don’t know how she knew that. The later messages were all sent to me and they did address me by name. Steven West! The messages started off alright really, just mildly menacing. They got worse by the hours they were sent. They threatened to kill me if I didn’t deliver the drugs to the address given to me by ‘The Hippy’. They also threatened to kill the hippy. Angel said that ‘The Hippy’ was Jack Sparrow, but I don’t know how she knew that either. I was alarmed that they knew my name. Whoever was sending the messages sounded like a horrible person. The various violence that they threatened me with if I didn’t deliver the drugs was extremely graphic and, after seeing what they did to Mr. Sparrow, I had no doubt that they meant business. I was suddenly very scared. I had a sickly feeling overwhelm me. Somebody was targeting me. They knew who I was and they were threatening me. They seemed very angry with me for some reason, even though I hadn’t actually done anything wrong. It was just a mix up - a mistake. They had obviously killed Jack Sparrow before they gave him chance to explain it and I was worried that they were going to do the same thing to me. Sometimes in life you just get mixed up in things that you had no intention of getting mixed up in. My mum and dad had always told me that I was just born stupid. I used to think that that was the reason I got into so much trouble, but as I got older I realized that I was just unlucky. It was nothing to do with being born stupid. That was just a coincidence.

  Chapter 6

  Jack Sparrow, a brief history.

  (Twelve months previously)

  Khaosan Road had long been a Mecca for backpackers, hippies, adventurers and free spirits. Some may call them lazy dropouts, but whatever they were called by themselves or by others, Khaosan Road called to them. Like the rest of Thailand, Khaosan Road had changed, but the new generation of visitors had nothing to compare it to, so it was still everything that they had read about. It was a gateway to adventure, an avenue of illegal drugs and illicit highs. Dreadlocks, beads and cheesecloth could still be seen worn by these self-proclaimed world travellers, as if in permanent tribute to the 1970’s. Cheap alcohol was shared and travel stories were exchanged and enhanced - each adventurer trying to endorse their own claim to be the only true free spirit amongst them. Casual sex was free amongst backpacking travellers, who still wore tee-shirts with slogans like ‘Make love not war’.

  Andy Machin was a twenty-eight year old society dropout. He had spent most of his young life drop
ping out. The only child of wealthy parents, he dropped out of every society, club and team at his expensive private school. He dropped out of university, employment and finally society itself. For the previous six years he had travelled the world at his parent’s expense. He had lived in communes, Five Star hotels and beach huts. He had experimented with drugs, religion and meditation. He spent a lot of time experiencing other worlds lost somewhere inside his mind. He had made his way to Thailand via India and Sri Lanka. Khaosan Road was always going to be his destination ever since he had read ‘The Beach’ by Alex Garland. He had read it twice, saw himself in so many of the characters and, if the character wasn’t him, then it was somebody who he must have met sometime, somewhere.

  When the taxi dropped him off at the top of Khaosan Road, Andy Machin walked slowly along the road just taking it all in. He felt that he had arrived. He felt that he belonged. He already looked like he had lived there for years. Now that he was there it seemed to him that there was only one thing to do. He sat outside one of the small bars and dropped his rucksack under the shiny metal table. The pretty Thai girl from the bar went to him and took his order - a bottle of Chang beer. He lit up a cigarette and sipped the cold beer from the bottle. Women, Thai, Asian and European looked at him. He was used to women looking at him. He was an attractive man. A sexy man. He knew that he was and his confidence made him seem even more attractive. His hair was dark and long and partially in beads. He wore a red bandana and a light touch of black mascara highlighted his dark brown eyes. Some people told him that he looked like Johnny Depp, but most people said he looked like Captain Jack Sparrow. It was a look that he had carefully cultivated. It had become his identity, even part of his character - a mask that he was comfortable to hide behind. On his passport it said that his name was Andrew Sidney Machin, but he told everyone that his name was Alfie. Alfie Brown, if he was pushed for a surname, which he seldom ever was. Travellers just don’t care that much, especially when they are tripping. The street was busy. Thais hustled and tried to sell the tourists everything that they would ever need and a lot of stuff that they wouldn’t. Andy sat and drank from his beer bottle. He relaxed and watched the world go by. A slight smile rested on his lips. It was a practiced smile. One he used to pose for the ladies without looking like he was posing.