Brett Battles - Little Girl Gone

After a bit, he glanced at Daeng. “You, uh, work for Christina?”

Daeng grunted a laugh. “No. Sometimes our paths cross, that’s all.”

“What is it she does?”

“A little bit of everything, I think. She’s been here forever. Knows everyone, knows what buttons to push and which asses to kiss.” Daeng smiled. “How old do you think she is?”

“I don’t know. Forty-seven, forty-eight. Something like that.”

“Sixty-one.”

“You’re kidding .” Not that Logan thought sixty-one was particularly old anymore, but she hadn’t looked even close to that.

“Not kidding. I think she has a plastic surgeon on retainer, but don’t quote me on that. She’s been here since the war.”

“The Vietnam war?” Logan asked, surprised again.

Daeng nodded.

“She couldn’t have been much out of high school,” Logan said.

“The way I heard it, that would be about right.”

“What, exactly, did you hear?”

Daeng hesitated for a moment, then said, “Apparently she had a brother in the Army who’d gone MIA. She came here because it was the closest she could get to the war. She used to hang out in places where soldiers took R&R, trying to find someone who might have heard something about her brother. She even paid a few of them to try and find him. One guy did it for free. He was the one who found him. But by that point her brother was only dog tags and bones. After that, instead of going back to the States, she just stayed.”

“I wonder why she stayed.”

Daeng shrugged. “I heard this story from someone else. Christina never talks about her past, at least not to me. Maybe none of it’s true.”

A little further on, the driver slowed, then said something to Daeng. They talked back and forth for several seconds, then the driver moved into the right lane, and made a U-turn at the next break. Keeping his speed low, he moved all the way over to the left.

Daeng said something and pointed ahead, then said to Logan, “It’s just down that soi .”

At first Logan wasn’t sure what he meant, then the car turned on a small road—a soi he guessed—and drove half a block down before stopping at the curb.

Daeng looked past him out the window. “That’s it.” He nodded at the building across the street.

All three of them got out and crossed over to it.

The apartment they were looking for was on the third floor. Logan was surprised when they got there to find three men waiting in the hallway outside the apartment’s door. There were several hushed greetings, and he quickly realized these men were with Daeng.

One of them rushed ahead, and instead of knocking on the door, he just opened it.

Daeng went in first with Logan right behind. They passed through a small entryway and into a living room. On a couch was a short, doughy man who couldn’t have been more than forty. He was dressed in a white T-shirt and a pair of boxer shorts, and looked nervous.

There were two more of Daeng’s men in the room. One was standing near the couch, while the other was in a doorway that led to the rest of the apartment.

Daeng spoke in Thai, and the man in the doorway answered. Seemingly satisfied, Daeng led Logan over to where the pudgy man was sitting.

“You speak English?” he asked the man.

“ Nitnoy ,” the man said nervously. “A little.”

“Okay, then we’ll talk in English.”

The man eyed Logan for a moment, then looked back at Daeng. “Please no hurt me. Me, my family, we do nothing.”

“No one’s planning on hurting you.” The guy looked like he didn’t understand, so Daeng spoke in Thai, translating what he’d already said, Logan assumed. The man responded in kind, but Daeng shook his head. “English, remember?”

Logan leaned over to Daeng and whispered, “His family’s here?”

“Wife and son in back.”

Suddenly Logan didn’t feel so comfortable about the situation.

“You have a van you rent?” Daeng asked the man.

“Have two van.”

“Okay, two then. You drive one of them?”

“Yes.”

“And the other?”

“My wife brother.”

“Which one of you picked up the group at the airport today.”

“We both at airport today.”

“I’m talking about the people who came in on the small plane. With the girl who was sick.”

The man looked even more nervous now.

“Was that you?” Daeng asked.

“Ye…yes. Was me.”

“Good. I want to know where you took them.”

“I…I…”

“Is there a problem? You had to take them somewhere, didn’t you? Where was it?”

The man’s gaze shot back and forth between Daeng and Logan, then he began speaking rapidly in Thai. At the end he seemed to be repeating himself, pleading.

“What’s he saying?” Logan asked.

“He says the people he gave the ride to made him promise to say nothing about them or where they went. They said if they found out he did, they would kill him and his family.”

“Yes, yes!” the owner said. “Please. Cannot say. Please understand. Have family.”

Logan could see that Daeng was about to start in again, so he quickly said, “Let me.”

He crouched down in front of the owner of the van, lowering himself so that they were eye-to-eye. “No one wants to hurt you or your family. Okay?”

The man just stared at him, his eyes full of terror.

“The sick girl who was with the people you picked up, they kidnapped her.” Logan could instantly see the man didn’t understand. “Took her. Against her will.” There was still incomprehension in the man’s eyes.

Logan looked back at Daeng, who then said something very quickly in Thai.

The man’s eyes widened as he realized what Logan had meant.

“I need to find her. I need to bring her home to her family. You understand?”

The man nodded.

“We need to know where you took them. You have to tell us.”

The man began shaking his head violently. “No. No. My family. Cannot.”

“But the girl has a family, too.”

The man closed his eyes and continued to shake his head.

Logan stood back up. He’d thought for sure he’d been getting through to him. “There’s got to be some way to get him to tell us,” he said to Daeng.

Daeng turned so that his back was to the man. “We could rough up his wife and kid.”

“Absolutely not!” Logan said. That was one road he would never go down.

“I was actually kidding. This guy’s done nothing but get hired by the people you’re looking for. I don’t hurt the innocent.”

Logan relaxed a little. “Sorry.”

“My fault, not yours,” he said. “I may have an idea that might work, though.”

Daeng turned back, then began speaking to the man in Thai. Logan could see some of the tension that had gripped the man fade. The van owner asked a few questions. Daeng answered two of them, then looked at Logan after the third.

“I’ve offered to put them someplace where I can guarantee their safety until this is over. He’s open to that, but…”

“Yes?”

“The vans are his only means of income. If he’s not working, he’s not making any money.”

Logan nodded. Here was a problem he could solve. “I can cover the rental fees.”

“I thought you might be able to.” Daeng turned back to the man and relayed the information.

For the first time the guy smiled and began to look like he was no longer worried he was about to die. He spoke with Daeng for another minute, then got up and went into the back room.

“Come on,” Daeng said, then headed for the front door.

“He told you where they are?”

“He told me where he took them.”

“Great.”

Daeng hesitated, then said, “Maybe.”

27

Logan and Daeng spent another twenty minutes traveling through town before they got out of the car again. They were under what appeared to be a long concrete bridge, in an area populated with more apartment buildings.

“Skytrain,” Daeng said, following Logan gaze up at the bridge. “Public train. Runs above the city.”

There didn’t seem to be any trains operating at the moment.

Logan came around one of its support pillars, and was surprised to see a wide, dark river off to their left.

Daeng started walking toward it. “This way.”

There was a gentle breeze coming off the water, making the warm, humid night almost pleasant. Daeng stopped on a sidewalk near the river’s edge. Beyond it was a wide cement area, with a pair of ramps that sloped down to an empty dock.

“The van owner said this is where he dropped them off,” Daeng said.

“Where, exactly, are we?”

“Sathorn Pier.”

“So from here where would they have gone?” Logan asked.

“Anywhere along the Chao Phraya.”

The Chao Phraya, that was a name Logan remembered from his previous trip. It was the royal river that split the city in two.

“So they could be anywhere.”

“Sure, but the choice is odd. Why even use the river? The van owner said they didn’t take one of the public ferries, or even hire a boat once they got here. He said there was a boat already waiting for them.” Daeng paused, then said, “The only thing I can think of is that they needed to use the river.”

That thought had crossed Logan’s mind, too. It was either that, or they had used the river to cover their tracks in case they were worried about being followed. But it seemed to Logan that moving from car to boat and boat to car again with such a large group that included one incapacitated girl would have created unwanted attention, doing the exact opposite of helping them to disappear.

“Okay, so what would they have needed it for?” he asked.

“Maybe a hotel?” Daeng suggested. “There are a few along the waterfront.”

Logan shook his head. A group like that, checking into a big hotel? Same unwanted attention problem.

“They could have been meeting someone at another pier,” Daeng offered.

“Possibly. But then, why not just drive there?”

Daeng looked down the waterfront. “There are also a lot of private residences along the river, apartment buildings, shacks. Nothing that’s particularly fancy, but some do have docks, and a few are actually built over the river, so, depending on the type of boat they were in, they could have gone right underneath.”

Logan thought about it for a moment, then nodded. “That makes more sense to me.”

“Don’t get too excited,” Daeng told him. “There’s miles of riverfront here, and thousands of places for people to live in. It might take us weeks to figure out which one they’re using, and chances are they’re going to be gone by morning.”

Logan grimaced. Daeng was right, of course. “What would you do in their situation?”

“I wouldn’t be in their situation,” Daeng said. “I don’t kidnap people.”

“Hypothetically. You’d be concerned about security, right?”

“Sure.”

“Would you be concerned enough to have guards posted around the clock?”

Daeng consider it for a second, then nodded. “I would.”

“Yeah,” Logan said. “So would I.”

“Okay, so they’re being careful. How does that help us?”

“If it was the middle of the day right now, or even the evening, I’d say it wouldn’t help us at all. But it’s three a.m. The river’s quiet. The streets are mostly empty. If we were ever going to notice someplace being guarded, wouldn’t this be the best time?”

“You want to go out on the river? Right now?”

“Tell me that I’m wrong.”