Read Online Breathing Water by Timothy Hallinan - Free Book Online

the window, hearing the clink of her spoon against the jar of instant coffee and then the flow of water as the tap goes on. “Do you remember a girl from the bar, short and a little fat, always laughing, named Jah?”
    Rafferty searches his memory. “Sort of. Maybe.”
    “You have to remember her. There was that girl, the ugly, awful one, who was dancing when you first came into the bar. She wore glasses, and you can’t tell me you’ve forgotten that.”
    Rafferty feels his face go hot.
    “So you thought she was a college student or something, and you gave her—”
    Rafferty tries to wave the rest of the story away. “I remember.”
    “—you gave her five hundred baht. Because you were a sap. And the next night when you came in, everybody was wearing glasses.”
    “Oh,” Rafferty says, the light dawning in the east. “ Jah .”
    “Right. She was the one whose glasses were so strong she walked off the edge of the stage and landed on that foreign woman. Anyway, Jah tested positive.”
    “Oh, I’m so sorry.” Rose is right, Jah had always been laughing.
    “She’s okay.” She comes back and takes her seat again. “She got into a place here in Bangkok with about a hundred and fifty women in it. I know five or six of them. They get the drugs without having to pay for them, they have a place to sleep, they get three meals. They’re not out on the street, dying, or curled up in some shack up north, with the whole village pointing at them. Pan pays for it all.”
    Rafferty says, “Last night he was calling the women on Patpong whores.”
    “They are,” Rose says.
    “Well, yeah, I mean, sure, literally.” This is not his most comfortable subject. “But he used the word—I don’t know—contemptuously.”
    “That’s who he is. He uses the worst words he can think of. And then he goes and sets up a place like the one Jah is in.”
    “I’m ready,” Miaow says, coming into the room in her school uniform. Her hair has been meticulously reparted and slicked down, and the skin on her cheeks literally shines. She is, Rafferty thinks, the cleanest child on the face of the earth.
    “Let’s go, then,” he says, standing up.
    “Why are you taking me?” Miaow demands. “I get there by myself every day.”
    “Why not?” Rafferty says. “I’m awake, it’s time, and you’re my daughter. You said so yourself.”
    Miaow slips into the straps of her backpack. “He’s weird today,” she says to Rose.
    Rose says, “He’s weird every day.”
     
    FOR THE FIRST five minutes of the taxi ride, Miaow gives him the brooding silence that seems to be her new default mode.
    When she finally talks, he gets the topic he wants least. “Something’s wrong, isn’t it?”
    “Why would something be wrong?”
    “I saw you when you were talking on the phone. You got all tight and squinched.”
    “Squinched?”
    “That’s English,” she says. “I think.”
    “I suppose it’s closer to English than it is to anything else.”
    “Anyway, you looked like that.”
    Rafferty gazes longingly out the window, which is too small for him to escape through. In retrospect, being alone with Miaow right now is not a tremendous idea. For some obscure reason, possibly because she knows he loves her with all his heart, she thinks she can ask him about anything. And, of course, she’s right.
    He opts for selective honesty. “You know that book they mentioned in the newspaper?”
    She blows out, her upper teeth against her lower lip to create a very long and slightly irritated “Ffffffffffff” sound. “I remember. It was only half an hour ago.”
    “Well, that was someone who told me not to write it.”
    Miaow says, “Or what?”
    He should have known better. “What do you mean, ‘or what’?”
    She crosses her arms high on her chest. “People don’t tell you not to do something without saying ‘or what.’ You know that.”
    “You’ve been watching too many movies.”
    “No. He said ‘or something,’ and then you