The monkey was asleep in Alan’s satchel and the room was quiet enough that Holden could hear the traffic thirteen floors down.
He sat on the bed with his eyes closed and waited for the sand-and-glass feeling to settle.
Stu was still on the floor.
His face was turned away but the tattoo was visible, dark and clean, and when Holden opened his eyes it was the first thing he saw.
Not the design.
The ink itself.
The lines were too precise for drunk work.
Whoever had done it had taken their time.
That was the first thing.
The second thing was the color: black, fresh, not the muddy grey of an old mark or the red inflammation of an infection.
It had been done recently and well.
The third thing was the placement.
Temple to jaw.
Deliberate.
Ceremonial, maybe, or at least someone’s idea of ceremonial.
He stood.
His knees unlocked slowly and the room stayed mostly level.
“Stu,” he said.
Stu didn’t move.
“Let me see your arms.”
Stu turned.
His eyes were red and his mouth was a line.
He held out his arms without a word.
He knelt.
No bruising on the wrists.
No ligature marks.
Stu hadn’t been restrained.
He’d sat for this.
Willingly, or at least without resistance enough to leave marks.
“Your ribs,” he said.
Stu lifted his shirt.
There was a bruise on his left side, purple-yellow, maybe two days old.
The shape was wrong for a fist.
He pressed the edge of it and Stu flinched.
“That’s from falling,” he said.
“You hit something flat.”
“Great,” Stu said.
“Wonderful. Does it matter?”
It did.
He stood and pulled the pressure in and let the night come apart into pieces again.
Stu had fallen, left side, and the bruise was two days old Thursday night, early Friday morning, before the tattoo.
So the sequence was: beach, karaoke, somewhere that involved falling, then the ink chair.
And the ink chair had taken hours.
“Phil. You said you played cards.”
“On a rooftop,” Phil said.
“Yeah. Why?”
“Was Stu with you?”
“No. He was” Phil stopped.
“Somewhere else. I wasn’t tracking him.”
“Alan?”
Alan glanced up from the satchel, the monkey’s tail curling past his wrist.
“I was at the market.”
“Did you see Stu?”
“I saw a man who looked like Stu but he was singing.”
He turned back to Stu.
“You were singing. Where.”
“It’s gone. All of it.”
“Try.”
Stu closed his eyes.
His hands were shaking.
“There was a stage. And lights. I think I was there were other people singing. It was loud.”
Karaoke, then.
He filed it.
“After that.”
Stu shook his head.
“You fell. You hit your ribs on something flat. A table, maybe. A bar.”
Stu opened his eyes.
“I don’t remember any fall.”
“But you remember the singing.”
“Barely.”
Right.
The bruise was two days old.
The tattoo was fresh.
That gap was the window somewhere between karaoke and the ink, Stu had gone to a place that involved furniture and gravity and maybe Teddy.
“Doug. You were in a tuk-tuk.”
“I think so. It’s blurry.”
“Was Teddy with you?”
“Maybe? It’s all fog.”
He let the threads pull and braid: Teddy had been with Phil on the rooftop until two, Alan had lost him near the temple at four, and somewhere in that two-hour gap was karaoke and a fall and a trip to a tattoo chair that had taken long enough for Stu to sit still.
Which meant the artist knew something.
He found his phone and called Pim.
She answered on the second ring.
“You have something already?”
“I need to find a tattoo shop,” he said.
“High-end. Someone who does temple work.”
There was a pause.
“There are many.”
“This one would’ve had an American customer two nights ago. Tall, panicking, probably accompanied.”
“Accompanied by whom?”
“That’s what I’m trying to find out.”
Another pause, and when she spoke again her voice had cooled.
“You are asking me to make calls to operators who do not like questions.”
“I’m asking you to find Teddy.”
“I am already finding Teddy. You are now asking for two things.”
He closed his eyes.
The room tilted and he steadied himself against the bed.
“How much.”
“Another thousand.”
He didn’t have it.
He had two hundred dollars and a prayer that his poker account could cover a wire transfer on a Saturday in Bangkok.
“Done.”
“I will call you back.”
She hung up.
He sat down.
His head was pounding and the ghost of Teddy’s face was still there, scared and small, and he shoved it away and focused on the bruise.
Stu had fallen, which meant a venue furniture, floor space, probably alcohol and after that he’d ended up under Kiet’s needle for hours.
Unless the fall came after, but the bruise was older than the ink.
The sequence held.
Phil was watching him.
“What are you thinking?”
“Stu went somewhere between the beach and the ink,” he said.
“And Teddy might’ve been with him.”
“Where.”
“Not yet.”
Stu made a sound.
It might have been a laugh.
“This is insane. We don’t know anything. We’re just”
“We know you got a tattoo and you fell and Teddy was in the same six-hour window,” he said.
“That’s not nothing.”
“It’s not enough.”
“It’s what we have.”
The phone rang.
He answered.
Pim’s voice was clipped.
“Three shops do temple work at that quality. Two say no farang customer that night. The third will not answer my calls.”
“Where.”
“Sukhumvit. But you will not get in.”
“Why not.”
“Because the operator does not speak to outsiders and he does not like trouble and you are both.”
“Then come with me.”
“That is not what you are paying me for.”
“I’ll pay you for it.”
Silence.
Then: “Another five hundred.”
The math was instant.
He didn’t have five hundred.
He didn’t have fifty.
“Done.”
“You are a very expensive client, Mr. Cross.”
“Send me the address.”
She hung up and thirty seconds later his phone buzzed with a pin on a map he couldn’t read.
He stood and looked at Phil.
“I’m going out,” he said.
“We’re coming with you.”
“No.”
“Holden”
“You stay here. You keep Stu calm and you keep Alan away from the monkey and you do not do anything else stupid until I get back.”
Phil’s jaw worked.
His wallet held two hundred dollars in cash and a credit card that might work and a sinking certainty that Pim’s fees were going to bury him before the wedding even started.
He pocketed the cash and headed for the door.
“Holden,” Stu said.
He turned.
Stu was still on the floor, his tattooed face in his hands.
“If you find him”
“I’ll find him.”
“How do you know?”
He looked at Stu.
At the tattoo and the panic and the belief, somehow, that he had an answer.
“Because I already know where to look,” he said.
He almost believed it himself, the second time through.
He took the stairs because the elevator felt like a trap and because moving helped.
By the time he hit the lobby his hands had stopped shaking and the ghost-face had folded itself into the part of his head that knew how to ignore things.
Pim was waiting outside in a car that looked like it had survived a war.
She nodded at the passenger seat.
“Get in.”
He got in.
The car smelled like cigarettes and jasmine and something faintly medical, and when Pim pulled into traffic without signaling the city swallowed them whole a river of brake lights and horn-blare and heat so thick he could taste the exhaust on his teeth.
“The operator is named Kiet,” she said.
“He does good work and he does not talk. If you push him he will lie or he will call people who are worse than lies.”
“I’m not going to push him.”
“You are going to ask about Teddy.”
“Yes.”
“That is pushing.”
“Then what do you suggest.”
Pim turned the jade ring on her finger.
Her eyes stayed on the road.
“You ask about the tattoo. You say your friend does not remember. You ask if there was anyone with him. You do not say the boy’s name and you do not say the boy is missing. You let Kiet tell you what he wants to tell you.”
“And if he doesn’t want to tell me anything?”
“Then you have wasted my time and your money and Teddy is still gone.”
The city blurred past.
Neon and concrete and the wet heat that made everything feel like drowning.
He closed his eyes and let the braided threads settle.
Stu at karaoke, Stu falling, Stu in the ink chair and somewhere in that chain, a sixteen-year-old who’d only wanted to see the city.
“We’re here,” Pim said.
He opened his eyes.
The place was small and clean and the sign was in Thai.
Through the window he could see a man at a desk, older, his hands still.
Pim got out.
He followed.
Kiet looked up as they entered.
His eyes went to Pim first, then to the farang behind her, then back.
He said something in Thai.
Pim answered.
The man’s face didn’t move.
Pim turned.
“He remembers your friend. The tall one with the loud voice.”
“Was anyone with him?”
Pim translated.
Kiet answered, voice flat.
“He says your friend came with two others. An older man, white hair. And a boy.”
His chest went tight.
“The boy. Did he leave with them?”
Pim asked.
Kiet shook his head.
“He says the boy left first. Before the work was finished. The white-haired one paid and they stayed.”
“Who was he?”
The question hung.
Kiet looked at him for a long moment.
Then he said something soft and deliberate.
Pim’s mouth thinned.
“He does not give names. But this one comes here sometimes. Very small. Laughs too much.”
The floor dropped.
Chow.
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TL;DR —
Silver / $6 / 10 ahead
Gold / $9 / 15 ahead
Platinum / $15 / 20 ahead, no weekly wait
That’s it.