“I’ll be fine alone, you Yankee degenerate.”

I smiled and held out my hand. “All right then. We’ll talk in the morning?”

“In the morning,” he said, and we shook. He got up, tossed a few hundred baht on the table, and headed for the door.

I chuckled to myself. It was going to be good to have something in my arsenal that I could bring up anytime Dox gave me grief.

I chuckled again, a little more softly. It was odd that she’d been in here, though. She seemed to have been on the make, and Brown Sugar was the wrong place for that. Sure, she could have come here to enjoy the music, to take a break, whatever, but the way she’d been looking around right away, the way she’d immediately zeroed in on Dox…

Maybe that was opportunistic.

Didn’t feel opportunistic. It felt focused.

I chewed on that. Then, in a sort of semiconscious shorthand that was more suddenly present in its entirety than deduced piece by piece, I realized:

If someone wanted to get to you and Dox, the first thing he’d look to do would be to separate you. To do that, if he were smart, he would employ some means that could distract, at least temporarily, your sensitivity to disparities in the local environment. Give you something you could focus on. A katoey, for example. Make you say, that’s what was bothering me-she’s not really a woman! Or, if you didn’t spot it, and one of you went off with her… boom, there you go, you’ve found your way to divide us.

Maybe it would have been easier, more straightforward, to use a real woman as the bait. But a katoey would have certain advantages. A lady-boy could take better care of himself in a scrape. And he’d be used to acting, to passing himself off as something he wasn’t, to fooling people, lulling them.

I felt the blood draining from my face, my heart begin to pound as an adrenaline dump kicked in. If Dox had still been at the table, he would have laughed at me. I didn’t care. There were certain things I would try to change about myself to accommodate our partnership. The way I go with my gut would never be one of them.

I stood up and walked briskly to the door, as fast as I could move without being obvious. I was hoping I was wrong, but I knew I was right.

FOR AN INSTANT after exiting the bar, I didn’t focus on any one particular thing. I let it all in: the placement of the sidewalk tables and patrons, the parked cars, the pedestrians.

Movement straight in front of me: a muscular Thai man in a black tee-shirt, mid-twenties, leaning against a cab at the curb, coming to his feet. “You need taxi?” he asked, in a thick Thai accent. He started moving toward me. “I give you ride. Use meter. Very good.”

His hands were empty and he was still more than three meters away. I did a quick scan for Dox. He had walked out less than half a minute before me; he might still be in the area. I didn’t see him. But I didn’t have time to look further, or to worry about what might have happened to him.

I checked my flanks.

Left flank: Caucasian male, late forties, alone at one of the sidewalk tables.

Right flank: two Thai men, mid-twenties and in shape like the first guy, watching me with a certain intensity, and getting up smoothly from their table.

Would any of this ever stand up in court? Your Honor, my partner left after an encounter with a lady-boy. I stepped outside. Someone asked me if I needed a cab, and the men to my right were watching me with “that look,” if you know what I mean. That’s why I killed them all.

Of course it wouldn’t stand up. But one of the things that separates people like me from live civilians and dead operators is an absolute ability and an absolute willingness to act decisively on evidence that in polite society would get you laughed at and that in court would get you thrown in jail. When you know, you know. You don’t wait for more evidence. You act. If you act wrong, you live with the consequences. You act wrong the other way, you don’t live at all.

The man in front of me was now two meters away. “You need taxi?” he asked again. His right hand was out, motioning in a “Come this way” gesture.

“Sure,” I said. I stepped toward him as though I intended to move past him on his right. He smiled, a smile that was supposed to look friendly but that to me was at least half-predatory.

I smiled myself, an “Aren’t you kind to help me, I’m so clueless” kind of smile. He nodded, reassured that this was going to be easy.

But it wasn’t going to be easy. It wasn’t going to be easy at all.

Just before I pulled alongside him, I snatched his right wrist in my left hand and fed his arm over to my right. I hooked his tricep and dragged him past me. My weight on his arm pulled him forward, and as I circled clockwise behind him, I saw his mouth dropping open in surprise. Apparently my reaction wasn’t part of the rehearsal.

I reached around his waist with my left hand and caught his right wrist. I cinched him in close and he grunted as some of the breath was driven from his lungs. We were both facing the bar now. The two men who had gotten up were two meters away to our left. I saw their faces hardening. Their hands were empty and I realized this was supposed to be a snatch, not a kill. Otherwise they would have had weapons and would already have used them.

I sucked in a breath and bellowed, “Dox!” in the loudest voice I could muster, half to warn him if he was there, half to call for his help.

The two men to the left started to charge forward.

The guy I was holding took a wider stance and dropped his weight to create a more stable base, and I realized from the reaction he was trained. He tried to snap a head butt back at me, but my face was too far to the right and pressed up close against his shoulder. I reached down to my right front pocket where the knife was clipped in place. In one motion I cleared it, opened it, and thrust it forward from behind his spread legs into his perineum and balls.

There’s a certain pitch of human scream that’s impossible to ignore, that drills directly into the most primitive parts of the brain. The kind that makes your hair stand up, your scrotum retract, your feet freeze dead in their tracks. That’s the scream that tore loose from this guy when my knife hit home, and it was exactly the scream I wanted. His partners moving in from the left were involuntarily stopped by it. Their conscious minds were thinking, What the fuck was that? Their unconscious minds were shouting, Who cares what it was! Run! They both pulled up short about a meter away from me.

I didn’t wait for them to get the circuits clear. I shoved the man I’d been holding into them and turned to my right, ready to bug out. But another Thai man was coming from that direction, fast enough to have already closed the distance. He must have moved out from the alley to the right of the bar. The scream that had frozen his comrades hadn’t had the same effect on him. Either he was very brave, very stupid, or very hard of hearing. Regardless of the explanation, he was now in my way.

I had already flipped the knife around in my hand to a reverse grip so that the blade was concealed along my wrist and lower forearm. Even so, Mr. Hearing Impaired must not have been paying proper attention, or he would have put two and two together: I was holding something in my hand, something that had just caused his partner to shriek like the eunuch he now was, and that something was probably sharp and pointy. Or the explanation for his failure to hesitate as his comrades had was indeed stupidity, because there is nothing quite so stupid as showing up for a knife fight unarmed.

He paused a meter in front of me and raised his fists as though we were about to box. I noted, half-consciously, scars around his eyebrows and the bump of a previously broken nose, and realized, Muay Thai, these guys are Thai boxers.