Breathing Water by Timothy Hallinan Read Free Book Online Page B

“What?” he says, his voice a frog’s croak in his ear.
    “Mr. Rafferty?” A woman’s voice.
    “Time is it?” Rafferty says.
    “Mr. Rafferty, this is Elora Weecherat with the Bangkok —”
    “Elora what?” He is rubbing scratchy eyes with his free hand.
    “Weecherat. With the Bangkok Sun .”
    “I don’t want a subscription.”
    “I’m wondering whether you have a comment about the story on page three.”
    Rafferty says, “Ummmm.”
    “Is the story accurate?”
    He hauls himself to a sitting position. “Give me a number,” he says.
    She recites a phone number, and he hangs up in the middle of it. He sits there, feeling the edge of sleep recede like the shoreline of a country he’s been forced to leave. The phone begins to ring again, and he pulls the jack out. This silences it in the bedroom, but he can hear it chirping away in the living room. He wraps himself in his robe as though it were a grievance and goes through the bedroom door, into the stuffy heat of the living room.
    The air conditioners in the bedrooms make sleep possible in the hot season, which this year seems to be twelve months long, but it makes little sense to cool the living room when no one is in it. The door to the balcony is closed, and the air is heavy with the stink of Rose’s cigarettes. For the thousandth time in his life with her, Rafferty wonders why cigarette smoke smells so much worse in the morning than it does at night. At night it has a sort of sinful razzle to it, but in the daytime it smells as toxic as asbestos. He goes to the sliding glass door and opens it. The clouds responsible for the previous evening’s drizzle have thinned to a high, pale ghosting, semitransparent as a film across the sky, a brilliant chromium heat-yellow in the east, but still a sleepy, pillow-feather gray to the west. As he checks his watch— 6:25? —the phone rings again. Or, more accurately, it chirps like the world’s biggest, most aggressive cricket, the ring tone Miaow programmed into it.
    He glares at it, but it doesn’t explode, so he goes into the kitchen.
    He has taken lately to grinding the coffee beans before he goes to bed, not so much because of the noise the grinder makes in the morning, since nothing short of a collision with an asteroid would wake Rose, but as a way of shortening the amount of time it takes him to get the first gulp of coffee into his system. All he has to do now is turn on the pot, pour bottled water into the reservoir, and then stand there in suspended animation while the coffee drips. And drips. And drips.
    The phone rings four more times as he waits, his forehead pressed against the cool of the refrigerator door. As he pours his first cup, it begins again. He ignores it, sipping the hot liquid and waiting for the daily miracle, the renewal of consciousness and judgment and volition, that coffee always brings. At the twenty-fourth ring, the phone stops.
    And, with the chirping silenced, he hears his cell phone ringing. The surge from the coffee gives him the energy to go into the living room and check the display, which says ARTHIT.
    His throat tightens as the previous night comes back to him. Noi’s stash of pills. What it might mean.
    “Arthit,” he says.
    “One of our friends has been busy,” Arthit says. He sounds thick as sludge, as befits a man who drank his weight the previous evening.
    The fact that this is not about Noi sends a porous buoyancy through Rafferty and makes the day visible through the open door look less stifling. “We have friends in common?” He sucks down most of the coffee that remains in the cup.
    “One of our friends in the card game. You’re famous.”
    Rafferty says, “Well, don’t worry, I’ll still say hello to you. If we should happen to meet, I mean. However unlikely that may be.”
    After a moment Arthit says, “How much coffee have you had?”
    Rafferty looks down into the mug, which is empty. “One cup.”
    “You have a very responsive