The Fourth Watcher by Timothy Hallinan Read Free Book Online Page B

Rose says. “I didn’t love you either. I didn’t even want to love you. I didn’t want to tell myself I loved you if what I really loved was the house and the passport. I stopped working because of you, did you know that? I told myself I stopped for me, but I didn’t. And after I stopped, I talked myself out of you a hundred times. Sometimes my heart hides from me. It took everything, Poke. It took a long time, it took months of being with you, it took Miaow, even, seeing the way you are with Miaow, but I love you.”
    â€œAnd I love you,” he says helplessly. The words hang in the air with a kind of phantom shimmer, a tossed handful of glitter. Rose looks at him in a way that makes him feel like a developing Polaroid: Out of the infinite potential of nothing comes a specific human face, with all its weaknesses and limitations. When she has his face in focus, or committed to memory, or transformed into what she wanted to see, or whatever she was doing, she looks down at the box and opens it.
    The ring has three stones—a topaz, a sapphire, and a ruby, none of them very large. “The sapphire is your birthstone,” Rafferty says. “The ruby is mine.” It sounds puerile and silly as he says it. “The topaz was my guess at Miaow. Now we can change it, make it a ruby and two sapphires.”
    â€œThe family,” Rose says. “In a ring.” She tilts the stones toward him. “Miaow between you and me.”
    â€œI guess,” Rafferty says, wondering why he never saw that.
    â€œPoor baby,” she says for the second time, but her tone is very different. “You want a family so badly.”
    â€œI want to put a fence around us,” Rafferty says. “Something to hold us together.”
    Rose says, “We’re not going to fall apart. I won’t let us.” Her face is very grave. She raises the box to him, and he takes it and removes the ring and wraps the warm smoothness of her left hand in his, and slips the ring onto her finger. It sticks at the knuckle, and he pushes at it, and she starts to laugh and chokes it off, and then raises her finger to his mouth so he can wet the knuckle with his tongue. The ring glides over her knuckle. His arms go around her, and she fits herself to him,pressing the length of her body against his. Then she laughs. “Peachy is going to be so happy,” she says.
    â€œPeachy can wait,” he says. “I want to make love with you when you’re wearing the ring.” He starts to lead her to the bedroom. “And only the ring.”
    â€œMake the coffee first,” she says. “I think we’re going to need it.”
    â€œRight.” Back at the counter, he glances down at the filters with her red lip prints on them, then takes the two that are still stuck together and drops them both into the basket. He upends the grinder into them.
    â€œWhat’s wrong with the ones I got for you?” she asks.
    â€œNothing at all,” he says, feeling as though he will rise into the air, lift off, float inches above the floor. “I’ll eat them later.”
    They are halfway across the living room, sipping coffee, hands clasped, when someone begins to hammer on the door.

8
Maybe a Problem
    D oesn’t anybody have a goddamned wristwatch?” Rafferty stands there in a robe that has never felt pinker, holding the door open a couple of inches and looking at the two uniformed Bangkok policemen standing in the hallway. “Do you have any fucking idea what time it is?”
    â€œWe know exactly what time it is,” someone says in American English. The cops part to reveal a thin, youngish man in a black suit. He steps between the policemen as though he expects them to leap out of his way, and they almost do. Behind the three of them, Rafferty is startled to see Fon, looking as though she’s just learned she has an hour to live.
    â€œOpen the door, sir,” the man in