Restless Soul - Alex Archer [71]
Luartaro had written that he intended to “stuff his face” while he was in town and would see about buying a puppy to replace the dog that the gunmen had killed in the Thins village. She smiled at that line.
Annja was still upset that Luartaro had taken some of the treasure from the cave—and intended to tell him to turn it over—but he partially redeemed himself with the line about the puppy.
“See you soon,” he wrote. “Love, Lu.”
She swallowed hard.
Love, Lu.
Did she love him? Could she love him after finding his pockets filled with pilfered jewelry? Was it true that some women were just attracted to “bad boys”?
She didn’t want to love him. Her life didn’t have room for such frivolities at the moment.
To get her mind off him, she looked through the business cards she’d found in the smugglers’ pockets. They were all for antiques dealers—in Chiang Mai in Thailand, Luang Prabang and Vientiane in Laos, and Hue, Dien Bien Phu and Hanoi in Vietnam. There were phone numbers scrawled on the backs, and initials and numbers that had no meaning to her. But the phone numbers might prove useful.
Annja dressed quickly in comfortable jeans, a maroon polo shirt she’d worn only once before and running shoes that made her feel as if her sore feet were in heaven. She brushed out her hair, which dripped down her back, then she strapped her fanny pack around her waist, made sure her wallet and passport were in it and that there would be enough room for her ruined camera. She thrust the antiques-dealer cards in her back pocket, and then she headed outside to wait for the police.
Two cars were already there waiting for her. Both had their emergency lights flashing, and one officer had a gun pointed straight at her.
Annja felt for her sword hovering in the otherwhere.
20
“That was my fault, really, that Sergeant Ratsami held a gun on you.” The police officer looked as if he’d just graduated from high school, as he sat in the passenger seat of the rusty truck. He let Annja drive, saying that way he’d have his hands free to take notes.
One of the police cars was in front, emergency lights turned off, leading the way to Chiang Mai. The other was behind her.
“I’ve lived here half my life,” he continued. He’d introduced himself as Andrew Steven Johnson, born to American diplomats and now a permanent Thai resident by choice, his parents retired back on a ranch in Fort Worth, Texas. “And I know Thai and quite a few of the tribal dialects, but I mispronounce a few things from time to time, and Wiset and Ratsami thought you were some kind of smuggler—not the one who captured a smuggler. Sorry about that.”
Annja smiled good-naturedly. “No harm done,” she said. Then she frowned. “The smuggler in the back admitted to killing our guide, Zakkarat Tak-sin, after torturing him.”
“It’ll make things easy if he also admits it to us,” Johnson said.
Annja could help persuade him, if necessary, she thought.
“We have a few men going up the mountain now,” Johnson told her. He tapped the clipboard on his lap and pulled out a pen. “If they can find the place in the dark. And those men you said you tied up, they’ll get taken into custody.”
Twilight had taken a firm hold on the resort area, and with no streetlights, it was a world of shadows with charcoal-like slashes of trees looming up on both sides of the truck. The truck’s lights weren’t very bright, perhaps by design. Annja fixed her tired gaze on the taillights of the police car ahead of her. The windows rolled all the way down, she tried to take in the pleasant sounds of the evening, the birdlike chirping of hundreds of frogs, the cry of some night bird and the gentle rustle of the leaves in the breeze.
Annja had set the backpack with the skull fragments and dog tags in it behind the driver’s seat. To her, it was not considered part of the treasure she was detailing to Officer Johnson. As far as she was concerned, the police didn’t need to know about it…at least, not yet.
“Mae Hong Son doesn’t have the resources of Chiang Mai,” Johnson explained. He continued