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Canary Air	By : Nos4a2 Category: DC Verse Comics > Birds Of Prey Views: 7065 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own Birds of Prey,nor any of the characters from it. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.

Chapter List
- 4
- 5
- 6
CHAPTER FIVE
A hand on my shoulder wakes me in the dead of night. Sonchai, I realize, making sure I don’t sleep through my appointment with Nong.
“You were dreaming,” he tells me, just a shape in the darkness of my hotel room on Wireless Road. “You cried out.”
I sit up, my mind still a little foggy. I feel like I’ve spent most of this trip in an altered state, either dopey or aroused or drunk. Could I bear this place, otherwise?
“Did I break anything?” I think to ask. Maybe he nods - I can’t see in the darkness - but he presses something into my hand.
Shards of a broken glass, smooth against my hand, gentle. I absorb everything like the blind do, alone in the dark.
“Sorry,” I whisper, knowing that the Canary Cry isn’t the most pleasant noise in a closed room. After my powers were returned to me, I had horrible nightmares. Lingering effects of my dip in the Lazarus Pit, I guess. They were the kind of dreams that are so bad you don’t let yourself remember them. I’d wake up in a cold sweat and every mirror and window in the house would be broken, my throat hoarse.
The life of a metahuman.
And to think, Barbara envies me.
“It’s three-thirty,” Sonchai reminds me. “You’ll be late.”
I nod, getting up and pulling on my shorts while simultaneously stuffing half a bag of M&Ms down my throat, poached from the minifrigde. The candy is cold, delicious. I feel like myself again, briefly, those little brown and yellow and red drops of heaven reminding me who I am and why I’m here.
I’ve got my appetite back.
******************
The club shuts down just after 4am, the neon hum and pounding music fading gently into the night, to be turned on again late in the afternoon. It’s a quiet time in Bangkok. The streets are cleared of drunken tourists and the vendors selling everything from pirated video games to the organs of endangered species vanish with their wares. The oppressive heat of the night and the pollution choking the city lift a little, and Sonchai waits with me outside the Pussy Go-Go club.
“You don’t like it here,” I point out to him. The Thai detective frowns, his hands folded quietly in front of him. I admire the way his clothes hang off his slim, perfect frame, the second-hand suit neatly aligned, the tie and shirt straight and unwrinkled although he’s been wearing them since yesterday morning. Ollie never really looked good in a suit. Not many men do.
“Bang Kwan is not meant to make one feel comfortable,” Sonchai tells me, wisely. I nod in agreement. No, the red light district is designed to arouse, to horrify, to seduce. Comfort has very little to do with it, or love. This place is sex distilled and refined until you can’t even begin to identify what’s missing.
“Did you ever come here?” I ask my friend, and he looks at me, his face composed. Then he shakes his head, slowly.
“I cannot-”
“You weren’t always an arhat, Sonchai,” I smile. “You were just a man, once.”
He knows he can’t argue, so he doesn’t try. Instead he looks around at the unlit neon signs and the vacant streets, seeing it differently than I do, with an eye for nirvana and everlasting peace. I try to picture him young, violent, lustful. Was there ever a time like that for him? Before his spirituality became a life-force, swallowing the callow young man I suspect he once was?
It’s a little like trying to picture Ghandi or Mother Theresa as they were at 16. Interesting, but ultimately pointless. We remember saints for who they became, not who they were.
“Does it make you happy?” he asks softly, catching me off guard. That’s what makes him a good cop, I realize. That quiet way of his, so soft, kind and sharp that the blade has worked its way in before you even feel it against your ribs.
I watch the soft pink glow of dawn over the rooftops of Bangkok. “It does when it’s love.”
I want to tell him about love, about how wonderful and awful it all is. What it’s like to stay up all night and watch someone sleep, your head against their chest, listening to them breathe. To be beaten down by life and to have someone to turn to at the end of it all. To know that maybe you’re not as alone as you feel sometimes.
I don’t tell him any of this, because I had it once and I don’t have it now. It’s like trying to describe this moment, this moment when I fail to let Sonchai in on what he’s missing. And I get the feeling that he really wants to know, that he’s curious to see if it’s really worth trading eternal enlightenment for a role in the hay.
But he’s asking about sex, not about love. And I don’t know much about either any more.
“There’s Nong,” I tell him, saved. She appears on the street, sees me, and inclines her head. I wasn’t sure what to expect. A rush of feeling, maybe desire. Or guilt.
“You very late,” she scolds, her little-girl voice in sharp contrast to the hard look in her eye when she notices Sonchai. “You not tell me you bring friend.”
“This is Detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep,” I explain lamely. “He’s helping me on an investigation.”
“Looking for your farang friend?”
I nod and Sonchai plays along, bobbing his head in agreement. Nong’s eyes flash something and she turns to him, her hands on her slim hips, a curtain of black hair tossed over her shoulder.
“I fucked her,” Nong tells him proudly. “I fucked the American.”
I wonder for a moment why she didn’t say it in Thai. I watch Sonchai’s face, his expression as impassive and tolerant as the Buddha shrines crowding this city. He glances at my horrified face and he lowers his eyes. I guess his questions about sex have been answered by Nong’s shrill declaration.
He says something in Thai to her, and Nong’s hands fall to her side. She seems mollified, whatever brought on her attack passing like a cloud over open ocean. “I have information from my people,” she tells me, her face closed to me now. “I tell you at my place.”
No point in arguing. I can see from their expressions that Sonchai and Nong have come to an unspoken agreement. My friend and my one-night stand are suddenly allied against me, and so I pile into the taxi and go with them.
****************
We arrive at Vin Dong Towers, a housing complex comprised of sixteen levels of single-room apartments. In America the building would be called a ghetto, but here I suppose it’s close to middle-class housing. We follow Nong up six flights, and I for one am grateful for the cool morning air filtering down the open staircase. There is exposed rebar in the cracked cement, and I eye the walls anxiously. I’m no engineer, but I know that exposed rebar plus tropical humidity means rusted metal, which will rot away beneath the concrete and weaken the structure of the whole building. I try to figure out how many people live in this complex and wonder why earthquakes are thought to be a bigger menace in Asia than lax building codes.
Nong’s apartment is a 6x9ft cell, bare concrete walls, bare floor, a toilet sectioned off by green roofing material, a kitchen consisting of a hotplate. And a narrow cot, on which sits a distinctly grubby toddler. The baby is chubby, dark-haired, and regards me with brown eyes widened in amazement. I realize the smell lingering in the tiny apartment is shit.
Nong ignores the baby, drops onto a low stool and removes her boots. A woman appears in the hall just behind Sonchai and says something. Nong replies heatedly and they argue for a few seconds, the woman stalking away.
Sonchai leans close. “She was supposed to be watching the child while Nong is at work. But the baby is teething and cries.”
“The kid’s quiet now,” I point out, trying to make my voice hard.
“Home remedy,” Sonchai whispers. “A cloth soaked in gasoline and put to the baby’s mouth for a few moments. It makes the child sleep.”
The baby is still looking at me. My heart twists and I pick the kid up. The little boy clings to me gratefully, sticky hands around my neck, soft, matted hair against my cheek. Beneath all the foul-smelling waste clinging to the small body in my arms, I can still detect that faint whiff of baby smell, that indelible mixture of warmth and sunshine kids lose about the time they start talking.
“Is there someplace I can-” I start, but Sonchai holds up his hand, stopping me.
“Can you give me a hundred baht?” he asks. I fish around in my pocket with my free hand and give him the money. Nong eyes the exchange greedily as the detective disappears down the hall.
“I find out what you want,” Nong says, peeling her vinyl boot away from her leg. “Your friend.”
The baby’s hands twine into my hair, tugging a little. “Is he alive?” I force myself to ask. At her nod, I close my eyes, not wanting her to see me so fragile and weak. Ollie’s alive. There’s still hope.
“He was, maybe week ago.”
I bring my head up. “A week ago he was staying at the Bangkok Hilton,” I inform her. Nong shakes her head.
“That was other man. Jones. My people were looking for him. He use your friend’s name, passport, credit cards.”
“Jones the music teacher?”
Nong nods, tired, and I can’t believe she’s the same woman from the night before. “He looks like your friend, yes?”
I grunt something in agreement.
“Jones needed to hide from my people. He has displeased the Khmer. He has friends. They kidnap your friend, hide him. Help Jones take his name. My people discover this. Kill Jones. Find your friend.”
“Where is he?” I ask, comprehending only half of what she’s telling me. I think the baby has fallen asleep; he’s heavy in my arms now.
“In safe place,” Nong says, her dark eyes gleaming. “You can see him, if you-”
Sonchai’s back, carrying what my one hundred baht has bought: a large red plastic bowl full of clean, warm water. He sets the bowl down and takes the baby from my arms, stripping off the kid’s overflowing cloth diaper and using a handy rag to wipe down the baby. I watch him as he does this, so calmly, without a hint of distaste or even pity for the kid. It’s a fact of life to him, part of the karmic cycle. I want to ask him what he thinks the child’s done to deserve this, but I don’t. I just watch, and try to absorb what Nong has told me.
“Let me get this straight,” I say, as much for my benefit as for Sonchai’s. “Oliver lands in Bangkok. He looks like this Jones guy. Jones, in trouble with your Khmer buddies, kidnaps him, steals his identity, and has his friends hide Ollie away? The Khmer discover this, kill Jones and grab Ollie? And now you want me to pay you to take me to my friend?”
Nong nods, tipping her head back and grinning at me. I want to smack myself in the head. For all the connections to drugs and snakes and the Khmer Rouge, this was just an extortion scheme. Get money out of the dopey American broad. Maybe to get her to compromise herself sexually into the bargain. This isn’t a whodunit, it’s a what’s she doing next. I haven’t allowed myself to be manipulated like this since I was nineteen years old.
“Look, you little-”
Sonchai grabs my wrist, and I tell myself that I could take him apart with my bare hands. His warm brown eyes work to calm me down, and I feel myself relax, my fighting stance falling away. He didn’t have to say a word.
The baby’s clean now, and has perked up a little. I try not to consider what kind of brain damage sedation with gasoline-soaked rags can cause and take the kid back from Sonchai, perching on the edge of the cot.
“When can you take me to him?” I ask calmly, bouncing the baby on my knee. He grins toothlessly, like a little old man, and looks at me like I’m the light of his life.
“Tonight,” she says. “Pack carefully; you not come back.”
I can’t decide if that’s a threat or not. “If anything has happened to Oliver,” I tell her, my tone deliberate, “I’ll hold you responsible.”
Her eyes challenge mine for a minute. I review the last few days and nights: the jet-lag, the worry, the strange sexual encounter, the snakes, Sonchai, and now this, where it all comes together and then falls apart. The moment I realize that I have absolutely no control over anything. I can’t save Oliver. I can’t bring the people who murdered Jones to justice. Hell, I can’t even bathe a baby in this godforsaken place. I’m at the mercy of a culture I don’t understand and there’s not a damn thing I can do about it.
I guess I have what the Buddhists call a moment of enlightenment. And it sucks.
Sonchai moves to the door and I rise, about to set the baby down reluctantly. At his gesture, I stop. He says something to Nong in Thai. She nods, not liking it, but yields to his strange, quiet wisdom.
We walk out, the baby still secure in my arms.
I was in the jungles of South America once, running from an army that doesn’t exist anymore. There were people in that jungle with me, villagers trying to stay one step ahead of the armed men who had burned their homes to the ground. I saw a baby, crying in the darkness of that jungle. And a woman, running just ahead of me. She stopped, scooped the kid up in her arms, and kept going.
A third-world adoption. I knew that if they both lived, that kid would have a new mom.
That’s what Sonchai and I did that day at the Vic Dong Towers.
*************************
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Canary Air