Dance Me to the End of Time by Christopher G. Moore

Author:Christopher G. Moore [Moore, Christopher G.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Mystery & Detective, Noir, Bangkok, Thriller
ISBN: 9786167503394
Publisher: Heaven Lake Press
Published: 2020-01-27T00:00:00+00:00

FIFTEEN

THERE WAS NO easy path to Joshua’s place. Canal boat was the best of the bad options. No one could locate each of the 1,682 canals in Bangkok. Most had run dry three years into the Great Upheaval. Dredgers came by rail from China; the river was too shallow in places to float them to the city. Local crews were made up of mostly Khmer and Burmese, who lived and worked on the dredgers. Their job was to keep the surviving 183 canals navigable. General Pratt’s police work had given him firsthand experience of the canals favored by criminals, who used them to transport illicit goods, dump bodies, escape from road searches and offload contraband stored in warehouses along the shore.

Pratt was waiting for me near the front gate of Benjakitti Park, flanked by two pedicabs, the canvas hoods pulled forward as a sun shield for passengers. He held a brown leather briefcase on his right side and wore loose gray trousers and an open collar with an untucked khaki-colored shirt that concealed the handgun in his waistband. At first I didn’t recognize him in a Red Sox baseball cap, sunglasses, a Fu Manchu moustache and Warren Beatty sideburns. I watched for a while. No one asked him for a blessing. He recognized me in a French beret pinned to the top of a fluffy gray wig and with a trimmed beard and moustache. I waved as I crossed Sukhumvit Road in front of Villa Market. He waited until I’d walked up to him to make sure it was me.

“If Che Guevara had lived to old age, this is how I imagine he would have looked,” said Pratt.

“Time to go to work,” I said.

Pratt heard at HQ about a column of ZOOM APCs, which had sealed off upper Sukhumvit Road for “transponder installation and repair work”—the standby reason to prevent panic. Most travel was banned going further than Ekkamai Road on Sukhumvit. Electric or solar-powered cars, electric buses, pedicabs, bicycles, even travellers on foot. Only ZOOM vehicles were authorized to enter the restricted area.

The official reason that scrolled across neural device outputs—Sorry for the temporary inconvenience. Road closure: Transponder site installation and repair work urgently required.

The Cube connection had been cut. The emergency indicators flashed red. The powers in charge were worried about something going on. When the Cube came back on, the only feed were pet videos from forty years before, kick-boxing outtakes, mountains, fields of sunflowers and river valleys after a snowfall.

When we reached Khlong Saen Saep outside the restricted zone. We paid the pedicab drivers and watched them pedal away before we walked down to the dock and waited for the ferry. We complimented ourselves on passing through without being recognized. The next test would be the ferry. Travelling by canal we’d get off at the ferry dock in front of Wat Phra Chang. From the wat, it was a fifteen-minute walk to Hanover’s warehouse. Sweat beads glistened in my beard as I looked at the khlong water.

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