The young man was unconscious, breathing shallowly, and bleeding from two wounds that looked nonfatal if she could get blood loss stopped and some first aid on its way.She grabbed a couple of cloth napkins, wadded them up, and pressed down on Feirn’s shoulder wound.
“Ema!Come here.Put pressure on this,” she yelled at the shell-shocked housekeeper.The woman, white and trembling, came and leaned down on the wad of napkins.“Auntie, call for an ambulance.Now!”Sophie found a silken table runner and wrapped it around the welling hole in Feirn’s leg.She tightened it mercilessly, glad for Feirn’s unconsciousness as she manhandled his wound to stop the bleeding.
In the background her aunt’s voice was raised and urgent as she phoned for the police and emergency assistance on a landline.
Outside, thesom tamvendor’s bell continued its rhythm.A boat chugged by on the distant river.Bangkok was teeming with life, unaware that one of its shadow queens had fallen dead in a modest wooden house that smelled of rice and stir-fry.
“Are you all right?”Malee asked, setting her gun on the table with a clunk.
Sophie gazed at her mother’s body, then at the aunt who’d saved her.She thought of her children, finally safe from their grandmother.“No,” she said honestly.“But I am uninjured.Thank you, Auntie.”
Malee nodded.“Now might be a good time to call those friends of yours in the FBI.Pim Wat was wanted in a dozen countries, but you never know who among the police here in Bangkok was on her payroll.”
“You’re right about that.And I need to let my father know she’s gone, anyway.Sadly, she matters to him.”
But as Sophie reached for her phone, she paused.Her mother’s jade bangle had rolled free of the body.After a moment’s hesitation, Sophie picked it up and slid it into her pocket.Not to use—never to use—but to remember who her mother had been.
She took out the sat phone and called her father.“Dad?She’s gone.Pim Wat is gone.Auntie Malee shot her to save me.I need you to make sure we don’t run into any legal problems.”
Sirens sounded.The bell rang at the gate.Sophie hurried to let the first responders in, filling Frank in on the current situation as she did so.
Soon she would be going home to Hawaii, where her children slept safely, dreaming ordinary dreams.She couldn’t wait to join them.
29
SOPHIE
After a briefand unremarkable police investigation, Pim Wat’s death was chalked up to a family dispute and ruled self-defense in favor of Malee.Money changed hands, forms were signed, and one of the world’s deadliest assassins became smoke and ash with the same efficiency she’d brought to killing others.
Sophie had overseen every stage of her mother’s body’s handling and disposal, superstitious that somehow Pim Wat would find a way to cheat death yet again.
Now she stood alone in the viewing room, watching as flames in an incinerator consumed the woman who’d given her life—and very nearly taken it.She held up her phone on video mode so Frank Smithson could watch too.
No monks chanting.No mourners weeping.No flowers, except a plastic bag of marigold heads the crematorium provided as part of their basic package.
“Some people just need killing,” Sophie murmured to herself, echoing something her mother had once said.
“What was that?”Frank asked from the video chat on the phone.
“Nothing.”Sophie turned the camera back, frowning at the sight of her father’s face.His color was ashy and pouches hung beneath his eyes.Frank had survived being shot and treated for cancer in the same year, but he’d appeared healthier than this the last time she saw him.“You’re not looking well, Dad.Are you sure you’re okay?”
He shook his head; gray was edging out the black of his short-cropped hair.“Sadder than I expected to be,” he said at last.“I had a good cry about her last night.The world is better off without Pim Wat, but she wasn’t always ...like she became.”
“Corrupt?Evil?A psychopath, you mean?”Sophie sighed, gazing at the wall of white-hot flames, strangely silent behind the heavy glass of the crematorium.“I know, Dad.I was there.She could be loving when I was small.”
“I’m glad it wasn’t you that had to pull the trigger.At the end of the day, she was still your mother.”
“Honestly?Me too.Auntie Malee was stone-cold about taking the shot.Took Mother—and me—completely by surprise.”
“I guess your aunt decided she was done being abused by her sister.”
“That’s it exactly.”
“You sure you don’t want to do some kind of ...memorial in Hawaii?”
“Who would come?Thieves, gangsters, killers for hire?The CIA who were her handlers?Auntie, who shot her?”Sophie shook her head.“I’ll figure out something to do with her ashes, but I won’t grieve her.I have others to mourn.”
Like Connor.
