A Nail Through the Heart by Timothy Hallinan

she says in English. “I put water and go.”
    “No,” Miaow says, looking up at her. “I want to tell you, too.”
    Rose colors with pleasure. “She likes us both today,” she says, and Miaow produces a low-wattage smile. “Why is your friend downstairs?”
    “Downstairs where?” Rafferty asks.
    “In the garage,” Rose says in Thai. “Asleep in somebody’s jeep, with his feet out the window.”
    “He’s waiting,” Miaow says. “We’ve been in worse garages.”
    “You and Superman?” Rose settles cross-legged on the floor with her back to the glass doors. The sunlight on her hair is dazzling, a knot of rainbows.
    “When I was little,” Miaow says, “he found me and took me to a place where kids were making garlands. My first day I made thirty baht. Almost a dollar. I could eat. Boo—that was his name then,” she informs Rose—“Boo showed me a good place to sleep. There was a number hotel that was closed. We could sleep in the garage, behind the curtains. We were dry when it rained.” Number hotels, indispensable to Bangkok’s sexually furtive, have curtained garages to allow customers to get out unobserved.
    “We started every day at five in the morning. We sold flowers until it was dark. Boo already had four kids with him. They were my first real friends, ever. When some older kids tried to chase us out of the garage, Boo took a big piece of wood with nails in one end and hurt two of them until they ran away.” She pauses for a moment to swallow. “He took care of us.
    “I sold flowers every day for almost two years,” she says. She is looking straight in front of her, seeing her own life unspool like a film. “Boo was always there. One night a man called me to come to his car. When I got there, he reached out and grabbed my arm. He tried to pull me into the car, right through the window. Like a bag of rice. Boo ran up and bit the man’s arm. He wouldn’t let go. The man dropped me and drove off, with Boo hanging from his arm, biting him deeper and deeper. We were running behind, screaming for the man to stop. The man was screaming, too. When Boo let go, he fell on the road. He got up with blood all over his face and shirt and on his elbows and knees from where he fell. He was laughing.”
    “Fierce heart,” Rose says.
    Miaow falls silent. Rafferty can see her struggling with the next words. Rose pulls a pack of cigarettes from her purse, looks at it, and drops it back in.
    “Then some bigger boys showed him about yaa baa .” Yaa baa is a cheap, potent variant on amphetamine that is widely sold on the streets of Southeast Asia. “Then he wasn’t Boo anymore. People who smoke yaa baa don’t want to eat, so he stopped helping us find food. He got mad all the time. If you smiled at him wrong, he got mad. He hit one of the girls so hard her nose broke. He was sorry later, but wewere already afraid of him. One of the kids left, and then another one. After a while it was just me.
    “He smoked it every morning. He smoked it all day. His hands shook. He screamed at people who didn’t buy a garland. Drivers closed their windows when he came up to them, and he spit on the windows. The police got him, and I didn’t see him for two weeks. When he came back from the monkey house, he took away the money I had made so he could buy yaa baa . I gave him the money when he asked, but he hit me anyway. Two days later he came again, and this time he cried and said he was sorry. He said he wasn’t going to smoke anymore. The next time I saw him, he was so crazy he didn’t know me.”
    “He was how old then?” Rafferty asks.
    “A year before I met you,” she says, working it out. “I was about seven. He was maybe nine or ten.”
    Rafferty blows out a breath he hadn’t known he was holding. “Miaow,” he says, “ yaa baa is cheap, but if he was smoking so much, he had to have money. Where did—”
    She stops him by raising the hand with the T-shirt in it, sees it, and drops it into her lap.