“I’ll explain it later.” Rafferty turns his back to Pan and opens the door to let them out. With his left hand, he pulls the automatic from his pants, and as Boo passes him, Rafferty glances down at it. Boo follows Rafferty’s eyes and takes the gun without missing a step. When Rafferty closes the door and turns back to Pan, nothing in the big man’s face suggests that he registered the transfer.
“So?” Pan says. He turns and goes behind his desk. He sits and pulls a drawer open.
“Da tell you about how they turned off her town’s river?”
“Actually, the boy told me. Terrible, terrible.” He takes the tube of lip balm out of the drawer and applies it. “The sort of thing that should never be allowed to happen.”
“What can you do about it?”
“Me?” Pan drops the tube back into the drawer. “I have no formal power.”
“And if you did?”
“Oh, well. If we’re going to be hypothetical, then hypothetically, I’d prevent it.”
“Would you give them their river back?”
Pan shakes his head in irritation. “It’s done. It’s over. What I’d do is make sure it never happens again.”
“What do you mean, over? A few bulldozers, an afternoon’s work, they’d have their river back. And how long could it take, how much could it cost, to rebuild a few shacks like the ones you put up in that postcard village in your front yard?”
“That’s not the point. The money’s been spent, the golf course has been built, probably a hotel put up. The people who did this are powerful. They’re not going to let go of it. They’ve got clout.”
“In short,” Rafferty says, “it wouldn’t be expedient.”
“You’re oversimplifying, and you know it. The point is to prevent it next time.”
Rafferty gives it a minute, turns and takes a circuit of the office. When he’s facing Pan again, he says, “So. How’d you burn your hands?”
“Sooner or later,” Pan says. He sounds weary. “I knew you’d bump up against that sooner or later. I told you I was in protection, right?”
“Right. With Wichat’s boss, Chai.”
“Chai,” Pan says. “
“Wichat means business.”
“Yeah? You talk to him?”
“Sure. I’ve talked to half a dozen people on the yellow list. A lot of them have wondered how you got burned.”
“Right, the burns. One of the women I was protecting had a three-wok restaurant on the curb, and some guys who had wandered onto the wrong block tried to rob her. I was just down the street. Protection, right? If I’m extorting money for protection, the least I can do is protect them. So I…um, got involved, and while I was taking care of the first guy, the second guy threw a wok at me. Full of hot oil.” Pan opens the top two buttons of his shirt and shows Rafferty an expanse of shiny, hairless flesh. “So naturally, like a total idiot, I reached out and tried to catch it. Not just my hands, but all the way up my arms and across my chest. Hurt like nothing else in my whole life.”
“So,” Rafferty says, “it happened back when you were working with Wichat. Before the Mounds of Venus.”
“That’s right.” Rafferty holds Pan’s gaze until Pan looks down at his shirtfront. He rebuttons the shirt and pulls a cigar out of his pocket. He centers it in the moist-looking mouth and fires up the smoke.
When Rafferty feels as if the silence has been stretched far enough to snap, he says, “Uh-huh.”
Pan drags on the cigar with every evidence of being completely absorbed in it, but when he finally looks up at Rafferty, he has the eyes of someone who suspects that the guy across the card table has just filled the holes in his straight. “You asked Ravi about Snakeskin,” he says.
“Actually, I didn’t. I just said the word to see whether it would persuade him to let me in. And it did.”
“How interesting,” Pan says. “You know, I’m beginning to wonder whose side you’re on.”
“What a coincidence,” Rafferty says. “So am I.”
Hang on to the gun,” Rafferty says. “Just in case. I’ll get it later.”
The three of them are walking the curving path to the front gate, since no swans were volunteered. Da carries Peep in both arms, staring openmouthed at the garden gleaming in the sun to her right. Boo has the gun wedged into the pocket of his too-large jeans, covered by the tail of his shirt.
“Why do I want a gun?” Boo says. “We’re leaving.”
“I’m leaving first, and you’re waiting about five minutes. There’s someone watching me, and I don’t want him seeing you. I don’t want anyone to see you.”
“Why not?”
“Tell you later.”
Instead of answering, Boo reaches over and slides a fingertip down the side of Da’s neck. She shrugs as though there’s a spider crawling on her, but the smile gives her away. “But the gun?” Boo asks.
“In case they try to keep you here.”
Da turns away from the ruby light of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and looks across Boo at Rafferty. “Do you think they will?”
“No,” Rafferty says. “But right now I can’t come up with a single thing that would surprise me.”
CAPTAIN TEETH SAYS, “He’s at Pan’s.”
