The Khmer Kill: A Dox Short Story (Kindle Single) Read Free Page A

“You want to be sitting right next to this guy when it goes down?”
    “It seems the surest and most uncomplicated way of doing things, don’t you think?”
    Dox considered suggesting,
I think you don’t know a damn thing about what it’s like to be talking to a guy one moment and having his brains all over you the next.
    Instead, he said, “Well, who is the guy?”
    Gant frowned. “Is that… something you ordinarily need to know?”
    Dox didn’t answer right away. The truth was, ordinarily he didn’t need to know much: a name; known locations, acquaintances, and habits; a photograph. The people who hired him didn’t want him to know more than necessary, and that suited him, too. Learning too much could make the target become too human. The more human the target became, the harder the job got. “If it inhabits your mind, it will inhibit your trigger finger,” an instructor had once told him, and he’d found the admonition to be true.
    Still, he’d never been brought onto a job and been told flat-out nothing. It was disconcerting, and he realized that until now he’d always been relying on some minimum amount of information about the target to feel comfortable taking the job. Maybe it was a rationalization, but the people he killed, one way or another, they were all in the game. If you wanted to be in the game, you had to accept the risks. An ordinary bare-bones target file was always enough to confirm, however incidentally, that the target fit the “in the game, knew the risks” profile. But killing some guy he didn’t know the first thing about… that just didn’t feel right.
    “Mister Gant—”
    “Call me Mike if you like.”
    “Whatever. The point is, I don’t even know you. I’ve got a buddy who vouched for you, and okay, that’s worth a lot, but I don’t know what outfit you’re with and I don’t know shit about what you’re mixed up in. For all I know, the guy you’re having a problem with is the damn prime minister of Cambodia.”
    “What if he were?”
    Dox smiled. “Well, then I priced the job too low and we’d need to fix that.”
    There was a long silence. If Gant thought the silence was working on Dox, making him want to talk more, he was wrong. Silence and patience were some of Dox’s best friends.
    Finally, Gant said, “How much do you know about this country?”
    “I know the tap water can kill you and they can’t make a proper martini.”
    Gant laughed. “All right, let me fill you in. Our man is named Rithisak Sorm. He’s former Khmer Rouge—”
    “Those folks are still running around?”
    “Oh, yes. Many of them make their home in Pailin province. Our man included, in fact. Though he’d be harder to get to there because outsiders are more conspicuous than in the capital.”
    “You’re looking to take him down for war crimes?”
    “Nobody cares what atrocities he committed in his youthful exuberance, though I can tell you he committed plenty. No, this is about something more contemporary. You might know that Cambodia is one of the world’s major hubs for human trafficking. Labor and sex slaves; men, women, and children; to and from Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, Macao, and Taiwan… they all pass through Cambodia. Or come to rest here.”
    Dox did know all that, and plenty more, but he’d gotten far in life having people think he was a hick. Partly it was the accent. Fooled ‘em every time. “Okay,” he said.
    “Sorm is a key facilitator of the trade. He has a talent for connections. Gang bosses. Politicians. Cops. He knows every customs and border official along the length of the Mekong. He makes sure everyone gets a cut of whatever they have a taste for—cash for the greedy, opium for the dope fiends, children for the degenerates.”
    Whatever reluctance Dox had been feeling a few moments earlier instantly evaporated. Bribery and dope-running put this Sorm character squarely in the game. And children? Sorm sounded like more than just a legitimate target.