Asian Heat by Stephen Leather

it was just a ramshackle collection of wooden shacks either
side of a potholed, dusty road. They pulled up in front of a wooden house on
stilts and the driver walked around and pulled open the sliding door for them.
Zed’s home was built of   teak with
a corrugated iron roof and sheets of corrugated iron over half the windows.
As   Zed ran up to the house calling
for her mother,   scrawny chickens
wandered around and a couple of mangy dogs looked at Dave disinterestedly.   The girls began pulling their bags out
of the minibus. On either side of the main house were two smaller wooden
shacks, not much bigger than garden sheds.
    “What’s the story
with the windows?” Dave asked Lek, pointing at the main house.
    “No have
windows,” said Lek. “No money for windows. Zed’s family very poor.”
    Dave gave Lek the
money to pay the driver and told her to make sure that the guy knew he was to
come back on Saturday morning to take them to Bangkok.
    A middle-aged
woman walked carefully down the steps, gathering up her long skirt with one
hand and holding on to a handrail with the other.
    “My mother,” said
Zed. She waied her mother, putting her hands together as if in prayer and
touching them against her chin.
    Dave immediately
waied the woman as well and she smiled and returned the wai. She wasn’t what
Dave had expected at all – she was tall and very pretty, with
waist-length hair and cheekbones that could have cut glass. Part of him
wondered why the mother hadn’t gone to work in Bangkok because she would have
had no shortage of customers.   Zed’s mother spoke no English so Lek came over to translate.   Another woman came down the wooden
stairs from the house carrying a baby and Zed waied her. “My sister,” she said.
“Ay.”
    Ay was in her
late twenties. She was a bit chunky but Dave figured that was probably because
she had only given birth a few months earlier. Ay had a tattoo of a dragon down
her right arm and he reckoned she had probably been a bargirl in the past.   Obviously she had fallen pregnant and
returned home which was why Zed had been sent to Bangkok.
    Zed’s mother said
something in Thai and Lek nodded. “She say that she’s made the small house
ready for you,” said Lek.   “You can
sleep there. She’s put a fan there for you to keep you cool.”
    “Great,” said
Dave, beaming. The fact that he was sleeping away from the main house gave him
more of a chance of linking up with Zed. That was what he hoped, anyway.
    Lek and Zed took
him to show where he’d be sleeping. It was little more than a teak shed with a
corrugated iron roof and a wooden bed around which was gathered a mosquito net.
There was no bathroom and the floor-mounted fan got its power from a flex that
ran out of the door and up the side of the main house.
    ‘There’s no light
but there are candles,” said Lek. “Just be careful you don’t set your mosquito
net on fire.”
    She drew back the
mosquito net and showed him the bed. It was a grubby mattress lying on the
floor. No sheet. No cover. Just the mattress. “Perfect,” said Dave, lying
through his teeth,
    “If you want we
can take you to a resort,” said Lek.   “The rooms there have air.”
    “This is fine,”
said Dave.
    “Not five-star,”
said Lek.
    Dave smiled at
Zed. “It’s your home and I’m happy to see your home,” he said.
    Zed nodded
enthusiastically. As they walked back to the main house, Dave noticed three
young men, all dressed in dirty jeans and faded t-shirts and lounging on rush
mats. “Dave, can you buy them beer?” asked Lek.
    “Beer?”
    “They know Zed
has come back and they want beer,” said Lek.   Zed nodded in agreement.
    “Who are they?”
    “Cousins,” said
Lek. “Just two hundred baht enough.”
    The two girls
were looking at him expectantly so Dave took out his wallet and gave the money
to Zed. She smiled and gave him a wai and then went over to the group. She
handed the money to the oldest boy and he