“Wondered what?”

“How long,” Porthip says. “Before you…” He lifts his chin, indicating the morphine drip. “Push that thing, would you?”

“Sure.” Rafferty depresses the plunger, and a moment later Porthip’s eyes slowly close and then reopen.

“Nothing,” he says. His voice is a husk, just a rough surface wrapped around breath. “I’ve pushed it too often. The limiter’s kicked in. But when it works, it’s great stuff. I’ve…seen things. On the walls. On the insides of my eyelids.” His back arches as a spasm runs through him. His eyes close. “Death,” he says.

Rafferty says, “So what?”

“Ah,” Porthip says, opening his eyes. “You’re angry.”

“You lied to me.”

Porthip says, “Why should you be different?”

“You’re dying. Why waste the effort now? What possible difference could it make to you at this point?”

“Habits,” Porthip says. “Hard to break.”

“Snakeskin,” Rafferty says. “It owned the factory that burned down. And you owned Snakeskin. With Tatsuya.”

“Tatsuya,” Porthip says, and this time he does smile. “The partner every businessman dreams of. Dead for years and years. Tatsuya is a signature machine back in Tokyo.”

“I don’t care about Tatsuya. You owned that factory.”

“Not according to the records,” Porthip says.

“No, of course not. But if you didn’t own it when it burned, then you did something that doesn’t make any business sense at all. You, as Snakeskin, bought a destroyed factory, paid good money for it, and then just let it sit there. You didn’t clean it up, you didn’t put it to use. It could be making money again. So why buy it if you weren’t going to do any of that?”

“Interesting question,” Porthip says.

“I don’t think you did buy it. I think you already owned it. You just quietly sold it to yourself, passed it from one company to another. You couldn’t sell it to someone else because it might have attracted media attention. The papers would have been interested. A lot of people died there.”

“One hundred,” Porthip says, and takes a breath. “And twenty-one.”

“And around the time of the fire, Pan disappears, and when he comes back, he’s got burns all over him and there’s suddenly some serious weight behind him. He’s doing big-boy business, the kind of business that requires someone to open doors. Someone like you.”

“You know,” Porthip says, “you can push the plunger on that thing up there until your thumb falls off, but it only delivers so much. They let you control your pain, but only up to a point. There’s a limiter that won’t let you go all the way to where I want to go. For that you need a doctor who’s so high up nobody would ever question him.”

“You owned that factory,” Rafferty says. “Pan got burned there, somehow, and you wound up owing him. And you’re high enough up that no one would, as you say, question you.”

Porthip’s body goes rigid, and his mouth tightens into a line as straight as a slice. Then his lips part and he lets out a long sound that’s just his breath traveling over his vocal cords, wind through a pipe organ.

“Pan put the locks on,” Porthip says when he can talk. His voice is frayed and ragged, and he’s taking more frequent breaths. “He put the bars on the windows. We had a…a problem with the ghost shift. Day jobs, some of them had day jobs. They were tired. People kept going outside, going into the sheds where the stuffing was stored. Big…soft piles of stuffing. For the bunnies, for the kittens. The ghost shift…they took naps there.” He struggles under the covers until he has an arm free, and then he lifts a twig-thin hand to the plunger and pushes it home. “Nothing.” He is panting with the effort. “But I can pretend I feel better.”

“They took naps,” Rafferty prompts.

“I hired Pan from Chai, who was the top crook then. I needed four or five heavyweights to keep the workers on the ball. Except for Chai, Pan was the only one who knew who I was, the only one-” His body arches again, his eyes slam shut, and a stream of air hisses between his lips. “He was the only one who knew anything. The others were just…muscle.”

“What happened?”

“There was…a rule,” Porthip says. “There had to be two guards outside. One of them had to have the key. One of them always…always had to have the key.” His eyes close again, and the lids flutter as though the eyeballs behind them are rolling up. Rafferty puts a hand on the arm Porthip extricated from the covers. The man’s eyes open. “Key,” he repeats.

He turns his head to the right, as though it eases the pain. “So Pan stops by the place in the middle of the night. He used to do that, just to…to keep everybody awake. And there’s smoke coming out of the windows, and people inside are screaming. He runs around the building, looking for the men who were supposed to…to be there…but they’ve gone…to…to eat. They’ve got the key. Pan went crazy. He tried to knock down the doors. They were iron, hot iron, and he was trying to push them open. He tried to pull the bars off the windows, even though flames were already coming out of them. He reached between the bars, into the fire. He tried to pull people through. He actually pulled one set of bars out and yanked three people through the window, but they were dead. They were on fire, but he pulled them over the windowsill and fell backward. They landed on top of him, burning. He rolled out from under them and tried to go in through the window, but he couldn’t. It was an inferno.” Porthip licks his lips. “Can I have some water?”

Rafferty picks up the glass with the straw in it and positions it under Porthip’s mouth, then waits as the man drinks.

“He was burned. Badly. His clothes were synthetics. They melted into his skin. He was in terrible pain. But when the guards came back, he killed them. Then he loaded them in the trunk of his car and dumped them in the river. At five A.M. he came to my house. He could barely stand up.”

“And you took care of him.”

“He almost died there. He tried to save those people. Never, not once, did he do anything that would have…exposed me. He was the kind of man you wanted to do something for.”

Arthit says, “But you’re exposing him now, aren’t you?”

Porthip looks past Rafferty and lets his eyes settle on Arthit. “He’s not the same man. Before, he had…he had honor.”

“What does that mean?” Rafferty asks.

“You’re doing so well,” Porthip says. “I’d hate…hate to deprive you of the satisfaction.”

“You backed him. You put him into businesses he never could have gotten into on his own.”

“At first,” Porthip says. “For a while.”

“And then you sold the factory to him.”

“No,” Porthip says. “You’re missing it.”

“Missing what?”

“Snakeskin. Snakeskin sold the factory to Pan.”

Rafferty says, “I just said that.”

Porthip shakes his head. “You said I sold it to him.”

From behind Rafferty, Arthit says, “It’s a corporation, Poke. It’s not an individual. It remains Snakeskin no matter who owns it.”

“Oh, Jesus,” Rafferty says. “You sold the company.”

Kosit closes his eyes and nods.

“To whom?”

Porthip’s lids open, and he looks at Rafferty out of the corners of his eyes. He lifts his hand toward the morphine-delivery unit and caresses the plunger with his fingertips, then lets the hand drop. “You don’t know?” he asks. “You haven’t figured it out?”

Rafferty tilts his head back and closes his eyes and lets the realization wash over him. When he opens them again, he finds Porthip looking at him with some of the old energy.

“Ton,” Rafferty says. “You sold it to Ton. And Ton gave the factory to Pan.”

“See?” Porthip says. “You’re not hopeless after all.”