Edge Running

I arrived in Bangkok two months later under the name of Doug McClure. I was still a doctor, though, and I still had a prescription pad that gave me, as a documented Doctor Without Borders physician, worldwide access to pharmacies. I was treated like gold by Tony Scarlotti, the troupe manager, and all of the other dancers. That was a good thing, being able to make more than the other dancers in the troupe, because I could be pickier when men showed up at the stage door after a performance looking for paid companionship.

We were settled in substandard rooms, two guys to a small room, at the Babylon Bangkok Hotel in the Silom red-light district part of Bangkok—one of several red-light districts there—between the large Lumphini Park and the Klong Toy industrial Chao Phraya River wharf district. None of us spent too many nights in our own hotel room, though. The club dancing was more a cover for how money really was made in this business. Girlie clubs predominated in the area but there were more than enough gay night spots too. We were booked to do two Chippendales Dancer-type shows three times a week at DJ Station, a night club with a stage off Silom road. Our hotel was off Satorn Road, which ran parallel with Silom, with the red-light district between them. We also did three shows at a smaller and seedier venue, Roger’s, off Silom Road. three nights a week.

At DJ Station, we performed on stage in a revue at 10:00 p.m. and midnight. In between, three of us had to be go-go dancing in glass cages elevated around the dance floor, where the dancing was to band music alternating with a DJ spinning records on a sound system. This was the classiest of our venues, as we were on stage or in glass cages out of the reach to the patrons.

The gig at Roger’s was more demanding than this, but this is where we dancers made money above basic sustenance. In the small print of our contracts that none of us had seen was a stipulation that the bulk of our contracted fees was not due until the end of every second month of dancing. This was to keep us from disappearing on our own as soon as we got to Bangkok. We were doled out just enough advance money to keep us from starving by eating street food—there were street food carts out all over the area. Anything above that was earned by tips while we were dancing or tricks taken on our own time. I fared better than the others as the lead dancer and troupe doctor, but even I had to make nice-nice with the patrons while I was dancing to encourage them to stuff money in my thong and I had to take a trick now and again.

At Roger’s the patrons were close to the stage and could pass tips for “feels” and between shows we went down on the club floor in just our skimpy costumes and were supposed to mingle with the customers and get them to order drinks for us and more drinks for them. We also could more intimately mingle with them and arrange hookups either off the premises after our night was done or in rooms behind the stage when we weren’t performing, where the house took half the take.

The patrons at DJ Station rarely got close enough to us to pass tips and we weren’t required to come down into the club during the intervals—though we could by invitation of a patron, who paid for the privilege. The patrons at DJ Station were much wealthier, though, than those at Roger’s. They could send an invitation to an individual dancer to go with them after the show was over. Bangkok never closed, so the dancers in the troupe got their best meals by going with a patron after a DJ Station show. They got fed and watered, but they had to either hump a guy or lay on their back and open their legs afterward. We had to be flip-floppers in this business. We were studs either way the patron wanted it. This wasn’t a problem for any of the guys in our troupe. They often got a much nicer bed to sleep in for the night than the shared hotel room at the Babylon Bangkok hotel.

Sex was definitely not a problem for the members of our dance troupe. We were all oversexed versatile studs—and in pristine shape—or we wouldn’t be in such a dance troupe to begin with. Most of us had paired up before leaving New York, and when we didn’t have a patron to service for money and benefit, we fucked each other. I had paired with a younger, olive-complexioned and dark-haired Mediterranean-stock Greek god by the name of Panos Stifano. We roomed together, flip-flopped each other, telling each other it was nothing personal, just for practice, and occasionally hunted together even in New York before arriving in Bangkok.

Thus, we had no trouble agreeing to go with a drug dealer after a gig at Roger’s at the end of our first week in Bangkok. I was willing to dispense some downers or uppers to the guys in the troupe and most definitely pills to prevent STDs, but I wouldn’t give them any of the really hard stuff. Bangkok was famous for readily available pure heroin and cocaine, though, and Panos was into that. On a Friday night he’d hooked up with a Thai-Chinese dealer, Kevin Lu, who also had some black American soldier in him. He was in his thirties, rangy, but hard bodied—a hard-used body too, having been in some knife fights. Panos had agreed to go with him before consulting with me. The best I could do was go with them to watch out for Panos. Lu didn’t seem to mind it being a threesome.

Lu took us to a gay hotel, the BBB Inn on Rama IV Road, near Lumphini Park. The rooms there were basic and could rent for $35 a night or $10 an hour. They preferred U.S. currency. The room as good as we had at the Babylon Bangkok and Lu was paying, so that was fine. Lu was also dispensing the cocaine in exchange for the fucking, so that was fine too—for Panos. I made clear I wasn’t interested in that. I might have left when it came out, but I wanted to be around to help Panos if he had a medical emergency.

Panos took his hit, as did Lu. It transpired that Lu really didn’t care that I came with Panos. After Lu watched Panos and me having sex for a while, he wanted to be doubled by us. Panos and I fucked him together, Panos, already in dreamworld, lying on his back on the bed, Lu on top of him, pointed to the ceiling, in the crab position, and me, sober and monitoring the situation, on top of the pile, holding Lu’s legs raised and spread, as Panos held his cock steady inside Lu’s passage and I pounded him.

This wasn’t all that unusual for our Friday nights other than we didn’t often double a patron. What was notable about it was that Lu apparently was impressed with me. This led to me being hooked up with a higher-level Thai drug lord, Dusit Thanat, who approached me, not at Roger’s, but at the DJ Station, and who almost became the undoing of me.

* * * *

“You know I don’t like going out and sitting with patrons between sets, Amnot,” I said. I was at the mirror in the dressing room, already beginning to line up the face paint to start making myself up for the next show. The paint didn’t go on my face.

“No choice, I’m afraid,” the manager of DJ Station said. I turned and looked at him. He did seem to look concerned and I saw a little sweat beading along his hairline. Amnot was usually cool and ready for anything. A lot could happen at DJ Station. “Dusit Thanat is out front with some businessmen and he wants you to come sit with them for a while. They like the way you dance and wanted to meet you. He said he could arrange that.”

“Who the fuck is Dusit Thanat?” I asked.

“You don’t want to know all that Dusit Thanat is in Bangkok. He’s said he can bring you out to the table and neither one of us wants to see what happens when he can’t deliver. He said to give you this.”

Amnot was extending a hand stuffed with a wad of high-denomination Thai baht bills.

“Why didn’t you say so in the first place?” I asked. I smiled. “Give me a couple of minutes to pull some clothes on and then show me where this table is.” All I was wearing was silky red bikini briefs.

“You’re just fine the way you are,” Amnot said, now all smiles. “But be really careful with this guy, Doug. You don’t want him to want too much from you.” The smile has been erased from Amnot’s face as quickly as it had painted itself there.

I could tell which one Dusit Thanat was as we approached the table. He had a Thai name. The three men at the table were middle-aged Japanese businessmen types—two slender and bespectacled and one shorter, younger, and heavy, all in expensive suits. All of them let their tongues hang out as I approached their table. I was dressed to be ogled—which meant I was just wearing the red silky bikini briefs.

The Thai was dressed expensively too. There were Thai bodyguard types at the adjacent tables on either side. I got the distinct impression they were there for Dusit Thanat, who I would have assumed was a Class A thug, even if Amnot hadn’t alerted me to that on the way to the table. He also was a solid-looking hunk. There was a class of underworld chieftains in Bangkok who did as they liked and got away with whatever it was. Amnot had clearly signaled that Dusit Thanat was one of those.

Just what I needed. A connection with yet another drug trade crime lord.

I was seated across from Dusit Thanat, who drilled me with his eyes as the Japanese businessmen, who spoke impeccable English, which the Thai didn’t speak at all, talked about me to each other, the two sitting on each side of me touching me here and there—wherever they wanted. I didn’t mind them assessing me, though, as everything they said was complimentary. I didn’t have any trouble understanding that I was supposed to impress the Japanese businessmen. I’d been paid enough up front not to argue with that. When one placed a hand on my basket and traced my shaft through the material, I dutifully turned my face to him and gave him a smile. If they’d been to the last show, they’d seen what was inside the pouch there, although they hadn’t been permitted to touch it.

I wasn’t too worried. The Japanese businessmen, although nothing to arouse me sexually, appeared to be very easy to handle when it came down to sex. It was Dusit Thanat himself who both sexually aroused me and scared the shit out of me as he sat at the table, observing the Japanese businessmen appreciating what he had brought to the table in me for their enjoyment. It was Dusit who I was unsure of handling. I had visions of being bound and spread-eagled, with him using me hard sexually.

They let me go in time to prepare for my next show—the last of mine that night—but Dusit Thanat’s thugs were there, at the stage door, with the back door of a long, black Mercedes limousine open to greet me after I’d finished my set and gotten dressed. I passed the money Amnot had given me, plus what he came back with at the end of my last set, on to Panos, whose eyes went really big when he saw how much it was.

“You’ve hit the jackpot tonight,” he said.

“Or the end of the road,” I said. I told him what the setup looked like it was going to be.

“You do like to run along the edge, don’t you?” he asked.

“From what Amnot told me, I don’t really have a choice. The rules don’t seem to be all that different here than they were back in Chicago. If I don’t get back, you can keep the money,” I said. “10 percent just for holding it for me if I can hobble home.”

“Hobble home?” he asked.

“There are four of them,” I said. I didn’t have to explain further.

By trusting him with the stash, I think I left Panos happier with that than when I fucked him.

I got fucked in the back of the limousine as we drove down Silom Road toward the Chao Phraya River. I sat on the cock of one of the slimmer Japanese businessmen in the center of the bench seat at the very back of the limo. I was stripped down. He wasn’t. I was bent over, hands on the floor of the vehicle while he opened me up with his long, sensuous fingers and then his tongue. He pulled me back into his lap and onto the cock, and helped me to rise and fall on it while Dusit Thanat and the other two Japanese businessmen sat in the rear-facing seats and watched me being fucked with slitted eyes. I easily understood that if we got into a traffic jam, I’d be gang banged back here. The two thugs were up front.

Bangkok traffic moves slowly and is tightly packed on the streets at all hours of the day and night. The windows of the limo were tinted and it was late in the night. I could see out, where the three-wheel samlor taxis and the motorcyclists were right up against the windows, but even though those in and on the vehicles looked into the windows of the limo, I knew they couldn’t see me. They would have had a definite change in expression if they could.

The Japanese man was long, but not thick. He knew what he was doing, though. He palmed my pecs and thrumbed my nubs while I bobbed up and down on his shaft. The other two Japanese businessmen talked while we drove down the road and the third businessman drove me, and it was clear the three of them were talking about me—my body and how well I was taking the fuck—but now they were conversing in Japanese. Somehow, although I went to a perfectly good college, Japanese hadn’t been on my course schedule. Throughout, Dusit Thanat sat, stoically, watching me with dead-fish eyes, and said nothing. He was holding himself aloft, exhibiting that what the Japanese were doing with me was elementary stuff—that when and if he had me, I would suffer.

The fuck was finished and I’d redressed in the slacks and T-shirt I’d come out in by the time we’d reached the entrance of the five-star high-rise Shangri-la Hotel on the banks of the Chao Phraya River. A twelfth-floor suite had already been booked and the door was opened for us by a young European guy—probably German or Danish—who was covered by a blue silk hotel robe and nothing else. The second impression I got from him was that he was sex on a stick and must be someone’s boy toy by how saucy he was acting. My first impression, however, was that he’d been through hell. He looked beat up—cuts and welts all over his body, much of which I could see, and he had a black eye, a cut lower lip, and a bruised chin. There was bruising around his throat too, as if he’d been choked to within an inch of his life.

Still, he acted happy to see us, especially Dusit Thani, who drew the young man to his side, placing a hand on his opposite hip, while the Japanese businessman, starting to pull off their clothes, guided me to the bedroom beyond. The two bodyguards stayed with Dusit Thanat and the European youth in the living room, which opened into the bedroom through a double door.

While the businessmen were stripping in the bedroom, one of the bodyguards delivered packets of cocaine to the bedroom. The Japanese men imbibed, engaging in recreational imbibing in a round-robin fashion—two trying out the drugs, which I took to be some sort of sampling for bulk buying—and one fucking me on the bed. When one finished with me on the bed, he went to the table where the lines of cocaine were set up, and another of the businessmen came up on the bed, manipulated me into the position he wanted, mounted me, and fucked me.

I could see into the other room, where Dusit Thanat was sitting on a sofa and the European youth was in his lap, facing him, and bouncing up and down on the Thai’s cock. The young man’s back was crisscrossed with angry red welts.

Later, I lay on the bed, tired and exhausted, splayed on my back, while the men did whatever deal they were doing in the other room. The European youth came through, went into the bathroom, and took a shower. He smiled wanly at me in passing.

We left the Japanese businessmen in the hotel suite. The European youth was left there too, naked, on his back, on the bed. The businessmen’s entertainment wasn’t over. Two of the Japanese men were climbing up on the bed, moving into a position where they could double the European guy.

I assumed Dusit Thanat would let me off at the DJ Station or my hotel, The Babylon Bangkok, although I wouldn’t have been wild about him knowing where I was staying, or that I would be left to get back to the hotel on my own. He didn’t however. We were driven back across town, beyond Lumphini Park, to the Sukhumvit Road area and then down a back soi—street—to the banks of one of the main canals that laced through the city, once the primary paths of transportation that gave Bangkok the name of the Venice of the East.

We drove into a walled compound of a series of traditional Thai-style teak pavilions raised on columns to keep the living areas above the perpetual flooding from the canals.

It took nearly an hour to get to the compound from the Shangri-la. Once again I sat in the center of the bench seat at the very back of the limo, with Dusit Thanat sitting, facing me, and looking thuggish and stoic. The two bodyguards were in the front seat. I assumed the drug lord would fuck me while we were driving, but he didn’t. I was getting the idea that maybe he wasn’t going to do that—that I was maybe just a whore he hired to help him sell his drugs in bulk to Japanese marks.

But I was wrong. He did want to fuck me. And he did fuck me.

He took me to his bedroom in one of the interlinked teak pavilions on thick wooden stilts, pushed me down on a massive bed, stripped me of my trousers and T-shirt, slapped my legs open, knelt and ate my ass out, and then came down between my thighs, pinning me to the bed, mounted me, and fucked me with a huge cock—vigorously, hard, deep, brutally, athletically, and into and beyond the dawn.

He manipulated me into whatever position he wanted, and like a good little well-paid whore—one who was scared spitless of this thug—I docilely went into whatever configuration turned him on and gave him what he signaled he wanted. Did he ask me what I wanted at any time? No, indeed he did not. Thailand was a man’s world in that sense, and Dusit Thanat clearly was The Man. Somewhat to my surprise, he didn’t torture me. He slapped me around a bit, but he didn’t reach the level of taking that I thought he might and that it looked like he did with the young man he fucked at the hotel.

At least he wasn’t violent that first time.

* * * *

Nothing was said about taking me back to my hotel. I didn’t have another show to do for the next two days, but I didn’t think Dusit Thanat knew that. Neither did I get the impression that he cared whether or not I had a schedule of my own. He didn’t do much talking at all. He did do fucking, though—and he did it well. He was maybe in his forties, but he worked his body hard. He worked my body hard too. There was no question I was going to give him what he wanted. He wanted me to lay back, open my legs in a V and provide something warm and spongy for him to stroke his cock in, and that’s what I gave him. Whenever I wasn’t fast enough to provide what he wanted, he slapped me around. I learned to figure out what he wanted quickly.

The violence in his fucking progressed as he moved from one fuck to the next.

I did feel a bit like a prisoner in the compound, like if I’d made a sudden move toward the driveway gate, which was guarded, that there would be a roving guard to stop me, but they hadn’t taken my cellphone. I called the troupe manager, Tony Scarlotti, to report that I was still alive—if stiff and sore—although I didn’t have the least notion where I was. I wasn’t familiar enough with Bangkok to know where we had driven from the Silom area.

“All taken care of,” Tony said as if all I cared about was money and my stage performances. “You’re covered in fees for the next two days.”

“I don’t know where I am.”

“And we don’t want to know where you are either,” the manager said. “This is all being handled through Amnot at the DJ Station, and he says we don’t really want to know what the arrangement is. I believe him. I think you should too.”

“Terrific,” I said. I looked up to see that Dusit Thanat was standing in the doorway into his bedroom. He was naked and in erection, and his body was hard, muscular . . . magnificent. As I clicked the cellphone off, he was on me in a flash, slapping me down onto my knees, putting me on all fours, crouching over he, mounting me, and grasping the hair on the back of my head and arching me painfully back while he thrust inside me and fucked me hard. He was a brutal top, but so far, although he’d slapped me a few times, he hadn’t beaten me like I’d seen the European youth from the previous night had been beaten and whipped. Maybe it wasn’t Dusit Thanat who had done that to the young man, I thought.

But I was to find that it was, indeed, Dusit Thanat, who had done that. And I couldn’t find my cellphone again after that toss in the hay.

“Go, clean up,” he said after he’d finished with me. “We go to see the kickboxing now.”

It was the most he’d said to me since we’d met.

* * * *

Thai kickboxing is a blood sport. They had an arena for it on Rama IV road not far from my hotel, the Babylon Bangkok. I contemplated trying to break away from the arena and get to the hotel all the time Dusit Thanat and I were ringside watching a series of Thai boxer pairs enter the ring, which we were just out of the splatter area of, donate blood, and only one boxer stumble out of at the end of a match. It was more of a gladiatorial event where it looked like anything was accepted to ensure survival. That the ever-present bodyguards were stationed at either end of the row we were in prevented my escape. Perhaps I should have tried harder.

Speaking of “hard,” that’s what the bloodletting did for Dusit Thanat. The brutal punishment of it gave him a hard. It also gave him wandering hands, and he felt me up and got all panty and breathy while we watched the slaughter in the ring. My mind went back to the young European blond guy who I’d seen in the Shangri-la Hotel suite. Dusit Thanat had done that. I had tried telling myself he didn’t, but the effect of watching two kickboxers try to kill each other told me he had. When he was with me last night, as manhandling as he was, he was on his most polite behavior. Even then his attentions were becoming increasingly punishing.

Dusit Thanat was a torturer. I knew that. He looked the part. Last night had just lulled me into thinking otherwise. It was coming to something like this Thai kickboxing that got his engine revved. I was in for a rough time. I started thinking again how to get out of there.

“I’ve got to go to the john,” I said between matches.

“Sure, go ahead,” he said—and he signaled one of the bodyguards. “Samat,” he said, and pointed to me.

Of course I would be escorted to the john.

When I got back, I said, “I can’t find my cellphone. You have one I can use? I’ve got to check in with my manager. I could have to work tonight.”

“I paid for you for two nights,” Dusit Thanat said. There was no reference to giving me access to a cellphone or any sort of question or concern about where or how mine had gone missing. He knew how mine had gone missing.

“I don’t really like this kickboxing thing all that much,” I said. “Could I wait in the car or something? Samat could take me to the car and we could wait there.” Chances were good I couldn’t slip away from the big bruiser of a bodyguard, but there was more of a chance I could escape from one guy than from three. My mind was already racing. If Panos had stayed at the hotel today and I could get there, I could collect the money I’d given him to hold the previous night and maybe that would get me on my way out of Bangkok. I didn’t have any clothes or anything here I couldn’t just abandon. But what means of getting out of the country could I use that a drug lord couldn’t intercept me if he wanted to?

Dusit Thanat had said we’d have a really good time after going to the fights. I shuddered at the thought of what he considered to be a good time. He really seemed to be thinking this brutal kickboxing thing was a good time.

“Yeah, I’ve had enough for today too,” Dusit Thanat was saying as he rose from his seat. “I’m in a mood to take you apart. Let’s go to the docks.”

Oh, shit.

We drove into the Klong Toy riverport area. It wasn’t a long drive, even with the enveloping traffic, so Dusit Thanat didn’t have time to wipe me out en route. He got a head start, though. I was naked, with his belt looped around my throat, being used as a leash, and he was on top of me, chewing on my nipples and with several fingers bunched up and stuffed up my channel, working on opening me up, when we pulled up in front of a big garage door in the side of a warehouse. The limo driver—the bodyguards were up front, one of them driving—sounded the car’s horn, the door rolled open, and the limo was pulled into a cavernous hangar-like building.

Other Thai thugs, dressed in black, were swarming around in the room. Back in a corner, under a mezzanine deck enclosed by windows, they had a drug lab set up. I was a doctor—a doctor who had some direct contact with drug pushers. I knew what a drug lab would look like. This was an industrial-sized one.

One of the bodyguards opened a back door of the limo, and Dusit Thanat pulled me out using the belt looped around my throat as a leash. If any of the swarming ants inside the warehouse thought it was unusual for their boss to be leading a naked young Farang—Westerner—with the physique of a Chippendales dancer around by a leash, they didn’t show it. I didn’t take that as a good sign.

The drug lord guided me up the stairs into the glassed-in mezzanine enclosure, while the two bodyguards sauntered over toward the crew cooking drugs. Upstairs was an office and living area of sorts, outfitted in a real plush style, with carpeting and everything. I presumed this was Dusit Thanat’s office. First thing he did, just to establish what was what here, was that he turned to me when I entered the room after him and hauled off and backhanded me across the face in one direction and then the other, sending me to the floor, curling up in ball in case he was going to give me a kick too. This was rougher treatment than he’d given me at his house.

Ashamedly, I went hard. This was going to be a rough fuck. To a male whore who was becoming immured to vanilla sex, something more demanding like this was arousing. He nudged me with his foot to feel me shudder. He didn’t beat on me further while I was on the floor, though. Muttering “We’re going to have one hell of a good time,” he went over to a massive desk, leaned into it, perching his butt against the edge, spread his legs, unzipped himself, and pulled his monster of a cock out.

“Come here,” he growled. When I struggled up from the floor and stumbled over to him, he grabbed me by the hair and roughly pushed me down on my knees in front of him.

“Blow me,” he said.

I opened my mouth, took his cock in, and started giving him head. He grabbed my head between his hands and forced me to take him deep. I gagged and he laughed. He leaned over me, and I realized he’d taken a set of handcuffs off his desk and he cuffed my wrists behind my back. I sucked him at great length, but he pushed me off before he came. He had a remote control in his hand and I heard a rumbling sound when he clicked it.

The back wall of the office slid open. There was another room beyond that. A sex torture chamber. My eyes bugged out at the first thing I saw: an X-frame, with a hand whip lodged in where the X crossed.

Oh, shit. Again.

We’d heard the rumble of the large garage door again while I was bringing him almost to a climax with my mouth and the burbling of loud discussion from below.

Dusit Thanat was pulling me up off my knees, and turning me toward the torture chamber beyond when one of the bodyguards came up the stairs and spoke to the drug lord in agitated tones.

“Don’t go anywhere,” Dusit Thanat said, pushing me down into a heavy metal straight chair by the desk and taking the time to cuff my ankles to the front legs before leaving the enclosure. I still had my wrists cuffed behind my back.

I was bound there for a good twenty minutes, listening to yelling and some screaming from below, until pounding on the garage door got added to the background noise, the sound of a gunshot—which in the cavernous warehouse building sounded like a canon—quite a bit of yelling and scurrying in a short minute and then just the pounding. Something hit the garage door from the outside, which caved it in, and then the noise of yelling and scurrying again.

A mix of uniform-wearing Thai and civilian-attired Farangs—Westerners—appeared at the top of the stairs, guns drawn. They fanned out around the room, checking for occupants other than me, I surmised, before one of the Westerners—a muscled up guy in his forties, who looked in charge, came up and stood in front of me.

“Do you speak English?” He asked.

“I’m an American,” I said. “I’m not with whoever you found downstairs,” I added.

“The only guy downstairs isn’t speaking any language. Conveniently, I’m with the American Embassy—and you don’t look like you cuffed yourself just to impress us. Although, I’ve got to say you impress me.” He was grinning.

“Any chance you could free me—and find me some clothes?” I asked.

“Where are your clothes?”

“They got left in the limousine last seen parked downstairs. I don’t suppose it’s still there.”

“It’s still there.” The American said something to one of the uniformed Thai guys, who went downstairs. He looked around, going into the party alcove. “There are a set of clothes in here—jeans and a T-shirt. Might be your size. These aren’t yours?”

“No,” I said. “We didn’t get that far.” I shuddered at the thought of whose they might be and why he wasn’t wearing them now. Why he didn’t need them. “Umm, this is getting a little uncomfortable,” I said, as a hint.

“Oh, sorry,” he said, coming back in and working on freeing me. It took a little effort, as Dusit Thanat had done a good job of trussing me up. As he worked, the American couldn’t avoid touching me rather intimately, given that I was naked. But I got the impression that he didn’t really try to avoid that. He was a hunk and a half for his age. I couldn’t help hardening up. I’m sure he noticed.

By the time he’d freed me, the Thai guy had returned with my trousers, bikini briefs, boots, and T-shirt. As I dressed, The American Embassy guy grilled me. I wouldn’t have minded if he’d done something else with me.

“I’m Roger Allard,” he said. “I work with the American Embassy. Today it’s drugs and I’m working with the Thai police. They’ll want to know who you are and what you were doing here. I’m pretty curious about that myself. I’ll assume until I learn otherwise that you are what you say you are, an American, and I’ll be on your side here.” The looks he was giving me indicated that he wanted to be more than just on my side.

“I’m Doug McClure,” I answered, giving him my new name, which is what my wallet that he’d pulled out of my jeans before handing them over and had in his hand was telling him about me. “I’m here with an American dance troupe, working the clubs.”

“The gay clubs?” he asked. “You’re an escort too?”

“Yes, the gay clubs. This was just an informal assignment, though. I don’t do this regularly.” Well, I did do it fairly regularly, but it was all ad hoc, it wasn’t an escort agency arrangement.

“You were brought here by Dusit Thanat?” he asked. “He brought you up here to fuck you?”

“It would appear so,” I said. I gestured toward the torture alcove. “And more . . . more than I would have wanted. I wasn’t aware of that being part of the date. And, yes, Dusit Thanat brought me here. I just met him, though. I don’t know anything about him or what he does.” I decided not to tell him that I’d spent the night with Dusit Thanat already and I’d already let him do a whole lot with me.

“It says here you’re a doctor. You aren’t into drug running as well as dancing and prostitution, by any chance?” he said.

“Not by any chance, no,” I said, giving him a level look.

“You run along the edge like this often?” he asked.

“More often than I’d like. It appears Dusit was bringing me here for something I wouldn’t want to be here for and you found me all tied up. Does it look like I’m part of the gang? Maybe you should ask him.”

“I’d ask him if I could, but there was only one guy still in here when we got in, and he’s not talking. We’ll have to catch up with Dusit Thanat some other day. We found there’s a tunnel out of here. They cleared out before we could get in. I guess you can leave and I could just see that it wasn’t reported that you were here.”

“You’d let me just leave?”

“I could see that you get back to wherever you live. Where’s that? Of course we wouldn’t want you to leave the country without checking with me at the American Embassy.”

“I’m staying at the Babylon Bangkok.”

“That isn’t far from here. I’ll drive you there myself.”

When we went downstairs, I saw what he’d meant by one guy being left behind but not talking. A Thai guy was tied to a chair in the center of the warehouse space. There was a bullet hole in the side of his head, but he’d taken a beating before that happened. That obviously had been why Dusit Thanat had been called downstairs. There was business to be done before he would be free to give me the business. Saved by a stiff and the cavalry.

When we got to the car Allard was going to drive me in, I turned and said, “You’re not letting me go without reporting I was here just out of the goodness of your heart, are you?”

“I’ve seen your dance revue at DJ Station, I know what’s on the menu for you dancers, and I think you know you don’t want to get caught into the Thai legal system because of drugs cooking connections. If we can’t use your room at the Babylon Bangkok,” he said, “I can get one at DJ Station. I have privileges there. You OK with that?” He stood back so I could get a good look at his body. It was “another” good look, as I’d already assessed him and given him “yes” marks.

“I thought so,” I responded. “You found me naked upstairs and you did more than just look me over real good—you copped a couple of feels. I didn’t mind.”

“So, you’ll let me do you?”

“You keep me out of the police system here and I’ll let you choose top or bottom.”

“You do both?”

He muttered, “Sweet,” when I nodded a “yes.”

Panos wasn’t in our room, so Allard and I fucked there. He laid me in a missionary, embracing me close, my heels rubbing his buttocks as he took me in hard, deep, strokes. He was a player—an expert. I had a good time. So, obviously, did he.

I promised to be available to him anytime he wanted me to, but, after he left, I went directly to our manager, Tony Scarlotti. I laid out my whole dilemma.

“I didn’t set this up with the Thai drug lord,” I said. “You’ll have to check with the manager of the DJ Station, Amnot, about that. But the guy, Dusit Thanat, is out there running free still. For all I know, he’ll think I set him up for the raid. I heard him create a dead guy. He could do the same for me. And he could get to the rest of the troupe too. I need to get out of here, Tony. I need to leave today . . . to get back to the States.”

“The States might not be a good idea, Doug. I know you have problems there too.”

“Listen, Tony—?”

“I can get you into another troupe. I can get you flown out tonight. In a private plane. No catching up with you getting on a commercial flight.”

“How? Where?”

“We have a troupe dancing at the Grand Diamond City Casino just across the Thai border in Cambodia at the Poipet border point. They can use another dancer. Same money, your contract would hold. I know someone who’s flying there tonight—off the flight schedules. I can get you on the plane. I can call ahead on putting you in the troupe. I think it’s the quickest, cleanest fix we can put to this.”

My heart jumped up into my throat as I was walking to the small plane at the remote flight strip outside of Bangkok. Climbing out of the cockpit to greet me was Kevin Lu, the Thai-Cambodian drug dealer who Panos and I had doubled with at the BBB Inn on Rama IV Road, near Lumphini Park, and who had set me up with Dusit Thanat at the DJ Station. I was numb as he handed me into the backseat of the plane. My mood didn’t improve when we were taking off and I found I was the only passenger. What in the hell was he flying out of here tonight if I hadn’t been added at the last minute? And if that didn’t make me queasy, when we were up in the air, headed northeast toward the Cambodian border, the seat cushion next to me came loose. It slid off as I tried to put it back in place and, under it, in a large compartment in the base of the seat, I saw piles and piles of small plastic packets filled with white power.

Oh shit.

To be continued.