Thirty hours to Singapore via Detroit and... Seoul? He wants to say Seoul. Not that it matters where the second layover was, since he'd just spaced out in the waiting area.
Since his plane touched down in Singapore, Harris' chin drops to his chest with an irresistible need to sleep at random moments. It took him two torturous hours to find his bus terminal to get out of the city.
His mind is sluggish, but even with mistakes in tallying up the hours traveled, it must have been two days since he's left Milwaukee. But his bus ticket is stamped with Wednesday, and he's left on Sunday, like three days has passed, not two. Damn time difference! It's so screwy. It makes him queasy.
Next, it's twelve hours to Kuala Perlis ferry.
Another hour by ferry to Langkawi island, Malaysia. Malaysia is suffused in soggy heat seemingly 24/7. He chugs down liters of water, and it leaves him with the desire to twist out of his skin and wring it out.
When Harris stands up on the ferry ride after the bust to stretch his swelling limbs, his head sticks up above the crowd. If he sits down, his elbows and legs get in the way of seemingly everyone else on board. And when he rents the scooter in Pantai Cenang, he has to fold them weirdly again.
He's too lanky to be here. Too awkward to do this. But he's here, as inconvenient as he is. So, he gives the scooter more gas.
After merely two wrong turns, the road brings him to the terraced villa he seeks. A crowd of masts to the east hedges a private marina. Low hills so overgrown by tropical greenery that they look like shaggy rags from the seventies crowd him on all sides. They march on and on, only interrupted by the coves. The nature seems to be custom-sized here for resorts. It wants to be and island paradise dream. Or the dreams are based on it.
But Harris didn't come to Langkawi to bathe, bask and sightsee like every other American tourist who makes it this far.
He stops by the villa's wide gates, straightens his t-shirt, smoothens his hair and finds an intercom next to a security camera.
A deep sigh in--and he presses down a button. The grounds are too extensive to hear the responding buzz. However, after only a minute, the doors of the house open up, and a sturdily-built, round-featured local matches toward him down the driveway shaded by trees. Harris doesn't know their names, but they're definitely greener than the trees back in Wisconsin.
The guard--it must be a guard--opens a smaller door by the gates a crack. He has a short-sleeved, impossibly crisp white shirt on, tacked into crease-free black slacks. His shoes are polished. Shiny black hair is pulled into a man bun. Deodorant barely wafts from him.
The spiffy guard asks him a question. Harris shrugs helplessly. "Sorry, only English."
His t-shirt is soaked in whatever moisture his body was willing to give out during three days of confinement and sleeping in a sitting position. The best smell he has on him is his mint toothpaste. His backpack looks battered and dusty. And he's riding a moped. No wonder he's taken for a delivery boy or something. He wouldn't have been guest-material for a villa like that on a good day. Today... yeah, he must look disgraceful.
"Sir," the guard asks in an accented but fluent English. "Sir, what brings you here?"
Harris crunches his empty, pitted plastic bottle between his fingers. The sound makes him cringe, but he can't stop.
"Please... could you tell Mrs. Ang that I would like to speak to her on behalf of Miss Agatha Leung?"
The guard's reflective sunglasses stare emptily at Harris. "And you are, Sir?"
YOU ARE READING
Ablaze
Mystery / Thriller||Love Triangle between a Firefighter, an Arsonist and an Heiress ♡|| Deeply wounded by his mother's betrayal, Harris, a Milwaukee firefighter, doesn't accept human failings, including his own. That's until he saves a redhead from a burning hotel...
