Free Curse of the Pogo Stick by Colin Cotterill Page A

few seconds Father and Mother will return From taking care of the cows .
    He then ad-libbed a line of his own:
Where the bloody hell are you, Mother and Father?
    He shook the water from his hair and opened his eyes to see seven females of various shapes and sizes standing in a line watching him. The youngest was no older than twelve; the oldest in her forties. They were dressed in similar black costumes decorated with fine embroidery. They were all smiling with not the slightest flush of embarrassment. Siri, for want of any more fitting recourse, gave a low seated bow. After a slight pause the audience laughed and clapped their hands.

7
    CASHEWS MAKE ME FART
    A lthough it seemed hardly possible, the second attempt on the lives of the coup spoilers was even more dastardly than the first. And more deadly. Phosy had discovered very little about the Lizard. The photograph on the wanted poster was the result of her only arrest. It transpired that she had been caught quite by chance with a forged pass to an official event at the Monument to the Unknown Soldier. It was an award ceremony at which the Medal of the Brave, Level 2, was given posthumously to unsung heroes of the revolution: the People’s Liberation Army equivalent of the Purple Heart. The government decided it needed more role models for the younger generation and was dragging old soldiers from their graves and making them celebrities.
    The Lizard had brought a wreath with a card claiming that she was a representative of the Luang Nam Tha Ladies Farming Cooperative. She laid her flowers at the foot of the monument around which stood several senior Party members, the chief of the armed forces, and the president. The Lizard was just about to step back, and presumably retreat, when the unthinkable happened. Against all the odds, the actual representative from the Luang Nam Tha Cooperative was in attendance. She stepped forward to get a better look at the wreath, pointed to the interloper, and shouted, “This woman is an impostor.”
    Several officers of the presidential guard piled onto the Lizard and the dignitaries were hurried away. The lady guards of the PLA discovered that the old woman had a Smith & Wesson K-38 Combat Masterpiece, strapped to one thigh beneath her traditional skirt. An inspection of the wreath revealed a time bomb buried in the leaves with less than five minutes left to run on the clock. At the nearest police station they fingerprinted the terrorist and took her photograph before loading her into a closed truck. On her way to the Security Division and inevitable torture, she had smiled at her four armed guards. Between her teeth they saw a small white capsule.
    “Ricin,” she told them. “Virtually instantaneous.”
    She bit down on the capsule and swallowed it. Although the guards did their utmost to remove the capsule and revive her, she was unconscious within a minute. There was no pulse. They explained what had happened to the officials at Security and the resident medic could not find any vital signs of life.
    Somewhere between the moment they laid out her body in an open cell and three the following morning the corpse disappeared. The details were a little foggy. As usual in the socialist state nobody wanted to take the blame. It wasn’t until the same woman was identified from her photograph at a subsequent act of terrorism that the PLA Security Division admitted she must have been alive when they had bagged her body that night. They had no idea how that could have been. There was conjecture that the pill she consumed may have served to slow down her pulse to a point that it was almost undetectable or that she may have actually died and come back to life again. Either way several officers were demoted.
    The fingerprint check produced nothing, as almost all of the fingerprint records had been destroyed by the retreating Royalists. The That Luang police station hadn’t actually known what to do with them as they had no relationship with