Free LAUNDRY MAN (A Jack Shepherd crime thriller) by Jake Needham

still an awful lot of screwy things about Barry’s story. It was unlikely, probably impossible, for vast amounts of money to have disappeared from ABC accounts all over the world at exactly the same time without the active collusion of somebody inside the bank. How could Barry not have thought of that since that was exactly the way he had scammed Texas State Bank in the first place? But he didn’t seem to have thought about it; or if he had, he chose not to mention it to me.
    “So what does Jimmy have to say about all this?” I asked after a while.
    “Are you fucking
kidding
me, Jack? You remember Harold Wilkins? He only lost
one
million dollars and you know what happened to him.”
    “In other words, you haven’t told Jimmy?”
    “No fucking way, man. No way he’d believe I wasn’t scamming him. Why do you think I’m hiding out in Bangkok?”
    I glanced back at the woman again. She was about fifty feet back, right where she’d been since we left Foodland.
    “So what are you going to do, Barry?”
    “The way I figure it, I’ve got only one chance. I have to find that money and prove to Jimmy that I had nothing to do with it disappearing in the first place.”
    All of a sudden Barry stopped walking and pointed his forefinger at me.
    “You know more about international banking and money laundering than anyone I know, Jack. I need your help.”
    “Me?
You want
me
to help you find your money?”
    “Money’s hard to hide. It always leaves footprints. A guy who knows how can follow them anywhere. You’re the best there is, Jack, so you’re my guy. I need you to find the footprints and tell me where they lead.”
    “You have got to be kidding me,” I said.
    Barry looked back at the woman trailing us and held her eyes briefly. Then he lifted his left index finger and pointed to a pedestrian bridge just ahead of us that crossed over Sukhumvit Road to the Sheraton Hotel. Immediately she walked toward us, passed by without a word, and started up the concrete steps to the bridge. Barry kept his eyes on me.
    “Come on, Jack. You can do this. Help me here. I’m twisting in the wind.”
    “Look, Barry, even if I was willing to help you, and even if I somehow found the bank’s money, what good would it do? Somebody else would still have it and you’d still be screwed.”
    “Yeah, but you haven’t heard the rest of my plan yet.”
    The woman was about halfway up the steps, walking lightly on the balls of her feet like someone poised for a fast take off. There was no one within earshot, but Barry leaned slightly toward me anyway as if he wanted to be certain he was not overheard.
    “After you find the money,” he whispered, “I want you to steal it back.”
    Then Barry turned away, jogged up the steps, and caught up with the woman near the top. I just stood there and followed them both with my eyes as they crossed the bridge and disappeared into the Sheraton. I was too dumbfounded to do anything else.

TWELVE
    THE NEXT MORNING I overslept. I showered and dressed as quietly as I could in order not to wake Anita, got the Volvo out of the garage, and made straight for Starbucks. With any luck, I could soak up enough caffeine and sugar to set me up nicely for my ten o’clock class. The course was a real yawner, even for me—a lecture series on the application of American securities regulations to capital raisings in the United States by foreign companies—and I assumed my students really hated it. Today in particular, without a caffeine high and a sugar buzz I didn’t have a hope in hell of getting through it.
    There were some people I knew who vilified Starbucks as an American corporate giant heartlessly homogenizing the unique cultures of the world in the headlong pursuit of profits. Strangely, I had noticed that the people who put the most energy into their vilifying were generally other Americans, mostly the kind you met abroad who were trying way too hard to be perceived as high-minded citizens of the world