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

rather than just Yanks on the loose. I liked Starbucks. The coffee was good, the food was okay, and the chairs were comfortable. If that made me a closet imperialist, I could live with it.
    It was a nice morning again by local standards. The night winds had come and gone and they had left behind a dazzling blue sky without the usual layer of brown crud to spoil it. I whipped up Ploenchit Road and pulled into the McDonald’s parking area just behind the Grand Hyatt. Smiling at the brown-uniformed security guard who came over to check me out, I transferred a red one-hundred-baht note smoothly into his lightly sweating palm.
    “Korp khun maak krap.”
Thank you very much, I told him. Then I went on my way ignoring the prominently posted signs that said the parking was for McDonald’s customers only. That was something I had to admit I loved about Thailand. The joyous, unrestrained air of corruption that permeated everything made life pretty simple once you learned to go with it.
    I selected a plump cranberry-and-bran muffin, got a grande low-fat latte, and carried them both to a window table looking out onto Ploenchit Road. Someone had abandoned a copy of the
Bangkok Post
on the table and I flipped to the front page to skim the headlines while I ate. Reading an English-language newspaper in Thailand was always an adventure. Reading a Thai-language newspaper was probably an adventure, too, but I couldn’t read Thai nor could any other foreigner I knew, so I wasn’t absolutely sure.
    When I first moved to Bangkok, I discovered that the
Bangkok
Post
wasn’t anything at all like an American newspaper. The usual fare of graphic crime stories and breathless accounts of various groups demanding special treatment, preferably at the expense of other groups, was largely if not entirely absent from the pages of the
Post
. Instead, the
Post
seemed to make do with photographs of watch shop openings and incoherent stories about Thai politics, although I was never certain whether it was the stories or the politics that was more incoherent. When I got through reading the
Post,
which seldom took more than ten minutes, I was usually pretty certain that nothing much had happened anywhere in the world that was of any significance at all. That always put me in a good mood.
    My head was buried in the sports section when I heard a familiar voice at my elbow.
    “Sawadee krap, Ajarn.”
Good morning, Professor.
    Jello’s real name was Chatawan Pianskool and I had never been absolutely certain what the source of his nickname was. I always surmised it might have something to do with his physique, but I wasn’t sure. Jello was a big man with a prominent potbelly, which was unusual for a Thai. He was one of those guys a lot of people took lightly when they first met him since he was almost a cartoon of a jolly fat man, but that didn’t seem to bother Jello. On the contrary, it was something he frequently turned to his advantage.
    Jello was a Thai police captain and he had been assigned to the Economic Crime Investigation Division as long as I had known him. Whatever Jello didn’t know about what was happening in Bangkok just wasn’t worth knowing, at least when it came to finance and commerce.
    “You waiting for someone, Jack?”
    “Nope,” I answered, folding the
Post
and tossing it onto the empty table next to me. “Sit down, partner.”
    Just then a half-dozen giggling college girls tumbled in through the door and we both glanced over at the commotion. Barelegged and smooth-skinned, they were uniformly so slim that they looked like a clump of reeds waving in the wind. They were all dressed in the customary Thai university uniform: tight white shirts, sling-back heels, very short black skirts, and wide brown belts looped loosely around waists so tiny they looked as if they had to be optical illusions. Even at that age, there was a gliding grace about most Thai women that left men slack-jawed.
    Jello and I both paused respectfully to take in