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

the passing procession. In a lot of countries, two middle-aged men watching college girls in a coffee shop meant trouble, but in Thailand it was different. Feminine beauty was the country’s pride, not the humdrum landscape of its countryside. To admire it when you were in its presence was as acceptable as enjoying an ocean view in Hawaii.
    When the girls had passed, Jello pulled out a chair and laid two chocolate croissants on a napkin alongside a large coffee.
    “What’s new,
Arjan
?” he asked.
    “Not much,” I said. “Same old same old.”
    I had absolutely no intention of telling a senior ECID cop about Barry Gale. At least not yet.
    “You working on anything important for Dollar these days?” he asked.
    “Nope, nothing really.”
    “Seen Dollar recently?”
    “Not for a couple of days. Why are you so interested in Dollar this morning?”
    “I heard something a little strange about him.”
    I said nothing, but my antenna quickly deployed and made a couple of quick rotations. Jello wasn’t a man for idle gossip. Something was coming.
    “I talked to Just John about an hour ago,” Jello went on. “John told me Dollar got beaten up last night.”
    “Beaten up?
Oh, come on. John must have been pulling your leg.”
    Jello picked up his cup and blew on the coffee before he tasted it. He didn’t say anything and I saw he wasn’t smiling.
    “I don’t think so,
Arjan.
He said that Dollar and some client got jumped by two guys when they came out of the office last night.”
    “Dollar’s office? Dollar was mugged coming out of the United Center?”
    “Yeah, in front of that Délifrance on the ground floor. I hear he put up a flight. Even knocked over one of those tables with the umbrellas when they were all rolling around.”
    “What time was this supposed to have happened?”
    “About ten.”
    I still couldn’t believe it. Jello looked unimpressed by my skepticism, but that did nothing to change my point of view.
    “Was Dollar hurt?” I asked.
    “Apparently not. He didn’t even bother to report it to the police.” Jello’s mouth was half full and he dribbled a few crumbs of croissant onto the table.
    Residents didn’t get mugged in Bangkok, only tourists, and even then mostly Taiwanese tourists for some reason. That approach had apparently become something of a firm rule among muggers since Taiwanese tourists seldom had much interest in returning at their own expense to testify against them, even if the mugger was unlucky enough to get caught—which he almost never was.
    “Who was the client?” I asked.
    “What client?”
    “The one Dollar was with when he was mugged.”
    “Oh.” Jello started in on the second croissant and sipped at his coffee again before he answered. “Just John didn’t say.”
    It was hard to believe that Dollar could have been mugged coming out of the United Center on Silom Road at ten o’clock at night. That was one of the highest profile spots in Bangkok, and at that time of night the sidewalk should have been crowded with punters going back and forth to Patpong just down the street.
    “Why don’t you call Dollar and ask him what really happened?” Jello suggested.
    I looked at my watch. Coming up fast on ten. I had to get going or I would be late for my class.
    “It all sounds like a lot of nothing,” I said. “I gotta go. I’ve got a class to teach.”
    We said our goodbyes and I headed out. As I pushed out through the door, I glanced back over my shoulder.
    Jello was still sitting quietly at the table, twisting his coffee cup with one hand and polishing off the second of his chocolate croissants with the other. He licked the last crumbs off his thumb and forefinger and stared straight ahead at the street, apparently thinking about nothing more important than the traffic flowing past on Ploenchit Road.
    But I knew Jello and I knew that wasn’t true. Something had just happened, only I couldn’t figure out what it was.

THIRTEEN
    MY TEN O’CLOCK class