Free Dead and Kicking by Geoffrey McGeachin

fire, and then more beers. Henk chatted to the waitresses in appalling Thai and they laughed a lot, which is what girls with mothers and grandmothers and brothers and sisters to support do when the rich farangs say pretty much anything. Of course, all over the world rich men have no problem getting good-looking women to laugh at their jokes.
    At Henk’s request Ry Cooder was on the sound system, and we pretty much had the place to ourselves. The owner and the girls were in the kitchen making dessert and giggling about something or someone when a spray of lead from a submachine gun displaced the gaggle of mosquitoes circling above my head.
    The shooter was perched on the back of a red Honda motorcycle stopped out on the roadway. I grabbed Henk and dragged him off his seat and down onto the floor. Luckily for us, the gunman was an amateur. The muzzle climb of a short-barrelled submachine gun firing full auto lifted the weapon upwards, and most of the contents of the shooter’s thirty-round magazine blasted into the restaurant’s roof. The thatched ceiling disintegrated in the stream of bullets, raining all sorts of bugs and spiders and crap down on top of us as we sprawled face down on the tiled floor.
    The motorcycle screamed away, leaving us in dead silence except for the sound of Ry Cooder’s slide guitar and some whimpering coming from the kitchen. The Dutchman lifted a lump of thatch off his head and looked at me.
    ‘
Godverdomme
, Alby,’ he gasped. ‘You’re a dangerous bugger to know.’
    I didn’t really feel I could give him much of an argument on that.

SIXTEEN
    Henk made a couple of phone calls from the restaurant while I helped the owner and waitresses clean up the mess. Surprisingly, the damage was minimal and the smiles and laughter were back after about ten minutes, but neither Henk nor I felt in the mood to party on. The bill for the food and booze came to less than ten bucks, but I left a hundred to cover the repairs.
    My mood improved a little when we got back to the Dutchman’s housing estate and found security had been beefed up and a dozen heavily armed men in uniform were watching the main gate.
    ‘This is where having a general for a landlord really pays off,’ Henk said, waving to the soldiers as we drove past.
    The Dutchman decided to call it a night, but I was still pumping with the adrenaline rush from the near miss in the bar. I snapped on the TV in the living room and had the usual viewing dilemma of a thousand channels and none of them worth watching. Chiang Rai locals made regular cross-border forays into Myanmar to buy black-market Viagra and discount satellite dishes, though I always wondered what the hell you’d need a TV for if you were gulping down Viagra on a regular basis.
    I settled down on a comfortable couch with the curtains drawn, lights off and the sound on the TV turned down, and channel surfed with the remote until my thumb fell asleep and the rest of me followed not too long afterwards.
    According to my trusty old Omega it was just after ten in the morning when I woke up. There was no sign of the Dutchman so I made a pot of coffee and some toast and scrambled half a dozen eggs straight out of the local free-range chooks. I didn’t really expect to find any cream in Henk’s fridge but there was butter and milk, and with some chopped fresh chilli, coriander and ground black pepper the eggs came out okay.
    The TV was still on in the living room, and when I wandered back in from the balcony a news broadcast out of Vietnam was showing an aerial shot of a smoking patch of heavily wooded hillside. There was some grainy old footage of a Vietnam-era Huey, the footage of the smoking hillside again and then they showed a couple of passport-type pictures – of Jack and VT.
    Henk walked in from the recording studio. ‘Jesus, Alby,’ he said, ‘you look crook. Something you ate?’
    I shook my head. ‘Something I saw.’
    ‘You sure you don’t need a Stemetil or some