Free Jimm Juree 01; Killed at the Whim of a Hat by Colin Cotterill Page B

However, unless any of the snakes were prepared to give evidence, it didn’t do a thing for Abbot Kem. I thanked him and watched him stroll back along the path, stopping here to pick up broken branches, there to pluck a dead leaf from a plant. As I walked down to the truck, I considered the variables. One resounding question that stuck in my mind was: Would a man who valued life enough to step between a pack of dogs and a cobra be able to kill another human being? But, I’d seen stranger things.
    ♦
    “How did you manage to talk your way past all those policemen?” I asked Arny as I climbed into the truck.
    “I didn’t have to.”
    “You must have said som – Oh, you were anxious, weren’t you?” He nodded. “And when you’re anxious your eyes water.” He nodded again. “And they thought you were crying and in desperate need to pray.”
    “It was stressful,” he confessed.
    I could picture the scene. Arny steps out of the truck. He’s surrounded. He panics. The detectives decide the only reason a one-hundred-kilogram brick barn would burst into tears is if he’s in desperate need of salvation. See? I knew there was a reason to bring Arny along. I climbed up his left side and gave him a kiss on the cheek. He liked it.

Four
“ Information is moving. You know, nightly news is one way, of course, but it’s also moving through the blogosphere and through the Internets .”
    —GEORGE W. BUSH, WASHINGTON, D.C., MAY 2, 2007
    T wo or three nights a week I’d phone Sissi in Chiang Mai or she’d phone me. We’re probably as close as two siblings who have nothing in common can be. I love her but I keep expecting that phone call where she says, “Jimm, I’ve decided you’re only pretending to like me so I don’t want to talk to you anymore.” That would bring her close-friend count down to exactly zero. To explain her temperament I’d need to go back a ways with this story.
    When I was growing up it took me a while to realize that boys and girls were different. I’m not talking anatomically here, I mean, my brother Somkiet and I were one creature, and it was decidedly pink. We co-wore all my clothes but never his. We giggled and slapped a great deal. We had dolls and we spent an awfully long time looking at me in the shower. Mair started off angry. “You take off that nightie at once, mister, and clean your football boots.”
    Granddad Jah bought him boxing gloves and enrolled him in the local gym. But over the years I felt a gradual decline in their resolve to divert Somkiet from the flowery path he skipped along. In fact it was Mair who gave him the final push.
    At sixteen, Somkiet was at that crossroads we hear so much about and was in desperate need of good advice, preferably from a father figure. But all he got at home was Granny preparing herself for nirvana, Granddad Jah moping about his lack of advancement through the ranks of the police force, and me, hopelessly in love with Liu De Hua, the Hong Kong TV star. Nothing seemed as important to me as Liu. Even I had abandoned Somkiet. Once she’d given up her happy life, Mair waded through several years of depression. She lived like Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest. Her world started at the pavement in front of our shop and ended at the spirit house at the back fence. We weren’t much of a support group for a girl in a boy’s skin.
    Somkiet’s two years at high school were probably miserable. He loved to study. He was smart and could have turned his hand to anything. But he was one of a small gaggle of what they call grateuys at his school, whose hobby was to mince around the yard, squeal loudly and do their nails during maths. There were no escape clauses, no crossovers. You had to be either one or the other: a serious student or a fairy. If peer pressure hadn’t been so great, and faculty expectations so meager, Somkiet could have found his way into any university in the country. But those were confusing times. Boys who wanted to be girls had