Number Two

by Colin Cotterill

  Number Two

  When You Wish Upon a Star

  A Jimm Juree Short Story

  By Colin Cotterill

  Number Two: When You Wish Upon a Star

  Copyright © Colin Cotterill, 2016

  First published by Sunshine Noir 2016

  eBook Edition published by

  DCO Books, 2017

  Proglen Trading Co., Ltd.

  Bangkok Thailand

  http://www.dco.co.th

  ISBN 978-616-7817-95-8

  All Rights Reserved

  This book is a work of fiction. All names, characters, and other elements of the story are either the product of the author's imagination or else are used only fictitiously. Any resemblance to real characters, living or dead, or to real incidents, is entirely coincidental.

  Also by Colin Cotterill

  Dr. Siri Paiboun series

  The Coroner's Lunch (2004)

  Thirty-Three Teeth (August 2005)

  Disco For the Departed (August 2006

  Anarchy and Old Dogs (August 2007)

  Curse of the Pogo Stick (August 2008)

  The Merry Misogynist (August 2009)

  Love Songs from a Shallow Grave (August 2010)

  Slash and Burn (October 2011)

  The Woman Who Wouldn't Die (January 2013)

  Six and a Half Deadly Sins (May 2015)

  The Rat Catchers' Olympics (August 2017)

  Jimm Juree series

  Killed at the Whim of a Hat (July 2011)

  Grandad, There's a Head on the Beach (June 2012)

  The Axe Factor (April 2014)

  The Amok Runners (June 2016)

  Other publications

  Evil in the Land Without (2003)

  Ethel and Joan Go to Phuket (2004)

  Pool and its Role in Asian Communism (2005)

  Cyclelogical (2006)

  Ageing Disgracefully (2009)

  Bleeding in Black and White (2015)

  Contents

  Introduction to Jimm Juree

  When You Wish Upon a Star

  Introduction

  Brief description of how the Jurees ended up in Maprao, the buttock-hole of the earth.

  I’ll keep this brief because it still irks me to tell our story. My name is Jimm Juree and I was, at one stage, a mere liver failure away from fame and fortune in Chiang Mai. But our mother, Mair, dragged the family down south to run a decrepit seaside resort on the Gulf of Thailand. I’m a reporter. A real one. And as soon as the head of the crime desk at the Chiang Mai Mail completed his impending suicide by Mekhong Whisky, I was to step into his moldy old shoes; only the second female in the country to hold such a prestigious position.

  Then Mair – nutty as peanut brittle – sold our family home without telling us and headed south. With her went her father, Granddad Jah, the only Thai traffic policeman to go through an entire career without accepting bribes or kickbacks, my brother, Arny, a wimpy lamb with the body of a Greek God, and me. The only one to pass up on family obligation was Sissy, my transsexual brother. Once a cabaret star, and briefly a TV celebrity, now an ageing recluse, Sissy had become something of an internet criminal and although I haven’t forgiven her for deserting us, I do find her skills useful from time to time.

  You see, although I would never have guessed it, Maprao and its environs is a hotbed of crime. Although I’m technically the part-time social events reporter for the shitty local newspaper, barely a week goes by that I’m not chasing down some misdemeanor or another. Our local police (who make the Keystone Cops look like the SAS) are of the belief that I brought all this crime with me from the city. I know that it’s always been here but our gentlemen in brown prefer not to notice it. As they say, and quite rightly too, they just don’t get paid enough to stand in front of a loaded gun. All we get from them are complaints about all the extra paperwork we’re causing them.

  So it’s down to our disjointed family to solve the mysteries and put the perps away. We’re a surprisingly efficient team of crime fighters but I have to confess we were hopeless at running a resort and deserved all the disasters that befell us. At the time of writing this, we still haven’t been able to salvage our monsoon ravaged bungalows from the depths of the bay and we’ve spent the past year doing odd jobs to make ends meet. The bank has been particularly slow in paying out on our disaster insurance claim. But we’re refusing to budge until they do.

  As it turned out, there was some method to Mair’s madness in bringing us down south, but in order to learn what that was you’ll have to fork out some money for the actual books that tell our sorry story. Details of those are below. I can’t say too much because Sissi and I are in a long ongoing dialogue with Clint Eastwood who probably wants to turn our family exploits into a movie. In the meantime, the files that I’m sending you in this series of shorts have been collated from the astounding cases I’ve been involved in since the floods. There is an expression, “Only in Thailand”, used freely by frustrated and frustrating foreigners who like nothing better than to complain about us. But, I have to confess, most of the cases I’ve been involved in here really could only have happened in my country. I hope you enjoy them.

  Novels most likely currently under option consideration by Malpaso Productions;

  Killed at the Whim of a Hat (July 2011) - Minotaur Books, New York ISBN 9780312564537

  Grandad, There's a Head on the Beach (June 2012) - Minotaur Books, New York ISBN 9780312564544

  The Axe Factor (April 2014) - Minotaur Books, New York ISBN 9781250043368

  The Amok Runners (June 2016) - CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform ISBN 9781533265289

  There’s also an exclusive short at Criminal Element called Hidden Genders that gives you some background on Sissi.

  It won’t help you much but the writer of these stories has a web page you probably shouldn’t bother going to.

  www.colincotterill.com

  When You Wish Upon a Star

  You had about four seconds all told. You can’t say a lot in four seconds so it helps to have a plan. Some people prepared their wish, whittled it down to the bare minimum and practiced it, just in case. But even then you’d waste a second as you looked up at the sky in wonder. Mr. Grabong had his wish standing by at one side of his mind but the sky in Lang Suan was muggy with car exhaust and the lights of the town blurred the view. To see shooting stars you’d usually have to drive to the coast and look out into the gulf and be patient.

  But Mr. Grabong was putting out the garbage bin in front of his town house when he looked up at the roof and the meteoroid sliced across the sky above it. He didn’t hesitate.

  “I wish my wife would die in a car accident,’ he said.

  Not every wish made upon a star bore fruit. It depended on the alignment of the night sky with certain supernatural elements he didn’t really understand. Few people can claim success at this method of improving their lives but on that warm southern Thai night in March Mr. Grabong got lucky.

  Only a week later, Auntie Sakorn sat on the balcony of her plywood hut waiting for a breeze that wouldn’t come. The burning heat of the day had been trapped under a blanket of cloud that rolled in late in the afternoon. The languid river current couldn’t shift it. The banana leaf fan in Auntie’s hand barely stirred the air in front of her face.

  The toads grumbled. The insects shrilled off key. There were no lights along the river bank, no human sounds. Not until Auntie heard the murmur of a car engine. Few people drove there at night. There was nowhere to go to or come from. But the sound got louder and the car accelerated and within seconds its full beam cast the shadow-puppet image of trees onto the far bank.

  A speeding car was out of place in the drowsy community and it was clearly heading for the river with no hint of s
lowing down. The motor roared, the tyres squealed and the river was briefly illuminated in a glary yellow light. The car sailed majestically into the air like a bat then paused long enough for Auntie Sakorn to gasp a warm breath. The bonnet dipped and the big black beast plummeted into the muddy water. It sank until the glow from the front and rear lights merged. It reminded Auntie of a pink phosphorous jelly fish deep in the water. Then, with a muffled click, it was gone. For a few seconds the wash sloshed against the riverbanks but there followed an absolute silence when even nature held its breath. Then a dung beetle chirped and all the animals and insects of the riverbank came out of their trance and yelled about what they’d just seen. And Auntie Sakorn crawled into her plywood hut and pulled shut the bamboo door.

  I was working for the Chumphon Gazette at the time. It was a comedown from the crime desk at the Chiang Mai Mail but sometimes family commitments took priority over happiness and common sense and a girl’s career. I’d followed my mother whose dementia had convinced her to sell our shop in the north and buy a rundown resort in a place nobody ever came to. So it was I ended up writing about school sports days and hair styling competitions. It’s not as if there was no crime in Chumphon but ours was a weekly magazine-style rag and by the time it hit the streets the police had already solved the cases or been paid off. My editor, Puk, steered clear of crime because he was a young startup novice using dad’s money to make a name for himself in media

  But there was something about the flying car episode that was mysterious and, in an odd way, suitable for families. The victim and her husband were respected public officials. My editor saw it as a human interest story. The police had already decided it was an accident. Of three part-time reporters, I was chosen to write the story, not because Puk considered me his best writer, but because I lived very close to the scene of the accident. Any big newspaper ego I’d brought south had long since eroded.

  Puk gave me two days to write a piece that could be stretched over two editions. He wanted emotion and good quality cell phone photographs so he didn’t have to fork out for a professional photographer. The car still languished at the bottom of the Lang Suan River and was due to be fished out the next day. That would be his iconic front page photograph. He showed me how to hold the phone so it didn’t shake when I was taking the picture and which button to press. There were many times I was tempted to show him other tricks you could do with a cell phone.

  ‘My name’s Jimm Juree,’ I told the pudgy policeman who sat on a folding chair in the shade of a spreading duck foot tree. His tunic was unbuttoned and his white undershirt was soaking wet. He had a towel around his neck. It was March and the temperature had hit forty-three centigrade. There was still a month to go before Thai New Year brought its nourishing rains. Nobody in their right mind went out in the afternoon unless they were under orders.

  ‘So?’ he said.

  ‘I’ve come to watch them lift out the car.’

  ‘You from Nissan?’ he asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Cause someone’s coming from Nissan.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘They have to check the brakes and steering and stuff.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘But that’s not you?’

  ‘No. Can I go take a look?’

  ‘I don’t care.’

  I walked to the river bank where a small group of onlookers was gathered in the shade. In the middle of the river was a pontoon with a backhoe sitting precariously on top of it. On a concrete jetty about thirty meters away there was a crane truck, its rusty arm reaching out across the water. I joined the onlookers. I knew most of them.

  ‘Don’t you people have any work to do?’ I asked.

  I parried and sidestepped a number of jokes about my weight increase and my brother cohabiting with a woman old enough to be his mother.

  ‘So, what’s the plan here?’ I asked.

  ‘They’ll use the backhoe to pull the car out of the mud then connect it to the crane truck and winch it up the bank,’ said Meng, the plastic awning salesman.

  ‘No body in there?’ I asked.

  ‘They took her out the night the car went in,’ said fishwife Moo.

  ‘She was alone?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where did the car go in?’

  ‘Over there,’ said Es the cockfighter, pointing to another jetty on the far bank at the end of a small road.

  ‘She must have built up hell of a head of speed to get from there to the middle of the river,’ I said.

  ‘Sounded like she accelerated before she left the road,’ said the policeman who’d come to join us.

  ‘Think it was suicide?’ I asked.

  ‘Drowning’s a horrible way to go,’ said Nut the squid trapper. ‘I almost drowned when I fell off my boat drunk one night. It’s like your lungs fill up with wet cement.’

  I wondered what other reasons there’d be for a woman to drive at speed into a river. The crane operator took over from the backhoe and dragged the car slowly up the bank. It was a black Nissan Murano, one of the many cars I’d imagined buying when I got lucky on the lottery. I took several unshaken iconic photos as it emerged. The first thing I noticed was that the driver’s window was closed but the front passenger window was wide open and water poured from it.

  ‘Who brought the body out?’ I asked.

  ‘Him there,’ said Moo.

  The chocolate coloured diver who’d connected the cable trudged up the bank wearing only a pair of briefs. He was like Ghandi in Y-fronts but not as good looking.

  ‘He witnessed the sinking?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ said Nut, ‘he’s with one of them rescue foundations. They got here about an hour after it happened. Some man phoned them.’

  ‘No eye witnesses?’

  ‘Look around,’ he said.

  I did. The only livable structure in either direction was a deserted-looking hut about a hundred meters away. Everything else was vegetation, which begged the question, why would anyone build two concrete jetties in the middle of nowhere?

  The diver was far more proud of his skanky body than he deserved to be. He sat on a rock under a blazing sun and I had no choice but to hoist my Farmer’s Bank umbrella and go talk to him.

  ‘Hello sweetheart’, he said.

  ‘They tell me you pulled out the body.’

  ‘That’s right,’ he said.

  ‘Did you bring her out through the window?’ I asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The window’s open.’

  ‘It was like that when I got down there. I just opened the driver’s door, cut the seatbelt with me gutting knife and floated her up.’

  ‘So her door wasn’t locked?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Wasn’t it too dark to see?’

  ‘We’ve got a spotlight on the back of the truck. We should go for a ride in it sometime.’

  I could see he was starting to enjoy talking to me in the worst possible way so it was time to go.

  ‘Why did you cut the seatbelt?’ I asked.

  ‘Couldn’t get it open.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘You got someone?’ he asked as I walked away.

  Nuth Grabong lived in a two-storey townhouse in Lang Suan not far from the train station. It wasn’t prime real estate. The rail line slum was just along the street. There was no front yard and I wondered where they parked the Nissan before it took its dip. It wasn’t the kind of street you’d want to leave a new car on. The house had no bell so I knocked.

  ‘Come in,’ came a distant voice.

  ‘It’s me,’ I said. ‘Jimm Juree. I phoned.’

  ‘I’m at the back.’

  I walked through to the kitchen where a man in white pajamas was slouched at the table. His eyes were bloodshot and he hadn’t shaved for a few days. With a shaking hand he gestured for me to sit opposite him.

  ‘I’m very sorry for your loss,’ I said. It was the best cliché I could come up with.

  ‘She was s
uch a warm and caring woman,’ he said. He looked like he might burst into tears at any moment. ‘Such a tragic, unnecessary thing.’

  ‘I was surprised you’d be willing to speak with the press.’

  ‘It’s vital that we get the word out,’ he said.

  ‘What word is that?’

  ‘You were there, weren’t you? You saw the road she was on.’

  ‘Yes.’

  That was a lie. It was a bloody hot day. I’d done all my investigative journalism from the far bank. The end of the road was visible but I didn’t get around to seeing where it went.

  ‘Then you’ll know there’s no sign,’ he said. ‘The road just stops at the river. There’s no warning. I went there the next day and I knew right away what had happened. My darling Malee was driving home. She took a road she’d never used before. It was a good, surfaced road. How could she have possibly known it ended where it did?’

  He lowered his head and dry sobbed. There was no fan in the kitchen so I was dripping with sweat and wearing an orange cotton top that changed colour when it got wet.

  ‘What was she doing out there late at night?’ I asked.

  ‘She liked to drive at night.’

  ‘So she didn’t go to Pak Nam to meet anyone or pick up anything?’

  ‘No’

  ‘According to the police report,’ I said, ‘you and your wife are both public officials.

  ‘Yes,’ I’m at the provincial electrical authority. My wife was at the land office.’