Inspector Zhang Gets His Wish by Stephen Leather Read Free Book Online Page A

really wanted to tell Mr and Mrs Clare that the best way of finding where Jon Junior had gone would be to find out where he was and if that sounds a bit like Alice in Wonderland, then welcome to Thailand. But I didn’t. I just kept on smiling reassuringly.
    “Do you think we should stay in Bangkok?” asked Mr Clare.
    I shrugged. “That’s up to you. But I can’t offer any guarantees of how long it could take. I might be lucky and find him after a couple of phone calls. Or I might still be looking for him in two months.”
    “It’s just that my cousin Jeb is minding the shop, and when the good Lord was handing out business acumen, Jeb was standing at the back of the queue playing with his Gameboy.” He held up his hands.   “Not that money’s an issue, It ’s not. But Mr Richards said there wasn’t much that Mrs Clare and I could do ourselves, not being able to speak the language and all.”
    I nodded sympathetically.   “He’s probably right. You’d only be a day away if you were back in Utah. As soon as I found anything, I’d call you.”
    “God bless you, Mr Turtledove,” said Mrs Clare, and she reached over and patted the back of my hand.   She looked into my eyes with such intensity that for a moment I believed that a blessing from her might actually count for something.
    “I would say one thing, just to put your minds at rest,” I said.   “If anything really bad had happened, the police would probably know about it and the embassy would have been informed.   And if he’d been robbed, his credit card would have been used, here or elsewhere in the world. If it had been theft, they wouldn’t have thrown the card away.”
    “You’re saying you don’t think that He’s dead, that’s what You ’re saying?” said Mrs Clare.
    I nodded and looked into her eyes and tried to make it look as if my opinion might actually count for something.
    Her husband was leaning forward, his eyes narrowing as if he had the start of a headache. He looked like a man who had something on his mind.
    “Is there something else, Mr Clare? Something worrying you?”
    He looked over at his wife and she flashed him a quick, uncomfortable smile. Yes, there was something else, something that was painful that they didn’t want to talk about.
    “We read something in the paper, about a fire,” said Mr Clare. “In a nightclub.”
    “Jon Junior wouldn’t be in a nightclub,” said his wife, quickly.
    Too quickly.
    The nightclub they were talking about was the Kube.   Two hundred and eighteen people had died. A lot had been foreigners. Most of the bodies still hadn’t been identified.
    I nodded and tried to look reassuring. “That was last week,” I said.
    March the thirteenth, to be exact. A Saturday.
    “We wondered …” said Mr Clare. “We thought…” He shuddered and Mrs Clare reached over to hold his hand.
    “Jon Junior doesn’t go to nightclubs,” said Mrs Clare. “He doesn’t drink. He doesn’t like the music.”
    “If…” said Mr Clare, but then he winced as if he didn’t want to finish the sentence. I tried an even more reassuring smile to see if that would help. To my surprise, it did.   “If Jon Junior was by any chance involved… in the fire.” He rubbed his face with both hands.   “Would they tell us? Would they even know? They said that the bodies ..”   He shuddered.
    Burnt beyond recognition. That’s what they’d said.
    The more salacious Thai newspapers had run pictures of the aftermath of the fire and it wasn’t pretty. I could see why the Clares wouldn’t want to talk about the possibility of their son being among the dead.
    “I really don’t think that’s likely,” I said, and I meant it.
    “But they haven’t identified all the bodies,” said Mr Clare, happier to talk about it now that I’d downplayed it as a possibility. “And there were a lot of foreigners. More than fifty they said in the Tribune.”
    “That’s true. But there are other