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

ladle before catching them again. When he saw me watching him, he flashed me a big grin and bowed slightly from the waist.
    On the other leg of the counter three Arabs in white robes sat drinking tea and whispering quietly among themselves. Beyond them, two sweating, middle-aged men spoke German to each other and halting English to their young Thai companions. The older of the two men was with a girl who was round and dark with a pleasant face and a nice smile, probably not long out of some upcountry rice field. The other had a stunner draped all over him.
    The stunner was tall and slim with skin like poured honey and a cascade of glistening black hair hanging around her shoulders. Stylishly dressed in a short, red leather skirt, white blouse, black spike heels, and a matching belt with a heavy silver buckle, she was a real showstopper. The guy looked like he was about to have a stroke from all the attention he was getting from such a gorgeous creature. I suspected he might very well, not right at the moment perhaps, but almost certainly a little later when he got down to business and discovered his dazzling companion was actually a
katoey,
a man. The guy was about to learn the most fundamental rule for hitting the streets after midnight in Bangkok. Very little is ever what it seems to be.
    “Help you, sir?”
    The girl who walked up behind me was young, not more than eighteen probably, with big eyes and a slightly dumpy air about her. I wondered what she saw when she looked at the Germans and their companions for the night.
    “Gafair dam.”
Black coffee.
    The girl bobbed her head and scribbled briefly on a thick pad before walking away. A few moments later a different girl, one of those who was scurrying around behind the counter, put a white ceramic mug down in front of me. I watched her pour the coffee and nodded in acknowledgement of her slight smile. I was jumpy enough already and really didn’t need the caffeine, but I lifted the mug anyway and reflexively sipped at the thick, bitter brew. With my free hand I pushed myself around on the stool and warily checked out what I could see of the interior of the supermarket.
    I spotted the man almost immediately. He was half obscured by a tall stack of Diet Coke cans, looking me over without trying to hide it. I saw him glance at a woman standing next to him and place his hand on her arm. Then she followed his eyes and examined me too.
    The man was a westerner about my age. He was wearing khaki shorts, an expensive-looking golf shirt hanging over his belt, and dark loafers without socks. Either he was completely bald or he had shaved his head cleanly and his scalp gleamed in the light. Oddly, he had a thin rim of neatly trimmed gray beard that ran all the way from ear to ear. The overall effect was to make his oval face look almost upside down. At a glance the man was largely interchangeable with the lean, tanned, middle-aged Western guys you could find around any of the five-star hotels in town favored by visiting executives. Well off, poised, cocky almost.
    The woman was another story. I doubted she was interchangeable with anybody.
    She was probably in her twenties and looked Chinese, except that she was at least six feet tall. Slim, graceful, and feminine in spite of her height, she was dressed in loose, dark slacks and a man’s white shirt. Her dark eyes looked tranquil, yet something gave her a quality of vigilance. She made me think of a cat lazing in the shade of a summer’s day, ready to spring into motion at the first sign of a pigeon.
    I was already willing to bet this was the guy who had called me; and since the woman looked as if she was standing guard over him, I wondered briefly if that meant
I
was going to turn out to be the pigeon.
    The man gave a little tug on the woman’s arm and they started toward me. When they were still fifteen or twenty feet away, she moved slightly to one side and leaned back against the chrome railing separating the store’s