Number Ten
Tom Tom
A Jimm Juree Short Story
By Colin Cotterill
Number Ten: Tom Tom
Copyright © Colin Cotterill, 2019
DCO Books
eBook Edition published by
Proglen Trading Co., Ltd. 2019
Bangkok Thailand
http://www.dco.co.th
eBook ISBN 978-616-456-013-0
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
Tom Tom
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
Tom Tom
Granddad Jah still wasn’t speaking to me. I’d shamed him. I’d shamed the whole family. Even my mother, Mair, who really didn’t lose much sleep over trivialities, had started to look at me the way a prison visitor might glare through the smoky glass. Perhaps if I’d been earlier for lunch I might have been able to open the letter before Granddad Jah arrived at the table. But I was late as usual.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“A pumpkin,” I said.
“I really don’t know where she gets this sarcasm from,” he said. “Her grandmother and I were certainly polite enough to answer a reasonable question with a reasonable answer.”
I looked around the table. If he wasn’t responsible for my sarcasm, that could only have left Mair, to my left, and my supposed father, Kao, beside her. My brother, Arny, sitting opposite, had not one sarcastic bone in his body, which, given the ‘sarcasm by gene’ theory, probably meant he was illegitimate.
“Father, perhaps the girl did not consider ‘What’s that?’ to be a reasonable question, given that it’s obviously a letter,” said Mair.
I loved it when she was on my side.
“Isn’t that right, Jenny?” she said.
I wasn’t so fond of her when she got lost walking home from the market, put ice-cream in the microwave, or got my name wrong, again.
“My name’s still Jimm, Mair,” I reminded her.
“Of course it is,” said Mair.
“But it’s not just a letter, is it?” said Granddad. “I can see from the insignia that it’s an official police document. So, why would the police be writing to you, Girl?”
Granddad had spent forty years with the Royal Thai Police as a traffic cop. As he’d refused to take bribes he’d risen to the lofty rank of corporal.
“I’ll let you know when I open it,” I said. “Later.”
And I put it in my shoulder bag, which hung from the back of my seat.
This was our weekly get-together. Technically, we were homeless while we waited for the painfully slow reconstruction of our seaside resort. It had been completely destroyed by a storm in the previous monsoon season, and we’d been fighting ever since for the bank to pay out on our natural disaster insurance policy. We met every Sunday at Captain Kao’s, had lunch, and talked about our week. Everyone else talked about how dull their lives were. I talked about the exciting criminal cases I covered freelance for the national newspapers. I may have exaggerated the excitement somewhat, and I certainly didn’t mention how little it paid.
Mair was a minute into a story she’d probably made up, about her childhood in Bosnia, when we heard a motorcycle approach along the gravel driveway. The dogs went nuts. Arny went to the window.
“It’s Da,” he said.
He was emotionally wagging a bit because his engagement to Gaew the body builder was off, and he was fond of the young clinic nurse.
“Tell her to come in,” said Mair. “Plenty of food for one more.”
Arny went outside but returned without her.
“She said she can’t stop,” said Arny. “She wants to see you, Jimm. Says it’s urgent. She seems to be in a bit of a state.”
So I jogged outside. Da was in her uniform but her hair wasn’t in its usual neat bun. It hung loose and wild. She was naturally skinny but the recent addition of a couple more kilos gave her the type of figure I’d been asking Santa for since I was a teenager. To make matters worse, she had a lovely face. She was still seated on her motorcycle, looking behind her. When she turned to look at me, I could tell she’d been crying.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Jimm,” she said. “I....”
And she broke down. I went up and held her and gave her a soft bosom to cry on. It was the only value my bosom had in those days.
I said, “There, there,” even though I had no idea what it meant, but it seemed to calm her down.
“I’m ... I’m being followed,” she said.
“Who by?” I asked.
“I don’t know him. He’s a stalker.”
“Has he tried anything?”
“Not yet. But he’s been in my room when I wasn’t there. He’s taken things. He left a photograph.”
“Of himself?”
“Yes.”
“Then we should take it to the police.”
“I don’t think it’ll help,” she said.
She reached into her top pocket and handed me the photo. She was right. It wouldn’t help – not unless the police had a catalogue of mug shots of erect penises.
“We should still go to the police,” I said.
“I can’t, Jimm,” she said. “You know that place. It’s all men there. They’d take the piss out of me something rotten.”
She was right about that, too. Not a lot of sensitivity training going on at our local Maprao police station. But there was always my favourite gay lieutenant. He had sensitivity in buckets.
“How about Chom?” I said. “Can we tell him?”
“No, Jimm. He’d still have to file an official report.”
“Then what do you want me to do?” I asked.
“Can you ... can you stay with me a few nights until he goes away?”
“I don’t get the impression stalkers are discouraged by the presence of a second potential victim,” I said.
“Please, Jimm. I’m afraid.”
Against my better judgement I agreed.
“Have you actually seen him?” I asked. “I mean the rest of him.”
“Only from a distance, in the bushes opposite my room. But mostly I just know he’s there. I’m sure he followed me here.”
She looked back over her shoulder.
“Are you on duty this afternoon?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“All right. You go to the clinic now. It’s always busy on Sundays, so you have nothing to worry about there. Do your shift and I’ll come by about six and go back with you.”
She was still looking back along the track.
“He’s not here,” I told her. “If he was, the dogs would have eaten him by now. They have pervert radar.”
*
She left, and I went back into the house. I was appalled to see my letter from the police open on the table.
“Well, well,” said Granddad Jah. He was leaning back on his chair with his arms folded.
“That is private correspondence,” I said with a heavy dollop of indignity.
“Nothing private about criminal activity,” he said.
Mair and Captain Kao had left the table and were washing the dishes. I detected a smile on Mair’s lips. Arny looked as if he’d just learned his sister was a serial killer. I stamped over to the table and picked up the letter. On one side was a photo of our Mighty X. The windshield was greasy and reflected the sunlight, so you couldn’t make out the driver. Beneath was a second photo, a close-up of the license plate. Absolutely our truck. The crime, as detected, was of driving at 98 kph in an 80 kph zone on the highway through La Mae. It cited Granddad Jah as the truck’s owner because it was registered in his name. On the back were dates and details and a section on how to pay the fine of five hundred baht.
Of course, it was me. Who in his right mind could ever sit on 80 kph on a straight, boring highway? The police know it’s impossible. It was probably their little joke. Even eight-wheelers and monkeys on motorcycle sidecars would exceed such a stupid limit. I could get up to 80 kph in third gear. There are people who ride bicycles faster than that.
“How do you know it was me?” I said.
“They have state-of-the-art technology. They don’t make mistakes, Girl.”
I shuddered at the thought of technology in the hands of the Thai police.
“I am so, so disappointed,” said Granddad Jah.
“It’s a speeding ticket,” I said. “As a crime it counts about the same as opening someone else’s mail.”
“Once you’re on the dark side of the law, there’s no crossing back,” he said. “Today, speeding. Tomorrow, dealing drugs in unlit alleyways with a stiletto in your raincoat pocket.”
He got to his feet.
“I can’t forgive you for this,” he said. “You have brought shame down upon our good name. You are no granddaughter of mine. I have nothing more to say to you.”
And he walked out. So, you see? It wasn’t all bad news. I thought I might enjoy Granddad not speaking to me for a while. On the few occasions he’d engaged me in conversation in the past, it was usually with an insult or a complaint. I wouldn’t miss that at all. But he was even scarier silent than he was his gruff old self. So Mair said I should do what it took to fix things. I had no idea where to start.
*
I was waiting in front of the Maprao clinic when Da finished her shift. She seemed relieved to see me. I parked my bicycle there and went to her place on her motorcycle. She lived in a single-storey unit at the end of a terrace of six similarly basic places. It must have been a bit like living in a concrete rabbit hutch. Inside was ‘the room’ and ‘the shower and toilet section’ that didn’t go all the way up to the ceiling. There was a metre of ground concrete front and rear, presumably for recreational purposes and to park the motorcycle. I didn’t ask how much rent she paid, but anything in double figures would have been extortion.
“This is temporary,” she said, obviously reading my mind. “I’m having a house built out by Bang Ga temple. Nice place. Two storeys. Plenty of garden space.”
I wasn’t sure I believed her, but it was a nice fantasy. She was a clinic nurse in her mid-twenties and she’d have to save into her sixties for such a dream to become reality.
“So, do you think your stalker broke in through the door?” I asked.
“Window,” she said, walking me to the rear wall.
The window comprised two sliding panes in an aluminium frame. The lock, if one could call it that, was a small button on one side. You could pop out the whole unit with a to
othpick.
“Did he at least put the window back when he’d finished?” I asked.
“No. It was in the back yard.”
“So, he’s creepy and inconsiderate,” I said. “What did he take?”
“Two bras.”
“Nothing else?”
“No.”
“So, he’s a breast man. And you said you saw him?”
We walked back to the door. I’m making this sound like we did a lot of walking in this little hutch, but two large steps in either direction and you’d hit a wall.
“Out there,” she said, pointing through the doorway to the other side of the vacant lot that would some sweet day boast even more concrete hutches. There was still unclaimed forest to destroy.
“It gets hot in here, even with the fan on, so those units that are occupied usually have the doors open for some air. We close them at bed time. He was in the bushes over there.”
“What was he doing?” I asked.
“He was taking a selfie,” she said.
I admit I wasn’t expecting that answer.
“That’s why I couldn’t see his face,” she continued. “He had his back to me.”
“Do you know and trust your neighbours?” I asked.
“Only two other rooms are occupied,” said Da. “And they’re both women … old, heavy. Neither of them would fit into my bras.”
Undaunted, I continued with my sensible security questions.
“Do you sleep with the windows open?” I asked.
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