Number Four

by Colin Cotterill

  Number Four

  The Zero Finger Option

  A Jimm Juree Short Story

  By Colin Cotterill

  Number Four: The Zero Finger Option

  Copyright © Colin Cotterill, 2018

  First published DCO Books 2018

  eBook Edition published by

  DCO Books, 2018

  Proglen Trading Co., Ltd.

  Bangkok Thailand

  http://www.dco.co.th

  ISBN 978-616-456-001-7

  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

  The Zero Finger Option

  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

  The Zero Finger Option

  Technically they could have called it a cyber crime as the seeds that would grow into gnarled, thorny, red-tinted branches in her head were sown on the internet. That might have been more appropriate. To be convicted by a jury of her Facebook peers and executed by a short circuit in her mouse – that would have fitted the deed. Because it was a website that badgered her into committing that awful crime, one for which she felt no remorse whatsoever. It seems so outdated for her to be locked in a brick and metal bar room – soon to have a chemical cocktail pumped through her arteries until she twitches and dribbles her way to the afterlife. They wouldn’t even allow her a laptop to document her motives. They said she might attempt to swallow its parts and deprive them of that morbid show. The worst fate I could imagine from eating a laptop computer is chronic indigestion. So they gave her three sheets of paper and a ballpoint pen. Naturally, she could have used the latter to gouge out her eye and bled to death but that seemed too archaic a hara-kiri for the IT crime unit in Kuala Lumpur to even contemplate. The world will never suffer from a shortage of fools.

  I received the first letter by regular mail on June 6th. The postman had trouble finding me because I didn’t have an address. It had been six months since my family-run resort was washed out into the Gulf of Thailand leaving me, my mother, my grandfather, and my brother refugees. We were scattered to the four points of a very small compass; all of us within cycling distance but none of us coordinated. Mair, my mother, still had this unlikely dream that the bank would pay out on disaster insurance and we’d all be sucked back into the vacuum of her heart. She imagined we’d build a new resort, more beautiful than the original, and make so much money we could establish Gulf Bay Lovely Resort franchises all the way up the coast. She seemed to have forgotten we hadn’t even been able to turn a profit on the one we lost.

&
nbsp; There however were ways to find homeless people in Maprao. It was a place few people came to and even fewer opted to stay in. Kids were leaving school and jumping on the first train north to escape the coconuts and squid and palm berries and the stink of sun-drying mackerel. Our postman had to ask where that reporter girl was living and someone pointed in the direction of my temporary shelter. I was still in my concrete shophouse but no longer pretending to be a photographer. When the letter arrived I was pretending to be an English tutor for middle-school kids. I wasn’t that fond of children but I could tolerate them in limited flurries. I couldn’t spot any future Nobel Prize winners amongst my flock. I still had my part-time job as social affairs correspondent for the Chumphon Gazette aka News aka Post (the owner couldn’t make up his mind) but that didn’t cover the rent nor keep me in sticky rice and mangoes. When the postman flicked the envelope at me without bothering to get off his motorbike it sailed through the air like a Frisbee and landed on the desk in front of me. I was impressed. I prayed it was a job offer. It wasn’t. But the contents were weird enough to make up for that disappointment.

  “Dear Jimmlin”, it began.

  It was written on a torn off rectangle of lined paper. I was already hooked. It was written in English, which was the language I would have chosen to be born into if I’d had a chance. It was from Chiang Mai, where I grew up and became a legend unto myself, and it used the name that only people who didn’t know me called me by. And that told me this was probably from someone I went to school with. Nobody ever knew me there. The letter was neatly hand-written in blue ink and unsigned. Receiving personal mail through the post office seemed so ancient. I looked back at the envelope. There was a post office frank but no sender’s name. The letter itself had no introduction. It just leaped into the story;

  “It all began innocently enough. I have – or, I suppose, had – two weeks of holiday a year and I fancied a trip to Europe. I was a year from retirement [so, perhaps she’d been one of my teachers?] and decided to splurge whilst still earning a salary. Once I was on a pension I’d be limited to the dull northern Thai outdoors. I was inspired by a full-page Asian Wings ad in the newspaper. It began with the headline, “GREAT NEWS. SPECIAL PROMOTION. PARIS RETURN FOR ONLY 9,999 BAHT.” You couldn’t even get a minibus to the Lao border and back for that. Nune, the school receptionist had told me there were so many budget airlines they were all waging a war to recruit customers. Sensational offers were commonplace. It didn’t occur to me for a second that a company might put a fraudulent advertisement in a national newspaper. There had to be some watchdog committee to vet such things. As a woman of what they call ‘a certain age’, I wanted to believe there was somebody in some law enforcement agency looking out for me.”

  I like a woman with a sense of humour but I already feared for her. I wanted to read on but my advanced class students arrived noisily. ‘Advanced’ in this context meant “Could correctly spell and pronounce their own names”. I had one group that could do neither. It wasn’t until the sun went down and the mosquitoes ganged up that I was able to finish the rest of my ripped note beside a slow-burning coil.

  It continued,

  “I went to their website with the enthusiasm of a YouTube kitten. The homepage was trendy and beautifully photographed. A family; white mother, black father, Asian children (probably adopted) were seated in a sparkling new aircraft with enough legroom for a giraffe. A gorgeous, female flight attendant with sensuous lips and a tray of gourmet food was leaning over them. A male model also in the company uniform was beside her. They were all smiling at me. It was impossible not to bond. In a pink speech balloon the mother was saying,

  “Hey, Welcome. Join us on a flight of a lifetime.”

  I clicked BOOK A FLIGHT. A button asked me to indicate my gender. I didn’t see what the point was but I clicked female. I was immediately dispatched to the next window. The handsome flight attendant was there waiting for me. One eye was half closed in what I interpreted to be a wink. In a pink speech balloon he told me,

  “Let me walk you through this process to make your experience trouble free. Just click the flight destination you’re interested in and I’ll be there waiting for you.’

  He looked like a runway model who boxed at the weekends. It’s conceivable that, subliminally, I may have taken the message to mean he’d be meeting me in Paris and that image stayed with me even after I hit PARIS PROMOTION. He asked me to click a smiley balloon to see if I was one of the first three hundred customers to apply for this offer.

  I clicked.

  I was.

  That was it. Can you believe it? It wasn’t particularly exciting but she just left me hanging there like a bat. I knew there had to be more to it. I was fascinated in a peculiar way. If I’d been one of those detectives on CSI I’d have analyzed the paper and the ink and pinpointed the shop that sold them. But all I had was a stamp with a postcode.

  The next day I rode into Pak Nam on my granny bicycle on another errand and stopped off to see Nat, the manager at the post office. Nat always reminded me of a Mexican. He had a bushy moustache and a belly I imagined to be full of beans. He was jolly and helpful but he was one of those people who used fifty words when two would have done the job just as well. He was half way through describing the national postcode system when I reminded him I just needed to know where my letter had come from. He led me to a chart on the wall and pointed to the code listings. See? He could have done that as soon as I arrived. My letter had been sent from San Sai in Chiang Mai. That didn’t help me at all but it was good to have one question answered. I stopped by the internet café. I’d never understood why it was called a café because they didn’t sell coffee or have tables. It was a long narrow shophouse with a bank of elderly computers lined up against one wall. The owner, Mor, had a very unpleasant face full of pimples and I couldn’t even say, “but he had a nice personality” because he didn’t. He scowled every time I went there, even when the kids were all in school, his shop was empty and the machines were leaking money.

  The service speed was a few seconds short of dial-up. I did a search for Asian Wings but kept getting the This Site Not Available message. I asked Mor what was wrong with his internet but he said the reception was fine. To prove this, he activated the machine nearest his desk which just happened to be open at a page of photos of nude Russian grandmothers.

  Back at my shophouse I called my ex-brother, Sissi.

  ‘Do you know anything about Asian Wings?’ I asked.

  ‘You do know it upsets me when you only phone if you want something,’ she said. She was in a frumpy mood. I guess that comes from locking yourself in a dark condominium and stealing money from rich people on-line. She needed some sunshine and a boyfriend and a real life. I wasn’t in a position to lecture her on those latter topics but at least I had sunshine in abundance.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I’ve only got forty baht left on my phone.’

  ‘You really piss me off, you know that?’ she said.

  Thanks to our mother’s quest to make her children citizens of the universe, we’d all spoken English to each other since we were in elementary school. So, insults didn’t really disturb us. It was just practice. Nothing personal.

  ‘Why’s that?’ I asked.

  ‘I’ve offered to pay all your phone bills,’ she went on. ‘I’ve sent you an i-Phone you never use, a laptop you can’t work…’

  ‘There’s no signal at our place,’ I reminded her.

  ‘Then move,’ she shouted.

  Mair refused to accept ill-gotten income from Sissi on all of our behalves although it would have made our lives a lot more comfortable. I personally had no qualms about receiving dirty money.

  ‘All right,’ I gave up. ‘I’ll move. But first, tell me what you know about Asian Wings.’

  ‘What is there to say?’ she said. ‘Just one more regional budget airline. Based in KL. No food. No frills. Cabin crew selected on perkiness of breast and sensuality of lip rather than willingnes
s to mop up baby vomit and show the elderly how to buckle their belts. Are you planning on going somewhere?’

  I told her about my letter.

  ‘That’s odd,’ she said. ‘Nobody calls you Jimmlin.’

  Right. Who’d want to go through life called “Cutey?” As soon as I was of legal age I’d converted all my personal documents from “Jimmlin” to “Jimm”. It was remarkably easy to change your name in my country; a felon’s nirvana.

  ‘So, this had to be from someone who knew me at school or before,’ I said. ‘I’m guessing it was one of our teachers.’

  ‘Not Ajan Sawee?’ said Sissi.

  Evil Sawee had hated me from the first day of English class when I corrected her grammar. I was lucky to squeak through her course with a C.

  ‘I can’t see her writing to tell me about her holiday plans,’ I said. ‘And I still doubt she can make a correct sentence. No, this letter was written by someone as good at English as what we is.’

  ‘The site’s down,’ said Sissi.

  I had tunnel focus so I hated people who could function on various planes at the same time. She could have an intimate conversation with me over the phone whilst blackmailing an Australian politician on-line over his collection of child porn. I knew she’d been trying to access Asian Wings as we spoke.

  ‘That’s what I told you,’ I said.

  ‘I never take the word of an illiterate on important internet matters.’