Highway Robbery

by Colin Cotterill

  Number Three

  Highway Robbery

  A Jimm Juree Short Story

  By Colin Cotterill

  Number Three: Highway Robbery

  Copyright © Colin Cotterill, 2017

  First published DCO Books 2017

  eBook Edition published by

  DCO Books, 2017

  Proglen Trading Co., Ltd.

  Bangkok Thailand

  http://www.dco.co.th

  ISBN 978-616-7817-98-9

  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

  Highway Robbery

  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

  Highway Robbery

  I was living at the back of a small shophouse in Maprao at the time. It was in a block of five, each with a screeching metal shutter that took all your effort to open and close. Beside me was Chat the bicycle repair man. He had a cassette player. Remember those? He had four Luk Thung country music tapes that he played ad nauseam. I got to know those songs really well in the five months we were neighbours. Two shops down on the other side of me was a woman with a rusty black sewing machine. For some odd reason she wouldn’t tell me her name, so I called her Singer. There was nothing invisible about her mending but she was cheap and had a steady trickle of customers who apparently liked their skirts puckered and their trousers darned into a lump. Between us was the empty shop that became a character in this case file.

  It was May. Mazu, the Chinese goddess of the sea, had absconded with my family’s run down resort at Christmas and left us without an income. To tell the truth, even before it was battered flat by the monsoon and dragged out into the Gulf of Siam on a storm surge, the place barely yielded us a living income. I was glad it was gone. I should have grasped the opportunity and headed back north to Chiang Mai and my rightful place behind the crime desk at the Mail. But we were battling the bank that had happily sold us disaster insurance without expecting anyone to make a claim. The way their lawyers put it, the Gulf Bay Lovely Resort and Restaurant was a disaster long before nature had its way. I couldn’t go anywhere until the compensation was sorted out. Meanwhile, the family was scattered. Our mother, Mair was living in sin with Captain Kow, the man she claimed was my father. My brother Arny was living somewhere just outside sin with his ‘girlfriend’ Daeng, twenty-six years his senior. My granddad Jah, well, nobody cared where he was. And my sister née brother, Sissy was still holed up as a recluse somewhere inside her beloved internet in the north. She was doing very nicely for her
self but the rest of us were, as they say, eking out a living.

  My own eke was never likely to have an influence on the Thai balance of trade. With the aid of a donated camera, I’d rented the shophouse, decorated it as best I could, and put out the word that I was a wedding photographer. How hard could it be? Even my temporary husband and I had looked happy in our album. But the beautiful framed pictures I displayed out front had been snipped out of magazines. I didn’t even have a portfolio. People were taking better photos with their cell phones than I was with my expensive Nikon. But I had to give it a go. Naturally, I didn’t have many customers. The divorce rates were low in the south so I only had one shot at each couple.

  There were three things I remember about that day. First, my only appointment of the week phoned to postpone. The fiancé tried to convince me they were stuck in heavy traffic and wouldn’t be able to make it. Postponements invariably morphed into cancellations so I didn’t expect to see them again. Second, on the TV news in the evening I was astounded to see scenes from our own Highway 41 where an armoured security van had been deserted, minus its cash. And, third, I was awoken just before midnight by the sound of groaning coming from the empty shop house beside mine. It was a while before I learned how these three events were connected.

  I was still wasting part of my time writing school band reviews and posting hairdressing competition results for a local rag called the Chumphon Gazette. It was a sad little weekly that often lost its way and died by the roadside only to be reincarnated in a new format with a new philosophy. The owner had a lot of his father’s money with which to experiment. At the time of the security van heist it was family oriented. No community news was too trivial for the Gazette. When I phoned the owner to pitch my potential story about the bloody van robbery he told me to stick to what I was good at and leave crime to the professionals. I seem to remember suggesting where he might want to insert a traffic cone but he’d hung up on me by then.

  But national news on my doorstep was too exciting to pass up. As I had a slot free on my wedding photography appointment schedule, I took a ride on my gearless bicycle into Pak Nam. The local police station has three types of officers. There are those that live locally, have families and have refused to be transferred anywhere else. Then there are those who were naughty elsewhere and were sent to the Pak Nam station for punishment. And then there was Lieutenant Chomphu. My darling Chom is matchless in the Thai police force. He’s not the only gay policeman, not by a long poke. But he’s the only one confident enough to mince unashamedly and to squeal unselfconsciously with joy. A minute in the company of Chom leaves not a shadow of doubt about his sexual leanings.

  ‘Because it wasn’t blood, darling,’ he said.

  ‘The TV report said it was,’ I reminded him.

  ‘Oh, well, if the TV said so then it must be true.’

  ‘They said there were pools of blood at the scene. Why would they make it up?’

  ‘Ooh, I don’t know. Ratings? Incompetence? Or perhaps they just didn’t taste it.’

  We were in Chom’s office, the only room in the station with lavender-coloured curtains, potted primroses and a poster of Antonio Banderas. We were drinking his herbal tea from bone china cups.

  ‘Lots of vampires around,’ I said. ‘But I imagine there’s some regulation about the tasting of blood at a crime scene.’

  ‘I doubt there is, but it wouldn’t make a tinkle of a difference because it wasn’t blood.’

  ‘Then what was it?’

  ‘Not absolutely sure,’ said Chom. ‘But I’m guessing it was something like Prego spaghetti sauce. We’ve sent it to the lab in Chumphon.’

  ‘So you did taste it?’

  ‘Don’t be silly. Can you see me on my hands and knees on the highway lapping up tomato sauce with my tongue like some prospective road-kill? It was on the bitumen in the midday heat. You soon know it isn’t blood. Prego has a very distinctive aroma. I’d say it was Roasted Garlic & Herb. The flies loved it.’

  ‘Then if it wasn’t blood, what’s the connection with the van heist?’ I asked.

  ‘My intelligent guess is…none at all. It probably fell off a supermarket truck earlier. Perhaps it caused the van to skid.’

  ‘Damn,’ I said. ‘You know I have a sixty-percent better chance of selling this article if there’s blood.’

  ‘Sorry, darling.’

  ‘So, it was just a robbery in broad daylight?’

  ‘Perhaps not even that.’

  ‘Not a robbery?’

  ‘Most likely not.’

  ‘What else could it have been?’

  ‘The Lang Suan office has had to defer to Chumphon central on this, as usual. Half an hour after we arrived at the scene, there they were, the Chumphon bullies in their black SUVs. Can’t have the local bumpkins investigating anything serious, can we now? But my source tells me that the security van driver and his mate are the main suspects. They believe they fled with the cash.’

  ‘How much was it carrying?’

  ‘A hundred and eighty million baht in thousand-baht notes.’

  ‘Holy…didn’t they have a police escort?’

  ‘That was the first thing I asked,’ said Chom. ‘They collected the cash at Surat Airport and were on their way to Lang Suan where they’d be dropping it off. It was an unmarked van and only the security company knew what time the cash would be arriving. There should have been a police motorcycle escort but there was someone important in town so they couldn’t spare a man.’

  ‘Not a coincidence, I’d bet,’ I said. ‘Why so much money?’

  ‘Infrastructure projects.’

  ‘Yeah, right.’

  ‘We’re a little unsettled politically these days…’

  ‘Why just these days?’

  ‘…so there’s a lot of money being stashed away until everything levels out again. But I don’t think you’re planning on writing anything about the government, am I correct?’

  I didn’t write about Thai politics because I didn’t understand it. We’d had the year of the yellow team; thousands of middle-class old-schoolers storming government house, shutting down the airports and rejoicing at the ouster of two dodgy prime-ministers. Now was the turn of the red team; northern farmers and labourers bussed south to cause havoc. They’d begun a rampage that recently climaxed in storming a political summit and beating people up. You really had to be a sports writer to do justice to Thai politics.

  ‘How much do you think a hundred and eighty million baht weighs?’ I asked.

  ‘Let me cast my mind back to the last time I carried large sums of money in my wallet,’ he said.

  ‘That’s the point,’ I said. ‘It’s got to be heavy, right?’

  ‘So you’re saying they had to have an accomplice?’

  ‘A few, I bet.’

  ‘I’m sure you’re right but it’s really none of our business anymore. Chumphon’s on the case. But while you’re out there trampling all over their crime-.’

  ‘What makes you think I’m about to-?’

  ‘…their crime scene, consider this. Why do you suppose the driver would park the van in the middle of the highway rather than pull over to one side?’

  ‘He what?’

  ‘Or, if he was planning to steal his own cargo, why wouldn’t he leave the highway altogether?’

  ‘You know, Chom? There are times when you think like a policeman.’

  ‘I’m touched.’

  ***

  ‘What are you doing?’

  I don’t know where he’d come from but Granddad Jah was leaning over my shoulder. I could feel his wormy breath on my neck. He frightened the jelly wobbles out of me.

  ‘Why do you always sneak up on me like that?’ I asked.

  ‘Awareness training,’ he said. ‘You should be more alert. You never know when you’re about to be garroted. And I asked you what you were doing.’

  I thought it was pretty obvious.

  ‘I’m weighing fifty scraps of newspaper cut int
o the shape of thousand-baht notes,’ I told him.

  He went over to the stool that I would have used to seat blushing brides if they ever showed up and he climbed onto it. He came every evening at what Maprao might call rush hour because my shop had a view of the street and he had a thing about road transport. I guess forty years as a traffic cop left its scars.

  ‘And why are you doing that?’ he asked.

  ‘Because I don’t have any actual thousand-baht notes,’ I told him. ‘I need to know how much they weigh.’

  ‘Didn’t they teach you mathematics at school?’

  What they taught me at school wouldn’t fit in a matchbox but, yes, I did learn how to count money. It’s compulsory in Thailand. That and being polite to people you don’t like.

  ‘How would that help?’ I asked.

  ‘A thousand-baht note weighs a gram,’ he said.

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘It’s common knowledge. ‘

  Granddad Jah had a lot of common knowledge nobody else knew.

  ‘So, if that’s true, that’s, what? A hundred and eighty kilograms,’ I said. ‘Not impossible for the two of them to offload by themselves. But used notes would be bulky. They couldn’t make off on foot with that much. They’d have to have a vehicle, at least. I bet they had an accomplice or two waiting in the bushes beside the road. I have to go look at the crime scene.’

  I turned to Granddad Jah. He was glaring at me so I shared the story with him. Traffic! Right up his street.

  ***