Highway Robbery

by Colin Cotterill

  Mair gave me two pairs of knitted socks (I didn’t ask) and a papaya salad in a plastic bag to share with my boy on the beach. She asked me if he was single, as she does with all the men who pass, however rapidly, through my life. Then she started a story about a relationship she may or may not have had with a bank robber. I left her to it and rode my bicycle back to my shop. I had a lot to think about. Until Granddad Killjoy’s intervention, I’d pretty much convinced myself Warm was innocent. But I’d ignored all those obvious discrepancies. My wedding couple had cancelled, they said, because there was a traffic jam on the highway. Nothing was moving. On the TV news coverage that first evening, I’d seen one lane of traffic snail past the crime scene. How convenient indeed that the highway cleared itself long enough to allow such an elaborate drama to unfold right there on the main road. And there was not one single solitary witness to back up Warm’s story.

  The news that evening promoted the Lang Suan heist to third in the rankings, not because the crime was solved but because the owner of the hundred-and-eighty million baht had been located and he was a celebrity. I’d done research on him back in my journo days. Even got to interview him once. As modern culture has proven time and time again, celebrity is not necessarily an outcome of ability. Amorn Duanphen was the son of a millionaire. The father, bored with counting money, had become a politician for a while. The Thai rich have always believed their money gives them the right to run our country into the dirt. Despite an official parliamentary income of under three thousand dollars a month, the father upgraded himself to billionaire status within two years in parliament. Thence came the son. After a druggy, privileged, unemployable youth, Amorn tried his hand at politics and failed. This said a lot about Amorn because a sack of chicken manure could become a minister in my country if it knew where to invest its money. Frustrated, Amorn married a TV star and had an affair with a porn movie actress but still he couldn’t break into the hi-so celebrity clique. Then, one night, he got drunk in a crowded pub, pulled out a gun and killed a man at the next table who had looked ‘lustfully’ at Amorn’s girlfriend. Thirty people witnessed the shooting and the CCTV camera caught the whole thing.

  Amorn got off. It was a perversion of justice that made the Simpson trial look righteous. The camera footage disappeared, the witnesses refused to come forward, the gun, complete with its fingerprints and spent bullets was lost and Amorn walked. It was the eternal combination of influence and money. How could you not respect such a man? He became huge; magazines, TV, endorsements, quotations on current affairs. He was on the panel of The Voice Thailand for three consecutive seasons. His website and blog got half a million hits a month. Women offered themselves to him in his chat room. Companies begged him to be the face of their products.

  So, not surprisingly, Amorn had a lot of enemies. He went everywhere with an entourage of bodyguards and traveled in a missile-proof limousine. He owned one of the largest shipping companies in the south of Thailand which, I knew for certain but couldn’t prove beyond a doubt, was a front for laundering ill-gotten gains from the methamphetamine business. My editor at the time had binned my article suggesting such a respected member of society couldn’t possibly have been involved in drugs. His family owned twenty percent of the shares in the newspaper.

  Amorn’s explanation for why he was transporting such a large sum of money by road was that he was a businessman and moving money was ‘normal’. But I tell you what’s normal in this abnormal Thailand of mine; using cash to buy votes. It would only be a matter of time before the yellow versus red stalemate led to another snap general election. A hundred-and-eighty million baht in unidentifiable notes would come in very handy at such a time. But that may just have been my inner cynic trying to get out.

  My second visit to the crime scene had a different focus. I was there to assess the validity of Warm’s version of events. The spaghetti sauce stain was barely visible after a downpour the night before. I visualized a pick-up truck stopped diagonally across the two lanes. For the driver to be visible, the truck had to be pointing towards the central reservation. If Warm’s version of events were true, the child in the pool of blood would have been between the front of the truck and the ditch. For my own sanity it helped to imagine a large plastic doll in sauce rather than an actual child. But at first sight it would have been a horrific vision for the van driver.

  I considered the amount of time it would have taken to empty several buckets of Prego onto the road and for the performers to assume their positions. Even with hours of practice I couldn’t see them setting the scene in under three minutes, which brought me to the bougainvilleas. As if supporting granddad’s theory that they’d been planted illegally, the bushes were no longer there. Vanished completely. Not a bract in sight. I phoned my neighbour, Ganya, who works at the Highways Department. She confirmed that her boss had seen the bushes in the TV footage and had hurriedly dispatched his people to remove them before the local MP got wind of it and pulled the job out from under him. The bushes had been freshly planted, she told me. The dirt was still soft. They couldn’t have been there for longer than a few days. I imagined a team of botanical ninjas in black pajamas putting up a curtain of bougainvilleas in the dead of night on the eve of the heist. What a performance.

  I walked the dirt track. It went a few hundred meters into the deserted rubber plantation. This would have been the wings, the off-stage location where they’d practice their lines, check their equipment and fight back the butterflies in their bellies. This was where either Warm’s accomplices or the robbers lay in wait for the security van. The Chumphon police had already taken truck tyre prints. I’d been impressed when I heard that. They’d probably learned the skill from some TV detective show. But did they search the area on each side of the track? Did they pick up cigarette butts or collect samples of urine stains from the tree bark? Probably not. And I wasn’t about to be sniffing around at that level either. I didn’t have access to a forensics lab but I did have a brain. I closed my eyes and visualized the truck parked as close to the highway as it could without being seen. They’d need a lookout to tell them when the security van was in sight. Perhaps they’d have someone with a cell phone driving behind it. But Warm said there was nobody in the rear view mirror.

  And that was what I like to call my denouement mouement – even though it’s not a word. Everything in this case came down to time and timing. I went back to my shop and called Sissy, my computer-bound ex-brother in Chiang Mai. I had a little hacking job for her and some research. Then I checked my phone records on the day of the heist to see what time my engaged couple had cancelled. I called the impending husband. He was embarrassed - thought I might want to reschedule – but all I needed was his recollections. Then I called my friend, Phoom, the desk sergeant at the Pak Nam police station and added some more times to my compilation. And, all at once, I had my working hypothesis. I thought I knew what had happened and how. All I needed then was a chance to prove it.

  ***

  Khun Amorn, the celebrity, caused quite a kerfuffle when his team arrived at Pak Nam police station that steamy afternoon. His bodyguards arrived first in their BMW750. One man with his hand inside his jacket secured the car park perimeter. Two others ran into the police station to check for…well, whatever they suspected might be lurking in a police station. The adorable Pak Nam police, not in the least offended by this private sector invasion, snapped their cell phones and took selfies in front of the splendid armoured limo. The head of the bodyguard detail took up his phone and punched in a code number. Seconds later a second BMW arrived. Someone opened the rear door and like Tom Cruise at the Oscars out stepped Amorn. A man in a silvery suit accompanied him and two bodyguards stuck to them like layers of plywood. Amorn waved to nobody in particular, absorbed a little photo frenzy, and walked up the steps. A dozen or so would-be criminals and victims wai’d him as he passed through the open-air reception area. He ignored them and followed the desk sergeant upstairs to the meeting room. He ordered his tw
o henchmen to wait outside.

  The first person he noticed and subsequently ignored in the room was me. I’d interviewed him five years earlier, just after he’d murdered a man, and I was certain I held no prominent position in his memory. The tables in the Pak Nam meeting room were set out in a horseshoe formation with Police Major Mana sitting at the central nail-hole spot. To either side of him, in no particular order, were me, Granddad Jah, Lieutenant Chompu, Constable Ma Yai, some senior policeman with a lot of decorations, the Banx Security Corporation southern region manager, and security van driver, Warm. There was only one free chair and nobody rushed to find another so Amorn sat and silver suit had no choice but to stand behind him.

  Amorn took this affront well. His smile suggested he had a lot of free time to experiment with tooth styles. They were too regimented and shiny white to be real. He was chubby but wore clothes that gave him a lot of space. I doubted his face had seen a razor but the not-so-subtle aftershave bouquet wafted across the room. I’d always been pessimistic about fame, and people like Amorn were the reason why. He was all package. He was an atom without a nucleus, a fritter without a banana. He had no contents. But the combination of fame and criminality made such people dangerous.

  I wasn’t surprised when he spoke first.

  ‘I’d like to wait for the press vehicle to get here before we commence,’ he said.

  ‘Afraid that’ll be a long wait,’ said Granddad Jah. ‘They hit a pothole coming off 4099. Broken axle.’

  Amorn glared at granddad then addressed the Major.

  ‘Who’s he?’ he asked.

  ‘Traffic consultant,’ said Chom from behind a delicate mist of chamomile tea fumes. His favourite pot of primroses decorated the desk in front of him. The Lieutenant had been designated lead interviewer that day. The Major had readily admitted he lacked confidence in such a gathering and we’d agreed to take the pressure off him by doing all the talking. There was the possibility our ploy might not work so he needed to wear that infamous Thai helmet of vagueness, just in case. On the other hand, if there were credit at the end of it all, he’d take it.

  ‘But fear not,’ I said, lining up my second-hand Sony camcorder on the table in front of me. ‘If I can work out how to start this video camera I’ll have the whole session recorded. No need to worry. We can send it on to the media later.’

  Everyone knew Amorn’s media team spread whatever version of the truth their boss told them to. We wanted our own bias on this story.

  ‘And you?’ he asked.

  ‘And me, what?’ said I.

  ‘Who or what are you?’

  ‘I’m the journalist who solved the case of your stolen money,’ I said.

  ‘I rather doubt that, child,’ said Amorn.

  Child? He was younger than me. It was another one of those moments when I felt it was always the wrong people who died in freak decapitation accidents.

  ‘On the contrary,’ said Chom, my hero, ‘It was Jimm here who captured the rogue security van driver you see sitting in front of you.’

  Warm smiled and wai’d the visitors.

  ‘So, he’s the one,’ said Amorn. ‘Why is he not handcuffed?’

  ‘We don’t do that sort of thing down here,’ said Constable Mah Yai.

  The silvery suit man was smarmy and snotty. I could see lawyer written all over him. He stepped forward.

  ‘This is all very well,’ he said. ‘Congratulations on capturing the perpetrator and all that. But you could just as easily have sent him to Chumphon, could you not? We could have held this meeting there. It was you who insisted on the press conference being held in this dirty little seaside dump. You said the whole town would be out. “A media frenzy” I believe you called it. All I see is an ancient video camera and a few extras in the car park. It seems to me you got us here under false pretences. I could sue you just for that. We have gone to a great deal of trouble and expense to be here. You said you’d be handing over the missing money. I don’t see that either.’

  ‘Well, Sweety, you know where it is or at least your boss does,’ said Chom. I could see he fancied the lawyer. He had awful taste in men.

  ‘If that were true, we wouldn’t be here, would we?’ said Amorn.

  ‘You’re here because you had no choice,’ said Chom. ‘We announced that we found your stolen money and had arrested the man who took it. You knew the first part of that was untrue. But you couldn’t refuse to head down here with your circus in tow because the national press would have been suspicious. You were fascinated about our claim. Did we actually find money that wasn’t yours? Would you walk away from here with a super bonus?’

  ‘That’s ridiculous,’ said Silver.

  ‘I don’t understand why I’m here,’ said Amorn.

  ‘You’re here because you’re a greedy little bastard,’ said Granddad Jah. ‘You’re here because your shipping company’s about to go bankrupt and your rich daddy won’t bankroll any more of your failures. You’re here because you think we might have screwed up and we’re about to hand over someone else’s booty.’

  So much for our well-conceived plan of holding on to our high cards. Nice one, Granddad. I had rather hoped to disclose Sissy’s research findings at the very end. But, never mind.

  ‘Who the hell do you think you’re talking to?’ said Amorn, putting one hand behind him. It was a gesture common among thugs when they wanted to threaten each other. All good criminals kept their guns in the back of their belts. But on this day, Amorn wasn’t armed. He knew his henchmen were carrying plenty of hardware. Sadly for him, that was to be just one of the disappointments of the day.

  ‘We’re finished here,’ said Silver.

  He took Amorn’s arm expecting to lead him out in protest but when he turned he saw their two bodyguards standing inside the door. They were no longer armed. Their hands were cuffed behind their backs. They looked deservedly embarrassed. Sergeant Phoom and Constable Mah Lek had been surprisingly light on their feet. None of us had heard a commotion from outside. Two other officers with guns drawn had entered the room behind them.

  ‘You have no right to restrain these men,’ said Amorn. ‘This is my security detail.’

  ‘They seem secure enough to me,’ said Chom.

  ‘Chumphon Central is handling this case,’ said Silver prodding at his cell phone, ‘I don’t see any of their investigators here. I doubt our good friend Commander Chatchai knows about this illicit media coup. Your chance to get your hick police station into the magazines. Make a name for yourselves. Is that what this is about? Wasting our time? Insulting us? I’m going to have your jobs, all of you.’

  ‘I’m afraid you aren’t going to get much joy from your splendid smart phone,’ I said. ‘We’re outside what they call the dome. Twelve kilometres into Lang Suan district and you can have unlimited phone and internet access. But down here on the coast you might as well be living in the fifteenth century. No antenna, no fibreglass cable, no satellite dish signal. It’s so frustrating here we all stopped trying to use cell phones. Nobody bothers to carry them anymore. And due to some land subsidence issues, not even this police station has a land line until they get it fixed. Shameful I know. Even to send this video footage to the nearest TV station I’d have to get on my bicycle and peddle into town.’

  ‘I can see no reason for us to be here,’ said Silver.

  ‘Let’s assume, just for a second, that you’re all under arrest,’ said Major Manat, stepping briefly into the game.

  ‘Is this some kind of joke?’ said Amorn, getting to his feet. He leaned on the table in front of him. It was a table not happy to be leaned upon.

  ‘You do know who I am and you must realize you’ll all be fired for this,’ he said.

  ‘That wasn’t very convincing,’ I told him.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You need more menace…more, what does he need?’

  ‘Balls,’ said granddad, who always had the worst words for the best occasions. Everyone in the room looked at him.
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  ‘That’s it,’ I said. ‘You’re lacking balls.’

  The celebrity’s face burst into flames.

  ‘My men outside will-,’ Amorn began.

  ‘Your men outside are under arrest too,’ said Chom. ‘There’s evidently some silly law against lay people brandishing weapons in a police station. Did you honestly believe you could charge in here like Chinese Haw bandits? Rape and pillage? Terribly bad manners.’

  ‘I suggest you sit back down and listen to the reasons you’re here,’ I said.

  Amorn huffed through his nose and dislodged a wad of snot.

  ‘You’re all going to let a little fat girl do your job for you?’ he asked.

  Now, that was really below the belt, especially coming from a man with stackable chins. I was burning on all cylinders at that point.

  ‘Okay, here we go,’ I said. ‘Sit. Don’t sit, I don’t care. I know you’re already aware of what actually happened to the security van but, for the benefit of the recorder, here’s part one of the heist story.’

  Amorn remained standing. He looked at my camera and, as I’d hoped, a little smile curled up the corner of his mouth.

  ‘If you’re standing comfortably, I’ll begin,’ I said. ‘This is a story of a van full of money. Due to some finagling beyond his control, the driver finds himself alone in the van. No second guard. No police escort. But the highway’s as busy as always. He drives through the intersection at La Mae, looks in his rearview mirror and realizes he’s suddenly all alone on the road. The reason for this is that three large trucks got into a slow motion duel after the lights. It happens often. Slow moving vehicles overtaking slower moving vehicles and causing a backlog. A couple I spoke to on their way to Lang Suan described it as a snail race. Whenever they neared a U-turn lane, an opportunity for the speed merchants to overtake, the third truck would morph together with the other two, effectively filling the entire width of the road. Nobody could overtake them. It was an HGV ballet.