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Scrambling back to the Toyota where Winnebago
waited behind the wheel, Eddie was screaming, “Go! Go! Go!” even
before he wrenched open the passenger door and dived inside. As
Winnebago slammed the accelerator to the floor and popped the
clutch, the sounds of two separate and distinct explosions
punctuated their departure. The hand grenade went first and, a
split second later, the gas tank of the Nissan.

As the two sounds rolled up together, they
reverberated back and forth between the buildings lining soi 23,
amplifying themselves into an awesome, guttural rumbling. In the
background, Eddie was sure he could also pick out another sound,
too: the higher-pitched staccato rhythm of the rounds carried by
the four Vietnamese exploding. They were going off one by one,
tapping out a minor key counterpoint to the bass roar of the
explosion.

***

WHEN
they closed up on the
lead van, Eddie leaned out his window far enough to give Bar a
thumb’s up sign and a big wave. Winnebago thumped the horn a couple
of times for emphasis, scaring the hell out of two schoolgirls who
had been puttering peacefully along the curb on a motorbike until
the three
farangs
flew by in the Ambassador Hotel vans.

Eddie felt his surge of adrenaline fade as
quickly as it had come and he slid back inside thevan, rolled up
the window, and settled heavily into his seat.

Winnebago glanced over. “You couldn’t have
done anything for the captain. This was the way he planned for it
to end.”

Eddie just nodded, his eyes straight ahead.
He knew Winnebago was right, but he was still going to have to live
with it for a while before he stopped thinking about it.

The two vans fell into convoy through the
nighttime streets of Bangkok, winding their way toward the Pattaya
highway. Winnebago focused his attention on following Bar and
didn’t say anything else for a long time.

Eventually he glanced over at Eddie and
wiggled his eyebrows up and down a couple of times. “Pretty good
moves for an old guy,” he said.

Eddie smiled a little at that and then he
leaned his head back against the seat and closed his eyes.

He wondered briefly if he should start trying
to put everything that had happened to him over the last few weeks
into some kind of perspective, to begin trying to understand
exactly where he had ended up and how he had gotten there. But it
was too soon, and it wouldn’t come, so he didn’t dwell on it.
Anyway, he decided, he was thinking like a lawyer again. He really
was going to have to stop doing that.

Inhale and exhale. Don’t try to hold your
breath. Not in this air.

Suddenly Eddie smiled to himself. He knew at
least one thing for certain, and he didn’t have to think about it
at all.

His future was out there in front of him
again. It was back where it belonged, back where, by rights, it
should always have been.

And so it began.

Enjoy a preview
of the first in Jake Needham’s series
of international legal thrillers
featuring Jack Shepherd

You can buy the full version of LAUNDRY MAN
here

Smashwords

LAUNDRY MAN

IT BEGAN EXACTLY
the
way the end of the world will begin. With a telephone call at two
o’clock in the morning.

“Jack Shepherd,” I croaked.

“Hey, Jack, old buddy. How you been?”

It was a man’s voice, one I didn’t recognize.
I sat up and cleared my throat.

“Who’s this?” I asked

“I’m sorry to call in the middle of the
night,” the man said, ignoring my question, “but this can’t wait.
I’m really in deep shit here.”

I was still struggling to place the voice so
I said nothing.

“I need your help, Jack. I figure I got about
a week here before somebody cuts off my nuts and feeds them to the
ducks.”

“I’m not going to start guessing,” I said.
“Who is this?”

“Oh, man, that’s so sad. You mean to tell me
you even don’t recognize your old law partner’s voice?”

“I’ve had a lot of—”

“This is Barry Gale.”

That stopped me cold.

“Surprised, huh?” the man chuckled.

“Who are you?” I repeated.

“I just told you who I am, Jack. This is
Barry Gale.”

I hit the disconnect button and tossed my
cell phone back on the nightstand.

WHEN IT RANG
again,
I silently cursed myself for forgetting to turn the damned thing
off.

I sat up and retrieved the phone and this
time I looked at the number on the screen before I answered. All it
said was unavailable. I thought fleetingly of just hitting the
power button, but I didn’t. Later, of course, I would wish I
had.

“It’s not nice to hang up on old friends,
Jack.”

“We’re not old friends.”

“Sure we are.”

“Look, pal, Barry Gale’s dead. I know it and
I’m sure you know it. So unless you’re Mickey the Medium with a
message from the other side, you can cut the crap. What do you
want?”

“What makes you think I’m dead?” the man
asked.

“Barry made a pretty flashy exit. It got a
fair amount of attention.”

“You talking about the body they found in
that swimming pool in Dallas?”

That was exactly what I was talking about. I
said nothing.

“As I remember, and I’m pretty sure I
do
remember, that body had been in the water nearly a week
before anybody found it so they couldn’t get fingerprints. Also I
hear the guy’s face was too badly smashed up to recognize. Nobody
thought it was worth bothering with DNA, and the ID was made from
dental records.”

“So what? The dental records matched Barry’s,
didn’t they?”

“Of course they did. They would, wouldn’t
they?”

“Are you trying to tell me the body in the
swimming pool in Dallas wasn’t Barry Gale’s?”

“Not likely, Jack. Not likely at all.
Particularly not as we’re talking to each other on the telephone
other right now.”

I tried it another way.

“Look, buddy, I’m a reasonably approachable
guy. Why don’t you just tell me who you are and what you want and
then I can go back to sleep?”

There was a brief silence and then the man
started talking again in a tired voice.

“Your name is Jonathan William Shepherd, but
your father started calling you Jack when you were a kid to keep
your mother from calling you Johnny and it stuck. You graduated
from Georgetown Law School and you’re admitted to the bar in the
District of Columbia and in New York. Stassen & Hardy recruited
you right out of law school and it’s the only place you ever
practiced law. You and I made partner the same year.”

I said nothing. The man apparently didn’t
care.

“Your home address was 1701 Great Falls Road.
It was a big white house out in Potomac, Maryland. Regrettably your
happy home dissolved when your wife, the lovely Laura, took up with
that proctologist out in Virginia. Dr. Butthole, you called him.
How am I doing?”

“Very impressive,” I said.

“I’m an impressive guy.”

“Is that it?” I asked. “You recite a few
things you’ve found out about me somewhere and now I’m supposed to
believe you’re Barry Gale risen from the dead?”

“Hell, Jack, I could go on all night. How
about this? Your office at Stassen & Hardy was about as far
away from the reception area as it was possible for you to get and
still be in the same building with the rest of us. You had a big
glass table that you used for a desk. Goddamn, Jack, I’m sure you
were the only lawyer in the world with a glass desk. It was like
you were trying to look purer than the rest of us. Was that it,
Jack? Was that what the glass desk was all about? And, oh yeah, you
had that big yellow couch with the deep cushions where you took
naps in the afternoon.”

“Look, I still don’t know what this is all
about, but—”

“We had a part-time receptionist, a little
Vietnamese girl who was going to law school somewhere and worked as
the relief girl on weekends. Remember? You fucked her right on that
yellow couch one Saturday afternoon and then you admitted it to me
a couple of weeks later after you’d sucked up an extra martini one
night at the bar in the Mayflower Hotel. You seemed to be all cut
up with guilt over it and said you hadn’t told anyone else. Had you
told anyone else, Jack?”

In the silence I could hear the guy breathing
and I was sure he could hear me, too, except I was probably
breathing a lot louder.

Because he was right.

I hadn’t told anyone else.

The man went on before I could figure out
what to say.

“You like living in Bangkok, Jack? I hear
you’re a teacher now. In some business school. That right?”

“Yes. I teach at Chulalongkorn
University.”

“No more lawyering? No more of that big-time
stuff we used to do?”

“I don’t practice law anymore if that’s what
you’re asking me.”

“Do you miss it?”

“Not particularly. I still do a little
consulting sometimes.”

“Consulting, huh? Is that right?” The man
barked an abrupt laugh. “You want to consult with me, Jack?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Still a fucking hard-on, are you?”

“I just don’t particularly like being the
butt of some clown’s crappy little joke.”

“Oh, this is no joke, Jack. I wish to Christ
it was, but it isn’t.”

I said nothing.

“Do you know that place called Took Lae Dee?”
the man eventually asked. “The little food counter up in the front
of the all-night Foodland on Sukhumvit Road?”

“Yeah. I know where it is.”

“Meet me there tomorrow, around midnight.
Just grab a stool and I’ll find you.”

“Midnight?”

“Is that a problem for you?”

“Yeah, that’s a problem for me. What makes
you think I’d even consider coming to some damned supermarket at
midnight just because a wacko pretending to be a dead guy calls me
up and tells me to? I don’t know how you found out all those things
about me, but if you think that’s enough—”

The man started laughing.

“Oh, it’s more than enough, Jack.”

He laughed some more. Thunder rumbled
somewhere in the distance and I listened to it without saying
anything else.

“I know you, my friend. You’d never pass up a
chance to hear a story like this. Never. Especially not when it’s
coming from a guy who’s gone to all the trouble I have to make
himself dead.”

And with that, the man hung up.

LAUNDRY MAN

I TOSSED AND
turned
for a while after that, but I knew I wasn’t going back to sleep
anytime soon. Eventually I gave up trying altogether and I went
into my study and took a Montecristo out of the humidor on my desk.
I pulled open the sliding door and walked out on the balcony.

Generally Bangkok’s foreign residents went to
considerable lengths to avoid breathing the city’s air until it had
been thoroughly dried, adequately chilled, and comprehensively
decontaminated. Not only was the stuff hot and soggy, usually it
smelled spoiled and a little sour, like it had been breathed by way
too many people already. But this was January, the middle of winter
in Thailand, and the southernmost edge of a large dome of Siberian
air had slipped down from China and momentarily broken Bangkok’s
muggy heat. The air had turned pleasingly cool, even sweet, and it
was richly thickened with the syrupy fragrances of frangipani,
jasmine, and gardenias.

I cut and lit my cigar and I stood there
smoking and looking out over the city for a long time.

When people in Washington first began to hear
that I was leaving to live in Bangkok and teach at Chulalongkorn
University, a few of them jumped to the conclusion I was making a
point of some kind, abandoning the land of my birth for reasons
that were probably political and no doubt wacky. Others who heard
what I was doing—and I noticed this group seemed to be composed
mainly of women—attributed my change of address to middle-aged male
angst fueled by overly moist fantasies of slim, submissive Thai
women serving me brightly colored tropical drinks with little
umbrellas in them. Most people, of course, fell into neither of
those categories. Most people just assumed that I had lost my
damned mind.

Part of the problem was that the whole idea
of living in a foreign country was just so strange to most
Americans, particularly since very few of them had ever seriously
entertained the thought, however fleetingly, themselves. After all,
everyone wanted to come to America, didn’t they? Half the
population of the earth was fighting to live in Orange County and
work in a 7-Eleven, wasn’t it? Why in God’s name would an American
even
think
of living anywhere else?