LAUNDRY MAN (A Jack Shepherd crime thriller) (16 page)

One of the boys flung himself into the air and executed what looked to me like a pretty nifty spinning kick. As he did, he loosed an earsplitting shout that caused my companion to swivel her head sharply toward him.

There was another silence after that and this time it began to annoy me.

“Look, lady, if Barry thought sending you around would intimidate me somehow, you can tell him he doesn’t remember me very well.”

“My name’s not ‘lady.’“

“Oh? As I recall, you were a little hazy on that point when you introduced yourself.”

Now my eyes were forward, too, waiting her out.

“My name is Elizabeth Staley. Most people call me Beth.”

I stepped up my pace a bit, running faster as we passed a group of Japanese men who had just appeared from somewhere. They looked like a visiting sumo team, but they moved with remarkable grace and economy, gliding along as easily as marathoners. The woman effortlessly matched me stride for stride.

“Who the hell
are
you, Beth?”

She glanced at me and said nothing so I gave her another nudge. “I get the feeling you’re a cop of some kind.”

“I work for a private company, Mr. Shepherd. We provide personal security for Mr. Gale.”

“You’re a bodyguard?”

“I am a private security officer.”

I snorted, probably a little louder than really necessary to make my point.

We reached the south side of the park and I started to turn back toward the lake where my usual finishing line was, but Beth pointed in the other direction to where a green wooden picnic table sat empty under some low-hanging gum trees.

“You and I need to talk, Mr. Shepherd.”

“What about?”

“There are some things you need to know.”

“There are a
lot
of things I need to know, but I doubt you’re going to tell me about any of them.”

Beth smiled and I noticed it was a very nice smile.

“You might be surprised,” she said.

Maybe she was right. Pretty much everything these days seemed to be a surprise to me.

“This way,” Beth went on, pointing again at the picnic table, “if you don’t mind.”

I slowed down and looked at Beth. “Look, before this goes any further—”

But Beth couldn’t hear me. She had already turned away and was running toward the picnic table at the same even pace she had maintained all the way around the lake. She was already halfway there.

I shook my head and followed.

WE SAT TOGETHER
on top of the table, our feet resting on one of the benches. I could hear the city coming awake out beyond the tree line that surrounded the park.

“What’s this all about, Beth?”

“I’m concerned about you.”

I didn’t know what to say to that, so I said nothing.

“They may know you’re helping Mr. Gale,” she went on after a moment. “They may think you know what happened to the money and come after you.”

“But I’m not helping Barry.”

“Then why were you making inquiries in Hong Kong about the Asian Bank of Commerce?”

I stared at Beth. How could she know that?

“You weren’t exactly making a secret of it,” she said as if she were reading my mind. “You even left your business card at the bank’s registered office.”

Archie must have been right after all. Somebody
was
following me when I was in Hong Kong. Was it somebody Beth sent or was it somebody else? And regardless of who it was, why on earth had
anybody
been interested enough in what I was doing in Hong Kong to go to the effort of following me around?
I
hadn’t even been particularly interested in what I was doing in Hong Kong.

“It doesn’t matter why you were doing it,” Beth went on before I could ask her any of the questions piling up rapidly in my mind. “I wanted you to know that you’re safe.”

“Safe?”

“We’ve had a loose net on you ever since your meeting with Mr. Gale.”

That was the second time in a week someone had used the phrase “loose net” in connection with me. I didn’t like the sound of it now any more than I had the first time.

“That was you following me in Hong Kong?”

“We weren’t following you. Some colleagues of mine were running counter-surveillance procedures. Mr. Gale asked me to keep an eye out for a few days to see if anyone followed you after your meeting.”

“You’re scaring me, Beth.”

“I don’t mean to. You were clean in Hong Kong. You should know that.”

“I can’t tell you how happy it makes me.” Then the obvious question occurred to me. “Did Barry send you here to tell me all this?”

Beth shook her head. Droplets of sweat dislodged from her hair rolled down her forehead, and into her eyes. She wiped them away with her hand.

“I just thought you ought to know I have you covered,” she said. “I didn’t want you to worry.”

I studied Beth and wondered about what she was really saying, but she wouldn’t meet my eyes.

“I guess I don’t get any of this,” I finally said.

“It’s not very complicated. Barry is afraid somebody may try to get to the missing money through you. He asked me to keep an eye out to make sure that doesn’t happen. That’s what I’m doing and I wanted to tell you that.”

Something behind me caught Beth’s attention and she looked away over my shoulder. I turned to follow her eyes and saw two men were walking toward us across the grass, the same two men who had disappeared earlier after I ran past them. Both of them were sweating and suffering badly in the morning heat and humidity and they looked even less like real runners now than they had when I passed them by the lake. I glanced at Beth and saw she obviously knew who they were so we sat and waited in silence until they got to the table.

Beth said something to the men in a language I didn’t recognize and I realized then they weren’t locals after all. The language sounded vaguely like a Chinese dialect, but I didn’t know a single word of any Chinese dialect so I couldn’t be sure. Beth had a question in her voice when she spoke—I was pretty sure of at least that much—and one of the men nodded quickly in response, giving a single crisp snap of his head. After that both men waited patiently while Beth looked off into space for a few moments.

“Okay,” she finally said.

Then she added something else in whatever language it was she was speaking and both men immediately turned and walked away without another word.

Beth took a deep breath and wiped both hands over her face.

“It looks like somebody may be interested in you after all,” she said.

“You mean somebody is following me?”

“There does appear to be surveillance of some kind operating.”

I blinked at that. “You have got to be kidding.”

Beth shook her head.

“Who is it?” I asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Are you saying that Jimmy Kicks—”

Beth interrupted, waving my question away.

“I don’t know. We’ll keep you covered with a counter-surveillance team until I’m sure what’s going on. Just keep on doing whatever you normally do and don’t worry about it.”

“Counter-surveillance team?
Look, Beth, what the hell is really going on here?”

“I already told you—”

“All of a sudden you sound more like a spook than a bodyguard to me, Beth. Is that it? Are you really a spook?”

“I am exactly who I told you I am, Mr. Shepherd. I am not associated with any intelligence agency.”

Beth’s response had a oddly wooden quality to it and I wondered for a moment if there was a message for me somewhere in there between the lines.

“It’s no concern of mine whether you believe me or not,” Beth went on before I could decide. “Mr. Gale pays me to provide security for him and I answer only to him. He asked me to monitor you for surveillance. Now it seems you may be tagged and I’ve got to tell you that I’m not real thrilled.”

“Well, that makes two of us, Beth.”

“The reason I’m not real thrilled,” she continued, her tone neutral, “is that now I’m going to have to pull some people off Mr. Gale to cover you and that leaves me weak if anything goes down with him. I don’t like to be weak.”

She paused and looked at me to make sure I appreciated the point.

“You must not tell anyone about any of this, Mr. Shepherd. You would be putting yourself in danger, and possibly others as well. If you
are
under surveillance, this changes everything.”

“Like what exactly?”

“It will be difficult for you to see Mr. Gale again.”

“That’s not a problem. I don’t want to see Mr. Gale again.”

“Don’t make jokes, Mr. Shepherd. This isn’t a game. I don’t think you understand what you’re up against here.”

“Oh, I think I do, Beth. I’m not up against anything because I’m not involved with Barry Gale and I don’t intend to
get
involved with Barry Gale.”

“Then why were you—”

“I had some time to kill in Hong Kong and I was curious.”

“Curiosity killed the cat.”

“Gee, I wish I’d said that.”

The corners of Beth’s lips lifted in a smile, but her eyes didn’t join in. “You’re not taking me seriously, are you?”

“Well… no.”

“These are serious people. It’s risky to underestimate people you don’t know and don’t understand. I doubt they have underestimated you and that gives them the advantage.”

“Hold on, Beth.” I tried to put just the right tone of appeal into my voice without coming off like a wimp. “Can you just lay it out for me? What the hell is going on here?”

“I’m only the hired help, Mr. Shepherd.”

“But you
could
tell me, couldn’t you?”

Beth hesitated, and for a moment I thought she was about to say something, but then she looked away.

“It’s up to Mr. Gale. My job is just to make sure no one bothers you. We’ll be around. Don’t worry. You’ll be fine.”

She smiled and there was something like an apology in her eyes, but I knew that was all I was going to get out of her.

“You really have nothing to worry about, Mr. Shepherd. In spite of what you may have assumed, I’m not just some bimbo. I did eight years with Special Branch Counterintelligence in Hong Kong. I’m very good at my job. I have expert ratings with a dozen kinds of firearms.”

“Are you saying that you may have to
shoot
somebody to protect me?”

Beth chuckled slightly, but she didn’t reply. She just slipped off the picnic table, nodded at me, and broke into a jog toward the park’s main gate on Ratchadamri Road. I watched her until she reached the gate, passed through it, and disappeared.

I pushed myself off the table, too, and started walking back to where I had parked the Volvo.

It was utterly inconceivable to me that there could be people watching me at that very moment. I was just an unimportant lecturer at an insignificant business school in an inconsequential country in an unimportant part of the world. I couldn’t believe that anyone—other than perhaps Anita—gave even the most minuscule of damns about where I was going or what I was doing.

The more I thought about it, the more certain I became there was only one sensible explanation for all this: Barry was trying to scare me. He must have concocted this whole ridiculous story and then sent this woman and the two guys around to make it look real. Barry probably figured if he could frighten me badly enough, I would jump into his arms in sheer terror and then he would have me right where he wanted me.

I had thought for a moment there that Beth might be about to tell me what was really going on. Could I really believe she had come to meet me without Barry knowing about it? There had been something, I thought, an instant in which she seemed to want to tell me everything—and I had almost been ready then to believe that she really was there on her own—but I was probably mistaken. Men in general tended to become unreasonably hopeful and stupidly optimistic in the company of beautiful women, and I was no different. That was probably all there had been to that.

When I got back to the Volvo, I glanced up the street and immediately spotted a man sitting behind the wheel of a blue Toyota van parked a short distance along Soi Sarasin and on the opposite side. He looked like a Thai, but he was wearing a green baseball cap and dark glasses, and it was hard to tell for sure.

The man was probably just waiting for someone, I told myself. He really didn’t appear to be paying any attention to me and there was nothing unusual about him or about what he was doing. Nevertheless, I found myself keeping a wary eye cocked in his direction while I started the Volvo, made a U-turn, and headed back toward my apartment.

When I turned the corner onto Wireless Road, I glanced up at my mirror and saw the man was still there. He hadn’t moved. He hadn’t even looked at me as far as I could tell. Then both he and his blue van slipped out of sight and all I could do was wonder.

ANITA WAS STILL
sleeping when I got back so I showered and shaved as quietly as I could. I left a note reminding her of my meeting with Dollar and then went back downstairs to the garage and got back into the Volvo again. I had nothing in particular to do before eleven o’clock, but I thought it might be pleasant to head on down to the United Center, treat myself to a peaceful breakfast somewhere, and then just hang around the office and shuffle papers until Dollar showed up.

I drove south on Soi Chidlom and caught a red light next to the Central Department Store. While I sat there waiting for it to change, I watched the army of sales clerks arriving for work streaming into the huge store through the employees’ entrance. They were overwhelmingly young and mostly female. Although I had the Volvo’s top down and was quite comfortable in a blue cotton shirt with the sleeves rolled up, most of the salesgirls wore coats over the white blouses and black skirts of their uniforms. Bulky nylon parkas in bright shades of red and yellow seemed to be the favored choice. One tiny girl even sported a purple ski hat pulled all the way down over her ears.

The Thais hated cool weather. At the first sign of sliding temperatures, they hauled out parkas fit for winter in Alaska and swapped their flip-flops for fur-lined mukluks. The city’s foreign residents usually reacted to the onset of winter in a somewhat more measured fashion. At most, we rolled down our sleeves.