The Axe Factor: A Jimm Juree Mystery (Jimm Juree Mysteries) (3 page)

When I reached the resort, I found Mair up a tree and the dogs below, barking. I stood with them.

“Mair,” I shouted. “Why are you up that tree?”

“There’s a cat stuck up here,” she said.

“I don’t see it.”

“It’s camouflaged.”

“That would make it a green cat, Mair.”

“Don’t be silly, Monica. It’s white.”

“And you can’t see it because of the snow?”

She laughed.

“The clouds, child,” she said. “That’s why you can’t see it from the ground.”

“The clouds are dark gray.”

“It’s a dirty cat.”

“Of course.”

I found myself bogged down in conversations like this more times than I cared to remember. She always won because she was the mistress of her own logic. She climbed higher. One of her flip-flops fell off and the dogs gasped. Sticky ran off with it.

“Mair,” I shouted, “have you ever seen a reasonably good-looking old
farang
with a beautiful Thai wife living over in Kor Kao?”

“That would be Conrad and Piyanart,” she replied.

Mair knew everyone by name for twenty kilometers around.

“How come I’ve never seen them?” I asked.

“They drive a big gray S and M. Tinted windows.”

“Would that be an SUV?”

“That might be right.”

“So, how do you know them?”

“They stop at the shop sometimes. They get their drinking water here. Catch!”

The kitten dropped between the branches, screeching and flailing her claws. As cats have nine lives, I considered stepping back and letting her use one up. But Mair wouldn’t have forgiven me. So I held out my arms and steadied myself. I’ve never been much good at sports. If it had been a basketball, I would certainly have dropped it. But that’s because basketballs don’t dig their claws into your forearms and hang on. Before I could scream, it had disengaged, was on the ground, and fleeing the dogs. I swore and held my arms out in front of me so as not to drip blood on my white shorts.

*   *   *

“I’ve never tried it myself, but they say you stand a better chance of bleeding out if you run the razor blade along the artery rather than across it.”

“What?”

“If you’re going to slash your wrists.”

“I didn’t … it isn’t a suicide attempt, Da.”

“Right.”

“It isn’t. A cat did it.”

“OK.”

“Really.”

“Whatever you say.”

Each district down here has a health center. They’re identical. Designed by a sadist. No matter how sick you are, you have to do a Rocky Balboa up a steep flight of steps to get to the surgery. If you make it, you can’t really be that sick. But that’s just as well because, although technically there’s supposed to be a doctor attached to each one, it’s a lucky patient indeed who catches one in residence.

“Alone again?” I asked.

Da was a real nurse with a uniform and everything. She’d escaped Maprao after high school, had completed her nursing training in Bangkok, and—more fool her—had come back again. Her childhood sweetheart, Wood, had promised to wait those three years for her return. However, his mates had convinced him that a pretty young trainee nurse in Sin City would have suitors tripping over their tongues after her. So he’d given her three months and married the girl from the fluffy-stuffed-animal shop in Lang Suan. As he hadn’t thought to mention this in his annual Thai New Year greetings cards, she’d returned with only his un-smudged fingerprints on her breasts and walked in on a family meal with Wood, his wife, and their two toddlers. She’d stopped eating that day, moved back in with her mother, and taken the only available position, at the health center. She only had her enormous skeleton to thank for hanging on to her skin because now there was no meat on her to fill it out. You saw her type on the Fashion Channel all the time. The scarecrows of haute couture. I have no idea what kept her alive, but she exhibited no lack of energy.

“Yeah,” she said. “The doctor’s off at a conference in Chumphon. Child development. Back tomorrow. You sure this was a cat? It’s really deep.”

“Small. Fluffy. Obnoxious.”

“That sounds like a cat. Was it vaccinated?”

I laughed.

“I didn’t really have a chance to check its medical records.”

“Then you’ll need rabies shots.”

“What? Jesus! It was just a kitten. An innocent. I doubt she’d had enough life experience to be picking up any diseases. Can’t you just clean up the wound and give me a course of antibiotics?”

“It’s in the blood, Jimm. She could have got it from her mother. And it’s incurable. I’m giving you shots.”

“More than one?”

I hate needles.

“Four. One every three days.”

“Can I refuse?”

“Of course you can. But when you start exhibiting odd behaviors, delirium, combativeness, loss of muscle function, spasms, drooling, convulsions…”

“Hmm. I wonder if my grandad’s got rabies.”

“… chronic pain and eventually death, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

I rolled up the sleeve of my fashionable but sweaty cardigan while she fumbled in the drawer for the meds. I located a vein and tapped it vigorously to make it an easier target.

“It’s not heroin,” she said. “Shoulder.”

“Shoulder? Are you sure? There’s nothing up there but flab. How’s it going to find its way to my blood? Can’t you just inject it straight into my heart?”

“I thought you didn’t have one.”

See? See what happens when you befriend the natives? You assume most of what you say goes over their heads, but these people remember everything. I’m constantly disillusioned. As a city girl, I’d always assumed evolution started in the sea, crawled up through the villages, and reached its peak in the coffee shops and garage music nightclubs of Chiang Mai. But I’m often presented with evidence that the suburbanites are hoovering up plankton and the advanced life-forms are living off the land and sea down here.

“I’d supposed, as a nurse, you’d have understood I was speaking metaphorically,” I told her.

She wrenched off my cardigan and exposed my braless Sydney Night Lice tank top. Lucky we were alone. It would have driven men insane with passion.

“So, where is Ed these days?” she asked.

She knew perfectly well where Ed was. Ed the grass cutter. Ed the boat skipper. Ed the builder. Ed the lanky, mustachioed breaker of hearts. He was with his girlfriend, Lulu, the slutty hairdresser. If men were awarded prizes for their taste in women, Ed had a Raspberry right there in his arms. He could have had me, if only he’d been more patient. He hadn’t learned the city rules. He’d expected me to agree to a date after one asking. That’s the way they do it down here. If you say “no,” it means “no.” So you give up. Ridiculous. Even then, muddled with intoxicants, before I knew about Lulu, I’d given him a second chance. I’d virtually thrown myself at him.

“You might feel a small prick,” said Da.

“What?”

She jabbed a javelin into the tender flesh of my right shoulder.

“Shit,” I said. “That hurt.”

“Sorry.” She laughed. “I hadn’t been expecting it to go in so easily. I’m used to durian skin. You’re a mango, Jimm.”

“Thanks.”

“You know? I’m worried,” she said.

“Whether you injected me with steroids by mistake?”

“About Dr. Somluk. I think she might be going senile in her old age.”

Da had come to the right place. I was a child of senility.

“How old is she?” I asked.

“Sixty.”

“Da, that doesn’t even count as old anymore. Sixty’s the new eighteen.”

“She’s started with these conspiracy theories.”

She abandoned my arm and sat on the sink unit. Unlike ours at the resort, it didn’t creak. She barely weighed more than her uniform.

“You know?” she said. “All that ‘They’re after me’ stuff. ‘If anything happens to me, make sure they don’t get my documents.’ ‘They’re more powerful than you’d ever know.’”

“Did she ever mention who these powerful people might be?”

“No. That’s just it. She always says it’ll be safer for me if I don’t know.”

“So, you think she’s going nuts?”

“Most of the time she’s normal. You know? Friendly. Funny. Really good with the patients. The kids love her. Then, every now and then, she’ll come out with one of these rants. It scares me.”

I knew exactly what she meant. My own Mair had started out like that. She’d be talking about the cost of washing powder, then mention in passing that she’d been standing in the checkout queue behind Kim Jong Il, the North Korean tyrant, and even he was complaining about the dramatic increase in the cost of Fab. I suspected from experience that Dr. Somluk was on the same slippery shopping slope.

“What should I do?” Da asked.

“Do you think it affects her work?”

“No.”

“Then ride it.”

“Really?”

“It doesn’t sound like she’s ready for the loony bin just yet. Maybe the sea air will clear her mind. It’s helped Mair. Now, do you think I can get some Band-Aids on my bloody wrists before they get infected? I have a very serious interview to conduct this afternoon. I need to look my best.”

*   *   *

I had to prepare lunch before my appointment at Kor Kow. My short straw had committed me to the kitchen at the Gulf Bay Lovely Resort, but in truth, nobody else in my family could cook. Even if they worked in the Oxfam mess tent feeding the starving masses, they’d get complaints. Unfortunately, I had a skill. They liked to watch me in the kitchen but deliberately failed to learn anything. I’d decided on
kanom jeen
with fish sauce that day because I’d made the sauce earlier, so I just had to boil the pasta. Still they traipsed into the kitchen to look over my shoulder. Mair came first.

“Are you sure the sauce is red enough?” she asked.

“No, perhaps you’d like to make it next time?” I told her.

“I’m just saying, when Grandma made it…”

“When Grandma made it, she used tomato ketchup. Liters of it. It was inedible.”

“She’s gone, you know?”

“And I shouldn’t speak ill of dead cooks?”

“I learned all my culinary skills from her.”

“I rest my case. Do you want to call the others? It’s almost ready.”

“But … the color.”

“I’ll toss some crimson emulsion in it.”

“Yes. Good idea.”

“Mair. Where’s Capt—where’s Dad?”

“He’s in a safe place.”

“Why don’t you bring him out? Invite him for lunch.”

“Really?”

“He has to eat.”

“You don’t hate him?”

“Not yet.”

“What do you mean?”

“He left you with three young children. Vanished. We’re all screwed up in our own adorable ways as a result. But we met him as Captain Kow and we liked him … well, Grandad hated him, but he hates most people. Arny and I saw a lot in the captain to respect. He doesn’t seem like the kind who’d abandon a family without a good reason. We’d like to hear what that reason was. If it turns out to have been due to, I don’t know, boredom or another woman, general irresponsibility—then we can hate him with a clear conscience. But we’re prepared to give him a hearing.”

“I don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t think we should ask him to give his reason.”

“Why not?”

She adopted her famous everyone-else-around-me-is-going-down
Titanic
smile.

“National security,” she said.

“Mair … I…” But when I looked up from the noodles, she’d already turned tail and fled.

It probably meant nothing. It had become a catchphrase to cover a lot of ills. The six soldiers who’d turned up at Mair’s Burmese school and searched the six-year-olds’ satchels had cited national security as their motivation. But when Dad walked out on us, there had been no such concept. Was she saying Captain Kow was a spy? Was he involved in some political intrigue? I needed to look up what was happening in the country during the period he left. Now that would make a good story. My dad—shaken martinis and a gadget-ridden Aston Martin.

Grandad Jah was next in.

“It’s not red enough,” he said as he pored over my sauce.

“I’ll open my wrist wounds and bleed in it,” I said. I thought I’d muttered it under my breath, but he caught it, gave me that “Don’t get fresh with me, girl” look and sat at the table. All the windows were open, which was unusual. The weather had been mild for the past two weeks but not calm enough for us to venture back outside to the bamboo tables. The monsoon season liked to lull you into complacency, then blow your roof off. The Siam Commercial Bank was considering offering insurance against natural disasters, but they hadn’t quite got around to it. (I tried for a product placement incentive for mentioning them in my story, but Mrs. Doom, the manager, said there wasn’t a budget for it. What she meant was that she didn’t think anyone would read it.) I hadn’t told the family, but I’d put money aside from my modest savings and would be the first to procure said insurance. Divine intervention was our only hope. Sadly, the Gulf didn’t have so much as a decent volcanic fault line. Even the disasters were dull here.

Arny sauntered into the kitchen, squeezed my flabby waist, and said, “It’s not—”

“Don’t.”

“OK.”

I like my brother.

“Where’s the bride to be?” I asked.

Arny’s fiancée, Gaew, had been spending more time at our resort. She helped Mair in the shop. They’d become close. That wasn’t such a surprise, given that they were the same age. Arny had “saved himself” till he met the right one. He’d found her in the form of the ex-bodybuilding empress of Indochina, thirty years his senior, divorced. At first, we thought it was a blessing that she’d pumped so many steroids into herself that she hadn’t been able to produce children. Her fallopian tubes were solid brickwork. But recently I’d been thinking it would have been nice if Arny had stepchildren his own age to hang out with.

“She’s working out,” he said, with a look of pride that his elderly paramour could still bench-press sixty kilos.

“Bah!” said Grandad Jah. “Get yourself a mindless teenaged bimbo like the rest of them. It’s unnatural. A boy like you—with her.”

Arny joined him at the table. “Have you ever loved anyone, Grandad?” he asked.