Jake Needham - Laundry Man

One of the smaller buildings looked like a large garage with room for several vehicles. It had a huge tank next to it that might have been for gasoline storage. The other two small buildings looked like guesthouses, except that one had four satellite dishes on its roof: three small ones and one very large one. Either there was a sophisticated communications facility in there or somebody watched a whole lot of television.

The main house sprawled across most of the rest of the compound. It was built of black rock with shiny brass trim and oversized windows and doors. Overall, the whole effect was something like Wayne Newton does Phuket.

As I studied one of the smaller houses more carefully, the one without the electronic apparatus on the roof, a man came out. I was too far away to pick out his features with any clarity, but I watched him as he walked toward the inside of the front gate. I lost sight of him when my angle of vision was blocked by the compound’s wall, but I kept scanning with the glasses and in a moment he reappeared. It looked to me as if the man was walking the compound’s perimeter like a watchman making his rounds, and the automatic rifle he carried in the crook of his left arm pretty much sealed the deal.

I continued to follow the man as he paced the inside of the wall. Then something behind him attracted his attention and I saw him half turn, apparently talking to someone. I swung the glasses in the direction the man was looking and braced my arms to steady them.

A woman with her hands on her hips was visible in the half-open front door to the main house and she looked as if she was giving instructions to the man with the rifle. I didn’t need to see her face to know who she was.

Beth Staley was a hard woman to miss.

My cell phone began to ring and in the silence it sounded as loud as a siren. I trotted quickly back to the jeep, dug the phone out of the duffle bag, and flipped it open. Since I was on what looked like the dark side of the moon, I couldn’t believe it would work very well, but then a man’s voice sounded in my ear so clearly that it startled me.

“Professeur?”

“Tom?”

“Oui, Professeur. It is me.”

Captain Tom sounded happier after we had identified each other with certainty, but I thought there was still some kind of an odd note in his voice.

“Find out who owns the house?” I asked.

“That was another joke, right, Professeur? Like the shit about the bazooka?”

“Look, Tom, just tell me what you found out. All right?”

“Yes, all right.”

Tom paused a beat before he went on. There was something in the silence, but I couldn’t decide what it was.

“The land title is held in the name of a Thai company, but that company is controlled by another one registered in Hong Kong, and the Hong Kong company is jointly owned by two companies, both of them registered in the British Virgin Islands as nonresident trusts.”

“Figures,” I said. “Let me guess. The trustees for the companies are both lawyers who are somewhere else.”

“Both companies have the same trustee. And, yes, you are right. He’s a lawyer who is somewhere else.”

There was that odd note in Tom’s voice again.

“Who is it?” I asked.

“Why are you fucking me around like this, Professeur?”

“I’m not fucking you around, Tom. I just want to know who the trustee is.”

“You really don’t know?”

“No, I really don’t know.”

“That’s strange, Professeur. I believe you, but that’s pretty fucking strange.”

“Why, Tom?”

“Because the fellow we use to run down this kind of stuff never gets it wrong. He says the name of the trustee for both companies is Jonathan William Shepherd. That’s you, n’est-ce pas?”

There was a long silence. I knew Tom was waiting for me to tell him exactly what was going on. Since I didn’t have any better idea than he did, I said nothing.

“You still there, Professeur?”

“Yeah, Tom, I’m here. Look, let that go. I don’t want to talk about it right now.”

And even if I did, I had no goddamned clue what I could say.

Captain Tom must have been accustomed to people who didn’t want to talk about things because he changed the subject smoothly.

“Where are you now, Professeur?”

“I followed the route you marked on the map. I’m in a spot just above the compound and I can see it pretty well. Do you know how many people are in there?”

“Why? What are you going to do? Rush the place with that faggot.45 of yours?”

“Maybe.”

“Well, shit, Professeur.”

There was a short silence before Captain Tom went on.

“I don’t know who’s in there. The place isn’t that big, is it?”

“Looks pretty big from here. You don’t know for sure?”

“Jesus Christ, Professeur, I know fuck all for sure.”

I didn’t say anything else. Captain Tom obviously hoped I would tell him what I was going to do, but he wasn’t sure he should press the point.

“Hey, I was only making a joke about rushing the house,” he eventually said.

“Uh-huh.”

“I mean… you wouldn’t really do that, would you, Professeur?”

“Nope.”

“Hey, okay. You had me worried there for a minute.”

Then Captain Tom must have played back the last bit of our conversation and noticed that I had left his original question conspicuously unanswered.

“So what are you going to do?”

“You got a phone number for the compound, Tom?”

“Ah… no.”

“Didn’t think you would. Then I guess I’ll have to go down and ring the doorbell like you suggested.”

“Hey, Professeur, now wait a minute. If I were you, I’d think about it for a long time before-”

I cut Tom off before he could get wound up.

“Ground control to Captain Tom. Over and out.”

I hit the red power button and my cell phone went dead. I shoved it into the duffle and walked back to the rock outcropping that had become my observation post; then I raised the field glasses again. The compound looked quiet and sleepy in the late afternoon sun and the guard was no longer anywhere to be seen.

So I’m the trustee for the property, huh?

Of course Barry Gale was down there. He had flown to Phuket under my name and now here he was, surrounded by armed guards and in an elaborate compound owned by companies I appeared to control. Barry couldn’t have made it any clearer if he had installed a red neon sign on the roof.

Barry Gale wanted me to find him.

And now I had.

So why wait any longer to ask Barry what the hell this was all about? I certainly wasn’t just going to drive back down to the Phuket Yacht Club now and think about it some more over a Heineken. In my experience, life generally worked out best if you just kept moving in a reasonably straight line most of the time, even if a lot of people tried to make it seem more complicated than that. For example, if you wanted to ask someone a question, usually the best approach was to walk right up to them and ask it. That way, you got your answer without a lot of unnecessary screwing around. Of course, the answer was frequently a lie; but hey, it was a start, wasn’t it?

I lowered the glasses and looked around. Barry had picked a hell of a good bolt-hole. Other than using the main road or coming cross-country like I had, the compound was unapproachable. Nobody could get within five hundred yards of the place without being spotted, and even if somebody could get up to it the walls made it a fortress that would have given General Patton pause. With the gasoline storage and the communications equipment, Barry could probably hold out in there long enough to make anyone stalking him throw up their hands in exasperation and just go away.