Jake Needham - Laundry Man

When I had finished I shut the laptop down and closed it.

“Done,” I said, and got out of the Cherokee.

Back across the compound, Jello was still faithfully standing guard over Barry Gale.

“Good dog,” I said when we all trooped back, but Jello ignored me.

“Can I load this one up now so we can get out of here?” he asked Phony Frank instead.

“I’ll take care of him,” Phony Frank replied, bending down over Barry.

When I thought back on it later, I was certain I hadn’t seen the gun until Frank fired.

Cops sometimes call the.22 caliber Colt Woodsman the hit man special. The gun is too small to have any real stopping power and it’s useless for self-defense; but load it with hollow points and fire it point-blank into a man’s head and it’s a foolproof killing machine.

Phony Frank had produced the little gun from somewhere and pressed it against Barry’s temple when he bent down, but the popping noises it made when he pulled the trigger were the first sign I had that something had gone badly wrong.

“You goddamned bastard!” I screamed uselessly at him.

Just John was ready when I lunged at Phony Frank, wrapping me in a bear hug and holding me while I futilely thrashed around.

Jello half pulled his service revolver, but Frank quickly straightened up and laid the muzzle of the Woodsman under Jello’s chin. Jello just stood there with a puzzled expression on his face waiting for his brain to catch up with his eyes.

“Put it on the ground, Jello.” Just John spoke in a soft and soothing voice. “Put it on the ground and then we’ll all have a nice little talk.”

“I’m not having any talk with you bastards!” I yelled. “You murdered that man in cold blood!”

I kicked back hard with my right heel and caught Just John squarely on his shin, but he never even flinched.

Jello lowered his arm and slowly bent his knees, laying his service revolver flat on the ground. Phony Frank scooped it up and slid it into a pocket of his jacket.

“I’m just doing what they told me to do, Jello,” he said.

Phony Frank watched Jello cautiously, but Jello still seemed more puzzled than alarmed by what was happening.

“My instructions were to locate the missing funds and then eliminate the cause. I guess it’s obvious why I couldn’t tell you that up front. I’m sorry, Jello. Really.”

“You’re sorry?” I barked at Frank.

“Not for him,” Phony Frank nodded toward the handcuffed corpse on the ground. “I’m sorry I had to string Jello along without telling him the whole story.”

“But why kill Barry?” I asked. “I got your goddamned money for you.”

“Barry Gale compromised a top-secret national security operation. Any way you slice it, Jack, you know we’re not going to leave him running around loose. You can’t imagine how much he knows.”

“Is that why you killed Howard and Dollar, too? Because of what they knew?”

“Every operation has losses, Jack.”

“I know as much as they did, maybe more now. And so does Jello. You going to kill us, too?”

Phony Frank swung the Woodsman away from Jello and took a lazy step toward me. “Well, you raise an interesting point there, Jack, a real interesting point. If it was up to me…”

Phony Frank slowly spread his hands in a gesture that left little doubt as to what his preferred choice was.

“But it’s not up to me. The guys who tell me what to do say you both walk away. Too many bodies in an operation, they figure, and people start snooping around. Besides, we’re sure that when you calm down and think everything through, you’ll both be safe bets.”

“I’ll tell you what, partner, your lap dog of a local cop over there may be okay, but I’m anything but a safe bet!”

Phony Frank was smirking now and I would have liked nothing better than to smash that look right down his throat.

“I don’t think you’ll be any problem, Jack. You’re a player now.”

“I’m a what?”

“You’re a player. You’re part of one of the great secrets of history. Look at it this way. If the guys we’re backing succeed in overthrowing the Chinese government and taking over the whole country like we think they will, you’ll probably get a goddamned medal. A secret one, of course.”

Phony Frank looked down and kicked the toe of his boot through the loose dirt. In the silence, the sound of it was like a wave breaking over stones.

“Hell, man, even if the little Chink bastards fuck up and the whole plan turns to shit, you’ll be one of the few guys around who knows how close we came to changing the world. That’s what a player is, Jack. That’s you now.”

Just John had loosened his grip on me and I shook him off and took several steps away.

“I’ll go to the press and burn you.”

“You really believe all that the-truth-shall-make-you-free crap, don’t you, Jack?” Phony Frank snorted. “You poor jerk.”

“You might get a few reporters going for a while,” Just John said. “But no respectable publication will ever print a word you tell them. We’ve got that covered. Maybe you’d get your own web page with the other conspiracy nuts, but that’s about the best you can hope for.”

“It’s all wrapped up, Jack,” Phony Frank said. “Tighter than a gnat’s asshole.”

He smiled serenely at me. “You got no place to go. Nobody to listen to you.”

“I’ve got a top-ranking officer in the Thai police as a witness. That’s got to count for something.”

We all looked at Jello.

“That true, Jello?” Just John asked. “You see anything here tonight that you might want to talk to somebody about?”

Jello looked at the ground and said nothing. He wouldn’t meet my eyes.

“There you go, Jack.” Phony Frank shook his head in mock sympathy. “A good witness is hard to find these days.”

I stood quietly and looked off across the compound. The wall was too high for me to see the ocean from where we were, but I could smell the salt in the heavy night air. Somewhere not very far away there were lovers cuddling on palm-lined beaches, fishing boats dragging home nets filled with lobsters, children playing tag on scruffy jetties, and seaside shacks filled with tourists drinking at wobbly tables. Somewhere out there, I reminded myself, normal people were still living normal lives.

But that was beyond the wall, out in the world I had left behind. Or that had left me behind.

“You’ve really got to face it, Jack.”

Just John’s voice was gentle now. He sounded like a priest trying to talk somebody out of jumping off a bridge.

“You’re on the inside now. You’re one of us.”

All I could do was stand and shake my head. I looked back at Barry Gale’s body lying facedown in the dirt, his arms still handcuffed behind him. The little Colt had left two small, tidy holes in Barry’s left temple. Thin streams of drying blood had run down from each wound and joined together into a single, thicker stream just above Barry’s ear. It was a neat, professional job of extinguishing a man’s life.

“I’m not one of you,” I said after a while. “I’m nothing like you.”

The morning after they shot Barry Gale, I woke well before daybreak and sat out on the balcony at the Phuket Yacht Club watching the ocean turn from black to blue steel as the sky slowly lightened. I ordered a pot of coffee from room service and made a promise to myself that by the time it was all gone I would decide.

A hard little seed of anger had formed inside me overnight. I cherished it. I nursed it. I willed it to grow.

It grew.

And after I finished the last of the coffee, I knew exactly what I was going to do.