Jimm Juree 01; Killed at the Whim of a Hat

might be living in the buttock end of the world but I could still sniff out a story. After nine months of highway traffic pile-up reports and coconut yield statistics, I’d been thrilled when I heard they’d discovered the bodies. Please let them be murder victims, I prayed. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a bloodthirsty person. I just needed reassuring that man hadn’t stopped displaying inhumanity to man. I’d begun to doubt it.
    I’d been sitting in one of our grass-roofed huts overlooking the bay, gutting mackerel when I heard the news of old Mel’s VW. Unless we get a few sea bass or a tasty anchovy, mackerel gutting’s usually the highlight of the week in our cul-de-sac of a village. Kow, the squid-boat captain, stopped by on his Honda Dream with its fishball-dispensing sidecar. He’s our local Paul Revere. You don’t need a cell phone or Internet connection if you have someone like Captain Kow in the vicinity. I’ve no idea how he hears it all but I’d wager he’s a good hour ahead of the BBC on most news.
    “You hear?” he yelled. Of course I hadn’t heard. I never hear anything. “They found a car with dead bodies in it under Old Mel’s back lot.”
    He smiled. He’s got a sort of mail slot where his front teeth ought to be. It makes you want to doubt him but he’s invariably right. His southern accent’s so thick I needed a few seconds to decipher his words.
    “Who’s Old Mel?” I asked.
    “Got twenty hectares out off the Bang Ka road just before Bang Ga.”
    I was elated. This was the first burst of excitement I’d felt all year. I had to get over there. My little brother, Arnon, playfully known as Arny, was out somewhere with the truck and Granddad Jah had the motorcycle. I didn’t have any choice but to use Mair’s old auntie bicycle with the metal basket on the front. I shouted to my mother that I was taking it and heard a faint ‘Make sure you put petrol in it’ from deep inside our shop. Right, Mair.
    Apart from the bridge over the Lang Suan river the roads are mostly flat around here, all palm and coconut plantations. Pleasant enough if you like green – I don’t. There are limestone cliffs sticking up here and there, making the place look untidy, but not much in the way of hills. Old Mel’s place was a good ten kilometers away and exercise wasn’t one of my strong points. But you know how it is when you get the scent of blood in your nostrils. My little legs pumped away at the pedals and the adrenaline coursed through my veins and, in a sudden bubbly rush of clarity, my mind became filled with all my glory moments. The marvelous crimes I’d reported; the numerous bodies I’d stepped over – being careful not to tread in the blood – the castrated cuckolds, the jimmied ATMs, the druggies, the lesbian high-rise suicides, the motorcycle hit squads, the truck smugglers, the mysterious backpacker mutilations, the high-speed schoolbus-race crashes, philandering fake fortune tellers, gangsters I’d exposed (albeit anonymously), stabbings, stranglings, garrotings…Oh, I could go on.
    What a career I had ahead of me. My name, Jimm Juree, was synonymous with accurate crime reporting all over Thailand. Not even the simple dim fare left after the medusa had feasted on me could detract from my obvious affinity for my job. I was respected. I was one seat away from the senior crime reporter’s leather chair. Saeng Thip rum had left little of the incumbent and everyone knew his health was shot and his days were numbered. They gave him six months. Then I’d be in. I’d all but been given the nod. The first female senior crime reporter in Chiang Mai Mail history. Only the second in the entire country. Me. Flying high.
    And then, one hot early evening in August last year, my rice-paper balloon burst into flames and crashed to the ground. I obviously didn’t pay enough tea money to the right people in a previous life. Our mother, Mair, despite her red-handed involvement in the affair, would continue to say it was fate. Karma, she called it, but I don’t think it was any coincidence that she’d rediscovered Buddhism at roughly the same time the dementia started to kick in.
    That evening, almost exactly a year ago, will be forever burned into the DVD of my soul. It plays over and over even when I’m not switched on. I see the scene. Hear the soundtrack. I know exactly which frame’s going to freeze with the look of horror plastered over my face.
    I’d had a great day,