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  Number Six

  Spay With Me

  A Jimm Juree Short Story

  By Colin Cotterill

  Number Six: Spay With Me

  Copyright © Colin Cotterill, 2018

  First published DCO Books 2018

  eBook Edition published by

  DCO Books, 2018

  Proglen Trading Co., Ltd.

  Bangkok Thailand

  http://www.dco.co.th

  ISBN 978-616-456-004-8

  All Rights Reserved

  This book is a work of fiction. All names, characters, and other elements of the story are either the product of the author's imagination or else are used only fictitiously. Any resemblance to real characters, living or dead, or to real incidents, is entirely coincidental.

  Also by Colin Cotterill

  Dr. Siri Paiboun series

  The Coroner's Lunch (2004)

  Thirty-Three Teeth (August 2005)

  Disco For the Departed (August 2006

  Anarchy and Old Dogs (August 2007)

  Curse of the Pogo Stick (August 2008)

  The Merry Misogynist (August 2009)

  Love Songs from a Shallow Grave (August 2010)

  Slash and Burn (October 2011)

  The Woman Who Wouldn't Die (January 2013)

  Six and a Half Deadly Sins (May 2015)

  The Rat Catchers' Olympics (August 2017)

  Jimm Juree series

  Killed at the Whim of a Hat (July 2011)

  Grandad, There's a Head on the Beach (June 2012)

  The Axe Factor (April 2014)

  The Amok Runners (June 2016)

  Other publications

  Evil in the Land Without (2003)

  Ethel and Joan Go to Phuket (2004)

  Pool and its Role in Asian Communism (2005)

  Cyclelogical (2006)

  Ageing Disgracefully (2009)

  Bleeding in Black and White (2015)

  Contents

  Introduction to Jimm Juree

  Spay With Me

  Introduction

  Brief description of how the Jurees ended up in Maprao, the buttock-hole of the earth.

  I’ll keep this brief because it still irks me to tell our story. My name is Jimm Juree and I was, at one stage, a mere liver failure away from fame and fortune in Chiang Mai. But our mother, Mair, dragged the family down south to run a decrepit seaside resort on the Gulf of Thailand. I’m a reporter. A real one. And as soon as the head of the crime desk at the Chiang Mai Mail completed his impending suicide by Mekhong Whisky, I was to step into his moldy old shoes; only the second female in the country to hold such a prestigious position.

  Then Mair – nutty as peanut brittle – sold our family home without telling us and headed south. With her went her father, Granddad Jah, the only Thai traffic policeman to go through an entire career without accepting bribes or kickbacks, my brother, Arny, a wimpy lamb with the body of a Greek God, and me. The only one to pass up on family obligation was Sissy, my transsexual brother. Once a cabaret star, and briefly a TV celebrity, now an ageing recluse, Sissy had become something of an internet criminal and although I haven’t forgiven her for deserting us, I do find her skills useful from time to time.

  You see, although I would never have guessed it, Maprao and its environs is a hotbed of crime. Although I’m technically the part-time social events reporter for the shitty local newspaper, barely a week goes by that I’m not chasing down some misdemeanor or another. Our local police (who make the Keystone Cops look like the SAS) are of the belief that I brought all this crime with me from the city. I know that it’s always been here but our gentlemen in brown prefer not to notice it. As they say, and quite rightly too, they just don’t get paid enough to stand in front of a loaded gun. All we get from them are complaints about all the extra paperwork we’re causing them.

  So it’s down to our disjointed family to solve the mysteries and put the perps away. We’re a surprisingly efficient team of crime fighters but I have to confess we were hopeless at running a resort and deserved all the disasters that befell us. At the time of writing this, we still haven’t been able to salvage our monsoon ravaged bungalows from the depths of the bay and we’ve spent the past year doing odd jobs to make ends meet. The bank has been particularly slow in paying out on our disaster insurance claim. But we’re refusing to budge until they do.

  As it turned out, there was some method to Mair’s madness in bringing us down south, but in order to learn what that was you’ll have to fork out some money for the actual books that tell our sorry story. Details of those are below. I can’t say too much because Sissi and I are in a long ongoing dialogue with Clint Eastwood who probably wants to turn our family exploits into a movie. In the meantime, the files that I’m sending you in this series of shorts have been collated from the astounding cases I’ve been involved in since the floods. There is an expression, “Only in Thailand”, used freely by frustrated and frustrating foreigners who like nothing better than to complain about us. But, I have to confess, most of the cases I’ve been involved in here really could only have happened in my country. I hope you enjoy them.

  Novels most likely currently under option consideration by Malpaso Productions;

  Killed at the Whim of a Hat (July 2011) - Minotaur Books, New York ISBN 9780312564537

  Grandad, There's a Head on the Beach (June 2012) - Minotaur Books, New York ISBN 9780312564544

  The Axe Factor (April 2014) - Minotaur Books, New York ISBN 9781250043368

  The Amok Runners (June 2016) - CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform ISBN 9781533265289

  There’s also an exclusive short at Criminal Element called Hidden Genders that gives you some background on Sissi.

  It won’t help you much but the writer of these stories has a web page you probably shouldn’t bother going to.

  www.colincotterill.com

  Spay With Me

  On the day I sent one of my mother’s dogs to hell, someone robbed the Siam Commercial Bank in Pak Nam. The two events sound unrelated, but they weren’t. The connection between the two was me and one amazingly bad decision I made. This will all become evident as I talk you through the events of that Thursday.

  My day began with me cycling over to my mother, Mair’s house. Mair lived on a small palm berry and coconut plantation in the hills with my supposed father, Captain Kow. (We were still waiting for DNA evidence on that issue, and as he plays no role at all in this case file I won’t go into details.) Mair was the Dr. Dolittle of Maprao. She took in sick and injured animals, nursed them back to health, or gave them a civilized burial, and hung on to those that survived. The inmate manifest that morning read like the day Noah set off in his ark: two cows, two ponies, two buffalo, a goat, three assorted monkeys, four cats, a paraplegic monitor lizard, a cage of squirrels, a shrew, two turtles and a bunch of anti-social dogs. And it’s the dog pack that concerns us here. I apologize to those of you who get irritated by lists but she had, in order of rescue: Gogo (half blind/unable to digest food/ ornery), Sticky (happy hunting ground for ticks/lifelong kleptomaniac), Psycho (deaf/grumpy/perpetually licking his testicles), and Beer, the star of this report (overweight/hairless/late night howler/and, apparently, promiscuous).

  “Jane!” said my mother, head down and focused on her pilchard gutting. “You think you’d be slimmer with all that cycling you do.”

  Mair, I have to point out, is honest to beyond a fault. She’s also up to her eyeballs in dementia. My name isn’t, and never has been, Jane. I’m Jimm, her middle child, her pride and joy who graduated with honours and became a prize-winning crime journalist. I’d prematurely ended my career to look out for her. You think she’d remember that, but mine was the only name she never got right.

  “What’s so urgent
?” I asked.

  I could hear the pained howling of a troubled animal in the distance.

  “What indeed?” she said, looking up from the bowl of fish bowels. “Political reform for one thing.”

  “What?”

  “They’re killing each other all over the place. Even Pattaya’s a battle ground. Red shirts. Yellow shirts. It’s insane. Not sure ‘urgent’ is even the best word to describe it. Dire, that’s the word. I’d even say…”

  “Mair, I’m not talking about politics.”

  “Well, you should be. I didn’t send you to Europe for ten years for you to come back and ignore the state of our nation.”

  She hadn’t sent me to Europe. I was an exchange student in Australia for a year. It’s an easy mistake to make. All I learned in Sydney was how to drink.

  “Mair,” I said. “You called me. Left a message to come over urgently.”

  “What about?”

  “That’s what I’m asking.’

  “I didn’t tell you in the message?”

  “Perhaps you were about to but you cut yourself off.”

  I held up my cell phone as if to prove she’d called me and, like some trained musical seal, it started to play the Mama Mia ring tone. I pressed ‘receive’ and recognized the sweet voice of Lieutenant Chomphu.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “Having an Alzheimer conversation,” I said. “What’s up?”

  Chom was my best friend on the Pak Nam police force. He had all the feminine traits that I lacked. We liked the same types of men and he gave me good clothing advice. Ours was the only police station in the country that would accept an effeminate officer like Chom. They were desperate.

  “Thought you might be interested in a bank robbery,” he said.

  He knew my part-time position at the Chumphon Gazette writing about cockfight finger food and papaya composting was killing me. I thrived on violent crime and gory homicides and our little village of Maprao wasn’t coming up with the goods.

  “Where?” I asked.

  “Right here in Pak Nam,” he said.

  “No? The Pak Nam branch was robbed? Wow.”

  “I know. Makes your bladder roll over, doesn’t it?”

  “Are you there?”

  “At the crime scene waiting for the big nobs to get here from Lang Suan.”

  “Any press there yet?”

  “Not yet, but I’m sure the major will call in his paparazzi to get action shots of him thinking and pointing. But if you got here soon you could probably get an exclusive.”

  “Mair,” I said. “Where’s the Mighty X?”

  “It’s parked round the back,” she said.

  “Excellent,” I said and told Chom I’d be there in fifteen minutes.

  “She’s in there waiting for you,” Mair continued.

  I pressed ‘end call’ and looked up at my mother on the balcony surrounded by wildlife like a Disney movie trailer.

  “Who’s in where?” I asked.

  “Beer,” she said. “I borrowed a carry box for the morning so you don’t have to put her on the back seat. You remember what a bad passenger she is. Projectile vomiting all over the place.”

  I recognized the howling. It was Beer already complaining.

  “Where’s she going?” I asked.

  “You’re taking her to the vet.”

  “I am?”

  “You promised.”

  “I did? When did I promise?”

  “In January. You said as soon as the boys come a calling you’d take her to get spayed.”

  “So I didn’t specifically mention a date?”

  “It has to be today. She’s ripe. I can’t protect her virginity anymore.”

  “Mair, I have to write about a robbery.”

  “And will writing about a robbery put a stop to a ten year, bi-annual cycle of producing un-loved, unwanted babies? Will it stop her tripping over her own saggy tits even before she’s middle-aged?”

  I assumed it was a rhetorical question.

  “Mair, I…”

  “Because, by taking just a few minutes out of your valuable day to take one soon-to-be sexually abused puppy to the vet would remove a good deal of unpleasantness from her life. I wish spaying had been an option for me when I was eighteen.”

  “Mair, she’s not even six months old.”

  “And already experimenting sexually,” she said. “The dirty old dogs are twiddling their moustaches at the sight of her pert buttocks and juicy-.”

  “Mair. Don’t.”

  I never won those battles and time was ticking by.

  “I’ll take her after the bank,” I said. “But she’ll have to behave herself.”

  “You won’t hear a peep out of her,” said Mair with a big smile.

  *

  I didn’t hear a peep out of her but that was the only sound that didn’t make it out of the heavy density plastic travel box. For most of the journey it was as if I had the siren on full blast. She had an impressive set of lungs for a young dog. She had a good appetite too judging from the weight she’d put on since I’d last seen her. Palm berries were very moreish and fattening and she gorged on them for most of the day and night.

  I knew getting a parking spot on market day was going to be a nightmare and with a dog in a box on the back I’d have to find a place with shade. And in my pocket I had the envelope that Mair had handed me before I drove off. It contained cash. Vet Somboon charged two-thousand-two-hundred baht for a spay and the ongoing medication. He was a livestock specialist and that’s what he charged for horses. I’d tried to convince him to adjust his fees to the weight of the patient but he quite logically pointed out that dogs and cats were more difficult because they had fiddly little organs and in that confined space you could easily confuse an ovary for a lymph node. With a horse you’d just wade in and hack away at immediately recognizable organs with a machete. Or so he suggested. Two-thousand-two-hundred baht was a sum my mother could hardly afford. We were all on basic subsistence rations while we awaited the insurance company’s decision on whether we’d get compensation for Mother Nature wiping out our beachfront guesthouse and restaurant.

  Perhaps that was why I made the call. Or perhaps it was my selfish desire to get Beer off my hands and hightail it to the bank before the real police arrived. I’ll never be sure. But I was passing Ny Kao Temple and I saw the shocking pink lettering that read STREET DOG PROJECT on the side of a truck. I’d like to think it was fate rather than coincidence that put it there at that exact moment. I made a split-second decision and slammed on the brake but the Mighty X took a few seconds longer to come to a halt. A motorcycle and side-car with seventeen Burmese day labourers onboard almost ran into the back of me. I reversed and parked beside a bush, hidden from sight from the temple grounds and I watched through the leaves.

  There were two elderly women with large nets running around like idiots chasing the dogs that sheltered there. I knew of the SDP. I’d written a scintillating piece on them for the Gazette. The group was funded and run by a German retiree name Birgitt whose goal it was to rid the streets of unwanted puppies and go to heaven with credit. She’d send her truck out to the suburbs to nab stray bitches, deliver them to the central animal hospital, and have them spayed. As they didn’t have a rehab center, after a brief period of rehabilitation, they’d be returned to where they’d first been apprehended. For each, a fleeting few days of kindness and healthy food.

  Dognapping at temples was particularly attractive for the group. The dogs were mostly lazy and lethargic from a diet of stodgy rice and inactivity. Their street smarts had been whittled away. Invariably, there’d be a monk in attendance - one who wasn’t just there hanging out from the law - who had built up some rapport with the mongrels, who could assist in their capture. But mostly it was left to the dog-loving grannies to catch their own. They were only too grateful for a little help.

  Beer was already drooling from car sickness. I removed her collar, dirtied her up a bit with
mud and carried her over to the truck. The driver was reading something gynecological. He blushed when I called out to him. He climbed down from his seat and directed me to the cages on the back of the truck and made no enquiries as to who I was or why I was bringing him a dog. I got the feeling he wasn’t a volunteer: just a hired gun.

  “You’ll bring her back, will you?” I said, shoving Beer into one of the empty cages beside a peculiar Chihuahua and weasel cross.

  “Two nights at the hospital,” he said. “So this lot should be back on Saturday morning.”

  “Any idea what time?” I asked. “I’d like to be here…with the abbot, to receive the medications.”

  “Before lunch,” he replied to my chest which had fascinated him since I arrived. It was nothing spectacular but nudity was obviously still on his mind.

  “They’ll be looked after?” I said.

  “Treated like royalty,” he said, then looked embarrassed to have mentioned stray dogs in such company.

  “Perfect,” I said.

  Beer watched me walk away with the expression of a death row inmate whose bid for a final appeal had failed.

  *

  I arrived at the Siam Commercial Bank feeling very proud of myself. I’d saved Mair a lot of money and secured top-notch medical treatment for her beloved dog. I knew it was my lucky day when I got a park opposite the bank. An ambulance was just pulling away. It hadn’t occurred to me there might have been violence involved in the robbery. All the better. I hopped across the road, pushed through a throng of onlookers, and tapped on the glass door with my pen. Constable Mah Yai was on door duty. He waved at me and put up a thumb. I mimed that I’d like to step inside. He looked over to my dear Lieutenant Chompu who was lounging on the customer seats. It appeared the Lang Suan heavies had yet to arrive. He gestured for me to be let in.