Read LAUNDRY MAN (A Jack Shepherd crime thriller) for Free Online Page B

everything.”
    “He’s really a pretty good guy,” Nata put in. “I think he just watched too many Bob Hoskins movies when he was young and never got over it.”
    There was a little silence then and Darcy and Nata both watched me expressionlessly. In the quiet, I thought I could feel something stirring around me. I didn’t know what it was, but it felt large and unpleasant.
    “What do you think I should do, Darcy?” I finally asked.
    Darcy placed one hand gently on my back. She had the sort of look on her face I imagined a mother might give a son who was going off to war, a look that said there wasn’t a thing she could do but wish him luck and hope for the best.
    “Be careful, Jack. Be very, very careful.”

EIGHT
    WHEN I GOT home I found some chicken in the refrigerator and leftover rice in the cooker. I heated them both in the microwave while I opened a Heineken, then I doused the chicken and rice in hot Sriracha sauce and took it into the living room so I could watch a replay of yesterday’s Redskins game on ESPN while I ate.
    Anita got home around ten. As soon as she closed the door behind her she took a couple of quick little hopping bounds across the room and dived over the back of the couch. Then she rolled into my lap and hung one arm around my neck.
    “I missed you, darling.”
    I tilted my head down and kissed her lightly on the lips. “I missed you, too. How was London?”
    “Cold. Wet. Dark. Like always. Am I interrupting your game?”
    “Not really. I wasn’t paying much attention.” I groped for the remote control and pressed the mute button.
    Anita and I had been together for a little more than a year. She was a true child of the world, having been born in Paris to an Italian mother and an English father and then moved to Hong Kong by her parents when she was ten. Later on she went to high school in New York and then graduated from UCLA with a degree in film.
    Now she was a painter of considerable note, although I had to admit somewhat sheepishly that I’d never heard of her when we first met at a Sotheby’s auction in Bangkok. Actually, I suppose that I had never heard of many painters, except for a few who died in the fifteenth or sixteenth century and all of them had beards, but it wasn’t long before I discovered that Anita had a huge reputation in Europe as a young artist to be watched. I, too, thought she should be watched, although I was pretty sure what I was watching and what the European art critics were watching were completely different things. At least I hoped they were.
    A few months after our meeting at Sotheby’s, Anita had simply packed up her whole studio and moved from London to Bangkok and it wasn’t very long after that she became white-hot in European art circles. She always said that it was the sensuality of Thailand that had given her work the push it needed to make that happen, but I naturally held to the theory that I might have been at least partially responsible.
    Anita was much in demand among the art set in Europe these days and she traveled there frequently to do publicity for galleries that sold her work. Of course, she was also much in demand by me in Bangkok, and it pleased me beyond reason that she made such an effort to strike a balance between those two tugs on her life.
    “So what have you been up to?” Anita asked me as maroon-and-gold uniformed giants silently smashed into blue-and-white giants on our television screen.
    I hesitated before I answered, not entirely sure what to say about the call from the man who claimed to be Barry Gale. It was just a beat, but Anita jumped all over it.
    “Ah ha! Out chasing bargirls, I’d bet.”
    “Look here now, I’m not taking any crap from a painter. Particularly not one who flew all the way to London just spent to stand around some drafty gallery sipping Campari from a plastic glass and listening to strange men feign fascination with her paintings in a transparent effort to get into her