The Maddening Model. Suzanne Simms

      One

      She stuck out like a sore thumb...from the tips of her three-hundred-dollar handmade Italian leather sandals to the top of her very red head.

      The essence of casual chic, she was dressed in pink silk trousers and a pink silk shirt. A designer handbag was tossed over one shoulder—he couldn’t quite make out the initials embossed on the front—and a pair of designer sunglasses were perched on the end of her nose.

      Her sunglasses probably cost more baht than the average Thai worker made in a year, Simon Hazard judged as he leaned back in the rickety chair, balancing his weight on its rear legs.

       Legs.

      Hers were long and lean and lithe. He could tell that much from the way she walked.

      Every eye in the Celestial Palace was on her. Little wonder. It wasn’t every day that a six-foot-tall amazon with hair the color of a blazing sunset sauntered into the back-street Bangkok bar.

      What in the bloody hell was a woman like that doing in a place like this?

      Simon shook his head, picked up the glass of beer in front of him and took a drink. It was none of his business. She was none of his business. He was here to meet a client. Nothing more. Nothing less.

      Pushing his cap back off his face—the USN printed across the front identified it as one left over from the days when he’d served in the United States navy for Uncle Sam aboard a nuclear-powered sub—he took another swig of his beer. It was a local brew—strong, pungent, dark in color and served at room temperature. Unfortunately, it was the hot season in this part of the world and the crowded bar was like a steam bath.

      An ice-cold beer on a sweltering hot day was one of the things he genuinely missed about the States, Simon reflected as he looked around the pub.

      A trio of noisy sailors had bellied up to the bar and were egging one another on as they downed straight shots of Russian vodka. There were two suspicious-looking characters hunched over a nearby table, arguing in a language he didn’t recognize. It wasn’t Thai or Chinese or Malay, and it certainly wasn’t English, the four principal languages spoken in this country once known as Siam. Bar girls of every size and shape, most of them dressed in cheap, skintight dresses and teetering on three-inch high heels, were serving watered-down drinks to the customers. An ancient jukebox in the corner was blaring the same tune over and over again. It was a young Elvis Presley singing about a “fool such as I.”

      Simon stared bemusedly into his beer. Maybe, just maybe, the “King of Rock ‘n’ Roll” was alive and well and living somewhere in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan the way the tabloids claimed.

      Or maybe Simon was losing the last remnants of his sanity.

      He must be. Here he was, sitting in a seedy bar in the red-light district of a city known for its sex and sin, a compact revolver on the inside of his belt and a small but very sharp stiletto tucked into his right boot, waiting for some damned fool who’d gotten it into his head that he wanted to see the high mountain country between Thailand and what was once called Burma and was now known as Myanmar.

       Answer a fool according to his folly.

      Simon took another swallow of tepid alcohol. Which one of them was the greater fool? His client, the mysterious Mr. S. Harrington, or himself?

      “As long as you’re playing Twenty Questions, what the hell are you doing half a world away from home, you crazy son of a bitch?” Simon muttered under his breath.

      But he knew the answer to his own question. He was on the job. For a nominal fee, he would drive his beat-up Range Rover and its passengers anywhere and everywhere they wanted to go.

      Although he hadn’t always been a glorified guide/hired driver in a third world country, of course.

      One morning, over a year ago, Simon Hazard had awakened in his penthouse apartment overlooking Minneapolis on one side and the mighty Mississippi River on the other, and realized that he was burned-out on his business, on what passed for pleasure in his life and on life itself. It had not, as he recalled, made for a great thirty-first birthday.

      So he had packed his bags and gone off to “get in touch with his feelings,” as the pop psychologists labeled it.

      He’d spent one entire year wandering among the saffron-robed Buddhist monks, the ancient temples and the golden spires of the Lotus Kingdom: Thailand. He’d made friends with the hill tribes of the North, lived in a primitive hut with a thatched roof, eaten food cooked over a fire fueled by dried water-buffalo dung and learned to use a machete like an expert.

      He now spoke the language, knew the customs, was beginning to understand the people. He could defend himself against the Siamese crocodile and the armed bandits who sometimes roamed the Golden Triangle. He knew when the king cobra was in season and how to avoid the fifteen-foot-long, lightning fast serpent with its fatal bite. He understood it was a gross insult to point his toe at someone, according to Thai thinking, and that the national pastime was gambling, whether it was on a cockfight or a boxing match.

      As a boy, he had once searched out the source of the Mississippi: Lake Itasca. As a man, he had gone in search of something more elusive. What he had discovered was a simpler time and place, and a people who hadn’t changed in hundreds of years.

      What he had found, Simon reflected, was himself.

      “Must be the alcohol making me wax philosophical,” he said by way