The Jake Mercer Files

Chapter One

The motorbike came out of nowhere.

Jake Mercer saw the headlamp first—a single eye floating in the humidity between the coconut palms. Then the engine screams. Then the rider, a local man in a stained grey T-shirt, fishtailing as if something had reached up from the asphalt to grab his rear wheel.

It was 8:47 on a Tuesday. Jake was walking back from the 7-Eleven with a bag of instant noodles and a half-empty bottle of Lao Khao. He’d been in Hua Hin for eleven days. He still wasn’t used to how dark the roads got once you left the night market behind.

The crash happened in two seconds. The bike slid sideways, the rider’s leg caught under the frame, and his head struck the raised concrete edge of a storm drain with a sound Jake would later describe as wet and final.

Jake dropped the noodles and ran.

The man was on his back, breathing in shallow, broken rasps. Blood pooled beneath his left ear, black in the weak glow of a distant streetlamp. His eyes were open but unfocused. Jake knelt, pressed his palm against the wound—too much, too fast, the kind of bleed that training videos told you to pack with gauze but never prepared you for the actual heat and smell of.

“Help is coming,” Jake said in Thai. His accent was terrible, but the words were clear. “I’m calling. Stay with me.”

The man’s lips moved. Jake leaned closer.

“She’s next.”

Not a question. Not a plea. A whisper of absolute certainty, as if the man had been holding those two words in his mouth for hours, waiting for someone to hear them.

Jake fumbled for his phone. “Who? Who’s next?”

But the man’s eyes had already gone distant. His chest rose once, twice, and then stopped. The humidity seemed to thicken around them, heavy as a held breath.

Jake sat back on his heels. He’d covered three wars, two coups, and a massacre investigation that ended his career. He’d seen death before. But he’d never heard a dying man deliver a warning.

He looked up and down the empty road—no other vehicles. No houses. Just the dark shapes of palm fronds against a bruised sky, and somewhere in the distance, the sound of temple bells that seemed to start a moment too late.

The Hua Hin police took two hours to arrive. By then, Jake had given his statement twice over the phone and watched three stray dogs sniff the body from a cautious distance. When the ambulance finally came—a converted pickup truck with a flashing red LED—a young officer named Somchai took Jake’s details with the bored efficiency of a man processing paperwork.

“You knew him?” Somchai asked, nodding at the body bag.

“Never saw him before.”

“Drunk?”

“I don’t think so.” Jake hesitated. “He said something. Before he died.”

Somchai looked up, pen paused. “What?”

“He said, ‘She’s next.’”

The officer’s expression didn’t change, but something in his posture shifted. A slight tightening around the shoulders. “Probably the shock. People say strange things when the brain is dying.”

“He said it like a warning.”

“A warning about what?”

Jake didn’t have an answer. He watched them load the body into the pickup. As the tailgate closed, he caught a glimpse of the dead man’s face—eyes closed now, mouth slightly open, as if he’d fallen asleep mid-sentence.

“Do you know who he is?” Jake asked.

Somchai consulted a damp notebook. “No ID. No registration on the bike. We’ll check missing persons in the morning.”

“I’d like to know.”

The officer looked at Jake—at his sunburned face, his cheap sandals, the thick scar above his left eyebrow from a mortar fragment in Mosul. “Tourists shouldn’t involve themselves in local matters.”

“I’m not a tourist.”

“Then you should know better.”

Somchai walked away. The pickup’s engine coughed to life, and the red light disappeared down the dark road, leaving Jake alone with his splattered instant noodles and the strange certainty that he had just heard a dead man speak.

Back in his rented bungalow—a converted garage behind a disused seafood restaurant—Jake opened his laptop. Old habit. He’d been a reporter for fifteen years. The first thing you did after a story broke was check the record.

He searched for fatal motorbike accidents in Hua Hin. Then, Prachuap Khiri Khan province. Then the past week.

Nothing matched.

He tried again with broader terms: road death, Hua Hin, unidentified male. A single result from a local news blog, updated three days ago.

The headline read: Motorcyclist Killed in Late-Night Collision on Phetkasem Road.

Jake clicked. The article was brief. A man named Somchai—common name, not the officer—had died after losing control near the junction with Soi 64. Time of death: approximately 9:00 PM. No other vehicles were involved. No witnesses.

The date on the article was Saturday.

Three days before tonight.

Jake stared at the screen. Then he scrolled to the photo at the bottom of the page. A grainy image of the deceased, provided by the family. A man in his forties, with a thin face, dark hair, and a faded rose tattoo on his left forearm.

The same rose tattoo Jake had seen on the arm of the man who had whispered She’s next and died in the road less than two hours ago.

He closed the laptop, walked to the kitchenette, and poured the Lao Khao down the sink. His hands were not shaking. That was the strange part.

He sat in the dark for a long time, listening to the geckos click on the ceiling. And then, because he was still a reporter, he opened the laptop again and started digging into every unsolved death along that stretch of road for the past ten years.