by Kim Oh
It’s not that difficult to transport a gun on an air flight. Obviously, you’re not going to bring it with you inside your carry-on bag. Then again, those TSA morons are so busy feeling up toddlers and groping senior citizens’ colostomy bags, you probably could wheel a loaded World War II howitzer on board the plane and they wouldn’t notice. But really, it’s usually only a matter of putting the gun in your checked luggage – unloaded, of course, plus it’s gotta be in a locked, hard-sided container. Guys going on hunting trips do it all the time with their rifles. No worse than traveling with golf clubs.
At least that’s the procedure for ordinary citizens. I was already well aware that it was different for somebody like me.
Mainly because of the gun itself. Yeah, Elton had a way to sneaky-Pete it out of some LAPD locker, and I was grateful for that. But that didn’t mean its serial number wasn’t on some computer registry now. On the off-chance that my checked luggage did get searched, and security had me open everything up, then who knows – they might run the number, and that would be likely to set off all sorts of alarms, which would end with security handing me over to a bunch of stone-faced federal ATF guys.
So much for getting to my job in Meridién and earning an easy paycheck; I’d be lucky if I ever saw daylight again. Even before the business with Elton and his police department connections, the gun probably had been hot, considering I’d originally gotten it from Cole. God only knew what he’d used it for, and how many times. If I’d been smart, I would’ve retired the piece a long time ago, and either picked up its legal equivalent or something that wasn’t quite so traceable. But what can I say? I’m sentimental. It was the only thing of Cole’s I had left.
So I finally decided it would be safer overall if I left the .357 hidden in the apartment and just went down to Meridién without checking any kind of weaponry through the airport. Yeah, it’d been nice of Elton to give me all those solicitous warnings and stuff, but the more I thought about it, maybe that’d been him showing how concerned he was about me. Given his constant horn-dog nature, he was probably setting things up for when he was done recuperating at his ex’s and could come around sniffing trails again. The guy never lets up. Keeping some little rich girl out of trouble during spring break? I didn’t need some big black cannon to accomplish that.
Of course, as it turned out, I could’ve sailed right through the airport and onto the plane with the .357, no problem. I’d forgotten one of the basic rules of life: Rich people get to do stuff you don’t.
When we got to the airport, I hooked up with Lynndie right outside of the screening lines, where the ordinary people were taking off their shoes and dropping all their valuables into those gray plastic bins. We didn’t do that.
“Over here.” Lynndie steered me, plus Donnie in one of the airport’s wheelchairs, over to an unmarked door at the side of the terminal. She barged right in, with us in tow, and got a big smile from the woman with a name-tag on her jacket, sitting behind a solitary desk. Like she and Lynndie were old friends – money has that effect.
The woman didn’t even bother looking at our passports, but just got up and led us out another door – and right past security. “Have a nice flight,” she told us. I could’ve had an AK-47 slung over my shoulder, let alone the .357 in my shoulder bag, and it wouldn’t have been a problem.
“That’s how it works?” I was impressed.
Lynndie shrugged as she kept taking her long-legged strides toward our gate. “My dad told them we’d be coming.”
So yeah, I could’ve brought my piece along. But . . . I was kind of glad I hadn’t. By the time I was leaning back in a plush first-class seat, I felt . . . light. Airy and weightless, almost. I turned my head toward the round-cornered window and watched the grid of city streets around the airport falling away, the ocean’s horizon tilting in the distance. It’d been a long time since I’d felt this way. Not really weightless, maybe, but more like . . . gunless. When you carry around those big hunks of ugly metal all the time, after a while you kinda forget about them. But they’re there, dragging you down. Making you just as heavy, just as ugly . . .
“What’re you smiling about?”
I opened my eyes, which had drifted shut. The voice that had broken into my wordless thoughts was my job. Heathman’s daughter Lynndie. I turned my head and gazed at her for a moment before replying.
“Nothing,” I said. “Nothing at all.” I let a little smile remain on my face. “That’s the great thing about vacations, right? There’s nothing to them. You don’t have to do anything, there’s nothing for you to think about. You just – are.”
“Oh, crap.” She rolled her eyes, as if she had never heard anything so stupid. “You’re not on vacation. I am.”
I could see that she already had started. On the little tray in front of her, that had unfolded on its metal arm from the side of the seat, a glass of something clear and silvery and obviously alcoholic had been half-emptied. Somehow she had talked one of the flight attendants into delivering that to her. Actually, I was pretty sure that her daddy’s money had done most of the talking.
There wasn’t anything I was going to say about it, though. As far as I was concerned, I wasn’t along to keep her from having whatever fun she wanted. I was just here to make sure she didn’t hurt herself while doing it – or at least not so badly that the same daddy’s money couldn’t kiss her and put her more-or-less back together. And frankly, if getting a little buzzed en route slowed the bitch down, that was just fine with me.
“What’d you do to your hair?” Lynndie set down her glass and peered closer at me. “Looks different.”
“Oh.” I poked at the side of my head. “It’s just . . . you know . . . I thought maybe I wouldn’t stand out so much, where we’re going, if I did something to it. So I tried putting in some highlights.”
“That’s so sweet.” She gave me a pitying look. “Honey, somebody like you is never going to stand out. Anywhere. It just isn’t anything that you’ll ever have to worry about.”
I knew she was right about that. I’d always known it. Actually, I was pretty much cool with it, since going unnoticed was an advantage in my line of work. Cole had told me that, when I’d first started out killing people. He’d been a lot more vivid personality than I’d ever be – not just vivid but insane, if you got right down to it – but he’d had all sorts of tricks for staying invisible. You’d probably never even known he was sitting next to you, until all of a sudden you were looking down the barrel of his big ugly .357, the one he’d wound up giving to me. And then that would’ve been the last thing you ever saw.
So I really hadn’t been sticking with the program Cole had laid out for me – keep cool, stay low – when I’d been in my apartment bathroom last night, standing at the sink with a towel around my shoulders and squirting that little plastic bottle of evil-smelling goop into my wet hair. What I’d been shooting for was a toned-down version of one of the singers in that 2NE1 K-pop group my brother was big on, the tough girl named CL. I know my limits; I knew I wouldn’t wind up looking all hot like her, but still . . .
What was I thinking? I’d stood there with my hands propped on the edge of the sink, looking in the mirror and wishing I could roll the last ten minutes back in time. That’s the problem with growing up feral the way I did – I don’t have any girl skills. I didn’t have any before I started killing people for a living, and if anything, now I was getting worse. Just as well Cole had advised me that I shouldn’t try for anything romantic in my life – I wasn’t likely to get it, anyway.
My hair wound up looking like somebody had run a slobbered-on caramel apple through it. Which got a big laugh from Donnie, until I smacked him one. Not hard enough to actually hurt, but he was smart enough to realize that I could still change my mind about taking him along with me. Best not to push it.
“Well . . .” Right now, I couldn’t think of much to say. “It was worth a shot.”
“I don’t know about that.” Lynndie squinted, l
eaning toward me to peer even more closely at my hair. “Did you use something that you bought? At a store?”
Her tone implied a sense of horror and disgust more suitable to my having been caught indulging in carnal relations with small furry animals. I nodded, mute and guilty.
“Okay, that’s not going to happen again.” The seatbelt light above us had gone off several minutes ago; even if it hadn’t, nothing would have stopped Lynndie from fishing her iPhone out of the creamily expensive purse at her feet and double-thumbing a note into her online datebook. “When we get back to L.A., I’m taking you to my colorist. And we’ll get that –” She took another glance at my hair, elaborately shuddered, then continued tapping on her phone screen. “– taken care of. Believe me.”
I didn’t say anything, for a couple of reasons. One is that I really find that whole bit creepy, the way people with tons of money just naturally figure they have the right to go all charitable on you and sort out your life, whether you want them to or not. As if they’re doing you some sort of kindness, because you’re so dumb and incompetent as to not have arranged to be born rich the way they were.
Oh, and it’s a setup – because they’ll bitch about you not being appropriately grateful for the favor. Life’s just one continual trial for these people, which is why they always seem to have that slightly aggrieved air about them, like reality just isn’t coming up to their elevated standards. But you can’t indicate how annoyed you are, because then you wind up fired or they find some other way of getting back at you. That’s one of the big problems with rich people: once you get past the layers of expensive PR, they’re jerks. Always in revenge mode – like they’ve got a grievance against the world.
The other reason is that I knew what Lynndie was up to. She was trying to get on my good side.
I’m going to stop here and let you in on something, even if you probably already know it. All that stuff about blondes being stupid – you know who puts out that propaganda? The blondes do. And you know why they do? So they can pull more stuff over on you.
Trust me on this one. I learned this through experience, not out of some book. They’re not as dumb as they want you to think they are. Some of them, in fact, are downright evil. They’re smiling away and acting all air-headed and stuff, and meanwhile, if you listen really carefully, you can hear the little gears inside their skulls, turning and meshing while they’re putting together some scheme. Come on, it stands to reason – naturally they’re going to want you to think they’re poodles, not human Rottweilers. It’s camouflage. And while they’re working on becoming the next Master of the Universe, everybody else is falling for that cliché Dragon Lady line about Asian girls, that we’re all inscrutable and stuff, when really most of us are just trying to qualify for a business loan to buy a convenience store in Compton. But it’s all karma in the end – it’s the people who fall for all these stereotypes who wind up getting hosed, losing half their net worth in the divorce settlement. Don’t let it happen to you.
Right now, Lynndie probably wasn’t scheming on anything other than getting me on her side, so I’d loosen up and let her have more fun down in Meridién than her father was paying me to allow. Personally, I didn’t care as long as I got the paycheck I’d been promised – if that meant clamping down hard on her, so be it. But what I really didn’t like was a) all those fakey Let’s be pals maneuvers she was doing, and b) her assuming that I was stupid enough to fall for it.
Which I wasn’t. So I figured I might as well get some information out of her, while she still thought she was putting one over on me.
“So what’s this Meridién place? Never heard of it before.” And I hadn’t even bothered to Google it last night, while I’d been packing for both me and Donnie.
“Smallest country in South America.” Lynndie didn’t look up from her magazine. “Makes Ecuador look vast.” She flipped a page. “Most people haven’t heard about it, or if they have, they’ve forgotten. That’s because it’d be worth something if it had either oil or bananas – but it doesn’t.”
“Sounds lovely. And we’re going there, because . . . ?”
“Because what it does have is some fairly nice beaches, and not too much dengue fever. There’s a town right on the coast – God, I don’t even know if it has a name – that got built up a few years ago. Hotels and stuff.” Another glossy page followed the previous one. “So that makes it a party town.”
“I thought people went to Mexico for spring break.”
“Not people like me.”
Which meant, of course, not people with tons of money. She didn’t have to elaborate – I could figure out the picture on my own. All those articles you read, about university kids getting wasted in Mazatlán every year – that was just rabble as far as people like Lynndie were concerned. Horny guys from podunk state colleges could drive there, as long as they started out early enough. When you’re as rich – really, really rich – you just naturally resent even having to share the same planet with those types. So if Lynndie was going to party down with her tribe, it was going to be some place farther away and a lot more exclusive.
And I was going to get to see all that. Oh, boy.
“Excuse me –” I undid my seatbelt and got out into the aisle. That’s a lot easier to do when you’re in first class, since you don’t have to squeeze by the person next to you. “I’ve got to go check on something.”
I was gone, heading toward the rear of the plane, before Lynndie could say anything. There was no emergency; mainly I just wanted to get away from her for a while, before my state of irritation became too apparent. And actually, it was just about time I went and saw how my little brother was getting along.
Lynndie’s dad had paid for my ticket, but the one for Donnie had to come out of my own pocket. He hadn’t given me any argument about flying coach, since he’s basically as frugal as I am. Plus the flight attendants always seem to make a pet out of him – maybe it’s the wheelchair thing he’s got going for him. Once he’s preboarded, he’s just about as comfortable there as anywhere else. Especially when the plane’s finally off the ground, and he can power up his laptop on the fold-out tray in front of him.
As I was making my way down the aisle in the coach section – narrow even for hipless me – I figured Donnie would have his headphones on. Because it was loud back there, with all sorts of frat-boy hilarity rising over the engine noise. The party had started early for that crowd. Granted, they didn’t have the benefit of alcohol, the way Lynndie with her financial resources had managed to score a drink up in first class, but that wasn’t stopping them. Maybe a couple of them had managed to sneak some shots of vodka through in those little three-ounce plastic bottles that you’re allowed past airport security these days. The rest though just seemed to be the living embodiment of the principle that ear-damaging high decibels are necessary in order to show the world that you’re having a good time. It sounded like an insane asylum on nitrous oxide, with the college girls shrieking in that glass-shattering way they all have now, and the guys nearly as bad, their guffaws and shouting pitched only a little bit lower.
And you want to know something? About these people? They really weren’t that rich. Not super-rich. Lynndie was basically slumming by hanging out with this crowd. Strictly nouveau riche – her dad could’ve bought the whole planeful. Sure, there was plenty of money involved, enough for these kids to avoid being anywhere near ordinary people, but real A-listers wouldn’t have checked onto this flight. They’d all be on Gulfstream jets, heading to some place in Switzerland so private, you couldn’t even Google Map it.
Now I felt sorry for having stuck Donnie back there. I figured that once I got him to the relative peace and quiet of the hotel room I’d booked, I’d have to find some way to make it up to him.
I managed to shove my way back to the row of seats where he was supposed to be. He wasn’t there. Great, I thought. The chances were pretty good he was still aboard the plane – I doubted if he had managed to score a parachu
te and bail on all this rackety chaos – but exactly where? That was the problem.
A voice shouted right at my ear: “You looking for your brother?”
I turned my head – that was about all I could, I was squeezed in there so tight – and saw one of the flight attendants. I shouted back at her that I was.
“We moved him to the rear of the plane,” she said. “It’s a little quieter back there.”
The two of us bulldozed through the overly happy throng, the flight attendant leading the way, shoulder-first and taking no crap from the partyers. I’ll be so glad when I’m a little older and can hate young people without feeling like a traitor to my generation.
When she’d said the rear of the plane, turned out she meant all the way to the galley, with all the aluminum coffee pots and microwave ovens – none of which were being used on this flight, since it would’ve been pointless. Actually, my brother Donnie had been installed on one of the little fold-down seats right outside the galley, the ones the flight attendants use when the plane is taking off or coming in for a landing. They’d even let him plug his laptop’s power supply into one of the galley outlets. I wasn’t quite sure how they’d managed to get him back there, though I suspected that it had something to do with the one resolutely cheerful, linebacker-size attendant, who could’ve tucked Donnie under his arm like a football, then dived over the heads of the party-hearty crowd like he was going in for a two-and-goal touchdown.
