by Kim Oh
One little thing kept me from pushing the button. One little thought that I hadn’t put away yet. Which was maybe I shouldn’t call him at all, but just keep him in the dark for now, about what’d happened to Lynndie. And I should just get to work, find her, and get her back before her father discovered what was going on.
“That won’t work.” I spoke aloud in the empty bedroom, not caring whether Donnie and his new buddy Mavis would hear me out in the suite’s main room. “You know it won’t.” Or at least it might not. Because let’s say I did get her back, and she was all in one piece, safe and unharmed – which of course would be the trick – how likely was it that she was going to keep her mouth shut about what happened, once she was back at home? Because even if she didn’t tell her dad – because there would be something about the whole incident she didn’t want him to know, like maybe it was her own fault for hooking up with the wrong people – she’d probably blab it to her sorority pals, and then sure as anything it would get back to Heathman, the way these things always do. And then I’d be screwed. He wasn’t the kind of guy who’d give me a bonus for a job well done – rich people like him are always control freaks, I’ve discovered, so more likely he’d rip me a new one for not bringing him in on the loop right at the beginning.
Or worse. Let’s say I didn’t get Lynndie back from whoever had her right now. And I hadn’t called Heathman up to let him know what was going on. Then I’d really be in deep doo-doo. He’d figure that if he’d known about it, he would’ve been able to call in some real heavy hitters, not some low-rent freelancer like me, and his little girl would be alive instead of dead. Dead like me, which is what I’d wind up being for having screwed up so majorly.
“Crap.” My brain felt like a lab rat running around in some kind of circular maze without a piece of cheese at the end of it. As much as I didn’t want to, there was no way out except to call Heathman. I sighed, held up the cell phone, put my thumb on the button, and pushed . . .
And guess what? It wasn’t so bad! Or at least not as bad as I expected. Granted, it kind of screwed my head up even more, the way Heathman took it so easily.
“Is that all you’re calling me about?” His voice sounded a little echo-y, from the close acoustics of his basement shooting range. “I’m a busy man, Miss Oh. You can’t be bothering me about every little thing that comes up.”
“Excuse me?” I felt a little flummoxed. “Did you hear what I said? Your daughter’s missing and it looks –”
“Yeah, yeah. Right.” The little clicky metal sounds of somebody rummaging through a carton of ammo came through the phone. “It’s a scam. Just the kind of thing my Lynndie does. You know . . .” I could hear a revolver cylinder being spun open and the bullets inserted, one by one. “I was really expecting a little better from you, performance-wise. I mean, in terms of not falling for something like this. These little games she plays. I suppose I thought that because of you both being female, and close to the same age. But . . .” If shrugs were audible, I probably could’ve heard him making one. “I guess that was really too much to hope for.”
I don’t know about you, but I really hate it when rich people lay out one of those weary, self-pitying verbal trips, as if it’s almost too much to bear that the world is just filled with so many disappointingly incompetent types. Like me.
“Uh, Mister Heathman?” I kept my gaze on the sticky tropical sunshine pouring in through the bedroom’s window. “Could we back it up a bit? I’m getting the impression there’s something you haven’t told me.”
“Really?” More of that almost exhausted pseudo-patience. “What would that be?”
“You said something about little games. That Lynndie plays. And how this is some kind of scam she’s pulling.”
“That’s right.”
“Got it.” The sonuvabitch was lucky I wasn’t standing there in front of him, with a gun rather than a phone in my hand. I didn’t care what kind of heavy armaments he might have racked around him. “Don’t you think it might’ve been useful for me to know? That she does little tricks like this?”
“Like faking her own kidnapping? Come on, Miss Oh. I would’ve thought that’d be the sort of thing a professional like yourself would be able to see coming. I thought you’d done this sort of work before.”
What I didn’t say back to him then was something along the lines of Not for headcases like you, or Now I see where your daughter gets it from. Instead – “Oh, I’ve done this before, all right. And I don’t want to waste your time. So let’s get down to business. How often has Lynndie pulled this sort of thing?”
“The kidnapping bit? Only a couple of times. It gets old. That’s why I’m a little surprised she’s tried it again. I mean . . . she managed to get a rise out of me the first time. Not so much the second. Which leads me to believe that this is a number she’s running on you. Weren’t you two getting along?”
“Like a house on fire, Mister Heathman.” The little scamp. She’d better enjoy herself with her phony kidnapper friends, because there’d be hell to pay when I finally got hold of her. “So. What exactly is it you’d like me to do right now? About this, I mean.”
“Do? For Christ’s sake, Miss Oh.” The weary act wore thin, all of a sudden. “You should do what I’m goddamn paying you to do. I hired you to keep my daughter out of trouble. Why don’t you start with that?”
“Okay. Exactly how much trouble is she in, if this is something she’s cooked up on her own?”
“How would I know?” Heathman’s anger quotient went up another couple notches. “I don’t know what kind of flakes she’s hired to help her pull this off. This time, that is. The ones she used before were complete morons. Party types. Not professionals at all – friends of hers. They couldn’t have pulled off shoplifting a pack of breath mints from the Seven-Eleven, without somebody on the inside.”
“I see.” At the moment, I was glad I hadn’t mentioned that at least one of this latest bunch had been professional enough to clock me unconscious. And had stage-managed a pretty convincing scene about a kidnapping having taken place in the suite’s bedroom, with the duct tape and all. “So is this something we really need to be worried about?”
“If you want to get paid, it is. My daughter would be better off if she had been snagged by actual criminal types. At least they wouldn’t be enjoying themselves with her quite so much. When I got her back the last time, I had to send her off to some detox mansion in Switzerland for a month, before she could put one foot in front of the other again. That’s not exactly the kind of bill I enjoy paying.”
Yeah, I thought, and she probably dug sticking you with it. See, this is what I don’t get about people with more money than they know what to do with. Why do they have to make everything so complicated? If I were set up like that – and probably you, too – I’d spend all my time having fun, eating gold-plated bon-bons or whatever, instead of running these weird little payback trips on everybody around me. Then again, for these people, maybe this is their idea of fun. Which is really something I just don’t get. If you have to have drama in your life, why not just go to the movies? That’s what normal people do.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll go pull your daughter out of whatever mess she’s gotten herself into.”
“Oh, good.” Heathman was into sarcasm now. “Seeing that’s what I’m paying you to do.”
“But here’s the deal.” I looked away from the bright window, holding the cell phone tight against my ear. “When I find her, then fun time’s over. I don’t care how much of spring break might be left.” I was already good and sick of the drunken shouts and laughter drifting up from the hotel pool area, and from the crowded, milling streets beyond the gates. “If I have to tie her up and stuff her in a duffel bag marked Fragile, she’s coming home. Then the two of you can spend your vacation together.”
“That’s fine, Miss Oh. You do that, and you’ll get the full payment for your services. Minus the charge for changing the plane tickets, of course.”<
br />
Whatever. At this point, I didn’t care.
“Great.” I laid back against the mound of over-fluffed pillows. There was something small behind my head – I reached back and found a foil-wrapped chocolate, which I threw on the floor. “I’ll call you when we’re heading to the airport.” I flipped the cell phone shut and tossed it beside me.
For a while, I just lay there with my eyes closed. Feeling pissed. After a moment, I rolled over, found the chocolate I’d tossed, and ate it in one bite.
This is what you get for taking easy jobs, I thought. Truth be told, I liked the kind where I just kill people better.
I poked around, hoping to find more chocolate, but there wasn’t any. Instead, a bright red spot appeared on the pillowcase, as I leaned over it. I reached up and touched the side of my head – I was still bleeding. But as I was looking at my reddened fingertips, all of a sudden the whole conversation I’d just had with Lynndie’s father went zooming down a black hole inside my skull.
He’s wrong. The realization sat me straight up on the bed. It’s not a fake –
She really had been kidnapped. Maybe she had tried to put one over on her father before, but this time it was for real. I knew it.
Because of what I’d seen, just before I’d passed out. A big, ugly revolver stuck right in my face. And I’d been able to make out the cylinder, just above the man’s hand wrapped around the grip. And the little rounded tips of the bullets –
The gun had been fully loaded. Who would bring a piece ready for action to a phony kidnapping? One mistake, an accidental squeeze of the trigger, and all of a sudden we’re not talking about a fun little skit, for a rich girl to get a rise out of her daddy. Whoever had taken Lynndie, they had been ready to kill to get the job done. These were serious people. If I’d put up any fight, I would’ve wound up with a bullet right through my forehead.
I swung my legs over the side of the bed, my mind racing. Serious bad people. They probably hadn’t wanted to fire off a shot while they were busy hustling Lynndie out of the hotel – that’s the kind of thing that draws the wrong kind of attention, just when you don’t want. But that didn’t mean they wouldn’t come back and finish the job, by taking care of whoever knew Lynndie had been snatched.
Which was me.
I got to my feet and headed for the bedroom door. I had work to do.
SIX
I was kind of expecting my brother Donnie to be taking all this in stride. After all, he’s pretty much used to what I do for a living – he’s been with me through the whole process of my turning from Little Nerd Accountant Girl to bad-ass female hitman. Supposedly bad-ass, that is; sometimes I have my doubts.
So when I went back out to the hotel suite’s main room, I wasn’t surprised to see that Donnie didn’t show any signs of being worried about the situation we were in – calm and collected, that’s my kid brother. Then again, it wasn’t him that’d just gotten clopped in the head. Or who was going to have run around with some seriously dangerous people, getting this whole business sorted out. In our little family, that’s what big sister me does.
What I was surprised about, though, was Donnie’s new buddy, this college girl Mavis. She and my brother had their heads together over her laptop on the chrome-and-glass coffee table, him in his wheelchair and her on the overstuffed leather couch close to him. They didn’t even notice as I stood in the doorway, but just went on talking and laughing and poking at the little screen in front of them.
“Oh. Hi.” That was Mavis, finally realizing I was there. “Did you talk to everybody you needed to? We were thinking about lunch.”
“That’s nice.” I walked into the main room. “You go on thinking about that.” The sun was bright enough coming in through the balcony window that it stung my eyes. “But when lunch happens, it’ll be up here. We’ll do room service or something. Order out for pizza – I don’t know. Or care.”
“You said your sister was all into proper nutrition and stuff.” That was Mavis, looking straight at Donnie, then back to me. “Pizza? Really?”
“She usually is –”
“We’ll get the vegetarian.” Goddamn fussy college girls. Like I was her dorm mother or something. “Maybe they can put broccoli or something on it for you.”
“But when she’s on the job,” said Donnie, “she can get a little cranky.”
“Cranky?” I was about ready to roll him off the balcony, then pitch his new friend after him. “Excuse me, but the person I’m supposed to be watching out for just got disappeared – and if I don’t find her, then I don’t get paid. And if I don’t get paid, you’re not even getting the plain cheese pizza, buddy.”
“Okay.” A judicious nod from my little brother. “Then go find her.”
“Oh, yeah. Right.” I gave my forehead a slap with the butt of my palm. “Why didn’t I think of that?” I fired my worst big sister glare at him. “You think there might be a little problem with that plan, due to the people who’ve got her? Because they’re the kind who wouldn’t complain about having to kill me when I come snooping around, then heading back here to knock off you and your friend, just to tie up the loose ends. They’d just think it was some of the perks of their job.”
“What?” Mavis went wide-eyed and pale. “They wouldn’t. They would?”
“I realize dealing with crazy-ass hitmen and kidnappers didn’t get covered in your freshman orientation – but yeah, they would. Trust me about this.”
“She’s right,” said Donnie. “She knows about stuff like this. It’s her job.”
Mavis was stunned silent now, her gaze traveling out to the balcony window. As though there were a little microscope lens implanted in her skull, I could look inside her thoughts, and see that she was seriously reconsidering her most recent definition of what constituted a good time. Everything’s fun when you’re splashing around in the shallows, as though the whole world was just a plastic wading pool with pictures of duckies and smiling goldfish around the side. It’s when things suddenly get deep and dark, with the barely glimpsed shapes of crocodiles and sharks gliding near your goose-bumped legs, that you start wishing you’d stayed on dry land with your beach towel and water bottle.
I felt sorry for her. Not the kid’s fault she grew up with a mom who waited on tables for a living. Not everybody’s fortunate enough to have killing people as the family business.
“Look,” I said, a little softer. “Everything’s going to be all right. You don’t have to worry. Like Donnie says, it’s my job. I take care of stuff like this. I just need you to hunker down right here – where you’re safe – while I go do my thing. Okay?”
Mavis gave a nod.
“Cool.” I turned and headed for the nearest bathroom – there were three or four of them in the suite, as best I could remember.
Leaning over the sink toward the acre of mirror, I tried to brush my hair into something like presentable – since I was going out – without touching the tender part of my skull, where I’d taken the hit. The zinging pain wasn’t the problem – I could just bite my lip and get past that – but I didn’t want to start any more blood trickling down the side of my face. I had things to do, things that required being noticed as little as possible.
“I’m sorry –”
I straightened up and looked over at the doorway. Mavis was standing there with arms folded tight against herself, looking uncomfortable for a lot of reasons.
“What about?”
“You know.” She gave a shrug. “Stuff . . . stuff we’ve been talking about. I don’t want you to think . . . you know . . . that I don’t respect you. Because of what you do, and all.”
Give me a break. I pressed my hands against the sink edge and stared at myself in the mirror. There had been a time, which now seemed like centuries ago, when I’d wanted to go to college, get a real education, all that good stuff. But since then, I’d seen what it did to people – well, some people, at least. Most of them, actually, as far as I’d been able to tell. All this getti
ng sensitive and everything, and being all concerned about people’s feelings, your own and everybody else’s. And then you hear about how it is for university types like this Mavis kid, how everything has to be a ‘safe space’ for them. Because otherwise, if somebody else – like me – said anything that hurt their feelings, or was what their little campus support groups would call politically incorrect, then they’d wither up and die, just die. That’s how fragile they all were.
So maybe I’d really had the best of it, after all. With my education, I mean. Which really hadn’t consisted of much more than that psychotic hitman Cole teaching me how to kill people. But maybe there had been more to it. If nothing else, Cole had taught me there were no safe spaces, at least not in this world. If you wanted to be safe – for a while, or as long as you could – then you had to toughen up. Which apparently I had, though it’d cost me. I really didn’t give a rat’s ass about how politically incorrect someone’s opinions were, or if they weren’t sensitive enough about my feelings, as long as I was able to ice them before they could do the same to me.
