by Kim Oh
They rattled as he dug them out and laid them in my palm.
Out at the front of the tienda, I undid the padlock and pulled the grille door open. “And another thing,” I shouted back over my shoulder. “There’s a difference between Chinese and Korean. You’re not gonna make it with somebody like me if you don’t even know that much.”
A flock of children had gathered on the crumbling sidewalk outside. They smiled up at me, evidently aware that something interesting had happened, even if they had no idea what it might’ve been. I reached back inside, and grabbed one of the plates stacked with those gooey-looking caramel squares, and handed it to them. That kept them entertained, as I hoisted my bag higher up on my shoulder and headed down the street.
ELEVEN
I let Donnie and Mavis watch me unpack the contents of my shoulder bag. My brother was used to seeing stuff like that, and Mavis probably should get that way, if she ever was going to get beyond the sheltered little life she’d been leading.
Evening already had been setting in when I finally got back to the hotel, the tropical sky streaking with orange and red. I’d been able to hear more of that damn party music, some ska-ish rock ’n’ roll, as I walked into the tourist zone – the stuff just never stopped, at least not until the last college-age reveler either got lucky or passed out. And actually there was even more of it than before, overlapping layers of raucous electrified noise competing with each other. The other hotels in the zone had started up their own poolside party scenes, with the amps and guitars turned up full blast. If you weren’t in the mood for mindless fun – I wasn’t – and determined to have it at any cost, then the audible effect was like sticking your head in a blender and hitting the purée button over and over again.
That was why I didn’t take the same sort of evasive maneuvers coming back to the hotel, as I had when I left it. The party crowd spilling out of the gates of the hotels, filling the streets with a jostling, laughing, heavy-drinking mob, provided more than enough cover for me. The frat boys all had on bright-colored Hawaiian shirts or tees with rude comments printed on them, and the girls had thrown butt-length cover-ups over their bathing suits. My jacket and jeans were like a suit of armor in this crowd. Not that they did anything to keep me from getting groped and anonymously mauled as I shoved my way through. At least Umberto back at the grocer’s tienda had some minimal conversational skills.
“You smell like tequila.” Mavis wrinkled her button nose as I sat down on the big leather couch in the suite’s main room.
“Is that a problem?” I set my shoulder bag on top of the smoked-glass coffee table in front of me. The back of my jacket was wet from the drink that some yahoo had spilled all over me. “If you think I’ve been drinking, guess again. I wish.” Which of course was complete b.s. – at my size, a glass of white wine and all I’d want to do would be to crawl into bed – alone – and fall asleep with the TV on.
“Did you get what you needed?” Donnie rolled his wheelchair over toward the coffee table and eyed my shoulder bag. He knew better than to touch it.
“Eventually.” They could both wonder what that meant. I set aside the barely warm pizza slice I’d started working on, then opened the bag and pulled out the two UHT milk cartons Umberto had laid on me. They had cartoons of smiling cows and the word Semidescremada on them. If you looked close, you could see where the flaps had been pried open, probably with a kitchen knife, then resealed after the original contents had been poured out and replaced with something different. Very different, in fact.
A smear of dried glue protruded from under one of the cartons’ top flap. I scraped that off with my thumbnail, then got a fingertip under the flap and pried it open.
Two ugly and efficient-looking objects slid out of the carton and onto the coffee table. A matched pair of CZ-100s, dull black and lethal. Kind of like a Czech knock-off of a Glock. In general, that’s the sort of thing I find useful enough, even though these were smaller and lighter than the .357 I usually carried. When I first hooked up with Cole – God, I still missed him, though I’m never quite sure why; he’d been a total psycho – he’d had me work out with pieces like these. His had been the older CZ-75s, though, with the steel-frame construction rather than the high-impact polymer like these. So a little heavier. My arm used to ache after all those hours of target practice.
I picked one of them up and turned it around in my hand. Pieces from over there, from what used to be the Iron Curtain countries, can be pretty good – they’ve really ramped up their quality control over the last few years, so they can compete on the international gun market. I was just glad I hadn’t gotten stuck with some rusty World War II relics, so old they might have seen duty in the Battle of the Bulge.
“Wow . . .”
I glanced up over my shoulder and saw Mavis standing behind the couch, watching my unboxing of the gear. Her eyes were big around as tea cups, looking at the guns. In the world she came from, she’d probably never seen anything like them, except on TV.
A nod and smile from me. “Nice, huh?”
“Are they real?”
Donnie laughed at that. He’d been around the block a few times, when it came to his big sister and guns.
My smile grew a little more evil as I pointed the CZ in my hand at her. I’d already checked to make sure that it was completely unloaded and safe as the milk that originally had been in the carton it came in. But the little university girl didn’t know that.
“Only one way to find out,” I said.
She froze, eyes even wider.
“Sorry.” I lowered the gun. “That was wrong of me.” Bad form, to jerk around the civilians. What my old killing mentor Cole had taught me was to never point a gun unless it was loaded, and to never point it at anything you didn’t want to kill. I may have gotten irritated a few times at this Mavis girl, but I wasn’t ready to ice her. Yet.
I opened up the other carton and slid out a couple ammo boxes. I hadn’t had to check when I’d been at the tienda – you always get everything you need from a grocer. The ammo was .40 Smith & Wesson, which meant that I’d be able to get ten rounds into the magazine of each gun. I would’ve liked to have had another box or so, just in case things got a lot hairier than just having to pop a few of the local hombres malos, but this amount would have to do for now. At least the bullets were hollow-points; that always helped. They rattled on the coffee table glass as I shook out a handful from one of the boxes. I pulled the magazine from the first CZ and started loading it up.
“So what happens now?” Mavis had recovered herself a bit, enough to sound peevish at my having put a fright in her.
“That –” I went on inserting the rounds one by one into the magazine. “Is a good question.”
TWELVE
Which I was still thinking about, and had been thinking about for an hour so, when I went back in the main bedroom. My shoulder bag, with the two loaded guns and the extra ammo, lay on the acres of satin-covered bed behind me. I sat on the mattress edge, wondering what the hell my next move should be.
The nonstop party noises, the music, and the general screaming and laughing chaos, filtered through the window. But I barely heard it. I’d kept the room light switched off – there was a little white plastic control box with a lot of buttons on the bedside table, which I thought was pretty convenient – and the curtains pulled open, so the silvery blue light of the moon and stars could wash over me. Sometimes, that helped me sort out the overstimulated contents of my head. Like meditating, except instead of achieving a higher consciousness, it was mainly about killing people. Couldn’t be doing my karma any good, I’m sure – I’d be lucky if I came back in the next life as a cockroach. Plus, it didn’t seem to be getting me anywhere as far as the present situation was concerned.
This was why I really wished Elton was here, and I was working with him again. Not because he was better than me with guns and all that action stuff – though he kinda is, but then again, he’s been doing this longer than I have. So even
as banged-up as he was right now, he still had quite a head start on me. No, it was because I would’ve liked to have had somebody else to think through all this with me – you know, get the advantage of having two viewpoints working on the problem.
As it was, I felt a little lonely, having to do it all by myself. Because I couldn’t talk about it with my brother, even though he was pretty hip to what I did for a living – maybe a little too cool about it, actually. Let’s face it, I’m not a good role model for an impressionable young mind like his. And obviously I couldn’t talk about it with Mavis, who was the only other person readily available. The way these kids are now, she probably would’ve tweeted about it, asked her online buddies to chime in with their opinions. Pls retweet: my new BFF is having a hard time figuring out which people to kill . . . Which would’ve been completely useless, free advice being pretty much worth every penny you paid for it.
I laid back on the bed, legs dangling over its edge, and closed my eyes. Sometimes looking out a window, when I’m thinking about stuff, puts me in a weird space. A long time back – well, it seems like a long time now – I had a motorcycle accident. This was right before I got hooked up with Cole and started learning how to do the stuff I do now. So that was my previous life, the one in which I had been nothing but a mousy little bookkeeper. Or maybe right between that world and this one.
When the bike went out from under me, I went down hard, and I stupidly wasn’t wearing a helmet, so I wound up giving the side of my head a good whack on the pavement. Pretty sure I cracked something. I’ve never gone in and had it X-rayed, because what’s the point now? The damage is done. And I guess I was afraid of what they might find back then – I’d just gotten fired, and by the sonuvabitch who might not have been the first person I killed, but he was the first one I set my sights on. It’s a long story, but I got him finally. Anyway, if the doctors had found something wrong with my head, like intracranial bleeding or something scary like that, I didn’t have medical insurance, so there wouldn’t have been anything I could do about it. And I already had enough problems on my mind.
But the aftermath – of the motorcycle accident, I mean – is that there really does seem to be something the matter in there. That I’ve never gotten completely over. Like right now – I knew that if I went on staring out the window at the night sky, all the laughing and shouting and party noises from out in the streets would go suddenly quiet, like somebody had turned the volume knob all the way down to zero. My heart would flutter a bit, because I’d have the sick feeling down in my gut, of what was going to happen next.
Which would be that the night sky wouldn’t be like a sky at all, but just a cheap, ratty piece of threadbare black cloth draped a few inches past the window glass. And the stars would be pinholes in the cloth, with the dim light leaking through from a twenty-watt bulb, dangling on a frayed cord.
And maybe – and this was the creepy part I really hated – maybe I wasn’t any more real than that. Maybe I wasn’t me at all, maybe it was somebody else lying on this bed, and maybe all the things I’d done, all the stuff about killing people for a living and the rest of it – maybe that was just a bad dream that other girl had. What would happen to me when she woke up?
Weird, huh? If you’ve got a crack in your head, like I think I’ve got, and it lets in crazy bits like that – probably not a good idea to go into this business. It’s bound to have an effect. I should’ve taken an online course to become a veterinary assistant, something a little more normal.
Too late now, though. I was stuck with the way things were, which included a bag close to the bed’s oversized pillows, with a couple of black, ugly guns in it. I didn’t have time to wig out right now – I had responsibilities to take care of, and a job to do. I squeezed my eyes shut tighter, summoning up my work ethic.
Inside my head – cracked or not – I did a review of the situation. Lynndie was gone, and I didn’t know who’d taken her, or how to find them. If those people were looking for a ransom, they wouldn’t contact me – they’d contact her father. He was the one with the money. I was just the one who’d be on the hook for having let her get snatched away. Fat chance of getting paid then. Not to mention the damage it’d do to my professional reputation. Word gets out that you’ve screwed up in as major a way as this, the future job prospects really can dry up. So the clock was ticking, to get this sorted out before Lynndie’s dad was clued in on what had happened on my watch.
Frankly, it would’ve been better if her abductors had come after me, even while I had been heading out defenseless to the grocer to pick up the guns. At least then – as long as I survived – I would have had a line on tracking these people down. My biggest concern was that they wouldn’t be interested at all in tying up whatever loose end I might represent to them. They might not be worried that I’d be trying to come after them, or if I was, that I’d be able to find them. They might not even be anywhere close – they could’ve popped Lynndie into a gunny sack, thrown her in the back of a van, and headed for Tierra del Fuego. Or she could be in the baggage compartment of a private jet flying to Ulan Bator. Someplace real remote.
I had the feeling that wasn’t the case, though. Something gave me the impression that whoever had done it, they were locals. And not the kind with international connections. I’ve done a little work with that brand of operators, and the jobs they pull off all go down a lot smoother and cleaner than what had happened here. For one thing, if it had been pulled by high-level international types, there wouldn’t have been any loose ends remaining – like me still being alive. I’d have been a quick kill, simple as that. These people, whoever they were, had been in a rush, and just a little chaotic. That’s how mistakes get made. When you’re in my line of work, one of the first things you learn is to always try to arrange things so you don’t have to hurry.
So. Locals – that was good for me. Inside my head, I made a little check mark beside that line. If that was the case – and I was pretty sure it was – then they’d want to stay on the turf they were familiar with, where they felt comfortable. They’d be hunkered down someplace nearby, and Lynndie would be with them, probably with a handkerchief stuffed in her mouth so she wouldn’t yap at them. Great – I felt a little better already, having figured out that much. At least it meant that I wouldn’t have to hop a flight to Vladivostok, or Katmandu, or some other dumb place like that.
Of course, what it also meant was that I’d have to somehow find these locals here, in a place where they knew all the alleys and hiding places, and I had squat when it came to resources for finding them. Not only did I not know the lay of the land, the way I would have if all this had gone down back in Los Angeles, let’s say, but I didn’t even know the language. Maybe if I’d grown up in L.A., or had spent more time there, then I’d be a little more fluent in what they spoke here, even if it was with a different accent. Let’s face it, the Spanglish I’d cobbled together from my tourist phrase book wasn’t likely to get me very far. Yo quiero – that was I want; I knew that much – una gringa con – what was the word for blond? Amarillo was Spanish for yellow, wasn’t it? And what was hair? Piel – no, that was skin.
The words went on circling around and around in my head. Then –
There was a knock. On the door.
My spine went rigid as I lay there. Not a knock on the bedroom door, but the suite’s front door, the one that opened onto the hallway with the guest elevators at the end. It’d been faint, the sound coming this far to me here, but I’d heard it.
Everything went dead silent in the front part of the suite, as though Donnie and Mavis had stopped talking to each other and quit tapping on their laptop keyboards.
The sound of hurried steps on plush carpet, then an even softer knock on the bedroom door. “Kim?”
That whisper was Mavis. I rolled off the bed, with one of the CZs dug out of the shoulder bag and in my hand. I pulled open the door and looked out at her.
“There’s somebody here –”
“
I know.” I stepped out into the hallway, with the gun held up high beside my head. “Did you see who it is?” The front door had the standard sort of peephole in it.
She shook her head. “I thought – it’d be better if I told you –”
“That’s fine. I’ll take care of it. But I’m going to need your help.”
My mind had moved out of the slow brooding it’d been stuck in and into a faster gear. As I headed out of the bedroom, Mavis trailing close behind me, I’d already figured out what moves I’d take. This would be some serious action – we hadn’t called down to room service for anything, and we weren’t expecting anyone else to come calling. In a posh establishment like this, they always rang you up before sending anybody around, if there was something that needed to be fixed; the electricians or plumbers didn’t just show up unannounced. Maybe one of the party animals had gotten lost, hit the wrong button in the elevator, and wound up on this floor instead of the one his room actually was on. But there hadn’t been any fumbling around with a card key and the door handle, but just the knock. So scratch that.
“Okay,” I whispered. I’d led Mavis back out to the front door. “Take a look.”
