by Kim Oh
She put her eye to the peephole, then turned to me. “There’s a man out there.”
I’d figured that much. “Local or gringo?”
“He looks, um, Latino.”
That didn’t surprise me. With my free hand, the one without the gun raised in it, I motioned to my brother Donnie to roll himself out of the direct line of sight from the door. If whoever it was on the other side came in blazing, I didn’t want him to have any targets – instead, I wanted him to have to take those couple precious seconds required to scan the room.
And I also wanted the person, whoever it was, inside and not out there in the hallway. So I could roll out the rest of my plans. There was more I wanted than just to neutralize our unexpected visitor.
I pressed my spine against the wall beside the door. Silently, I mouthed the words Let him in to Mavis. Looking pale and shaky, she did as instructed.
“Yes?” She stepped back from the open door. “Is there something –”
My suspicions were confirmed when the man stepped quickly into the room. Whatever business he was here for, he didn’t want to take care of it in public.
He didn’t have time to say anything. I know how to use a nice, heavy piece for more than just shooting someone. When I clopped him hard, just behind the ear, he went down like a sack of laundry.
But not completely out. He moaned where he lay, face down.
“Give me a hand.” Mavis and I dragged him the rest of the way into the room, and I kicked the door shut.
I gave the figure on the floor a quick pat-down, with one knee pressed into the small of his back. He wasn’t carrying anything – that came as a surprise.
Another surprise when I rolled him over. “Umberto –” I stood up and gazed down at him. “What the hell –”
“Ayyy – don’t hit me again . . .”
Mavis’s brow wrinkled. “You know this guy?”
“Marginally.” I held up the CZ. “I got these from him.”
“What’s he doing here?” Donnie had rolled over in his wheelchair to take a look at him.
“That’s a good question.” I prodded Umberto in the ribs with the toe of my shoe. “You got an answer? It better be a good one.”
He pushed himself into a sitting position against the wall. “I came to see you.” He winced as he rubbed the side of his head. “That’s why.”
“Well, all right.” Mavis nodded in approval. “And I thought you were all business, all the time.”
That got a glare from me. “I am not on a social basis with this guy. And yes, I am all business. At least when I’m working.”
“Kim –” Umberto interrupted us. “Miss Oh –”
“Crap.” I pointed the gun at him, not to do anything with it, but just to indicate how annoyed I was. “How do you know my name?”
“My cousin told me.”
I was glad to hear that the information hadn’t come by way of anybody connected with Elton – that would’ve been a major screw-up on somebody’s part. But I wasn’t glad to find out that somebody else was talking about me down here.
“Who’s your cousin?”
“He’s the hotel manager. Here, where you’re staying.”
Not good. I really didn’t like that.
“Okay –” I leaned over, bringing my face down closer to Umberto’s. “I’m going to give it to you straight – you are really making a mess out of things. For yourself, even more than for me. I thought you were at least a little up to speed about being a grocer. The ground rules, I mean.”
“Sí, but –”
“Don’t give me that. There’s more to it than not hitting on any women who come by to pick up some merchandise.” I bulldozed on with my lecture. “There’s a whole general principle. Don’t . . . get . . . involved.”
“But I can help –”
“Wrong.” I jabbed the gun’s muzzle toward him for punctuation. “You provide a service to people like me. You do that service – you provide what we need to do our jobs. And then you bug out. Understand? People like me, we don’t want anybody to know what we’re up to. Including the local grocers.”
“Kim –” Mavis spoke up. “Maybe he can help.”
“Yeah,” said Donnie. “What other leads do you have?”
That was the problem with having as smart a brother as mine, who knew so much about my business. He’d also figured it out, that I was kind of screwed as to what to do next.
“All right.” I sighed and lowered the gun in my hand. “Get over here and sit down. We need to talk.”
THIRTEEN
First things first. I wanted to know how he’d known to come here looking for me. I hadn’t exactly left him my contact details, back at his grocer tienda.
“Muy facil.” Umberto shrugged. “You had to be at some hotel, no? There are only a few in town. Good ones, that is.” He smiled, “Para los gringos.”
“And this one just happens to be run by your cousin?” I set the CZ down on the coffee table, and pulled up one of the chairs to face him across it. “That seems like kind of a coincidence.”
Another shrug, and a shake of the head. “Not really.” Umberto took a sip from the soft drink can Mavis had brought him from the courtesy bar at the side of the room. I supposed that would go on some credit card for Lynndie’s dad, when we checked out – if we ever did. Alive, I mean. “I just had to ask around. All these hotels –” He pointed to the bright lights of the towers visible out the window. “They’re all managed by my cousins. Except for the Imperiale – that’s my older brother over there. We’re a hotel family; it’s what we do. When I was in North Carolina – I told you I was there, remember? – I was helping with some motels we own.”
I sat back in the chair – I’d been leaning forward, with my forearms across my knees, drilling my hardest interrogator glare into his eyes. “Including your uncle? Alonzo, I mean – with the grocer setup.”
“He was kind of the black sheep with us.”
“Yeah, until you came along.” I mulled it over. Some of it made sense. One thing did, at least – working the motel business in the States was probably how he got into the habit of trying to take a piece off any single female that came his way. He’d probably encountered a sufficient number of norteamericano bimbos to convince him they were all that way. “Okay, here’s another question. Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why’d you come looking for me?”
“Kim –”
That’s what I got for not checking in under an alias. I’d figured this far from home, I wouldn’t need one. And now he’d apparently gotten my name from his cousin, the hotel manager. That annoyed me.
“I figured,” continued Umberto, “that you were in trouble. You wouldn’t have come to see a grocer if you weren’t.”
“Wrong.” I reached forward and tapped a finger on the gun. “Soon as I’ve got one of these, then I’m not in trouble – somebody else is. That’s how my business works.”
“If you say so.”
Mavis leaned over the back of the chair, bringing her face down close to mine. “I need to talk to you.”
“What?” I pulled back and stared at her. “Can’t you see I’m busy here.”
“No, seriously. I really need to talk to you. Right now.”
Something was going on – I’d been able to hear her and Donnie whispering to each other, over by the window. “All right.” I pushed myself up from the chair. “Hold that thought,” I told Umberto. I started to walk away, then turned back, picked up the gun from the table, and followed Mavis into the nearest bedroom.
She closed the door behind her. “Don’t you get it?”
“Apparently I don’t.” I sat down on the corner of the bed. “What’re you talking about?”
“Why he’s here. That Umberto guy.”
“Um, that’s what I was in the middle of trying to find out.”
“Well, he’s not going to tell you, is he? Not the real reason.” Mavis leaned back against the door, arms folded
across her breast and a smug look on her face. “It’s you. That’s why he came here. He’s got a thing going on. In his head. For you.”
Crap. I realized she was right about that. And I hadn’t even been able to tell. That’s how retarded I am – sorry for the non-PC language, but that’s how I felt. And not for the first time, either. When you grow up feral the way I did, getting shuffled from one foster home to another, and nobody telling you how things worked – no wonder I was so frickin’ clueless. The only person who’d ever taken an interest in me, and told me stuff, had been that psychopath hitman Cole. And mainly what he’d told me – my semiformal education, as it were – had been all the best ways to kill people. As mentors go, Cole had been kind of a trip, but a little short on the interpersonal relationship stuff.
So if this Umberto guy was, shall we say, fixated on me, then even a little geek girl like Mavis probably was right about that. Kind of thing that she and her pals back at university would spend quality time chit-chatting about, when they took a break from running statistical analyses, and all went off together and painted their toenails. Or whatever it was that girls did when they were hanging out. Girls who aren’t like me, I thought with just a little sad bitterness.
“Are you sure?” I let the CZ dangle between my knees. “Why would he get that way? Doesn’t make sense – you saw how hard I clopped him. And I roughed him up even worse before that.”
“Just the way some guys are.” Mavis spoke with an air of vast, worldly authority. “When they get what they want easily, then they’re not interested in it anymore. Believe me, some of the stories I’ve heard from my friends –”
“I’ll pass.” I didn’t need to know, and it wasn’t likely to make me feel any better.
“So some guys, you give ’em a hard time, then they go nuts. For you.”
“Great.” That was all I needed right now. Situation wasn’t complicated enough – now I had some lovestruck Latin American on my hands.
“It’s okay, Kim. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to. It’s not like you owe him or anything.”
“That’s a relief.” I looked at the gun in my hands, then back up at Mavis. “You think maybe I should just get rid of him, and toss the body down the laundry chute?”
“Kim.” She slowly shook her head. “That can’t be your answer to every problem you come up against.”
“It’s worked so far.”
She sat down on the bed beside me. Close, her shoulder against mine – getting all gal-pally, which kind of unnerved me. “Look at the positive side,” she said. “When guys get this way, they can be useful.”
“Sure. Next time I move to a new apartment, he can carry the boxes.”
“No. Come on. I mean right now.”
“Really? How?”
“Well . . .” The gears inside Mavis’s head almost audibly turned. “We’re in a hotel, aren’t we?”
“We’ve already got all the towels we need.”
“Not what I mean. This guy knows how hotels work. Family business, remember? And his cousin’s the manager. So if anybody could help us, it might be the two of them. The thing that happened – the reason we’re in trouble – it happened here, after all. In a hotel.”
She had a point. Which, in my defense, I would eventually have gotten around to on my own, if I hadn’t been weirded out over what she’d told me about what was going through Umberto’s mind, such as it was.
“Look,” said Mavis. “Just go ahead and talk to the guy, I mean, without beating him up any more. That’ll only make things worse. Who knows – maybe he’s got something cooking. Besides just coming here to see you.”
After a moment, I gave a nod, then stood up and headed back out of the bedroom.
We’d been gone long enough that Umberto and my brother had started up their own conversation. It looked like Donnie was showing him how to cheat at blackjack on the laptop.
“All right.” I sat back down. “So what’s the deal? What did you come here to tell me?”
“I know what happened,” said Umberto. “About your friend – who was taken away.”
“Not my friend, actually. More of a client. Or daughter of a client, to be exact –”
I suddenly fell silent. He knows, I thought. About Lynndie being kidnapped. That changed everything. Until he said that, I’d operated under the belief that whoever did, locals or international professionals, they’d managed it smoothly and efficiently enough that nobody else knew what they’d done. Except for me, and that was only because they’d had to go through me to get to her. Nobody knowing was the reason the police hadn’t shown up here.
But if this guy Umberto knew about it – that raised some interesting possibilities.
I raised the CZ and pointed it straight at his forehead. “You’re in with them, aren’t you?”
His eyes went wide. “No –” He pushed himself as far back from the gun’s muzzle as possible. “I swear it . . .”
“Then how do you know about the girl getting taken?” I didn’t lower the gun, but kept it fixed right on him.
“My cousin – he told me.”
“The hotel manager here?”
A fervent nod from Umberto. “Sí.”
“Okay,” I said. “That doesn’t make any sense. Unless your cousin is the one who’s in with them.” Which I supposed was possible. Maybe the ones who’d taken Lynndie had bribed Umberto’s cousin, or threatened him into cooperating, so he’d clear the decks here at the hotel for a quick and easy snatch job. Otherwise, you’d have to explain why, if the hotel manager knew what had happened, he hadn’t gone to the police. Having guests kidnapped – especially ones with rich fathers – and not doing anything about it is the sort of thing that gives a place a bad reputation. Kiss your TripAdvisor recommendations goodbye.
“He doesn’t have anything to do with them. Why would he? My cousin has a hotel to run.”
“So help me out, then.” I waggled the muzzle of the gun a little bit, just for emphasis. “Your cousin isn’t in with the people who took the girl – my client – but somehow he knows it happened. How would that be?”
A shrug. “He saw it.”
“You mean he was up here when they pulled it off?” Hmm. I get slammed in the head, I’m lying there on the floor, and the manager of the hotel doesn’t get me any help? Just lets me lie there, bleeding? Didn’t sound like very good business practice. I could have died. Then he would’ve had on his hands one guest kidnapped, and another one dead. Stuff like that keeps piling up, eventually somebody’s going to find out.
“No –” Umberto shook his head again. “He wasn’t even in the hotel. He was home, asleep.”
“So how –”
“On the security monitors. The cameras recorded it, what happened. That’s how my cousin saw it.”
“Right. That’s a very good explanation. Except for one thing.” I brought the muzzle of the gun an inch or so closer to the bridge of Umberto’s nose. “This hotel doesn’t have security cameras. I’ve been all over the place, and I haven’t seen one.” That was true – when we had checked in, I had scanned the place pretty thoroughly. There hadn’t been of those little metal boxes with the lenses on front, like you usually see mounted up in the corners of whatever room or hallway you might be in. Sometimes they’re shiny black plastic half-domes, with the cameras hidden inside – there hadn’t been any of those, either. “Really,” I said. “If you’re going to lie to me, you need to do a lot better job than that.”
“It’s not a lie,” protested Umberto. “It’s the truth! There are cameras here – you just can’t see them. Here, I’ll show you.” He gestured over toward Donnie in his wheelchair. “Your computer, por favor.”
Donnie handed over the laptop, and Umberto hunched over it, rapidly tapping at the keys.
“You know . . .” Donnie watched him. “The Wi-Fi here actually is pretty good.”
“Sí. My cousin likes spending money on electronics. Very modern. Ah, this is it.” He turned t
he laptop screen toward me.
What I saw was a web page – duh – for some company calling itself Visual Induction Technologies. There was too much Flash on the page for my taste – bits and pieces were still loading up as I looked at it. My brother Donnie was an even bigger snob about tech-y stuff like that, but then, he spends more time online than I do.
The company’s motto crawled across the screen, from right to left. A New Breakthrough in Security! I supposed that was better than an old breakthrough.
