Real Dangerous Fun (The Kim Oh Suspense Thriller Series Book 5)

by Kim Oh

  Something else started up. All of a sudden, the familiar sounds – over-familiar, as far as I was concerned – of souped-up car engines came snarling into the room. From where I was sitting by myself on the couch – Umberto had gone out to the hallway to use his cell phone – it was loud enough to overwhelm the thoughts circling inside my head. I looked over at the table by the window and saw my brother tapping on his laptop keyboard, while NASCAR drivers roared around a huge oval track.

  “Donnie – what the hell are you doing?”

  He didn’t even glance over his shoulder at me. “It’s time for my weekly vlog –”

  “You mean blog,” I said. “Even I know that much.” Not that I did anything like that. The only stuff I had to blog about would land me in prison if I talked about it online.

  “No, he means vlog.” Naturally, Mavis was right on top of any opportunity to show that she knew more than I did. “It’s a video blog. He’s on camera. See the little light?”

  She pointed, and sure enough, there was a bright white dot just above the top edge of the laptop screen. Which I also knew meant that the machine’s built-in camera, the tiny lens at the side of the dot, was doing its thing.

  “It’s my post-race analysis.” Donnie tapped a few more keys. “I do a complete statistical breakdown, lap by lap, of the past week’s race. Plus a running season comparison of the pit crew times –”

  “Yeah, right. You’ve told me.” More than once, actually. Just my luck, I thought – not for the first time – to have the only Korean-American NASCAR enthusiast on my hands. Must’ve been something he picked up when he was a little kid, and the two of us were getting shuttled in and out of all those white-bread foster homes. Just goes to show that you’re never too Asian – genetically, at least – to channel your inner redneck. “That’s great,” I said, “but do you have to do it right now?”

  “Excuse me.” He raised a lofty eyebrow as he looked around from the laptop screen. “I have over three thousand subscribers. When they log on, at the regular time, they expect to see me.”

  “Fine.” I knew better than to argue with him. “Just keep it down, okay? I’m trying to figure out a way to make sure that we all don’t get killed.”

  Donnie didn’t say anything as he turned back to the laptop. He had more important things to be concerned about.

  “He’s very confident in you,” whispered Mavis.

  “Yeah, well, that plus a fiver will get you a latte.”

  The door opened and Umberto came back into the suite. “I checked with Jorge. Just to be sure.” He slipped the phone into his jacket pocket. “There’s a video from the cameras hidden in the lobby, that shows your client leaving with those men. But that’s about all.”

  “Thanks.” I hadn’t expected much more. The security video I had seen already had been enough to send my thoughts spinning as fast as the cars my brother was watching.

  “Kim. I have an idea.” He sat down on the couch and leaned toward me. “I think I can help you.”

  “I appreciate that.” Actually, I did. “But you’ve dug yourself into a deep enough hole here already. You shouldn’t have gotten involved at all. Maybe it’s time for you to check out and not worry about what I have to do.”

  “Listen to me, Kim.” He leaned closer, gaze intent. “I have a friend here at the hotel – not really a friend; somebody I know. He’s one of the security guards. But he’s not honest – he’s a crook. I know that much about him. When you’re in the grocer business, you hear all sorts of things like that. He steals, he brings in drugs and prostitutes for guests who want them . . .” Umberto’s shoulders lifted in a shrug. “You know what I’m talking about.”

  “Sure. So if this guy’s doing that kind of stuff, and you know about it, why haven’t you told your cousin about him? I’m sure he’d like to know.”

  “Hey. Jorge’s a big boy – it’s his business, he can take care of it himself. And to be frank about it –” Umberto spread his hands apart. “Not everything is wonderful between him and me. Not as far as I’m concerned, at least. Our family should’ve given this hotel to me, so I’d run it. Instead of shipping me off to frickin’ Asheville, North Carolina. Stupid motels. So if one of Umberto’s guards is stealing from him, and doing all sorts of bad things – that’s his problem.”

  That was the kind of thing I’d heard a thousand times before, that made me glad Donnie was all the family I had. Him I could handle.

  “So.” My turn to shrug. “What’s the point of telling me this?”

  “Simple. This guy – he’s exactly who they’d talk to. The ones your client, this Lynndie, is involved with. Whatever they are up to, he wouldn’t have been in on it – he’s too chickenshit. Low-level guy, not into kidnapping – even a fake one – and stuff like that. But the ones who did it, they would’ve talked to him, maybe paid him a little money, just to make sure that none of the other guards were around when they came in and hit you, and left with the girl. Maybe he’d call when things were all clear and ready for them.”

  That made sense. Always useful to have somebody on the inside.

  “All right.” I nodded. “Then I need to talk to this guy.”

  “Exactamente, Kim.”

  I looked over toward the window, where Mavis had gone to sit next to Donnie. He had put his headset on – which explained why I hadn’t been able to hear the revving engine noises for the last few minutes – and was speaking into its microphone as the race cars continued zooming around on the laptop screen. Mavis had set up her laptop on the table as well – right now she was frowning with furious intensity at whatever she was looking at.

  “Hey –”

  They ignored me, or in Donnie’s case, didn’t even hear me at all.

  “Yo.” Louder this time. “Over here, guys.”

  Mavis glanced around at me, then nudged Donnie. He took off the headset and looked over his shoulder.

  “You kids take it into one of the other rooms, okay?” I tilted my head toward the suite’s hallway. “I’ve got some, um, private business to discuss here.”

  From the tone of my voice, Donnie knew I wasn’t joking around. He didn’t say anything, but just swiveled his wheelchair around and headed away from the table. Mavis looked at me for a second longer, then got up and followed him.

  I heard one of the bedroom doors close as I turned back to Umberto. “You can set me up with this person?”

  Umberto smiled. “I already have. He’s waiting for us.”

  “Here at the hotel?”

  “No –” A shake of his head. “That would be a bad idea. Too many people who might hear us. And who would then go and talk to the wrong people. You don’t need to worry about that – I arranged a place for this little meeting. I’ll take you there, you talk to him – everything will be good.”

  Wasn’t the first time I’d heard that. “Sometimes,” I said, “people need a bit of persuasion. If they’re going to tell you what they know. Especially bad people.”

  I reached over the side of the chair and picked up my shoulder bag by its strap. I set it on the coffee table and opened it up. Umberto watched as I took out the two CZs, pulled the magazines from each, and made sure they were fully loaded. That was something I’d learned way back at the beginning, from Cole. Always check.

  Umberto frowned. “You don’t need that. I told you – he’s a chickenshit. He’s already scared.”

  “Yeah. Sometimes scared people do stupid things.” I shoved the magazines back into the guns, and dropped them both back into the shoulder bag, along with the spare box of ammo. I set the bag back on the floor and stood up. “I’ll be right back.”

  Donnie and Mavis looked up at me when I came into the bedroom.

  “Okay,” I said. “I have to got out and talk with someone.”

  The serious expressions stayed on their faces. What I’d said could mean anything.

  “Donnie, you know how to get hold of Elton, don’t you? You’ve got his number.”

  He
nodded. “Yeah . . .”

  “If I’m not back in, say, three hours or so – or if I don’t call you and tell you that I’m going somewhere else – then you call Elton. And you do whatever he tells you to. He’ll take care of things. Got it?”

  Another nod.

  I leaned over and kissed him on the top of his head. Then I glanced over at Mavis. “Don’t worry,” I told her. “I do this kind of stuff all the time.”

  Umberto was waiting for me at the suite’s front door. I grabbed my bag and slung it over my shoulder. “Let’s go.”

  SIXTEEN

  When you’re not in a party mood, there’s nothing worse than actually being at a party. That’s just hell, which everybody else is enjoying and you’re not.

  I already had been feeling that way, just being here, and being on the job when everybody else I could see had nothing on their minds except nonstop drinking, getting hammered by the over-amplified music, then going back to their hotel rooms to climb on top of each other. Okay, so maybe I’m never in the mood for any of that, but there’s always the feeling of getting left out of something that other people think is so wonderful.

  So, bad enough being inside the hotel, but it was even worse as Umberto led me out through the lobby’s front doors and outside. Where the action was . . .

  Remember when you were a kid, and your parents took you to the beach – I mean an ocean beach, not a lake or something like that – and the waves were so big and you were so little, they would just pick you up, right off your feet, and carry you back toward where they came splashing on the sand? One of the foster families Donnie and I had been placed with – one of the many – lived someplace in New Jersey, and they took us out there once. We had a ball – I had to hold Donnie up against me, or I suppose he would’ve drowned, but he laughed and laughed the whole time.

  That’s what it was like, stepping out from the hotel’s automatic front doors and out onto the street. Except a lot louder, and not fun.

  It didn’t help that I was shorter than just about all of this party crowd. That was bad enough, but the way the street was jam-packed with bodies, I could barely breathe – I had to bring my forearms up in front of me, just to keep from having a complete claustrophobic attack. Even then, the crush was so bad I actually did get lifted off my feet a few times, as I was trying to keep up with Umberto, shoving his way through the crowd like an icebreaker ship up in the Arctic. And I got groped by a couple of drunken fraternity types, though one of them I was able to catch with an elbow to his shirtless gut, hard enough to double him over, puking on his flip-flops.Plus, what is it with drunken college girls? The way they screech when they’re supposedly having fun – makes you want to cover your head and shout Incoming! like you’re under attack by mortar rounds on some way over-populated battlefield. Whoo-hoo, my ass.

  All the hotels in the tourist zone had brought their house bands and DJs out from the swimming pools, and set them up on bandstands right on the sidewalk. The amps were dialed up so high that you could practically see the woofers smoking and shredding like tissue paper inside the stacked speaker cabinets. Which didn’t actually make the music sound any worse, since everything had melded into a thumping, deafening soup, from one end of the street to the other.

  “Hey!” I grabbed the back of Umberto’s jacket and shouted. “Wait up!”

  He glanced over his shoulder. “What?”

  “I said, wait up.” I pulled him to a halt. “Do we need –” Another sonic tsunami broke over us, as the nearest DJ cranked up the rig he stood behind. “Do we need to get a taxi or something?” There weren’t any in sight, of course, but I figured maybe down one of the side streets branching off the main drag. “How far are we going?”

  “Taxi?” Umberto bent down, cupping his ear close to my mouth. “No –” He shook his head. “It’s not far. We can walk.”

  “Easy for you to say –”

  I couldn’t hear the ring of the Samsung phone I’d swiped earlier, but I could feel its vibration where I had tucked it in my jeans pocket. Why would Elton be calling me now? Bracing myself against the bodies pressing against my side, I dug the phone out and thumbed the Answer button on the screen.

  “Yeah?” I pressed it against my ear, elbow tucked tight to my ribs. “What do you need –”

  I covered my other ear with the flat of my hand, but still couldn’t hear anyone’s voice. Lowering the phone, I glanced at the screen to make sure I hadn’t broken the connection accidentally.

  There was a photo on the screen. Mavis must have taken it with her phone; I’d forgotten she had this one’s number, too. I could recognize the hotel suite in the background of the picture. In the front was my brother Donnie, looking serious, holding up a sheet of paper with three words scrawled on it in big black letters –

  CHECK YOUR GUN

  Soon as I read that, I hung up the call and blanked the screen with a quick push of my thumb, before anybody else might be able to see what had been there.

  “Anything wrong?” Umberto shouted through the pounding music and shouting, laughing noise.“No –” I slid the phone back into my jeans pocket. “My brother . . . um, he just wanted to let me know they were calling down to room service. That’s all.”

  “Come on.” He started pushing his way through the pack again. “Not good to be late.”

  Let me tell you, it’s not easy examining a gun, especially a hand-filling automatic, in the middle of a crowd. Just about the last thing I wanted was for one of this party bunch to spot me doing that, and start a panic – I would’ve probably gotten trampled in the stampede.

  And the really last thing I wanted was for this Umberto guy to see me doing it. I knew something was up, even if I wasn’t sure yet what it was.

  Fortunately, I didn’t have to take either weapon out of my shoulder bag to discover what Donnie had been alerting me to. I tugged on the strap to swing the bag onto my hip – keeping an eye on Umberto ahead of me, I reached into it. Soon as I wrapped my hand around the grip of one of the CZs, I knew what was wrong.

  The ammo magazine inside it was empty. Somebody had unloaded the gun. I had handled enough of these things, to be able to tell the difference, just from the missing weight of the bullets that should’ve been in there. I let go of that gun and tried the second one – it was empty, too.

  I didn’t know how Donnie and Mavis had discovered that, some time after I’d left the hotel, but there was only one person who could’ve done it. The guy pushing his way through the street party crowd right in front of me. Umberto – and nobody else – had been in the room where I’d left my bag, when I’d gone into the bedroom to talk to the two kids.

  Which meant that Umberto didn’t want me to have a loaded gun when we got to wherever we were going. Something was going to happen there, and either he or somebody else would prefer I was unarmed when it did.

  Screw that, I thought as I continued following him through the crowd. With the din of the music and the braying voices in my ears, I worked out my options. One, I could turn around right now and make my way back to the hotel. It would take at least a couple of seconds for Umberto to realize that I wasn’t behind him anymore, and then I’d be hidden in the crowd – finally, being short would be an advantage for me. That would give me enough of a lead on him, to get into the hotel and up to the suite, then lock the door behind me, before he could catch up.

  Then what? I’d be right back where I’d started, without a clue as to what to do next. Actually, I’d be even worse off, because whoever Umberto was hooked up with would know I’d somehow figured him out. They’d up their game real fast, with me and Donnie and Mavis stuck there waiting for them.

  So that was out. Option two was to go on following Umberto, to wherever he was taking me. And be ready for whatever might happen there.

  † † †

  I could smell the sea water.

  “Just up here,” said Umberto. “See? I told you it wasn’t far to go.”

  If the crowd hadn’t started
to thin, right after I found out that the CZs in my shoulder bag were empty, then I might have had a chance to reload one of them without him noticing. With him pushing his way through, maybe I could’ve kept my hand in the bag and pried open the flap of the cardboard box of ammo, then gotten the magazine extracted from one of the guns. With a little bit of fumbling – a lot, actually – I might’ve been able to one-hand the bullets into the magazine and get it back into the gun, before he caught sight of what I was doing.

  Now there wasn’t anybody around us, and I didn’t even have that chance. I could still hear the music of the street party, but in the distance behind us now. When we had shoved our way through the crowd and gotten at last to the end of the tourist zone, Umberto had signaled with a tilt of his head to follow him down one of the dark side streets. The brightly lit façades of the hotels fell away behind us, until there was just the cloud-mottled moon and stars turning the graffitied walls silvery blue.