by Kim Oh
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PART ONE
The only bad jobs are the ones where you don’t get to kill somebody.
– Cole’s Book of Wisdom
ONE
“So you’re gonna go see that Morton guy?”
“Yeah . . .” I didn’t glance over at my brother Donnie, but just went on packing my shoulder bag with the things I figured I might need. “Finally.”
“Be careful, Kimmie.” That was all Donnie said before turning back to his laptop on the kitchenette table. He didn’t even have to say that much.
Wasn’t quite sure what to expect. Like my buddy Elton had warned me, there was something definitely hinky about the whole arrangement. For the last couple months, this Morton – whoever the hell he was – had been leaving text messages on my phone, all about setting me up with jobs. Or assignments, or whatever you want to call them. I think the phrase he used the most often was, Lining up some business –
Maybe his kind of business wasn’t anything I wanted to get involved with. That’s why I took along my favorite .357, tucked inside my bag.
“Okay –” I slung the strap over my shoulder and picked up my helmet. “Don’t forget to eat lunch.”
He nodded, not even hearing me. Just leaned closer to the screen, tapping on the keyboard.
Down in the apartment building garage, I fired up the Ninja and headed out the ramp and onto the street. Even through the tinted face shield, the L.A. sun was hard and bright enough to make me squint. The shaggy-topped palm trees barely cast enough shadow to notice as I rolled past. No sense aiming for the freeway – it would already be at a standstill, and I didn’t feel like cutting between lanes the whole way. Easier to work the surface streets over to Pico, then take it all the way to Fairfax and cross there to Wilshire, right by the La Brea Tar Pits. Then downtown . . . and Morton.
But first, along the way, there was something else I had to take care of.
Which I shouldn’t have. But I did.
Because it was a lot more fun.
If you’re into two-wheeled hardware, a dealership is like a candy store you can ride into, then get off your bike and walk around in. Surrounded by pretty machines – well, actually, some of them are kinda evil-looking. I mean the big-displacement motorcycles, like a Hayabusa or maybe a ZX-14R – that thing’s got nearly 1500 cc’s of instant suicide. Never really seen the attraction, myself. But then I don’t have to advertise my testosterone level the way guys think they do.
I parked my machine over by the service department. Carrying my bag and helmet, I walked through the slanted rows of bikes and into the showroom. My man Julie was waiting for me.
“Yo, Kim.” He stood up from where he’d been polishing the rims of a stand-mounted CBR. “We decided not to wait for you. Sold it to some college kid from the Valley.”
“Your ass.” I’d already spotted the motorcycle in question, just outside, with the temp DMV plate on the rear fender. “That bike’s mine, sucker.”
“Sure is.” He gave me a tobacco-yellowed smile. “Come on over here, and let’s play with the pencils. You got the cash?”
“Cash and trade, pal.” I followed him behind the counter and into the little office with all the race posters on the walls. “Like we arranged.”
As I said, I really shouldn’t have. But I’d actually come out of my last job with a nice little wad of cash – the whole bit with that rich guy Heathman and going down to Meridién with his daughter Lynndie. And I really had stuck most of it in the bank, except for the emergency bug-out fund I always keep on hand, in an envelope taped to the bottom of my underwear drawer. But I’d been thinking about this new bike for a long time . . .
So in a little less than half an hour, I was riding out of the dealership lot and back onto Pico, with a brand-new Ninja 300 ABS SE underneath me. You shouldn’t have, I told myself again, to which the other side of my brain replied, Yeah! Glad I did!
I’d been bringing my 250 in there for servicing, so the dealership's mechanics were pretty familiar with what shape it was in. Kinda banged up, actually, with the front fairings cracked in a couple different places from the hard falls I’d taken on the bike. So Julie didn’t give me much for it, but I didn’t care. The Ninja 300’s updated engine wasn’t that much bigger than the old 250 model’s had been, so it wouldn’t even be that much faster – but the antilock braking system was the big feature for me. Maybe if I’d had that all along, I wouldn’t have gone down with the 250 as many times as I had. With these sportbikes, it’s the things that keep you out of trouble that are the selling points – at least for me.
Plus, the new one looked pretty cool – the bodywork was all kinds of sleeker. I know that real hard-core motorcycle types think that’s a shallow attitude, to judge a bike by its appearance rather than just speed and handling, but what can I say? I figured I looked good on the 300. I’d debated in my head about getting it in the pearl-white finish, because that way it kinda looked like an Imperial Stormtrooper with two wheels and a racing stripe, but I’d finally told Julie to order the bike for me in all black, what Kawasaki calls ebony. Just as a practical matter – sometimes I have to sneak up on people, or arrive someplace as unobtrusively as possible, and it’s a lot easier to do that on a black motorcycle, at least at night. And of course, if you haven’t put on some screamer after-market exhaust that sounds like an F-15 jet coming in for a landing. So I went with the black.
But really, practicality didn’t enter into it. I just wanted something nice and new – and I figured I deserved it, after some of the stuff I’d been through recently. Yeah, I’d managed to squeeze a decent payday from that job in Meridién, but it’d been tougher than I’d planned on – I still had a tender spot on the side of my head, from those thugs whacking me when they’d been pretending to kidnap my client’s daughter. Just pulling on my motorcycle helmet caused me to wince. Before that, though, the whole business on the freeway here in L.A., with that nutjob Richter and his crew bottling up all those cars – including the van me and Elton had been in – all that had gotten me was hospital bills and a scar down my left leg that was still fading.
I told the voices bickering back and forth in my head about whether I should or shouldn’t have bought the new bike, to just shut up. Even in the L.A. city traffic, I was getting a kick out of riding it. Or even just waiting for a stoplight to change, with my boots down from the pedals. This Morton guy would have to turn out to be really unpleasant before my mood would be totally spoiled.
Which was why I was surprised when I rolled up to the address that I’d been given. Some of the tourist guidebooks for Los Angeles say that there’s still a street corner on Wilshire, somewhere around MacArthur Park, where you can gaze toward downtown, and somehow the angle is just right so it looks like what Raymond Chandler would’ve seen back in the thirties and forties, when he was writing all those hard-boiled detective novels. The Big Sleep’s always been my favorite. But I don’t know about any part of L.A. still looking like Chandler territory – everything’s so built up, with all those glass and steel towers.
Morton had texted me. The little dingy building, with its soot-blackened facade, looked like it had fallen out of some time warp and landed upright at the edge of a cracked cement sidewalk. About six stories, with old-fashioned signage lettered on the dusty windows – a cut-rate bail bondsman, a Chinese
dentist, a defunct-looking insurance brokerage. That sort of thing. It didn’t look like they were getting many customers – when I leaned the Ninja over on its kickstand and killed the engine, the only other human being I saw for blocks around was a bag lady in a man’s tattered overcoat, pushing a shopping cart half full of scavenged deposit bottles down the street. For a moment, I had the feeling that it was the bike, and that I had traveled from some modern era into one that had died and gone into rigor mortis sometime during the Second World War, if not the First.
The building’s front door, with a leasing agent sign taped to the glass, was unlocked. Carrying my helmet by its strap and with my bag slung over my shoulder, I pushed my way into the dim lobby. A bare fluorescent fixture buzzed and flickered above the directory board, which had enough letters missing to make it an illegible scramble. I didn’t need it – Morton’s last text message told me what floor to go to. The elevator looked like it’d stopped working a long time ago, with nothing but an empty shaft and dangling cables behind the creaking grille. I took the stairs.
Up on the fifth floor, I thought I could hear the mosquito-like whine of a dental drill. I passed by that glass-paned door and headed to the one at the end of the hallway. Weirdly, there was somebody waiting outside it, sitting in one of the rickety wooden chairs lined up against the splotch-marked wall. He didn’t look like he belonged there, either – too well dressed, with that tailored ease only money can give. No tie, but the jacket certainly hadn’t come off the marked-down rack at the Men’s Wearhouse. His silvering hair was the best clue that he might’ve reached his sixties. He didn’t glance up as I approached, but just went on thumbing the screen of the smartphone in one hand, as though idly checking his email.
“Are you . . .” I pointed to the door next to us. “Waiting for . . .”
The man waved me off. “You go ahead.”
I didn’t like that whole bit at all. If Morton wanted to have our meeting in a dump like this, that was fine by me – but I’d been expecting it to be private, just the two of us. Who was this guy? Maybe something to do with the business that Morton wanted to line up for me. Why else would he be waiting there?
I tapped a finger against the door glass. No answer. I turned the rust-spotted doorknob, pushed the door open, and went on in.
The office was empty, or at least as far as I could see. Nothing but a wooden desk sitting in the exact center of the space, and looking beat-up and old enough for Moses to have edited the Ten Commandments on it. Not even a chair behind the desk. Murky sunlight, hazed by the dust on the window glass, slid through venetian blinds old enough to have grown fur on them and cast thin parallel lines on the bare floor.
I didn’t bother calling out to see if anyone was around. In rooms that have been empty as long as this one, you can always tell you’re the only one there.
Stepping behind the desk, I spotted the white extension cord snaking across from the electrical outlet and into the bottom drawer. At the same time, I heard that funny little boop-boop noise Skype makes. I’ve heard that a thousand times – it’s what Donnie uses to get hold of me when he’s out with a school program or something like that.
Pulling open the drawer, I found a cheap HP laptop, the screen raised up a couple of inches. I took it out and set it on top of the desk, tilting the screen farther back. The Skype window said that a video call from morton2kim_private was coming in. So I’d finally get to see this Morton guy, even if he wasn’t here in person. I moved the little cursor arrow over with the touchpad and tapped on the ANSWER button.
TWO
Only I didn’t. See him, that is.
Instead of a live video feed, an old black-and-white photo came up on the screen. Really old, like one of the presidents whose name you never can remember – Taft or Harding, or somebody like that, gazing sternly at some point beyond my left shoulder.
“Very funny,” I said, setting my hands down on either side of the laptop. The little dot of light had come on at the top of the screen, indicating that the camera was on. So he could see me, even if I couldn’t get a view of him. “You just shy, or what?”
“Hello, Kim.”
More gratuitously spooky stuff. The voice coming out of the laptop speaker was filtered through one of those audio programs that makes the words sound like they’re spoken by a chain-smoking robot. Whoever was on the other end not only didn’t want me to see what he looked like, he didn’t want me to hear his real voice, either.
“That’s right.” In a corner of the Skype window, I could see a little postage stamp of my own face. I looked annoyed – as a general rule, I don’t go for games like this. “Am I talking to Morton?”
“You are.” A tinge of amusement managed to seep through the mechanical grackle voice. “I’m glad you kept our . . . appointment. I wasn’t sure you would.”
“Really?” I lifted one hand and looked at the dust it’d picked up from the desktop. “Why wouldn’t I?” I wiped my hand on my jeans.
“Oh . . . I don’t know.” The voice from the laptop turned thoughtful. “You haven’t really seemed . . . umm . . . enthusiastic before. About doing business.” Morton paused for a second. “With me.”
“That . . . probably would be because I don’t know who the hell you are.”
“You have a suspicious nature, Kim.” The black-and-white picture didn’t move, but I could imagine this Morton guy slowly nodding as he spoke. “I like that.”
“Yeah? You do?” My face grew larger in the little postage stamp as I leaned down closer to the laptop. “You want to know something I don’t like? I’ll tell you. I don’t like people – who I don’t know who they are – knowing who I am. And what I do.”
“That’s understandable.” As much as a gritty robot voice can sound sympathetic, this one did. “But you don’t have to worry. I have your best interests at heart.”
I glanced over my shoulder at the sunlight leaking through the ancient blinds, then back to the laptop. “Morton . . .” I shook my head. “I’ve heard that one before. Usually just before getting screwed over by somebody.”
“Okay. So . . . if you don’t trust me, Kim . . . then why did you come here?”
That was a good question. And one I didn’t quite have the answer to, either. I’d thought about it last night, lying on my bed, staring up at the dark ceiling. Part of me – a big part – didn’t want to have anything to do with this person, whoever he was. That was probably the smartest part of me. I should just go on ignoring all his text messages, and every other way he kept on trying to get hold of me, and just go about my business, completely on my own. In this line of work, it’s a good idea not to trust anyone. Yeah, there were exceptions for me – like my buddy Elton. Him I trusted – but then, we’d gone through a lot together. I’d saved his ass a couple of times, and he’d saved mine. But other than that . . . not worth the risk.
So why, then? Why come here? Or better yet, why not just turn around and head for the door and keep on walking, right on out of this decaying old building and back onto the street? Get on the bike and head for home. This whole bit with Morton not even really being here, but just this laptop with the crinky-cranky altered voice – boy, that just about defined hinky. The whole thing could be a setup – for all I knew, there was a Predator drone missile heading for this office’s window right now, with its target sights locked onto the back of my head.
Plus, I’d already had a taste of the kind of business Morton was looking to set me up with. I was pretty sure that it’d been Morton who had steered that Heathman guy onto me. If I’d been smarter, I would’ve made certain about that before I’d killed Heathman. Granted, I’d managed to pull a nice little payday out of the whole thing, but I’d also come pretty damn close to getting killed myself, down there in Meridién with Heathman’s whacked-out daughter Lynndie. So if that was a sample of the jobs that Morton had in mind for me, I’d be better off dropping my business card at the local restaurants to find my next gig.
So maybe it was jus
t curiosity on my part that’d brought me here. Maybe I’d wanted to see face-to-face just who it was who’d tracked me down, and who knew so much about the kind of lethal stuff I did for a living. In which case, I’d gotten screwed, since I wound up Skyping on a laptop, with nothing to look at except an archive photo of Warren G. Harding, or whoever it was on the screen.
But I don’t think that was it. I’d already been around the block enough times to have learned that curiosity is a dangerous emotion. My old killing mentor Cole, the guy who’d gotten me into this line of work, would’ve told me to leave well enough alone – people who stick their noses in where they don’t need to can wind up with their heads in a noose.
So that left just one good reason for coming here. I’d pretty much figured that out while I’d been thinking on it last night. And that reason was to plug a hole. This Morton character knew way too much about me for me to be comfortable about it. I didn’t know how he was doing it, or why. This whole bit about lining up business and having my best interests at heart – yeah, like I believed that. Two things I’d learned from Cole when I’d first started out – the first was that nobody does anything for free. And the second was that everybody always has another agenda. When a person tells you their reason for doing something is X, you know there’s a Y underneath, and they’re not telling you about it. It’d even been true for Cole himself – the same time he’d been telling me all this, as part of my education on how to be a hitman, he’d been running all sorts of numbers on me, which had almost gotten me killed.
