Real Dangerous Ride (The Kim Oh Suspense Thriller Series Book 6)

by Kim Oh

  And third. That bit Dalby had mentioned, about wanting to build up my business? He’d nailed me on that one. When you’re hungry, everything looks like a sandwich.

  “Kim.” Morton’s voice this time. “What’s your answer?”

  Like my old killing mentor Cole told me once – If you don’t step over the edge, you’ll never know where it is.

  I picked up the stack of money from the desktop and tucked it in my jacket pocket. Then I lifted the backpack by one of its straps. “So – where am I delivering this to?”

  THREE

  I had some things to take care of before I got on my way.

  There are some real advantages to using a motorcycle for your main transportation. Especially in the city – not only do you save a lot on gasoline and insurance, there’s the parking thing as well. Which in a place as jam-packed as L.A., that’s a biggie. Plus, being able to lane-split when you’re on the freeway and the traffic freezes up solid – and that happens a lot. Every hour is rush hour around here – you could be traveling at three in the morning, then boom, instant gridlock. So the ability to put your bike’s front wheel on the lane divider and just slide between the motionless vehicles – that’s nice. And I’ve been told it’s even legal, according to the DMV, no matter how many dirty looks you get from the people stuck in their cars.

  And – I have to admit it – I do look good on the bike. Especially this new one, since it’s not as dinged up yet as my old Ninja 250 had been. And with my hair streaming out from under the helmet, as I roll on the throttle . . . yeah, I’m hot. Or at least as hot as I’m ever going to get.

  But here’s the catch. For some things in life, this kind of ride just doesn’t work.

  Like grocery shopping.

  Which I hate doing anyway – that’s another one of those supposedly female specialties that somehow I just didn’t get the memo on. I’ve gone grocery shopping, and I’ve had oral surgery, and at least with oral surgery they give you drugs. If there was some way I could shop while under general anesthesia, I’d sign up for it. Not sure what would wind up in the basket, though.

  Anyway, unless you’re just picking up a quart of milk and a Hershey bar, the sportbike really doesn’t cut it. That’s why, after that weird meeting with Dalby and the laptop posing as Morton – and I still hadn’t found out anything about him – it took me a little bit longer to get home. Because I had to go over to the Zipcar lot on La Cienega, pick up the little Toyota econobox I’d reserved on my smartphone, and then hightail it over to the Trader Joe’s and stock up. Any time I’m planning to be on the road, I always stuff the refrigerator freezer with things that even my brother Donnie isn’t too lazy to throw into the microwave. That way, he’d have no excuse for phoning out for pizza every time he got hungry, though he’s been known to do that anyhow.

  So I took the Zipcar card I always carry with me and ran it over the little sensor patch in the upper left corner of the Toyota’s windshield – I’d had the same dark blue one a couple times before – and heard the gratifying click of the driver-side door unlocking. Every once in a while – not often – the card doesn’t work, and you have to call up Zipcar headquarters to sort it out. But this time I was good to go. I tossed my shoulder bag onto the passenger seat, followed by the backpack I’d just gotten from that Dalby guy, then climbed in behind the steering wheel, found the key dangling on its lanyard below the dashboard, started it up, and swung the Toyota around and out of the lot. I hated leaving my brand-new Ninja out on the street, but there really wasn’t any other option.

  I’ve gotten my shopping down cold, so I can blitz in and out of the store in less than an hour – it helps if you just buy the same damn things every time. With the backpack strapped to me – I’d left my own shoulder bag locked in the Toyota’s trunk – I pushed the cart through the TJ aisles like I was on some kind of kamikaze mission.

  Not much longer after that, and I was back at the apartment building, carrying the bags up in the elevator. I managed to hold on to them while I unlocked the door and pushed it open with my knee.

  “Where’ve you been?”

  That was my brother Donnie, in his best accusatory tone of voice. He should really think about going to law school and becoming a prosecuting attorney – sometimes, he’s really got the attitude for it.

  “What’re you talking about?” Trying to keep all the shopping bags balanced against myself, I looked around the area by the door. “What’s all this?”

  “Kimmie –” He sat in his wheelchair, with his jacket on. Which meant something was up – I just didn’t know what. “You forgot. Didn’t you?”

  I squeezed past him and managed to unload the bags onto the kitchenette counter, without any of them toppling over and spilling its contents. I unslung the backpack from behind me and set it down as well. When I turned back around, I saw that his soft-sided luggage was out there as well, with his laptop bag stacked on top of it.

  “You’re going somewhere?” Duh.

  “You did forget.”

  “I’m sorry. Jeez.” From one of the bags, I took the Häagen-Dazs and shoved it into the refrigerator freezer, so it wouldn’t melt while I was getting reamed out by my little brother. “I’ve been busy. All right?”

  Donnie didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. His gaze was like a freight train with twenty cars of guilt trip lined up behind the engine.

  “Really. I am sorry.” I sat down on the floor beside the wheelchair and laid the side of my head against his arm. “If you could just fill me in . . . I’d appreciate it.”

  “The conference,” said Donnie. “Remember?”

  “Umm . . .”

  He sighed and took a fat manila envelope from where it was tucked next to him on the other side of the wheelchair. There was some kind of corporate-looking logo in one corner and a white label with our mailing address in the center.

  I bent back the little metal bits and opened it up. The biggest thing inside was a glossy brochure with a lot of photos of kids not much older than Donnie, grinning at the camera while surrounded by banks of expensive electronics. Really expensive, the kind you’d see in the basement of the Pentagon. I ran my gaze over what little text there was – a lot of buzzwords about The Future, specifically how to create it. Maybe my kid brother had been recruited into a training program for tomorrow’s mad scientists.

  When I looked at the other papers inside the envelope, the whole thing came rushing back into my head.

  “Oh. Yeah . . . right.” I nodded. “That conference.”

  I’d even paid for this – one of the pieces of paper was the receipt for the hit to my MasterCard. Something about young tech entrepreneurs – which was what Donnie was aiming for, at least at the moment. The whole thing was being put on by a bunch of Silicon Valley companies, scouting for the next generation of computer whiz kids – or that was the public relations spin on it. A whole week up there, getting toured around those futuristic high-tech campuses, hanging out with their fellow nerds and having a bunch of T-shirt-wearing millionaires in their twenties and early thirties tell them how they were all going to get just as rich and cool. Doing stuff that people like you and me wouldn’t even have a clue about – like dogs at the side of the road, watching a glistening Lamborghini streak by and not even knowing what it was.

  Actually, I was cool with all that. There was a bunch of stuff that Donnie did on his laptop that he didn’t even tell me about anymore, other than promising me none of it would result in the black helicopters landing on the roof of the apartment building, and uniformed NSA agents breaking down the door with their assault rifles. I was doing enough dangerous things on my own, without all that extra hassle. So as long as Donnie sent me a postcard now and then, from whatever strange new world he and the other kids were putting together for the rest of us, I’d be happy.

  But in the meantime, I had to admit that this conference – or whatever they were calling it – was a neat break for him. He gets stuck inside more than I really like, an
d too many of his friends he only knew from online. So this would be real face time for him. Age-wise, there would probably be a lot of others older than him, but apparently that didn’t matter in the geek world – if you could talk the language, you were in.

  And it was a bargain, too – I’d only had to pay the registration fee. Those tech companies were paying for the shared hotel room up in San Francisco – really nice place, too, over by the Embarcadero – and all the meals and transportation as well, including the airfare. What the heck, they had the money to splash out for it. There hadn’t even been any extra charge for the necessary accommodations for Donnie’s wheelchair. Then again, with him being both mobility-challenged and technically minority status, they were getting a twofer in the diversity sweepstakes. That counts – when it comes time to start filling out my brother’s college applications, expect me to play that card for all it’s worth.

  “So this is happening now?” I scanned the dates on the paperwork. Apparently so – I had completely lost track of the calendar.

  “The van should be here any minute,” said Donnie. “If you hadn't gotten back here in time to sign the release –” He pointed to one of the papers. “I wouldn’t have been able to go.”

  “Okay. Okay – I suck.” I wrapped my arm around his shoulders. “But I did get here. All right? So you’re gonna go, and you’ll have a lot of fun.” I squeezed him tight. “I’ll miss you.”

  He gave me a break. “Miss you, too, Kimmie.”

  After I signed the release, I leafed through the rest of the paperwork to see if there was anything else I had to take care of.

  “Oops.” I looked at the plastic-encased ID badge that had been included in the packet. “They got your name wrong.” I held it up so he could see. “Either they screwed up, or I did – they put down my name instead of yours.”

  “Yeah, I saw that. So I’ll be Kim for a week, while I’m there.” He shrugged. “I’m just glad your name’s not Alice.”

  Actually, I was pretty sure the mistake was mine. I was such a flop at being Korean – that’s what happens when you’re raised by round-eye foster parents – that I’d had to have somebody tell me that Kim was really my family name. Me and a few hundred million other people from that particular gene pool. And Oh or Oh-seong was my given name – somewhere along the way, when I’d been a kid, some set of papers had gotten filled out with the names backward for both me and Donnie, and it’d stuck because I hadn’t known any better. So good chance I’d screwed up the forms for this conference when I’d written everything in.

  The buzzer beside the front door went off. The van was pulled up at the curb downstairs, double-parked and with the engine running. I got Donnie and his luggage hustled down the elevator and everything necessary handed over to the efficient-looking woman who was the trip coordinator. A kiss on the top of his head, then he was loaded on. Soon as the van headed down the street, I glanced at my watch.

  Crap – I had about a quarter-hour to get the Toyota back to the Zipcar lot. I shot upstairs, grabbed the backpack – no way was I going to leave it there in the apartment – got the car out of the parking garage, and barreled toward La Cienega.

  † † †

  I made it, just barely.

  With a minute to spare, I pulled into one of the lot’s empty parking spaces. The next person who’d reserved the Toyota was already there, looking irritable and glancing at his watch every two seconds.

  “Cutting it kind of close,” the guy said sourly. He radiated the prissy officiousness of somebody stuck in a middle-management job who figured he should’ve been a VP by now.

  “Yeah –” I’d already popped the trunk. I slid out from behind the wheel with Dalby’s backpack, grabbed my own, and slammed the trunk lid back down. “I kept the seat warm for you.” I headed toward my motorcycle without looking behind me.

  I bungeed my backpack onto the rear of the Ninja’s seat so I could strap Dalby's backpack onto myself. Cutting through the late afternoon L.A. traffic, I started to smile. Because there was something I was already cooking up. Not for Dalby or Morton – but for my brother Donnie.

  When I got home, I slung both bags onto the couch and went to my bedroom to dig out the laptop I used – I get the hand-me-down every time we upgrade Donnie’s machine. Usually, whenever I have someplace to get to, that I haven’t been before, Donnie Google Maps it for me. But I could manage all right without him, if I had to.

  A little bit of clicking and touchpadding, and I had what I wanted – on the laptop screen was the street view of the address Dalby had hired me to deliver the backpack to. Some kind of store, not too old and shabby – certainly not as derelict looking as that place in downtown L.A. where I’d hooked up with him and Morton. Nothing unusual about it. With my fingertip, I drew a circle on the touch pad, panning the view around the full 360 degrees and back to the building – cars frozen in place on the street, a few pedestrians caught in mid-stride – all perfectly normal. Which was what I wanted, of course.

  I checked the address again, on the slip of paper that Dalby had given me. That made me smile again –

  The address, where I’d make the delivery, was in San Francisco.

  I love it when things work out that way, like the bits and pieces of the universe were lining up for my own personal benefit – even if it was just a couple of the bits. Most of the time, it doesn’t . . . but every once in a while . . .

  That was what I hadn’t told my brother Donnie, when I’d come home and found him all packed up, ready to go off to that techie conference. I’d had to bite my tongue to keep from blurting out that I was going up there to San Francisco as well. Granted, he’d be flying and I’d be riding the Ninja the whole way – so he’d be getting there a lot sooner than I would – but it was still a cool thing that it’d just happened to come about that way. Neither one of us had ever been there before, but I’d been able to figure out with Google Maps that I’d be dropping off Dalby’s backpack over on the other side of the city – toward the ocean, north of Golden Gate Park.

  But as soon as I’d made the delivery, I’d be free to zip east toward the bay, and to the fancy hotel where Donnie was staying. And I’d be able to surprise him – he’d be totally not expecting me to show up there. I’d be cool about it, of course, and not do any embarrassing big-sister stuff in front of all his new geeky friends. But maybe there would be just a little bit of time he’d have free, so maybe he and I could have lunch or dinner – I’d always heard that the Asian food in San Francisco was killer, not that I’d necessarily be able to appreciate the difference between it and what I’d already gotten used to here in L.A. And if there wasn’t time, which would be cool, too – I’d just get a kick out of seeing the look on his face when I tracked him down in the hotel lobby, or wherever.

  I didn’t have much more of a plan than that – I figured I’d play it by ear when I got there.

  It’d be a long ride, though. Something like twelve hours, Los Angeles to San Francisco, assuming you didn’t get held up along the way. And as much as I loved the sportbike, I knew from experience that being on it for that long would be pretty wearing. Better if I waited until morning to get started.

  Traveling light’s kind of a specialty of mine – I was able to cram into my own backpack everything I figured I’d need for the day or two I’d be in San Francisco, before turning around and heading back home. So my best pair of dress jeans made the cut, plus my travel skincare kit – that long a ride on a motorcycle really beats the crap out of you. My makeup was so minimalist, I could stuff it in one of the backpack’s tiny outside pouches.

  I went and stood in front of my closet, hesitating for a moment – then reached in and pulled out one more thing. A white cotton shirt, an expensive one, that I hadn’t even worn yet. I’d been in the Beverly Center a couple weeks ago, to pick up a new AirPort Time Capsule at the Apple store – it was for Donnie; I’d managed to talk him down from the three-terabyte model to just the two-terabyte – and for some reason I
wandered into the Ann Taylor store. I’d felt like an imposter there, but then I found the petite sizes. And the white really did look good against my skin tone – the advantage of being genetically Asian, even if I came up short on the cultural side. I really hadn’t bought anything like that for a long time – since before I’d gotten into the business of killing people, actually.

  I took the shirt off the padded hanger and folded it up as carefully as I could before sliding it into my backpack. It’d get wrinkled, I knew, by the time I got to San Francisco, but I figured I’d be able to find somewhere to get it pressed. Plus, if I wound up taking Donnie out someplace nice, I didn’t want the poor kid to be embarrassed by his older sister.

  I zipped the bag closed and set it by the front door, ready to go. Then I went to bed early, with Dalby’s backpack and my .357 next to me just in case I had any unexpected visitors during the night. But I wasn’t really worried about that.

  I switched off the lamp on the little bedside table and closed my eyes –