by Kim Oh
The Kim Oh Thrillers:
Kim Oh 1: Real Dangerous Girl
Kim Oh 2: Real Dangerous Job
Kim Oh 3: Real Dangerous People
. . . and more to come.
Praise for the Kim Oh Thrillers –
“Real Dangerous Girl grabs you from the first sentence and leaves you wanting more about this wonderful character. Thankfully Kim Oh is giving all of us more . . .”
– Dean Wesley Smith, USA Today Bestselling author
“Kim Oh hardly seems dangerous – a one-hundred-pound orphan, barely out of her teens, caregiver for her disabled brother – but the people who assume she won’t fight back when they get in her way learn a tough lesson in survival. And some of them don’t survive. Real Dangerous Girl is smart, funny, and cool . . . Kimmie Oh is a heroine to identify with, and to root for.”
– Louise Marley, author of The Brahms Deception and Mozart’s Blood
“With Kim Oh, we’re treated to a refreshingly original experience: joyriding shotgun alongside a truly irresistible heroine in a world of crime, thrills and mayhem.”
– David Sakmyster, author of Crescent Lake and The Pharos Objective
“With nods to Mack Bolan, Jonathan Quinn, and Mike Hammer, Kim Oh takes you on a non-stop thrill ride to Hell with no guarantees she’ll ever get back. How far would you go if your life – and the lives of those you love – were at stake?”
– Nathan Lowell, author of Half Share and Full Share (Solar Clipper Trader Tales)
“Kim Oh’s Real Dangerous Girl should come with a warning label – may cause addiction. It’s fast and fun, and I devoured it like a tub of kettlecorn. More, please.”
– Sean Ellis, author of Dark Trinity: Ascendant
Copyright © 2011 by the Author.
This ebook edition first published October 2011.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including digital reproduction, photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the express written permission of the
Author & Copyright Holder.
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Real Dangerous Girl.
PART ONE
Good things happen to you when you work hard. Especially if you also hold a loaded gun to people’s heads.
– Cole’s Book of Wisdom
ONE
I didn’t start out killing people. I had to get to that point. Kind of a work ethic thing.
But once I decided to do it – it worked out. I mean – not for them. The people who got killed. I mean for me.
I leaned my hands on the sink, in the bathroom of that little apartment, and looked in the mirror. A hundred and a few extra pounds – okay, maybe a 110 when I’ve been porking out – of Korean-American girl, who would’ve still been in community college if I hadn’t taken all those advanced placement classes. Me and every other kid who wanted – or needed – to get out and start making some money before the entire U.S. economy was lying around us in hot, smoking ruins. The blonde cheerleader types might’ve had bright futures ahead of them as pole dancers, and then marrying whatever IT guys on whose laps they’d already spent their working shifts. But I was a little too meager in the rack department to have that as a realistic career option. And really, Asian girls who get implants just wind up looking like strange Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloons. Guys who go for that are a minority taste, so to speak. So I’d known at an early age I was going to have to work for a living. And I mean grind it out.
Who knew that killing people would make things so much easier for me? Just goes to show that you really do have to be open to the opportunities life presents you.
I had to stop thinking about stuff like that and get to work.
I think a lot. It’s probably a bad habit.
In the living room, I grabbed my backpack from the couch. The fully loaded, ready-to-go .357 made it heavy. I slung it over my shoulder and headed out the front door.
I had a job to do.
TWO
The great thing about getting mad – really mad – is that you just don’t care what happens. As long as something really bad happens, you’re cool with it.
That was something else I had to learn.
* * *
At the beginning, I didn’t like Cole. In fact, I hated his guts. Which is funny, when you find out how important he became to me.
Picture this. A canary-yellow ’57 Chevy Bel Air convertible cruising down some dark city street . . .
Can you believe that? The nerve that guy had! Of course, that was back when Cole was in his prime, on top of his game and all, but still. Here’s a guy who makes his living, essentially, by killing people – and yes, he taught me everything I know – and you’d think the last thing somebody like that would want would be to draw attention to himself. And there he is, cruising along in that dream machine, one hand on top of the steering wheel, the other draped on top of the empty passenger seat beside him. Like he hasn’t got a care in the world, or at least none that he couldn’t take care of with the big ugly .357 – black, not shiny steel like the one he gave me – he had tucked inside the glove compartment. He could’ve been Pamela Anderson stark naked on a tricycle, and his ride wouldn’t have gotten more long stares from guys than that Bel Air did.
“Dig it,” Cole told me once. This was later on, when he had been teaching me stuff. “They see the car. They don’t see me. That’s the trick. Police come along and ask around, did you see somebody in a yellow ’57 Chevy, they’re gonna tell the cops all about the car, not me. Like I was the freakin’ Invisible Hit Man driving it.”
Anyway, here’s Cole riding along, on his way to work. You figure it: three in the morning, and the kind of guy he is, he’s probably not delivering a pizza. You’d be right about that. Streets are empty, the mercury-vapor lamps overhead are dropping pools of that weird orangey light on the asphalt, the Bel Air’s cruising easily along, slowing for a stoplight . . .
He’s got the music on. He’d found a custom shop that’d managed to cram a Blaupunkt into the dashboard, just so he could listen to all that dopey metal stuff he likes so much. I never got into that, no matter how long I hung out with him. I’m not exactly the target audience for it.
But that’s okay. When you get your lessons in killing people from somebody even a few years older, you have to expect at least a couple creative differences. So to speak.
So Cole’s got the Bel Air stopped at the traffic light. That late at night, there’s no traffic on the city streets, at least not downtown where the big corporate office towers are. He could just as well slide right through the red light, keep on going to the job he’s got lined up. But he doesn’t.
“Here’s the deal,” Cole told me once. “You can break the big rules all you want. Where people like us get messed up is when they break the little ones. Be cool.”
Which was true enough in this case, on this night. Because there actually was a patrol car, a regulation black-and-white, parked around the corner. Two cops inside, loafing through their shift, one of them asleep, head tilted back and mouth open. Cole just hadn’t spotted it yet.
This is his idea of being cool. Stuck waiting for the light to change, sitting in a convertible where anybody could see what he’s doing – so what does he do? He pulls the piece out of the glove compartment, along with a box of the hollow points he preferred, flips the gun chamber open, and starts loading it up. Nodding along to whatever hair band’s blaring out of the car stereo . . .
Of course he had given me his big lopsided grin when he had told me all this. He knew what a jerk he was. Proud of it, actually.
&nb
sp; He’s got the open .357 and the box of ammo in his lap – and that’s when the black-and-white creeps forward, from where the cops – or at least the one who’d been awake – had been watching him. Which they would’ve been doing even if he hadn’t been sitting there in a canary yellow ’57 Bel Air. The cop behind the steering wheel had been a woman; Cole had looked up and seen her, on a diagonal across the empty intersection. She’d jabbed an elbow into her partner’s ribs, waking him up, all blinking and yawning. Then the two of them had sat there, peering at Cole and whatever he was doing in his own car.
“They were lucky,” he told me, “that I was already running late. Otherwise things might have gotten less than cool.”
So all he’d done was slide the gun and the bullets off his lap, onto the passenger seat beside him. Easy, nothing to hide. While he made eye contact with the lady cop –
And smiled at her.
That had been all he’d had to do. He knew what he had going on, in that department.
“You gals are all the same.” Talking like a big ol’ redneck hit man. “Even at that distance, I could see her nostrils flare.”
The light finally changes, and he gives the Bel Air some gas, just rolling easy through the intersection. Cole looks up in his rear-view mirror and sees the two cops watching him go – well, the female cop is watching him; her partner’s just looking at the yellow dreamboat car. Then the black-and-white pulls out into the intersection, turns, and heads off the other way.
Cole reaches over to the passenger seat and one-hands the gun, sliding the last round into the chamber, then closing it up and putting it away. Not back into the glove compartment this time, but inside his jacket . . .
THREE
I was working that night, too. My old job, the one I used to do.
There were a lot of nights I was there at the office, way past midnight. That’s the problem with doing the accounts for a business that was a little on the funky side, to say the least. It’s a lot more work. You’re keeping two sets of books, two sets of numbers – one to show the regulators and anybody else who might come snooping around, the other so the boss and his pals could see how much money they were actually making. Like I said, a lot of work.
Not that I minded. I was a total little grind back then. I mean, I’m not exactly glammed up now – I can spend way more money at the gun shop than I’d ever be able to spend at the Nordstrom makeup counter – but then I was even more of a lost cause, sexiness-wise. If it hadn’t been for the long black ponytail hanging down the middle of my back, you might’ve figured I was some Korean-American accountant guy behind my big round glasses, inside my white polyester short-sleeve shirt with the sweat stains under the arms. Amazing how crunching numbers can be so much work – is it any wonder that when I had the chance, I got into killing people instead?
Because if nothing else, I’m stuck behind a computer terminal, with stacks of printouts and receipts and transaction logs all over the desk, in a little windowless office the size of a broom closet – might actually have been one before; it still had that Clorox-and-wet-mold smell – and that putz Cole is out there, having all the fun. It didn’t strike me that way back then, because I had my head down in the company accounts all the time, but I think you’d have to admit that there’s a basic unfairness in any universe where people – the ones who are working as hard as I was – don’t get to ice some jerk every once in a while. Just my opinion, but the American workplace would be a lot happier if a few more worthwhile murders were allowed. I’ve been there.
Meanwhile, over at some other big tall office building in the city, there’s a limo pulling up to the curb in the front. Three in the morning, all kinds of business being taken care of – just not the kind most people get to hear about.
First out of the back seat of the limo are a couple of black-suited bodyguards, crew-cut types shaped like walking refrigerators and just about as smart. But good at their jobs. These two muscle types get out and stand on the sidewalk, scanning the area with each one of them keeping a hand inside his jacket, ready to pull out some ugly cannon if they spot anything funny. Their whole function is to get whoever’s inside the limo from one place to another, without their boss getting drilled in a public place. Like right out here on the street. That’s an important job, at least as far as their boss might be concerned, and it’s totally taking up all the brain cells in their heads. No room for anything else – their hard, slit-eyed gazes are scoping out everything, every building, every street, every alley-like radar dishes turned down level to the horizon.
The only thing they’re not catching is Cole, watching them from around a corner a block away. When he wants to, he’s spooky good at not being seen. In this movie, he’s already left the screaming yellow Bel Air a couple streets away, and gone sneaking the rest of the distance to his target, slipping like a ghost from one dark spot to another. Until he’s right on top of them . . .
All clear, at least as far as the bodyguards can tell. One keeps watch, constantly scanning, hand inside his jacket, while the other turns back to the limo. He reaches into the limo and helps out the figure who’s been patiently sitting there on the rear seat, waiting for his crew to make sure everything’s safe. A smaller man, silver-haired, groomed with that sleek gloss that rich and powerful people just naturally acquire along the way – he steps out of the limo and walks without hurry, flanked by the taller, wider bulk of the two bodyguards, toward the glass front door of the building.
I know all this, and can see it, because Cole told me all about it. Telling me about his own jobs, the ones he pulled off for the creep we’d both been working for back then – that was all part of my education.
At the office tower door, one of the bodyguards takes his gun out of his jacket and uses the butt of it to rap against the glass. A uniformed security guard comes scurrying out from behind his station in the building’s lobby, unlocks the door, and lets the trio in. The guard oozes all sorts of cringing respect to the white-haired one in the middle, tugging at the bill of his uniform cap, nodding and smiling in the nervous way flunkies get when they’re confronted by somebody this big and powerful. None of this makes any impact, of course, on the boss – he’s been getting that response, or something like it, most of his life. It’s like the weather to him; there, but not worth noticing.
From his nice and hidden vantage point, Cole watches the important boss guy get shepherded safely into the building. He can see one of the guards staying with the smaller man as the security guards relock the building’s front door. The other bodyguard goes back out to the limo, leans into the rolled-down window up front and says something to the driver, then leans back against the side of the limo, keeping watch, arms folded across his chest.
That’s all fine as far as Cole is concerned. It’s not like he was going to try anything stupid right out there in the open. That’s not his style. And it’s not what he taught me. Which is why I’m alive, and some other people aren’t.
Instead, Cole pulls back from the corner of the building where he had been hanging out and walks down to where he had left the duffel bag that he had taken out of the Bel Air’s trunk, when he had parked it streets away. The big green Army-style duffel is heavy enough – it’s got his tools in it, the stuff he uses to do his job – that it takes an effort to get its wide canvas strap slung over his shoulder. Cole’s got some pretty good muscle tone – at least he did back then, before all the bad things happened to him. More than I’ll ever have, that’s for sure – but it’s not like he’s some sort of hypertrophied weight lifter.
“Just enough to get the job done.” Another thing he told me when he’d been schooling me in the fine points of my new career. “Anything more just gets in the way.”
Cole has got his tool bag slung over his shoulder. He turns and keeps on walking away from that other office tower he had been watching. He’s got another route already set up, to get to where he needs to be.
Which is one of the city’s older office buildings, the
kind that have some sort of historical registry brass plaque on the front, and the offices inside are all shabby and disreputable, full of insurance agents with no clients and Chinese dentists with pre-World War II equipment. You know the kind of place, somewhere somebody like you wouldn’t go into in a million years –
Cole wasn’t going into it, either. Instead, he goes around to the dirty, garbage-strewn alley in the back. A couple of slinky stray cats watch him as he pulls down the fire escape’s rusty ladder. With the duffel bag slung on his back, he starts climbing up.
In the meantime, while Cole’s doing all sorts of fun, neat stuff out in the night, I’m still stuck at my desk, grinding away at the numbers.
“Okay,” I mumble as I paw through a sheaf of accounts receivable. “It’s gotta be here somewhere . . .” When I’d get tired, I used to talk to myself. Maybe just to keep myself company. A lot of times, working that late, I figured I was the only one there, except maybe for the janitors mopping the floors.
Turns out, this time I wasn’t.
But back to Cole. His movie’s a lot more interesting than mine was, at least back then.
He gets to the top of the old office building and throws his duffel bag onto the roof. It lands there with a clanking thud that echoes away in the night. But nobody hears it except him. He boosts himself from the top platform of the fire escape and scrambles onto the roof. He picks up the duffel bag by its strap and heads toward the other side. When he reaches the roof’s edge, he stops and takes a look around.
