Kim Oh 1: Real Dangerous Girl

by Kim Oh

  “That kind of stuff might mean a lot to you – but you’re an accountant, right?” She lowered her head in order to look into my averted eyes. “You eat and breathe numbers. That’s what you do. They’re real to you.” With her thumb, she pointed to the window across from the cubicle. “But the people out there – they could give a rat’s ass. You can’t even get the cops interested – you tried that already, didn’t you?”

  I shook my head.

  “Then take my advice, and don’t bother. Look, I know why you came here. Lots of people have it in for McIntyre. Including me. Yeah, I’d love to nail him. He’s been the biggest dirt bag in this town for years. Nailing slime like him is what people like me do. Plus, I’d be up for a Pulitzer if I did get him. But I can’t do it with junk like this.”

  She took the disk out of the computer and handed it back to me. I sat there looking down at it in my hands.

  “Look.” Her voice went softer and kinder. “Having a bunch of stuff in a computer file, or in a notebook, and somehow you can destroy somebody like McIntyre with it – that’s something you see in the movies. It doesn’t happen in real life.”

  “I guess not.”

  “Can I give you some more advice?”

  I nodded dumbly.

  “Don’t get caught with this stuff on you. Get rid of it. You’re in enough trouble already.”

  She was right. I knew that. What I didn’t know, was what I had been thinking of when I had come to the television station. My first plan had fallen apart, and then just like that, I had come up with this one. Which sucked. It was all part of my head being in a bad place.

  “Let me know if you come up with something else.” She turned back to the computer and started typing again. “Like a videotape of McIntyre molesting a Cub Scout on the city hall lawn, with a knife held to the kid’s throat. That I could use. Now if you’ll excuse me . . . I’ve got half an hour to get down to the editing room and put together something that people actually want to watch.”

  I stuck the disk back into the binder, stood up, and stepped out of the cubicle.

  “Hey –”

  I looked back at the reporter.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “You’re not the only one with a grudge against McIntyre. Let’s just say he hurt a lot of people on his way up.” Her voice went quieter. “A lot of people.”

  We looked at each other for a moment longer, before I turned and walked away.

  THIRTEEN

  Soon as I stepped outside the television station building, I thought I was busted.

  There was a car parked alongside the motorcycle, close enough to keep me from even getting to it. And there was somebody behind the steering wheel, waiting for me.

  “Hey, honey –” She had on big Hollywood-type sunglasses. Her long red hair was looped in a loose braid falling over one shoulder as she leaned out the car’s window. “Come here. I want to talk to you.”

  I halted a couple of yards away, warily regarding her. Right now, with everything that had been going on, this couldn’t be good. I wasn’t in a place where good things were likely to happen.

  “What do you want?”

  “I told you. I just want to talk. That’s all.”

  I didn’t move, except to get out of the way of one of the news vans rolling toward the parking lot exit. “Talk about what?”

  “Don’t be so suspicious. I’m not going to hurt you.” The woman nodded her head toward the empty passenger seat beside her. “Come on. Just get in – so we can be comfortable. Private, you know?” She flashed a big, fakey smile at me. “And we can chat. Just you and me.”

  I wasn’t sure about that. For all I knew, there could be a half-dozen thugs crouched down in the car’s back seat, ready to lay on me whatever new bad thing the world had cooked up.

  Plus, my mind was racing. I had seen this woman before, but I couldn’t remember where.

  Then it hit me. At the club where I had gone looking for a job – she had been the woman, obviously one of the club’s dancers, who had been sitting over on the stage, reading the newspaper, when I had come in. I had a vague memory of her idly glancing over at me when I had been talking to the bartender. Her hair had been all combed out loose then, a big red fall of it, just like you’d expect a dancer to have in a place like that. And flashy makeup, with eyelashes that a bird could land on. But this was the same woman.

  “No –” I shook my head. No way was I getting into that car. “You can tell me whatever you want to, from here.”

  “Okay, you little twit. I’m not messing around.” Her smile evaporated, leaving a hard, murderous look behind. “I’ve got stuff I want to talk to you about, and I don’t want everybody in the freakin’ world to hear it.”

  The way her words grated really had me scared. I glanced over at the lot’s exit, thinking that maybe I should just run for it. I could always come back for the motorcycle later.

  “Don’t,” warned the woman behind the steering wheel. “Just get in the car. I promise it’ll be better for you if you do.”

  I eyed her with even more suspicion. “Why would it?”

  “Oh, come on.” She leaned an elbow out over the windowsill. “You used to work for McIntyre – yeah, I know all about that. And here you are, a couple of days after you got fired by him, coming out of someplace that’s just stuffed with all sorts of snoopy reporters and news types.” She pointed to the binder I was holding up against my breast. “I’m sure you had something interesting to show them, didn’t you? You know who else would be interested? McIntyre, that’s who. You don’t want to talk to me, that’s fine. I’ll just go talk to him instead. And tell him what you were doing here. Then your skinny little butt will be cooked.”

  I stood there frozen, the thoughts scurrying inside my skull the only part in motion. Then I circled around to the car’s passenger side, pulled open the door, and climbed in.

  “Okay –” My heart pounded as I set the binder on my lap. “What do you want to talk about?”

  “Cole.”

  “What . . .” I blinked at her, uncomprehending. After a couple of seconds, I was able to get a complete sentence out. “What about him?”

  “You don’t know?” She ran her hand across the top of the steering wheel. “You didn’t hear what happened?”

  “No –” I shook my head. That seemed to hook up something inside. I peered more closely at the woman. “Are you . . . Monica?”

  That was the name. I was pretty sure of it. Cole had said something to me one time, back in my cubbyhole office late at night, when he had picked up one of the checks for services rendered that McIntyre had told me to cut. With that big psycho grin of his, telling me what a hot night he had lined up for himself – for him and Monica – when he got home to her. He was one of those guys who liked talking about stuff like that, especially to timid little mice like me. There was some kick involved, I suppose – not from the sex talk, but from rubbing it in that he had a life that was all sorts of exciting and wild, the kind of life that a mouse was too afraid to even think about.

  The woman sitting behind the wheel was obviously her. I knew it. She not only looked like the kind of woman who would’ve been Cole’s girlfriend, the kind of flashy creature he’d be attracted to. Not just over-amped sexually – whatever she had going on in that department, she had more of it in her little finger than I did in my entire undersized schoolgirl body – but also radiating that dangerous vibe, the certainty that people like her and Cole just didn’t care what happened in this world, how much damage they caused to everyone else in it as they tore their way past us.

  I had known girls like that back in the long line of high schools, none of which I’d ever had the chance to spend more than a couple of semesters in as Donnie and I had gotten shuttled from one foster home to another. Or known of, really – the way an astronomer with his eye to his telescope would know of some incredibly distant comet streaking through the sky, that he would never actually touch. Those girls scared me then, as I scur
ried past them to my locker, mousy head down . . .

  Right now, I was terrified.

  “Yeah,” she said, “that’s it. Cole must’ve said something to you about me.”

  “No –” I quickly shook my head. “Just . . . your name.”

  “Super. He told me about you.”

  That didn’t lessen my terror. “Like what?”

  “No big deal, sweetheart. Just that he got his paychecks from you. And he thought you were funny.”

  I managed to breathe a little bit. That wasn’t too bad. It was the best that a girl like me could hope for in this world.

  “So you didn’t hear about what happened, huh? To Cole, I mean.”

  I shook my head again. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “That’s cool.” She nodded slowly, mulling things over to herself as she gazed out the windshield. “I wasn’t sure whether you were in the loop on that or not. I should’ve guessed that you weren’t. McIntyre probably kept you in the dark about all kinds of stuff.”

  “Yeah . . . you could say that.”

  “I just needed to make sure.” She took her sunglasses off and turned her gaze toward me again. “When I saw you come into the club – you looked like the way Cole had described you.”

  I knew better than to ask for details about that.

  “Then I checked with the manager,” she said. “And he told me that you were somebody who used to work for McIntyre. So I pretty much figured it was you. Took me a little while to track you down, though. I had to ask some people.”

  That didn’t surprise me. There were all sorts of those in the crummy neighborhood that Donnie and I lived in.

  “Why . . . why did you want to find me?” I squeaked out the question. “Was it something . . . something about Cole?”

  “I don’t know.” The expression on her high-cheekboned face darkened with brooding. “What I was going to do. If you’d had something to do with it. With what happened to him.”

  “I told you.” My voice went all pleading. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You really don’t. Do you?” Her mouth set hard and grim. “Let’s go for a drive.” She reached out and turned the key in the ignition. “I’ll show you.”

  “But –”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll bring you back here.” She dropped the car into drive and swung it around, tires squealing, toward the parking lot exit.

  * * *

  I don’t have a lot of memories. I mean, the kind that other people do.

  Donnie has more of them than I have. Even though he’s younger than me. He tells me that he remembers a lot of things, from a long time ago, that I can’t find anywhere inside my head. It’s like an empty box that you can’t throw out, even though every time you look in it, there’s still nothing.

  Though actually there is one thing, rattling around in that box. I try not to pick it up and look at it too often.

  What it is, is a memory from when I was a little girl. I mean a little, little girl. A child. Donnie must’ve been just a baby then, so how can he remember any of these things? But here’s what I remember. It’s not much. Somebody’s leading me by the hand – I don’t know who it is and I can’t see the person’s face; I’m so little that I barely seem to come up past their knee. It’s a long white corridor, and it smells funny, like bleach, only it’s not bleach, and there are lots of doors with numbers on them. And past the doors are funny-looking beds, complicated-looking ones, with different kinds of machines around them, with hoses and tubes and wires coming out of them, and a little television screen with nothing but a green line ticking up and down across it. There are people in those funny beds, but from down where I am, I can’t see their faces. But I can hear their slow, labored breathing, in time to the chugging and clicking of the machines.

  There’s not much more. Whoever it is that has me by the hand, we finally reach the room at the end of the hallway. And we go into one of the rooms, crowded with the funny bed and all the other stuff. And whoever it is lets go of my hand and picks me up around my waist, then lifts me so I can see the person in the bed.

  I don’t remember the next part. I just remember all the funny machines going silent, and the room seeming to get much bigger all around me. While the green line on the little TV screen stopped hiccupping up and down, and just went flat . . .

  That’s why I hate hospitals.

  Probably why most people do. Stuff like that.

  So I have to figure that Cole’s girlfriend Monica was just being sadistic by bringing me there. She could’ve just told me and my head would’ve been messed up enough, just by knowing. But she wanted to see my reaction. See it in my face. Things weren’t going the way she wanted them to, either – so somebody had to pay. Even just a little bit. I just happened to be the one she glommed on to.

  The corridor Monica led me down had that same disinfectant smell that I remembered. The room wasn’t at the end of the hallway, though; it was about halfway down. Close to the nurses’ station. In the intensive care ward, there were a lot more machines hooked up inside the rooms.

  One of the nurses, with a clipboard in her hands, was inspecting the bags of fluids hanging up like sad, soft Christmas ornaments all around one of the beds. Narrow tubes ran from the bottoms of the slowly collapsing bags to the figure lying motionless in the bed, with the sheet drawn up across his chest. The nurse gave a little nod of recognition to Monica, then slipped out to make room for us.

  I gripped the bed’s raised chrome rail with both hands as I leaned over and looked down at Cole. Even with there being so little of his face exposed, with the big ridged air hose locked into his mouth and the other hoses threaded down his nose, with the surgical tape holding everything in place, including all the wires and patches monitoring his vital signs – even with all that, I knew it was him. I knew it was him as soon as we stepped into the room.

  It’s a strange thing looking at somebody in the hospital, somebody really messed up like that – when it’s somebody you’ve always been afraid of.

  I wasn’t afraid of Cole now. I just felt sorry for him.

  And sorry, and scared, for myself. Because if something like this could happen to him – whatever it had been – then anything could happen. To anyone, including me and Donnie. Cole had been the scariest person in the world. To see him lying there, his eyes closed, nothing moving except his chest rising and falling in time to the respirator clacking away beside the bed . . .

  I turned and looked over my shoulder at Monica. “What happened?”

  “What do you think?” Her voice was tight and bitter, her eyes two narrowed slits. “Same as what happened to you.”

  I nodded, silent.

  “He got fired,” said Monica.

  * * *

  She had lied to me. She didn’t drive me back over to the television station. She stayed there at the hospital, beside Cole’s bed.

  I walked back. Carrying the black binder in both arms across my breast. It started to rain before I had gone more than a few blocks, but I didn’t mind. That way, nobody could tell if I was crying or not.

  Even when I got to the TV station, unstrapped my helmet from the back of the seat, and pulled it on. I left the visor up as I rode through the glistening wet streets. Hoping that the wind and the rain would just wash everything away . . .

  PART TWO

  Enough bad shit happens without trying. Your job is to make sure it happens to the right people.

  – Cole’s Book of Wisdom

  FOURTEEN

  After that, at least for a few days, I didn’t care what happened. If any of the lowlifes slinking around the apartment building figured out that Donnie and I were getting by on that money I had sorta, kinda stolen from McIntyre – I just didn’t care.

  I should’ve spent the time thinking about what I was going to do next, but I didn’t. It’s not like I was having any great success coming up with plans. I’d already had, in short order, two of them come crashing apa
rt. The bit about keeping my head low and going out and getting a job, any kind of job, so that nobody would suspect that I might be hanging onto something that wasn’t mine and was McIntyre’s instead – that had gone right out the window. And then the crazier plan that had popped into my head right after that, about going to the television station with the binder full of backup disks, and just bringing his whole evil empire down with all those financial records – what a joke. The news reporter had been kind to me when she had filled me in on the nature of reality, that doing things like that wasn’t part of it.

  Given that track record, I wasn’t even sure I should try coming up with another plan. Yeah, I know the third time’s the charm and all, but what exactly was that supposed to mean? Maybe I’d come up with something that worked and solved all our problems for us – or maybe it meant the next one would wind up getting both of us killed.

  Or maybe we’d get killed, no matter what I did. Or if I did nothing at all. I didn’t know.

  That’s another problem with being in a bad place. There are no exits. Every door either leads to something worse, or back to where you were.

  So a couple of weeks went by that way, with me staring out the window, down to the street below, and Donnie knowing better than to bug me.

  I took a couple of nibbles out of the money from the envelope – I had to. First to pay the rent, then to get some more groceries into the place. It turned out that in this neighborhood, breaking a hundred-dollar bill at the corner market didn’t draw as much attention as I had been concerned that it would. I figured it out; it was because of the hookers. The grizzled old guy behind the cash register just gave me my change and a look of respect I’d never gotten before. As though I had finally figured out a way of making more money than I had at my crappy accountant job, though who he figured I was peddling it to, other than guys who were into twelve-year-old boys, was beyond me.