Kim Oh 1: Real Dangerous Girl

by Kim Oh

  Another week goes by, and I still don’t have a clue. If it hadn’t been for the money in the envelope – I still kept it hidden on the closet shelf, under the sweaters – I suppose my brother and I would’ve just sat inside the apartment and starved to death. Too scared to leave town, too freaked to come up with another plan. Unless waiting for some other bad thing to happen constitutes a plan.

  “Hey! Kim!” A shout came at me as I was coming back from another run to the store. “Come over here – I want to talk to you.”

  With my arms full of the grocery bags, I looked over and saw a car that I had ridden in before, pacing me. Monica was steering with one hand while leaning toward the rolled-down window on the passenger side.

  “We talked before.” I kept walking. “I didn’t enjoy it.”

  “Yeah, well, I can understand you feeling that way.” Monica kept cruising alongside me. “Think it was fun for me?”

  “Fun for you?” I stopped and stared at her. “It was your idea! I didn’t want to go to that stupid hospital. And see . . .” I let my words drift away unspoken.

  “Okay, okay.” She had stopped the car as well. “Forget what I said. I don’t want to talk to you.”

  “Great.” I lifted the bags higher in my arms and started walking again. “Thanks for dropping by.”

  Usually I wasn’t so sarcastic with people. Even the ones I couldn’t stand. I guess holing up in our crappy little apartment, slowly going nuts, had started to give me a little bit of an edge.

  “There’s someone else who wants to talk to you –”

  I stopped and looked back at her in the car. “Yeah? Who?”

  “It’s Cole.”

  That gave me something to think about. Even if I couldn’t.

  “Well . . .” I looked down inside the bags, then up at her again. “I can’t go with you right now. I’ve got ice cream here. I don’t want it to melt.”

  “Look. I’ll buy you more ice cream. Just get in the car.”

  I got into the car – I’m not sure why. Maybe I was the one who wanted to talk to somebody.

  * * *

  After a few blocks, I realized Monica wasn’t driving toward the hospital.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Home,” she said. “Our home. I mean where Cole and I live.”

  “Oh.” I looked at the buildings going by. “So he’s not at the hospital? Not any more?”

  “Duh. They let him go home.”

  “Wow. That’s great. So he’s all recovered and stuff?”

  “I said he went home.” She didn’t look over at me. “Let’s leave it at that.”

  When we got close to the wharves, I could smell the oil-stained river water. There were warehouses and loading docks all around us, when Monica pulled the car over to a stop.

  “We’re here.” She pushed her door open. “Come on.”

  She led me to the small, normal-sized door at the side of one of the warehouses. A lop-eared dog barked at us from the other side of a rattling chain-link fence. Beer cans and a few syringes were scattered in the dry, trodden-down weeds between the stretches of broken concrete.

  I’d never been in a warehouse before, at least not that I could remember. This one was a big, mostly empty space, with just a few ancient cardboard cartons with Chinese lettering on them, stacked up by the loading dock door. The rafters were streaked with white droppings from the pigeons that fluttered up near the ceiling. Dusty sunlight filtered in through the high, broken windows.

  “Over here.” Monica headed toward the rear of the warehouse.

  The two of them had made a little home for themselves, in a walled-off section of the building. That is, if you think of home as any place with a mattress on the floor and a lot of guns.

  There had probably been more of them at one time – the guns, I mean – judging by the dirty silhouettes on the walls. Guns and other things, the stuff Cole had used to do his job with.

  “Yo – I’m back.”

  No answer came from the figure lying curled up under a blanket on the dirty mattress.

  Monica went over and prodded the lumpy shape with the toe of her boot. “Wake up,” she said. “We got company.” She looked over at me. “Come here and say hello to the man of the house.”

  The figure stirred and rolled onto one shoulder. I could barely recognize him. His face was all bony and gaunt, the stubble matching the gray buzz-cut that his shock of yellow hair had been shaved down to.

  “Gotta take a leak,” mumbled Cole. He didn’t open his eyes. “I mean like now.”

  “Least you held it ’til I got home.” Monica gazed down at him, her own face set hard and expressionless. “Not like last time.” Over to me again. “Don’t you want to say hello?”

  I stepped over to the edge of the mattress. Even the blue of his eyes seemed faded and washed out as he rolled the back of his head on the thin pillow and looked up at me.

  “Hey . . .” Cole managed a woozy smile. “It’s our little accountant. The girl with the adding machine. And the checkbook.” He propped himself up on one skinny elbow. “Didja bring me a check?”

  “No.” I shook my head. “I don’t have one for you. Not today.”

  “Too bad. Coulda used it.” He rolled farther onto his side and rummaged in a plastic bucket for a bottle of pills. He downed a couple of them with a swallow of grocery-store vodka. “Stuff costs, ya know.”

  “Yes . . . I know.”

  “Hope you’ll ’scuse me if I don’t stand up and shake your hand. Got a problem doing that, these days. Standing up, I mean.”

  He rooted around some more in the litter around the mattress, coming up at last with a half-empty pack of cigarettes. “Hey, honey – where’s my lighter?”

  “Here you go.” Monica squatted down on her haunches and lit the cigarette for him. “How’s that?”

  “Righteous.” He took a deep drag, then coughed hard enough to shake his entire body, the blanket falling away from his bare chest. “That’s the best.” The cigarette hung off his lower lip as he dug the points of his elbows into the mattress. He dragged himself into a sitting position against the wall behind him, his legs dragging limply along under the blanket. “The absolute . . . freakin’ best.”

  I couldn’t say anything more. This was worse than the hospital.

  “Glad you could come by.” He coughed some more, than wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Nice to see people. You know . . . like for old times’ sake.” His crooked smile lifted a corner of his mouth. “There haven’t been a lot of ’em. Matter of fact, you’re the only one. Who’s come to see me –“ Another coughing spell racked his frame. “Ain’t that crazy?” He shook his head. “Makes ya wonder what they’re afraid of. I mean – you’re not afraid of me, are you? Not any more, that is.”

  “No . . .” What I felt was worse.

  “So it’s nice. Ya know? Because . . . I don’t get out much anymore.” His barking laugh turned into another cough that doubled him over, ash from the cigarette falling across the blanket over his lap. He used his free hand to push himself back up. “Just the way it is, sweetie.”

  “Monica said . . . you wanted to see me.”

  “I did?” He looked over at her. “Did I tell you that?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “You did. That’s why I went over and got her. And brought her here.”

  “Huh. Imagine that.” He scratched the side of his head. “That’s really . . . strange. Because that’s not what I think is going on.”

  His dark-circled gaze locked onto mine.

  “It’s what you wanted. Isn’t it, Kim? You wanted to come and see your old pal. Didn’t you?”

  “ I don’t know . . . what you mean . . .”

  Cole suddenly lunged forward, one hand grabbing my ankle. Squeezing tight.

  “That was nice of you.” His face split with his crazy grin. “To want to come and see me. You remember – good times, huh? But there’s something more. Isn’t there?”

  I could
n’t pull myself free. I almost stumbled and fell backward as I struggled against his grasp.

  “Isn’t there?”

  And then I knew he was right. When Monica had shown up in the car, when I had been walking home from the store – part of me hadn’t been surprised at all. For part of me, it had been like an answered prayer. That I hadn’t even heard myself whispering.

  “I . . .”

  “You what? What is it, Kim?” His knuckles whitened. “It’s not what I wanted. It’s what you wanted. What is it? Just to say hello? That’s so nice of you. Really nice. Is that all you wanted? Is it?”

  Everything around me blurred as tears filled my eyes. Now I was scared.

  “I thought . . .”

  “Thought what? Thought what?”

  “I don’t know . . . I don’t know . . .”

  He let go of me, so suddenly that it staggered me backward.

  “Did you get what you wanted? Is this what you wanted to see? Huh? Is it?”

  I turned and ran. Catching myself against the doorway, I could see Cole looking down at himself and the wet stain seeping through the blanket over his crotch. “Aw, crap,” he muttered.

  It was dark outside when I stumbled out of the warehouse. A long walk home, and I didn’t know the way.

  * * *

  Donnie had stayed up for me. In his wheelchair, in the middle of the front room, the lights off.

  “You were gone a long time,” he said.

  “I know.” I sat down at the table. I laid my hands flat on top of it. “The ice cream,” I said after a moment. “I forgot the ice cream.”

  FIFTEEN

  I didn’t know it at the time – but there were really other bad things going on. It was probably just as well that I didn’t know, given how screwed up my head was then.

  Those bad things were happening back at the office building where I used to work. At McIntyre’s company. Since I wasn’t there, watching and listening like a fly on the wall, I can’t tell you exactly what happened. But I figure it went something like this –

  Michael, the thuggy security guy, comes into McIntyre’s office, like a garbage scow parking itself at a landfill dock. McIntyre is going over some reports that his new pet MBA, the one who got the CFO position, routed over to him. He doesn’t look up from them as Michael lumbers to a halt.

  “Sit down.”

  Michael squeezes his bulk into the chair in front of the desk.

  “Okay . . .” McIntyre makes some pen marks on one of the columns of numbers. “So what is it you wanted to talk to me about?”

  “Security,” says Michael.

  “Well, that’s your job, isn’t it?” More little marks.

  “That’s why I wanted to talk to you. I think we got some problems. Security problems.”

  “Really?” McIntyre lays his pen down and leans back in his office chair. “Such as?”

  “Cole.”

  That gets a raised eyebrow. “What about him?”

  “I don’t think it was such a good idea to just dump him. And not take care of him. I mean, permanently take care of him.”

  “Oh? Why?”

  “He’s dangerous,” says Michael.

  “Dangerous?” McIntyre smiles. “He can’t even walk. That’s why I pulled strings down at the District Attorney’s office and got the charges against him dropped. If I were worried about him, I would’ve let him wind up in some prison hospital.”

  “Yeah, but –”

  “Seriously,” says McIntyre. “If my head security guy is afraid of a cripple, then maybe I need to get a new one.”

  “Wait a minute – I’m not scared of Cole –”

  “Okay, fine, you’re not.” McIntyre puts his fingertips together in front of himself. “But if you’re bitching about him being alive instead of dead – exactly whose fault is that? You’re the one who put together that set-up on him.”

  “It should’ve killed him,” glowers Michael. “Phony bastard.”

  “Guess he’s a little tougher than you anticipated. You should’ve known that just a shotgun wasn’t enough to kill him.”

  All ugly and stewing, Michael doesn’t say anything.

  “Besides – what does it matter?” McIntyre picks up the report again. “He’s sidelined. A severed spinal column tends to do that.” McIntyre studies the numbers for a few seconds, then looks over the top of the printout. “You still here?”

  “I just don’t like it,” says Michael. “You should let me take care of him.”

  “I thought you did.”

  “Permanently, I mean.”

  McIntyre shakes his head. “We’re not that kind of a business anymore. We just don’t go around killing people. Or if we do, we need a good reason.”

  “I think we do,” says Michael. “We need to finish the job.”

  “You know what I think?” McIntyre lays the report down again. “I think you need to learn some modern management principles. When somebody is removed from an organization, it’s no good to keep on fretting about them. They are just . . . gone.”

  Michael slouches down in the chair, his expression heavy and brooding.

  “It’s a waste of time to worry about them. They no longer exist. Understand?”

  McIntyre dismisses Michael with a wave of his hand.

  “You want to worry about things that don’t exist, go ahead. I’m too busy.”

  Michael simmers for a moment longer, then gets up and leaves the office.

  * * *

  As I said, something like that probably went down between the two of them. The day after I had found out that Cole was still alive, that he hadn’t died in the hospital where I had seen him, I could picture the whole exchange inside my head. A mixture of good and bad: if McIntyre, in his lofty superior way, couldn’t be bothered with the people he had thrown to the curb, the ones who didn’t fit into his new corporate business model, then that was good for me. It meant that I didn’t exist for him anymore. Which was right here where I wanted to be – at least as long as nobody figured out what my younger brother and I were living on, the envelope full of money stashed in the bedroom closet. So maybe we had a little breathing room. When enough time had passed, maybe Donnie and I could sneak out of town, just disappear, with nobody thinking anything of it, nobody making a connection. Maybe.

  The bad, of course, was that the longer we waited, the more chance there could be that it could all unravel – and the two of us would still be here, like sitting ducks. Maybe there already was somebody who’d figured it out, that the reason I could flash a $100 bill at the corner store wasn’t because I had put together a lucrative new career in renting my tush out to some clientele who liked ’em lightweight. But because I had done some sticky-fingered number on my former employer. Who wouldn’t be happy to hear about it, and for whom I would then exist again, though not for long.

  That, plus the Michael thing. He might not be sulking about me still being alive, but I’d had enough run-ins with him while we both had still been working for the same boss, that I knew how his berserker Neanderthal mind worked. For a guy like that, the only way to get somebody he disliked out of his mind was to kill the person. For somebody like Michael, there was only one kind of dead.

  And somebody might’ve seen me with Cole’s girlfriend Monica. Out on the street, or at the hospital, or over at that warehouse dump where they lived, out by the wharves. And then told Michael about it. So there would be a connection in his rat-like brain between me and Cole. That was definitely not good. I knew he’d go on sulking about Cole, until he figured out exactly what he wanted to do about him, that he might finally be able to convince his boss McIntyre to go along with. Whatever the plans were that Michael might come up with, I didn’t want to be part of them.

  So those were the kinds of things that I was brooding about, as I sat at the little table in the apartment kitchenette. Looking out the window and not seeing the crappy, trash-strewn street down below, but instead all the bad movies that were playing on the scre
en behind my eyes . . .

  Until I finally came to a decision. A plan of my own.

  I went into the bedroom. “I’m going out,” I told Donnie. I was already pulling on my jacket – not the one from the business-lady outfit, but the cheap leather one I’d picked up, for when I was riding the motorcycle. Even when the sun was out. If I went down again, better the jacket should take the scrape rather than my precious skin.

  He looked up at me. “Where to?”

  “Don’t worry.” I leaned over and kissed him on the forehead. “I’ll be back before you know it.”

  I headed for the apartment’s front door. Actually, I didn’t know if I would be back at all.

  It was that kind of a plan.

  * * *

  A little while later, I was slowing the Ninja down and coming to a stop outside Cole’s warehouse abode. I didn’t see Monica’s car parked anywhere nearby. Maybe she was out working, at the club where I’d first spotted her or somewhere else just like it. That suited me fine.

  I left the motorcycle at the curb and went around to the door on the side of the building. As I’d expected would be the case, it was unlocked. Anybody who had a notion of ripping Cole off, while he was sitting there in the middle of his lethal toys, would’ve first been an idiot, then a corpse.

  That was why I called out to him, soon as I slipped inside. I didn’t want him letting off a shot at me.

  “Hey, Cole –” My voice echoing in the empty space sent a couple of roosting pigeons into a flutter near the ceiling. “You’re here, aren’t you?”

  “Where the hell else would I be?” His voice came from the walled-off section beyond. “Sounds like my little friend Kim. Come on back.”

  This time, he had on a T-shirt, a ratty-looking black number with an NRA emblem printed on it. He was still sitting on the mattress, adding one cigarette butt after another to the overfilled ashtray beside it, and watching a portable TV set up on a folding chair.

  “This or The View.” With his cigarette, he pointed to the cartoons bouncing around on the TV screen. “And I hate those broads.” He picked up a remote from on top of the blanket and switched off the set. “Find yourself something to sit on. Make yourself comfortable.”