Kim Oh 1: Real Dangerous Girl

by Kim Oh

  “Your partner here worries an awful lot.” Monica pointed at me with her fork, then took another bite of the eggs. “Is she like this all the time?”

  “Pretty much.” Cole sprinkled Tabasco on his plate, from the little bottle that Monica had tossed to him. “But we’re working on it.” Mouth full, he looked across at me. “What if I’m wrong about what?”

  “About Pomeroy being nervous. I mean, about how long it takes him to get over his nerves and give McIntyre a call?”

  “Then I’m wrong about it. Big deal.” Cole alternated between bites and drags from the cigarette he kept balanced on the edge of his ashtray. “Then McIntyre’s watching the accounts, and he sees what you’re doing with them. So when you go downtown tomorrow morning to draw out the money, Michael and one of his security crew are waiting there for you. They grab you and take you away.”

  “Then what?”

  “What do you expect? Then you’re dead.”

  My incredulous gaze traveled between the two of them, calmly finishing off the scrambled eggs. “You seem awfully okay with that.”

  “Actually, I’m not.” He set the empty plate down beside the mattress. “Believe me, if that’s what happens, I’ll be just as disappointed about it as you. I mean, as you would be if you were still alive. You’re the best shot I’ve got right now, for helping me to off McIntyre.”

  “Great.” I couldn’t keep the disgust out of my voice. “I’ll try not to mess it up. For your sake.”

  “You do that.”

  Monica got up and carried the plates to the sink in the bathroom.

  “Go home and get some sleep.” Cole switched on the little portable TV and turned his attention to it. The yammering sound of Dancing with the Stars filled the space. “You’ve got a big day tomorrow.”

  I grabbed my helmet and stalked out.

  NINETEEN

  I was getting on the motorcycle when a hand grabbed my elbow.

  This late at night, I hadn’t brought down the visor of my helmet. By the yellow glow from the one functioning streetlight at the end of the block, I could see it was Monica.

  “Didn’t you hear what he said?” I nodded toward the warehouse door. “I have to get home and get my beauty sleep. Want to look my best, if I’m going to get my head blown off.”

  “Look,” she said. “You don’t have to tell me what a jerk the guy is. I’ve been hooked up with him for years. Believe me, I would know.”

  “Then you’ve had time to get used to him.” I kept my grip on the handlebars. “Or at least resigned. I haven’t.”

  “You will. Unless you’re careful.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “We need to talk.” Monica held up a couple of beers that she’d taken from the little camping fridge plugged inside the warehouse. “Come on.”

  “No thanks,” I said. “I’m still underage.”

  “Yeah, right. You’re putting together your plans to kill somebody, then you’re worried about being a minor caught with a brewski in her hand. Get real. Anybody sees us, I’ll tell ’em I’m your mom.”

  “Then you’d get charged with endangering the morals of a minor.”

  “Honey, your morals have already crashed. And you’re just climbing out of the wreckage of them.”

  “Whatever.” I gave up. I pulled the helmet off my head and set it on the motorcycle seat behind me. I nodded as I looked at her. “Yeah, the family resemblance is obvious.”

  Monica twisted off the cap of one of the beers and held it out to me. I got off the bike and took the beer from her.

  “Let’s go for a walk,” she said. “Helps you think.”

  Little Nerd Accountant Girl had had a beer, or anything alcoholic, maybe once or twice before in her wildly adventurous life. I hadn’t cared for it then, but this night it seemed to hit the spot. One that I hadn’t known existed before. If nothing else, it sluiced the taste of cigarette smoke off the tongue, that you pick up just from hanging around somebody who’s smoking up a forest fire. Now I could see why the stuff’s popular in bars.

  We walked along the empty industrial district streets, past the locked-up freight haulers and the clusters of identical white panel vans behind more chain-link fences. Monica kept silent, just taking a swig from her own green bottle now and then. She seemed to know where she wanted to get to.

  Which turned out to be the pilings at the foot of the nearest wharf. We sat down there and watched the slow, listless waves deposit more oil-slicked rubbish on the wet gravel below us. Out on the water, the big black silhouettes of container ships blocked out the city lights.

  “All right,” said Monica at last. Holding her beer by the neck, she swirled the last inch around inside. “Here’s the deal. You know why I’m still hanging out with Cole? I mean, given his condition, he’s not exactly a prime catch. Is he?”

  “I don’t know.” I had been leaning forward, forearms on my knees, dangling my own bottle before me. I glanced over at Monica. “Maybe . . . you’re loyal or something. Something like that.”

  I didn’t even know why she was asking the question. If I’d ever known why anybody did anything, I probably wouldn’t have been in the situation I was in now. You might as well ask your house cat how to do algebra. You’d have a better shot at getting an answer.

  “Sure,” said Monica. “Like I can afford stuff like that. Nobody can. That’s why you don’t see it very often.”

  Right now, I was just hoping that I wasn’t going to wind up sitting here, listening to her problems. I had enough of my own.

  “Okay,” I said. “So why then?”

  “Simple.” She took another swig. “I don’t have any options. When you don’t have options, you do what’s left. I hooked up with Cole, then things happened – things you don’t need to know about – and then one day there weren’t any other options. There was just him.”

  “That kind of sucks.”

  “No . . .” She shook her head. “It’s not so bad. We’ve had some fun. But it’s the kind of fun you have when you don’t have any other choice.”

  “Well . . .” I tried to think of something to cheer her up. “I haven’t even had that kind of fun.”

  “You’ve got something else. You’ve got options.”

  “I do?” I hadn’t thought about it.

  “Even now. Even this far along in the process.” She pointed with her thumb down the way we had come. “You could go back there right now and get on that little motorcycle of yours, go home, and get your little brother and strap him on to it, then just head out. Just get on the highway and go, for as long and as far as you can. People do that kind of thing all the time. That’s what I did when I was your age.”

  “Okay.” I gave a slow nod. “Not to be rude or anything – I mean, I appreciate your advice and all – but isn’t your having done that kind of how you wound up with somebody like Cole?”

  “Good point.” She took another drink. “You’re thinking. That’s good. That was never much of a habit with me.”

  “I don’t know – it’s not like it’s done me that much good so far.”

  “That’s because you haven’t thought enough. About what’s going to happen. If you go along with all this stuff that you and Cole have cooked up. Correction, honey – that he’s cooked up. You don’t know half of what he’s thinking and planning.”

  I didn’t bother pointing out that I pretty much didn’t know anything about what Cole was planning. Other than going to the bank tomorrow morning and either walking out with a bundle of money or getting myself killed. After that, the agenda was pretty opaque.

  “You don’t even know,” said Monica, “what he’s planning for you.”

  “Guess I’ll find out.” If I were still alive for that part.

  “You don’t have to. Like I said, you’ve got options. All this stuff that you’ve told yourself, and that Cole has told you, that you don’t have any other choice except to have him go after McIntyre – that’s all crap. The only reaso
n you’re telling yourself all this stuff is because it’s what you want to do.”

  “Okay.” I shrugged again. “Then it’s what I want to do. What’s the problem with that?”

  “The problem is that it means your head’s kinda messed up.”

  Not telling me anything new there.

  “There’s no future in this stuff,” said Monica. “Look at what happened to Cole.”

  “Give me a break.” I lowered the bottle after taking another swig. “I just want to have somebody killed. Just one. It’s not like I’m planning on making a habit out of it.”

  “That’s what you think.” Her voice turned dark-shaded. “Cole started out with options, too.”

  “I’ll try to bear that in mind.”

  “Maybe he’s right about you.” She gave me a hard look. “Maybe you’re just about as cold-hearted as he thinks you are. With all this having someone killed stuff and all.”

  “Yeah, well, maybe it’s just a phase I’m going through.”

  I was getting close to the end of the bottle. When you’re as small as I am, one’s enough. Or a lot.

  “He sees something in you,” said Monica. “That’s probably not good.”

  “What kind of something?”

  “What the hell do you think?” She gave a quick laugh. “Something like him. Like what he’s got. Though frankly . . .” She studied me for a moment. “I can’t see it. Messing with people’s not what I would’ve thought you’d be good at. Maybe he thinks you’ve got some sort of built-in kung fu ability or something.”

  “That’s Chinese.” I shook my head in amazement. “What is it with you people? If there were an exhibit at the natural history museum marked Dumb Round-Eyes, you and your boyfriend would be in it.”

  “Huh. Oh isn’t a Chinese name?”

  “Not in my case. It was Oh-Seon or Oh-Seong or something like that, when my grandparents came over from Korea.”

  “Fine, great. Have it your way. But still – isn’t there some sort of crazy Korean martial art?”

  “Yeah, we call up our cousins in Pyongyang and have ’em launch a nuclear strike on Tokyo. How the hell would I know?”

  Monica’s laugh was beer-tinged as well. “You’re kind of a bust at being Korean. If that’s what you are.”

  “That’s because I’m not. I’m not even Korean-American.”

  “What are you then?”

  “I don’t know.” It hadn’t taken much alcohol to unlock a little door inside me, that I would just as soon have kept closed. Even if I had known it was there. “I’m just like everybody else – I’m not anything. Maybe we’re all just Feral-American now. You know what feral is?”

  She nodded. “Wild dogs.”

  “Cats, too. Any kind of animal. Just abandoned, left out on their own. That’s what we’re all like. No wonder everybody’s so screwed up. Nobody tells us what we should do, what we should even freakin’ be. Like if there was supposed to be some bundle of ancestral Korean wisdom, I sure as hell didn’t get one. I gotta try and figure out everything on my own, just like everybody else has to. You know what that’s like?”

  “Sure –”

  “I’ll tell you what it’s like.” Something unrestrained came bursting out of that unlocked door inside me. “When I was a kid, I mean a little kid, like fourteen or something – a couple of the foster parents who were taking care of me and my brother, they dragged us to some Methodist church every Sunday. And I wound up in the choir. Not because I could sing, but because having me in the front row made it look all diverse and stuff. Like Token Asian Kid. They liked that sort of thing. And then –” I drained the last of the beer and slung the bottle into the water. “The freakin’ choir goes to Spain. To sing at some dopey festival. I don’t even remember it. But I’ll tell you what I do remember. What I remember is that we all took some train ride, when we weren’t singing, to go look at some cathedral or something. And we wound up at some train station in some little town in the middle of nowhere. I had to take a pee, and I knew just enough tourist Spanish to know which was the ladies room. I go in there by myself – and there’s a freakin’ hole in the floor! That’s the plumbing. And I’m standing there, this fourteen-year-old girl, a million miles from home – a million miles from Korea, for that matter – and I’m looking at this hole in the floor. And believe me, it’s not a pleasant hole – it looks like people have been doing something in it since Year One. Only I don’t know what it is. What I’m supposed to do with it.”

  The empty beer bottle had landed with a splash. The oily water, glistening in the moonlight, smoothed out again.

  “And that’s what it’s like,” I said. “My whole life. That’s what it’s like for everybody, I guess. All the time. It’s like being a fourteen-year-old girl who has to pee, and you’re someplace where you don’t even know how that’s done there, and you have to figure out on your own how to pee!” I shook my head. “I don’t think that’s right.”

  “But it’s the way it is.”

  “Yeah.” I took the bottle out of her hand, tilted my head back to drain the last bit, then threw the bottle after the other one. “It’s the way it is.”

  “So that’s why you’re listening to Cole. And hiring him to kill somebody.”

  “I guess so.” I hadn’t really thought about it before. “I mean . . . yeah, he’s kind of a psychotic and stuff. And he kills people – or he used to. So at least something is happening.”

  “And that’s good enough for you.”

  “I don’t know.” Whatever had been inside me was gone, leaving me unfortunately sober again. “I suppose I’ll find out.”

  “Sure.” Monica stood up from the piling on which she had been sitting. “You want to know something else?”

  “No. But go ahead and tell me, anyway.”

  “You didn’t say anything I didn’t already know you were going to say. About you and Cole . . . and all of it. Except for the peeing thing. That was a little strange. But all the rest of it . . . I already knew that was where you’re at. I just didn’t want you to be able to say that nobody ever warned you.”

  I slowly nodded, looking out at the water.

  “Come on.” Monica started walking back toward the warehouse. “Big day tomorrow.”

  TWENTY

  Weird thing was that it wasn’t a big deal at all.

  The bit at the bank – it went off with no problem.

  Maybe that’s a tribute to good grooming. I had put on the business-lady outfit in the morning. And I had left the Ninja parked a few blocks away from the bank, so nobody would see me getting off of it.

  Probably also a tribute to being a little Asian chick. You can fly under people’s radar that way. When you’re my size, nobody expects anything bad from you. Which is an advantage.

  Of course, the whole time I was sweating. Especially when the bank staff took me to a private office. You withdraw that much money from an account, they don’t stack it up for you at one of the teller cages.

  “Are you sure you wouldn’t rather have a cashier’s check?”

  Sitting in front of the bank official’s desk, I was afraid that at any moment Michael and his fellow security thugs were going to burst out of the oak-paneled walls. These people might have been just messing around with me, lulling me into thinking that everything was going along fine, just so they would enjoy it more when the hammer came down on me.

  “No, I’m afraid it’ll have to be cash.” I was mainly concentrating on keeping my cool, refraining from running out of the bank in a sudden panic. “My client is rather . . . eccentric.” To say the least.

  “It’ll take a few minutes. I hope you don’t mind waiting.”

  “Not at all.” I handed over the empty briefcase I had just bought at the office supplies store along the way. “I understand.”

  What else I learned that morning? You overdraw your checking account by five bucks, you get treated like dirt. Because you’re nobody. Ask for a wad bigger than the annual budget of some Third Wor
ld nations, and you’re somebody. You get treated different.

  A quarter of an hour later, and I was out of there. The sun shone on me as I walked along the downtown sidewalk. Michael and his thugs were nowhere in sight.

  My spirits lifted. Maybe, I thought, just maybe – it’s all going to happen. Carefully, I strapped the locked briefcase to the motorcycle seat, pulled on my helmet, and headed for the wharves. The way it’s supposed to.

  I was about to find out otherwise.

  * * *

  “Nice job.” Cole sat on the mattress, with the briefcase on his lap. “I knew you wouldn’t have any trouble.”

  “You knew?” I stood looking down at him. “Then what was all that last night? What were you getting me all cranked up for?”

  “Think of it as practice.” He closed the lid on the money. “Practice being tense. It’ll come in handy later. Not everything’s going to be a piece of cake like this.”

  About then, I was wondering how much I’d screw up my karma if I kicked a cripple’s ass.

  “Fine,” I said. “Enjoy that. I’ve had enough for today. I’m going to go home.”

  “No, you’re not. No time for kicking back. We’ve got some work to take care of – or at least you do.”

  “Now what?” Even if everything had gone all right, the whole business at the bank had worn me out. All I wanted to do was go home, pull off this stupid panty hose, make lunch for Donnie and me, then fall asleep on the couch. “Can’t it wait?”

  Monica stepped out of the bathroom. She obviously had just finished putting on her exotic dancer makeup, getting ready for work.

  “I’ll leave you people to it.” She took her jacket from the hook it was hanging on. “Have a good time. Try to leave a couple of walls standing, at least.”

  I looked back at Cole when she had left. “What was that supposed to mean?”

  “It means the job you’re going to work on now.” Cole laid the briefcase at the side of the mattress. “Where’s the gun?”

  “What gun?”

  “The .357. The one I gave you.”