The Mia Quinn Collection

by Lis Wiehl

  “I’m trying to be a better man than you were, Dad,” Gabe said aloud to whatever ghost or memory was in the room with him. “I’m trying to be the man you should have been.”

  He pulled out a dark-blue shirt. Some of his dad’s shirts were too nice for a kid to wear, made of silk or with contrasting cuffs, but this one was just plain sturdy cotton. He pulled off his T-shirt and slipped on his dad’s shirt. Just a few months ago, it would have hung on him. Now it was a little snug through the chest and biceps.

  He was going to miss that feeling. But he was starting to think that Charlie was right, that what made him a man was what he thought, what he did. Not how he looked.

  After buttoning the shirt and tucking it in, Gabe set the phone in his pocket, with the pinpoint of the camera pointing out at the world. In the mirror, he checked it out. Against the dark-blue shirt, the black phone was nearly invisible. And he himself looked almost unrecognizable. Like an adult.

  And now he was going to act like one.

  He took the bus to the Jade Kitchen, the same place he had met Tyler before, a meeting he had arranged after texting him this morning between classes. Every time the bus driver hit the brakes, his stomach lurched. His hands were starting to sweat. Even the bottoms of his feet. Gabe unzipped his down jacket and tried to blame it on the overheated bus. He hoped he wasn’t pitting out the shirt before he even got to the restaurant. At least it was a dark color. After he got off the bus, he turned on the video camera, then carefully slipped the phone back in his pocket and took off his jacket.

  “Takeout order?” the hostess asked after he came in the front doors. It was too late for lunch and not yet time for dinner, so the restaurant was nearly empty.

  “Um, no. Can I have a table for two? My friend will be coming soon.”

  While Gabe waited, he tore tiny strips off his napkin. Despite his churning stomach, he ordered some pot stickers, but didn’t touch them when the waitress set them down.

  Even though he had been waiting for him, Gabe still jumped when Tyler pushed open a swinging door in the back of the restaurant. In one hand was a white paper bag. He wore jeans and an open, blue down vest over a skin-tight, pale-gray knit shirt that showed off every muscle on his torso and arms. He pulled out a chair and sat down across from Gabe. The bag was out of sight now, in his lap under the table.

  “You’re not done with your cycle yet, are you?” Tyler shifted his bulk. “Because it’s not a good idea to up your dosage when you’re just starting out.”

  “Actually, what happened is that my mom found what you sold me before and flushed it down the toilet.”

  Tyler swore as his eyes went wide. “What? Where did you tell her you got it?”

  “Don’t worry, I didn’t tell her I got it from you. I didn’t tell her anything. I just need to replace what she flushed.”

  Tyler was already pushing back his chair. “I’m sorry, man.” He got to his feet. “I can’t help you out. You’re on your own. Because I do not sell steroids. And I never have.”

  He sounded like he was speaking for an audience. Which, Gabe realized, Tyler thought he was. He thought Gabe was wearing a wire. Which was more or less true.

  “What are you talking about? I need you to help me. I’m going to get small, man.” At the thought, real emotion colored his voice. “I mean, what am I supposed to do?”

  “You lift weights and eat protein. Like I said you should.”

  Gabe lunged across the table and tried to grab for the bag, but Tyler clutched it to his chest and pivoted away from him. He made for the front door at something close to a run. The hostess stared after him as the door banged shut.

  Now what was Gabe supposed to do? Had his plan just crashed and burned?

  But Tyler, for all his muscles and swagger, was probably the end link in the chain. And every time Gabe had gotten steroids, Tyler had come out from the kitchen area holding a white takeout bag. Gabe was pretty sure this was where the drugs were coming from. Maybe he could still salvage things.

  He got up and went toward the restaurant’s kitchen, pushed open the same swinging door Tyler had walked out of. If someone caught him, he could say he was trying to find the bathrooms, even though they were actually near the entrance.

  The kitchen was straight ahead. Two Asian guys were tending huge blackened woks set over leaping flames that hissed and sputtered. Along the back wall, a third guy was using a hose to spray off dishes on a black rubber conveyor belt. All three men were engrossed in their work and didn’t appear to notice him. Gabe darted down the short hallway to his left. None of the doors were marked.

  He opened the first door. An office. An empty office, with a desk, a computer, and even an abacus. But looks could be deceiving. He stepped inside and closed the door behind him. With shaking hands he started yanking open drawers in the desk and then the filing cabinet. All he found were papers. Papers, papers, papers. His heart felt like it would beat out of his chest. He slammed the last drawer closed.

  Gabe went back to the door and peeped out. The hallway was still empty. He slipped out and tried the next door. It opened, revealing a very startled Chinese guy. He started yelling at Gabe, putting his hands on his shoulders to push him out. But not before Gabe had made sure that his torso—and his phone—had been pointed in the direction of the two plastic bins, one filled with blue pills, the other with tiny red-topped clear glass vials.

  Suddenly an arm went tight around his neck, the elbow right underneath his chin. He felt another hand cup the back of his head, pressing him forward, ratcheting down on the space that was already too small for his neck.

  And then everything went black.

  CHAPTER 46

  With every beat of his heart, Kenny’s eye throbbed, the pain sharp and red. All the fault of a stubborn woman who didn’t know when to let go, when to give up. When to admit that her stupid whore of a daughter was dead and nothing she could do would bring her back.

  Instead of accepting her fate and dying quietly, Bo Yee had hammered back with her high heel, leaving a rapidly swelling dent on the top of Kenny’s head. The last strike caught his eyebrow, like a hook piercing a worm. A millisecond later, continuing its downward trajectory, the heel impacted his eye. The pain had been like a live electric current zapping his eyeball.

  And then the heel had torn through.

  “Follow my finger,” Guangli Lo said now, holding up his index finger and moving it back and forth.

  After the attack, Kenny had balled up the scarf he’d planned to strangle Bo with and instead pressed it to his bloody eye. Unsure, at that moment, if he even had an eye. He had driven home with his one good eye and one free hand, then called Guangli.

  Guangli had been a doctor back home in China, at least until he had been removed by the Health Ministry for accepting “red envelopes”—money and gifts given in exchange for treatment. By that point he had made enough that he could afford to pay up front to be smuggled to the US. Now he provided homesick Chinese immigrants, legal and not, with traditional Chinese medicine, especially herbs and acupuncture. He could also be counted on to deal with traumatic wounds and injuries without asking pesky questions. In addition to stitching the tear in his eyebrow closed, he had insisted on measuring Kenny’s pulse and looking at his tongue.

  Now he was back to evaluating how badly damaged his eye was.

  Kenny must have adapted to American ways. For this injury, he did not want traditional Chinese medicine, with its emphasis on balancing yin and yang. He wanted to go straight to the emergency room, he wanted to see an ophthalmologist, he wanted high tech scans. But he couldn’t take the chance of seeking out that type of care. He didn’t know where Bo Yee was, just that she had taken off. Even though she didn’t know his name and they had never met, what if the local hospitals had been alerted to be on the lookout for a Chinese man with unusual facial injuries? Injuries inflicted by a woman’s high heel?

  With difficulty, Kenny tried to follow Guangli’s fat finger. Or was it fat? I
t was like trying to see through a red curtain.

  Guangli stopped moving his finger from side to side and began to move it up and down. “Does it hurt to move your eye?”

  “No more than it hurts to keep it still.” Kenny supposed he should be glad that he could still see something. At first he had been afraid that his eye was completely destroyed. With his good eye, he had stared in horror at the blood trickling through his fingers and willed himself not to scream again. Kenny had heard Bo get on her bicycle and bump down the stairs, followed by some sort of crash when she reached the bottom, but he hadn’t paid much attention.

  “Cover your good eye and watch my finger again.”

  Kenny did as he was told, and immediately the edges of everything went soft and dull.

  “Is it blurry?” Guangli asked.

  Kenny sought the right word. “Watery.”

  Pressing his hand on Kenny’s forehead, Guangli tilted his head back underneath the light, peering so closely that Kenny could smell the fishy odor of the man’s dinner creeping into his nostrils.

  “I believe you have a scratch on your cornea. It should heal, but you need to let it rest. If it begins to hurt more or if things get more watery or blurry, you may still need to go to a hospital emergency room.”

  “Will I lose my sight?”

  “Probably not. But it is hard to say. Again, this is not my area. You should go to the hospital—”

  “No.” Kenny cut him off, even though it was what he wanted more than anything. “No hospitals.”

  “Then let me see if I have a patch.”

  Guangli dug into his bag of wonders—treatments and supplies that were half American and half Chinese—and came up with a black eye patch. He also left behind some herbs to swallow and others to make a poultice of, to be applied three times a day.

  After he left, Kenny took stock of his situation. Bad things never walk alone. His eyesight compromised, maybe gone from his left eye for good. Bo Yee run off, who knew where? David Leacham out on bail, but how long would that last? Atkinson dead, or soon to be dead, leaving Kenny without anyone he could trust to solve his problems.

  His musings were interrupted by a phone call. It was a woman named Kwong who worked as an interpreter. Whenever a policeman or a doctor or a lawyer hired an interpreter, they needed someone who spoke the right dialect. But that shared dialect meant they had grown up in the same region as the person whose words they were translating. Maybe in the same city. Maybe even on the same street.

  Which meant that interpreters often knew a lot more than they might let on. Interpreters were supposed to be more machine than human, doing their jobs without favor or rancor. They weren’t supposed to gossip. They weren’t even supposed to acknowledge someone they had met through the job if they saw them again on the street.

  Every month Kenny paid Kwong to report back on anything interesting she had learned. A lot of it wasn’t interesting, of course. But now and again there was a hidden gem.

  As had happened a few hours ago, with an arrested prostitute named Jiao. Kwong had not realized whom Jiao was implicating until the girl had said Kenny’s name, at which point Kwong stopped translating. She had realized she had to put a stop to things before they got worse. So she had told the girl that if she kept talking to the police she was going to die, and die slowly, and so would all her relatives back home in China.

  The girl had decided to end things then and there, and nearly succeeded, with a little help from Kwong. Without Jiao to testify, how far would they get, really?

  “Do you think she will die?” Kenny asked.

  “With luck.”

  “Maybe there needs to be more than luck,” Kenny said carefully. “Maybe you should be very concerned about her. Concerned enough to visit her in the hospital. I would be most grateful.”

  He pressed the button to turn off the phone, but it rang again in his hand. It was the manager at one of his restaurants.

  “We’ve got a problem.”

  “What kind of problem?”

  “A guy burst into the back room. He saw the steroids. He was filming them on his phone. I thought he was a cop or something, and I panicked. I put him in a choke hold. Only it turns out he’s fifteen years old. A kid.”

  “Did you kill him?”

  “No. I’ve tied him up and gagged him. But now I don’t know what to do.”

  The answer was clear. The manager just didn’t want to face it. It was too late to go back now.

  It reminded Kenny of the first time he had killed someone. It had been before he had hired Atkinson to be his bodyguard. A man named Longwei had owned the original Jade Kitchen, but he hadn’t wanted to sell it, even though it had been in his best interests, the price more than fair. Kenny had simply meant to threaten Longwei, but somehow the gun had gone off, wounding him in the shoulder. They had looked at each other, both shocked by what had happened. The wound had not appeared to be life threatening. Except that it was. Looking at the blood pulsing out between the fingers Longwei was pressing against it, Kenny had seen what would happen. The hospital would call the police, and the police would not rest until they had answers. Once Longwei had been wounded, there was no way to go back to the moment before. And no path led to a good outcome for Kenny. In a split second, he had realized it was better to cut his losses, that there would be far fewer questions if the man simply disappeared.

  So Kenny had taken one step closer, put the gun to Longwei’s temple, and pulled the trigger.

  Now Kenny sighed. “I’ll come down and take care of it. What’s the kid’s name?”

  “Gabe Quinn.”

  A long pause, during which Kenny’s eye throbbed with every beat of his heart. “Did you say Quinn?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is he conscious?”

  “More or less.”

  “Ask him what his parents’ names are. I’ll wait.”

  A minute later, the manager was back. “He said Mia and Scott Quinn.”

  Well, well. This might have been useful information to have. Once. When he could have blackmailed her. Now it was too late. He could only hope that the disappearance of her son would throw her off her stride.

  Only maybe it wasn’t too late.

  Kenny began to see how he could solve his problems. Didn’t the Americans have a saying? “To kill two birds with one stone?”

  CHAPTER 47

  It was dark when Gabe woke up. His head ached and his neck felt weird.

  Only he realized he hadn’t woken up. Not exactly.

  He had come to.

  With a rush of panic, he remembered bursting into that room at the Jade Kitchen. The feeling of the arm coming across his throat and squeezing. After that, everything had gone dark.

  Now he tried to get to his feet, to run, but found he could barely move. His knees were jammed up against his chin. His arms were pinned behind his back, and his hands were locked together. He was in some sort of small, confined space that pressed in all around him. That reflected every panicked, snorted exhale right back into his face.

  Gabe couldn’t scream. He couldn’t even breathe through his mouth. It was sealed shut with some type of tape.

  He managed to turn one hand enough that he could run his fingers across the bond that linked one hand to the other. A metal chain. His hands were cuffed behind his back.

  Another jolt of adrenaline surged through him. Had he been buried alive?

  But wherever he was, it didn’t feel like dirt around him. It was hard and rubbery. And it didn’t smell like dirt. The air was sour and hot, reeking of rot and mold.

  He was, he realized, in a garbage can. A big one. Like industrial-size. One they hadn’t bothered to clean before they handcuffed him and dumped him in here. It must belong to the Jade Kitchen.

  But what if they had put him in here thinking he was dead? What if they never came back to get him out? How long would it take him to die? Overwhelmed by a fresh wave of panic, Gabe screamed twice, screams that left him shaky and sweating
. Even though he had screamed as loudly as possible, he could tell it hadn’t left the inside of his head, let alone penetrated the garbage can and gone out into the world.

  He felt a sudden surge of nausea. Closing his eyes in the darkness, he fought it back down. If he threw up now, with the duct tape across his mouth, he would choke and die. He couldn’t afford to cry either. Not if his nose might run and block his only way of breathing.

  He had to calm down. He told himself that they wouldn’t have bothered with the duct tape or the handcuffs if they had thought he was dead. And if they had wanted to kill him, they would have done it right away, without bothering to restrain him.

  So maybe he was okay. Maybe they were just going to hold him for ransom or something.

  But Gabe didn’t really want to hang around to find out what that something was. So where was the garbage can? Was it outside? Was anyone watching him? But any observer would have known he was conscious by now, and no one had kicked the sides or yelled at him to shut up. No one had reacted at all. So maybe wherever he was, he was alone, at least for now. If he could manage to knock the can over, he might be able to crawl out, stand up, and escape. Run clumsily because of his bound hands and numb legs, but still run.

  Gabe shifted on his deadened legs, rocking back and forth. He thumped one side with one shoulder, then the other. Each time the garbage can moved a fraction but settled right back into place. Then he tried to stand up, but his legs had gone to sleep and he was too crammed in to get any purchase.

  Did he hear something? He held his breath and tried not to panic. Was someone coming? Someone good—or someone bad? Should he try to make noise or should he try to keep quiet?

  Make noise, he decided. Because the bad guys were the ones who had put him here. They already knew about him.

  He tried again to scream, tried to put power behind it.

  And in answer the lid swung back.