by P. D. Martin
I give the paramedic a nod.
The second ambulance arrives just as the first drives away. When Agent Dan Young is safe and sound on his way to hospital, I take stock. Mee Kim is still being held in an unknown location and Suzuki is still at large. And I know Ling’s not going to be the most cooperative suspect, either. Of the few hit men in his league that have been apprehended, all have maintained their code of silence. Some have admitted to crimes, talked about their life even, but none have given up their end employers. Park Ling will be no different. It’s up to us to find Mee Kim and Suzuki.
Ling had thirty thousand dollars in cash on him, in a yellow envelope inside his jacket pocket. The cash will be examined by forensics and hopefully Suzuki handed it to Ling personally. At least then we’ll have another round of evidence for charging and convicting Suzuki of contracting the murder of a federal agent. At the moment, Suzuki’s at home, oblivious to the fact that Ling’s attempt to kill Marcus/Agent Dan Young has failed…oblivious to the fact that I was in the alleyway with a gun and able to even up the odds.
A couple of minutes after the second ambulance heads off, De Luca and Hana arrive.
“Are you okay?” Hana asks.
“Fine.” I can’t look at her. “I shot Ling. He’s on the way to hospital now.”
De Luca eyes me carefully. “Did the paramedics take a look at you?”
“Yeah. I’m okay.” Well, sort of. They said I need to take it easy, maybe come in to get an X-ray to check my ribs, but I know what a cracked rib feels like and mine are just bruised, not broken.
De Luca shakes his head. “I know it’s sexist but a woman with a black eye just never looks right to me.”
“And a man does?” Hana asks.
He shrugs. “Guess you’re right.”
I bend down into the nearest car’s side mirror. It’s a beauty, all right. Man, that’s going to take a lot of foundation in the morning. Thank goodness my parents are back in Australia and never need to hear about this. Guess I’ll tell them I shot Ling, but I don’t have to tell them I got a shiner and bruised ribs in the process. Not to mention the dozen or so other bruises I know I’ll have all over my arms and legs in the morning and the renewed pain in my shoulder blade. But first things first.
“De Luca. Mind if I have a word? It’s about Petrov.” I lead him away from Hana and make sure my back’s to her. “Agent Young was here. Ling tried to kill him.”
“What? Is he okay?”
“Yeah, he’s fine. Couple of broken bones but the paramedics have taken him to hospital, too.”
De Luca nods, the relief evident on his face.
“There’s one other thing.”
“Yes?” He runs his hand over his head.
“Young wasn’t able to confirm who the leak is, but it is a woman.”
De Luca glances at Hana. “Damn it.” His jaw tenses.
It’s going to be hard on De Luca—Hana’s his ex-partner.
“I know.” I look at my shoes. “And Suzuki knew that we had names of possible hit men.”
“Okay, thanks, Anderson.” He stares into the distance. “I rang Petrov.”
“And?”
“He’s pissed with you…though I imagine he’ll be less pissed when he finds out you saved Agent Young’s life.”
“Guess I evened the score.”
De Luca smiles. “Yeah.” He starts walking toward Hana but keeps his voice low. “Petrov’s organizing simultaneous raids on both properties known to have housed Mee in the past, as well as the Long Beach house the Asian Boyz have been using to produce meth, and Suzuki’s home address.”
“But we don’t think Mee’s at any of those places, do we?”
“Probably not, no.”
I sigh. At least Dan’s been able to confirm that Mee was alive and well only hours ago.
“Everything okay?” Hana asks once we’re back within earshot.
I force a half grimace, half smile. “Apparently I’m in trouble. For coming here when I’m not supposed to be on active duty.”
“But you got Park Ling. Surely Petrov can’t be that pissed.”
I shrug. “We’ll see.” My phone rings, unknown caller ID. “Agent Anderson.”
“Agent Anderson, this is Mee Kim.”
“Mee? Where are you, Mee? Are you okay?” I ask.
De Luca and Hana both look at me, eyes wide. I nod and mouth the word “Mee.”
“I’m okay. I’m calling from a payphone in…” She trails off. “I don’t know where I am.” Her voice breaks.
“That’s okay, Mee. What’s the payphone number?”
“Um…5–6-2–4-5–1-6–8-9–8.”
“Okay, got it.” I scribble down the number and repeat it back to Mee, just to make sure. “Stay near the phone, Mee, but out of sight if you can. I’ll be there soon.”
“Okay.”
Once Mee’s off the line, I ring the FBI switch and get routed through to the tech area. “It’s Agent Anderson here. Can you please give me an address for this payphone number?” I repeat the number and wait on the line until I get the answer.
“She’s in Lakewood. On South Street near Bellflower Boulevard,” I say.
De Luca looks me up and down. “I’ll drive. You come with us.”
No need to take two cars, and he’s right—driving isn’t exactly going to be easy or pain-free for me, at least for another couple of days.
Half an hour later we see the payphone on South, just before Bellflower. De Luca waits in the car while Hana and I linger by the payphone. We’re only there for a few seconds when I see Mee crossing the road toward us.
I draw my gun, just in case she’s not alone, and Hana follows suit. When Mee’s this close, the last thing we want is for her to be snatched or shot right in front of us and I have to keep my eye on Hana as well as my surroundings.
Once Mee’s in the car, I put my gun back in its holster and climb in next to her. “You okay?” I ask.
She nods, but I can see the fear in her eyes. She’s a different woman from the Mee Kim I met a couple of weeks ago. Her hands rest in her lap and she looks down at them.
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have run. It’s just…when you told me about Jun Saito…”
“You realized he must have been your father?”
She nods. “Yes.”
“Why didn’t you call us?”
“I thought maybe Omma had done something wrong. Something illegal. I was scared…of you and the Yakuza.” She shakes her head. “I needed time to think, time to find out exactly what my mom’s role was in all of this. But then they found me. At first it was okay. A man called Tomi Moto told me that they were concerned for my safety and that Jun Saito was my father and had been his friend. He seemed…honorable. And Marcus checked in on me…he seemed nice and I trusted him. But then yesterday everything changed. Another man, someone I hadn’t met before, came and told Marcus there’d been a change of plans. That Mr. Moto wanted to move me again. We went with him, but when Marcus was getting in the car the man’s bodyguard hit Marcus over the head and blindfolded and drugged me. When I woke up I was locked in a caged room in a basement. Marcus was gagged and bound, tied to a chair, and I was chained to the wall by a foot iron. Then they took Marcus away….” She looks down at her hands.
“Marcus is alive.” At this stage I presume Young won’t be trying to resume his cover in the Yakuza as “Marcus Miki,” but I still use his false name—for both Mee and Hana.
“Really? I know—I know he’s Yakuza, but he was nice.”
“He’s in hospital with a few broken bones, but he’s going to be okay.”
She nods. “He was different from the others. Like he was really looking out for me.”
Maybe Young wasn’t doing such a good acting job, or maybe just not around Mee Kim.
After a few moments of silence I say, “Then what happened?”
“They left me with a woman.” She hangs her head. “I saw the opening and took it. I hit her…hard.”
Mee wrings her hands. “Please let her be okay.” Despite her situation, Mee’s worried about the physical well-being of this woman—she feels guilty.
“Can you take us back to the house from here?” I ask.
She nods.
De Luca starts the car and Mee Kim directs him, only motioning a couple of lefts and rights.
A bit later, we pull up at the house, and just then a woman staggers out the front door and onto the lawn.
“No! No!” screams Hana.
“Oh, shit.” De Luca slams on the brakes and reaches for his gun, while Hana leaps from the car, even though it’s still rolling.
“Jae!” Hana runs forward and I suddenly realize what’s going on. The woman is Jae, Hana’s sister. Jae’s the mole. And just like Hana and the woman from my vision, she has long, dark hair. It was her on that park bench.
Jae holds a gun, which she brings up.
Hana stops dead. “Jae, it’s me.”
Jae’s badly beaten, and seems out of it. Still, there’s recognition on her face and the gun wavers, ever so slightly.
Hana moves closer. “Jae, put the gun down.”
De Luca jumps out of the car. “Put the gun down now, Jae.”
I hold my ground in the car. The situation is heated enough without me adding to it.
Hana holds her hand in a stop sign behind her to De Luca. “I’ve got her, Joe. Get back in the car.”
But De Luca stands his ground.
I think Hana’s right, the situation is much more likely to defuse if it’s just her and her sister, but De Luca’s protective streak is showing.
Jae brings her gun up again, and her swollen eyes dart from Hana to De Luca.
“It’s all right, Jae. It’s my old partner, Joe. You remember Joe. He’s not going to hurt you. Just put the gun down, Jae.”
Jae looks confused, but she keeps the gun up.
Hana puts her own gun down on the front lawn. “It’s okay…I know you didn’t mean it.”
A tortured sob erupts from Jae’s lips. After a few seconds she says, “You really thought I wanted to follow in your footsteps?”
“Jae, no.” Hana’s voice is full of pain.
Jae staggers a few steps closer to Hana.
“Don’t take another step,” De Luca warns.
Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit. I can see the situation escalating and someone getting shot. “Get down, Mee.”
Mee does as she’s told, bobbing down in her seat. The last thing we need now is for Jae to see her attacker. If she wasn’t so badly beaten up she’d probably already have realized that Mee is sitting in the backseat. Besides, I want to make sure Mee isn’t on the receiving end of a stray bullet.
I undo my holster and take my gun out. Jae can’t see it, and I keep it under the line of the car’s windows and out of sight.
“Everything will be okay, Jae. Just put the gun down.” Hana tries again and Jae wavers. “Please, Jae,” Hana begs.
Jae shakes her head. “Takeshi’s right about you.”
“Takeshi?”
“My lover. He’s right about all of you.” She waves the gun at De Luca and toward me in the car. “You’re sheep. You follow The Man. Do what you’re told. Right and wrong, it’s not that black-and-white.”
The behavioral analyst part of me is dying to step in. I know what to say to calm Jae down, but does Hana? Does De Luca?
“It’s never black-and-white, Jae. We both know that.”
I find myself nodding my head at Hana’s response.
“This was justice.” Jae’s trying to defend her actions, defend Suzuki’s actions.
“Justice? You mean because Jun Saito killed Takeshi’s sister fifteen years ago. That’s revenge, Jae. Not justice.”
Jae shakes her head. “Sometimes the justice system doesn’t work. You tell me that all the time, Hana.”
“Yes. But no one should take the law into their own hands. And Takeshi? He’s using you.”
Another bitter sob. “To get to you, I suppose?”
“Jae, look at what he’s made you do! This isn’t you. You’re holding a gun, for Christ’s sake! You used to hate guns.”
She looks at the gun in her hand, her resolve wavering again.
“It’s all right, Jae. Put the gun down and it ends here.”
We all know that strictly speaking, that’s not true. Jae’s an accessory to kidnapping and an accessory to a murder-for-hire plot.
She looks at the gun in her hand again, and it shakes more.
Even though Hana’s back is to me, I can tell she’s crying. She walks forward, leaving her gun on the ground and out of reach. I think perhaps she’s being a little too trusting of her sister. Or maybe it’s De Luca she trusts.
“Jae, put the gun down.” This time Hana’s voice is soft, but also firm. A big sister asserting her authority. It has the desired effect and Jae lowers the gun ever so slightly. “It’s okay, Jae. I’ll look after you.” Hana keeps moving closer to her sister, both arms reaching out to her. “Just put the gun down.”
And in that instant, Jae drops the gun and falls to her knees. “What have I done?”
Hana closes the distance and throws herself down next to her sister. She cradles her in her arms and strokes her hair as Jae sobs uncontrollably.
Thirty-Six
Jae’s face has been patched up and she sits in a hospital bed. Mee managed to crack two ribs, break Jae’s arm and her nose, and split her cheek so Jae needed a few stitches. One eye is swollen and bruised and she’s got a concussion—enough that they wanted to keep her in overnight for observation. Still, Jae’s come out of this lightly…for a second there I thought De Luca was going to take her out.
“Jae, I’m going to leave you with Sophie and Agent Petrov now. It’s best for both of us if I’m not involved in your questioning.” Hana looks down.
A few tears trickle down Jae’s face.
“It’s all right, baby sister.” Hana leans over and gives Jae a kiss on the forehead. “I’ll just be outside.”
Petrov gets straight down to business when Hana has left the room. “Ms. Kim, are you sure you don’t want to have a lawyer present?”
She shakes her head. “I just want this over with.”
Petrov nods. “When did you meet Takeshi Suzuki?”
“A year and a half ago.”
“Where?”
Jae hesitates. “He approached me in a bar. Bought me a drink.” She shakes her head. “I’ve been thinking about this a lot for the past few hours, but I’m sure he had no idea that my sister was a DEA agent. I know it sounds bad, but—” she sniffles “—I love him.”
She won’t be the first woman fooled into a life of crime by the promise of love. She won’t be the last.
“I didn’t realize he was involved in anything…untoward until we’d been seeing each other for a few months. And by then it was too late. I was in love with him.”
Again, I’ve heard that story before. “What was the first thing he asked you to do?” I ask.
She sighs. “He was worried that maybe he was being watched. That Hana would find out about us and she’d get in trouble. So he suggested I ask her if she was investigating anything on the Yakuza.”
“And you did.”
“I didn’t want my relationship to get Hana into trouble.”
Takeshi concealed the manipulation, pretending to be concerned for the relationship and Hana’s career. And it worked.
“Hana loves her job, loves talking about it, but at first she was very careful not to mention specific cases. So I made it a game. I’d say, ‘I know you can’t tell me, but it won’t do any harm to just nod or shake your head. Is it Asian Boyz? Mafia?’ And that’s how it started. As a guessing game. At first she just shook her head to everything, but after a week or two, when I told he
r I wanted to join the DEA but didn’t feel I had a real understanding of the kinds of cases I’d work on…” She sighs again. “Then she started giving me little snippets of information. She liked the idea that one day we’d work together.”
“And you relayed anything she told you to Takeshi.”
“Yes.” She pauses. “And he’d pass them on to his boss.”
Suzuki was in the driver’s seat—as far as Jae knew, Suzuki was passing information on to Moto, but he was probably being very selective about what his boss did and didn’t know. Especially given Agent Young’s discovery that Suzuki’s been running drugs on the side.
“But then…it just spiraled out of control.” She rubs her hands over her face gently. “I don’t know how it happened. How I let it go that far. At first I thought I was doing it to help us. You know, to make sure Takeshi and I could be together and to keep Hana out of trouble. But now, now that I look back on it…I don’t know what I was thinking.” She shakes her head. “About six months ago, I started going through her BlackBerry.” Tears of shame form in her eyes. “I’d check e-mails, phone calls, everything, and pass it on to Takeshi. And each time I gave him something useful, he’d buy me presents. Jewelry, clothes, payments on my student loan.”
“Did you guys ever go out in public together?” Petrov asks.
She hangs her head. “Not exactly. Takeshi was paranoid. Paranoid that he was being tailed by the Feds, and worried that I’d get in trouble. So we used to meet in a little apartment he owns in Santa Monica. It’s a beautiful place.” Tears start to roll down her face. “I imagined we’d live there together one day.”
I know Jae’s only twenty-two, but part of me can’t help but wonder if she really believed that lie. Men like Suzuki don’t leave their wife and kids. But they do sleep around.
“Do you know if Takeshi took anyone else to the apartment?” I ask. Dan Young has already filled us in on the apartment’s existence, and the existence of another mistress.
“What do you mean?”
I don’t push it for the moment. Instead I ask her how often she saw him.
“Once or twice a week. We always met at the apartment on a Wednesday night, for dinner. I told Hana I was taking salsa classes. She was usually still at work when I left and in bed when I got home.”
