by Rhys Ford
“Mostly, I came over to tell you to stay out of the case, especially since O’Byrne has a hard-on for you. But since you’re going to ignore me and sneak around behind my back, I came to shake down any info you might have that I don’t. Some of Jenkins’s cases rolled over to my desk, including one Eun Joon Lee, so, tell me everything you’ve got, since it’s probably a damned sight better than what Jenkins ever wrote down.”
I went over everything I had, including my suspicions. Dex added nothing to the conversation, merely grunting at certain points like he was an acting coach and I was delivering a poor rendition of Hamlet’s monologue. When I got to the part of Gyong-Si impregnating multiple women, he almost choked on his coffee.
“He’s on my list of people to talk to. I got him on the phone, and he felt… off. Like he’s too gay. Everything’s neon bright and flashing,” Wong mused. “So he’s faking it? Putting on a show? That’s what you think?”
“I know guys who are more femme, for lack of a better word. It’s a part of who they are. Nothing wrong with it. Some guys just are.” I cocked my head. “Gyong-Si? He’s a plastic cutout. I think he picked out things that would make him look gay and camps it up.”
“But why would he do that?” Wong asked, stabbing at the desk with his finger. “Koreans hate the gay, right? Why would he act that way if he knows it would kick him in the balls?”
“We don’t know how he acted back home.” Pointing out the obvious to Wong didn’t seem to gain me any points. “Look at it this way. He was trained by this famous fortune-teller over there. Wouldn’t that give him a golden ticket to the candy factory? So why toss that aside to come here where he’s got shit for reputation and would have to build things back up? He must have run from something. I just don’t know what or who to ask.”
“Why’d Sun come here, then?” Dex asked. “That makes as much sense as Gyong-Si coming over if she’s going to take a hit to her rep.”
“Her son’s here. Gyong-Si, as far as I know, doesn’t have any family connection to anyone,” I said. “He’s hiding something… and I think it’s his supposed sexual therapy. I’m betting he got into trouble over in Seoul and it came back to bite him in the ass. Coming over here, he’s got a huge Korean population to pull his clients from, and by pretending he’s gay, he’s got his bases covered while he tiptoes through the tulips, as it were. Husbands are assured their wives are safe, and any women who fall for his bullshit about the healing properties of his gay peen aren’t going to tell their spouses they fucked their fortune-teller. Maybe it goes under getting a massage or pedicure.”
“Shaky, but it’s a maybe.” Wong pursed his mouth. “Where’d you get the idea Gyong-Si was faking it?”
“Info came from the man’s very pretty and gay assistant.” I smiled despite myself. “Seriously, the guy’s assistant is hot. You’d hit on him. But Gyong-Si doesn’t.”
“So hot you forgot about Jae-Min?”
“Dude, I’m… I might have Jae, but—” I’d almost said I was taken. It was on the tip of my tongue, and I swallowed it whole, wondering if Jae’d considered me really his. Leaving off the lack of interest from my cock where Terry was concerned, I smiled. “I’m not dead. I’m still going to look.”
“I don’t know, McGinnis. Your theories are kind of weak.”
“I’ve been meaning to circle round on Gyong-Si to see if he conned any other women, but shit’s been going on. I was hoping to see if I could find some of the man’s other clients and verify the assistant’s story. But there’s Lee’s husband too. I was planning on seeing if he had something to share.”
“Let me do that,” Wong interjected. “I can shake that down from my angle. I’ve got to hit up the woman’s husband and see if he knew she was pregnant. If he did—and knew it wasn’t his—I’ve got a motive there.”
“You going to share what you learn?”
“Are you?” he countered. “Because I know you, Cole. Even after everyone tells you to back the fuck up, you keep going. Didn’t we already have this conversation once before? Actually more than once?”
“Yeah,” I conceded. “But I promise, anything I dig up is yours.”
“And when it comes to taking someone down?”
“Your name is on my speed dial. I will take nothing down but license plate numbers and addresses.” Crossing my heart, I tried to look as sincere as possible. Truth was, I didn’t want to get shot again. It fucking hurt. “Now share what you know.”
“Actually, it’s not much.” Wong made Claudia’s chair squeak again. “You know Vivian Na was seeing a Korean thug named Park Hong Chul. His street name is C-Dog. Minor stuff. For all the talk about gang activity, he’s pretty clean on that front. No arrests. No domestics or violent crimes. No affiliation but does have a group of like-minded, stalwart friends he hangs out with. A group that used to include one Darren Shim, but Mr. Shim had the unfortunate luck to encounter a very heavy urn yesterday, and now C-Dog’s pack is down one mutt.”
“Did you get to talk to Park?”
“C-Dog. You know he worked hard to earn that nickname. It’s very original,” Wong chastised me. “And no, he’s on O’Byrne’s list of people to hassle. McGinnis, you’ve got to remember that the only place these are all connected is in that tiny little lizard brain of yours. The rest of us are chasing this down like actual police cases. I’ve got Lee and Choi now, and since there is a connection through the fortune-tellers, I can go harass those people without the captain going apeshit about me stepping on toes.”
“Just go easy on Sun,” I murmured, finishing off my coffee. “She just lost her daughter.”
“Everyone on my list’s lost people, McGinnis,” he said mournfully. “I just gotta make sure I can find out which bastard did it before we lose any more.”
I NEEDED an in. Actually, I needed a Korean, preferably one who slunk around the underbelly of certain places and possibly had some contact with the area’s underground element. Luckily, I knew one. I wasn’t happy when he went stalking around in the dark, but I’d given up trying to get him to stay safe a long time ago. Now, Jae’s penchant for crawling through the gutter… both figuratively and literally… was going to come in handy.
If only I could convince him to help me.
“Hello?” He answered on the second ring. A positive sign for me. The grumpy in his voice was a negative, but I could get around that.
“Hey, what are you doing?”
“Why?” His sigh was epic, a tidal wave of sound against my ear. “What do you want?”
“You,” I murmured.
“Cole-ah….” Another sigh, but this one was different, laden with promises and seduction. “Sometimes I don’t know what to do with you.”
“Really? ’Cause there’s this guy named Vātsyāyana that’s got a manual that might help,” I suggested, rocking back in my chair. “We might have to fake it for a couple of pages, but I think we can work it out. You’re pretty bendy.”
“My sister is here,” he reminded me, but the sultry rasp in his voice remained lurking behind the scold. “What do you really want?”
“Honestly, I do need your social skills, what you have of them, anyway.” Teasing Jae was always fun. He made little disgusted kitten noises, and I wasn’t disappointed when a few echoed through the phone line.
He cut straight to the chase. “Cole-ah, stop teasing.”
“No, really, I do need you.” I gave him a quick rundown of the situation, ending with my need to find one Park Hong Chul, better known as C-Dog.
“And you think I somehow have an in with criminals now?”
“He’s not really a criminal. Who hasn’t done some stupid stuff when they were kids? Wong pretty much said Park keeps his nose clean. And it’s more like, you talk to a lot of people in Koreatown,” I explained. “Maybe someone who knows someone? He’s not really on the cops’ radar, so there’s not really some place he hangs out. Especially if one of his boys probably gunned Vivian Na down before getting his head bashed in. If
he wants to distance himself from that kind of shit, he might be reluctant to talk.”
“That would make me… reluctant to talk,” Jae agreed. “What do you think I can do?”
“Lend me some cred?” I caught myself doodling on my notes, mostly trying to write Jae’s name in hangul. I sucked at it, but eventually I’d get it right. “I’ve got an address, but it’s his mom’s. I don’t want to show up at his mother’s house to shake some info out of him without someone who can speak Korean. We might end up talking to his parents, and I want to stack the deck in my favor as much as I can. Now, I can take Bobby—”
“God no, the two of you together means a trip down to the police station to bail you out,” he grumbled. “I’d come with you, but I’ve got Tiff here. I don’t want to leave her alone.”
“What about the friends she went out with the other day?”
“She’s never seeing those people again.” The growl in Jae’s voice perked my slumbering dick up a bit, and I reminded it that it would have to wait until later. “She came back smelling of pot and beer. I’m going to find them and kill them. She says she didn’t do anything, but I don’t believe her. God, I’m getting old. I don’t want her doing those things.”
“She’s your sister. You can be old where she’s concerned. Tell you what, bring her over here,” I suggested. “She can maybe connect with Mo and Sissy. They’re good kids. At the very least, I’ve got a fridge full of soda and game systems she can mess with.”
“I don’t know,” Jae stalled. “I don’t want to just dump her at your office—”
From somewhere close to Jae, I heard his sister yell, “Does he have a real Internet?”
“Shit, that’s right. Your stone box isn’t a hot spot.” Jae’s curse was almost lost when I laughed. “Just that one dedicated line to your computer.”
“It was enough for me,” he grumbled. “I only use it for work. Apparently, splitting the connection, it isn’t good enough to download episodes of Sungkyunkwan Scandal. It works fine for batch uploads. I just let it go overnight.”
“Dude, just bring her over,” I coaxed. “She’ll be fine. Hell, the conference room’s got a big flat screen. She can watch her—whatever that is—on that.”
“She’s already packing up her bag.” From the increased sounds of traffic, I’d guessed he’d stepped outside of his gopher hole. The rasp of a lighter and then he exhaled, hard. He’d be smelling of cloves when he got to me. “I don’t know what good I can do with Park Hong Chul.”
“He doesn’t have any priors for violence,” I explained. “He might feel better talking to someone… Korean. Besides, you know the area. If we’ve got to run for it, you’ll know all the escape hatches.”
“You’re not making me feel better about this, Cole-ah.”
“Hey, personally, I’m hoping we can duck into someplace dark and hidden. If it’s small enough, we might have to get close, you know, to conserve space.”
“And let me guess, you’re going to bring some lube in case it’s too tight?”
“Jae, love,” I whispered, hot and bothered. “You are always the right kind of tight for me.”
PUTTING three teenagers in a room is kind of like playing with a bottle of shaken up Diet Coke and a fistful of Mentos. Tiff and Sissy mentally circled each other while Mo was torn between sticking by his sister or chatting up a hot Korean girl. Hormones won over familial ties, and he was the first one to cross the invisible line, offering to get her an iced latte or something from across the street.
Tiffany Kim looked a lot less like Jae once seen from the front and with her hair pulled back. A little bit shorter than her brother, she had his body type, lean legs she showed off to her best advantage in a pair of denim shorts. The tank top definitely wasn’t her brother’s. Its bright pink fabric was studded with rhinestones in the shape of that large-headed, mouthless cat I couldn’t seem to avoid.
“That thing creeps me out,” I whispered in Jae’s ear. He smelled good, and I wanted to kiss his cheek or his neck. Tasting his skin on my tongue was one of my life’s pleasures, and it’d been too long since I’d had the silk of him on my mouth.
“What? What thing?” He looked around, confused.
“That cat thing she’s wearing. Looks like it farms fava beans to go with its dinner.”
The girls made their initial contact, establishing home territories and interests, and then Sissy’s face blossomed with a wide smile. Tiffany’s stiff demeanor shifted, and she dropped her arms from their crossed stance over her chest. From what I could make out, Sissy had a deep love of a show Tiffany was following. Everything out of their mouths became a mishmash of Korean and English with a heavy dose of squees and giggles.
Within a few minutes, the girls bonded over Korean dramas and streaming services’ bad translations. Before Jae and I could give them a few ground rules to follow while we were gone, they were setting up Tiff’s laptop and plotting out the afternoon’s entertainment.
“I’ll watch the door.” Mo edged in past the screen door, juggling a carrier full of iced coffees. I held it open for him, and he grunted a thank you. “Sissy’s usually only got Hyunae to watch those things with.”
“Hyunae?” Jae dropped his voice down to a whisper. “Marcel’s girlfriend, right? We met her at the hospital.”
“Yep.” I nearly hooked my arm around Jae’s waist, stopping midstep before Tiff saw me. “You guys have our numbers. If something happens, call. We should be back in a couple of hours.”
Tiff rolled her eyes, a very not-like-Jae gesture. For a seventeen-year-old girl, she seemed to drip more sarcasm and bitters than rainbows and ponies. Jae didn’t seem too worried about it. Putting his hand on her shoulder, he spoke briefly to her in Korean. He could have been saying anything from behave to don’t worry, he’s not going to be sticking his dick up my ass. I wasn’t going to ask. Some things are meant to be private.
Whatever he said didn’t seem to lighten her mood. Her eyes did another circuit around in their sockets.
The girls disappeared into the conference room before we’d even said our good-byes. Mo shrugged and saluted us with his coffee. “Have a good time, Uncle Cole. I’ll hold down the fort.”
“If the giggling gets too loud, close the door,” I cautioned him.
“Close it? Shiiii….” He cut himself off before he swore in front of me. “I’m a’gonna nail it shut.”
Chapter 15
I CAUGHT Jae’s face in my hands before he could get into the Rover. Pressing him up against the car’s steel door, I dipped my head down and captured his mouth with mine.
Like I’d imagined, he did taste of cloves, sweet and spiced from fragrant smoke, but there was something else there, something so uniquely Jae I couldn’t put a name on it. I would imagine moonlight would taste of Jae, a heady slice of silver and darkness. Moonlight poured through a cup of espresso, because there was an echo of the sip he’d stolen from Tiff’s latte.
I wanted to say fuck it all about the case and drag him into my—our bedroom. Nothing sounded better than stripping him bare and laying him out on the mattress, then taking my time making him mewl.
Jae moved slightly under my touch, turning his face so his lips ran over my palms. The tip of his tongue sought out the lines on my hand, following the creases up until he found the V between my fingers. Licking at the web between my index and middle finger, he suckled me until I grew hard with the thought of that mouth… those sweet lips… curled around my cock and my hands wrapped tight with strands of his black hair.
“The kids can probably see us. Okay, maybe just Mo.” Those were not the seductive words I wanted whispered into the wet cup of my palm. My dick took notice of the chilling effect and promptly went back to pretending it was a dead octopus tentacle.
“I just went from hard to soft like I got dropped in a snowbank. Thanks for that.” I gave him one final kiss and pulled back. His own jeans were tight around his crotch, and I brushed the back of my fingers against the bulge,
giving him a conspiratorial wink. “Hold onto that thought. Maybe I can take care of that later.”
“Pervert,” he grumbled at my back but got into the Rover after I opened the door for him.
“Guilty as charged,” I admitted, shutting the door. “But only for you, Jae. Only for you.”
KOREATOWN had slippery boundaries. Tendrils of it wove through outer neighborhoods, mingling with a meandering Hispanic population. Many people placed the edge of K-town at Vermont and Wilshire but spots of it sprung up farther beyond, an Asian thrum underscoring the area’s more Latino beat.
Hong Chul’s house sat in one of these areas, a single story bungalow with a flat roof lined with earthenware ginger jars. It wasn’t the only home with an odd arrangement of kitchenware along the roofline. Squeezed in tight on small plots, nearly all of the older structures sported covered pots of some kind, either battered enameled steel or ceramic hulks. The only reason I knew they were for fermenting kim chee was because Jae told me. Even knowing that, the neighborhood looked like it was gearing up to dump hot oil on any invaders or scammers selling fake magazine subscriptions.
Color seemed to reign supreme, not nearly as bright as Gyong-Si’s place but blindingly close. The Park home was green, a lime hue not found on any citrus tree. The front porch was almost hidden by a wall of plants, but the steps were clear, a sparkling white wooden stairway up to a dark red door. A pond of slippers pooled out on the left side of the threshold. A pair of vivid pink floral flip-flops stood out, tiny rubber footprints floating on top of the darker sea.
I got out of the car and nodded to the porch, probably pointing out the obvious to Jae. “There’s a kid living here. Little sister, maybe?”
