Dirty Laundry

by Rhys Ford

  “Don’t know why he would. It didn’t really come up.” Ichi frowned at something he was reading.

  Whistling under my breath, I went back to reading through Bhak’s address book. “Dude, you are… a bundle of surprises.”

  “My father puts it a different way,” Ichiro laughed. “But then he doesn’t know about the boys either. If he did, I think he’d drown me.”

  We spent more time drinking beer and trying to read Bhak’s handwriting than matching up names to my flowchart. About an hour into the hangul and English ping-pong game, I stared down at the pieces of paper I’d taped together and tried to make sense of the lines and boxes we’d mapped out.

  “Shit, he’s had… maybe… ten kids? Maybe? And no one’s tapped him for this?”

  “This guy… Gyong-Si… he’s kind of a whore.” Ichi traced one of the lines. “Take a look here.”

  My flowchart looked like I’d taken a pot of macaroni and thrown it down on the paper. I’d switched colors at some point to differentiate where he’d impregnated his clients. He had a red kraken leading out of his spot to the women he’d gotten to in Korea and a black octopus to his clients in California. One box had both a red and black line.

  “Eun Joon Lee.” I whistled softly. “Fuck.”

  “Considering he got paid by most of these women, pretty much… yeah. Wasn’t she one of the murdered women?” Ichi asked.

  “I think that’s the only question I’ve got an answer to,” I replied. “Yeah, she was, but Bhak didn’t know she was pregnant. I filled in that black line. But he knew she’d gotten pregnant before. He might have been in touch with her here in Los Angeles. He’s got her address in his book.”

  “So what happened to the baby?” Ichiro stacked up his notes and ran through them quickly. “Bhak doesn’t say anything about it. Just that she had a baby by him when they were both in Seoul. She must have been a kid. Maybe she lost it or something?”

  “Gave it up for adoption? Like Madame Sun did?” I suggested. “But then why would she go back to him and get pregnant again? That doesn’t make sense.”

  “None of this makes sense.” My brother rubbed at his full belly and belched, laughing when I chuckled. He grinned back at me. Nothing said brotherly bonding like shared gas. “So Gyong-Si’s got a lot of kids. Why would anyone care?”

  “Jealousy?” I guessed. “Or maybe he’s got money someplace and someone’s trying to take out the competition? I don’t know, but it’s the only straw I’ve got to grasp. Nothing else makes sense.”

  Ichiro’s phone sang out “Love Addict,” and he grimaced, pulling it out of his pocket. “Hold on. It’s our brother.”

  “Yeah, I make that face all the time when he calls.” I gathered up the two empty bottles and paper plates. Stepping over Ichi’s legs, I nearly stumbled when he nudged my calf. Grumbling halfheartedly at him, I dumped the trash into the recycle container and came back into the living room, where he was packing up his stuff. “Heading out?”

  “Yeah, he wants to go over a few contracts I had drawn up. I’m thinking of starting a shop over here. What do you think about that?” He looked like a little boy asking for a cookie. “Mind having your little brother around the city a few months out of the year?”

  “Nah, it’ll be cool,” I replied. It would be. We got along well enough, and it seemed like we’d formed a half-assed alliance against our control freak older brother. “At least I’ll have someone else to read Korean for me. Pretty sure Jae’s figured out I’m only using him for his brain and not his hot body.”

  “I’ll mention that to him the next time I see him,” Ichi teased, slinging his backpack over his shoulder.

  “Thanks, ’cause I don’t want to ever have sex again.” I walked him to the door and stopped short when he pulled me into a fierce hug. It took me a moment before I thought to wrap my arms around him, but it didn’t seem like Ichiro noticed.

  Pulling back, he slapped me on the shoulder. “It was good doing this with you. Gave me an idea about what you do. Next time, we go out and get you some ink from one of the guys I’m thinking about hiring. You can live in my world for a few hours.”

  “No fucking way. I’d sooner get blown off through a glory hole at an orthodontic trade show.” I shuddered at the thought. “Dude, the only person I’d trust to put a bunch of needles on me would be you.”

  That little bit of sharing got me another hug, a fiercer lung-squeezing than before. Stepping back, my younger brother nodded manfully and patted my arms.

  “Thanks,” he mumbled. “That’s the nicest thing someone’s ever said to me. Glad it came from you.”

  “I meant it. You’re okay.” It was getting a bit too teary-eyed in the foyer for me. We weren’t totally comfortable enough with one another for me to break out the whiskey and get I-Love-You-Man drunk, but it was getting close. “I can’t kick the shit out of some stranger who fucks up my skin, but since you’re technically my younger brother, I can beat you and write it off as sibling love. You’re the bottom of the food chain now, Ichi. All part of learning how it is to be one of the boys.”

  “And Maddy?” He crooked an eyebrow up. “She one of the boys too?”

  “Fuck no. First, you don’t hit a girl,” I snorted. “Secondly, she can run you down like a cheetah and pound you into the ground with her purse. Don’t fuck with that woman. She carries cinder blocks around just in case she has to build a wall or something.”

  I closed the door behind my laughing brother and headed back into the living room to soak in more of the Pastafarian Ouija board I’d created. The notes Bhak wrote down were sketchy. I had no idea when Eun Joon’d first gotten pregnant or even when she’d come over from South Korea.

  “Let’s see, Eun Joon, you were… what, forty-one? Forty?” I didn’t know a lot about women, but it sounded kind of late to be having a baby. “Maybe you were pregnant before but lost the first baby, and getting a kid from your husband wasn’t happening. Did you go back to the guy who knocked you up before and then try to pass the baby off as Lee’s? Or can Lee even have kids? Then he found out about Gyong-Si and killed you.”

  I really needed Wong to get back to me about Lee. The rut I was stuck in seemed only to get deeper and deeper the more I ran around, and I couldn’t see a way out. If I kept it up, I was pretty certain I was going to be buried under a pile of maybes with no clear answer.

  My phone rang while I was staring at those damned red and black lines leading to Eun Joon’s name. Thinking it was Mike calling to yell at me for not coming with Ichiro, I let it ring a few times before picking up.

  It wouldn’t do if Mike thought I lunged to answer the phone each time he called. That kind of thing led to a swelled ego, and his head was big enough without my help.

  Except it wasn’t my bossy, overbearing older brother. Instead, the male voice on the other end of the phone had a harder edge to it, something cut from violence and tightly held back emotions. I couldn’t understand what he was saying. Then it kicked in that he was speaking a fast, guttural Korean I had no chance in hell of comprehending, even with my limited understanding of the language. To make matters worse, it sounded like whoever was calling was in the middle of an arcade.

  “Whoa, hold up,” I cut him off. “First, English. Sorry, but my Korean’s only good for ordering off a menu. Who’s this?”

  “Fuck, hold on. I… shit, hold on. I’ve got to get out of this room.” The chatter and beeping in the background faded, and all I could make out was the guy’s breathing. “Is this the guy who came to see me? Um… Cole McGinnis?”

  “Hong Chul?” I hadn’t been around him long enough to recognize his voice, but he sounded rougher than I’d remembered. “What’s up? Got through a lot of your grandfather’s—”

  “I didn’t call you about the damned papers, man,” he spat into the phone. “I called you because someone knifed my daughter this afternoon. What I want is for you to tell me who the hell is doing this shit so I can go return the favor. Swear to God, man.
Abby dies and I’m going to fucking kill anyone who ever had anything to do with Gyong-Si. And then, I’m going to start in on his ass with a knife and see how he fucking likes it.”

  Chapter 19

  THERE is no longer trip than driving to a hospital. Especially when a little girl I’d just met lay on a table somewhere in the building with surgeons’ fingers inside of her guts. I stopped on the way to pick her up something to make her smile, blindly looking for something to stave off the wild dread running like a nightmare through my brain. All I could see in my mind were her tiny little flip-flops sitting on the porch and her little hands on her father’s face when she leaned in for a kiss.

  I parked and wondered if I needed to hit reception up to see where Abby’d been taken, but I spotted her father first, his waxen face a spot of white in front of the building’s blue-gray stone blocks.

  Hong Chul was standing in the large cement smoking circle outside of the hospital where his daughter, Abby, fought for her life. If I’d had any doubts of his love for his little girl, they were swept away when I saw the broken young father fighting to keep his hands from shaking as he lit a cigarette. I wanted to tell him I knew how he felt, but the hard look I got through a plume of menthol smoke told me he didn’t want to hear it.

  So I didn’t say it.

  Instead, I pulled a head-sized fluffy gray thing with ears out of a plastic bag and handed it to him. “Here. It’s for Abby. It’s called a Totoro. The lady at the store in Little Tokyo said kids love it. Thought she might like one.”

  “Thanks.” Hong Chul made no move to take the toy. Instead, he took a long drag on his cigarette and stared up at the sky. Even in the orange-fizz glow of the parking lot lights, I could see tears forming in his eyes. A taint of pain-filled water, then they were gone, lost in the wispy streams. I put the Totoro back into the bag, paying close attention to fitting its body in past the handles to give him a bit of time to pull himself together.

  Mouse-sized moths played death-tag with the lights overhead, creating fuzzy Batman symbols on the asphalt below. A few hundred feet away, the hospital’s ER did a brisk business. The automatic glass doors barely had time to kiss before they were flung open again by someone hurrying in. Several scrub-wearing men and women hung at the edge of the smoking area, fatigue draining their faces to a lifeless gray. Blood and gore stained their cottons, making them look more like hapless butchers than healers.

  Personally, seeing how tired they all looked, I’d sooner trust them with a Q-tip than a scalpel, but the hospital had other plans for them. One detached from the pack, then another. Others came to take their places, less splattered but no less tired.

  Hong Chul and I were the only civilians. Almost made me want to light up just so I could fit in. As it was, Hong Chul’s pulls on his cigarette seemed halfhearted at best. Nothing compared to the frantic inhale and puff assembly line next to us.

  “How’s she doing?” I had to ask. Even if I didn’t want to hear the answer, I had to ask.

  “Okay,” Hong Chul grunted. “I guess. Fuck, no one’s saying she’s fantastic, but she’s out of surgery. Fucker nicked her liver. We’ve got to watch her turn fucking yellow and get sick on top of worrying she’d die.”

  I knew nothing about the side effects of being stabbed in the liver, but it was never a good thing when an organ got punctured. I couldn’t imagine how small Abby’s organs were. A knife made serious damage in an adult. I’d be surprised if Abby’s insides didn’t look like they’d been put through a blender.

  “How’d it happen?” His daughter was maybe three feet, tops. Someone would have had to squat down and stab her. It’s not a motion that would have gone unnoticed. “Where’d it happen?”

  “My mom took her to one of the Korean malls—I don’t know—for a purse or something.” Hong Chul’s hands clenched into fists at his sides, and I took a step back. Even if Wong had told me Hong Chul was a nonviolent man, keeping out of arm’s reach still seemed like a good idea. “There’s this grocery store on the first floor, and I guess they were having a huge half-off sale. My mom put her in a cart so she wouldn’t get stepped on, then grabbed a bag of rice. She turned around because Abby was screaming, and that’s when she saw all the blood.”

  “What did the cops say? Any suspects?”

  “Shit, no one saw anything. There were too many people.” He sniffed and looked away. In profile, he seemed more like a lost little boy than the hardened thug Madame Sun made him out to be. His lower lip trembled, and he pulled his mouth in tight, desperately fighting to keep control of his emotions. “Who the fuck does this to a kid? My kid?”

  I’d done calls with Ben where we’d found a kid in the middle of some of the worst shit imaginable. It always amazed me how brutal people could be to children—especially their own. Just when I thought I’d seen it all, some other monster would crawl out of the pits of hell and show me a new way to carve childhood and joy out of a kid. I wouldn’t want to see that dead-soul film build up in Abby’s innocent eyes.

  From the way Hong Chul chewed on the end of his cigarette, he intended to find out who’d hurt his baby girl and God help them.

  He pinned me in place, his face desperate with pain. “You think whoever killed Vivian stabbed my kid?”

  “Dude, I don’t know, but it’s not something we can ignore.” I wished I could give him some solace, but that kind of hope was too pie in the sky. “What did the cops say?”

  “Fucking nothing. There’s a woman cop upstairs. She’s still talking to my mom.” He cleared his throat. “It’s one of the cops who came by earlier. She’s the one who thought I killed Vivian. Told her what I told you, and fuck her if she thinks I did something to Abby.”

  “Is her name O’Byrne?” He nodded once, and, belatedly, I wished I’d called Bobby up so I could use him as a human shield if she started in on me. She’d caught Vivian’s murder and Hong Chul was a one degree of separation from that case. It made sense for her to come around to sniff out anything about the assault on Abby. “Yeah, she’s a bitch, but she’s a hardass cop.”

  Then, out of the night, I heard her voice “Well, if it isn’t the man I thought I’d have to hunt down tomorrow morning.”

  And I was pretty certain she’d just heard me call her a bitch.

  There really should be an international warning signal that all evil people should wear. I’d probably catch some shit about freedom of speech or some crap like that, but really, a jester hat with bells would go a long way in keeping people—mainly me—from making an ass out of themselves. At the very least, the scrubs standing between us and the door should have scattered like pigeons when a cat strolled through them, but no such luck. Plastering a pleasant look on my face, I turned and gave her a nod hello.

  “O’Byrne.” I kept it short and businesslike. Maybe I was hoping she’d hop on the nearest broom and fly off with her monkeys, but she didn’t deliver.

  “McGinnis.” She smiled, her hyena teeth turning a ghastly tangerine in the off-putting light. “Good to know you hold me in such high regard. Especially since I don’t hold you in any.”

  “Calling them like I see them, Detective.” I made another attempt to hand the fat gray ball over to Hong Chul. This time he took it. The bag crinkled loudly in his fist, and his knuckles turned white, pale even under the citrus glow.

  Finishing off the rest of his cigarette, Hong Chul let the verbal ping-pong pass over his head and put the stub out on the cement. Exhaling the last of the smoke out of his lungs, he nodded at me but gave O’Byrne one of his hard looks. It didn’t look like he was any more fond of her than I was.

  “You done with my mom, or are you going to be harassing us some more?” The thug Madame Sun had told me about was suddenly evident in Hong Chul’s furious glower. I would have stepped back, but O’Byrne was next to me. I’d have knocked her on her ass, and she’d probably shoot me in retaliation.

  “I’m just doing my job, Mr. Park.” O’Byrne used the patented cop soothing voice they’d ta
ught all of us at the academy. “If you’re done here, your mother hoped you’d head back upstairs. Your daughter was beginning to wake up when I left.”

  “Fuck, and I’m not there.” Hong Chul swallowed any bile he had left in his throat, and I slapped his shoulder. “I’ll talk to you later, dude. If you find out anything, let me know, okay?”

  “Yeah, sure.” It was a lie. O’Byrne and Wong would both have my ass if I told Hong Chul I found out who stabbed his daughter first. The detective practically snarled at me when Hong Chul headed inside.

  “What the hell are you doing here, McGinnis?” She didn’t even wait until Hong Chul cleared the doors before she turned on me. “And why are you hanging around one of my suspects?”

  “He called me. We do yoga together.” I stepped out of the bounds of the cancer-summoning circle. She dogged me, her legs long enough to match my stride.

  Once clear of the smoke ring, O’Byrne grabbed my arm and tugged me around. I let her. She was friends with Bobby, and I never knew when I’d need him to hit her up for some info. It didn’t mean I liked it or even wanted her to think she could push me around. O’Byrne pulled every subtle intimidation tactic we’d all be taught. She squared her shoulders and tucked her hands on her hips, pushing back her jacket and exposing her gun.

  I knew she wasn’t doing it because she needed to prove she was one of the guys. O’Byrne didn’t play the gender game. She was a cop and probably bled blue. I bled red. I’d liked being a cop, but it hadn’t been my entire life. Cops like O’Byrne cut their milk teeth on handcuffs and badges. I’d told Hong Chul the truth. She was a bitch and would stab at me in any way she could if she thought it would get the job done, but the bottom line was O’Byrne was a damned fucking good cop.

  And I was glad she’d pulled Abby’s case. Even if she was only on the fringes of it.

  I looked down at her hand on my arm, and she released her hold, letting her arm drop to her side. “You really think Hong Chul stabbed his kid? That’s fucked-up, even if you’re in full paranoia.”