by K. W. Jeter
“For God’s sake, Kim. Are you trying to embarrass me, or what?”
I looked over to where he pointed with one outflung hand. In the distance, the big deluxe passenger van in which the Japanese businessmen had arrived was just heading out the gate, followed by a Mercedes salon car, the top guy’s white-haired head just visible through its rear window.
“You don’t turn your back on people like that,” Karsh continued angrily. “And then go wandering off like your personal business is more important than theirs. It’s a matter of protocol. And respect. What the hell were you thinking?”
“I’m sorry . . .”
Worse, I knew he was right. I’d blown it.
“Sorry’s not good enough.” He shook his head in disgust. “If you’ve screwed up this deal for me . . .” He turned and stomped off.
“Huh.” Elton stood beside me, watching our boss climb into the back of the limo. “That’s not good.”
“Tell me about it.” It was just about time for me to go pick up my brother Donnie from his school. And I was watching my ride out of this dump swing around and drive off, leaving nothing but a cloud of dust behind it.
THREE
ELTON LET me drive.
Because he was being a gentleman – he knew I was pissed – but also because he didn’t know the way. He’d been in Los Angeles longer than I had, but he was such a country boy at heart, he hadn’t figured out the freeways yet.
“Okay,” I said. “Here’s the deal –”
I hadn’t realized before what a great view you get, sitting behind the wheel of a great big panel truck like this. For somebody like me, a little on the short side, it was like I had suddenly been transformed to six feet tall. I could see a long way over the top of all the ordinary cars in the lanes in front of us.
“Lay it on me.” Elton dug around in the glove compartment for a pack of smokes. It wasn’t really his truck, but he’d taken it over when he’d gone to work handling security for Karsh’s heavy equipment business. The scuffed-up, bare-metal space in back of us was full of welding equipment and various other tools for repairing any of the cranes or bulldozers or whatever that the company leased out. Before he closed up the glove compartment, he took his own gun from his belt holster and tossed it inside, along with the cell phone from his front pocket. He leaned back, rubbing the sore spot where the piece had been digging in under his ribs.
“I’m the boss.” I looked over at him. “I’m your boss. It’s the same deal it would’ve been if you’d signed on when I asked you to, back when Karsh first put me in charge of security. When he did that, it was for all of his businesses. Including this one. So nothing’s changed.”
“Yeah.” He nodded slowly. “About that.” He lit up and politely blew the smoke out the side window. “That’s the way it would be, all right. If some other things hadn’t come up.”
“Like what things?” I rode the brakes to keep from piling into the rear of some low-rise SUV. Late afternoon traffic was already starting to pile up on the Harbor Freeway. “What’re you talking about?”
“Well . . .” He shifted awkwardly in the passenger seat. “There’s stuff that’s been said. About you.”
“Yeah?” I had an inkling where this was going. “Said by who?”
“You know.” Elton took a long drag on his cigarette, looking even less comfortable. “The guys working for you. Some of them . . . really aren’t on board about having a woman in charge.”
Big surprise there.
“So let me guess.” I slowed the panel truck down some more as the freeway traffic kept stacking up. “That’s why Karsh brought you in. Through the back door, so to speak.”
“Kinda.” Elton gave a nod. “He figured since you and me had worked together before, you’d take it a little bit better. If I took over the head security job.”
Let’s just leave me and Elton there for a moment, riding along in that beat-up panel truck on the freeway, somewhere in the middle of L.A. Because I’d like to tell you something you probably already know –
You want to know why your job’s so crappy? I’ll tell you.
Your boss sucks. That’s why.
I’d already figured that out, regarding this guy Karsh I was working for now. Same as my previous two bosses, the ones I’d killed already. And it’s not that I’m all that bad an employee; it’s just that people keep ticking me off. But I knew that if I kept on this way, I was going to have the world’s worst personnel file.
But what’re you going to do? This seems to me like a fundamental flaw in the universe, that idiots like this keep winding up in charge of everything. It probably seems that way to you, too. I sat there behind the wheel of the panel truck, stewing over what Elton had just told me. I mean – what was Karsh thinking? A couple of meatheads gripe about me to him, so what does he do? Does he tell them to put on their big boy pants and just shut up and do their jobs? No – he starts trying to figure out some way to slide me out of my job, which I was certainly doing a lot better than the last guys he’d had watching out for his ass – the guys I had also managed to blow away. I shook my head as I bitterly mulled it over. I mean, really. Who do you have to kill to keep your job these days?
So my boss sucks and your boss sucks. And no offense if you happen to be the one-in-million boss who doesn’t suck. If you’re reading this, you’re probably smarter than the average. But tell me you can’t walk down the street and point to one business after another and say, that place is run by an idiot, or that place is going broke because it’s being run into the ground by some moron who inherited it from his dad. Or just read the paper. Makes you wonder what they actually teach people in those MBA programs. You’d think being an idiot would be something that people would know how to do already, without having to go to school for it.
Back to me and Elton in the panel truck.
“I’m really sorry about this,” he said. “If you want me to quit and just take a hike, I’ll do it.”
“No –” I shook my head as I drove. “What good would that do? Karsh would just come up with somebody worse. Worse even than you, I mean. You, at least I know.”
“There’s that,” admitted Elton.
“What’re you even doing here, anyway?” The freeway traffic had already dropped below 40 mph. “Last time I saw you, you said you were going back home to Mobile or wherever. To see your kid.”
“That was the plan. But my ex-wife – well, we were kinda married – she slapped a restraining order on me.”
“Yeah? What’d you do?”
“Never did anything. Except fall in love with the wrong women.” He gave me that smile again. “Up ’til now, that is.”
“Oh, pack it in, buddy. I told you once – that’s not going to happen.”
As far as that sort of thing was concerned, I was just following the advice I’d been handed by Cole, the guy who’d given me my first break in the business of killing people. He’d told me that if I was going to be any good at this, I’d have to give up any notion of getting any. For women, apparently, putting a padlock on it was a requirement for this job. I wasn’t going to take a chance on it – I’d put myself on ice, and I had managed to keep myself alive, at least. So maybe Cole had been right about that, same way as he’d been about a lot of other things.
“Even if I was your boss?”
“Believe me.” I leveled a cold glare at him. “If there was anything that was going to get me hot, that’d be the last on the list.”
“Kind of a shame.” He nodded toward my lap. “’Cause that’s really cute.”
I looked down and saw that my skirt had ridden up high enough to show the Smith & Wesson strapped to my thigh. Taking a hand off the steering wheel, I tried to yank it back down, but it didn’t help much.
For the moment, I was through talking to Elton, or anybody else who wore trousers. I leaned forward, peering through the windshield to see if there was some reason for the slowdown, other than the usual L.A. traffic jam that always happened this
time of day.
I spotted something up ahead. I could just barely see it, but I was pretty sure it was the half-length yellow bus from Donnie’s school. This wasn’t the first time I’d caught up with it on the freeway. The program took the kids around to a couple different campuses in the district during the day, winding up at one fairly close to our new apartment. I’d made arrangements to pick Donnie up there, so we could drive home together in the Toyota sedan that I’d gotten as a job perk. I would’ve preferred to have my little Ninja motorcycle I’d left back East, except there wouldn’t have been much room for my brother and his wheelchair on the back of its seat.
One time, I’d actually gotten right up behind the bus here on the freeway. Donnie and I had spent nearly a half-hour creeping along toward the next off-ramp, him laughing and waving to me through the window at the rear of the bus, me looking up through the car’s windshield and waving back to him. Even now, with what I’d just found out from Elton, thinking about that made me smile a little bit –
Then something happened. Real fast.
Brake lights flashed on in front of us, along with those of every other car and truck all down the freeway lanes. Traffic at least had been moving a little, in the usual fits and starts, but it suddenly packed up solid now. I could hear, past the sparking and grinding of the panel truck’s worn-out brakes and the clatter of the tools and welding equipment slamming into the back of the panel truck seats, the ugly screech of tires smoking out of control across the pavement, their treads sideways to their motion.
Up ahead, a double trailer rig had jackknifed, its bulk cutting across all three lanes of traffic in an open V. The squeal of the cars hitting their brakes in a sudden panic-stop mixed with the noise from the truck. A crunch of minor fender-benders sounded beneath the scream of the tires, as the more inattentive drivers on the stretch of freeway, either wrapped up in their cell phone conversations or tending to their stereos, were yanked back to the real world around them.
I gripped the steering wheel tight and stood on the brake pedal. It looked as if the truck rig’s momentum would be enough to topple it over, exposing the underside of the joined trailers to the cars that had slammed to a halt just inches away from it. The rubber-shredding scream of its massive tires faded, the wheels along the near side of the truck rig lifting clear of the freeway pavement. Then its entire weight came back down with a thud, heavy enough to shake the nearby cars on their suspensions. I actually felt it in the panel truck seat beneath me, but it still wasn’t the thunderous crash that we would’ve heard if it had gone over on its side.
The freeway traffic had come to a complete stop. That happened all the time here in Los Angeles. You just had to sit it out, until things started moving again. Sometimes that was just a few minutes, sometimes it was longer. This was obviously going to be a lot longer.
“Jeez.” I slumped back down. “What the hell was that all about?”
“I don’t know . . .” Elton frowned in puzzlement. “I’ve driven rigs like that. You blow a tire, when you’re up to speed, and something like that can happen, all right. But that guy was just creeping along.”
“Maybe the driver had a heart attack or something.” That was all I could think of. “And when he fell over, he cranked the wheel around.”
“Maybe.” Elton didn’t sound convinced. He suddenly leaned forward, peering through the windshield. “What’s that guy doing?”
“Who?” I let my wrists hang limply on top of the steering wheel. The panel truck didn’t have air conditioning.
“The cop. There – the one on the motorcycle.”
I had been aware of the police up ahead of us, the Highway Patrol officer on the big regulation cruiser and the squad car with a single officer inside it. The CHP guy had actually swung his bike in front of the black-and-white, causing it to jerk to a stop. If it’d been crawling along at more than a couple of miles per hour, it would’ve knocked over the motorcycle and its uniformed rider.
They were close enough, and their voices raised high enough – especially the black-and-white’s driver – that we could hear everything they said to each other, even with all the car horns honking up ahead and behind, which always happens when traffic grinds to a halt on the freeway. Not that it ever does any good, of course.
The one officer came boiling out of the black-and-white, looking like he was ready to flatten the motorcycle cop. The LAPD blue of his short-sleeved summer uniform was already sweat-stained even darker, down along his ribs. Dismounting from his machine, the other pulled off his helmet – and that was the first wrong note I caught. Before then, he’d seemed like perfect casting for the role, all lean and mirror-shaded, radiating the usual air of unsmiling, unflappable control. His hair was a close-cropped buzz cut, not unusual for the type, but grizzled gray. And his face, the parts not hidden by the big reflective sunglasses lenses, was creased and lined, his bony, hard-edged profile looking way older than the usual young-stud action you always seemed to see on CHP bikes.
“What’s the problem?” That was what we heard the motorcycle cop say. Two little reflections of the short-sleeved cop appeared in the mirror lenses, as he turned his cool gaze toward the other one.
“Problem? What – are you blind or something?” I would’ve said the same thing, except maybe even angrier. “Which division you work out of?” The short-sleeved patrol cop had lost his temper completely; with his hands planted on his hips, right at his own gunbelt, he’d stood staring at the motorcycle cop in amazement. “Everybody there an idiot like you?”
As we watched, the motorcycle cop didn’t say anything, but just leaned back against his bike –
And smiled.
The patrol cop obviously wasn’t in on the joke, whatever it might be. He just shook his head, turned away on his heel, and headed back to the black-and-white.
“Hold up a second.”
On the motorcycle cop’s knife-angled face, the thin smile hadn’t thawed; it was just as cold as before. But the patrol cop barely had time to see it. He stopped and turned only partway around, just as the motorcycle cop unsnapped the black leather holster at his side, pulled out the gun, then brought it up level in one smooth motion and fired into the other’s chest.
That was when the car horns stopped. First the ones right around us, where the drivers had been able to swing their gaze around from the jackknifed truck and watch exactly what had gone down with the two cops. And then, as if on cue from some unseen movie director, farther and farther along the freeway lanes, a wave of silence pushed along by the fading report of the gunshot.
FOUR
I’VE GOT a problem.
Let me tell you about it, then I’ll get back to what was happening there on the freeway.
I’ve been dealing with it for a while now. It all goes back to when things first started getting strange for me, and I wound up killing people for a living. Right about when that whole process got started – my transformation from little nerd accountant girl to bad-ass hit woman – I took a hard shot to the head. From falling off that zippy little Ninja 250 motorcycle I bought – first time riding it, and I wound up losing control and taking a low-sider to the asphalt. Can’t quite remember what happened, but I’m pretty sure I hit my head – I mean, there was blood in my hair and all, right above one ear. I never had it checked out, no X-rays or anything, mainly because I was scared what they might find. What if I’d really screwed up something in there? Then who was going to take care of my brother Donnie? You’d think that somebody in my line of work wouldn’t be such a candy-ass, but I just really didn’t want to think about it.
So I don’t know if there’s a connection, but right about the same time I started having these strange flashes. I’d look out the window of our crummy little apartment and everything outside, the street and the dirty gray buildings – all of that would look like it was just painted on sheets of transparent plastic. Nothing real, everything fake – and not even a very good job of faking it, either. Then I’d get the creepy f
eeling that something I couldn’t quite see yet, something with cold, unblinking eyes, was about to peel away the plastic sheets from the bottom and peer up at me. Just watching and waiting . . .
Of course, that’d be right about the time I’d have my own eyes squeezed shut, my heart pounding, one hand holding on to the curtain at the side of the window, hoping that things weren’t going to stay this way, no matter how screwed up my head was. And that everything around me would get real again.
Which it always did. At least so far. Sometimes it’d be months between them, but those weird little flashes would still come and go –
And that’s what was happening to me there on the freeway in L.A. My hands locked tight on the steering wheel of the panel truck as I stared at what had just happened in front of us. Even through the dusty windshield, the dead cop’s blood was bright red as it pooled beneath him. But then – all of a sudden – it didn’t look real at all to me. That strange fake thing kicked inside my head, and I might as well have been looking at some low-resolution TV screen just a few inches away from my face, with some cheap, low-budget action movie playing on it. The kind with special effects so bad, all you could do was laugh at them.
