by Rhys Ford
Miki hitched back the torturous memory of the time he spent mourning Damien’s death, layering it with the moment he’d seen his brother amble into the Morgans’ kitchen as if he’d simply gone out for a walk instead of disappearing for nearly two years. Clearing his throat, Miki said, “I missed you so damned—”
“Oh no, Sin,” Damie countered quickly, sliding his fingers across Miki’s trembling mouth. “We don’t look back, you and I. We can celebrate Dave and Johnny, but we’re not to have regrets. I am not your regret. I came back. You’ve got me back, and we look forward.”
“Some days—shit.” Miki couldn’t finish his thought, not and hold back the tears already threatening to wash away his shaky world. “Fuck. I can’t stop thinking about the what-ifs, you know?”
“That’s why you’re going to go see Penny, and she’ll teach you how to do that. I’m not saying we don’t look at our past and feel sad, but you and I both know you keep coming back to it, picking at it like a scab. And I can’t help you stop that. She can.” Damien swung his arm around Miki’s waist, dragging him over. “Someday, we’re not going to be together, but it’ll be only for an instant. Just like you and Kane or me and Sionn. Death just holds us long enough for the others to catch up, and then we’re back into the stars. Some part of you knew I was lost back then, because you were waiting for me. Even when Kane came into your life, you still held something of me in you. Like the seed I needed to get my head back to where it needed to be. I really believe that. We’ve got a lifetime of music and love ahead of us, and I’m going to need you to be sane and healthy while we live through it.”
“D, I’ve never been sane and healthy.” Miki tapped his head. “Suppose all she does is take away what makes me tick?”
“You’re too fucking stubborn for that, Sin. Trust me, no one can dig their heels in like you.” He laughed at Miki’s elbow jabbing into his ribs. “You’re going to be fine. And if she isn’t the one to help you out of that bramble you got yourself into, then we’ll find someone else. No matter how long it takes, we’ll find you someone who will show you it’s okay to be happy and that no one’s going to take that from you. That’s what I’ve got to get you to believe, brother. That all of us, our love for you, won’t go away and that you fucking deserve every bit of it. So you work on that and let us hold on to you until you do.”
“It’s hard. I’m just so damned tired of being scared all the time.” His admission was a soft one, but its roots ran deep, a weed gripping at Miki’s core foundation. “It’s just like a low hum, like an old tube amp.”
“Yeah, that I get.” Damien stretched his arm out and snagged the package off the crate. Shaking it at Miki, he asked, “So, Sinjun, the question is, are you going to open it? And it’s okay not to.”
“I kind of have to open it. Kane’s going to have to dig through it for what he’s doing, and I can’t have him looking at me knowing who I am when I don’t know what he’s seeing.” He made a face, disliking the push at his guts. “I have to open it.”
“You want me around for that?” Damie laid the package on Miki’s lap. “Because this is big for you. I don’t know if—”
“I want you here.” This time, it was Miki who reached out to pinch Damie’s mouth closed. “Just fucking hold on there for a bit. Because I think I know who else needs to be here with me… with us. Let me just make a call.”
Chapter Sixteen
She walks through dreams
Childhood wishes on stars
A faint echo of a woman
Look for her in dives and bars
Familiar stranger
To fill a hole in my heart
Never been together
Never been apart
—Hole in My Heart
“DAMNED SHAME about the timing of this,” Kel grunted from the driver’s seat of their most recent police-issued car. “But Chang said Wong’s sister is heading back over the pond, so it’s either we talk to her now or wait for her to come back after whatever festival’s going on in China.”
“Moon festival,” Kane supplied, trying to work his seat belt buckle. It fought him, almost as if the two ends were from two different cars rather than together in the late model sedan. “Sanchez, I swear to God, you pissing off the motor pool is going to get me killed. I can’t even work this damned seat belt.”
“You’ve got to lick it first,” his partner shot back, easing the car around a corner. He slowed as a pack of teenagers skipped and jumped their way across the street. “Don’t give me that look. I’m serious. It needs a bit of lube to get it in there.”
“Kel, I grew up with brothers. I’m not licking this fucking seat belt,” Kane retorted. “And how the hell would you even find that out? Who licked the damned thing first? And what’s wrong with WD-40?”
“Marsha in Motor Pool told me to do it,” Kel mumbled, his voice nearly lost in the car’s sudden backfire. “Shit, she told me they fixed that.”
“Swear to God, one day they’re going to sell you a handful of magic beans.” Kane felt a small surge of triumph when the belt finally clicked shut. “Here we go.”
“Yeah, too late. We’re almost there.” Kel glanced down at the map display. “A few more blocks anyway. How weird is it that you know Miki’s mother’s name and he probably doesn’t yet?”
“I don’t like it,” Kane admitted. “I think we need more time with what was in that packet, but our window with Wong-Lee this morning is really short, so we are going to have to take what we do have and try to play it. The thing is, we can connect Chaiprasit’s murder to Wong through Chin. Even with the preliminary evidence we have of Chin’s gun being used in her murder, you and I both know we need to cut the head off of the snake. Wong has a list of people he wants dead and Miki is on it. Chin probably wasn’t, so we have a secondary player trying to level the field.”
“Which is why we’re talking to Susan, but is she going to be willing to let the cops handle it? Or is that secondary player her kid?” A bus cut in front of their car and Kel sighed in frustration. “The problem I see is if Chin was a message to Wong, that means our secondary isn’t willing to spill Wong’s blood. It could be the nephew, but it could just as easily be the woman we’re going to go see in a few minutes. Any idea on how you want to play this?”
“Like you said, our secondary is as much of a worry as Wong. If it is somebody who is close to him but estranged, it wouldn’t take much for things to flip and our secondary decides to do Wong a favor and pick up his people-who-need-murdering list.” Kane estimated their arrival to be another fifteen minutes, considering the traffic around Union Square. “I just wish we had a better idea of how she feels about her brother now that he’s terminal and out of prison. We know that she is going to protect her son, first and foremost. She stepped out of protection for him, so that is a hard point on the board.”
“Yeah, when someone is staring down the big C, family tends to forgive everything and anything from the past.” Kel worried at the steering wheel with his thumbnail, scraping off the remnants of a sticker left near the horn. “The reports we got from Chang said there had been bad blood between her ex-husband and Wong—”
“I think her relationship with Wong is a lot better than people realized. That’s the same ex who ended up dead a couple of years after she got her kid back from him. Wong was in prison by then, but it was all fresh. He still had power.”
“So you’re thinking that Wong did his sister a solid by killing her ex-husband?” Kel mused. “Are we sure it’s her son running things and not her? She sounds cold. The kind of cold you need to be when running drugs or slinging people on beds to make a buck.”
“Nobody said she didn’t have a hand in what her son has going on now.” Kane stared out the window, watching a group of businesspeople in sneakers walking while chatting. “You and I both know it’s harder for women to gain respect in some organizations. It could be that she has a lot more influence and power than what everyone attributes to her. For all we know,
she was the brains behind Wong’s business.”
“Well, one of the bonuses of being the puppet master is that you don’t have a target on your back. Wong was lined up to take the shot in case things fell apart, and when they did, it does seem like she stepped in to fill the vacuum.” Kel swore under his breath in Spanish, shaking his head. “I don’t like going into this interview not having a clue about where she stands. Maybe it’s because Miki is involved, but this case has got me on edge.”
“I wish we had enough time to go through the stuff Alex left for us and get a good look at what the DA had been holding. I’m not sure I believe she’s headed anywhere. It just seems too convenient.” Kane understood Kel’s frustration. They were going in blind and nobody seemed to have any answers other than to feel out Wong’s sister. “What doesn’t fit here is if Susan Wong-Lee came back out for her son, I would think she would leave another woman’s son alone. And maybe I am just speculating here, but if a woman feels that strongly about her children, they normally assume other people do as well. I know my mother does.”
“Shit, Morgan. Your mother feels strongly about the children you guys drag home like stray cats. If anybody was going to head up a criminal organization, it would be Brigid. Thank God she hooked up with a cop.” Kel flinched dramatically at Kane’s playful backhand on his thigh. “I just feel like we are missing a really big piece of something, and it’s probably staring us in the face, if only we were back in the station digging through a mountain of information instead of chasing after Wong’s sister. I would love for her to take one look at us and cough up where her brother is, but we both know that’s not what’s going to happen. So we’re back to how do we want to play this?”
“Let’s see if we can get a read on how she feels about her brother and whether or not she benefited from him going to jail. She might give us a few leads. She called back and is making an effort to see us. Hell, that says something,” Kane pointed out. “Wong could be destabilizing her son’s territory. Even if he’s not tons of influence, he still bringing in a lot of chaos. She might want to minimize that and, let’s face it, like you said, Wong is terminal. If she has to choose between her brother and her son, she’s going to choose the future and not the past. You don’t need to know her to understand that.”
“We’ve got two dead bodies, a primary influencer as well as a possible secondary who probably has more resources but less motivation to kill.” Kel’s eyes narrowed and he said, “I say we don’t use any other name but Chaiprasit’s and Chin’s. Let’s see where she takes us. If she drops the DEA guys into the mix, then we’ll know she has a line in on Miki.”
“Agreed. We can definitely lead her around that. I would want to start a discussion about how Wong is only hurting himself and the family in the long run by targeting people from the past. Anything that he does is going to have a ripple effect on her son. She might know exactly who Wong wants to target based on who he feels betrayed him the most, and even if she doesn’t know where he is, it’ll give us a very clean idea about who is on his hit list.” Kane whistled under his breath at the building they were pulling up to. “Looks like she hasn’t done too bad for herself. If I were her, I would want to make sure nothing threatened my livelihood. She’s got to know if Wong gets his way, it could open up a whole lot of interest about things she and her son do. That’s something else we need to drive home. As long as Wong is out there trying to take people out, the SFPD is going to be her family’s very best friend—probably not what she or her son wants.”
“So then, we’re going to go with the friends and family plan?” Kel grinned. “I like how you think, Morgan.”
THEY COOLED their heels in the penthouse’s foyer for five minutes before the grim-faced Chinese man who let them in returned. The outer walls were glass from top to bottom, giving the space an incredible view, but the elevator bank on the one side of the six-by-six-foot room and the black lacquer double doors on the far wall hemmed everything in. Someone had gone to great effort to make the space seem welcoming, with a broad, colorful frieze spanning the remaining empty wall, but upon closer inspection, Kane discovered the images were of hunters and their prey.
“Interesting choice,” he said to his partner, studying a particularly gruesome square. “Do you think this is a warning to solicitors or just an indication of who lives here?”
“You’re the one with the minor in art,” Kel reminded him. “To me it looks like a bunch of tiles with people killing rabbits and shit.”
“You’re not far from wrong.” Kane turned when the doors to the apartment finally reopened. The gaunt, hollow-cheeked man who’d greeted them at the elevator looked, if possible, even less happy to see them there.
“The lady will see you now.” He shuffled back, his limbs stiff and graceless as he let them in.
The black suit Wong-Lee’s majordomo wore was slightly oversized, as if he needed room for a musculature he didn’t have. His appearance was at odds with the sleek elegance of the apartment he guarded from unwelcome guests. The door opened immediately to what had to be the penthouse’s great room, a long, wide area wrapped in windows and furnished with a sparse collection of Asian-influenced furniture. There were more pieces of art on the walls and on pedestals than places to sit, and Kane felt like they’d walked into a museum rather than someone’s house.
A hallway jogged off to the right, blocking any line of sight to the rest of the high-rise apartment, leaving only the great room accessible to whomever came through the front door. Kel hovered a few feet behind him, leisurely studying a statue, then a painting, but Kane knew his partner was using the tour he was taking to assess the place. Dark hardwood floors provided some relief from the light gray walls and pale upholstered furniture. Most of the art ran to stonework, with only a few paintings adding spots of vivid color to the area. It was a space washed with the gloom of a rainy day and little hope for sunshine, easily fighting off the blue skies and panoramic view of the apartment’s glass outer walls.
Kane couldn’t imagine anything looking more like the lair of a supervillain, and he leaned over to mutter at Kel, “All this place is missing is a bunch of sharks with lasers on their heads.”
“If you would please wait here, she will join you shortly. The lady prefers the divans by the fireplace should you want to sit down,” the majordomo droned flatly, his expression curled into the edge of the sneer. “I will return with coffee and tea.”
“Oh, we don’t need—” Kel stopped himself short, an amused grin on his face as the marionette of a man step-jerked his way quickly out of the room and down the hallway before either of them could say anything else. “I guess we’re having coffee and tea.”
“I guess so,” Kane agreed with a chuckle. “Fireplace looks nice. Lots of marble, have you noticed?”
“Yeah, last time I saw this much veined stone, I was inside of my uncle Fernando’s mausoleum trying to get my aunt to stop beating his crypt with her shoe because his five girlfriends showed up for his funeral.” Kel strolled over to the circle of low couches near a gas fireplace set into the far wall. “I like how this place is set up to show you she’s very rich but doesn’t really want you to stay and visit. Nothing here looks comfortable, everything is too short or too stiff. What do you think?”
Kane cocked his head, catching the echo of heels on a hard floor. “I think we’re about to have company.”
They’d taken a bit of time back at the station to look at a few photos of Susan Wong-Lee before driving over to interview her. Do yer homework on anyone ye’re going to meet, Donal taught Kane long before he’d earned the badge his father pinned on him. Know how they look, know where and how they live, and most importantly, find out what kind of person they are, he’d said. That way yer not surprised in any way, because I will bet my last penny, son, that the person ye need to be the most wary of is the one who is going to do their homework on ye.
Susan Wong-Lee was definitely someone who’d done her homework on Kane and Kel long before she e
ver agreed to an interview.
She probably came up to Kane’s shoulder, but her stiletto heels added a couple of inches to her height. She was older than Kane expected, having achieved the pearlescent beauty of a middle-aged Asian woman. Her sleek black hair was cut into a long bob, curving along the line of her strong jaw. Her dark brown eyes were sparsely made up, a few strokes of black eyeliner and a coating of mascara done only strong enough to emphasize their shape and color. Her flawless skin was dewy, but the beginnings of faint lines were forming on her brow. There was an imperfection next to her right eye, a small divot of a scar winging back toward her temple, and its hollow played with the shadows, dancing in and out of focus as she moved. She’d gone with a strong plum lipstick, a hint of wine in its tint to go with the merlot shell top she’d paired with black pants, and she wore very little jewelry, only a slender white jade bangle and matching earrings.
But mostly, Susan Wong-Lee wore her power.
There was something about how a powerful woman entered a room. Having had a ringside seat to his sister Kiki’s transition from childhood to inspector in the SFPD, Kane had seen the shedding of pigtails and hula hoops happen nearly overnight, replaced by a psychological strapping-on of armor and sharpening a cunning wit into a lethal weapon. If there was any sibling Kane felt in his gut would one day wear the captain’s bars, it was his baby sister. He planned to wear them first—he was older—but there was no way he could match Kiki’s determination and drive. She wore her competence firmly on her squared shoulders and her intelligence in her hard gaze. She’d never spend years proving she was just as good as any boy because she’d grown up knowing she was better than most. She had an unmistakable, unshakable confidence in her core, and Kiki led with it, a life-forged lance she used to fight her daily battles.
