Ramen Assassin

by Rhys Ford

  “Lots of people there remember the riots,” he reminded her. “Sure, it was a long time ago, but that kind of thing stains the area. People are always looking over their shoulder late at night, and back then, it wasn’t like the cops were around to help. Hell, there’s pictures of guys with bulldozers parked in front of their stores to protect their place. Maybe he’s just prepared.”

  “Or maybe he’s an ex-cop,” she shot back. “You said the gun was big—”

  “Huge. Like a cannon. Sounded like one too.”

  “And the cops didn’t even blink at him, right?”

  “Kimber didn’t say anything. Hell, she talked to him for a few seconds after she was done with me and then walked away.” He sipped again, grateful for the soup cooling down, because his tongue tingled from the last time he’d put his lips to the rim and drank. “I didn’t even get to thank him for saving me. She had me shoved into a police car and off the property before I could even cross the parking lot.”

  “You shall have to go back to the shop and see him.” Sera grinned slyly, a deep dimple forming in her left cheek. It wasn’t hard to see why his father had become enamored with her. There was an earthy sassiness to her personality, and combined with her gut-punching sensuality, she was a potent mix of vixen and power. “I’d say you could cook him dinner as a way of saying thank you, but let’s face it, you’d burn air if it was possible. Maybe you can do takeout. Dish it up here. Pop a bottle of sparkling cider and take your time expressing your gratitude.”

  “One, I don’t think he’s gay. Two, he is way out of my league.” Trey shook his head, moving his grilled cheese out of Sera’s reach after she helped herself to another pinch. “Go make your own. This is supposed to be my convalescence meal. What kind of nurse eats her patient’s food?”

  “A hungry one,” she shot back. “And how can he be out of your league? You were in teen magazines! The kind of shit where they tell infatuated little boys and girls what your blood type is and what kind of toothpaste you prefer.”

  “Those days are long gone, honey.” Trey nearly choked on his sandwich. “Besides, no one ever really asked us those questions. They just made shit up and printed it after we spent a couple of days getting our photos taken in different outfits. And it’s not just looks. He’s got his shit together and I haven’t even picked all of mine up from the backyard. So, way out of my league.”

  Sera was about to respond when Trey’s phone chirruped and vibrated across the coffee table. He began to chew quickly, regretting taking as big of a bite as he had when she picked up the device. Easily avoiding Trey’s flailing, grasping hand, Sera frowned as she read the incoming text.

  “Don’t you know better than to open up a gay man’s phone?” Trey made another attempt to grab it from her, nearly falling off the couch when he leaned over.

  “Please! You’ve got Miki St. John wearing a My Little Pony T-shirt as your wallpaper. The biggest question I have about you is did you photoshop this or is he secretly a brony?” She gave another frown when the second half of a text scrolled up across the screen. It was too far away for him to read, mostly because he was tired and his astigmatism blurred anything past six feet away. “Well, shit.”

  “His guitarist dared him to wear the shirt. I thought he looked sexy. And give me my phone so I can see what you’re pissed off about.” He resigned himself to sitting back on the couch. Fighting with Sera would do no good, and honestly, his joints hurt too much. “Tell me it’s Kimber and they found the dead guy.”

  “No such luck. My guess is, Kimber squealed like a greased piglet being chased by a bobcat,” she sighed at him. “Better go take a shower and get dressed because the car’s going to be here in half an hour. It’s your dad’s secretary. It looks like you’re being called on the carpet.”

  THERE WAS never any question about Harrington James Bishop the Second’s immense clout and long-reaching power. His father’s unshakable grip on other people’s lives was evident in every inch of his environment, including his children.

  One of the benefits of being Harrington Bishop’s son was never having to wait for an elevator. Still, getting from the parking garage to the top floor of Bishop International’s glass shard of a skyscraper in downtown Los Angeles meant crossing over an ocean of gray-veined white marble on the lobby level. It was a gauntlet of disapproving looks and barely concealed sour expressions. If there was one thing his father commanded besides others’ attention, it was their loyalty. He inspired a nearly slavish devotion from his employees.

  Trey couldn’t make heads or tails of it, but that could have been because he was too close to the man himself. He didn’t know the Harrington Bishop who was an industrial giant with an alleged heart of gold. He was only acquainted with the cold, brutal truth of a man who demanded his children be excellent in every way possible, something Trey never could achieve. There was no grade high enough or award esteemed enough to satisfy Harrington Bishop’s hunger for perfection in his offspring. Kimber’s defection to the police force dealt the man’s ego a nearly fatal blow, and he’d tightened his grip around his other children. Trey’s sisters, Margaret and the unfortunately named Scooter, were powerhouses of industry at BI, cutting their teeth on deals and acquisitions before Trey could even walk.

  And if Kimber wearing a badge was a nearly fatal disappointment, Trey didn’t even want to imagine what his father thought of him.

  Harrington never told him. Never exploded in a rant or diatribe like he did about Trey’s sisters. With his son, Harrington Bishop remained silent but steady, refusing to entertain any suggestion he turn his back on Trey, but at the same time, never dropping a word of encouragement. It made Trey feel like some kind of experiment, some kind of social engineering data point his father leveraged in his business dealings with self-destructive former child stars.

  His father’s bulldog waited for him at the top floor’s elevator, a cold-faced sentinel with flame-red hair and wearing a black leather skirt. There was nothing sexy about Tatiana. Or at least nothing Trey could see. She looked like she was carved out of the same marble they used in the lobby, her translucent pale skin with faint indigo lines running under it where Trey assumed her blood had frozen. Her eyes were a pale blue, frosted over with gray, and her lush mouth sported a dark red lipstick, a slash of vibrance against her nearly bloodless white face. He didn’t know how old she was, but then stones rarely showed their age. She’d come into his father’s life when Trey was a kid, replacing the grandmotherly Marion, who’d gone to Florida to be with her family.

  If ever there was an apocalypse, Harrington Bishop would survive solely because his right-hand woman probably could kill the grizzly bear with the power of her glare, then skin it with her sharp fingernails.

  God knew the tight smile she gave him probably hid her rows of bristling pointed teeth.

  “This way please,” she said in her lightly Russian-accented voice. “He is waiting for you.”

  “I know the way, Tatiana.” Trey slipped past her, nodding at the receptionist behind the swoop of wood and metal the company’s designer decided was forbidding enough to use to welcome guests to Harrington Bishop’s inner sanctum. “Good to see you, Gloria.”

  He didn’t need to look behind him to know Tatiana was hot on his ass. He could practically feel her ice-cold breath on the back of his neck and imagined he could hear her high heels clicking a fast tempo despite the thick gray carpet, much like a rattler signaling its intent to strike. No one went anywhere near Harrington Bishop without Tatiana hovering nearby. Oddly enough, she was the one woman in his father’s life who he’d never slept with, or at least he’d never heard about his dad’s dick falling off in some tragic sexually induced Arctic accident.

  The top floor wasn’t a cubicle farm. No, his father had the outer perimeter chopped up into offices styled after a gentlemen’s club with one wall of floor-to-ceiling glass, giving the lucky occupant a stunning view of Los Angeles. Each office came with an assistant, their doorless space enclose
d by more glossy wood paneling and glass panels. It was meant to look lush and rich, but Trey was a little unnerved by the lack of windows. It felt like a cloistered, stuffy cage, and not one he ever wanted to be trapped in. His father’s office was directly across of the reception desk, taking up nearly half of that part of the space, with two enormous corner offices on either side. Those belonged to his half sisters, two women from different mothers who shared their father’s ambition and need for power. Chances were, he wouldn’t see them during his visit, but then he hadn’t seen them in years.

  His father’s current assistant, a spindly balding man named Bruce, was manning the phones at his own desk, rattling off something in German, then placing his call on hold to stand up and greet Trey. “You can go right in. He’s expecting you.”

  Trey didn’t know where Tatiana sat. He imagined his father probably had a falcon perch she squatted on in between meetings, or perhaps a restaurant-grade freezer hidden among the cabinets where she folded up into her space, waiting for Harrington Bishop to summon her to fight battles. What he did know was he felt immense satisfaction in closing the inner sanctum’s door in her face.

  His father didn’t even look up from his desk. Whatever was on his computer screen was much more entertaining or compelling than saying hello to his only son, and Trey fought the nearly overwhelming instinct to help himself to a tall glass of whatever potent amber liquor his father had on the wet bar. He’d taken his first drink in that office, stealing a sip of something expensive from an unmarked crystal decanter. It burned going down. Much like it burned coming back up. But the numbness it left on Trey’s tongue and eventually his brain was glorious.

  Also destructively seductive. Or seductively destructive. He still hadn’t determined which.

  Despite being in his early seventies, Harrington Bishop was a giant of a man. Sporting a full head of silver-white hair and a firm lantern jaw, he looked more like a vintage movie star ready to storm beaches and have a shootout in an old corral. Lightly tanned from spending a few hours on the golf course or the yacht he’d purchased years ago, the man was still fighting trim, with broad shoulders bulging with muscles beneath his expensive fitted gray suit. His teeth were white, sparkling, and still his own, or at least he liked to brag. His mother, Joy, liked to point out she could claim her boobs were her own as well, having paid for someone to install them.

  The only thing he’d gotten from his father was his nose and hair color. Everything else passed down the genetic stream came from his allegedly Scandinavian mother with her five-hundred-yard legs, high cheekbones, and an addiction to anything and everything bad for a sane human being.

  “Sit down, Harry… er, Trey.” His father glanced up from his screen, motioning toward one of the high-backed armchairs set in front of the massive oak desk he’d inherited from his own father. “Let me finish this up and I’ll deal with you.”

  “Deal with me? There’s nothing to deal with,” Trey scoffed, willfully ignoring his father’s order for him to take a seat. Ambling over to the wet bar was a habit, but this time, like the last few times he’d been called in to the old man’s throne room, he reached for a bottle of sparkling water from the fridge. “Want one?”

  His father spared another glance, eagle-eyed and wary. Nodding when he spotted the bottle, he returned to what he was working on, only paying attention to the scrolling numbers on the screen. Behind him, Los Angeles was having a glorious day, clear skies with the barest of clouds laced over its crystal-blue canopy, and the city stretched out beneath the sun’s warming rays. If he squinted, he could make out the edge of the ocean peeking up over the horizon or imagine it was there. The cloud cover was thicker on the coast, layering a brushed aluminum filter over the edges of the sky, but everything else was in crisp, hard contrast, clean-lined buildings bristling into the crowded downtown grid.

  Turning back to grab another bottle of water for his father, he caught sight of a very familiar face in the photos hanging on the long pale stretch above the wet bar. Amid the sea of framed images arranged on the watered damask silk–covered wall, one stood out, a cherubic red-cheeked older man with a white streak across one eyebrow and thinning hair he trimmed close down to his scalp.

  Trey’d seen the man only hours before, bled out white and slack-fleshed, his flaccid body wrapped in sheets of opaque plastic. The dead man was grinning widely, nearly a foot shorter than Trey’s father, but he’d somehow forced his arm up over Harrington’s shoulder, dangling his plump hand down across his collarbone. Another man Trey didn’t know stood on the other side of his father, his hatchet face sporting a forced smile, and his arms were firmly against his sides, locked into place while the other men were clearly having a good time. They were all dressed for some event, a black-tie affair with a crowd of diamond-wearing, smug-faced people milling about, but the photographer captured the discomfort of the one man compared to the friends on the other side, a genuine grin on Harrington’s face instead of the practiced, politically correct half smile he normally wore in photos.

  Trey knew that other smile well. He’d seen it often enough in family photos, especially the ones where Harrington annually gathered up all his offspring, forcing them to sit in one another’s company long enough to capture the moment. Not being asked to sit in on the family shoot was a dire indication of how displeased Harrington Bishop was with a particular child, and since Trey hadn’t sat down for one in years, he figured he was the current record holder at being the subject of the old man’s ire.

  After shoving one water bottle under his arm to hold it and taking another one out, Trey lifted the photo from the wall, turning it over to see if there was a name or something scribbled on the back. Most photos on the wall were transients, cycling in and out depending on Harrington’s moods, but there were a few core shots Trey no longer saw when he was in the room. They’d been up that long. This was one of them, and its back was sealed brown paper, wetted down to tighten up against the frame, and no note on the back to indicate who was in the image. Frowning, he padded back over to his father’s desk, placing the bottles on the desk.

  “Dad, who’s this?” He held the photo up.

  “Can’t this wait until I talk to you about what you did last night? Kimber said you’re using again. Hallucinating dead men and such, so you and I are going to have a little discussion, mister, then I’m going to figure out what to do with you. I can’t carry you anymore, Trey. You’ve got to man up.” Harrington scowled at the screen, clearly displeased at what was there. “I need ten minutes. Play with something on your phone.”

  “I’m not five anymore. Video games aren’t going to keep me quiet for half an hour. And I was stone cold sober this morning. I went running so I wouldn’t take a drink. I wasn’t hallucinating. Not the dead guy. Not the guys shooting at me. I get Kimber not trusting me, but shit, you’ve got to believe me on this.” Trey leaned across the desk, putting the photo right under his father’s nose. “Who’s the guy on the right?”

  “Son, that’s Robert Mathers. Known the guy for years. You’ve met him before. You just probably don’t remember.” Harrington stared at the photo, his steely eyes fixed on the man’s face for a moment before looking up at Trey. His frown intensified, growing stormy, then disappeared, wiped away as if it never existed. His father didn’t like to lose control of his emotions, keeping a steady, calm expression even in the worst of storms. Only Trey seemed to be able to break it, cracking the man’s authoritative serenity. “I played golf with him this morning, Trey. His game was off, but everyone has a bad day. Why?”

  “Because this is the guy I saw this morning. The one I saw dropped into the street.” Trey hated how his hand shook, but the cold was back in his bones, doubts beginning to form icy shards along the edges of his thoughts. He’d blacked out before, waking up without a single memory of what he’d done or drank, but this time it was different. He recalled every single second of his early-morning run, and despite the weight of confusion pressing in on him, he refused to b
elieve he’d slid back into his old ways. Not without a hell of a fight. “This is the dead man, Dad. I saw him as clear as day. Like I’m seeing you now. So I don’t know who you played golf with this morning, but it sure as fuck couldn’t have been Robert Mathers.”

  Four

  MAKING NOODLES for a restaurant took a lot of time, but it was one of the things Kuro enjoyed the most. While the Tako Shop storefront sat only twelve customers, not counting the employees’ table, its back kitchen was huge, a master chef’s workshop hidden behind a wardrobe—in reality a steel door—where Kuro and his crew could prep the day’s offerings in a luxury of space.

  It was a delight to work in the kitchen, its long walls filled with bins of fresh vegetables dropped off early that morning, and a bank of walk-ins and freezers bulged with rendered soup broths and prepped toppings for a couple of days’ seatings. A delivery of fresh eggs arriving two hours too early forced Kuro out of his bed that morning, a stumbling run down the stairs from his apartment upstairs to let the man in. There’d been apologies and a smatter of catching up, a gush of formal Japanese Kuro struggled with until his brain kicked in. The night before had gone late, stretching into the early hours of the morning, and for nothing other than sleeplessness and the image of Trey Bishop’s crestfallen face burned into his memory.

  So instead of going back to sleep, Kuro stayed in the kitchen and began to make noodles.

  They made everything on-site. It was one of the things he’d insisted on, paying hefty wages to bring in people who knew what they were doing to work the kitchen and the bar. More than a few of his servers “graduated” to the kitchen or ramen assembly, earning their way up the ladder through hard work and drinking in everything the shop did. But there was something peaceful about noodle making, or at least the kneading of the dough and the delicate wrapping of the sectioned-off pale balls so they could be set aside to rest. Cutting would come later, something the morning crew would do for the rushes, but for now, the kitchen was empty, the silence before the storm of chatter his employees would bring with them in a few hours.