Ramen Assassin

by Rhys Ford

  Trey’s smoky gray gaze drifted back toward the street, the pink light from a bar’s neon sign gilding his skin with a rose-gold glow. It was odd to see a patchwork quilt of resignation and determined resolve on a man’s face, a conflict of spirit and experience doing battle in front of him.

  “Maybe because I’ve spent my life fighting for the underdog,” Kuro admitted cautiously. “Or maybe—just maybe—you’re my particularly favorite brand of trouble.”

  TREY SAT at one of the tall stools near the kitchen’s long island. He couldn’t shake the feeling of déjà vu at seeing Kuro on the other side until he realized he’d sat at the ramen counter more than a few times, watching the then-silent man in black work his magic with a bowl of miso and freshly made noodles.

  This time was different. There were still noodles, dehydrated ones newly liberated from orange plastic packets, but the seasoning foils that came with them were promptly tossed into the trash, their disposal accented by Kuro’s disgusted hiss. Out of the cabinets came things Trey didn’t even realize he’d had. Small plastic pots of concentrated stock were dug out from behind a jar of chili powder in the spice cabinet, as well as a small container of chili flakes. From somewhere in the fridge came one lone sweet potato, a handful of mushrooms, an unopened bag of baby carrots, half a packet of thickly sliced bacon, a few eggs, and a slightly limp bunch of green onions.

  “I swear to God the only thing in there before you opened the door was a bottle of ketchup and some olives I got for martinis.” Trey scowled. “And they weren’t even my martinis. Where did all of that come from?”

  “I didn’t smuggle it in. That’s one job I won’t do.” Kuro began doing something complicated with one of Trey’s knives and the long steel thing Sera left in a drawer. The blade made snick-snick noises as Kuro ran the knife down the steel length, his strong fingers wrapped loosely around its black handle. “Why don’t we get down to what we’re here for… besides getting something to eat. Let’s talk about what happened that night.”

  “Where do I start?” Kuro looked up, and Trey found himself drowning in the man’s mesmerizing blue-flecked green eyes. It was akin to being caught in an ocean off the secluded beach in Hawai‘i, the pull of a wave scented with salt and sunshine powerful enough to pick him up and slam him into the silken white sands. “I didn’t ask for any of this. I was just trying to run off some shit going on in my head.”

  “Kind of shit?” The sweet potato didn’t stand a chance with Kuro wielding a knife against it. From what Trey could see, he didn’t even look down at the tuber as he sliced, lopping off identically wide rounds of its firm purple flesh. “It was three o’clock in the morning. What were you doing up then?”

  “What were you doing up then?” Trey opened the carrots and fished one out. Nibbling on the end under Kuro’s watchful glare, he pressed on. “Look, my crash-and-burn was played out on every television and magazine over the last eight years. I’m sober now. I was trying to stay that way.”

  “Up until someone told me about you, I had no idea.” Kuro rescued the carrots from Trey’s clutches and poured a dozen out onto the chopping board. After tossing the bag back at Trey, he made quick work of their plump orange bodies, slicing them on the diagonal. “It sounds like you had a rough time of it.”

  “You telling me you’ve never heard of Down the Tracks? It was the biggest thing on television next to that Korean War show.” He sat back a little bit, trying to wrap his head around someone who hadn’t caught at least a whisper of the gritty drama he’d spent so much of his life on. “It ran for twelve seasons. We dominated the airwaves. The finale was the most-watched thing in the history of television over the last twenty-five years.”

  “I was… busy.” Kuro’s explanation was cautious, a slow pour of honey over prickly bramble. “There wasn’t much time for anything. Including television.”

  “You can’t be that much older than I am. What? Four or five years? I started the show when I was eight. What the hell were you doing?” Trey leaned back on the counter, resting his elbows on the hard stone. “You couldn’t have been much more than twelve or thirteen. It was everywhere.”

  “Like I said,” he replied with a shrug. “I was busy. Talk to me about that night. What were you doing out there?”

  He didn’t like talking about what led him to pounding the asphalt in the weary hours of a Los Angeles morning. In some ways it felt like a death wish, flinging himself out into the night with nothing more than his drug-starved brain and a growing desire to quench its thirst. He ran through some of LA’s worst neighborhoods, or at least that’s what people told him. Trey found if he didn’t stop, he was left alone. No one bothered with the crazies in LA, and since no one but a crazy person would be running at two or three o’clock in the morning through its violence-haunted streets, Trey figured he was dialed up to eleven on the insanity scale. If only he hadn’t run through that alley. If only those men hadn’t dropped their plastic-wrapped corpse. And if only he hadn’t recognized the man from years of staring at his smiling face in the photos on his father’s walls.

  But no one believed him. Not even his own sister. No one except the man standing across of him blending a bit of pancake mix with a lot of water in a blue CorningWare bowl he’d somehow inherited after a potluck. Trey was tired of the doubt and suspicion hanging over him. They were dark clouds following him, keeping the light off his shoulders and face. There was only so much pushback a man could take before he snapped, and Trey feared he would tumble back into the bottles he’d just climbed out of to get some relief from the pressure.

  He couldn’t do that. Not to himself. He would’ve said not to everyone who’d stood by him, but he’d burned a lot of those bridges, and the only one who had his back now was Sera, his father’s ex-mistress and his best friend. Kuro represented something Trey never imagined he’d find. He was a clean slate. Ignorant of everything Trey’d done and his destructive past.

  Kuro also was willing to help him, and the sheer relief of being believed in lifted Trey’s soul. He was going to take a risk on the man who’d fed him and defended him. After all, Trey had already kicked more than a few gift horses in the mouth in his lifetime. He sure as hell wasn’t going to look at this one’s teeth too closely. He’d learned that lesson. One never knew when another horse would come by, and the one God delivered to his doorstep was possibly the hottest man Trey had ever seen.

  Once he got past the sneaking suspicion Kuro could kill him with his pinkie finger.

  Trey didn’t think he would ever get past that.

  “One of the things I picked up in rehab was whenever I wanted to take a drink or do drugs, I should distract myself. Sometimes reading a book works, but if things get too bad, I run.” He grabbed another carrot, chewing on it as Kuro dredged the sweet potatoes in the milky batter, then slid them into a skillet with hot oil. “I was having a really shitty night with the shakes. I went all the way down to the freeway and came back up. I was getting tired, so I cut through the alley next to your shop, then across the back. That’s when I ran into those guys on the next street. It was kind of like finding a spider in your bathtub. Okay, more like two cobras instead of a spider, because normally when I run into people doing something at that time of night, I just keep going.”

  “But that night you didn’t.” Kuro pushed at the battered sweet potatoes with a pair of long chopsticks Trey was certain he didn’t own. His kitchen was turning into Mary Poppins’s carpetbag, and if he wasn’t already awestruck by the man’s overwhelming competence, he’d wondered if he’d somehow wandered onto some magician’s show. “You stopped. Why?”

  “Because they felt like cobras. I don’t know how else to explain it. There was something wrong about them. And I just stopped because it felt too dangerous. Or at least that’s what it felt like afterwards. Right then and there? I wasn’t thinking. I was just frozen in place.” Bites of carrot he’d taken were turning to ash in his mouth, and Trey forced himself to swallow the gritty bits. “I pro
bably would have turned around and gone the other way even if they hadn’t dropped that guy onto the street. Something told me to get as far away from them as possible, but as soon as I saw them drawing their guns, it was like that’s what my brain needed to see before it engaged.”

  “And you say you recognized the man?” He fished out the potatoes, putting them onto a plate covered in paper towels, then began another batch. Once he slid those into the oil, he picked up one of the cooked pieces and laid it on an empty plate in front of Trey. “Be careful. It’ll be hot inside. Don’t burn your mouth.”

  The man had fed him before, but this was intimate. Sure, Sera made him meals all the time, but the tumultuous current flowing between him and Kuro was nearly as sweet and hot as the tempura Trey gingerly bit into. He’d never been with anyone who cooked for him, and Trey was torn between wanting to fall in love or scraping back the emotions crawling up from inside of his depths, scared to discover he was attracted to the man solely because Kuro was being nice to him.

  He also couldn’t believe his kitchen actually had the ingredients to make what looked like a fantastic bowl of ramen.

  “Yeah. He’s someone my dad knows, but he’s alive.” Trey chewed, then swallowed, reaching for the glass of water he’d poured himself earlier. Kuro was right. It was hot, and he felt it burn all the way down to his stomach. “His name is Robert Mathers, and he owns a hell of a lot of companies. He also played golf with my dad the day I saw him lying dead on the street.”

  “Could you have been mistaken?” Kuro asked, fishing the rest of the potatoes out. The carrots underwent the same process, battered and then into the oil.

  “No. When I’m sober—okay even when I’m not—I remember people’s faces. I have to be pretty fucked-up to not know where I am or who I’ve seen and, not going to lie, there’s quite a few blank spots in my brain because I’ve been pretty fucked-up,” Trey confessed. “But my mind doesn’t let go of things. That’s my biggest problem. Once I’ve seen or heard something, it gets tucked away back somewhere. It might take me a while to recall where I’ve put it, but I always know. All I need sometimes is a little trigger. It’s like I never get lost, because once I’ve been someplace, I always know where I am.”

  “Boy, I could’ve used you on quite a few trips I’ve taken,” Kuro murmured, grinning up at Trey. “So, there’s the dead guy who’s not dead and another dead guy who shot at you and came after me. The cops aren’t going to dig into what you saw that night, so we probably won’t run into anyone with a badge while we try to figure this out.”

  “Are you seriously talking about investigating this?” Trey nearly choked on a piece of potato. “Shouldn’t this be something we leave to the cops?”

  “They’re not going to do jack shit about this. They don’t believe you, and other than both of us getting shot at, there isn’t a murder to dig through. You said it yourself, the man you saw that night is alive and walking around playing golf.” Kuro looked away, but not before Trey saw the fire in his eyes. “But there’s still another man out there, and we don’t know why his partner decided I needed to die. It’s only a matter of time before he finds you too, and I’d really like that not to happen.”

  “How the hell are we going to find out any of this?” he asked. “I can’t prove I even saw a dead guy. I saw Robert Mathers. And it’s not like we can question the guy in the truck. You blew his head off.”

  “Let me ask around and find out who today’s dead guy is. That will at least give us someplace to start. After that, I can see where that takes us.” Kuro stopped fussing with the vegetables to give Trey a slight reassuring smile. “Remember when I told you I was too busy to watch television? Well, it’s time for me to get busy again, because I really do love fighting for the underdog, and from where I’m standing, you need someone like me to fight for you.”

  Seven

  “I WAS expecting you last night,” Holly purred at Kuro as he climbed out of the Challenger. “Especially after I pulled all those strings to get you shaken loose.”

  The purr was deceiving, but then Holly always purred. She couldn’t help it. It was in her nature, a beautiful package of danger and nurture, a conflicting bundle of trouble Kuro was very glad to have on his side.

  Nearly as tall as he was, Holly was built along the lines of a 1940s gangster moll, complete with a filled-to-the-brim hourglass figure and legs up to her chin. Now in her midfifties, Holly hadn’t changed a bit since the time he’d first met her, back when he was wet behind the ears and she assumed control over his life. Well, she’d changed somewhat. She was now missing her left eye. The cavernous hole left by the too-near-for-comfort sniper bullet was covered by a jaunty black eye patch, and her long blonde hair was now a smart bob cut short to curve around her sharp, fey features. Her blue gaze was still as cutting, a brilliant-cut sapphire not blunted at all by the lack of its twin, and she limped a little, the result of having her right kneecap blown out by a counteroperative she’d then taken out with a pair of shears.

  She’d been his handler from the moment he’d picked up his first gun, and her retirement papers were on the chief’s desk the day they turned Kuro out onto the streets. He’d traveled a bit after they’d black-inked his identity, rolling his stats back into society’s registers, but Holly’d immediately taken up residence in her Brentwood chateau, surrounded by lush expansive gardens and a pair of Tibetan mastiffs she’d named Brutus and Fluffy. Kuro couldn’t tell the dogs apart, and for all their fierce reputation, the most savage he’d seen them become was an intense wrestle over a pair of bunny slippers they’d found under Holly’s bed. They each carried one around in their mouths at some point in the day, sopping bedraggled messes Holly refused to even acknowledge existed.

  Kuro didn’t know how she did it. Ignoring several hundred pounds of slavering fur carrying a mangled stuffed-bunny head in its mouth took a certain panache, and Holly dealt with the situation as she dealt with every wrinkle in Kuro’s life, with grace and without a blink of her eye.

  “I ended up taking Bishop home. They pulled him in at the same time they were shaking me down.” Kuro closed the Challenger’s door and eyed the two shambling mounds of fur quivering with excitement on the chateau’s sweeping front steps. “Let’s keep the puppies under control today, all right? I don’t want a repeat of the last time I came to visit.”

  “They love you, that’s all.” Her smile was a thing of beauty, and Kuro knew from experience it held more than a tincture of treachery in its gleaming whiteness. “It’s because they smell that cat of yours on you, and you know how they love cats.”

  “I’m pretty sure Yuki-onna would be as fond of them as I am.” The one on the left dropped down, hunching next to Holly’s heels, and not for the first time, Kuro wished he was carrying a weapon. He’d seen firsthand what a Tibetan mastiff could do to a man, and for all of Holly’s assurances—and the dogs’ oddly exuberant affection for him—Kuro wasn’t convinced.

  “I don’t know why you don’t like dogs.”

  “Those aren’t dogs. They’re killing machines you’ve raised as lap puppies, and one day, they’re going to remember they can take a water buffalo down with a single pounce, and with my luck, that’ll be the day I’m looking particularly like hamburger.” Fluffy… or Brutus… finally broke his hold on his patience and bounded down the stairs, eating up the distance in a few short hops. The dog was on Kuro before he could blink, and he went down under the mass, hitting the hard cobblestone drive with a sickening thump he could feel up and down his spine. A second later he was blind, covered in fur and long viscous threads of dirt-speckled spittle. Shoving helplessly at the massive dog’s chest, Kuro called out to his mentor, unable to dislodge her pet. “Swear to God, Holly, I’m going to shoot him.”

  “You wouldn’t harm a hair on his pretty head. You love animals too much. Fluffy, come on. Let’s go inside and get a treat.” Holly turned, resting her hand on the other dog’s head for support. “When you pick yourself up off the floor,
come to the study. It’s time you and I had a little talk.”

  Picking himself up was fairly easy. Getting into the chateau was a bit harder. The dogs haunted his every step, slamming into Kuro’s legs as he tried to walk up the stairs. Holly was right. They were affectionate and, despite being totally unaware of their mass, playful and friendly. They just loved him way too much to make it easy to do anything like crossing a room without one of them being there to see what he was doing.

  One thing he was grateful for—at least having the run of a multiacre estate surrounded by thick woods seemed like ample enough room for the dogs to work off their spare energy.

  The chateau was a gorgeous aged burnished-ivory manor house, a thirteen-bedroom stretch of stone, windows, and blue shingles. Dovetailed stonework braced every corner and sill, the slightly lighter stonework curving into sturdy covered verandas on the east side of the building. Its cobblestoned drive was artistically laced with dollops of close-cropped grass, softening the hard dark round bricks, and its broad stairs leading up to the ten-foot-tall double doors glistening with flecks of mica, looking as if someone had scattered diamonds in Holly’s wake. Several turrets competed for attention around the front and back, jostling a bristle of chimneys into place between the chateau’s sloping roofs, as if fearful for the competition for the sky. If he hadn’t known better, Kuro would have said Holly somehow plucked the chateau from the Aquitaine countryside and rearranged it among the gardens and various pools scattered about the estate. He’d have been fully fooled if it hadn’t been for the neighbors’ towering queen palms’ fronds dusting at the top of the west side’s tree canopy.