Ramen Assassin

by Rhys Ford

  “And that little trip you took with Jenkins after we cut you loose?” The detective paced off the room, two long strides eating up the floor before he had to turn back around to face the desk. Kimber remained silent, even though Garrett gave her a ferocious scowl. “Any time you want to add something to this, Detective Bishop, just jump right on in. You’re the one who spotted them leaving together.”

  “You were spying on me?” Trey tilted his head back, whistling up at the ceiling in slight exasperation. “Am I a suspect in this? Do I need a lawyer? I don’t even know what you are trying to get at. The first time I heard of Mathers being dead was you accusing me of killing him. The officer who came to get me only said Kimber had more questions for me. I just don’t have any answers.”

  “I wasn’t spying on you,” Kimber murmured. “I followed you to see if you needed a ride home. I was just coming outside when you got into Jenkins’s car. You have to admit, Harry, you claim you don’t know the man very well, but after he’s in a shootout with two men you claim were carrying a dead body, he ends up being followed up Mulholland Drive by one of your attackers and kills him. Then, after I shake you loose, you climb into his vehicle.”

  “A vehicle we should have impounded, but funny thing about your friend, he’s made out of Teflon. Everything and everyone just slides off of him. He or somebody he knows has a lot of juice.” Garrett scratched at the silver stubble beginning to emerge on his jaw. “Since your daddy insists he’s not going to dig you out of any more holes you fall into, that means you’re going to bed with somebody else. Because you have a stink on you, Bishop, and people keep dropping like flies all around you. You know more than you’re telling, and you’re not going to see the light of day until I know what’s going on.”

  Trey was about to begin another round of denials when a knock sounded on the door. A bright-eyed uniformed woman popped her head in, stage-whispering to Garrett that he was needed elsewhere. The man’s forehead rippled with a conflicted frown. It didn’t take a psychic to know he would have preferred to remain, spending his time stripping Trey of his sanity and possibly his mind, but he obviously thought better of it, telling the cop he’d be out shortly.

  “See if you can get something out of your baby brother while I’m gone.” Garrett stabbed at Trey’s shoulder with a stiff finger. “You! Do you ever think about the shit you get into and how it affects your family? Your sister here is never going to get any further up the ladder because of the shitstorm you brought down on her. Do us all a favor and either finish killing yourself with a handful of pills or do the right thing and cough up some info. You owe her for all of the times she’s stretched her neck out for you, only for her head to get cut off because you fucked up.”

  Garrett might as well have punched him in the face. The silence in the room when the senior detective closed the door behind him was ripe with past arguments and old anger. Rubbing at his knees, Trey shook his head, wishing he could undo the damage he’d brought down on everyone he cared for. His lifetime would never be long enough for him to make all of the apologies he owed people, and emotional restitution was useless if no one would let him make it. Glancing up at Kimber, he opened his mouth to say he was sorry, but his older sister tightened her lips into a thin line, then sighed.

  She shifted against the desk, the leather holster she wore across her shoulders creaking when she moved. Kimber dressed better than most detectives, born into wealth and a mother who lived for Fashion Week, but there was no mistaking she was pure cop. Her wide-leg tweed trousers, mannish white button-up shirt, and black boots might’ve had designer labels, but she carried them on her body as if she was still wearing her uniform. Looking up at his sister, Trey realized he’d never seen his sister as anything other than an authority figure, another brick in the wall he’d slammed his head into countless times before.

  “I thought maybe you’d finally got straightened out, you know?” Kimber rubbed at the same spot Trey did when he got a headache, and he couldn’t help but smile, amused they shared something besides the patrician genetics of their sometimes self-centered father. “Don’t grin at me. The famous Bishop charm doesn’t work on me, remember? I know all of your tricks. I just don’t know what your endgame is in this.”

  “Look, I get you don’t believe me. I’ve done nothing to gain your trust back—”

  “You never had it, Harry.” Another sigh, and this time her words were razors slicing through Trey’s heart. “You’ve been handed every chance in life and have done nothing with any of them. You’ve set fire to everything you touch and destroyed every accomplishment you’ve ever achieved. It’s been like that since the day you were born. Like you were created solely to destroy our family, and once you got your wild up, you took that bit between your teeth and ran with it. I don’t know why I even bother.”

  “I’m sober. Ever since I walked out of that rehab—that last rehab—I swore I would never go back to a place like it. I’ve worked on becoming healthier these past couple of years, and I know it may not seem like a lot, but I was finally at a place where I felt like I could do something again, be someone better than who I was, then this all happened.” Trey felt his voice break, shattering beneath the weight of his emotions. “I wish I could take back everything. I do. Even if it’s just so you believe me now, I’d give anything for that. I just don’t know what to do, Kimber. I don’t know what to say to you to make this right.”

  Someone outside laughed, a moment of jollity dancing through the ruins of Trey’s life. It seemed unfair the world continued on around him while he struggled out of the quicksand he’d created for himself. Kimber was right. There’d been too many times when his family extended their hands out to him to pull Trey free of the quagmire, and he’d used their support to get out of trouble, then dove back in with a gleeful vengeance.

  “I’m just so frustrated. There are times when I wondered if our lives wouldn’t have been better off if I hadn’t performed CPR on you that day. I think about it all the time. The taste of your vomit in my mouth. The sour stink of coke coming off your skin when I pressed at your chest.” Kimber closed her eyes, turning away from him. “I couldn’t get the smell of your death off of my hands, Harry. I couldn’t tell the EMTs what you were on because you were lying in so much filth, I couldn’t see what you’d taken that night or what you’d used the weeks before.

  “Then Scooter lost her baby that night, and Mom was so angry at me,” she whispered. “You know how superstitious she is. Because you can take the chicken herder out of her small village, but she carries that village around with her, holding on to her old beliefs. She started screaming at me in the ER, telling me the reason Scooter lost her little girl was because I pulled you back from death. A life for a life, she said. I’ll never forget that. Because I stood there, crying for our sister’s loss, and I couldn’t even reassure myself that you were worth saving. Now, prove my mom wrong. Tell me everything you know about Robert Mathers’s murder and let’s give his family some closure.”

  IT TOOK nearly an hour for Trey to get to Koreatown from the police station. Sixty minutes spent bogged down in traffic and trapped in the back seat of an overly perfumed Toyota driven by a woman who spent more time on her phone than a telemarketer. With only a few miles left to go before they reached his bungalow, Trey tapped on the driver’s shoulder and told her he was getting out.

  A twenty-dollar bill took care of smoothing down her pissiness for having to cut the ride short, but it was worth it. Especially since Wilshire’s bus-fume-filled air felt fresh and clean compared to what he’d been sucking in during the trip through a congested LA.

  She’d let him out in front of the Tako Shop, an odd, serendipitous event Trey decided he couldn’t ignore. The small twelve-seat ramen restaurant had a line waiting outside of its propped-open front door, and the delicious salty, savory aromas drifting out into the street brought a slavering lust to Trey’s mouth. He’d been at the cop house for hours, going round and round with his sister and then
again with Garrett, before finally asking them if he needed a lawyer.

  That had shut them up.

  There were whispers when he pushed through the small crowd on the sidewalk, hot mutterings and evil looks caught in his wake. There were words. Ugly words. Ugly enough to haunt his footsteps and chase him inside to the almost-too-warm confines of the cramped long shop.

  A round-faced girl spoke to him from her perch at a podium near the door. She’d sat him before, usually leading him to a table in the middle before the shop’s owner—Kuro—rumbled something at her in Korean or Japanese and he was taken to the back table where the employees usually ate. This time he stopped in the middle, a rock suddenly thrust into the stream of people trying to move in and out of the shop, and faced the prep area, where Kuro Jenkins stood behind the four-foot-tall glass panels separating the dining area from the ramen shop’s cooking stations.

  It struck Trey how loud the place was, a sudden flush of sound reaching his ears. People were bumping into him, nudging him aside to get past, but he paid them about as much mind as he did the girl by the door. He didn’t know why he’d come in. He didn’t know what he was looking for. There was a familiar itch along his spine and up the middle of his chest, but this time the monster crawling through his blood wasn’t begging to be numbed by alcohol or drugs.

  This time, it was crying out to be held.

  He had no expectations of anything other than a bowl of noodles from Kuro Jenkins. The conversation they had in his bungalow had been mildly unsettling, a pull of attraction where Trey believed he was the only one tugging on that twisted rope. The food had been fantastic, but the conversation left him aching for more. It’d been a confusing night followed by a perplexing day, and he’d gone over every word Kuro said, looking for something warm to extinguish the coldness buried deep inside of him.

  Trey meant nothing to Kuro Jenkins other than a complication in his life, bringing him death and chaos just like Trey brought to everyone’s lives. He was about to turn around and leave when Kuro met his gaze and he fell into the mesmerizing trap of the man’s blue-flecked green eyes.

  From the moment he’d discovered he liked men, Trey reveled in tasting every single one who’d caught his eye. Finding sexual partners was easy. He was pretty, famous, and rich, the perfect storm of self-gratification and hedonism. There wasn’t anything he hadn’t tried, sometimes even more than once, and toward the end—before his final self-destructive crash—Trey couldn’t even remember everything he’d gotten into. Or everyone.

  So after a lifetime of men in designer clothes with their perfect teeth and beautiful hair, Trey shouldn’t have found a rumpled Kuro Jenkins sexy.

  But goddammit, he was.

  His thick black hair was shaggy, unkempt inky black strands around his sharp-featured face, and there was a smear of something white along his strong jaw, a dusting of flour from the fresh noodles he shook out, then dropped into hot water for every bowl of ramen. A slightly soiled chef’s apron covered him from his trim waist down to his knees, hiding a pair of powerful thighs wrapped in black jeans, but Trey knew what was behind the folded cotton panel tied around Kuro’s muscular body. There was a strength to his corded forearms, and the bulge of his biceps flexed and strained the seams of his black T-shirt’s short sleeves. A coiled elegance and simmering danger existed behind the taciturn, cool façade Kuro presented, and Trey caught a peek of it when Kuro’s eyes went hot and fierce.

  “Go sit down at the back table.” Kuro’s raspy baritone went thick with authority, hitting Trey hard. “Did you eat?”

  “No.” Trey wanted to say more, but the words wouldn’t come, or at least it didn’t seem like the place to dump out his frustrations about being in the middle of a police investigation and being choked to death by his family’s disbelief. “I just came—”

  “Back table.” Kuro used a pair of long cooking chopsticks to stab at the air, pointing at the back of the shop where a darkened niche held a rickety round table and a pair of mismatched chairs. “Give me ten minutes.”

  Those ten minutes were fraught with anxiety. Everything Kimber said to Trey echoed back on him. Sitting in the shadowed corner, watching people eat and laugh dug deep into Trey’s dawning understanding he would never be a part of his sisters’ lives. Or never had been. Exasperated, he rubbed at his face, the brisk scratch of his palms on his cheeks rubbing away some of his self-pity.

  “You’re the one who set fire to the family,” he reminded himself in a low whisper. “What did I expect? She’s got no reason to believe me. Hell, I’m not too sure I believed me, but fuck! The guy’s dead. They found him. And instead of buying my story, they—”

  “Are you talking to yourself, or do you have one of those Bluetooth things hidden under your hair and you’re on the phone?” Kuro nodded at the table, jerking his chin up. Holding a tray with two hot steaming bowls of ramen and bottles of water on it, he said, “Move your arms so I can set this down. Get some food in you, and if you want, we can talk, but let’s get your belly full first. You look like shit.”

  “I feel like shit,” he confessed softly. “I just didn’t know where else to go. I know I’m not your problem but—”

  “Hey, boss.” The slightly pudgy kitchen manager hustled up to Kuro’s side, his dark eyes flicking toward Trey’s face. “I need you out back. There’s something you’ve got to see.”

  “What?” Kuro carefully placed the tray on the table, but a bit of the broth spilled over one of the bowls, the swirled pink-and-white fish cake medallions set on top sloshing with the movement. “Can’t it wait, Aoki?”

  “I don’t think so.” The man shook his head, then mopped at the sweat beading his forehead with a bandanna he pulled out of his back pocket. “Somebody stuffed a dead man into our dumpster, and there’s a note nailed to his forehead promising that this guy right here is next.”

  Nine

  A LOT of people didn’t understand Los Angeles. Many equated it with the plastic crinkle of Hollywood, but that really wasn’t the city. New York shouted, screaming at its own armpit with a snarl that was mostly bluster and no bite. Its outer boroughs had charm, but Manhattan was an origami of steel and cardboard with neon runners along the edges. Boston just liked being an asshole, and San Francisco was a slice of old Europe with hints of Asia and the perfume of a smug superiority in the air.

  Kuro liked all of those cities. He liked how they presented themselves and the treasures he could find on their streets, but Los Angeles held a magic of its own. A guy just had to know where to find it.

  Too many let the California stereotype of a bubbleheaded blonde with big boobs stand in for the city’s face. Los Angeles was anything but empty-headed. It murmured, a rattling chatter through its many neighborhoods, the language shifting and flowing from Spanish dialects to Korean to the uniquely patterned English of a SoCal speaker. Its inner core was rough, filthy with poverty and grime, while its outer rim sparkled with expensive mansions and white sandy beaches.

  Every area had its own heartbeat, an immense gathering of sounds and colors wrapped up as an asphalt-and-steel present. But it was Koreatown that held Kuro’s heart. He knew what to expect there. A little bit of dangerous edge from the young men walking its streets, bristling with resentment at their growing familial obligations or luxuriously carefree, ignorant of what awaits them. The women were the core of the neighborhood, a silent matriarchal presence where only the strong survived to lead families forward another generation. There were subtle battles for power in nearly every interaction Kuro came across, especially when running a restaurant.

  But what he loved most of all about Koreatown was its blissful turning away when something happened. Kuro knew gossip ran strong, especially since he never showed any interest in the local women, but no one ever said anything to him, simply continuing a shallow friendly relationship before going on their way. It was probably also the most frustrating thing the police were going to have to run into, because no one in K-Town was going to give the
m the time of day. No one saw anything. No one would say anything.

  A lot of that came from lessons learned during the LA riots, where the police did very little to defend Koreatown from looters and violence. The times were different then, but grudges ran hard and long, especially among the older Koreans. They’d armed themselves and waited, determined to defend the small scrap of America they’d fought to own. After the dust settled and the streets cleared, many sent their families down south to Orange County and the relative safety of Diamond Bar and Rowland Heights, but K-Town’s population soon regained its strong numbers and expanded outward, swallowing up more territory from the surrounding neighborhoods.

  Lieutenant Kimber Bishop and her people were reaping the rewards of dissentious seeds sown years ago, and from the sour look on her face, she wasn’t too happy about the harvest.

  “Why would I put a dead man wrapped in plastic in my own dumpster?” Kuro bit off the profanity he wanted to fling at the detective trying to crowd him against the ramen shop’s back wall. “My crew takes the trash out every hour. It’s not like they wouldn’t notice. That’s how they found him in the first place.”

  “That’s what I’d like to know. Because it seems kind of funny one of your crew suddenly finds a dead body.” The detective’s attention shifted to a gaggle of uniformed police officers working through collecting statements from the ramen shop’s customers. “It’s the early hours of the dinner rush but no one sees anyone dumping this guy. Which is odd, considering there’s a parking lot filled with your customers’ cars right by the dumpster and they have to cut through the alleyway to get to the front door. Still, no one saw anything. So either I’ve got twenty-plus people who are legally blind or that guy was dumped there before your place got busy. Which is it?”