Ramen Assassin

by Rhys Ford

  The movement must have drawn the woman’s attention, because the next thing he knew, Trey was staring down the barrel of her weapon and Kuro stood a few feet away, a deadly-looking gun pointed at the center of Tatiana’s forehead. His father’s redheaded assistant narrowed her eyes, and her aim drifted toward Kuro’s chest.

  “Kuro, stop!” Trey panted, rubbing at his knee where he barked it against the hearth. “I know her!”

  “I know her too.” Kuro didn’t drop the gun. If anything, he grew more menacing, stepping in between Tatiana and Trey. “Hello, Boom Boom. Long time no see.”

  “Hello, Blackie,” Tatiana said with a chilling smile. “Now, if you don’t mind, drop your weapon, because as annoying as he is, I’m not going to let you kill my boss’s son. And after you do that, you can tell me who sent you to assassinate him.”

  Eleven

  “LAST I heard you were stuck in a Turkish prison trying to carve your way out with a wooden spoon.” Kuro cut across the living room, keeping Boom Boom in his sights. “Someone finally scraped up enough belly lint to get you out?”

  Edging between her and Trey took only a few strides, and he caught a blur of movement behind her, a bit of shadow lurking in the darkness beyond. He was getting soft, no two ways about it. The moment he’d come into the house, he should have turned on the outside lights, flooding the area in the anticipation of someone coming in just like the Russian operative had done.

  “Last I heard you were babysitting and got the tires blown out from under you,” she retorted, keeping her gun steady on him. “I got out of the Turkish prison, but it seems like your tires are still blown out, yes?”

  “Tell whoever you’re with to come out and I won’t blow your head off.” Kuro couldn’t risk glancing back at Trey, but he felt the man coming up behind him. “Get down. She—”

  “Works for my father,” Trey replied. “She’s not going to kill me. She’s had lots of chances to kill me before. Hell, she probably wants to kill me but my dad won’t let her.”

  “You would not be wrong.” The Russian woman took a step to the left, trying to ease around Kuro. “Are you okay? Has he harmed you?”

  “He made me dinner. Seriously, I’m really kind of sick of guns, and the sprinklers are probably going to go off in a few minutes. I’m guessing my dad’s outside wearing something expensive and dry-clean only.” Trey’s exasperated huff was enough to bring a smirk to Kuro’s mouth. “Tatiana, put the fucking gun down and tell Dad he can come inside. If you’re hungry, there’s probably enough duck left. Dunno about the vegetables, but I’m pretty sure we can do something.”

  “The man’s an assassin.” Boom Boom eyed Kuro, a sharp, assessing gleam in her narrowed eyes. “He’s here to kill you, Trey.”

  “I was an operative, never an assassin,” he corrected her, keeping his gun up. They’d tangled more than a few times in the past, and if he remembered right, he was in the black on their tally marks. “Tell whoever is outside to come in. With their hands up.”

  “Jesus, the two of you!” Trey moved to get around Kuro, aiming for the door, but Kuro made a grab for him, snagging him by the waistband, holding him back. Boom Boom retaliated with a step forward, her gun lifting up as she closed the distance between them. Trey struggled, but Kuro was too strong for him, his stockinged feet sliding on the wood floor. “Dad! Can you just get in here, please?”

  “Sir! Ignore that!” Tatiana raised her chin, shouting over her shoulder, but her gaze remained fixed on Kuro’s face. She was waiting for him to telegraph his next move, probably wondering if she could take him, considering he was off balance by holding on to Trey and only having one hand on his gun. It’s what he would’ve calculated, but it was hard to tell what was going on behind her ice-queen façade. “Blackie, let him go and then we can talk. But I’m not going to drop my weapon until I know he’s safe.”

  Trey stopped pulling, but his frustration was as spicy hot as the jalapenos Kuro put in the duck sauce. Something was going to have to give. Judging by the shuffle of feet on the gravel outside, it sounded as if the person was uneasy, uncomfortable with waiting. They were too loud, with too much movement, and chances were, it really was Trey’s father, but whether or not Boom Boom came in hot in the hopes of snagging his son was a reality Kuro couldn’t afford to risk.

  “Let’s see the old man first,” he offered. “It’s been a never since we were on the same side. The only time you’ve ever had my back is when you were aiming at it.”

  “You killed my brother.”

  “Only after he tried to kill me first,” he reminded her. “And that was after he tried to get me into bed. Your family doesn’t take rejection well. Also, there was that small matter of a nuclear bomb I didn’t want him to have. Or have you forgotten that little detail?”

  “We weren’t that close,” Boom Boom replied, giving Kuro a lazy shrug. “If he’d been talking to the family, I would’ve told him not to bother seducing you. People who go to bed with you tend to die afterwards.”

  “Only the ones intending to fuck me over,” Kuro responded. “I want to see his dad come in. After that, we take it from there.”

  “What is taking so long?” A deep, authoritative voice broke through the tension, the sound of leather loafers scraping through the dust on the cement walk outside. “Tatiana, either shoot the man and step over his body or put your gun down, but either way, I’m coming inside. The goddamned sprinklers went off and the back of my pants are soaked.”

  The doorway filled with a man who carried most of his weight in his chest. A barrel of muscle and a bit of middle-aged fat around his belly filled out a suit that probably cost more than Kuro’s monthly take at the shop. There were bits of Trey here and there scattered about his face, but his features ran more toward centuries of country club breeding rather than Trey’s aristocratic beauty. His hair had gone silver, a glistening thick metallic mane any man worth his salt would be proud to sport. He was an aging lion but still majestic and in charge of his pride. As he moved into the room with powerful strides, it became obvious where Kimber got her tough exterior. Trey’s father suffered no one lightly, commanding the room with the force of his personality. The gleam of intelligence in his hard eyes warned Kuro he was someone to be reckoned with.

  Kuro neither lowered his weapon nor let go of Trey.

  “Trey? We good?” Kuro kept his lips as relaxed as he could as Boom Boom—Tatiana—dropped her arms, then holstered her gun. “Your call.”

  “Yeah,” he muttered. “That’s my dad. This is his assistant. Or at least I thought she was his assistant. I didn’t think the corporate dress code extended to firearms. What the hell is going on?”

  “What’s going on is someone left Robert Mathers’s hand in the front seat of my car a couple of hours ago with a warning that I’m next if I don’t shut my son up.” Harrington Bishop the Second flared his nostrils, pushing his shoulders back to take up even more space. “So what I want to know is what are you doing here with a man Tatiana swears is a killer, and what do you know that’s so dangerous I’m getting death threats?”

  THE BEER Kuro found in the back of the beverage refrigerator was Chinese and cold. Having sworn off alcohol, Trey apparently buried them behind sparkling water and sodas left over from a party thrown when he’d moved into the bungalow. Since Kuro never really considered beer could expire, he figured the Tsingtao was still good enough to drink, especially when being shared with a former Russian spy who’d apparently come in out of the cold and into a plush job with a Los Angeles mogul.

  “You sure it’s a good idea to leave them alone in the house?” Sitting on the Challenger’s front fender with Boom Boom was a surreal experience, but it seemed to be the safest bet, considering he wasn’t going to actually let her into the car. He passed her over a bottle he’d just popped the cap off, tucking the metal disc into his jacket pocket, then began working on opening the other with the lever on his keychain. “The old man didn’t seem too happy. He the type to take a
swing?”

  “No. They have a very complicated relationship. Bishop Three is a waste of space for most of the family, but the boss says he has untapped potential. He just doesn’t know what that potential is or how to get to it.” The redhead sniffed at the bottle, wrinkling her nose, a gesture easy to see in the glow given off by the bungalow’s front porch light. “Trey has let him down more times than there are stars in the sky, but it appears as if this time, sobriety has stuck. He still hasn’t found something to do with his life, though, and the boss is getting antsy.”

  “I met the first daughter. She’s… it’s hard to say because I want to call her a bitch, but there’s a lot of water under the bridge between them, and now that I’ve met the old man, I’d say she was actually just a chip off the stubborn block.” The beer was cold, and from what Kuro could tell, the years it spent in the refrigerator hadn’t affected it one bit. At another time in his life, he would have never drunk alcohol when there was a potential the night would go bad, but he lived in stranger times now. A beer seemed like a good place to start. “I haven’t met the other two.”

  “Variations on the first. Scooter is a little bit more Earth Mother, but I think that just hides how much she’s like her father. All three of them are very driven, ambitious women. Not at all like their brother.” Tatiana shot him a look from under her eyelashes. “I thought you meant to use him. Looks like something different with you and him, though if you were planning on killing him, you wouldn’t tell me.”

  “I wasn’t planning on killing him but eventually, probably will sleep with him. Not that that’s any of your business.” He saluted her with the beer bottle. “For right now, I’m just trying to keep him alive. Tell me about the hand you found. The detective daughter didn’t tell me Mathers was missing a hand.”

  “He’s missing both of them. The boss recognized a ring on one of the fingers as Mathers’s. Some family thing. Kimber reluctantly told us. It’s not something they’re letting out to the public.” She hooked her heels into the space between the wheel well and the tire, resting her feet on the rubber. “She also told us about the dead body in your dumpster. Trey wasn’t wrong. When Kimber showed the boss a picture of the dead man’s face, he identified him as Mathers. So the boss’s friend is the key to this whole thing, but I don’t have a clue what the whole thing is.”

  “Me neither,” he confessed. “Do they even know who the dumpster guy is? And why does he look like Mathers? Plastic surgery or relative? And was he killed because they thought he was Mathers, or were they planning to replace Mathers with him and something went south?”

  “I was thinking the same thing. I tapped into some of my resources to see what I can get on Mathers.” She gave him another look. “I burned bridges behind me, so I don’t have the resources you probably do.”

  “If you’re telling me you flipped, you know I can check that out, right?”

  “I not only flipped, I sang.” She took another sip of beer, wincing as she swallowed. “God, I wish this was vodka, but beggars can’t be choosers.”

  He grinned, amused at the stereotypical response he’d come to expect from every Russian operative he’d known. “Why’d you flip? From what I understand, things are pretty good on your side of the fence for you.”

  “I had a mother who was getting sicker and sicker while they were using her to push me into assignments I didn’t want to do. So I sang and she got to spend a year and a half in Fiji before passing away. That alone was worth everything.” Tatiana glanced at his knee. “Are you as burned as people say you are? Rumor is they shot you to hell and back, crippling you, but you seem fine to me.”

  “I get a little stiff on cold mornings. There’s a reason why I’m in LA.” He gave her back one of her shrugs. “And there isn’t a news agency that didn’t have my face on its feed for two weeks after that extraction, so chances of me going under again went to zero, even if I could pull a hard job. This thing with Trey is easy. You being in the mix is hard. I don’t want to have to watch my back knowing you’re in my rearview mirror.”

  “I have no problem with you. I have a job to do and I like it. For the first time in my life, I own my own time.” She still winced when she took a sip, but the beer seemed to be going down easier.

  “I killed your brother, remember?”

  “He had it coming.” Her smile was a flash of white teeth, sharp enough to belong to a lioness. “I probably would have shot him myself eventually.”

  “I know how I got into the middle of this,” Kuro said, returning her smile. “How did you end up going from blowing up buildings to working in one? And how did you wind up working for Trey’s father?”

  “The first one is a long story best told over better alcohol than this piss water,” she muttered, holding the bottle up as if to examine its pale liquid. “And the second question has a very simple answer. Kimber Bishop is my girlfriend.”

  “DID THEY cut his hand off when he was alive or dead?” Trey asked from the kitchen as he sliced up some of the duck breast, trying to keep it as thin as he could.

  The guava-jalapeno sauce was already warmed up, and the air fryer he used for crisping frozen french fries was once again churning away at its appointed task, a bottle of ketchup at the ready for when it dinged. Knowing his father wouldn’t touch any of the vegetables, he nibbled on a spear of roasted asparagus as he cut, arranging the slices on a plate as he went. It didn’t look as good as when Kuro did it, but Trey figured so long as it tasted nice, his father wouldn’t care what it looked like, and it wasn’t as if he was passing the food off as something he cooked.

  “Do you honestly expect me to eat while we’re having this conversation? And what difference does it make?” His father scowled as he studied one of Trey’s paintings. “Two men are dead and I’ve been threatened. How or why they mutilated Robert isn’t the question you should be asking. I’m more interested in what they are trying to keep quiet and how you’re involved. Or better yet, is that man outside at the center of this and he’s dragged you in?”

  “Considering I was the one getting shot at and he defended me, Kuro couldn’t have dragged me into anything.” Pointing out the obvious to his father was something Trey was used to. The man never seemed too willing to see anything outside of the narrative he had in his head. “Should I even put asparagus on your plate or just leave it on the side so I can eat it?”

  “If it’s green, I don’t want it,” his father protested with a dark grumble. “My guts are fine. Stupid doctors don’t know what they’re talking about.”

  “Just because scotch is made out of barley doesn’t mean it’s got fiber,” Trey remarked, putting the last of the duck onto the plate. The fryer dinged, announcing it was done with its potato-crisping task. After dumping the fries next to the slivered meat, he tucked the bottle of ketchup under his arm and brought the food over to his father sitting on the couch. “And before you complain, I’ll move the asparagus onto my plate. I didn’t see the point in dirtying another dish.”

  “You wouldn’t have to worry about washing dishes if you were living up at the house.” His father held his plate steady while Trey scooped the spears off. “You wouldn’t have to worry about a lot of things.”

  “Drugs made me not worry about things, and look where that got me,” he reminded his father. “’Sides, you and Mom would end up using me as a poker chip in that marriage game you two are playing. I’d rather not be played.”

  “Is that what you’re doing with that man outside? Playing him?” His father stabbed a piece of duck with his fork, then sniffed at it. “What’s the sauce made out of?”

  “Guava and jalapeno. And I swear to God if you dip that into ketchup, I will hold you down when they come to kill you.”

  “I’m not an ignorant savage, Trey. Ketchup only belongs on hot dogs, french fries, and scrambled eggs.” His father tucked a piece of the duck into his mouth, chewing thoughtfully. “Now answer me about the man, and then I want to talk to you about Robert.”

/>   “The man’s name is Kuro Jenkins. I told you about him before. He’s the guy who came out and shot at those men trying to kill me that night. Someone on his staff found Mathers’s doppelgänger in the dumpster outside of his restaurant.” The asparagus was still tasty, but Trey found it hard to get anything else into his stomach. “What about the threat you got? Besides the hand, was there a note?”

  “Printed off of a computer. Nothing so exotic as a typewriter or letters cut out of a newspaper. That would’ve at least given them something to go on, or so your sister told me.” His father studied a fry as if it held the answers to the universe’s mysteries, then chewed through it. “Is this Kuro guy going to stick by your side through this, or should I have Tatiana cover you?”

  “I’m fine. Or at least I think I am.” He thought back about the kiss Kuro gave him, its tingling warmth lingering somewhere along his nerve endings. “Just so you know, I’m kind of interested in him.”

  “I’ll have Tatiana run a background check.”

  “I think it’s safe to say that they know each other, Dad. From the sounds of it, it looks like they have a history.” He grinned at his father’s frustrated huff. “Why did they kill Mathers? And why did they kill that other guy? And why do they need his hands? Does Kimber know any of that?”

  “Didn’t she tell you?” His father shot him a curious look. “That other man was Robert’s twin brother, David. They haven’t spoken in years, not after David embezzled twenty million dollars from the company they inherited from their father. The last thing Robert knew about his brother, he was living down in Venezuela, but it wasn’t like he could get extradited, so the loss was written off and Robert rebuilt.”

  “You said Robert’s golf game was off, right?” Trey leaned back, an idea percolating in his head. “Does that happen a lot?”