Dirty Kiss (20 page)

“Jae-Min Kim. Don’t get me wrong, Princess, I’m glad you’re back in the game.” He grabbed the copy of the suicide note, turning it around. “It took you long enough.”

“So?” I frowned. The second sip was more palatable after I worked the lime down the neck and into the water. “I wasn’t ready before. I’m not so sure I’m ready now, but God, I want him. I just wish I could stop feeling like I’m cheating on Rick.”

“It’s been years since Rick… since Ben,” he said softly. “When are you going to forgive yourself for that? I watch you smile and then shut down when some guy smiles back.”

“Rick’s dead because of me.”

“Rick died because of Ben.” Bobby cut me off. “Not because of you. Not because he loved you and because you had a life together. He’s dead because of Ben. That doesn’t mean that you can’t start living your life again.”

“I thought you weren’t the girly-talker type.” I poked back.

“I’m not, but who the hell else is going to listen to you?” He pulled the papers away from my hands.

“Not the voices in my head, that’s for sure.”

“Fuck him, Cole. Fuck him and enjoy it.” Bobby went straight for the kill. “I’m not saying that you didn’t love Rick. Hell, I didn’t even know Rick, and I know you loved him, but Cole, you’ve got to go on.”

“I tried, Bobby,” I admitted. My face grew too tight, and I rubbed at it. “I kissed him, then fucked him, and it was
so
damned good. So why am I thinking, ‘how can I be doing this to Rick’? Isn’t that stupid?”

“Did he kiss you back?” he asked. “Before the sex?”

I had to stop and think about it, then regretted even doing that. Jae’s mouth on mine was an erotic slide into need, and reliving it wasn’t going to make my life easier. I’d felt the tip of his tongue on my teeth, then on my lower lip, his mouth opening wide enough to let me taste him. There was a hint of the cloves he smoked and something promising in his kiss. My body burned where his hands explored my ribs, stroking at my sides as he made soft kitten noises under me. I was surprised at how much happened in those few seconds, and then the cold air between us when I jerked away.

“Yeah, he kissed me back,” I said from behind my hands. “Next thing I knew, I was… you know. Then I left.”

“You’ve got to be the most fucked-up guy I’ve known.” Bobby took a swig from his beer bottle. “And I’m including myself in that. What the hell were you thinking? You should have stayed, and damn the job.”

“It’s his
job
, Bobby. And he needs some room,” I replied. “We’re not… good for each other. He’s some loose idea of what the truth is, and I’m poking around his family and stirring up shit. Not a good way to start a relationship. Wait. Sorry, I forgot. We can’t have a relationship because he’s got to go off and get married soon. Because he’s Korean.”

“Okay, you lost me,” Bobby admitted. “What the hell?”

“No, apparently that’s how it works. You can be gay until a certain point. Then you have to go off and have kids,” I said, turning the bottle around in my hands. “That’s what Hyun-Shik did, and Jae-Min’s probably going to do the same. It’s what they all do. Have to have a kid for the family.”

“And that leads us to his cousin’s bitch-wife, yes?” he mused. “So this kid decided to pull off the rainbow panties and go have a straight het life?”

“Poetic. You should write that down.”

“I’ll jot it down when I write my memoirs.” Shuffling through my notes, Bobby pointed to the now-familiar suicide note. “So who ran you off the road? The sobbing widow?”

“She wasn’t sobbing.” I recalled Victoria’s grief crumbling away under her anger. “Well, she was, but it was as fake as her boobs.”

“You noticed her boobs were fake?” He shook his head, swishing a sip of beer in his mouth, and swallowed. “I worry about you sometimes, Princess.”

“Concentrate less on her breasts and more on why she’d want Hyun-Shik dead,” I said.

“But we don’t know that for sure,” Bobby pointed out.

“No, we don’t,” I agreed. “But that’s as good a place to start as any.”

“Nothing big on the insurance take. Everything goes to the son. It’s a big something, but she can’t touch it.” He dug through the paperwork spread out on the coffee table. “House and finances revert to our dear enhanced-boobie widow. She had money when she came into the marriage, so he’s not that big of a leap on the economic food chain. Our Vicki-girl scored big when her parents died a year ago.”

“I checked that out. They were in a car accident in Italy. I don’t think she had anything to do there.” I checked the notes I’d gotten from Mike. “Hyun-Shik made out better in the marriage. Her dad was connected, and the Kims’ law firm benefited from that.”

“You said something about a guy. That family friend.” Bobby sat back, leaving his beer bottle on the table. “He could have done Hyun-Shik to get him out of the way and make time with the wife.”

“Who says ‘make time’ anymore?” I asked.

“I’m old. Cut me some slack.” He reached across the space between us and jabbed me in the chest with his index finger. “We’ve got the friend who’s sniffing around her. Maybe he took care of Hyun-Shik with Jin-Sang’s help, then scratched him off next?”

“So it was him in the van?” The couch cushions let go a sigh of air when I leaned back into them. There were times when I wished I had a dog. Right about now, scratching a Labrador’s wide head would go a long way in the thinking process. Glancing over at Bobby, I guessed he’d draw the line at that kind of affection.

“This would have been easier if you actually saw the guy.”

“Sorry, I was busy trying to stay on the road, and then I got kind of consumed with knocking him out of commission,” I replied. “It was bad enough being rescued by a hippie chick in a sports car.”

“Takes all kinds in California,” Bobby reminded me. “What’s the friend’s name?”

“Give me a minute,” I said, scrambling through my half-assed notes. “Brian Park. Works for Papa Kim’s law firm. Hyun-Shik was his boss, but Brian assured me that they were all buddy-buddy.”

“Buddy-buddy as in fumbling in the closet together?” Bobby’s eyebrows crawled up his forehead and wiggled at me with a lewd shuffle.

“I don’t know. I don’t think so.” Park hadn’t seemed to have it for his dead boss, but I’d been wrong before. “He seemed to be more interested in patting Victoria’s hand than sobbing after Hyun-Shik. He did say the gay thing was a shock, or words thereof.”

“So not so close friends that he knew our boy was dipping himself into other guys,” Bobby mused. “What about the cousin? The one you have the hots for? Are we sure that Hyun-Shik wasn’t doing him?”

“Jae wasn’t seeing his cousin.” If I didn’t know better, I’d have said I was becoming territorial. From the look on Bobby’s face, he seemed to share my opinion. “Sorry, it’s been a rough day.”

“Yeah, what with being run off the road and getting some.”

“We’re back to that, then,” I said slowly. I was getting tired of the people around me who seemed very willing to toss that last handful of dirt onto Rick’s grave. “I’m still working through this shit. I don’t appreciate my friends sticking their faces into my business.”

“Yeah, we’re back to that.” With a nod, Bobby squared his shoulders, preparing for a fight that I knew I was going to lose. He went gentle with his next ripping off of mental bandages, but the sensation was no less painful. “Rick’s not coming back, Cole. I already told you, it doesn’t have to be forever with this Jae kid, but hell, it’s something. I don’t think Rick would expect you to spend your entire life alone.”

“Depends on how generous he was feeling at the time.” I laughed, mostly to blot out the sorrow choking my throat, but also because, while I loved him, Rick wasn’t the easiest person in the world to get along with. But he purred like a kitten when stroked the right way, just like Jae had when I’d held him against the couch and sucked on his mouth.

“Did you ever talk to someone? I mean, since the shooting?” Bobby pried carefully, edging closer.

“Like a shrink?” My laugh this time was much more bitter. “Yeah, the department sent one as soon as I woke up. He wanted to make sure I didn’t go on some revenge rampage against other cops.”

“No, about Rick.” The verbal jab was as sharp as his finger, poking at healed-over scars. “Your brother, maybe?”

“Dude, Mike wants to hear about my sex life as much as you want to hear about his,” I responded. There was a burning along the edges of my eyes, and I pressed my lips together, biting at the inside of my cheek. We were getting too close to things I avoided, and despite my brotherly affection for Bobby, I didn’t want to tumble into some crying jag. “I don’t want to talk about Rick. He’s gone and buried someplace his family guards like it’s the Hope diamond. I can’t even fucking visit him there. They even took the goddamn dog.”

“Okay,” he agreed. “Then how about Ben?”

“Jesus fucking Christ, Bobby!” I was across the room before I knew it. The table lay on its side, and the paper stacks we’d pulled apart were on the floor, flat victims of my anger. I wasn’t prepared for Bobby’s feint, but then I never am. Stuttering, I struggled to regain my mind and failed. “Why the hell would I want to talk about Ben?”

“You talk about missing Rick, but you never talk about Ben,” Bobby said, grabbing at my shirt as I stalked past him. I resisted, but he wrapped the shirt around his fist and pulled, dragging me down onto the couch. Staring down at me sprawled out next to him, Bobby patted my chest, unerringly finding the knots of tissue under my clothes. “You lost two people you cared about that night. Maybe you don’t need to talk about Rick as much as you should talk about Ben.”

“I can’t.” It was hard to admit pain, even to someone like Bobby. While I was busy fighting for my life, Ben’s life was bleeding out in the front seat of the car we often bantered in. His body was being interred, and Rick’s brains were already being washed off by the infrequent Los Angeles rains before I woke up from my coma. “Bobby, I don’t have anything to say. What the hell can I say?”

“It’s okay to miss him, you know.”

“Rick?” I was confused. Upside down and staring at the ceiling, I felt like I did when I woke up in the hospital room amid beeping machines and a squishy tube looped down the nasal passage Mike hadn’t broken when we were kids.

“Not Rick. Ben.” Bobby’s hand on my stomach moved in small circles. “It’s okay to miss him. You were with him longer than you were with Rick. Hell, you spent more time with Ben.”

“It’s not okay,” I replied. Broken bits of guilt were surfacing, flotsam I’d shoved into a river of grief to avoid looking at them. “How the hell is it okay to miss him after what he did to me? After what he did to Rick? How the hell do I even give him that much of myself? Huh?”

My face hurt, the skin over my cheeks drawn tight as I lay on Bobby. In my mind, I could see Ben’s face, laughing at something stupid I’d said as we wandered the streets, looking for something or other. My memories with Rick were too entangled with images of Ben, his face popping up in pictures of backyard barbeques or at a football game, all of us drunk off our asses and grinning like the idiots that we were.

“He never told me why,” I choked out. “Fucking son of a bitch never even left a note.”

Bobby prodded again, fearless as he walked on the fractured ice of my heart. “What would you want it to say?”

“Something.” Frustrated, I sat up, scrubbing at the drying tears on my face. “Fuck, anything, Bobby. You know, something that would make some sense of all this shit.”

I didn’t hear what Bobby said under the ring of my cell phone. Since I’d already spoken to Mike, I let it go, waiting for it to go into voice mail, when he grabbed it, holding the damned thing for me to answer.