Dirty Kiss (32 page)

“Nope, that’s it. Just some white girl.” Johnny headed back to work, which to me looked mostly like standing around watching the waiters get the club in shape for opening. Scarlet had disappeared while I was talking to the bouncer, but Jae remained behind, leaning against the bar. He headed over when the other man left the table, carrying the sodas he’d gotten from the cold case.

“Do they know you stole those?” I asked, taking one of the chilled bottles from him.

“You’re welcome.” He sat down in the chair Johnny had vacated. “Did he help?”

“Yeah.” I wiggled the bottle at him. “I’m going to head out, and I’m taking this with me. You going to be okay?”

“I’m with nuna. She has a driver that makes that guy look like he’s a twig.” Jae pointed at Johnny. “I’ll be fine. Where are you going?”

“I think Victoria came here and, with Jin-Sang’s help, killed her own husband.” I told him about the blonde talking with Hyun-Shik, adding the part about Kwang-Sun at the end, and Jae nodded, as if his cousin hitting on a young man was no surprise.

“Do you really think she killed Hyun-Shik?” Jae asked after digesting the information. “She’s a bitch, but a killer? I don’t know, Cole.”

“I didn’t think so at the time, but now, yeah, it looks like it,” I said. “To be fair, Hyun-Shik didn’t seem like a very nice guy.”

“Nice and Hyun-Shik were rarely in the same sentence together,” Jae agreed. “He once told me the only reason I made tips as a dancer was because I had a pretty face, not because I actually could dance.”

“He sounds like an asshole,” I commented. He nodded, sipping at his soda with a delicious pout of his mouth, and I cursed Hyun-Shik for getting himself killed. I thought I’d have enjoyed beating him to death for putting those shadows in Jae’s eyes. “Jae, why do you want to know who killed him? If he was such an asshole, why do you care?”

“Because he’s family,” Jae said, shrugging his shoulders under the shirt he’d stolen from my dresser. “Because he helped me when I didn’t have anywhere else to go. I owe him that at least.”

“He brought you here.” I looked around the room with its worn drapery and the smell of sex lingering in the air. “This wasn’t much of a help.”

“It was something,” he replied. “I thought I was in love with him. Maybe I was then, but Hyun-Shik didn’t love anyone but himself. He was honest about that. Hyung told me from the start that he didn’t love me but he’d help me at least get on my feet. So yes, he was an asshole and a cheat, but considering the rest of the family, how was he going to be any different?”

I had to give Jae that. For all of Hyun-Shik’s faults, he had at least seemed to do what he could to help, first with Jae and then with Brian Park. I found my keys in my pocket and picked up the soda bottle.

“I’ll see you at home,” I said, catching myself before I kissed him goodbye.

Standing, Jae leaned his head back, leaving me a touch of his mouth on mine. Murmuring against my lips, Jae breathed into me, a soft laugh escaping him when I sighed.

“Don’t get shot at or blown up again,” he said, pushing me toward the door. “I’ve got plans for you, hyung. And they don’t include you lying in bed unconscious.”

Personally
, I would have loved to go home with Jae-Min, kick everyone out of my house and see how much my bed could withstand. Or at least how much my bruised-up body could take. It would be a sacrifice, but one I would be willing to make. Instead, I fought my way back down through the canyons and into the depths of Los Angeles’s heat. Despite the sun being down, the inner valleys retained their mugginess, a sweltering stew instead of air that clogged the pores. As the amber lights of the cities flickered on, it caught on the low brown haze, turning the night sky to a deep sienna.

Smog sometimes made for lovely sunsets, but it was hell on the lungs. I was about to take the toll road when my phone buzzed me. Clicking on the headset, I frowned when my brother’s voice bellowed at me from the speaker.

“Where the hell are you?” Mike had never been subtle or one for hellos.

“Hi, Mike,” I chirped back. “How are you?”

“I need you to get your ass back here.” From the sound of my brother’s strained voice, he wasn’t in the mood for any of my usual crap. “Did you talk to Brian Park this afternoon?”

“Yeah. Why?” I took the off-ramp and circled around to get back on the westbound lanes. Avoiding a long-trailer semi, the SUV bounced a bit on the uneven cement freeway, its new tires catching on the grooves ground down to leech rain from the surface. “Did he call you or something?”

“Cops were called out to his apartment about an hour ago, Cole. He was shot in the back of the head.” Mike’s words chilled the warmth Jae had left in my stomach, and I swallowed the sourness rising up my throat. “His secretary told them he canceled his afternoon appointments to meet with you. They want you to come in.”

“Hey, he was alive when we finished,” I protested. “We met at a coffee shop, and then I headed straight down to Dorthi Ki Seu. I couldn’t have killed him.”

“Just get over there. I’ll meet you there.”

“That’ll look good, me bringing my brother with me.” I snorted. “I’ll be fine.”

“Cole, as soon as you open your mouth, you stop being fine,” he replied sharply. “And I’m not going as your brother. Until I get another attorney in, you’re going to have to deal with me. I don’t want you talking to anyone about Brian or what you discussed with him. Not unless I’m in the room.”

“Are they charging me?” I knew better than that, but it was good to poke at my brother’s doomsday predictions. The detectives on the case were following the first thread they hit, regardless of who was on the other end. There was silence on the other end of the phone, and I nodded triumphantly, even though I knew Mike couldn’t see me. “No, they’re not. Mike, you know how this works. I’m going to go in and let them ask their questions. I’ll call you if I run into any problems.”

The dial tone in a headset is a very loud thing, especially when the person on the other end doesn’t have the satisfaction of slamming the receiver down. I anticipated another call from my brother after he paced around his office for a few minutes, so I turned my phone off and headed back into the mess I’d inadvertently left behind me.

Most cop houses have an atmosphere to them. To the general public, it probably looks like everyone is working or scurrying about with something important to do. Things are usually very different if you know what to look for. There’s a sense of desperation and frustration that comes with being a cop. Most of the people a police officer meets on a day-to-day basis really don’t want to see him and will in fact, at times, either run away or possibly even take a shot at him. Murders happen, and robberies seem to come like tidal waves, hitting every few seconds without fail. It’s a good day when someone confesses to killing someone else, and it’s a banner day when there’s a drug bust that takes a serious crimp out of what’s on the street, but for the most part, being a cop means getting used to being a speed bump for a bullet train.

I smelled the frustration first. It rolled off the female detective I was escorted to, her frenetic tapping of a pencil against the side of her desk a strong barometer of which way the storm was blowing. She gave me a quick glance, rifling through a sheaf of papers, and then pointed to a battered metal chair next to her desk.

Detective Dell O’Byrne looked more Latino than Irish. Her long brown hair hung straight down her back, pulled into a queue with a no-nonsense black hair band. Tanned and lean, she had a strong face, high cheekbones, and sharp eyes, nearly as dark as her hair, which took in every detail of my face. I would lay money down that she could describe me to a sketch artist, down to the small scar on my chin. Leaning back, I drank in the chaos around me, watching uniformed officers maneuver handcuffed suspects down a corridor to a detention area.

The detective hung up the phone and turned in her chair, staring at me down her long nose. She was younger than I had initially thought, only a year or so older than I was, but she wore her badge on her skin. If I’d seen Detective O’Byrne on the street, I’d have known she was a cop without even a second glance.

“Cole McGinnis?” Standing, she was nearly my height and had a strong grip. Grabbing a manila folder from her desk, she waved me toward an open door. “Let’s go in there and talk. It’s more private.”

The rectangular room was painted in latter-day drab, the station’s budget running toward faded puke instead of the warm beige that covered most of the walls. A long mirror separated the room from the observation alcove. The light was on behind the glass, and I could see past the one-way mirror into the empty side room. If O’Byrne had suspicions, that light would have been off and the small room would have boasted one or two other cops, each watching me and taking notes.

“Have a seat.” She sat without waiting for me and opened the folder, flipping over the top sheet. I pulled back the heavy chair, sitting down across from her. “Nice bruises you got there on your face, Cole. Did you run into someone who didn’t like you? Maybe Park?”

“Nope.” I tried a grin when she looked up from her papers, but O’Byrne didn’t look impressed. “Someone tried to blow me up. I ended up face first into my front lawn.”

“So I guess that someone doesn’t like you.” Her smile did nothing to make her beautiful, but warmed her face. “Tell me about your meeting with Brian Park.”

I had nothing to gain by hiding anything, not with Park being dead and my one lead on who killed Hyun-Shik resting on the memory of a pissed-off bouncer. Leaning back in the chair, I sketched out my steps, starting with the Kims hiring me to investigate the death of their son and ending with my conversation with Brian at the coffee shop.

“You’ve got a Glock registered to you,” O’Byrne said slowly. “Fire it recently?”

She lifted the folder so I wasn’t able to see anything other than the back fold, its surface doodled over with blue stars and leaves. A few words stood out, part of a grocery list. From what was written, I gathered the detective had a cat and a fondness for hot dogs, but beyond that, I couldn’t read anything from her expression.

“A few times at the range,” I admitted. “Just to keep in practice.”

“People seem to have a difficult time staying alive around you, Mr. McGinnis.” The glint in her eye gave me an uneasy feeling that she was looking for a way to pin something on me, if only to keep me out of the way. “I’ve asked around about you when I found out you’re an ex-cop.”

“I can imagine.” I met her gaze with a steady stare, keeping eye contact until she glanced down at her notes. I didn’t fool myself into thinking I’d intimidated her. I wasn’t sure if she was talking about Jin-Sang Yi and Brian Park or Rick and Ben. Either way, she was right. I didn’t seem to be a good luck charm for the people around me.

“Did you go to that coffee shop with the intention to blackmail Brian Park? Maybe to kill him?” I couldn’t have been more surprised unless O’Byrne had punched me in the face. She waited until I finished choking on my own spit, leaning back in her chair. “It’s not an unreasonable question, McGinnis.”

“Money isn’t a problem for me,” I reminded her. “If you asked around about me, you’d know that. I went to talk to him about Hyun-Shik Kim. I told you that already. There’s no reason for me to want Brian Park dead.”

“Park was killed up close with something pretty powerful.” She slid a photograph over toward me, and my eyes caught on the splash of red on the bright white of Brian’s shirt. “You own a Glock 23. That kind of gun can do this to a man, especially up close.”

There was not much left of Brian’s face except for the ridge of his nose and parts of his jaw. The exit wounds took off most of his cheekbone and blood pooled around the shredded edges of his torn skin. He lay on a short blue carpet, speckles of spit dried on what was left of his lower lip. It looked like someone had emptied the entire clip into his head, and I forced myself to look away, closing my eyes against the memories I knew would soon overwhelm me.

“Do you need a minute, Mr. McGinnis?” I barely heard O’Byrne over my breathing, a patent concern laid thinly over the steel in her voice.