Dirty Laundry (33 page)

Across from me, Bobby smirked and jerked his head toward the archway again. I snarled a silent no at him and cut my stiff hand down, telling him to stay put. If James had a clear shot, he’d probably take it, killing both of us if he could. The water spray arched toward me again, and I ducked before tossing another question at James.

“Why now? If you’re so pissed off at him, why not just kill him? Why go after innocent people like your sister?”

“Vivian? She was never my sister. My mother gave her everything, a family back home, money and education, and what did she become? A whore. She was so much of a slut she fucked her own brother.” James’s fury escalated, and he sounded like he was popping a vein. “It was never enough for her. Why didn’t she go to that faggot father of hers for money? It was bad enough she ruined my family in Korea. She had to come here to get between me and my mother?”

“So you went after Gyong-Si’s kids?” It was a stretch of the imagination by anyone’s logic. Claudia told me once, sometimes it doesn’t pay to argue with crazy, but in this case, I needed to argue. Anything to buy us time to distract him. “That doesn’t make any sense!”

“It would have been too easy if I just killed the whore. Gyong-Si deserves more than that.” Another loud crunch of mulch sounded next to me, and Bobby’s grimace deepened.

Holding his hands up a few feet apart, he tried to tell me how far away James was to my hiding place, then pantomimed jumping with his closed fists. I nodded, hoping Bobby was telling me James was hopscotching around the courtyard, probably to avoid stepping directly into the punishing blast of the high-powered sprinklers.

“I wanted him to know what it’s like for his family—every damned child he’s ever made—to be taken from him. Just like what he did to us back in Korea. My father left us because of him. And don’t worry, I’ll deal with Gyong-Si last.”

I didn’t know if that meant he’d already killed Terry Yi or still had the kid on his hit list. Even if Terry were dead, there was still Abby and Hong Chul. Bobby and I needed to get out of there and take James down with us.

A thin river of blood ran down Bobby’s arm, and he’d begun to shiver uncontrollably. Huffing to control his breathing, he turned over onto his side, tucking himself farther under the bush to get away from the sprinkler heads pointing straight at him. The water was pooling up around my feet, and small bits of foamy mulch were floating around the sides of my Doc Martens.

My boots.

They were black leather and hefty, meant to take a pounding. I’d worn them while doing the renovations to the house, and they’d shrugged off hammers and power tools being dropped on them. Once, after a two-mile hard run to chase down a runaway I’d been hired to find, I actually took them off because it was easier to walk without their weight. Steel-toed and thick-soled, they were as heavy as shit.

They were going to have to do.

I quickly yanked them off, then hastily pulled at the shoestrings until I had enough hanging to knot them together. Using the tree trunk for cover, I crept up to my feet and called out to James. “Tell you what, how about if we talk about this?”

I looked at Bobby and pointed behind me, hoping he could tell me where James was. The tips of his fingers were nearly bleached white, and the beds of his nails were a sickly blue. A smear of blood covered his hand, and a trickle of red ran down his wrist toward his elbow. He was bleeding too much for a flesh wound, and his arm shook when he held up two fingers then made an
L
before pointing behind me.

“Why don’t you come out so I can shoot you?” James’s sneer leaked through his voice. “I’m pretty sure I’ve already killed your friend.”

“Like you killed Darren Shim?” I could sneer back with the best of them. “Nice how you killed him so no one could trace Vivian’s shooting back to you.”

“That asshole came to her office! I had to get rid of him. He was going to hurt her.”

It was easy to put together now I had the missing piece. He’d probably run into Shim when Hong Chul was around. From what little I knew about Shim, he’d gladly have done some dirty work for cash. I wasn’t going to waste any tears crying over a man who shot up a café and killed a defenseless woman, but he probably hadn’t known he was walking into his own death trap. If James hadn’t bashed Shim’s head in then, he still would have killed his hired gun later to cover his tracks.

I wasn’t graceful. Other guys brag about how they pounce on a guy during a fight, and they make it sound like a ballet. The only ballet I could have been accused of doing was the “Dance of the Hours,” and I was a pink-tutu-wearing hippo named Hyacinth. Still, at least I had some element of surprise when I stumbled out from my hiding place swinging my jury-rigged nunchucks.

One caught James across the throat and slapped the back of his head. He pitched forward, nearly doing a face-plant into the mulch. He grabbed a handful of the bark chips and flung them at my face, trying to blind me. They were too wet to do much more than fall a few inches from his outstretched arm, but James unknowingly gave me an opening.

I didn’t spend time in the boxing ring with Bobby for exercise. Since the only person I’d ever gotten into a real fist fight with had been my brother Mike, I’d thought it would be good to learn how to actually punch. JoJo was a good teacher. Bobby was a good opponent, and the various men who’d ducked under the ropes to go a few rounds with me never gave me any quarter. So I felt pretty confident that I could hit… and hit hard. After rearing back my arm, I laid one out, planting my curled fist into the middle of James’s face. He reeled back, his head bouncing on his neck in a loose bobble, and I got a satisfying crunching noise and a fountain of blood streaming out of his nose.

He also dropped the gun.

I wasn’t going to waste time going for the Beretta. I didn’t know where it had landed, and James was standing right in front of me. Kicking up as much mulch with my feet as I could to hide its whereabouts, I moved in, intent on doing some damage with my bare fists. With more than a few inches and about forty pounds on the guy, it wasn’t going to be much of a fair fight unless he had some martial arts moves I didn’t know about. From the way he threw his arms up to protect the top of his head, I was safe.

The trick to hitting someone effectively is putting weight behind each punch and having a good, firm stance. My problem was I couldn’t really feel my feet, and my arms were deadened from the icy water. I was slower than I’d have liked, and the mulch slipped around under me. The fight was still more mine to lose, but I was going to have to work for it.

James swung at my head, an open-palm slap I would normally have avoided easily if I wasn’t frozen down to the marrow of my bones. The smack of skin against skin was something I preferred to have happen in the bedroom, and only with a naked, sweaty Jae-Min. James’s ill-aimed cuff brought me no pleasure. Only a ringing sound when his cupped palm forced a burst of chilled air into my ear canal.

The rush of pressure against my eardrum hurt more than the slap, and I bit back a grunt of pain. James floundered, losing his footing. He made a grab for something to steady himself, then screamed when the palm’s serrated trunk dug into his hand. It wasn’t the best distraction, but I was going to make the most of it.

I tackled James at the knees, wrapping my arms up around his midsection. We went down into a bunch of shrubs, shaking out a shower of tiny purple flowers. He fought me, punching at my shoulders to get free. Hooking my legs around his thighs, I heaved up and drew back, blocking one of his flails with my arm. He struck at me a few more times before I found an opening I could take.

That’s when I broke his nose again, driving as many bone shards up into his sinuses as I could.

Concentrating on his face, I hammered at James’s cheekbones and jaw. His nails scored lines into my neck during one of his passes, and the cold air bit into my now burning skin, leaving behind a painful sting. The blood on James’s face splattered, then ran when a blast of water hit us from one of the churning sprinkler heads. The spray caught me unawares, tearing into my mouth. It tasted nasty and with a suspicious iron-metallic aftertaste that had me wondering if I’d torn my lip. I spat out the foul water, and James struck back, delivering a soft punch to my side. I would have laughed off the strike, but when he punched again, a searing pain erupted across my ribs and I caught a flash of glittering metal in his hand.

He must have had the knife in his pocket. Only a few inches long, it was a wide, strong steel, easily cutting through my soaked shirt and into my side. Grinning up at me with a maniacal smirk, he dug his elbow into the ground and twisted the blade, catching its tip on my ribs. The pain was intense, and I doubled over, nearly puking from the ache coiling around my abdomen. I rolled off, taking the blade with me. Clutching at the hilt, I was trying to pull it free when I heard a gun blast echo through the courtyard.

Tensed, I curled up onto myself, quickly working through the numbness and pains I already had. A moment later, Bobby’s hand yanked my sliced shirt up and pressed against the deep, bleeding cut on my side. A few feet away, James Bahn lay still and pale. There was no mistaking the stippling of gunpowder on his skin. At some point during our fight, Bobby’d found the gun and fired it, nearly point-blank, into James’s neck.

“Is he dead?” I coughed, and my wound leaked, the flaps of skin gulping like a dying goldfish.

“Don’t know,” Bobby grunted at me, pressing harder on the cut. “Don’t care. Probably. Now shut up. I’ve got to get you to stop bleeding.”

To tell the truth, he didn’t look much better than James. The cold had set its hooks in deep, and I was pretty sure we’d lose a toe or two from frostbite. Bobby hooked his arm under me and dragged me out of the landscaping. Not stopping until we were in the relative safety of the dry stairwell, he gripped my shoulders and stared me down.

“What the fuck is it with you and crazies? It’s like you’re not happy unless someone insane is chasing you down.” He wrung his shirt out as much as he could and used it to staunch my wound. The hit he’d taken from James’s gun looked like it’d taken a chunk of meat out of his arm, and it began to bleed freely now that we were out of the deluge. “Think you can stay out of trouble long enough for me to go get my phone and call 911?”

“Out of trouble, sure.” I grinned up at him, probably looking stupid from the pain. “Hey! One good thing—”

“What the fuck could be good about this?” Bobby growled, grabbed my hand, and put it firmly on the damp shirt to hold it in place. “You tell me, Princess… what the fucking hell can be good about this shit?”

Pointing at the knife wound in my side, I replied, “At least I didn’t get shot this time.”

B
Y
THE
end of the next afternoon, I was sucking down handfuls of ibuprofen and wishing I’d taken the doctor’s offer of painkillers. Hearing me hiss in anguish for the twentieth time that day, Claudia gave me the evil eye over her granny glasses and pursed her mouth.

“You’re going to kill your liver there, boy.” Mo looked up at her, and she shooed him back to his studying. “Not you, the idiot over here.”

“I’m fine. Really,” I lied.

It ached a little bit, but I wasn’t going to let the slight pain bother me. Or so I told my manly self. The knife went in a bit sideways, and other than a bone nick and minor muscle damage, it was mostly okay. I’d had worse. Hell, I’d have taken worse if it meant Bobby escaped unscathed, but I didn’t and he hadn’t. From the way he’d bitched at the emergency room when they’d begin poking him a local sedative, someone would have thought he’d been gutted by a Tyrannosaurus rex instead of getting a 9 mm slug into the meat of his upper arm.

Three hours of his complaining, and when the doctor announcing the inevitable overnight stay to watch his vitals turned it into a full-blown typhoon of rage, I played the coward and let Claudia take a verbal strap to his ass.

“Besides—” I smirked back at her, rocking back in my office chair. “Why do you keep coming in when the doctor told you not to? You got shot, you know.”

“Boy—” Claudia inhaled hard, and I braced myself. Mo stepped in to save my ass, once more reminding me that one did not poke a simmering dragon with a look that clearly assessed me for mental stability and found me wanting.

“Nana, it’s time to go. We’ve got to get going if we’re making dinner at Uncle Mace’s.” His backpack was already bulging with electronics and books. She huffed, and I slipped him a twenty, mouthing a thank you behind Claudia’s broad back. He palmed it like a pro, tucking it into his jeans pocket while I handed Claudia her cane.

Then dodged when she tried to hit me with it.

“Hah!” I almost stuck my tongue out, but she caught me with her backswing, smacking my calf. “Shit!”

“Don’t think I can’t beat you down, Cole McGinnis.” Claudia shook her cane head at my nose. “Mo, help me down the stairs before I stay here and knock some sense into this man.”

Detective Dexter Wong was climbing the steps when I opened the door for Claudia. He was sporting a new haircut, shorn nearly down to his scalp on the sides with a pouf of chunky spikes on top. It looked a little silly on him, but by the way he strutted up the stairs and gave Claudia a jaunty wave, I figured I couldn’t really give him shit about it. The gray polyester jacket, however, was fair game.