Dirty Secret (10 page)

“Whiskey’s food. It’s like oatmeal. Sort of,” I protested as I twisted off the black plastic cap. “I’m Irish. We drink whiskey when shit happens.”

“I’m Korean. We eat.” He leaned against me, then held his can out. “I’ll try being Irish. I don’t think I can eat.”

“If you really want to be Irish, you’d drink from the bottle and then pretend to sip the Coke as a chaser.” I poured about half a shot of Jack into the can. “Let’s start you off slow.”

I drank from the bottle, leaving the other Coke on the nightstand. The whiskey burned the sides of my mouth, and I swallowed, letting the fire hit my belly. Moving up to sit against the headboard, I held Jae’s soda can so he could climb over my leg and nest between my thighs, leaning his back against my chest. We sat there quietly, my left hand lying on Jae’s belly while the right remained curled around the whiskey bottle. After Jae finished his drink, he took the Jack Daniel’s from me and took a sip, gasping at the rawness in his mouth.

“That’s….” He coughed, hard. “I drink soju, and I think
that
stuff’s nasty.”

“Keep drinking until it tastes good,” I suggested, kissing his temple. “Then you stop. Unless you want to be really Irish, and then you keep drinking until you start telling everyone you love them.”

Jae swallowed another sip and handed the bottle back to me. Leaning his head back, he stared up at my face and said, “It was shitty… what happened today. It was really shitty.”

“Yeah, it was,” I agreed. There was nothing else to do but agree. We left the house with no idea who did the shooting or if there’d been any reason for it.

I knew how that felt too.

Really
fucking shitty.

“I feel like….” Jae murmured softly. “I feel like it’s all connected to me. All these people dying. Like there’s a thread or something going through me, and people I touch die. Hyun-Shik. Jin-Sang. Brian. Victoria. And now Helena. I know it sounds stupid. I didn’t
do
anything. It’s just… so many… so close to me.”

I wasn’t going to tell him it wasn’t his fault. Nothing I said or did would take that feeling of dread from his chest. I would only be able to hold him when the nightmares hit.

Only fair. He did it for me.

“You know what’s going through my head?” The skin on his belly was soft, and I traced his stomach muscles with my fingertips as I spoke. “Why Helena? She’s what… twenty-four… twenty-five? Why go out of your way to kill her? What could she have done?”

“I don’t know. She was… nice?” Jae shrugged. “I didn’t spend a lot of time with her. Just about an hour, talking about what kind of photos she and David wanted. She wasn’t very… complicated.”

Coming from the king of complicated, I took that to mean she was a nice girl, but dim. “So David was the brain trust?”

“I suppose,” he said, taking the bottle from me. His sips were getting more daring, and he swallowed the whiskey with a practiced ease. We’d be working through the rest of it if we weren’t careful. “He’s a lawyer. I think he’s going to work for
hyung
.”

“And we’re back to the incest,” I grumbled. “You guys kind of scare me. It’s like a syndicate or cult. Very much you scratch my back, and I’ll wash yours.”

“How do you think I get most of my jobs?” He snorted. “And it’s not like they’re the yakuza. Mostly they’re…
chaebol
.” My look of confusion must have been epic, because he rolled his eyes at me. “
Chaebol
… they’re families… rich families. What’s the word for it? Dynasties, I guess. They marry each other, have their own rules
. Hyung
’s family is powerful. So is Kwon’s. Jae-Su could have worked for
hyung
’s family in San Francisco, but he’s too….”

Jae’s shrug was enough. His brother was useless.

Suddenly, other things made sense. Jae’s living with his richer cousins, the Kims, when he was thirteen or fourteen, only to be turned out when Hyun-Shik’s mother blamed him for her son’s homosexuality. He’d lost more than a place to live after Hyun-Shik seduced him… he’d also lost the chance to elevate his family to those rarified circles.

I began to hate Jae’s aunt even more than I had before. And in my own quaint, philosophical way, expressed my disgust by saying, “Your aunt so fucked you over. What a fucking bitch.”

“You’re smarter when you’re drunk.” Jae slurred slightly, and I grinned at him. “You’ve only now caught on?”

“You just explained that whole… gerbil thing.
Now
it makes sense.”

“
Chaebol
.” He was patient with me, especially when I slaughtered his language. “But killing Helena still doesn’t make sense.”

“Someone hate the Kwon… family thing?” I suggested. “Enough to shoot… someone?”

“It would make more sense if you said someone hated
hyung
’s family, but Helena was the one who died, not David. The Kwons have a lot of money, but the Seongs have more power… they’re older… have more… everything. Unless they killed her to hurt him, but he’s not… David doesn’t have any weight in the family yet. He’s too young.”

“Hold up, how does that make sense?” Either the whiskey was too strong for my brain, or I was missing something. “How does Seong count in this?”

“His family has more influence.” Jae removed the bottle from my hand and drank. I’d nearly upended it on the covers, so I didn’t mind when he held onto it. “Remember? David’s mother is
hyung
’s sister. She’s a Seong. Dae-Hoon’s a Park. His family has money, but not as much as the Seongs.”

“So Dae-Hoon married into the Seong…
chaebol
,” I tried the word out. It couldn’t have been too bad, because the eye roll he gave me was slight. I sat up, suddenly a lot more sober than I wanted to be. Jae grunted at being shoved forward, and grumbled again when I reached for my notebook to write down my thoughts. “And his sons… if Dae-Hoon had been around, they’d have been…
tainted
… by being connected to him, right?”

“Yes, but Dae-Hoon’s been gone for years, and they were raised by the Seongs.” He frowned. “Shin-Cho and David weren’t touched by what Dae-Hoon did. Well, until Shin-Cho… what he did was stupid. Now people are talking about Dae-Hoon again, and saying his sons are like him. It might affect David too, especially since he stood by his brother.”

“I’ll bet you that’s it,” I said. “You say family’s everything for you. It would be for someone like Dae-Hoon too. I don’t think he died, Jae.”

“Then what happened to him?”

“I think he walked away,” I said, kissing the tip of my lover’s nose. “They would have fucked him over, like they did you… like they did your family. I don’t think he would risk that. You once told me Koreans live for the generation after them. It makes sense for Dae-Hoon to not want that for his kids. It would kill him to have his sons suffer like that. I saw photos of him with his kids. He loved them. I think he walked away so his sons could grow up without his… shame… affecting them.”

I hugged him, jostling the Jack Daniel’s bottle he still held to his chest. Jae protested a bit, then grumbled more when I took the bottle and set it on the nightstand with my notebook. Tumbling him onto his back, I covered Jae with my body, stretching out to capture him under me.

“I think Dae-Hoon might still be alive,
agi
.” I kissed him, tasting the whiskey on his tongue. “David might have lost his fiancée, but maybe I can give them back their father. I just need to know where to look.”

Chapter Seven

N
AMING
Los Angeles the City of Angels was a colossal joke, usually perpetrated on the stupid fool who decides to brave the midmorning rush in the special hell that is the 110, 10, and 101 triangle. It was as if Satan looked down on the city and said:
Fuck it, I was an angel. I’m going to piss right on this spot and call it mine.

And damn, did he drink a Big Gulp or something before he took that piss.

I’d left Jae asleep with Neko curled up on my pillow. We’d finished off the bottle of Jack at some point, and lay against each other, just listening to one another breathe. Morning hit with a vengeance, especially since I’d forgotten to pull the drapes closed, and the sun punched me in the face. A few ibuprofen, a bottle of water, and a toothbrush scrubbing later, I felt more human than the throbbing, aching sponge I’d woken up as. A shower and a cup of hot, strong coffee took care of most of the rest of it, and I’d headed out to meet Bobby in the driveway, thankful for the drive-thru Starbucks a few blocks away from my house.

Yes, I had a bunch of independent coffee shops right around me, including the granola-munchers across the street, who I avoided on the principle that they wore tank tops in the summer and didn’t shave their armpits. I couldn’t care less if someone didn’t shave their armpits. Hell, I fucked men. Armpit hair came with the territory. I just objected to it being anywhere near the open end of my cup of coffee.

“There better be fucking gold in that storage locker,” Bobby complained. We’d inched forward for the last fifteen minutes, inhaling exhaust fumes and powdered sugar from the donettes Bobby brought with him. Years of sharing cars with other officers pretty much immunized Bobby against the need for a spotless interior. Anything dropped was vacuumed up or washed off the truck’s leather seat. Mike, on the other hand, had issues with a stray straw wrapper left in his car.

It was sometimes hard for me to remember whose car I could accidentally spill in, and whose I couldn’t. So I ate off a napkin, getting me some strange looks from Bobby.

“Want a bib, Princess?” he finally grunted. “Times like these, I miss having a siren.”

“Why don’t you just lean out the window and scream,” I suggested. “I could even kick you in the balls so you can scream higher.”

“Don’t get smart with me,” Bobby warned with a wide grin. “You’re not too big for me to pull over to the side of the road and spank.”

“I’m not your type,” I reminded him. “I don’t take orders well.”

“True,” he mused, then sobered. “How’s Jae doing? Shit, that kid’s had a rough few months.”

I’d told Bobby about the shooting while we were in the drive-thru. The first thing he asked was if I’d gotten Jae drunk. Second thing was if I’d fucked the unhappy out of him. I reminded him that sex didn’t solve everything, and sometimes what someone needed was to be held. That’s when he accused me of having a vagina, because, for men, sex solved pretty much everything.

“Not as rough as Helena and David.” I added Shin-Cho to that list as well. He’d have to spend a lot of time shoring his brother up. The only good thing about that was he wouldn’t be obsessing about Kwon. “Fucking hell, I don’t know what to say to Jae. He’s carrying around this guilt about people dying around him. I don’t know how to fix what he’s feeling.”

“Well, when you figure it out, you let the rest of us know so we can say it to you,” Bobby replied softly.

I kept quiet. The past couple of months had been rough on me too. I still wrestled with my guilt over Rick’s death and my growing affection for Jae-Min. I had about as many answers as David Park did right now.

“You’re not sticking your head into that mess, are you?” Bobby said suddenly. “With the girl’s death, I mean.”

“Staying as far away from it as possible. The cops have it. What can I do about it?” I debated having another mini-donut. “Look, we’re moving now.”

“About fucking time.” Bobby shifted the truck and consulted the GPS for the fiftieth time. “A mile. We only have a fucking mile to go. Longest damn mile of my life.”

“Spoken like a man who’s never been to Comic-Con.”

“I’ve been to Southern Decadence. Now
that’s
a mile I’d like to get stuck in until the end of time,” he leered at me.

It took us another fifteen minutes to go the final mile to the next off ramp. It might have been the longest mile Bobby ever drove, but it was the longest fifteen minutes of my life listening to him drive it.

The storage place was only a few blocks from the freeway, and we pulled into an empty parking lot. Like most storage places in California, all that was needed to get into the lot and locker was an access code and the key to the lock the renter put on the unit’s rolling metal door. The unit was an interior locker, so Bobby and I spent a few minutes in a cinderblock warren, trying to find where Scarlet put Dae-Hoon’s life.

“Thank God this was inside. Imagine what a bitch it would be to open this if it’d been outside.” Bobby spritzed the lock with graphite and worked the key in. Surprisingly, it released easily, and I pushed the door up, turning my head aside to avoid the dust storm falling down from its metal slats. I didn’t have a lot of faith in the dangling bare bulb turning on, but a flick of the switch surprised me, and the four by four foot unit filled with light.

It was surprising to see how little of Dae-Hoon’s life he’d left behind. After all the clothes were given away and the furniture sold or passed along, only a few boxes of personal items and books were left. There were about ten boxes in the unit, mostly uniform in size, and all marked with the name of a moving company that went out of business almost nine years ago. The cellophane tape holding the box flaps closed had long given up the ghost, turning yellow and brittle, despite the air conditioning pumped through the units.