Kim Oh 2: Real Dangerous Job (The Kim Oh Thrillers) (12 page)

“You don’t understand.” I couldn’t see him or anything else in front of me. “There was this guy . . . an older guy . . . at McIntyre’s company.” For some reason, the memory came up before my eyes. “He was already working there when I started. He ran the mail room or something. I’m not sure what. But he was a real nice guy. Kind of quiet. He and I used to talk.” I wiped my nose with my sleeve, then went on. “He’d never done anything in his whole life. Just went to work, then came home, then went to work again the next day. Except one time. He saved up his money and quit whatever job he’d been working then, just so he could go overseas and hike around Northern England and Scotland for six weeks. Why there, I don’t know. He told me it was just what he wanted to do. But the thing was, he’d never even flown in an airplane before. This was the first time.” I could hear the guy quietly speaking inside my head. “And something happened when the plane took off. He’s sitting there, crammed into his little economy seat, and one of the engines blows out. And the plane starts to go down. And he can see out the window next to him, the plane’s tilting to one side, and he can see the ground coming up at them. And you know what he thought? What he told me?”

Cole didn’t say anything, but just sat and listened.

“The guy thought,
At least I got this far
. That’s what he thought.
At least I got this far
. And he was so happy. Happier than he’d ever been in his whole life. And then the pilot got the engine started again, the plane leveled off, and everything was fine. But it would’ve been fine, anyway.”

I nodded slowly, thinking about the rest of the story.

“Then he left,” I said. “Left the company, I mean. He quit. McIntyre got on his ass about something, some petty bullshit, and he just said that was it, and he left. Went down the elevator and out the building lobby. And I liked him so much – I mean I liked talking to him – that I ran after him and caught up with him out on the street. I asked him what he was going to do now. He smiled and told me that he was just going to keep on walking. As far as he could. And see where he got to.”

I could see Cole fiddling with his cigarette pack on top of the table, pushing it with his finger.

“I’m sorry.” I rubbed my eyes. “I talk too much. It’s just . . . I can still see him, walking down the street. And I wanted to go with him. And I didn’t.”

My hands laid themselves flat on the table. I must’ve looked a mess by now.

“All right,” said Cole. “We’ll do it.”

“Really?” I looked up hopefully at him.

In this world, that’s what counts as hope anymore. If you’re lucky, if you win the lottery, you get to kill somebody and maybe get killed yourself. It’s something, at least.

“Sure.” Cole picked up his cigarettes and tucked them inside his jacket. Getting ready to leave. “Why not? But –”

My breath caught in my throat.

“Remember I asked you something? About what else you wanted to do?”

I nodded. “You wanted to know if it mattered to me. If I was still alive afterward.”

“What’s your answer now?”

“I don’t know.”

“Okay,” he said. “That’s good enough.”

* * *

Later, after I had gotten Cole downstairs to the van and taken him back to the warehouse, I thought about it some more. Lying on the couch, with the blanket pulled up to my neck, gazing at the ceiling.

Not about what I wanted. But about that bit with him telling me that he was pulling the plug on the whole thing.

He’d probably been gaming me. I realized that now. Running a number on me. The kind of thing that somebody like him did, to get somebody like me where I needed to be.

I didn’t mind. At least I was there.

I picked up the shiny .357 from where I had set it down beside the couch. With my eyes closed, gripping the gun tight in both hands, I pressed its smooth, cold flank fiercely against my breast.

PART TWO

They’re right when they say that fear is a man’s best friend. As long as it’s the other guy’s.

– Cole’s Book of Wisdom

TWELVE

I pissed Cole off.

By getting out to his place late the next day. Something came up in the morning, that I had to deal with.

I was still pulling myself together, getting dressed and stuff, when my cell phone rang.

“I’m trying to get hold of someone named
Kim Oh
.” The woman’s voice emphasized the last two words, the way people do when they’re calling a number they never have before. “Is this her?”

“Who’s asking?” I had gotten a lot more cautious these days. I supposed it came with the territory.

“This is Karen Ibanez.”

The TV reporter. I wasn’t completely happy about her getting hold of me. I wouldn’t even have cared whether she had remembered me or not, from when I had come to see her at the TV station, carrying along with me the binder full of backup disks that I’d thought would nail McIntyre’s hide to the wall. And which she had set me straight about.

“Okay,” I said. “You’re talking to me. What do you want?”

“I need to talk to you.”

“I told you – you already are.”

“Don’t screw around with me, Kim.” Her voice turned hard. “This is important.”

That didn’t make it much different from everything else that was going on.

“How important?”

“Important,” Ibanez said, “as in
your ass is in big trouble
important.”

“Tell me something new.”

“Okay. How about important as in
you blew up a bunch of people downtown yesterday
. Does that sufficiently ring your chimes?”

“Oh.”

That hadn’t taken long. I didn’t know how she made the connection between me and the explosion, but if she had, the police might be able to as well.

“So . . . should we talk? Your call, Kim.”

Or maybe she was the only one with a clue. That was her job, after all – to figure out stuff like this. And she’d met me before, knew who I was. The police probably didn’t even know I existed.

I glanced over at where my backpack was sitting on the couch. I knew it’d be heavy when I picked it up. From the weight of the loaded .357 inside it.

“Sure,” I said. “Let’s talk.”

* * *

I met her at the coffee shop she’d given me the directions to. Blocks away from where Braemer and his equipment-dealer friends had gone up. The way street traffic was back to normal, people on the sidewalks going about their business, you wouldn’t have guessed that there was a corner nearby that was just a blackened hole in the concrete, with construction barriers set up around it.

Ibanez was inside already, in one of the booths. I saw her through the coffee shop window as I leaned the motorcycle onto its kickstand. I strapped my helmet to the seat and went on in.

“You want anything?” She had a half-drained latte in front of her. “My treat.”

“Just a decaf.” I set my backpack down on the booth seat beside me. “I’ve been drinking so much regular coffee lately, I’m about ready to explode. So to speak.”

“That’s because of the people you’ve been hanging around with lately.” She slid out of the booth. “They’re a little over-caffeinated.”

I didn’t ask her what she meant by that. A couple minutes later, she came back and set a Styrofoam cup in front of me.

“How did you get my phone number?” All the way over here, I had been wondering that.

“It was written inside that binder.” She sipped at her drink. “That one with all those backup disks inside it. I wrote the number down when you weren’t looking.” She gave a thin smile. “That’s the kind of thing that people like me do.”

“Okay.” I wrapped my hands around my cup. “So what do people like you want to talk to people like me about?”

“Nothing much –”

“That’s not what you said on the phone.”

“Well, let’s just see if it’s anything big or not.” She dug into the Coach shoulder bag on the bench beside her. “Take a look at this.”

She brought out one of those shiny black tablets, not an iPad, but something smaller. I’d been saving up to get Donnie something like that for Christmas. She switched it on and began poking at its glossy screen with a red-polished fingernail.

“You watch the news yesterday?” She didn’t look up at me, just went on finding what she wanted on the tablet.

“Some of it.”

“Big explosion,” she said. “Right over there.”

“So I heard.” I took a sip of my coffee. “Sounded like not-nice people – I mean the ones it happened to.”

“They weren’t Boy Scouts.” She swiveled the tablet around on the table and pushed it toward me. “Any time something like that happens, especially downtown, the station gets videos in the email. People take them with their cell phones and send them to us. Sometimes they’re interesting. Like this one.”

Another poke and a video started playing on the tablet screen. I leaned over it to watch.

It looked like it’d been taken with a cell phone, shaky and not the greatest resolution. But it was still a pretty clear shot of the corner where Braemer had met up with his dealer friends. They weren’t visible anymore – there was just the post-fireball wreckage scattered about, and the black smoke piling up into the sky.

At least that was what could be seen in the distance. The person who’d used their cell phone to take the video must have been a couple of blocks away, looking along the traffic stalled in the street. There was something closer, though, right at one side of the shot.

A girl wearing a plain white helmet, sitting on top of a motorcycle. She had the helmet’s visor pushed up, so she could hold her own cell phone up to her head –

It was me.

In the video playing on the tablet screen, I could be seen lowering the phone in my hand and gazing stunned at what had just happened down the street. Then hurriedly stuffing the phone into my jacket, turning the motorcycle around and gunning myself away as fast as possible.

“Interesting, huh?” Ibanez reached over and stopped the video with another fingernail poke. “Though I suppose it could be just a coincidence that you were there when it happened.”

“How do you know it was me?” I tried playing the Asian card. “Don’t we all look alike to you?”

“On the same motorcycle, that I looked out of the TV station’s window and saw you riding? Now you’re stretching it.”

I had to think about this. My brain felt as if it were revving up, but not getting anywhere, like whenever I flubbed a gear shift on the Ninja.

“Okay,” I said after a moment. “Maybe I was there when it happened. So what?”

“Well, let’s think about this, Kim. The way somebody like me thinks about it. You come to a TV station and talk to a reporter, telling me how much you want to get back at McIntye for the way he fired your ass. I gotta say it – you came across a little strange. Especially when you found out that the way you’d thought you were going to be able to get back at him wasn’t happening.” She tapped the edge of her cup with a fingertip. “Disappointed people . . . sometimes they do some crazy things. Things you normally wouldn’t expect them to.”

“Like blow people up?” I leaned back in the booth. “Why would I blow those people up instead of McIntyre?”

“Beats the heck out of me. But they were people – at least a couple of them – who had connections to McIntyre. Business dealings. Given that you used to keep his accounts, I would’ve thought you knew that.”

She had me there. Maybe not to Braemer, but I was actually pretty sure I’d made out checks to some of his equipment dealer friends.

“So those are some pretty intriguing pieces, Kim. You’ve got something going on inside your head, about wanting to do something to McIntyre. And you’re there when people he knows go up in smoke.” Ibanez shrugged. “Maybe those things hook up, maybe they don’t. What do you think?”

“I think maybe you’d better back off.”

“Ooh. Very scary.” She smiled. “You know, you’re a lot different from the girl who came and talked to me at the station. As makeovers go, this is wild.”

“You don’t know the half of it.”

“Let me give you some public relations advice, Kim. When you talk all spooky and weird like that, you’re not exactly convincing me there’s nothing going on. When somebody like me hears somebody tell them to back off, that’s pretty much confirmation that whatever’s going on, it’s worth snooping into.”