Kim Oh 2: Real Dangerous Job (The Kim Oh Thrillers) (15 page)

At least the company had paid for the cab fare back then. So there was at least that much that McIntyre didn’t owe me.

From the gates, I could look up the winding drive to the house. I didn’t see McIntyre’s limo parked out front. Or Michael’s car. Hard to tell what that meant. McIntyre might still be there, but with the limo parked in the garage. But before, when I had dropped off those financial reports, there had always been either Michael’s car or one of the company’s other vehicles there, sometimes with a couple of the other security guys still in it.

I pushed the button on the intercom box. I was in luck. I got McIntyre’s housekeeper.

“Manuela – hi!” I put on as much of a cheerful voice as I had anymore. “This is Kim. From the office. Remember me?”

“Oh, sure.” Her voice crackled over the intercom’s speaker. “How you doing,
mi hija?
You haven’t been by in a while.”

She and I had hit it off before. Probably because in a house like that, I’d been the friendliest face she ever saw. If I’d had to come out really late at night, she would even fix me something in the kitchen – about three times as big as my entire apartment – and sit and talk with me while I ate.

“I’m sorry.” I kept the button pressed down. “I’ve been busy. Is Mr. McIntyre there? I’ve got those reports he asked me to bring by.”

“Oh, Kim honey – he’s not here. He went out.”

This is what I’d been counting on. McIntyre wouldn’t have told his housekeeper that I didn’t work for him anymore. Why would he? So she thought I still did.

“Do you just want to drop them off? I’ll buzz you in.”

“No, that’s okay. When he called me, he said he wanted them right away.” I paused for a second, then went in for the kill. “Do you know where he went?”

“Sure . . .”

A couple of seconds later, and I had the information I needed. I was back on the motorcycle and heading for the other side of town.

* * *

“This just gets you into the park.” The guy in the booth leaned close to the chrome stalk of the microphone in front of him. “You can’t go on any of the rides. Unless you buy another ticket inside.”

“That’s cool.” Just about every dollar I had on me, I had just scraped into the booth’s cash slot. “I just like to look at the lights.”

“You sure? Because it’s a lot more expensive if you do it that way. If you decide you want to go on something. The best deal’s the Super Fun Pak. It gets you on –”

“I’m good.” I scooped up the ticket with the hologram on the front and headed for the entrance turnstiles.

There was a lot I already knew about this place – at least from the financial side. McIntyre had acquired it on my watch. I hadn’t been quite sure why he’d thought that buying a failed amusement park was a good idea, but hey – not my money.

And then he’d partnered up with some Japanese media company, to do a complete redesign on the place. Some third-party investment company had put up the capital for that project and had gotten majorly burnt by the time it was over – which was where McIntyre had wound up making his profit, from all the over-priced contractors he’d foisted on them.

All of which had eventually resulted in the world’s creepiest amusement park – at least of the ones actually open to the public. Maybe there was some shut-down fun fair on the outskirts of Chernobyl that had a more repellent vibe, but if so, nobody was still selling tickets to it.

Not being interested in the fine points of amusement park design, McIntyre hadn’t done his due diligence on the Japanese media bunch he’d gone in with. So yeah, they’d really been big on the pop culture thing, but not the way he probably thought they’d be. He might have been expecting some kind of Grade B Pokemon thing, or maybe the classier sort of
anime
that ultra-hip Hollywood types are already touting as the next big thing –

Instead, he got an amusement park redesign based on that kind of Japanese
manga
that if the customs people find it in your luggage when you come back to the U.S., you get taken to a very small room in the basement of the airport. And you don’t come out for a long time. We’re talking serious perv stuff.
Hentai
to the max, and those cartoon little girls with the enormous eyes, like some sort of pedophile wet dream. Some of the design roughs and architectural renderings got routed to my cubbyhole office by mistake, and I had run them through the shredder, figuring that somebody in the company with a fixation for Asian girls had forgotten the sexual harassment guidelines.

Good thing for McIntyre that he’d already made his money before the place reopened for business. It wasn’t popular. At least not after a couple hundred snarky college kids had finished putting up their YouTube videos about it and had moved on to other things.

McIntyre might have been able to sell the pervy amusement park, or tear it down and build condos or something, but he’d hung on to it, instead. And worked another scam, that I’d wound up keeping the books on. He’d let school parties and youth groups into the place for free and then write off the jacked-up admission prices as a charitable donation from his company. Plus there was some kind of accelerated depreciation schedule from the IRS that he got in on, based on – get this – the amusement park’s educational value. There had been some other scammy things associated with the whole project, all the nickels and dimes of which I’d had to chase down on the computer in my office.

So I was already sick of the place before I ever set foot in it. This was my first time there. Donnie had never wanted to go, even though there was an employee discount from the company that I could’ve taken advantage of. He’d said that he’d rather we saved up our money and go instead to the Talladega Raceway someday.

I got through the turnstile and into the amusement park’s big central area, from which all the other sections branched off. Why McIntyre would have wanted to come here tonight at all – that was a question I wasn’t even thinking about. His housekeeper had said this was where he was going, so that made it the only lead I had. If he hadn’t in fact come here, or if he’d already been here and left, then I was screwed. Plus, even if McIntyre was here, that didn’t mean he had my brother Donnie with him. He might have had Michael take Donnie somewhere else. Anywhere else – or worse. I wasn’t going to think about that, either.

Coming to a halt, I scanned around the amusement park. It was mainly shops here, souvenir stuff and T-shirts and funny hats, plus some places to eat, fast-food junk mainly, all themed to the park’s weird motif. And signs, big ones, plugging the various attractions and rides that the customers had to walk farther into the park to get to. Some of the signs were lit up with neon and bright backlit plastic, others had big flat images of cartoony characters, animated so they waved hello at the crowds, over and over . . .

I didn’t have time to get any more creeped out than I already was, by the giant images of the
manga
little girls in their frilly, panty-revealing school-girl outfits. I had figured that if McIntyre and Michael, or one of the other of them, were here in the amusement park with Donnie, and out in the open, I’d have an advantage in spotting them, what with Donnie being in a wheelchair. It wasn’t much of an advantage, but it was all I had.

And then I saw that I didn’t even have that.

The place was full of wheelchairs.

Kids in wheelchairs, all ages, filling up the amusement park’s spaces, rolling or stopping in front of the shops, the attractions, the food places, the signs, and everything else. There were plenty of other people as well, adults mainly – walking around, either pushing the wheelchairs or strolling along beside them, or putting mustard and relish on a pair of hotdogs and handing one to the kid in the wheelchair they were with, or waiting in line with them. Basically, everything you’d expect to see people doing in an amusement park, only with wheelchairs.

“What’s going on?” I cornered one of the uniformed park staff, who was emptying an overflowing trashcan into the back of a motorized cart. I pointed to the crowd around us. “I mean . . .”

“It’s a special event.” He dumped out the can and set it back down. “Charity thing. For disabled children and their families. There’s like free admission and special access accommodations for the rides and stuff. It’s kind of a big deal.”

This was something new, that’d come around after I had gotten tossed out of the company. But it sounded like something McIntyre would come up with – he was good at the kinds of things that made him look good. Giving back to the community and all. Just public relations, same as for any other company.

It just didn’t make my job any easier. I wasn’t even sure my brother Donnie was here – and checking out every kid in a wheelchair, in the general racket of an amusement park, would take forever. Anything could happen to Donnie while I was trying to do that.

I didn’t have any choice.

The crowd had gotten more congested with new arrivals coming through the gates, just in the couple of minutes it had taken me to find out what was going on. I started to push my way through, frantically turning my head from side to side as I got past people, scanning the faces of the kids in the wheelchairs, looking for my brother . . .

It’s in crowd scenes like this that you really get reminded of the disadvantages of being as small as me. When you’re just over five feet, the whole frickin’ world can seem like being at the bottom of a well, especially when there’s other people involved. As the crowd got more jammed up inside the park, I found myself pressed nose-first into the backs of people way taller than me, with more of the same pushing me from behind. My forward progress came to a halt until I was able to wriggle past, turning myself sideways so I could duck my head down and angle a shoulder underneath somebody’s arms. A couple of times, I just barely avoided taking an elbow right into the eye. And the whole time, I’m trying to catch a glimpse of the kids in the wheelchairs scattered through the crowd. They were the ones I really felt sorry for. Those kids were down even lower than I was, with even less of a sight line past the other people’s backs – then all of a sudden there’s some frantic Asian chick staring them in the face for a split second, before she turned away and shoved farther into the crowd ahead. I think I heard a couple of them burst into tears behind me.

By the time I pushed my way through the crowd, all the way to the farthest edge of the park, I was exhausted. My head was spinning, the broken thoughts ricocheting from one side of my skull to the other. To keep myself from being trampled or sucked back into the crowd, I pressed my spine hard against the base of the animated sign behind me. Over my head, a pair of
manga
girls in abbreviated sailor outfits, their eyes big enough that you could’ve parked a car on their pupils, danced a close-pressed tango back and forth. The cartoons were smiling idiotically; I was panting for breath.

This was hopeless. I looked across the crowd as though it were a storm-wracked sea, full of riptides and rocks. McIntyre’s PR people must’ve publicized this event to every family with mobility issues, one kind or another, throughout the entire state. He couldn’t have found this many kids with wheelchairs and walkers and other devices just here in the city.

Then I lucked out.

I turned my head to one side, looking down the wall I was pressed up against. The animated sign ended several yards away, at the edge of one of the rides with a slow-moving line snaking through the roped-off lanes in front of it. The kind of ride that zoomed people in little cars through a maze of roller-coaster-like ups and downs, before splashing through a big pool of water at the end. What all that had to do with the couple of park staff at the ride’s entrance, dressed up like sumo wrestlers, only with bow ties and top hats, I had no idea. Didn’t seem to matter to the people in line either, as they shuffled forward, pushing their kids in wheelchairs ahead of them inch by inch.

Raising myself as high as I could on tip-toe, I scanned across the line’s faces, but didn’t see my brother anywhere among them. What I did see, when I lowered myself back down, was the holding area that had been set up right where the amusement park’s customers got aboard the little cars – it was filled with the empty wheelchairs, row after row, waiting for the kids and parents to finish the ride and reclaim them.

Donnie’s empty wheelchair was there. I recognized it by the Joe Gibbs Racing Team sticker that he’d sent away for and slapped on the back of his own ride. His favorite NASCAR team – I’d already heard more about the drivers than I could remember.

Which meant that he was somewhere on this stupid ride. I shoved myself along the edge of the crowd, fighting to get as close to the ride entrance as I could.

With my stomach shoved against the last barrier, I gripped the rope swung between the metal stanchions and craned my head, hoping to catch any sight of my brother –

I didn’t see him. But I recognized Michael’s heavily muscled neck and his broad shoulders, sitting at one side of the little car just starting to clank up the tracks toward the top of the ride’s first incline. Which meant that the figure on the other side was McIntyre. And the little figure between, the top of whose head I could just make over the little car’s back – that had to be Donnie.

As I stared upward, the car reached the top, seemed to halt for a moment, then plunged down the other side, gathering speed.