Kim Oh 2: Real Dangerous Job (The Kim Oh Thrillers) (9 page)

“So how do we do it?”

“I’m working on it. And you’re going to help me sort it out. You know stuff – stuff about McIntyre – that I need to know.”

“What would that be?”

“Think about it,” said Cole. “You sat on top of that guy’s business for over a year. Those weren’t just numbers. There were names attached. Go through that data the right way, and all kinds of useful things might pop up. You’d know who he meets, when he meets up with them, where they do it, even what they talk about. That’s what’s in those numbers. And –” He pointed with his finger. “In your head. You probably know more about where McIntyre comes and goes than he does.”

“I’m . . . not sure about that.”

“I am. I’ve done jobs like this before. Trust me on this one.”

“Okay.” I sat down on the weightlifting bench, laid my arms on my knees and looked over him. “So we figure out where McIntyre comes and goes. And when. What good does that do us?”

“Dig it.” Cole picked up a dumbbell from one of the racks and started doing arm curls. “When McIntyre’s home safe, with his bodyguards, or he’s in that office of his, then he’s protected. He’s hard to get at. But when he moves from one place to another, the protection thins out. That’s just the nature of reality. Nobody is ever as safe when they’re going from Point A to Point B, as they are once they’ve arrived. So that’s when McIntyre becomes vulnerable. That’s where we get at him.”

It seemed to make sense. If anything did anymore.

“One more thing.” Cole switched the weight to his other hand. “That we gotta think about.”

“What’s that?”

“What else do you want to do? Besides kill McIntyre?”

“Huh?” I felt my brow crease. “What do you mean?”

“I mean,” said Cole, “do you want to be alive afterward or not? Because it’s one kind of job to get in there and blow away somebody like that, and it’s another kind to blow them away and get back out. Which do you want to do?”

I didn’t have an answer for him. This was something I hadn’t thought about before. In the short little movie that played on the screen inside my head, nothing came after the scene in which I emptied a gun into McIntyre’s chest.

“Well . . .” I gave a slow nod. “I guess I want to get back out. When we’re done. And . . . you know . . . alive and stuff.” I nodded a little more forcefully. “Yeah. I’m pretty certain that’s what I want.”

“You sure? Because that makes it harder.”

“I got responsibilities. There’s my brother –”

“That’s as good an excuse as any.”

“It’s not an excuse. He’s . . . like you. He can’t get around on his own. Somebody’s got to look after him.”

“I know all about that,” said Cole. “And that’s fine. But like I said – it makes the job harder.”

“But we can do it, right? And get back out. That’s doable, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, sure.” He went on doing reps with the weight. “I just need to think about how we go about the job. Everything’s possible, Kim. Except for the stuff that isn’t.” The veins on his arm were starting to stand out, like blue snakes. “In the meantime, you do some thinking, too. About what you know. About McIntyre.”

“All right.” I stood up from the bench. I started for the warehouse door, then stopped and looked back at him. “What about you?”

“What about me?”

“What do you want? Do you want to get back out, after we kill McIntyre?”

“Maybe.” He shrugged. “I mean . . . it’d be fine if it happened that way. But I don’t really care. One way or the other.”

“Oh.” I didn’t know what to say next.

“Don’t worry about it.” Cole set the weight back in the rack and picked up a bigger one. “It’s just one of the ways that you know. That’s there’s still a difference between you and me.”

I didn’t say anything at all. I just turned and left.

NINE

At least Cole wasn’t watching cartoons when I got over to the warehouse the next day.

“Check this out.” He had gotten himself hooked up with one of those DVR rigs – that probably also came out of the money I had stolen from McIntyre’s business accounts – so he could record and play back shows he’d otherwise have missed. “You didn’t make the news. That’s good.”

I stood beside the mattress on the floor, unzipping my jacket, and watching the news report he brought up with a couple pushes on the remote. The face of Karen Ibanez, the reporter who I’d gone to see a while back – not that it’d done me any good – came up on the screen. She was holding a microphone with the station logo on it. Behind her was the blackened street corner where the bomb in Braemer’s backpack had gone off, the whole area cordoned off with yellow
Police Investigation – Do Not Cross
tapes. Usually she did straight business coverage, but since the explosion had taken place right at the edge of the downtown financial district, that must’ve been the reason she got sent out for this spot.

Cole turned up the volume so I could hear what she was saying.

“. . . Meanwhile, federal agents are investigating possible links between at least two of the victims and international terrorist organizations –”

He muted the portable TV set with another push on the remote.

“Pretty cool, huh?” He looked up at me. “They’re all going to be chasing their tails, looking for big, bad terrorists. Who said these heightened security alerts don’t do any good? Nobody saw some little Asian chick shooting away from the scene on a motorcycle.”

“Maybe if I’d been wearing a
burqa
.”

“Nah – then you’d have been even more invisible. It’s like going through security at the airport. Wave a cardboard scimitar over your head and shout,
Death to the infidel!
 – they’ll invite you to sit up front with the pilot. In the meantime, you’re off the hook. Nobody’s looking for you.”

“Story of my life.” I set my backpack down on the warehouse floor.

“Trust me. It’s what you want.”

“Did she say those guys – the ones who got blown up – that they were terrorists? Because if that’s what that Braemer guy was, I’m not impressed.”

“She said links.” Cole pointed to the TV. “Connections. As in selling stuff to people, that they shouldn’t have.”

“Like you.”

“At least I know what I’m doing. I don’t blow myself up with it.”

“Neither did they.”

“Yeah, but that’s what the police and the federal types will think happened. Great thing about nitwits like that getting hold of dangerous stuff, they tend to eliminate themselves before they can do too much damage to anyone else. As a general rule . . .”

I wasn’t really listening to him. I was trying to work out the numbers for my personal ledgers, inside my head. Just goes to show that you can make the girl into a killer, but some part of her is still going to be an accountant. The way I figured it, I had definitely killed that old man Pomeroy. So that was a solid one in that column. And now that Braemer guy and his equipment dealer buddies – that was another half-dozen, after the police coroners had gathered up all the bits and pieces. But I hadn’t been really trying to kill them – I’d just been the one who’d pushed the button on my cell phone. That whole thing had been more of Cole and Monica’s doing. But still, I should get at least fifty percent credit for that last bunch. So add in another three in the kills column.

“This sucks,” I said aloud. “I’m racking up numbers like crazy here. And I still haven’t gotten around to killing the person I want to.”

“Take it easy,” said Cole. “It’ll happen.”

“I don’t know.” I dragged over one of the chairs and dropped myself into it. “This doesn’t seem like progress to me.”

“You’re not giving yourself enough credit. You’re already sounding more like me than what you used to.”

“Like I said.”

“Seriously,” continued Cole. “Normal people don’t react to these things they way you are. Just adding up the numbers. With civilians, there’s usually more of an emotional response. But you’re cold, Kim. Like a psychopath. Like me.”

“Huh.” I had to think about what he was saying. “So this is what being a psychopath is like?” I shook my head. “I would’ve thought it’d be more fun than this.”

“Why would you think that?”

“I don’t know. Maybe my expectations were too high. I mean – look at that Hannibal Lecter guy.”

“He’s not real. Fictional character, right?”

“Yeah, I know . . .” I was still trying to work it out. “But you see him in the movies and he’s always got a smile on his face.”

“Comes with being nuts.”

“Not for me, it doesn’t. He’s out there, killing people – and eating them, even – and having a fine old time. Meanwhile, I’m worried about paying the rent.” Another shake of my head. “I’m not getting it. If I’d known ahead of time that this was what killing people was like, I might not have put in for the job.”

“But you did.”

I remembered what Monica had told me, what seemed a long time ago now. About still having options. And then what she had told me much more recently – that I didn’t have those options anymore. She was right, I knew.

“All right.” I took a deep breath and straightened myself up in the chair. “If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s listening to people whine about stuff.”

Cole smiled. “Especially when it’s you.”

“Especially then,” I said. “Let’s get to work.”

* * *

“Give me a hand with this.”

I had been expecting that we were going to talk strategy and stuff. About how we were going to arrange things, in order to kill McIntyre. Instead, I found myself helping Cole over at his workbench.

He finished up with the welding he needed to do, then pushed his goggles up on top of his head and rolled his wheelchair back. Some of the metal was still hot, so he’d given me a pair of heavy-duty work gloves to wear.

“What is this thing?”

“It’s a door-jammer,” said Cole. “Go over on the other side there. That’s good.”

I was able to get a better look at it now. This wasn’t any kind of homebrew electronic device, like some of the other equipment he built for himself. This was all mechanical. Basically a square, heavy steel frame, with flanges on two opposite sides. In each flange, there was a hole drilled through, about an inch in diameter. Cole had mounted a pair of heavy-duty steel springs inside the frame. Those were connected to another piece of steel, a thick blade that ran through the device, the blade’s edges set in narrow slots cut in opposite sides of the frame, parallel to the flanges on the outside.

I helped Cole get the construction into the big vise at the end of the workbench. Then he had me turn the vise’s wheel, compressing the springs inside the steel frame, so that the blade piece was drawn back like an arrow in a bow. The springs were so powerful that I was sweating by the time I got them squeezed together to Cole’s satisfaction. That left the squared-off end of the blade piece sticking out a couple of inches from one side of the frame. Cole reached over with a mallet and tapped a couple of cotter pins through the lined-up holes in the frame and the blade.

“Okay,” he said. “Release the vise.”

I spun the vise’s wheel. The blade piece stayed in its tensely drawn-back position inside the steel frame.

“That should do it.” Cole wiped his grease-smeared hands on a shop rag.

Over in the other section of the warehouse, he pulled a couple of beers out of the camping fridge and handed one to me.

“How’s your part coming along?” Cole lowered his own beer after knocking back nearly half of it in one long pull.

“Which part?” I took a hit from the cold bottle in my hand. “You mean the numbers?”

“What else?”

Back at the apartment, I had already started sorting through the data on the backup disks I had lifted from my old office, from back when I had still been working for McIntyre.

“I’m not sure,” I said. “I think . . . maybe I’ve come up with something.”

“You already have.” Cole dangled his beer at the side of his wheelchair. “Real useful. That’s why I got on the stick about building what we need.”

I nodded. I hadn’t seen anything important in what I’d pulled off the disks, about the leasing agreements for the building where McIntyre had his company headquarters – the building where I’d had my dingy little cubbyhole office – but Cole had spotted it. He had an eye for that sort of thing.

That was why he was so good at his line of work. He saw the possibilities.

“So you’re sure that nobody in the building management office ever saw you?”

I gave another nod. “McIntyre’s lease was all pulled together before I ever got there. Like years before. And the monthly payments were set up to be made automatically. I never touched them. So I wouldn’t have had any reason to ever talk to the building people.”