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

“Sure,” I said. “That’d be how you’d describe it, all right.”

“But it’s harder for you. Guys don’t react the same way.”

“I thought you all got off about girls having guns. Gets you excited. You see it on TV all the time.”

“That’s why you should watch cartoons.” Cole pointed to the portable set on the chair. “They’re more realistic. But here’s the scoop, Kim. Yeah, guys’ll get interested because you’re all dangerous and stuff – but that’ll just shut off half their brains. When they pick up the wavelength that you’re not spreading it around, like the rest of the women they know, then the other half of their brains shuts down.
Then
you blow them away.”

That made sense, actually. I just couldn’t tell if it was fortunately or unfortunately for me.

“Seems a little unfair.”

Cole shrugged. “So file a complaint with the feds. Like I said, I’m just trying to help you out here.”

Even if I could’ve, I figured I wouldn’t bother. I bent down, picked up the bowl, and ate a couple milk-soggy bites with the same spoon he’d been using. However bad these conditions were, they beat what it’d been like when we’d both been working for that sonuvabitch McIntyre.

Who was the reason why I was here at all. That was the big job, the guy that Cole and I were getting ready to kill.

TWO

After dinner, my brother Donnie and I watched some television. Not those stupid cartoons, though. There was a limit to how much of Cole’s advice I was going to take.

“Logano’s having a rotten season.” Donnie pointed to the screen. “If it weren’t for bad luck, he wouldn’t be having any luck at all.”

“I’ve heard that one before.” Inside my own head, actually. It had pretty much been the story of my life. Right up until I started learning how to kill people. Who says things never get better?

We were both sitting next to each other on the saggy couch that’d come with our crummy little apartment. I’d helped him out of his wheelchair so we could watch the Speed Channel’s NASCAR wrap-up show.

“No, he really is,” said Donnie. There was some tall beanpole on the TV screen, not bad-looking, in one of those racing fire suits with sponsor endorsements all over them – the kid didn’t look any older than I did. “It’s having serious consequences for my Fantasy League. I’m getting hammered in the standings.”

I knew that was one of the things my kid brother spent a lot of time on, with the laptop computer we kept back in the bedroom. There had been one week, a while back, when he’d made more money on side bets than I had at the stupid accounting job I used to have. Not this season, though.

“You should’ve gone with Harvick,” I pointed out. “You hate Harvick.”

“Why would I do that? Pick him, I mean.”

“Like I said. You hate him.” There had been a time when I hadn’t even known any of these NASCAR drivers’ names. If there were any other Korean-American girls who did know them, I’d be surprised – we don’t seem to form very much of the fan base. “That way,” I explained to Donnie, “if Harvick wins, you’re happy because it helps you out with your Fantasy League. And if he loses, you’re even happier.”

“Huh.” This wasn’t the sort of thing that would’ve naturally occurred to Donnie – he’s a much nicer person than I’d ever been, even before I started killing people – but I could tell that he was mulling it over. “But . . . you can only pick a driver so many times. According to the rules.”

Something else I wouldn’t have known about. Which was in general the case with this whole NASCAR trip that my little brother had gotten into. He’d tried explaining it all to me and it just hadn’t penetrated. Maybe it was the Korean in me coming out, but I didn’t understand it at all. I’d picked up that the people who ran the sport had some kind of so-called diversity program going on, to get more – or any – African-American and Hispanic drivers racing around the tracks. I supposed that was a good thing, even though it didn’t seem any big concern to me that the drivers they already had were pretty heavily weighted toward the good ol’ boy, cracker side. Seemed fair, actually – I mean, how many of those guys had a shot at getting into the NBA? But I’d noticed that there didn’t exactly seem any big push on to get some Asian-American drivers putting the pedal to the metal. Maybe because the NASCAR officials had already figured out that the chances of finding a Chinese, Japanese, or Korean kid whose parents would allow him to go flying around an oval at a couple hundred miles an hour, plus maybe hitting the wall and blowing up into flaming shrapnel, were somewhere between slim and none. Better to just keep on hitting the books and get into MIT.

So maybe Donnie and I were letting down the side or something, genetically speaking, by watching the NASCAR races on the weekends when the season was on. But it gave us something to do for ten months a year. Curled up on the couch in our pajamas, with bowls of milk and those cheap imitation Cheerios that were a dollar less a box than the real thing. There was always a certain hypnotic fascination to watching the race cars go round and round, even though I didn’t have much of an idea of what was going on, at least not until the last three or four laps. Donnie tried to fill me in, and I’d listen attentively – and still be just about clueless. I was mainly glad that he liked it so much.

What I liked were the commentators, up in the booth at the race tracks. They seemed pretty funny. And sometimes they said things that stuck with me. Or that I didn’t even know had gotten lodged inside my head, until something jarred one loose and it came floating to the surface of my thoughts, like the strip of paper from inside a fortune cookie, that’d gotten dropped into a cup of tea.

Like right now. I leaned my head back against the couch’s musty-smelling upholstery. I was tired. Cole had kept me at shooting practice for hours, blasting away at actual targets hung up inside the warehouse instead of just trying to hit the wall, the way I’d started out. My arms ached and my ears were still ringing, despite the plugs I’d stuffed in them. When you’re a hundred-something pounds like I am, firing off a gun that big, over and over – it’s work. Plus, there was everything else to think about. That I should’ve been thinking about, if I still weren’t too scared to.

The time was coming – and soon – when I wouldn’t be firing at paper targets. I’d be raising the gun in my hands and squeezing the trigger and firing at something real. Someone, actually. That was the point that I’d just about reached. I still wasn’t sure what it meant.

Something drifted through my head, that I’d heard one of the NASCAR commentators say on TV, a friendly-looking, round-faced guy named Larry McReynolds. I remembered his name because Donnie had given me a whole lecture about how many races the guy had won when he’d been a crew chief – a lot of them. I’d been watching with the empty cereal bowl on my lap and there had been a whole bunch of drivers spinning out in Turn 4 at some place called Loudon. And McReynolds had said one of those things that just stick.

If you don’t step over the edge, you’ll never know where the edge is.

It hadn’t meant anything when I heard him say it. Why should it? Little Nerd Accountant Girl didn’t need to know where the edge is, because she was never going to go near it. I was just going to keep my head down in my spreadsheets and ledger books, crunching one row of numbers after another. And whatever happened, it would be nice and safe. I wasn’t going to be slamming into the wall at 200 mph any time soon and bursting into flames . . .

I wasn’t at that place anymore. I was someplace else now. And if the edge wasn’t at my feet right at the moment, it was in sight and getting closer. I closed my eyes and tried not to think about it.

I woke up some time later. Donnie was still asleep, his head leaning against my shoulder. The NASCAR coverage was over – on the TV, those weird-looking European sports cars were zipping around some road course instead. I rubbed my stiff-feeling face with my hands. I didn’t know how many hours had gone by, but I knew it was late. The way I could tell without looking at the cheap plastic Casio under the cuff of my motorcycle jacket, when I’d be cruising out of the warehouse district on my little Ninja sportbike, and the city streets would be all empty and dark.

I shifted my weight so I could stand up from the couch without waking my little brother. I didn’t try loading him back into the wheelchair. He’d grown so much that it didn’t really fit him anymore. I was going to have to get him a new one soon, and I didn’t know where I was going to find the money for it. But he really needed it. Technically, he was already taller than I was – we’d checked that by lying next to each other on the apartment floor, with our bare feet flat on the wall, a process which had given us both a fit of the giggles.

So I didn’t put him in the wheelchair, but instead I hoisted him up against me, leaning back to balance his weight, then dragged him to the other room, laid him down, and covered him with the blanket.

Sitting on the corner of the bed, I brushed his hair – shiny black like mine – away from his brow. I glanced through the doorway at the empty wheelchair in the front room. Soon as things settled down a bit – soon as I was done with the job I had to do – I was going to get him a better one. I’d figure out a way. Something really nice . . .

* * *

The next morning, I saw the one I wanted to get.

Cole was in it.

“Check it out.” He pushed the joystick mounted on the armrest and nearly ran me over. “Some machine, huh?”

“Yeah . . .” Standing with my spine against one of the bullet-pocked walls, I watched him spin the motorized wheelchair around in a tight circle. “It’s . . . nice.”

He brought it to a halt, out in the middle of the warehouse floor, so I was finally able to get a good look. All gleaming black, like something Darth Vader would’ve ridden around in, if he’d ever made it to the Imperial Retirement Home.

I’d already decided. Donnie would so dig something like this. Guys are all alike, at least that way. If it had a motor on it, then it was love at first sight.

“When did you get this?”

“Monica picked it up this morning,” said Cole. “She’s taking the cargo van back to the rental place right now.”

“Wait a minute.” A less pleasant thought struck me. “Is this something I paid for?”

“You paid for?” Cole straightened up, after reaching over the side for the cigarette pack he’d left on top of the mattress. “How do you figure that?”

“You know. With the money I got for us. That I almost got killed getting for us.
That
money.”

“What if it is?” He took a drag from the cigarette he’d just lit. “Can you think of something better to spend it on? Or were you planning on carrying me around piggyback when we go after McIntyre? I need wheels, baby. Besides – that’s not how I got it.”

“So how did you? I thought you were so broke. At least, that’s what you told me.”

“Social Services paid for it.” He exhaled a cloud of gray smoke. “’Cause I’m like disabled and shit.”

“What?” Now I really was pissed. “Donnie never got anything like this from them.”

“Hey. Is it my fault you don’t know how to work the system?”

I didn’t say anything, mainly because I was too busy stewing over the whole deal. Our tax dollars at work, giving psycho hit men stylin’ rides.

“So don’t fret about it.” Cole pushed the joystick again, starting another circumnavigation of the warehouse. “All right?”

“Hold on a second.” I peered more closely at him, when he headed back in my direction. He stopped a couple feet away from me. “You look . . . different.”

“Yeah. I’m not over there, lying flat on my back.”

“No.” I shook my head. “You look bigger. Like you used to look.”

“Think so?” Cole looked down at himself. “I ain’t seeing it. Pretty scrawny, compared to what I was.”

“Not bigger like that. Bigger like . . .”

I couldn’t find the words. Instead, I raised my hand and made a pistol out of it, sticking my index finger out from the others. I used my thumb as though I were cocking and firing the make-believe gun. “Like that,” I said.

Cole studied me for a moment, as though regarding his own reflection at the center of my eyes. Then he slowly nodded.

“You might,” he said, “be right about that . . .”

* * *

This was good news for me.

I thought about it as I was riding the Ninja home. I try not to think when I’m on the motorcycle – I’d already gone down in one accident, and I didn’t want to do it again – but sometimes I just couldn’t help it. I maneuvered the slender sportbike in and out of traffic, mulling over what I’d seen back at the warehouse.

There’d been a time, not too long ago, when Cole had been the biggest, scariest person I’d ever seen. Or that a lot of other people had seen, Cole being the
last
person they saw as well. Not because he was so big in a physical sense – he was way taller than me, but then just about everyone in the world is – but because of that crazy killer radiation he used to give off. That sense that when you were looking at him face-to-face, you might also be looking at your own imminent demise. That’s always going to make somebody look big.