4 Real Dangerous Place Read online

  PART ONE

  You never need to go looking for trouble. It’ll find you.

  – Cole’s Book of Wisdom

  ONE

  I WAS HAVING a bad day even before the motorcycle cop smiled and aimed his gun at my head.

  You’d think in a place like Los Angeles, I would’ve been in a good mood all the time. I mean, the sun is so frickin’ bright. Back East, we’d just barely gotten done with winter, and I was so sick of those lead-gray skies and the brown slush frozen on the sidewalks, I felt like I’d been living in a root cellar for the last six months.

  Plus – and this is a personal thing, I admit – but how bad can a city be that has a neighborhood in it called K-Town?

  “Korea Town,” I told my little brother Donnie when we’d first arrived. “Cool, huh?”

  “Where is it?” He’d seemed a little suspicious about it, as though I might be yanking his chain.

  “Um – somewhere around Wilshire and Western. Those are streets.” That was about all I knew. I must’ve read about it online while we’d been getting ready to fly out here.

  Nothing would do but Donnie had to dig the map out of the rental car’s glove compartment and figure out how to get there. More or less – we got lost a few times, but we finally found it.

  “Hey. We could pass here.” I’d taken a hand from the steering wheel and pointed. “Look at the signs.”

  “That’d be great,” Donnie had said, “if either one of us could actually read Korean.”

  “I’m pretty sure those are restaurants.” I’d been leaning forward, peering through the windshield. “I think.”

  “Yeah? What’s Korean food like?”

  “How would I know?” That was a point of contention – not between me and Donnie, whose curiosity was only mild in that regard, but between me and the Child Protective Services, who were always getting all politically correct and on my case for not raising him, the way they put it, “in a nurturing environment consistent with his ethnic heritage.” They probably would’ve yanked him right out of my custody if they’d ever found out how far into that NASCAR stuff he’d gotten.

  “I’m not sure about this, Kimmie . . .” He’d gone on, looking dubiously out the car window. “I mean about us blending in around here. These people all look like Jorge.” That was the janitor at our old apartment building. “And he’s Guatemalan.”

  “Um.” I’d had to admit the kid was right. “Maybe the Koreans are all inside. Or at school. Like you’re going to be.”

  That was one of the big reasons I’d been happy about coming out here to L.A. with my boss Mr. Karsh. Even if it was just for a little bit, while he was sorting out a couple of his subsidiary businesses. Actually, being Karsh’s head of security, I was hip to the real reasons for the extended trip, which had more to do with his wife still being back East. And a glossy bit of fluff, an actress – yeah, right – named Alice being out here. But I wasn’t going to say anything about that. Donnie’s main case worker had been on my butt about the home schooling he’d been getting over his laptop not being enough, even though he was acing all the state tests. I was way suspicious of the CPS wanting to mainstream Donnie into a regular school, mainly because the difficulty of getting him and his wheelchair in and out of our crappy little apartment would’ve put my position in jeopardy, and if that’d happened – I mean losing my job – they would’ve swooped in on him like the proverbial duck on a June bug and shoved him back in some foster home. And then I would’ve had to kill all the case workers – which, God knows, I’m perfectly capable of doing, especially when I’m pissed – and please believe me about this, I really am trying not to make a habit out of that sort of thing.

  I didn’t particularly like Karsh – he was pretty much the same sort of slimeball as my previous two bosses, who I actually had drilled through the head with the honking big .357 I kept in my shoulder bag. But I could’ve kissed his hatchet face when he had his secretary line up a ground-floor apartment out in Studio City, complete with a wheelchair ramp at the front door. Plus she got Donnie into some private school program – well, she and Karsh’s money did – for kids like him with mobility issues, where they’d pick him up in a special bus with a loading lift and all. That was neat. And not just because it got the CPS bunch off my case for a while, at least until Karsh dragged us all back East again, but because I’d been worried as well about my kid brother not getting outside more. He could do with a lot less laptop time and more time out in the sunshine – which, as I said they seemed to have plenty of here in L.A.

  So really, I had no reason to be having a bad day. There should have been nothing but good days for Donnie and me, from here on –

  Of course, that was before I got my ass blown up by a bomb made out of acetylene welding tanks and watched my best friend get thrown over the side of the freeway in a flaming panel truck. That sort of thing tends to color your mood a little bit.

  TWO

  THE BAD DAY – the real bad day, I mean – didn’t start out at the heavy equipment company’s business premises. I had been in a weird mood before then, something to do with me and Donnie earlier that morning. But what happened out there, surrounded by all those cranes and bulldozers and other sorts of earth-moving and big construction gear, really dialed it up for me.

  Plus, I had to ride out there in Karsh’s limo, with him and his girlfriend Alice. I sat up front up with his driver, so I had to turn around and look back over the seat to listen to him.

  “These are important people, Kim.” He didn’t even glance up at me, but just went on going over some computer spreadsheets he’d taken out of a manila envelope. “They control billions of dollars in reconstruction money back in Japan. Tens of billions, actually. We really need to make a good impression on them, if we’re going to get a slice of that money.”

  “Okay . . .” I frowned as I mulled it over. “Wait a minute. Did you say they’re Japanese?”

  “That’s right.” Beside him, his girlfriend was texting on her iPhone, with the intense concentration that comes from not knowing what letter comes next in words like cat and dog. “That’s why I wanted you there. Not because I’m anticipating any security issues – even if I were, I’ve already got a man out there. But because I thought it would . . . you know . . . make a good impression on them.”

  I didn’t say anything. You never do yourself any favors by popping your boss’s bubbles. If he thought a bunch of Japanese businessmen were going to think more highly of him because he brought along some nominally Korean-American chick on his staff, I wasn’t going to be the one to tell him otherwise. I wasn’t sure whether Karsh even knew I was supposed to be Korean, instead of just generic plain-wrap Asian. Probably didn’t make much of a difference to him, anyway. So the chances were just about zero of getting it across to him that there were a bunch of Japanese – Japanese from Japan, I mean – who still have a real problem with Koreans. Unless you’re drop-dead gorgeous, of course, like Park Ji Yoon or some other favorite of my brother’s that he’d picked up on from watching all those Korean music videos on YouTube. Then maybe you’d have a chance of getting a little bit of that Hallyu thing going on, which was all about Japanese getting a kink on over Korean singers and actors. Who were admittedly pretty damn gorgeous, both the men and the women – but that wasn’t exactly me. Granted, I’ve got at least a little something going on since I started killing people, but I know I wasn’t up to that level.

  All of which still left me in a spot that I mulled over as the limo maneuvered like a big black whale through some grimy, unglamorous industrial district. If these Japanese business types weren’t impressed with me – whatever that meant – then Karsh was probably going to think it was my fault. If he didn’t seal his big cons
truction equipment deal with them, he wasn’t going to blame it on himself, that’s for sure. Big wheels like him never do.

  We finally pulled in through the open chain-link gates of the heavy equipment company’s display yard. The Japanese were already there, pretty much as I expected, all suited up and buttoned down, the younger ones taking photos with their cell phones of the big construction cranes towering over them, the older and much more important-seeming ones looking over the glossy brochures they’d been given at the sales office, toward the back of the yard.

  “Is this going to take very long?” Alice looked up from her phone. Her doll-like face was set in a serious pout. “I’ve got my own meetings to get to, you know.”

  I was familiar with those, from my regular job of making sure nothing bad happened to Karsh or anybody he was with. They mainly consisted of drinking and bitching at clubs filled with B or even C List movie industry types, all of them shouting over the PA systems’ booming music, turned up to ear-bleed level. Though that way, of course, nobody had to listen to what Alice and her friends were actually saying, least of all me. Which was a blessing.

  “Don’t worry, sweetheart.” Karsh patted her expensively manicured hand. “This is just a little meet-and-greet. I’ve got lots of other people back at the office to hammer out the contracts.” He pushed open the limo door beside him. “Come on, Kim.”

  I followed him over to the little knot of businesspeople, leaving Alice sulking in the limo’s back seat and Ferdie the driver sitting placidly behind the wheel, with the calm, infinite patience you need for that kind of job.

  Outside the limo’s mobile pocket of air-conditioning, I was already starting to sweat in the black wool business lady get-up, complete with panty hose, that I’d put on for the occasion. If I were going to do much more of this stuff out here, I was going to have to unload some serious money at Nordstrom and get something more suited to the weather than what I’d brought from home.

  Plus, with this outfit, I’d had to leave my favorite piece in my shoulder bag, now sitting on the floor of the limo next to Ferdie. That was the .357 given to me by somebody important in my life, who I still thought about a lot even though he’s dead. Maybe even more so because of that. Your life’s in a funny place if you find yourself missing a sociopathic redneck hit man like Cole.

  Gun-wise, I’d had to go instead with a dinky little Smith & Wesson LadySmith 3913 in a Clament Custom Leather holster strapped to the inside of my left thigh, just above the hem of my skirt. I’d tried carrying the .357 there, but everybody was able to spot it; not exactly a “concealed carry,” if you know what I mean. Plus, you haul around something as big and clunky as that between your legs, you not only don’t need a boyfriend, you don’t even want one. So in situations like this, it was the S&W or nothing, even though it had about the stopping power of a gnat compared to the big piece.

  But I wasn’t even thinking about that.

  As I’d expected, the Japanese businessmen looked me over for all of about two seconds, then I ceased to exist for them. Which was fine by me – in my line of work, being invisible is what you shoot for.

  And even better, my boss Karsh didn’t pick up on their disregard. He’d already bounded forward to pump the hand of the oldest and most important-looking of the bunch, some white-haired Toshiro Mifune clone flanked by his own refrigerator-sized bodyguards. Thin smiles and slight bows; I think they’d met before, maybe over in Osaka or someplace like that.

  I stood a couple yards away, watching as Karsh went right into full-on sales pitch mode. Everything he said, one of the old guy’s retinue translated for him.

  “This is the one I was telling you about.” Karsh climbed up into the operator cab of one of the biggest and most intimidating pieces of earth-moving equipment standing in a row there. Some kind of backhoe on steroids. “Top of the line!”

  He actually knew how to run those things. Like a lot of guys who got into less-than-legal business operations, he’d started out in construction, slapping up parking garages in New Jersey and making a killing on the substandard concrete, minus the payoffs to the building inspectors. You don’t last very long in that racket unless you make certain arrangements, so to speak, to eliminate your competition, while making sure they don’t eliminate you. That’d been before I’d hired on with him; my job was mainly to make sure that anybody with a grievance from those days didn’t come within twenty or so yards of him. Since starting out, he’d branched into a lot of other businesses – including low-budget movie production, believe it or not. Which hadn’t gone so well.

  “Watch this –” With his silk necktie flung back over his shoulder, Karsh gave an expert yank on a couple of the black-knobbed control levers in front of him. The backhoe’s massive metal-toothed scoop reared up into the sky, the motion rocking the machine down onto its tank treads for a moment. I heard an admiring gasp come from the Japanese businessmen, as though they had already gotten done with their agenda for the day and had instructed their own chauffeur to take them to the Universal Studios tour, where they’d come face-to-face with some life-sized mechanical dinosaur attraction. “Cool, huh?”

  That was the most enthusiasm I’d ever seen from my current boss. He was really in his element with stuff like this.

  Meanwhile, I’d glanced over toward the sales office. There was somebody else standing there and watching the show.

  Somebody I knew.

  Karsh left the scoop reared above everybody, as he hopped down from the backhoe’s padded seat. “We’re talking mean-mother quality here, folks.” There was no way he could be sure of just how up-to-speed, English-wise, the younger ones in the group were, but he was already too far into his pitch to slow down now. From his suit’s inside pocket, Karsh whipped out a laser pen, flicked it on, and with a glance over his shoulder, aimed the red dot, bright even in the L.A. sunlight, up to his target. “Those’re all molybdenum alloy, cold forged.” The dot hopped across the scoop’s symmetrical teeth. “Godzilla couldn’t outbite this puppy.”

  That got a reaction. The young ones smiled and chattered at each other, then the translator turned to the gray-haired numero uno in the middle of the group, who had been standing there, looking both puzzled and politely serene.

  “Gojira.” The translator pointed up to the scoop.

  “Ah.” Enlightened, the old guy nodded, then bestowed a slightly yellowed smile on Karsh. “Gojira.” He raised both hands up like a movie monster’s claws. “Arr-rawwrr!”

  I supposed that was what passed for business talk among high-levels like this, nowadays. I wasn’t even paying attention anymore. Instead, I was walking over toward the sales office, letting my boss and the Japanese businessmen continue doing their thing.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” I kept my voice down to a hissing whisper, not wanting Karsh and the others to hear.

  “I’m working,” said Elton. He smiled. “Same as you.”

  He and I went back a little ways. Not very far, just to when our old boss Falcon had gotten iced – I had done that, actually, in the back rooms of a Polynesian restaurant – and I had wound up going to work for the dead man’s partner.

  “Wait a minute.” I looked at him in fury. “You’re on security here?”

  “That’s right.”

  Now I really was pissed. That was when the day turned seriously bad. Karsh hadn’t told me he had hired Elton for anything. There’d been a time when I had actually tried to hire Elton, figuring that as Karsh’s new head of security I could use somebody as competent as him. Elton had pretty much saved my butt when everything had come down with Falcon and that whole scene. But that didn’t keep me from being way annoyed.

  “So when were you going to tell me?”

  “Right now.” Elton let his smile widen, exuding all his lazy Southern charm. “When you got out here.”

  I wasn’t falling for any of it. I didn’t like this at all. Karsh’s business operations were so spread out, I was still in the process of finding out e
xactly who he had working for him. There’d already been some of his security guys that I’d had to get rid of, because they’d given me the same problems I’d been hit with when I signed on as the only female member of Falcon’s bodyguard team. Guys in this line of work aren’t really known for their progressive attitudes.

  So there was a big part of my brain that was wrestling with what it meant for Elton to be standing here in front of me. And what it meant that Karsh hadn’t told me about all this. I was sure it wasn’t anything good.

  “Look.” I jabbed a finger into Elton’s decent-looking suit. He’d cleaned up a lot since the last time I had seen him. “You and I are going to have to talk. But in the meantime, just stay out of my way. Got it?”

  “I don’t know . . .” His smile shifted to a little frown as he gave a slight shake of his head. “That might not be possible –”

  I didn’t get a chance to ask him what that meant. I heard footsteps crunching on the display yard gravel behind me. Glancing over my shoulder, I saw Karsh striding toward us, his face set all hard and angry.