by Kim Oh
I dug around in the cold stump of Lynndie’s hand with the tip of the pliers, and found the tendon Elton had shown me. Actually, there are a couple of them you need, but you can get hold of both at the same time, if you come in at an angle. The ice packs had kept the flesh from completely stiffening – when I pulled on the tendons, the fingers obediently curled, just as if they were picking up some unseen object.
It took a little doing – not the sort of thing you want to hurry – but I finally managed. I got the .44 grasped tight in Lynndie’s hand, its forefinger curled around the trigger. I pulled harder on the tendons, to make sure there was a good set of prints left on the smooth walnut of the .44’s grip.
The hand with its bloodied stump went back into my shoulder bag, along with the pliers. The gun I left beside Heathman’s body. The most important part was the money – that I shoved into my jacket pockets.
I felt dizzy when I stood back up. Sometimes, this job wasn’t as much fun as other times.
† † †
I dropped off Lynndie’s BMW at the airport, then went and got my preferred ride. When Heathman’s body was found, along with a gun with his daughter’s fingerprints on it, the police would do their usual methodical search. When they located her car, they’d have a fine time figuring out where she’d flown to. Not that they’d have much success, but at least they wouldn’t be looking for me.
Getting back on the Ninja, with the shield of my helmet pushed up, made it a little better. The cold night air rushing into my face actually was soothing. I could even relax now – just about everything was taken care of.
There was a guy out in Culver City – another sort of professional – who Elton and I had both used before. He worked out of a machine shop, and could make anything disappear, like it’d never existed. No questions asked – that was his specialty. Tomorrow, I’d ride out there and drop off the shoulder bag with its grisly contents. For a couple hundred bucks, I wouldn’t have to worry about it again.
Eventually, the police would find Lynndie’s car, where I’d left it at the airport’s long-term lot again. They’d have a lot of fun figuring out where in the world she had flown to, after she’d killed her father.
I rolled the bike’s throttle as I leaned down over the tank. I was starting to feel okay.
And I could even think, as I wound and banked my way through the city streets. About why I’d done it. Killed Heathman, that is. I’d been sure I wanted to do it, but I hadn’t been exactly clear as to the reason. Now I knew.
Here’s the deal. I didn’t want him to ever offer me another job, just because he’d liked the way this one had turned out, the whole bit with getting rid of his daughter Lynndie. You never know in this business – it has its ups and downs. And I might’ve needed the money, if he’d come around sometime and talked to me again. Now I didn’t have to worry about that happening.
I tucked my head down below the top of the bike’s narrow windscreen, and watched the headlight beam cut across the shadowed buildings.
Up in our apartment, I found Donnie with his head down on the table, asleep next to his laptop. “Hey –” I nudged him with my elbow, as I set down the pungent-smelling takeaway sacks. “Dinner.”
We were both more tired than hungry. We picked away at the mee krob and khao man kai that I dished out, not making much progress.
“Did you hear from Mavis?” I nodded toward the laptop. “She get home all right?”
“Uh-huh.” Donnie propped the side of his face against one fist. “She emailed me. She’s fine.”
“Nice kid.”
“Yeah.” He nodded. “She’s . . . nice.”
That tiny pause brought the hairs up on the back of my neck. The way he said that – it was such a guy thing.
“Wait a minute.” I glared at him, my forehead creasing. “Did you and her . . . did you . . .”
He looked straight back at me. “Well, what were we supposed to do? You left us there the whole time. It’s what you’re supposed to do on spring break.”
That little tramp, I thought. These university girls – they’re all alike.
“Plus,” he went on, “you pretty much told us that we might all get killed at any moment, so –”
“Okay, okay. But that doesn’t mean . . .” I shook my head. “Forget it.”
I took another bite of whatever was on my plate. I was just glad that somebody had managed to have some fun.
Turn the page to preview
KIM OH 6:
REAL DANGEROUS RIDE
I spotted the drone ahead, more by the commotion it was causing than by the glimpse of its white metal-and-plastic frame. Still fluttering and swooping, it bounced off the side of an SUV hard enough to gain a couple of feet in altitude, the backpack swinging below by its straps. The driver freaked – maybe he thought he was under attack by terrorists or something – and cranked his steering wheel hard to the left. That move resulted in him sideswiping the sedan in the lane closest to the freeway divider. This was all happening right in front of me, so I had to quick roll off the throttle and pile on the rear brake without losing traction and going into a skid. I tilted the bike, diving into a gap in the right-hand lane, just as the SUV bounced back into the center – its tires smoked as it spun around ninety degrees and rocked to a halt.
As I passed the SUV, its hood pointed toward me, I heard the crunching steel noise of first one car slamming into its right side, then the next two vehicles’ screeching brakes, followed instantly by their own crumpling fenders, one after the other. A clamor of skidding wheels and shrieking horns came from farther behind.
I didn’t even bother glancing at my handlebar mirror – my sight was locked on the drone ahead, still swooping from side to side, not much more than a couple of yards above the pavement. The tangled multivehicle collision it’d left behind acted as a barricade, emptying out a stretch of the freeway. I had a clear shot back into the middle lane, following behind the drone’s erratic flight. In my head, I was trying to calculate my next move, whether it would be better to try and catch up with it, or just keep it in sight until it finally crashed to the ground. If I got close enough to reach up and grab one of its struts, or the backpack dangling and swaying beneath, I didn’t know if it might pull me off-balance, crashing the motorcycle onto its side with me aboard. That wouldn’t be pleasant.
My thoughts along those lines came to a sudden halt when I heard the roar of a big-cylindered engine coming from behind. I recognized the snarling noise even before I caught sight of the car in my right-hand mirror – it was that goddamn Dodge Challenger, doing a quick swerve close to the guardrail and snaking past the pileup in the center of the freeway. When I’d chased its driver off, just before the crew of phony paramedics tried to gas me, he must’ve shot ahead and exited the freeway at the next off-ramp. Then he’d circled back on the surface streets running alongside the freeway and gotten on again so he’d be able to take another shot at me. Had to give the guy points for persistence –
Or at least I would’ve, if I hadn’t been preoccupied with figuring out what to do about him now. Then again, it struck me as I straightened back up behind the windscreen, the Challenger guy probably wasn’t interested in me at all – he’d only messed me up because he wanted to get the backpack. Only now I didn’t have it on me – it was up ahead, flopping around beneath the drone as it swooped and careened like a wounded bat. One corner of the drone’s white frame rattled across a stretch of the chain link mesh dividing the freeway, before the device spun around and yawed back out toward the empty middle lane.
I heard the Challenger’s engine roar louder, the bass rumble swamping the Ninja’s higher-pitched snarl. A second later, the muscle car passed me on the right, the fury of its rush nearly enough to suck me and the bike under the rear wheels. I caught a glimpse of the driver, slit eyes focused on his target. I was right. He wasn’t interested in me – the drone, and the backpack dangling beneath, were all that he cared about.
Once he was in fron
t of me, it wasn’t hard for him to match speed with the drone. Its flight grew increasingly erratic, barely covering more than a few yards a second. Its square white frame tilted at a forty-five-degree angle, swooping in a low arc along the left-hand lane. The corner with the broken rotor scraped across the pavement, causing the whole thing to pinwheel end-over-end, like a four-sided card table that somebody had tried to fling into a landfill. My sped-up heart skipped when the backpack, still tethered to the drone’s underside, slapped into the concrete hard enough for it bounce upward, the shoulder strap going from taut to slack. But the momentary loss of the backpack’s weight enabled the drone’s three functioning rotors to rev up again, and it wobbled higher into the air, looping at an angle toward the middle lane –
Which put it right in front of the Challenger, as its driver cranked the wheel and cut sharp across the lane before me. The car’s rear end fishtailed as he piled on the brakes – with its bumper rushing toward me, there was no way for me to hit either of my brakes without dumping the bike into a low-side spin on one of the footpegs. Instead – without even thinking but just letting my body do the reacting – I pushed down hard on the left handlebar grip, leaned the bike over, and swerved around the Challenger’s fender with barely an inch to spare. A split-second later, I was jamming my other hand down on the opposite grip and shifting my weight racer-style, pulling the bike upright to avoid the freeway center divider. The side of my boot scraped across the strip of white-painted steel, as I swung back parallel with the Challenger.
Turning my head, I could see through the side window as the driver glared at me with even more murder in his eyes than the last time I’d gotten this close to him. His knuckles whitened as he gripped the wheel even tighter, his shoulders bunching up under his muscle shirt as he prepared to swing the car into my lane and slam me against the divider. I’d have to hit the brakes hard and drop back to avoid getting crushed against the metal.
But then, I didn’t need to – suddenly, in that heartbeat moment as our gazes locked on each other, the flailing drone swooped down and crashed onto the Challenger’s hood, then bounced and struck the dark-tinted windshield. I ducked down lower, chest against the bike’s gas tank, as another one of the drone’s rotors disintegrated from the impact, the white plastic blades spinning past my head like knives.
That took the driver’s attention away from me and whatever he’d been planning to knock me out of the chase. His wide-eyed gaze shot away from me and focused on the battered drone a little distance away on his windshield. It was still in one piece – barely – but it wasn’t going to be flying away again anytime soon. There were wires and sparkly electronic bits dangling out of the cracks in the drone’s hub, and the two remaining rotors at opposite corners weren’t turning anymore. The thing was dead.
Which meant there wasn’t anything to keep it from sliding across the windshield, away from the driver and toward the car’s passenger side, dragging the backpack with it.
That was the last thing the driver wanted. If the drone dropped off the car’s right side, I’d have a chance of swooping over, past the Challenger’s rear end, and snatching it up. Even if he stood on his brake pedal, it’d be yards and yards of skidding and smoking tires before he’d be able to come to a halt and then come back at me.
The calculation went through the driver’s head in no time at all – he hit the brakes while cranking the wheel over, whipping the car’s tail to the right, the drone sliding back across the windshield to the left. Before the side window was halfway down, he had his arm out, reaching to grab any hold he could on the damaged drone.
I was reaching for it, too. Matching speed with the Challenger as the driver straightened it out, I brought the bike within inches of the front left fender. The sleeve of my jacket slipped along the guy’s sweating bare arm – we were that close to each other. He could’ve turned and spat in my face if he hadn’t been gritting his teeth so hard.
The bike lost speed when I took my hand from the throttle grip, straining for any jagged angle of the broken machine as it tumbled toward the windshield’s corner. The Challenger jumped a couple of feet ahead of the Ninja; at the same time, the driver’s fist seized hold of the white ring surrounding one of the rotors. He jerked his arm back with the prize.
In a flat arc, the drone slid free of the windshield. That momentum, combined with the car’s speed, whipped the attached backpack toward the bike’s headlight. Pushing against both footpegs, I lifted myself forward and off the seat, far enough that I could reach past the backpack, looping the crook of my right arm through one of its dangling shoulder straps. The backpack flopped onto the tank as I pulled myself back and grabbed the throttle, rolling it on again.
I had to speed the Ninja up once more, because the Challenger’s driver and I were now linked to each other by the battered carcass of the drone, hooked to another one of the backpack’s straps. He was still holding onto the piece he’d grabbed – if I didn’t keep up with him, he’d be able to pull me off balance, toppling the bike over. At the speed we were traveling, and me without a helmet – I wouldn’t survive a crash like that.
A second more, and he’d either slam on his brakes or swing the car into me – either would take me out, with the bike’s pieces and my remains cartwheeling down the pavement.
I didn’t wait for him to make his move. Instead, with my right arm still holding onto the backpack, I took my left hand from the handlebar grip, reached into my jacket, and tugged out the .357. The driver’s eyes widened in panic when he saw me swinging it around toward him.
We were still so close to each other that I could’ve put the gun right into his face, then pulled the trigger –
Which would’ve sent the Challenger spinning out of control on the freeway, wiping me out with it. So instead, as I kept the bike’s throttle to its max, I shifted the angle of the .357’s muzzle a few degrees and pumped three quick shots into the drone.
It was already pretty beat up, from its careening flight and crashing into vehicles along the way. The bullets ripped through the remains of the device, sending splinters of white plastic in all directions. A couple of pieces struck my forehead and jaw, before falling behind the Ninja. That didn’t matter to me – all I cared about was that the circular segment the Challenger driver had been holding onto came loose in his hand. With the backpack’s other strap dangling free, I could hit the brakes without toppling the bike over or being pulled off it.
The Challenger shot ahead as I dropped back behind it. Raising my head above the windscreen, I could see other stuff happening, all of which meant trouble. In the bike’s mirrors, red lights were flashing, somewhere beyond the tangle of wrecked trucks and cars we’d left behind us, and I could hear the thin wail of police sirens. All this action, starting from when the Challenger driver first blindsided me, had brought the attention of the authorities – which I majorly didn’t want right now. I’d gotten my delivery parcel back into my hands, but I didn’t feel like explaining to anyone – especially the police – what I was doing with it. I needed an exit strategy, immediately.
Or just an exit. As soon as I spotted the off-ramp at the right side of the freeway, I didn’t have to think about it. I leaned the Ninja over as far as I could, taking me in a tight, flat curve across all the lanes. The angle was so extreme that I didn’t have to clamp my arm against myself to keep the backpack at my side. I wound up overshooting the start of the off-ramp, heading into the triangular barrier section where it peeled off from the right-hand lane. I hit the brakes, then dragged my right boot sole against the concrete to keep from toppling over as I scrubbed off as much speed as I could.
I heard another skid, which had nothing to do with me or the motorcycle. I glanced over my shoulder – the Challenger was heeling onto its left-hand tires, as the driver wrestled it into a hard spin. The car’s rubber shredded as it kept skidding sideways for a few more yards. It rocked back down on all four tires, then the rear tires dug in and smoked. With a lurch, the Challenger
leapt across all three lanes, straight for me.
Or for where I’d been – I was already moving, pushing the bike upright, then rolling on just enough throttle to get me back to the off-ramp I’d overshot. The rear wheel swung in a short arc as I wrestled the bike around, getting it pointed down the ramp’s sloping curve –
If I’d taken an instant more to shove the Ninja into gear and jam the throttle on full, tucking my elbow tighter against the backpack at my ribs, I would’ve been flattened by the Challenger jumping the raised concrete corner of the off-ramp. Tucking myself down behind the windscreen, I didn’t see but heard behind me the crash of the car’s right fender against the guardrail. Metal screeched against metal as the driver pulled the car back in line. In one of the bike mirrors, I had a quick glimpse of the car’s remaining headlight and steam boiling up from the fractured radiator and across the buckled hood. The driver ground the gears, ripping away a section of the rail and leaving it dangling at the side of the off-ramp as the car gunned ahead, only a few yards away from my own rear fender. Behind the wheel, and the clenched hands that looked like they were about to snap it in two, the driver had the blood-crazed expression of a predator about to rip the haunch off its fleeing prey.