Dirty Laundry

by Rhys Ford

  “Okay, so we walk around,” I said to Bobby’s disgusted hiss. “Come on. It’ll help you work off that burger I’m going to buy you.”

  Not much had changed in the complex since I’d last been there. The trees were still tall and bushy, their tops reaching the upper floor roof, and the courtyard resembled an ancient rainforest. Someone’d gone wild with the fertilizer, because a pungent organic-fishy smell hit us in the face once we got past the front archway. The patches of lawn interspersed between the flower beds glistened from dew, and a butterfly dive-bombed my face when I stepped out into the dappled rays coming through the trees. Despite the cloudless sky, the morning was still bitter, and the wind whistling through the archway and pass-through cut down to the bone.

  “This is kind of nice,” Bobby murmured, looking around. Cocking his head, he frowned. “And kind of too… quiet. No toys or anything on the walkways. Mostly adults?”

  “I think most of the people who live here either are retired or work during the day. Kind of feels like one of those places.” I pointed to the stairs near the pass-through to the parking lot. “That’s the only way up. Yi said she has the place next to the Lees. Let’s see if she’s home.”

  He sidestepped a sprinkler head that had popped up suddenly. A few feet down, the dirt beside the sidewalk sprouted a row of black spigots. “Those things better not go off. These are new boots. What exactly are you hoping to get from her?”

  “Stop worrying about your delicate feet.” He slapped my back with the flat of his hand, and I reached back to rub at the sting. “And I don’t know. Maybe she knows someone who wants Gyong-Si to suffer? They were close, and he seems kind of self-absorbed—”

  “Kind of?”

  “Okay, very,” I corrected myself. “She’s one of those women who collects gossip. If there’s any dirt on someone, I think she might have it. Especially if it’s about Gyong-Si. I’m hoping she knows about someone like that. Or at least we can warn her to go to the cops if someone suspicious comes around.”

  The sprinklers went off full blast before I could go any further. The water was fucking cold and, for some reason, shot out in hard, pounding sheets. Dodging against the outside wall of the apartments didn’t do us any good. The blasts of water coming from the popped-up heads were like being bombarded by fire hoses. I felt the sting of the blast through my jeans and tried to skip out of the way, only to fall prey to the next shot arcing toward my crotch.

  “Shit, head to the stairs, kid.” Bobby took a shot of water to his chest. The water continued to ratchet upward, leaving welts on his cheek and jaw. “What the fuck is—”

  We never made it to the stairs. A shot came out of the shadows above us, scoring a groove into the cement by our feet. Another followed, then, like the sprinklers, a line of blasts cut us off from the archway.

  Braving the beating lines of water, Bobby and I dove toward the center of the courtyard, both of us looking for cover among the tree trunks. Cowering behind one of the smaller palms, I pressed my back to the striated trunk and looked around for any sign of the shooter, catching the last bit of a water stream on my shoulder. Bobby somehow ended up farther in, a few feet away behind a eucalyptus.

  “Can you see him?” Bobby shouted above the chunking sound of the sprinklers and loud gushes of water. I shook my head, and he bared his teeth in frustration. “Tell me you brought your gun!”

  Shaking my head so the shooter couldn’t hear my response, I grumbled to myself, “Who the fuck would bring a gun to talk to a fortune-teller?”

  I dug my phone out of my pocket and sighed at its flickering screen. Soaked down to the chips, the screenshot I’d taken of Neko for my background glowed a demonic red before being cut through with blue dots and lines. Holding my phone up for Bobby to see, I lifted my eyebrows and pointed at him, asking him if his was any better.

  His mouth turned into a sour fish kiss and he shook his head, then pointed back toward the parking lot.

  “Really?” I grumbled over the water noise. “You fucking leave your phone behind and you give me shit about a gun?”

  He shrugged and took a peek out from behind his tree. Our gunman must have had a better view of Bobby’s hiding place, because the second his face popped out from behind the trunk, another shot went off and pieces of papery bark flew into the air.

  We were a lot closer to the back of the complex than the front. Making it to the stairs would be tricky, especially since I couldn’t guarantee we could get to the shooter before he cut into us. From the looks of things, the first floor was either deserted or filled with people with more common sense than Bobby and I had.

  The water pouring out of the sprinklers was freezing, and I shivered, feeling a ripple of ice starting to kiss my blood. Rubbing at my shoulder to get my circulation going, I took another look around the trunk, trying to spot a way to get to safety. Short of getting inside one of the lower floor apartments and then smashing out through a back window, things did not look good. There didn’t seem to be anyone to hear the gunshots, even if they could over the gushes of water, and the gunman wouldn’t have to wait long for us to either begin to stiffen up under the cold water or float in the lake forming in the complex’s courtyard.

  I was about to damn myself and dash to the archway for help when a man’s voice called out to me from the upper floor.

  “Mr. McGinnis?”

  I rolled my eyes at the really? face Bobby gave me. I wasn’t surprised the guy knew who I was. Chances are, we were on the same road map, circling around Gyong-Si’s offspring. Thing was, he and I had totally different reasons for doing so. He wanted them dead, and I took offense to that. Sticking my head out a little bit, I shouted back, “Yeah? What can I do for you?”

  Scintillating conversation at its best, but there wasn’t much else to say, short of begging him to let us go. Considering he’d just spent the last minute or so trying to blow our heads off, I didn’t think it was going to be an option.

  “You know I’m going to have to kill you and your friend.” He sounded almost delighted, a flippant slant to his voice. Like Jae, he had a smooth roundness to his English. I didn’t recognize his voice, but he sounded vaguely familiar. “You might was well come out and get it over with.”

  “Dude, I don’t even know who you are.” If anything, the water got colder. Either that or my core body temperature was beginning to drop. I’d lost feeling in my toes, and from the blue splotches creeping into Bobby’s lips, he wasn’t doing much better.

  “Really? I would have thought you’d have figured it out.” A shadow emerged from the stairwell.

  The light hit him, and I saw Bobby frown, struggling to put a name to the face. I had no such problem. Even distracted by the Beretta he held pointed at my head, I recognized him straight off.

  I’d only really seen him twice. Once when he picked his mother up at my office and when he’d been in the conference room after Vivian’s death. He’d mastered the dutiful son look then, in his dress slacks and polo shirts. Now, he was working on serial killer and doing a damned fine job. Even as shitty a dresser as I was, I knew green khakis did not go with an orange Hawaiian shirt.

  “James Bahn—fuck.” He’d seemed like a decent kind of guy. It’d all been an act put on for his mother—an act that probably also included him being the loving older brother to his wayward illegitimate sister, Vivian Na. Bobby ducked back behind his cover, but not before he gave me a who-the-fuck look. “Madame Sun’s son, right?”

  “Good to know that, for some of you, we don’t all look alike,” he sneered at me. I scuttled around the trunk, carefully aligning myself so he couldn’t get a clear shot.

  “Pretty fucking shitty thing to say there, James.” The numbness was eating away at my feet, and my fingers joined the party, tingling when I flexed them. “Kind of racist, actually. Especially since I’m half Japanese. What do you want to let us go?”

  “Let you go? I can’t do that, Mr. McGinnis.” I heard him shuffling in between the shots of sprin
kler sprays and strained to figure out if he went left or right without getting my head blown off. “Or should I call you Cole?”

  “Whatever makes you happy.” I caught a glimpse of Bobby’s shoulder emerging out from behind the eucalyptus. Shaking, he came into view, curled up onto his haunches and balancing on his toes. He motioned toward the next tree, pointed to himself and then again to the tree. I shook my head, hoping to keep him in place, but Bobby frowned furiously, negating my concern. I took a deep breath and shouted at James, hoping to keep his attention on me. “What are you doing here? Besides trying to kill me?”

  Bobby took off before James could answer, and suddenly, the bushes around Bobby were peppered with two shots. I heard Bobby’s pained grunt and toppled over, trying to sprint toward him. My legs weren’t responding, and I shook from the cold. The sunlight coming through the trees wasn’t hot enough to warm us up, and I was struggling to get some feeling in my limbs when Bobby rolled under a stand of thick hibiscus bushes, their yellow pollen dusted over his short hair.

  He was clutching his left arm, and a trickle of blood seeped out from between his fingers, soaking into the cedar mulch chunks around the stand’s roots. Making eye contact, Bobby mouthed at me, I’m okay.

  Nodding in return, I went back to shouting at James. “Let me guess, you’re here to kill Terry Yi.”

  “Smart man.” His laugh was loud, telling me he was closer than I’d have liked. “You’re not as stupid as you look. I thought I’d kill his mother too, since I’m here. You, on the other hand, are becoming a problem I sorely need to get rid of. And now your friend too. Such a shame. Especially after everything you’ve done for Mother.”

  Cursing the water spray leeching the warmth out of my body, I dug around the tree, hoping to find a rock or something to throw at his head. “Want to give me the five minute evil villain monologue, or should I just guess? It has something to do with Gyong-Si and your mother.”

  “Gangjun Gyong-Si? That bastard?” Any calm in James’s voice melted away under the heat of his furious reply. “For a gay man, he’s ruined a lot of lives by sleeping with women he should have left alone to begin with!”

  Across from me, Bobby smirked and jerked his head toward the archway again. I snarled a silent no at him and cut my stiff hand down, telling him to stay put. If James had a clear shot, he’d probably take it, killing both of us if he could. The water spray arched toward me again, and I ducked before tossing another question at James.

  “Why now? If you’re so pissed off at him, why not just kill him? Why go after innocent people like your sister?”

  “Vivian? She was never my sister. My mother gave her everything, a family back home, money and education, and what did she become? A whore. She was so much of a slut she fucked her own brother.” James’s fury escalated, and he sounded like he was popping a vein. “It was never enough for her. Why didn’t she go to that faggot father of hers for money? It was bad enough she ruined my family in Korea. She had to come here to get between me and my mother?”

  “So you went after Gyong-Si’s kids?” It was a stretch of the imagination by anyone’s logic. Claudia told me once, sometimes it doesn’t pay to argue with crazy, but in this case, I needed to argue. Anything to buy us time to distract him. “That doesn’t make any sense!”

  “It would have been too easy if I just killed the whore. Gyong-Si deserves more than that.” Another loud crunch of mulch sounded next to me, and Bobby’s grimace deepened.

  Holding his hands up a few feet apart, he tried to tell me how far away James was to my hiding place, then pantomimed jumping with his closed fists. I nodded, hoping Bobby was telling me James was hopscotching around the courtyard, probably to avoid stepping directly into the punishing blast of the high-powered sprinklers.

  “I wanted him to know what it’s like for his family—every damned child he’s ever made—to be taken from him. Just like what he did to us back in Korea. My father left us because of him. And don’t worry, I’ll deal with Gyong-Si last.”

  I didn’t know if that meant he’d already killed Terry Yi or still had the kid on his hit list. Even if Terry were dead, there was still Abby and Hong Chul. Bobby and I needed to get out of there and take James down with us.

  A thin river of blood ran down Bobby’s arm, and he’d begun to shiver uncontrollably. Huffing to control his breathing, he turned over onto his side, tucking himself farther under the bush to get away from the sprinkler heads pointing straight at him. The water was pooling up around my feet, and small bits of foamy mulch were floating around the sides of my Doc Martens.

  My boots.

  They were black leather and hefty, meant to take a pounding. I’d worn them while doing the renovations to the house, and they’d shrugged off hammers and power tools being dropped on them. Once, after a two-mile hard run to chase down a runaway I’d been hired to find, I actually took them off because it was easier to walk without their weight. Steel-toed and thick-soled, they were as heavy as shit.

  They were going to have to do.

  I quickly yanked them off, then hastily pulled at the shoestrings until I had enough hanging to knot them together. Using the tree trunk for cover, I crept up to my feet and called out to James. “Tell you what, how about if we talk about this?”

  I looked at Bobby and pointed behind me, hoping he could tell me where James was. The tips of his fingers were nearly bleached white, and the beds of his nails were a sickly blue. A smear of blood covered his hand, and a trickle of red ran down his wrist toward his elbow. He was bleeding too much for a flesh wound, and his arm shook when he held up two fingers then made an L before pointing behind me.

  “Why don’t you come out so I can shoot you?” James’s sneer leaked through his voice. “I’m pretty sure I’ve already killed your friend.”

  “Like you killed Darren Shim?” I could sneer back with the best of them. “Nice how you killed him so no one could trace Vivian’s shooting back to you.”

  “That asshole came to her office! I had to get rid of him. He was going to hurt her.”

  It was easy to put together now I had the missing piece. He’d probably run into Shim when Hong Chul was around. From what little I knew about Shim, he’d gladly have done some dirty work for cash. I wasn’t going to waste any tears crying over a man who shot up a café and killed a defenseless woman, but he probably hadn’t known he was walking into his own death trap. If James hadn’t bashed Shim’s head in then, he still would have killed his hired gun later to cover his tracks.

  I wasn’t graceful. Other guys brag about how they pounce on a guy during a fight, and they make it sound like a ballet. The only ballet I could have been accused of doing was the “Dance of the Hours,” and I was a pink-tutu-wearing hippo named Hyacinth. Still, at least I had some element of surprise when I stumbled out from my hiding place swinging my jury-rigged nunchucks.

  One caught James across the throat and slapped the back of his head. He pitched forward, nearly doing a face-plant into the mulch. He grabbed a handful of the bark chips and flung them at my face, trying to blind me. They were too wet to do much more than fall a few inches from his outstretched arm, but James unknowingly gave me an opening.

  I didn’t spend time in the boxing ring with Bobby for exercise. Since the only person I’d ever gotten into a real fist fight with had been my brother Mike, I’d thought it would be good to learn how to actually punch. JoJo was a good teacher. Bobby was a good opponent, and the various men who’d ducked under the ropes to go a few rounds with me never gave me any quarter. So I felt pretty confident that I could hit… and hit hard. After rearing back my arm, I laid one out, planting my curled fist into the middle of James’s face. He reeled back, his head bouncing on his neck in a loose bobble, and I got a satisfying crunching noise and a fountain of blood streaming out of his nose.

  He also dropped the gun.

  I wasn’t going to waste time going for the Beretta. I didn’t know where it had landed, and James was standing right in fron
t of me. Kicking up as much mulch with my feet as I could to hide its whereabouts, I moved in, intent on doing some damage with my bare fists. With more than a few inches and about forty pounds on the guy, it wasn’t going to be much of a fair fight unless he had some martial arts moves I didn’t know about. From the way he threw his arms up to protect the top of his head, I was safe.

  The trick to hitting someone effectively is putting weight behind each punch and having a good, firm stance. My problem was I couldn’t really feel my feet, and my arms were deadened from the icy water. I was slower than I’d have liked, and the mulch slipped around under me. The fight was still more mine to lose, but I was going to have to work for it.

  James swung at my head, an open-palm slap I would normally have avoided easily if I wasn’t frozen down to the marrow of my bones. The smack of skin against skin was something I preferred to have happen in the bedroom, and only with a naked, sweaty Jae-Min. James’s ill-aimed cuff brought me no pleasure. Only a ringing sound when his cupped palm forced a burst of chilled air into my ear canal.

  The rush of pressure against my eardrum hurt more than the slap, and I bit back a grunt of pain. James floundered, losing his footing. He made a grab for something to steady himself, then screamed when the palm’s serrated trunk dug into his hand. It wasn’t the best distraction, but I was going to make the most of it.

  I tackled James at the knees, wrapping my arms up around his midsection. We went down into a bunch of shrubs, shaking out a shower of tiny purple flowers. He fought me, punching at my shoulders to get free. Hooking my legs around his thighs, I heaved up and drew back, blocking one of his flails with my arm. He struck at me a few more times before I found an opening I could take.

  That’s when I broke his nose again, driving as many bone shards up into his sinuses as I could.

  Concentrating on his face, I hammered at James’s cheekbones and jaw. His nails scored lines into my neck during one of his passes, and the cold air bit into my now burning skin, leaving behind a painful sting. The blood on James’s face splattered, then ran when a blast of water hit us from one of the churning sprinkler heads. The spray caught me unawares, tearing into my mouth. It tasted nasty and with a suspicious iron-metallic aftertaste that had me wondering if I’d torn my lip. I spat out the foul water, and James struck back, delivering a soft punch to my side. I would have laughed off the strike, but when he punched again, a searing pain erupted across my ribs and I caught a flash of glittering metal in his hand.