Ramen Assassin

by Rhys Ford

  From what the bubbly woman knew, Gilder was a shark who had his finger on the pulse of nearly everything Mathers did and had for years, which was exactly what Trey hoped to hear.

  Nodding at the guard, Trey continued walking, expecting Aoki would catch up. He didn’t stop to see if the guard actually rang up the offices. Nor did Trey care. He was through apologizing for what he’d done and his past mistakes. Someone took Sera away, killed her in his home, and the time for crawling around on his belly was long over.

  Trey held the door for Aoki when the elevator slid open. Staring at a keypunch by the buttons, he shrugged and worked through a sequence of numbers, smiling to himself when the access light flared green and the Fifteen button turned on. Aoki snorted and settled against the wall, staring at the Los Angeles skyline through the elevator’s windows.

  “Good thing you knew the code.” He grinned smugly. “Probably pissed that guard off. I mean, sure, we don’t look like we belong here, but man, no need to be a snob about it. Damned good poker face you’ve got. And how’d you know your dad’s done business with this guy?”

  “Yeah, I’ve been here before, but I was kind of buzzed, but my dad’s got habits. And the code’s easy. I’d just use the same passcode he always uses.” Trey shrugged when Aoki’s mouth dropped open. “It’s always my birthday. He’s weird that way. He’s got lawyers on staff, but the best way to make sure the good lawyers can’t sue you is to have them on retainer. You should see the suits he’s got around his poker table. I’ve been nose-deep in lawyers since I could see over the table and deal out chips.”

  “Never would’ve imagined you to be a poker player.” Aoki chuckled. “You look too—”

  “Naïve? All-American?” Trey had his own laugh at the thought. “I spent my formative years on the set with some of the biggest assholes in the world, and those were the good guys. First thing they did was teach me how to play poker. Second thing they did was teach me how to fix a drink. If I can’t bluff my way past a security guard, I think I’d be kicked out of SAG. On second thought, they might’ve already kicked me out. I haven’t checked. I did decide to find my balls again, and I’m sick of someone punching at them, so let’s hope somebody at the lawyers’ office will talk to me about Mathers.”

  “That the dead guy we found in the dumpster? Or the other one?” Aoki rolled his eyes. “Because I’m having a hard time keeping track.”

  “Hold that thought, because I’ve got a few questions about that,” Trey replied, taking a deep breath when the elevator dinged their arrival. “Okay, we got past the guard. Now let’s see if we can get past the bigger monster, the receptionist.”

  It went far easier and smoother than Trey expected. The woman at the desk either recognized his name or the guard calling ahead gave the office enough time to scramble up some information, because a few moments after his feet hit the law office’s lobby, they were escorted into a meeting room and asked if they wanted coffee.

  The Caldwell-Gilder meeting room was a cookie-cutter knockoff of a gentlemen’s club, much like many meeting rooms Trey associated with his father and his ilk. Dark mahogany paneling and forest-green paint dominated the walls, with overstuffed tufted burgundy leather chairs in artful arrangements around low tables on a scatter of old Oriental rugs. The setting was at odds with the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking downtown Los Angeles, but the outside environment was obviously not taken into consideration when decorating. Trey knew from experience people like his father felt more comfortable in the stodgy trappings from an older time, eras where they held a firm grip on their industry and the people beneath them.

  “I feel like there should be a tarp in the middle of the room,” Aoki said, shoving his hands into his jeans’ pockets. “And I don’t want to touch anything. This is the kind of place that charges you for how much air you breathe.”

  “You are not wrong,” he agreed. “But God knows, I put my lawyers through the wringer more than a few times.”

  “Well, technically, Mister Bishop, I suppose one could say I’m a new lawyer for you to put through the wringer, although I sincerely hope not. If you retain our services, of course.” An older man entered the room, but he looked miles away from the clean-cut, gray-haired men in expensive suits Trey thought of whenever the word lawyer popped up in his head. Most of the firms his father engaged were tried-and-true old boys’ networks where most business was conducted at the golf course or at the bar in a country club. This man, if possible, looked even rattier than they did.

  He was about Trey’s father’s age, and his hair was definitely silver, but it ran long, gathered up into a ponytail that hung over one shoulder. The sneakers on his feet were expensive, but they’d obviously been used for hiking or something to drag them through red clay, because they were stained and scuffed. His T-shirt possibly could’ve been blue at some point but had since faded to a nondescript gray and sported a few holes along his belly. He looked fit despite having climbed firmly into his sixties, having a lean, ripcord body not unlike Trey’s, his exposed arm muscles rippling as he reached out with one hand.

  “Stuart Gilder, attorney at law and keeper of secrets. It’s good to meet you, Mister Bishop.” He grinned as he shook Trey’s hand, then pivoted to clasp Aoki’s before motioning toward the chairs. “I suppose you’re here to talk to me about your inheritance.”

  His smile was blinding white, and everything about Stuart Gilder was meant to be disarmingly congenial, a smooth sweetness to his voice and a hint of reassurance in his manner. Trey trusted him as far as he could throw him, but he didn’t know the man, and stewing in the trouble Mathers seemed to have put him in, Gilder was the only one who possibly had answers. Or at least someone he could ask.

  “Actually, I’m not here about my inheritance. If anything, I’d like to give it back, because it seems like someone’s trying to kill me and I’m not sure why,” Trey said, settling down into one of the chairs. “I don’t know how much you are aware of what’s happened, but I lost a really good friend yesterday, and I think her death is connected to all of this money, or maybe just Mathers.”

  “If you don’t mind me talking in front of your boyfriend,” Gilder replied, nodding his head at Aoki, “I’ll be glad to answer any of your questions.”

  “Oh, he’s not my—” Trey started to protest.

  “I’m just here to keep him alive, because the guy who probably is his boyfriend or going to be—I’m really not sure and I haven’t asked—would skin me if anything happens to him,” Aoki interrupted. “I’m already pretty sure I’m going to get my ass kicked for even bringing him here, but at least this way I can keep an eye on him, and if I’m lucky, they’ll kill me instead of him so the boss can’t get to me first.”

  “Are you in some kind of trouble, Mister Bishop?” Gilder reached behind him and pulled out a cell phone. “If you’re being held or threatened—”

  “It’s not like that. If anything, Kuro’s done his best to keep me alive, and lately, I don’t seem to have enough common sense not to look up when it rains.” Trey leaned forward in his chair, resting his elbows on his knees. “I need to talk to you about how Mathers died. Robert, not David. Or maybe both. I don’t know.”

  “Explain to me what you need and I’ll try to help you,” the lawyer offered, putting away his phone. “But I don’t know what I can tell you.”

  “A few nights ago, I saw two men carrying what I thought was a rolled-up rug but that turned out to be a dead body who I recognized as somebody I knew, but I didn’t know who it was. Then I saw Robert Mathers’s picture on Dad’s wall, but he told me Robert was alive, because they played golf together that day,” Trey explained, working through everything clouding his head to find the details he needed. “Later on, one of the guys I saw that night tried to kill Kuro, who defended me when they shot at me. Then a couple of days later, I think, they find Robert Mathers stabbed to death, but that’s not the guy I saw that night. Or I don’t think so. Because the guy I saw that night was found in
the dumpster behind Kuro’s shop the other day while I was there.

  “Then yesterday, a bunch of guys shot up my bungalow and killed my best friend, Sera. They were probably trying to kill me but they got her instead, and none of this makes any sense, because I can’t even identify the other guy who shot at me and I don’t know who murdered Robert or David. Dad told me David was a dot on the horizon and no one saw him for years, but he shows up dead in Los Angeles?” Trey shook his head, unable to find his way out of the maze of conflicting information. “David was Robert’s twin, right? Maybe they killed David thinking he was Robert? And why didn’t anyone think I saw David when I said I recognized the dead guy as Robert?”

  “Probably because they were fraternal twins,” Gilder remarked, then paused as the assistant who’d led them into the room returned with a tray of coffee cups and cookies. Thanking her, he waited until she left the room before motioning for them to help themselves, picking up the mug to sip at the black brew. “If you put them side by side when they were younger, you could tell them apart. As they got older, it looks like genetics drew them closer. I was the one who identified David’s body.

  “His hair was cut the same as Robert’s, and he’d gained enough weight around his face and belly until, if I hadn’t known better, I would’ve sworn I was looking at Robert, but fingerprints don’t lie and neither do teeth.” Gilder aged in front of Trey’s eyes, sagging in on himself. The lines in his tanned, vibrant face grew deeper and his skin turned ashen. “David’s front teeth were false, implants he had put in after Robert punched him during the fight they had over the business. His front teeth were white and the rest of them were yellowed. That’s how I knew it was David in the dumpster. Well, that and they’d already found Robert. The police are on it. I think your sister is on the case, isn’t she?”

  “She’s not necessarily sharing information,” Trey replied. “I’m just trying to make sense out of what’s happening and who’s after me. I didn’t even know Robert. I don’t know why he left me anything. I mean, he was my godfather, but I didn’t even recognize the man. He was just one of my dad’s friends hanging on the wall with other people.”

  Trey’s cell phone went off, an oddly cheerful tune singing about the wonders of a fruity oaty bar. Glancing at the screen, he groaned, then showed the phone to Aoki.

  “Don’t tell him I’m here.” Aoki waved his hands in front of his chest, a blur of fingers and panic. “No! You have to tell him I’m here or he’ll kill me for letting you walk out of the shop. Shit! I don’t even have a gun.”

  Gilder looked panicked, but Trey shook his head and said, “It’s okay. It’s just Kuro.”

  “It’s just Kuro?” Aoki exclaimed. “You don’t know him. I’m going to be shredding carrots and daikon for the next two years. I’ll be lucky if he even lets me make broth after this. He’s going to bust me down to checking chopsticks for splinters.”

  “It won’t be that bad,” Trey said, answering the call. “Hello?”

  “Where are you?” Kuro barked at him across the line. The man who held a gun on Tatiana in the front room of his bungalow was back, stepping over the gentle soul who’d made him duck breast and left him with a bald cat for company after holding him through the night. “Is Aoki there with you? I told him to keep you at the apartment. Instead I find both of you and his car gone.”

  “Yes, he’s right next to me. The car’s downstairs in the parking garage. I couldn’t fit it in the elevator, so it couldn’t come up with us. And if you have forgotten, what you told him to do was pretty much kidnapping,” Trey retorted. “Or didn’t they go over that in the super secret ninja school you went to?”

  “Technically, that’s illegal confinement, but you should’ve followed my orders.”

  “If you haven’t noticed, I’m kind of allergic to following orders,” he growled back. “You could’ve left me a note. Maybe a text telling me why I needed to stay there? And that I don’t appreciate—”

  “I’m coming to get you because I need to know you’re safe,” Kuro cut him off. His voice gentled, rolling softly through Trey’s ruffled temper. “And I found something out about the dead body in the dumpster. That wasn’t David Mathers. That was Robert, and from what my people tell me, it looks like he’s been dead and on ice for years.”

  Fifteen

  KURO WAS spoiling for a fight.

  He recognized the signs. The tightness of his gums around his teeth. The twisting clench of his guts and the pull of his balls up into the hollow between his thighs. Most of the time these signs crawled out of his body when adrenaline hit his blood and bullets were flying.

  Never when he was angry at a man sitting next to him in the car.

  Kuro was also scared to death.

  Fear wasn’t a new sensation. Only the insane and sociopaths never tasted the sour lick of fear through their lungs and up their throat. Anticipatory fear was the worst. There were too many variables, too many possibilities for things to go wrong, and the human mind had an endless capacity for imagination, dredging up even the most fantastical of disasters, packaging them in easily believable bites.

  He just didn’t understand why he was afraid. Or rather, why he was afraid for Trey.

  Losing people was a part of the business. It’d been a while since he’d had to step over the body of someone he knew to complete a mission, but he’d done it so many times before, Trey falling to whatever mess was swirling around him shouldn’t have even rippled Kuro’s calm.

  Yet it did.

  He didn’t like the idea of Trey’s body going cold. Even worse, he hated the thought of something happening and not knowing where Trey had gone or where he lay. And it seemed like his fear manifested in a tight anger, a barbed-wire spiderweb wrapped tightly around his chest.

  Trey wore his grief on his face, purple shadows smeared beneath his sad eyes even as his restrained anger worked to seep out. Kuro didn’t have to be a mind reader to know Trey was pissed off. It rolled off of him in waves, slamming against Kuro’s own agitation and working right back in on top of them, a continuous storm of emotion they’d bottled up as if it were a message to be thrown into the sea.

  For all its roominess, the Challenger was a shitty place to have an argument. The car needed Kuro’s full attention, but so did Trey. The surface streets were touch and go, a barely moving stream of brake lights and rolled-up windows. Even as congested as Los Angeles’s arteries could get, Kuro was always amazed at how silent it was. There might be a boom-boom-boom of a bass line thumping through a lowered import’s massive speakers or the odd caterwauling of someone singing along to a song about shiny knives and being unable to kill the beast, but there were rarely any horns honked.

  At midafternoon, it was later than he liked, but there was no helping it. Between losing Trey and traffic, a fifteen-minute drive became nearly an hour and a half, or so his mapping application told him. He was about to offer to stop at a drive-through to get Trey something to eat or drink when Trey cleared his throat.

  “I don’t work for you.” Trey’s opening gambit was curt and to the point. “And I’m not going to be put behind the kiddie gate with Aoki set up as a watchdog. I’m grateful for your help, and you’ve pulled my ass out of a couple of really shitty situations, but that doesn’t give you the right—”

  “I’m sorry,” Kuro ground out between his teeth. The Challenger roared when he pressed his foot down on the gas, giving the car enough to get past a slowing bus. “I came back to the ramen shop to find you and you weren’t there. I lost my mind a little bit. I thought maybe somebody grabbed you.”

  “And what? Aoki went after them?” Sarcasm sharpened Trey’s words into spinning razors through Kuro’s apology. “I haven’t known him long, but I’m guessing he’s not the action hero kind of guy. I don’t see him crawling on top of a white horse to go save the day. Or me.”

  “That’s not fair to him,” he replied, wincing even as he defended his friend. He hated lying, and Trey wasn’t wrong. Aoki was more li
kely to hide behind the trash can lid than use it as a shield to protect others but still was a good man. “He would try to do something. I don’t know what, but he would try.”

  “Okay. Agreed. I am being shitty about him because I’m pissed off at you.” The grumble beneath Trey’s breath was in French, a burbling spit of water on hot cast iron. Kuro didn’t catch it all, but what he did hear wasn’t complimentary. “You didn’t have to come get me like I was some kid that got suspended from school.”

  “I came to get you because I thought you’d want to go with me to talk to this guy about the Mathers brothers. Especially since, while we’ve got the brothers swapped, our theory still holds. Someone needed Robert’s identity to carry through on this long con, and David probably overstepped. At some point Robert’s body probably began to break down and it couldn’t be used anymore. I don’t know for sure, but the guy we’re meeting might be able to confirm some of this.” It was an olive branch, a twisted, malnourished one, but an olive branch just the same. “He’s got some backdoor information and maybe a name we can follow up on. The amount of firepower used at your place is pretty huge, but it was a messy hit. Don’t know if there’s anything we can learn there, but that’s another maybe.”

  “Kimber said there’s no way they can trace the guns that were used.”

  “No. Too many weapons out there that can use that kind of ammo, but the amount they used is what we’re going to go on. It’s either someone who bought a little over a long period of time or a whole bunch at once. Guns are easy to get, but these days, sometimes finding ammo is like digging up hen’s teeth.” Kuro glanced down at the GPS screen on his phone, calculating how long it would take them to get to East Hollywood in the thickening traffic. “The guy we’re going to meet skims information. Normally, I would go through someone else, but the local source here and I rubbed each other the wrong way, so he sent me up directly. No phones. No emails. No recordings. Has to be face-to-face, and whatever’s said has got to be remembered. I don’t even know if we’ll be allowed to write it down.”