Dead Soon Enough: A Juniper Song Mystery (34 page)

Chaz always insisted we didn’t need to carry guns. I’d disagreed in theory, but I’d never gotten around to getting the permissions I’d need to have one on the job. I kept a Taser in my glove compartment, but it wouldn’t do me much good with two attackers and a busted car. All I could hope to do was to Taser the guy on foot, and piss off him, the driver, and whatever other goons they had in tow.

I went back to my cell phone. I might have time to dial 911.

But now there was a face at my window.

It belonged to an Asian man with a shaggy black beard shot through with a dozen strands of white. He was about forty-five, with coarse skin and narrow eyes. Chinese, I thought instinctively, though I couldn’t say why. On another street, at another hour, I might have thought he had a kind face, gentle and a little doughy, soft in the cheeks. But even Mister Rogers would have put the fear in me under these circumstances, and this was not Mister Rogers. This had to be the man Van knew as Hong.

He tapped at my window and I tried to think of a way to avoid rolling it down. My tire was busted, but I was inside, everyone else was out. I didn’t want to create another breach.

He sighed loud enough for me to hear through the glass. When he tapped again, the sound was heavier. I looked back up. He was tapping with a gun.

I rolled down the window and waited for him to speak.

“You seem to have a flat tire, miss,” he said, finally. His voice was smooth and calm, with the hint of an accent carried over from a childhood in another country.

“It’s a little late for that script,” I said.

“I guess you’re right.” He laughed, congenial and maybe a little embarrassed, as if I’d pointed out that his fly was open. “I’m not here to change your tire,” he said.

I didn’t say anything.

“Why don’t you get out of the car?” he suggested, casually aiming the gun at my throat.

I obeyed. It was clear in any case that the car was not going to get me out of there.

The other car had stopped behind mine. It was a Crown Victoria with a dull blue paint job, nondescript aside from a family resemblance to a police car. Another man was emerging from the driver’s seat. He was big. The kind of big that suggests oafishness, thoughtless physical power—the childish strength of Lenny Small, the servility of Pinky to the Brain. He wore a scowl on an Eastern-European face, his eyebrows thick and blunt. Boris.

“This isn’t exactly a fair fight,” I said, echoing Hong’s reasonable tone. “I mean, there are two of you.”

“I’ll make you a deal.” He gestured at his sidekick with a long thumb. “If you want to challenge us in hand-to-hand combat, you can fight him while I watch.”

I entertained a brief fantasy of kneeing his balls and running away, but I knew there wasn’t anything in it.

“You might be interested to know that I’ve already called the police,” I said instead.

The men looked at each other. “I’d like to take a look at your phone,” Hong said. I gave it to him and he thumbed the screen, finding my call history. “No 911 call.”

“No, but check the time stamp. I called someone, didn’t I? I can assure you I wasn’t ordering pizza.”

“Veronica Sanchez. Girlfriend of yours?”

“You could say that. She’s also a homicide detective.”

He thrust his tongue into a cheek, causing the beard beneath it to bristle. “Yeah? And what’d you tell her? Couldn’t have had much to say about us.”

He had a point. I couldn’t have seen much before he approached me, and I was off the phone by then. I thought for a few seconds, about whether it would be wise to tell them I had police coming.

Hong might as well have read my mind. “Are they coming here?” There was no trace of fear, or even anxiety, in his voice.

I didn’t say anything, and he laughed, softly. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “We’re not staying, either way.”

Raw panic ran through me, and I remembered other times when I’d been packed into strange cars by dangerous men. It was a scenario that never seemed to end very well.

“It’s over for Van Gasparian,” I blurted out. “I told my friend he killed Nora Mkrtchian. I got that from his own mouth, and he might not have told you this, as he didn’t know, but I recorded his confession.”

He stared at the phone in his hand. “On this thing?”

I nodded. I was about to tell him that I’d already sent it to the police when Boris took the phone from his hand and smashed it on the pavement, crunching it under a heavy-soled dress shoe.

There went Van’s confession. I wasn’t likely to get another, even if I did make it out of this night alive. I felt sick to my stomach, like my computer had crashed and swallowed my thesis. Only the recording was a bit more important than schoolwork.

I kept my face as calm as possible, then morphed my expression into a smile. On the bright side, the giant’s big move had strengthened my bluff.

“If you’d waited one second, you might’ve spared the effort and saved me a few hundred bucks,” I said. “I already sent it to the police.”

Until a couple years ago, when I started this business, I’d always thought of myself as a bad liar. It was a skill I’d never put to the test in any serious way, and I just assumed, that given what I thought of as my forthright, bullshit-free nature, I would be unable to utter falsehoods without my better self getting in the way—if not by stopping me altogether, at least through a quiver in my voice, or a conscience-driven facial tic. If anyone had ever asked me, I would have said I was a terrible liar, and it would have been a standard humble brag, a baseless nod at my own integrity.

Then one day, I started lying. Not pathologically, not when I could avoid it. But I compromised, and there was no way to take that back. I had my reasons, and in my softer moods, I let myself think they were good ones. The end result was no less dirty for my attempts at rationalization. There was a big lie to start, and it created the need for smaller ones. I told them to people I loved, to people I respected.

I hated it. It made me vile; it changed me. But in a way it brought me closer to the truth of me. I learned one thing, anyway—it turned out I was a great liar, probably always had been.

Hong stared at me for a full fifteen seconds, reading my face for a flinch or a tell. I didn’t give him anything. When he was finished, he smiled. His eyes narrowed even further, nearly disappearing amid a mirthful network of wrinkles.

“How did you do that?” he asked. He sounded genuinely curious.

I shrugged and hoped he’d defer to my millennial savvy. “Sent it to the cloud. You can do that from any smartphone. If your friend hadn’t brutalized mine, I could show you.”

“It’s convenient,” he said, smiling steadily, “that I can’t call your bluff.” He gave his partner a strong pat on the back. It was less congenial than it was a threatening show of power, and it pushed the giant man in my direction.

Anger flashed across his face as his footing faltered. He recovered quickly and walked right up to me, then smacked my face with the back of his hand.

The shock of it almost dropped me. In my short career as a private investigator, I’d been grabbed, dragged, and held at gunpoint. I’d even been knocked out with a blow to the back of my head. But I’d never been confronted with anything as straightforward and openly violent as a hand to the face.

The pain was stunning, bright and magnificent—it filled my whole head, from the ringing in my skull to the pulse in my lip to the tear in my cheek, where one jeweled finger had made first contact. My hands shot up to my face to assess the damage. The fingers at my cheek came away wet with blood.

“No cause for that,” said Hong. He checked the time on his phone. There was a picture of a golden retriever on his lock screen. He was a regular sweetheart, this Hong.”We’d better get off this street, though. We can continue this conversation in the car.”

Boris grabbed me by the shoulder with enough force to tack me up on a wall. Hong walked ahead and we followed him to the Crown Vic. Hong didn’t look back. Boris had me under control.

He only let go to shove me into the backseat of the Crown Vic. I registered a throbbing soreness in my shoulder as I scanned my surroundings and noticed the car door was unlocked. I ran some quick calculations as Boris took the driver’s seat. Speed and distance and odds of survival. There wasn’t a straw to grasp at in sight. I let my head fall back against the seat.

“Where should we go?” Boris asked Hong.

“Echo Park, Echo Park…” He snapped his fingers. “Let’s go to that staircase,” he said brightly, as if he’d thought of the perfect spot to get lunch.

They didn’t bother to blindfold me, and I took this as a bad sign. Boris drove silently while Hong fiddled with his phone. I willed myself to peek at his screen, which was how I learned he was playing
Angry Birds
.

He didn’t look up until Boris stopped the car a few minutes later. We were still in Echo Park, on one of the hilly streets scattered with old apartment buildings. Hong got out first and Boris followed, dragging me with him.

The street was dark and the buildings around us looked unoccupied, blind. We were parked at the foot of a long concrete staircase that ran up the hillside like a dirty zipper. There were dozens of these staircases speckled around the Eastside, free gyms for morning joggers that were empty at night. This one was more isolated even than most, with nothing but ground and grass on either side. It was a nice spot to get up to no good. Hong did a lap up and down the stairs—making sure, I guessed, that there weren’t any high school kids fucking on the landings. When he was almost back to our level, he waved us over, saying, “The coast is clear.”

There was a good chance I’d punch my ticket on this stairway, and I tried to make each step last as long as possible, trying to force time to expand to fill the needs of my mind, to allow for an arrival at a final kind of peace. It didn’t work.

When we reached a high enough landing, Hong sat at the top of the steps and gestured for me to sit next to him. I obeyed, and felt Boris standing behind me like a pillar ready to fall down.

“What did Van tell you?” Hong asked.

“He told me what happened to Nora,” I said. “He told me he had friends in dark places who owed him a favor.”

“A favor?” A note of contempt crept into his tone. The first hint of unpleasantness in his demeanor so far.

The irritation felt like a step in the right direction. “Would that be a mischaracterization of your relationship?”

He smiled wide. “What did he say about these friends?”

I thought about our conversation, about the gambling operation in Seoul Tokyo Grill, his role as surgeon to the mob. Hong and Boris, named and described in recognizable detail.

The recording was pure gold. It incriminated not only Van, but a whole ring of gangsters who had come in touch with him. I felt a powerful sense of loss.

“Nothing,” I said, affecting suppressed exasperation. “He was vague. He kept saying he’d get killed if he said anything.”

The giant made a gruff sound of approval, and I saw Hong flinch at the elbow, as if he might want to jab him in the ribs.

All at once, the panic and desperation screaming in my head subsided into something quieter, something a little more relaxed and muffled. I saw my situation at a short remove—the distance between a player and her chessboard. I was in check, but not checkmate; I could force a draw with an ugly move. My split cheek throbbed with a vivid red pain. It was distracting, even in this moment, and I thought of the bleak lessons of
1984
, the impossibility of heroism in the face of prospective pain.

I’d been gearing up for a bargain from the moment my tire blew out.

“But it’s only a matter of time before the police get to him,” I said. “They’ll arrest him. Tomorrow definitely, maybe even tonight. They’ll take him away from his family, charge him with murder.”

Hong was listening. There was a thoughtful, attentive look in his eyes that allowed me to keep on going.

“And what do you think he’ll do when he’s hauled in? How confident are you in his loyalty? He’s just a doctor. He’s not one of you.”

I felt Boris’s eyes on me as I spoke. I knew he couldn’t dispense with me until Hong said so.

“Someone like Van, he doesn’t feel like he belongs in prison. He can’t imagine it. He doesn’t have the right constitution. You think if he has a bargaining chip to stay out, he’s not going to use it?”

“That rat,” Boris said. He sounded as angry as if my prediction had already come true. “I never did trust him.”

“This was a good idea when Van called you, okay? I’m a loose end. You get rid of me, Van walks, at least for now. Nora stays buried. You get to keep your surgeon. But the situation is different now. You seem like a levelheaded guy,” I said to Hong. “You must recognize that.”

He smiled. “You’re a smart girl, I have to give you that. But the way I see it, all that’s changed is that there are now two loose ends.”

“Let me go,” I said, keeping my voice as calm and rational as possible. “You have no use for me. I won’t hold any of this against you. And even if I do, what am I going to do about it? I don’t know the first thing about you.”

“You could be lying about that,” he explained. “You could cause us trouble.”

“She knows about the barbecue spot,” Boris put in, ever helpful.

“It’s too late to keep Seoul Tokyo out of this. Van didn’t have to give that up when I talked to him—I already went there and asked him about it on tape. And look, I understand I’ve caused some inconvenience here, but there’s no real upside to getting rid of me. You don’t want the trouble that comes with murdering an innocent Korean girl. You’ll get heat from the cops. Speaking of which, it can’t be too long now before they pick up Van,” I said, looking straight into Hong’s eyes. “So isn’t there somewhere else you need to be?”

Hong held my gaze without fear or anger, but a building intensity. I didn’t breathe until he broke away, what felt like minutes later.

He stood up, knees creaking, and patted Boris on the back. “Come on,” he said.

“We’re leaving her?”

“Don’t sound so disappointed, my friend,” he said, looking at me one last time before heading down the stairs. “We can always come back.”