Dirty Kiss (3 page)

“Yeah, I got the feeling Mr. Kim’s doing this for her. He didn’t say it, but that’s what I got when I spoke with him.” Mike was almost down the steps when I called out to him to stop. The porch light cast shadows over my brother’s face, his prominent cheekbones stark under the glare.

“What if I find something?” I asked. “What then?”

“Then, little brother.” He cracked a smile, back to being the superior sibling I’d known and loved all my life. “I expect you to chase it down and find out the truth. Put that pigheadedness of yours to good use. I don’t expect you to do anything less.”

The
water felt good on my body. What felt even better was washing out the last of the bark from my hair. I leaned against the tile, one hand holding my weight as I watched the dirty water swirl down the drain. The shower spray beat against my neck, and I worked the fingers of my other hand over my scalp, making sure there were no remnants of the night’s activities left. A minute leaf, newly formed and spring green, fell and bobbed on the current. I worked it down the drain with the edge of my toe. The color reminded me too much of Rick’s eyes. They were never that green, but he’d often worn contacts to pop their intensity, liking the startling effect against his tanned skin.

He’d been wearing them that night. Bright greens mocked me at times. The leaf was no exception.

Turning off the water, I grabbed a towel and scrubbed the water from my legs. A bruise was forming along the inside of my thigh, a long line of purple from the thick edge of the wooden fence. The mark ended at the edge of the gunshot scar on my leg, the smallest of my wounds. The bullet had torn through the muscle, passing straight through and embedding into the brick wall behind us.

It was the last shot taken, and I didn’t remember getting hit there.

I passed the towel over my chest and down over my stomach. If I woke up early enough, I could head down to the gym and get a few rounds in before I started work. Working out helped keep the scar tissue on my ribs limber, or so I kept telling myself. At the very least, it helped keep me in shape so I could outrun rabid old women with shotguns.

The nodule of tissue on my ribs was still florid, darker than the one on my chest, and prominent. Rubbing the reducing salve over the circular scars, I let my mind wander, thinking about the young man and his suicide.

There’d been a note of sorts amid the papers, a copy of a paper scrap scrawled with a few bits of Korean. The hand was masculine and strong, confidently marching the letters across the page. If Hyun-Shik was doubting himself, it certainly hadn’t shown in his handwriting.

I recognized the language with the circles and dashes from seeing restaurant signs more than from any knowledge on my part. I could speak English and passable Spanish, but Korean was far outside of my comfort zone. I might have had a Japanese mother, but other than knowing the difference between noodles and rice, I was about as Asian as a bowl of cornflakes.

“Need someone to translate that,” I mumbled to the empty bedroom as I hunted for a pair of boxers. My dresser was sadly lacking in clean clothes. I added laundry to my list of things to do in the morning. Something didn’t seem right about the note. It nagged at me as I turned off the light and lay back on the bed. “What’s there that made them sure it was a suicide? And why would you write your suicide note on a torn piece of paper?” But then that made as much sense as swallowing a bunch of pills at a karaoke sex club in Garden Grove.

Sighing, I closed my eyes, letting my fatigue finally take me. The last image I had in my mind as I fell asleep was of Hyun-Shik’s face as he held his son. The happiness there was at odds with the desperation of a man driven to suicide. But then, I told myself, everyone has demons they keep hidden. It’s when those demons fight free that we find out the truth of things.

I couldn’t
blink away the clouds in my eyes. No matter how hard I tried, they wouldn’t clear. I tried to turn my head, but I was much too tired. The sheets were rough under my cheek, starched hard and fixed tight against the mattress. The room was fuzzy, but I knew where I was. The smell of antiseptic and bleach overwhelmed me. Despite the acrid stench, I could still smell vomit and urine under it.

There was another odor, metallic and bitter. I knew that smell too. It was blood. And there was a lot of it.

Machines beeped around me, a steady burp of noises and burbles, marking each of my breaths and heartbeats. There was a rhythm to it, my life counted off as each second passed. There were shapes around me, dark and light blobs that grew more solid as I blinked.

It hurt to breathe. Something was catching on my lungs, and there was a hard cylinder in my throat. I almost laughed at the irony of finally being able to swallow something that deep. I had a gag reflex that couldn’t stop once it started. It kicked in now, and I choked against the tube that kept my lungs clear of fluids. My body fought the foreign intrusions, but there was no hope for it. I was paralyzed, trapped in the cocoon of my immoveable body.

The room came into view, slowly becoming solid around me. A powder-blue paint covered the walls, and flickering lights reflected back at me from the chrome of the hospital bed next to mine. The faint, steady sound I heard under the blips grew louder, and I watched in horror as the linens on the next bed slowly turned crimson, the excess blood splattering to the floor as it dripped. Something lay on the bed, a familiar something, and I tried to speak, but no words could come out around the white plastic in my throat.

I knew those eyes because their brilliance haunted me. I watched, helpless and immobile, as Rick reached for me, his hand gnarled and shaking when he tried to span the distance between us.

An echoing boom took off Rick’s face, leaving only one of those spring green eyes staring back at me. His body twitched, trying to come to grips with its own death, and I screamed silently as his brains splattered into my mouth and onto my face. Blood spurted over me, tasting of Rick’s life as it drained away from him. Then the pain hit me, and everything went black.

The sentient part of my mind—the part that knew I was in a dream—screamed to get out. It knew Rick never made it to the hospital. I’d never seen him on a bed or hooked up to monitors. None of those things ever happened, but my subconscious didn’t care.

The chirrup of the machines continued, cold and uncaring, as Rick died all over again in my nightmares. Again. Always dying, and I’m always helpless to stop it.

The
ringing of my house phone was what woke me, an incessant tug of sound on my ears. I stank of sweat, and for a moment, the foul, cloying scent of blood filled my nose, but it dissipated as I struggled to clear the dream from my head.

Reaching for the receiver, I blearily looked at my alarm clock, wondering where the night had gone. It seemed like seconds since I’d lain down, but here it was, nine in the morning, and more than likely, Claudia was calling me from downstairs.

“Hello?” I know I sounded rough. My throat was raw, as if the tube had been real. Phantom memories, left over from the days after they took me off the hospital machines. The scar on my ribs hurt, twisting nerves sending little shockwaves through my belly. And if that wasn’t bad enough, I had to pee very badly.

“Honey, are you coming in to work today?” Claudia’s accent was a thick molasses in my ears. She swore she’d never lived anywhere but California, but there was more than a hint of Southern in her voice. “Because if you’re not, then I’m going to bust your head open for making me come in.”

Ah yes, dear, sweet Claudia, who could probably bench press me with one hand behind her back. I hired her because she was friendly and wouldn’t scare off any fidgety clients that might walk through the door. She’d raised eight sons in the depths of Long Beach and gotten each one into college. There was steel under that soft exterior. I had no doubt in my mind that she could crack my head open with a flick of her fingers.

“I just need to wake up. Must have slept through the alarm.” I mumbled an apology to my sole employee. “I’ll be down in a bit.”

I wasn’t an idiot. Claudia kept me on the straight and narrow, as it were. She’d finally stopped trying to fix me up with her son, Marcus, having decided I probably wasn’t good enough for him, but she still treated me like I was one of her boys. I’d tried growing a mustache once, and it lasted all of half an hour. She’d come in, taken one look at me, and sniffed that I looked like trash. I went upstairs and took it off without even arguing. I would damn my father to hell with my last breath, but I’d be damned if I disappointed Claudia.

“Take your time. I’ve got coffee on and some apple pie down here,” she replied. “I’m going to be watching some of the morning shows. They’ve got some dancing dog on right now. Tell me, who the hell needs a dancing dog? You want to impress me? Get the damned thing to do dishes.”

I hung up after mumbling a goodbye. It’s best to cut Claudia off before she gets on a tear, especially when there was coffee and pie waiting for me. She might be bossy, but she kept my books in order and was as dependable as the sun. The morning she walked into my office to answer the ad I’d placed in the paper was the best day of my life.

There were some reservations on my part when a large woman, wearing her Sunday best, arrived on my doorstep. I couldn’t guess her age, but there was a steady wisdom about her, and there was no denying she was a force of nature. Our interview was short and sweet: I told her I was gay and had some issues, she told me she was black and had high blood pressure.

At the time, she knew next to nothing about computers, and I let her spend the day either knitting or watching her stories on the television I’d bought her, but she kept my schedule tight, my bills paid, and if I needed feeding, she took care of that too. Claudia worked because she didn’t want her brain to get rusty after retiring from the school district. I worked because I didn’t want to turn into a couch slug, no matter how much money I’d gotten from the department. It was a winning scenario all around.

Except that she and Mike often conspired against me. God help me if they both decided at the same time that I needed to date. There’d be no saving me.

I did a quick shower to get the night sweats off of me. I debated dressing with a bit more care than I usually did. A visit to the Kim household probably would require more professionalism than I normally sported. Most of my clients were more interested in seeing what their spouses were doing or digging up dirt on employees who were claiming debilitating injuries. A pair of jeans wasn’t going to cut it.

Dark khakis won out. My closet was limited in choices. It was either the khakis or black denim. I must have skipped fashion sense when I stood in line for my gay genes, because Mike was of the opinion that I couldn’t dress myself. A cream polo was about as risky as I was going to get with the pants.

And apparently I’d guessed wrong when I went downstairs to the office and greeted Claudia with a cheery hello.

She took one look at me and held up her index finger, turning it around in the air and pointing up, silently telling me to go back and try again. There was a pinch to her brows when she did it, her face screwed up into either pain or displeasure.

“What? These go together!” I stared down at the pants and shirt. They both were kind of brownish.