Follow Her Home (30 page)

Chaz hung up the phone and pulled over. “Looks like I got you out of a tight spot. I think it's time you filled me in.”

I took a Lucky from my back pocket. “Mind if I smoke?”

He shook his head. I borrowed his car's cigarette lighter and fired up. I took a deep lungful of smoke and exhaled the whole story, letting it tumble out in fast, ugly sentences.

He listened, closing his eyes in solemn respect for the numbered dead. “You think Hector's a goner.”

“You should tell the police what I just told you. See what they find. I hope I'm letting my imagination run away with me.”

“We should go to the police right now. I'm not in the business of hiding murders.”

I shook my head. “If we call it in now, Cook will get away with everything. I've got nothing but my word, and against him it won't be worth much.”

“The cops have no reason not to trust you.”

“Remember that part where I took Lori from her home in the middle of the night? I mean I doubt that's a kidnapping, technically, but it doesn't put me in a good position against her mother and a lawyer.”

He scratched an itch high up on his inner thigh. He was thinking. “What would you rather do, then?”

I would have to negotiate my safety. Cook had lost his gunman and I had his gun. “I just need to get to Cook before I go to the cops. If you won't take me, I'll get a cab.”

He protested for a few minutes, but in the end he complied. I could tell he was rattled, and that the sight of me, haggard and injured, left him unable to refuse me. Chivalrous Chaz, my knight in white tennis shoes.

The Mazda's clock said 5:14. The morning was coming and the sky knew it if I didn't. We drove into the thinning blue, through empty streets that would be clogged in another couple of hours.

We were outside the house by 5:35. I punched in the gate code and had Chaz pull into the driveway and stop his car where it wouldn't stick out to observers at the windows.

I looked at the house. “This should only take a few minutes. I'll grab Cook and then we'll take him to the police. Do you have the handcuffs?”

“I'm not staying in the car and picking my nose.” He undid his seat belt and opened his door. “How am I supposed to look my daughter in the eye if I let something happen to a little girl like you? You stay in the car.”

I felt a smile climbing on one side of my face. “That's not happening. Do you have a gun?”

He frowned. “No, I don't. Are you taking that with you? You'd better let me hold on to it.”

“No, thanks.”

I opened the door and hobbled out of the car. I went straight to the front door and leaned my fist into the buzzer.

*   *   *

I felt my hand go toward the gun in my waistband. It surprised me. I had never touched a gun until an hour earlier, but I had read about them and seen them so often onscreen that I had built a real-life response to cinematic danger. Marlowe kept a gun and he knew when to draw it, knew when to touch it in anticipation of its need. I was on the enemy's doorstep. I needed backup, and Chaz was neither intimidating nor capable of firing at will.

My plan was simple. I wanted to produce the villain when I presented my story to the police. It would take more than a phone call to get Cook in handcuffs, and once he learned that I had survived the night, he might find fifty ways to worm away. I knew the power of a drawn gun from recent experience. I had a thousand reasons to kill him in cold blood. He would do what I wanted.

It took him a minute to get to the door, but when he opened it I saw that he hadn't been sleeping. He was dressed as I had seen him the afternoon before, in a different polo shirt and the same khakis, a little more worn. His face was drawn and sallow, plagued with wakeful agony. It was a face that needed a drink. It fell when he saw me in his doorway, injured but alive, wearing my hate like a cape.

“Let's talk,” I said.

He backed away from the door and cleared a path. I heard Chaz come in behind me. When Cook was five feet away, I told Chaz to close the door and drew the gun. My head started to pound and my body moved with nausea. I heard Chaz mumble a bewildered obscenity and felt myself separate, so that I seemed to watch this new scene from behind a curtain.

“What do you think you're doing, Song?” Cook's eyes started darting as I crept forward, leading us to the living room we'd sat in less than twenty-four hours earlier.

“Yeah, what do you think you're doing?” Chaz whispered.

I laughed, a bitter, breathless laugh. “What do I think I'm doing? Where do you think I got this?” I said, giving the gun a slight shake. I tried to stay focused, eyes open and hands steady. I was on the verge of explosion, and my voice came out in a trembling shout. “Aren't you curious, Mr. Cook? Aren't you curious at all as to why I'm here instead of your brother?”

His face turned white in the wan strands of morning light falling into the room. I felt my finger tense on the trigger and realized with revulsion how badly I wanted to cock the hammer and squeeze.

“You murdered my best friend and tried to kill me. Tell me why you get to live.”

I could hear the thick, parched maneuvering of his tongue. “Please, Song. Put the gun down. I didn't—”

“Why the fuck should I? Your brother admitted everything. Gleeful, gloating. You—”

“I promise you, Song, on my life, on the life of my son—I had nothing to do with Diego's death.”

“Bullshit.”

He trailed backward and swallowed. “I swear to you, John acted alone. He thought he was doing what he had to do. Protecting me. Our family.” He was starting to sweat. “When I found out what happened to him, I was sick. He was a good man. I didn't want him hurt.”

I laid out the players in my mind—the two brothers, one powerful and fatherly, the other fatherless, unhinged, grateful, and obsequious. I knew it wasn't impossible that Cook was telling the truth. “Even if I believed you, I know this much: you tried to have me killed.”

“You don't know that.”

“I do.” I shook my head and cocked the hammer.

His face drained with panic and tears now came to his red-veined eyes. “Look, anything I've done has been to protect my family. Song, you—for the last few days you have dedicated your life to coming after me, to taking away my wife and son. I mean you of all people—you know what it's like to pin a family together. And you know what can happen when you fail.”

He waited, lip hanging, for me to cry and forgive him. “Bold card to play, Cook. I might have some sympathy, you know, but we're talking about murder. You can't just do whatever the fuck you want.”

“Is there anything you wouldn't do to get your family back?”

I struggled with a knot in my throat, sudden, dry, and wooden. “Chaz, go grab him and let's take him to the car.” I kept my gaze aimed at Cook's forehead, heated with bloodlust, while Chaz took him by the arms. Then, for an instant, Cook looked past my shoulder with a frightened, curious glint in his eye. By the time I thought to turn around, it was too late to react.

Someone jumped onto my shoulders and grabbed for my right arm with both hands. I uncocked the hammer and held on to it with all the strength I had left. But I was weak and exhausted, and I was on my knees with the weight on my back. As my assailant tore it from my hands, I saw Chaz and Cook wrestling, the physicality of the act surprising them both.

I stayed on the floor in a heap of skin and bones, the will to fight slipping out of my body like water from a toppled glass. My heart jammed against my chest, pumping, urgent and terrified. But the rest of me was more tired than scared, and my eyelids started to drop in anticipation of the big sleep. I jogged them back open so I could stare into the barrel of the gun.

Yujin stood over me in a black tank top and yoga pants. Her face was as worn and sleepless as Cook's, but her eyes bored down on me, alive with wild panic. I heard the steely click of the hammer for what seemed the thousandth time in my life.

“Where is she?” Her voice quivered with a tone as strained and thin as violin music in a horror film. It took me a few seconds to register that she had addressed me in Korean.

I responded in kind. “Your daughter is safe.”

She shook her head, and I watched with disbelief as tears welled up in her blazing eyes. Then I understood, and I filled in the correct implied pronoun. “Where is he?”

I answered slowly, in my halting Korean, in a voice designed to be calm. “I don't know. We got into a crash downtown. He was unconscious when I left him, but I don't know how badly he was hurt.”

Her hand was shaking now. “You bitch. What did you do to him?”

“He was trying to kill me. I was tied up. I was lucky we crashed.” I felt no obligation to tell the whole truth. I continued carefully, trying my luck again. “Look, I didn't stick around to see how he was doing, but there was a lot of blood.”

She moved the gun toward the pile of men. “Get away from him, Mr. Lindley.”

Chaz looked up at the sound of his name, his mouth open, his eyes terrified. He and Cook disentangled themselves and he shuffled across the carpet on his knees.

Cook stood up where he was and looked down at me with fury and contempt. “Don't speak Korean,” he said. “Yujin, what did she say?”

She turned to him, seething through clenched teeth. “John is hurt.”

“What do you mean, John is hurt?”

“He has been in an accident. A bad one.”

“Shit,” he said, nearly spitting on the floor. “Shit.”

“We need to help him,” she said. Her hand had turned the gun back to point at me, but she was facing Cook, her eyes wide with authority. “We have to.”

Cook slumped onto the piano bench. “Yujin.” Out of his mouth, her name came out like “Eugene,” long in the second syllable. “Let's think this through.”

“What is there to think through?”

“If he was in an accident, the police probably have him by now. He's probably getting help.”

“You do not know that.”

“Come on, Yujin. He's probably at a hospital right now.”

“Listen to me, Bill. We cannot just sit here waiting for news. We have to do something.”

“What can we possibly do?”

“We have to go to him.”

Cook looked at her with stern patience, like she was a child throwing a tantrum. “You know we can't do that.”

I turned my eyes back to her face and I knew, right away, that she'd forgotten all about me, about Chaz. Her mouth fell open and her brow grew tight, stunned and furious. “I do not think I heard you, Bill.”

“I know you heard me.”

She let out a nervous laugh. “Your brother is somewhere dying because of you, so forgive me for hoping I misheard you.”

“I'm sure he's being helped. We'd be giving ourselves up for nothing.”

Her gun hand was now at her side, slack and vulnerable. I weighed the tension in the room, and I tried to force enough energy into my knees to allow me to spring for the weapon.

“Nothing?” she shouted. “It would not be nothing for me.”

“I get it, but let's be rational here. We have ourselves to think about. He'll never give us up. The only way we can end up in jail tomorrow is if we go galloping after him and turn ourselves in.”

I watched as the gun found its way up, its muzzle turned toward Cook. “We are going to help him.”

“Put that thing down. We both know we can't go, and you're not going to shoot me over it.”

Maybe Cook hadn't seen Yujin Chung as I'd seen her, just the day before. His voice betrayed less fear than it had when I had the same gun pointed at his head. He spoke with the same dismissive tone that he'd used when describing his brother as a troubled young man. As far as he was concerned, Yujin was in the palm of his hand. She was just a woman on his payroll, and she had lived thus far to please him at the expense of her own flesh and blood. He was smug.

“Can you take me to him?” There was another delay before I recognized that she was addressing me again.

“Hey, stop speaking Korean.” Cook started toward her. “And Jesus, Yujin, give me that gun.”

She repeated the question, faster this time. “Can you take me to him?”

There was only one answer I could give. “Yes,” I said, and closed my eyes.

The gunshot was louder than I expected. It rang out, pulling the room and the world outside into the dark burst of sound, sharp and deep, tearing space. When I opened my eyes, Luke's dad was lying on the floor. Blood sprayed from a hole in his throat, an impossible amount with an impossible trajectory, onto his beautiful oriental rug, painting the keys of the grand piano. I looked away. This was an image that I'd never forget. It was nothing like the books, nothing like the movies. No clean shot leaving a single dark red stain to get the point of death across. I felt myself starting to cry.

Yujin stumbled and collapsed around folded knees, the gun falling to the floor with a heavy thud. She was white with shock, her eyes unable to move from Cook's corpse. It was a small window, I knew, and I collected my nerves and lunged for the gun. I didn't need to hurry. She sat very still for a long time.

“I had to do it,” she said. She was speaking English again. “But I did not know it would be like that. I know what you think of me, but I have never killed anyone before.”

I couldn't think of a thing to say. I was happy to have the gun back on my side.

“Where is John?” She was still looking at Cook.

“I don't know, but if he's alive he's getting help. I called in the accident before I came.”

She started to sob and I got an uneasy feeling in my stomach that I recognized as guilt. I had been instrumental in the scene in front of me. I saw the love and panic in Yujin, and I saw the rift between my two enemies. I had a gun in my face, and, ignoring the fallout, I had done what I could to get it pointed elsewhere.