Kim Oh 3: Real Dangerous People (The Kim Oh Thrillers) by K. W. Jeter Read Free Book Online

business card out of his wallet and held it out to me. “Give me a call. Like to talk with you.”
     
    Not sure why, but I’d stepped back and taken the card from him, then stood there looking at it as he’d turned and walked away.
     
    Two days later, I called Curt. Sitting in my crummy apartment, with my cell phone in one hand and the card he’d given me on the table in front of me.
     
    A week later, I was up in Albany, working for one of Falcon’s branch operations there. That made a long commute for me. I had to be on the bike by 5:00 a.m., just to get up there when the rest of the security crew was drinking their coffee. And jobs like that don’t have regular quitting hours – plenty of times, I’d be dragging my ass back into the apartment after midnight. After 2:00 a.m., even. Which gave me just about enough time to eat whatever dinner Donnie had fixed for me, collapse on the couch for a couple hours, then stumble into the shower to do it all over again. But at least I’d been keeping the rent and the rest of the bills covered. So who was I to complain? Plenty of people working themselves into the ground these days – and those are the lucky ones.
     
    Three months later, I was screwed. As in I had screwed up.
     
    Or at least I took the hit for it. Somebody had to. And since I had been the new guy on the crew up in Albany, that would be me. One of Curt’s crew, the guys working right around Falcon, had come up to oversee a takeover operation on a little outfit hustling protection on the restaurants and clubs on the east side of town. If they’d just been content with the low end of the 25/75 cut that had all been worked out between them and Falcon, nobody would’ve touched them. But they’d gotten greedy and had started to skim from the gross receipts. When you do that, and you’re hooked up with somebody like Falcon, you might as well have tattooed a bull’s-eye on your forehead. Curt’s guy had been named Andriessen – I only got to talk to him a couple of times, but he seemed nice enough. Model of efficiency, though. He was only up there in Albany with us for a few days before the takeover was completed. Which meant that there were four dead bodies on the ground, and the revenue stream now went straight to Falcon. As a former accountant, I appreciated the simplicity of that arrangement.
     
    The only problem was that one of the dead bodies was Andriessen’s. There’d been a crossfire situation, lasting all of about ten seconds, and somehow I got blamed for not covering him. Or not covering him enough – either way, he took a round right through his throat. The other security guys I’d been working with got their stories straight – and I was out of a job.
     
    It could’ve been worse. They let me walk. Sometimes, when things go wrong, they don’t do that.
     
    I’d figured that was the end of my ever working for Falcon again, in any of his operations. Yeah, the hours sucked – and maybe my being totally exhausted had been at least part of the reason that things had gone wrong up in Albany – but the pay had been decent. Or decent enough. Better than zero at any rate, which was what I’d had coming in while I scrounged around for some other paying gig.
     
    So imagine my surprise when I got another phone call. From Mr. Falcon himself. When the big guy calls, you gotta jump on it. Maybe he hadn’t totally bought the explanation he’d been given about what happened to his guy Andriessen. And really, it didn’t matter what his reasons were. When you’re the boss, you don’t have to have reasons – what you say, goes. So yay for me.
     
    Sitting in the dark, at the little kitchenette table, gazing out at the night street below . . . I was thinking that maybe it wasn’t so wonderful after all. These old guys I was going to be working with – I was going to have to watch my back around them. Especially that Foley character. He was a big hit of wrinkled-up bad news. And in