Bite Me

CHAPTER 8

Vic checked his watch again. Now he was getting worried.

“Where the hell is she?”

“We should have wired her,” Shen said, his focus still on his laptop.

“I tried. She said no.”

“Your girlfriend is not big on communication, is she?”

“We both know Livy is not my girlfriend.”

“She’s constantly in your house, making you breakfast, and eating honey while naked. And you don’t slap said honey out of her hand like you do with me. What else would you call her?”

“My friend whom I find considerably less annoying than you. And you don’t eat honey.”

Vic opened the van door and stepped out. “I’m not liking this.”

“We’d hear sirens if she’d been caught. Just relax. Your girlfriend knows what she’s doing.”

Vic glared at Shen. He thought about knocking that bamboo stalk out of his mouth but knew it wouldn’t really help the situation.

Glancing at his watch, Vic debated his next move . . . but that was when he realized he didn’t have a next move. He had nothing. This was all Livy. All she’d wanted from them, all she’d allowed, was Shen handling the security cameras, getting her the intelligence on the building, and the two men accompanying her to the target site. Other than that . . . she’d had no use for them.

And, Vic realized as he saw a limo he was guessing had Allison Whitlan in it turn the corner to park at the front of the building, he was now going to pay for this stupidity when Livy was busted and ended up doing hard time for . . .

His increasingly panicked thoughts faded off when he saw Livy come out of the dark alley and head toward him.

Sighing in relief, Vic smiled and stepped farther out on the sidewalk. But as Livy neared him, Vic’s smile faded. It wasn’t just the expression on her face, which was . . . disturbing. It was her entire body. He’d never seen her so stiff before. Normally, Livy moved like a very loose lumberjack. She didn’t amble like Dee-Ann. It was a street-savvy walk. Like she could handle anything that came her way.

Yet now . . . now she looked like she’d kill the first person who said anything to her. Man, woman, or child. Like she was just waiting for that one thing to set her off.

When she was close enough so that he didn’t need to yell, Vic asked, “Livy? What happened?”

“Later,” she said, walking right by him and to the van. She grabbed the big backpack she brought everywhere.

“Livy?”

“Later.”

Then she and her backpack were gone, and Vic had absolutely no idea what the hell had just happened.

“What’s going on?” Shen asked from the van.

He looked at the panda and threw his hands up. “I have no idea.”

Chuntao Yang, who’d renamed herself Joan when her family first moved to America, woke up early. Her sisters and an aunt needed to catch a flight to Belgium in the afternoon. They had to prep for a job in Italy. It was always risky when they worked that close to the Vatican, but the payoff would be outstanding.

Still, they had to plan carefully no matter what country they were working in. Joan had no desire to go to prison. Her kind, honey badgers, filled prisons all over the world, which meant she’d end up spending most of her time fighting. So she’d rather stay out of prison and enjoy her life.

Joan put on her favorite red dress—she looked wonderful in red—matching Jimmy Choo red heels, just enough gold jewelry to highlight her attributes, and her red cashmere coat.

Satisfied with what she saw in the mirror—and when wasn’t she satisfied?—Joan headed down the stairs toward the kitchen, where her sisters and aunt were making breakfast and preparing for their afternoon trip.

Once she got to the bottom step, Joan placed her travel cases on the floor and dropped her coat over the banister. Fluffing her hair, she walked down the hallway, her mind turning, planning for this next job.

Joan loved her work. Loved how it took her out of her problems. Everything in her life narrowed into planning and executing The Job. So much so that when The Job was complete, her problems had usually gone with it. Or at least the worst was over.

And the way things had been going lately . . . well, Joan was really looking forward to this particular job. More than she could say.

As she neared the kitchen, Joan could hear her sisters and aunt chatting in English and Mandarin. For years, Joan refused to speak her native language because she wanted to be able to blend in as much as any Asian woman could blend in America. It had worked to some degree. She could speak English, French, Russian, German, Italian, and Spanish flawlessly, her accent in all those languages near perfect. But when she got angry enough, the Mandarin came out of her with or without her consent. Of course, only her family and her ex-husband ever seemed to get her that angry. No one else was worth the trouble.

Joan was about to step into the kitchen when she stopped, her daughter’s scent surprising her.

Slowly, Joan turned, and yes, her daughter stood behind her, just a few feet away. Unsure what she was doing at their safe house in Chicago, Joan was about to ask. But Olivia cut her off.

“Who did we bury, Ma?” she asked.

Joan blinked. “What?”

“Who did we bury in Dad’s grave?”

Without looking behind her, Joan knew from the sudden silence that her sisters and aunt were listening to every word. Not that she blamed them.

“Who did we bury?” Joan asked. “Well . . . your father, of course.”

Livy shook her head. And Joan now realized that her daughter was angry. Not just angry . . . livid. And because her daughter was a lot like Joan herself, that was a very rare sight.

“It can’t be Dad.”

“It can’t?” Joan asked, trying to sound bored. “Why not?”

“Because I just saw him.”

Joan felt her heart pound in her chest while she fought her anger at him for not contacting her in all this time. “He’s alive?”

Her daughter stared at her for a moment. A long moment that told Joan something was very wrong.

“Livy?”

“No. He’s not alive. He was stuffed and placed next to some bitch’s fireplace for all her friends to gawk at while eating hors d’oeuvres and drinking champagne.”

Livy’s words tore through Joan, her heart no longer pounding from excitement but despair and anger.

“So it can’t be Dad in that grave. Now I’ll ask you again, and then I’m going to start flipping the fuck out . . . who did we bury in that Washington graveyard?”

As soon as Livy cursed, she knew she’d hear it from her aunts and great-aunt. They might be honey badgers but the whole respecting-the-elders thing was big among her brethren. So as soon as that “fuck” left her mouth, her aunts were on her, yelling at her in Mandarin and shaking fingers at her while her great-aunt Li-Li helped her mother into the kitchen to sit at the large table and held her hand.

Livy, in no mood for any of this, pushed past her finger-wagging, yelling aunts and stalked into the kitchen after her mother.

“Answer me.”

Livy’s aunts followed, but before they could get in the middle of this, she spun on them, bared her fangs, and hissed a warning.

“Stop it,” Joan said. “All of you.”

“I’ll get you some tea,” Li-Li said before going to the stove, briefly stopping to give Livy a hard “Li-Li glare,” as it was called among the Yangs. Then she scratched the big, brutal scar on her old neck and continued on to make the tea.

Livy ignored her relatives and pulled out a chair, catty-corner from her mother, and dropped into it.

“Sit down,” her mother ordered her sisters.

They did as they were told, but Livy’s aunt Kew stopped to poke Livy in the shoulder while snarling, “You were always a horrible daughter.”

“Touch me with that finger again,” Livy warned, “and I’m eating it.”

“Kew, please,” Joan pushed, and for the first time, Livy heard her mother sound very tired.

Aunt Kew stomped over to her chair and dropped into it, arms crossed over her chest, legs crossed at the knee, one foot shaking dangerously.

Yeah. Livy knew she’d be hearing about this little episode until the end of time. But she really didn’t care.

“I want to know what’s going on,” Livy told her mother. “And I want to know now.”

“Your father and I,” Joan began, “may have divorced when you were eighteen—”

“You divorced when I was fifteen.”

“The first time.”

And that’s when Livy began to get a headache.

“Anyway,” her mother went on, “we never stopped—”

“Messing with each other’s heads?”

Her mother paused, lips pursed, before she admitted, “It’s what we always did well. Long before you ever came along.

“But no matter how much we argued,” her mother continued, “no matter how much we threw things at each other and cursed at each other . . . we still loved each other.”

“And were business partners.”

“Yes,” Joan hissed. “That, too. We had an agreement. No matter where we were; whom we were seeing at the time; or what jobs we might be working on, we always—always—met on certain dates at this little hotel we loved by the Baltic Sea. Dates and a location that only we knew.”

Livy frowned, wondering how only she managed to have parents who would pick the goddamn Baltic Sea for their romantic getaways.

“And?”

“And your father didn’t show up for two of our set meetings. We’d been meeting each other like this for more than ten years and he’d never not shown up once, let alone twice. Even when he was dating that porn star. Even she couldn’t keep him away from me.” She shook her head, started to rub her eyes, but quickly remembered the amount of makeup she used on her face, so she stopped, and pulled back any tears that might threaten to ruin all that careful work.

“I checked with his brothers and sister,” Joan went on. “Checked with the police and morgues in several countries. I did everything, but he never made contact with anyone. I spoke to Baltazar and he agreed with me.”

“Ma, Uncle Balt would agree with anything you asked him, because he’s had the hots for his brother’s woman since the day Dad brought you home.”

Joan slapped her hand against her knee. “Stop acting like I killed Damon myself!”

“I never said you killed him . . . you just lied to me. About my own father. And I have no idea what you did to the body that’s actually in that casket.”

“That one was already dead and not by me. And I didn’t tell you because I knew you’d make a big deal about it.”

“And you had to make sure you got that life insurance before his girlfriend or Aunt Teddy did. Right?”

And that’s when they all started yelling at her. Aunts, great-aunt, mother. Standing over Livy and yelling at her in English, Mandarin, and for some unknown reason, a little bit of Italian.

All of which proved that Livy was right. Because when her family started yelling, it was usually because they were lying their collective asses off.

“She must have found something,” Shen said, busy on his laptop.

“But what could she have found? I mean, the woman was once poisoned by a cult member whom she did really horrible things to once she woke up from a brief coma, and I can still say . . . I’ve never seen her look that angry before.”

“Yeah. I know.”

“Have you found her yet?” Vic asked, looking over Shen’s shoulder.

“I think so. Yes. Here it is. She took a flight into O’Hare. No bags checked. She arrived this morning. She didn’t rent a car, and it looks like she paid cash for the flight.”

“O’Hare? She goes into Whitlan’s daughter’s apartment, comes out, and immediately goes to Chicago?” Vic stared at an equally confused Shen. “Dude . . . what the fuck?”

Livy had nearly made it out the front door when she heard, “So what are you going to do about all this?”

Livy stopped and faced her family. Her mother, aunts, and great-aunt were all staring at her, arms crossed over their chests.

“What do you think I’m going to do?”

“You can’t tell your uncles.”

“You want me to say nothing?”

“What would telling the Kowalskis about this do for anyone?”

“They already know he’s dead,” one of her aunts said. “What would telling them about how he died change anything or make anything better?”

“So we let these full-humans get away with what they did to my father?”

“A father,” Great-Aunt Li-Li felt the intense need to remind her, “that you said you were disowning.”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“We just don’t think you should upset things,” Joan said, stepping closer to Livy and running her hand softly down Livy’s arm. “Let’s just leave things as they are.”

“I don’t think—”

Her mother’s soft hand was now a fist, one forefinger pressing against Livy’s nose, pushing it hard. “You don’t have to think.” And her mother’s voice was low, dangerous. “Just keep your mouth shut and be smart. Understand me?”

Livy stared at her mother. Hard black eyes stared back. Eyes just like Livy’s.

Without saying a word, Livy turned and walked out.

The four women sat down in the kitchen table and stared at each other.

“She’s going to make this ugly,” Kew finally informed them.

As if Joan didn’t already know that.

Joan would be the first to admit she’d never really understood her daughter. Nor had she bothered to try. All that art talk that had nothing to do with what things cost, or how they could be taken, sold, and the cash received and split up equally among all those involved. That was what art meant to Joan and to Damon and to both sides of their families. Yet Livy believed herself to be an actual artist. She took pictures and expected people to pay to hang them in their homes. And some did. Joan clearly remembered that nosy bitch Jackie Jean-Louis coming to her house, more than once, to “discuss Livy’s future.”

Livy’s future? Joan had always thought her future would be the same as Joan’s and her sisters and her brothers and their mothers and aunts and uncles and on and on. But Jean-Louis and that ridiculous family of hers kept pushing the art thing again and again until Livy actually believed it. And she was as stubborn as . . . well, as stubborn as Joan. So Joan knew there was no point in fighting her. Instead, she’d let her go off and do whatever she wanted. Art school? Sure. Why not? Jobs taking pictures for fancy magazines? Whatever.

There was simply no point in getting a bug up her ass about it because Livy was going to be Livy.

“Well,” Joan snarled, “I’m not giving any of those Kowalskis the life insurance money. He was my husband.”

“Ex-husband,” Kew reminded her.

Joan scowled at her sister.

Li-Li tapped her long, manicured nails against the table. “Stop this. We need to know what that girl is going to do.”

Joan laughed. “I’ll tell you what she’s going to do.” She looked at each of her sisters and her aunt. “She’s going to tear this world apart to get at whoever did that to her father.”

Aunt Li-Li nodded her head. “Then we should cancel the job.” When her nieces just stared at her, thinking of all that money slipping through their fingers, she added, “If you want to keep some control of this situation, Chuntao, then we stay. It’s what a caring family would do . . . and we pretend, very well, to be a caring family.”

Joan looked at her sisters. “She’s right. We do very well at pretending to be a caring family.”