Dirty Bites by Rhys Ford

Author:Rhys Ford [Ford, Rhys]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-64108-501-4
Publisher: Dreamspinner Press
Published: 2022-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Surprisingly, Jae wouldn’t let me go out by myself. Not like he had anything to worry about. He made some noises about me just rolling around in the street and being bruised to hell, but when aren’t I? Also his Mexican is better than mine, so I wasn’t complaining.

He could also speak Japanese, so there was that.

Honestly, he could have gone out all by himself and probably be all right. Except I didn’t want him wandering alone, especially not in the torn jeans he was wearing.

But that just could have been my own dick talking.

At midnight, Los Angeles’s lower downtown was still active. High-end restaurants were closing down their dinner service and trickles of kitchen staff were making their way to tight-walled apartments nearby or heading to the subway lines for a long trip to the outer reaches of the city. SoCal Mexican dominated the murmuring threads, with spots of Hmong and Vietnamese thrown in sporadically, a gunfire spot of hot oil among the spicy flow of rolling vowels.

An elderly Latino woman eyed Jae as he approached her, her shoulders rounded in with fatigue until he drew near. Her body snapped up at the ready when their shadows crossed, darker grey shapes cast by the street’s citrus splash lamps lining the sidewalk. Jae smiled, shaking his head to reassure her, holding up the photos I’d given him as he approached.

“Auntie, were you here last night? Coming home? Did you maybe see this van?” His Spanish was halting at times, hindered by his Korean accent, but his pretty face got him further than the last three people I’d approached. He went on about a wedding and the cat but I stepped away, looking for a likely witness in the crowd.

I found one in a cook, his chef whites embroidered with the name of a place I’d taken Jae to and paid through the nose for a dollop of cranberry foam and a sliver of meat Neko would turn her nose up at. His broad Bronx accent was a surprise but the rapid-fire aggression rolling off of his expression wasn’t. It was late and I was a speed bump in the road as far as he was concerned.

The fifty I flashed was enough to make him slow down. So were the photos I showed him. “Fuckers. Yeah, I know them.” He grunted, scowling even deeper if that was possible.

“You know them or saw them? Is this one of them?” I asked, shuffling through the photos until I found the sketch Ichi did for me as I described the young man who’d shot at me. It was a good likeness, as best I could give him considering I was paying more attention to the gun than to the guy.

“I know them. That asshole used to valet cars for the place I work at.” Louis—or at least that’s what his whites said his name was—tapped at the sketch. “They fired him for ripping off the cars he was parking. Him and a buddy of his.

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