Your House Will Pay Read online

  But Shawn worked Saturday mornings, and besides, he thought, he was getting old. Not old old, but older than he thought he’d ever be in those days, when the only people he hung out with were boys shining with furious energy. Now he spent most of his time with a woman and a child. There were just about two things he wanted on a Friday night: peace and quiet.

  These were hard to come by with a three-year-old in the house. Monique had run Shawn ragged tonight. She’d seen a rodeo in one of her cartoons—goddamn the son of a bitch who put a rodeo on a kids’ show—and all she wanted to do was climb on Shawn’s back and shoulders and demand that he giddyup. Jazz tried to stop her, but Shawn could tell she was torn by how cute it all was—her little daughter on his shoulders, screaming with glee as he bucked and huffed and neighed. There was laughter in Jazz’s voice, and she had her phone out, recording, while she shouted at Monique that she’d had enough. What could a man do? He horsed around until the child was tired.

  Now was his chance for a little sliver of peace and quiet. It was nine o’clock—he wanted to be asleep in an hour. He took a long, hot shower while Jazz put Monique to bed. His neck was tender, and it took a second for him to connect the pain with his evening spent as a rodeo horse. He smiled to himself, rubbing the base of his neck with his thumb.

  He put on a T-shirt and boxers and got in bed to wait for Jazz, leaning back against a stack of pillows. She was still putting Monique to sleep, a process that could take an hour and a half when Monique was in a demanding mood. She’d made Shawn read her three books the other night, the last of them twice in a row. That girl ruled this house—Jazz was less of a pushover than Shawn, but she was still putty in Monique’s pudgy little hands. They were powerless against her sweet pout, her gleaming brown saucer eyes. What that child needed was a sibling, someone to challenge her reign. Who knew what kind of tyrant she’d grow into unchecked?

  He chuckled to himself as he thumbed through pictures Jazz had taken on his phone, the latest in a long wall of pictures of Monique. There she was pretending to lasso him—Jazz had stopped her from using a jump rope, even though Shawn said it was fine—there mounted on his shoulders, clinging to his head, her eyes half shut, squealing. And underneath her was Shawn, his face so giddy with joy he was almost embarrassed, looking at it. Papa Shawn was a silly, silly man.

  He was still scrolling through pictures when his phone buzzed. It was a text from Tramell, who he was in touch with again now that Ray was out. He opened it up, smiling to himself.

  Thas crazy bout jung-ja han

  He sat up. He read the text three times, sure that his eyes deceived him. But there was her name: Jung-Ja Han.

  Not counting the remember-when stories, the ones that always had fresh quotes from Aunt Sheila, Jung-Ja Han hadn’t been in the news in over twenty-seven years. Hers was a name people associated with the violent ’90s, like Rodney King, like Ava Matthews. For a year, she was everywhere, in papers, on TV, on flyers—Shawn couldn’t avoid that tight, proud, fearful face, though he’d wanted to with all his heart. Then, after the trial, she disappeared. It was over—no longer in custody, she burrowed away from the media, into a private life far away from South Central. No one knew where she was, what she was doing.

  He knew this because he’d looked. With the unthinking reflex of the wronged, he’d kept an ear to the ground for news. He couldn’t imagine how she lived, and part of him had always wanted to know, had wanted to feel the smart of it. When the internet came along, her name was the second one he plugged into a search engine. The only hits were the ones he’d seen when he’d looked for Ava. He tried again, now and then, over the years, but Jung-Ja Han had changed names or stayed laid low or both. She left no bread crumbs after ’92.

  But Tramell knew something. And Tramell wasn’t the guy who always knew something—there had to be word going around. Jung-Ja Han was back.

  Shawn googled her name. His shoulders slumped—there was no mention of her in any news outlets. And yet something had clearly happened.

  His phone vibrated again—another text, this time from Duncan.

  KARMAS A NASTY BITCH

  He got out of bed and put on a pair of gym shorts. Jazz was still with Monique, but he didn’t want to be on the phone when she came in, not about this. It didn’t matter that it might be cold out—if anything, the desert night might calm him down. He stepped into his sandals and walked outside, the phone already at his ear. The motion sensor light turned on, bathing him in a wash of white.

  He knew he must be desperate, calling Duncan for news. For the thirty years they’d known each other, Duncan had made Shawn consistently uncomfortable, for an impressive variety of reasons. When Shawn was small and eager, trying to hang with Ray and his friends, Duncan mocked him and ribbed him, took obvious pleasure in dominating him for sport. When Shawn started banging, Duncan egged him on every chance he got. When Duncan stopped banging, he counseled Shawn with sudden saintly condescension.

  To his credit, Duncan had made a good life for himself. He never went to jail—he decided that wasn’t for him the one time he got picked up for questioning. He kept things cool with the Baring Cross crew, but as far as Shawn knew, he quit all criminal activity when he enrolled in community college. He transferred to Cal State LA and funneled his smart-ass initiative into something legal and lucrative. Now he was a legit small-business owner, running a bar off the 14, where he made solid money off a regular rotation of drunks. He was good at talking to people, even the right-wing white folk who populated the Antelope Valley. They trusted him for some reason. Maybe because he was light skinned and green eyed with a fluorescent, charlatan smile. Shawn knew better, but he also knew Duncan was stuck in his orbit for good. He was Ray’s best friend, and life had brought them all to Palmdale. And there were pros to having him around—Duncan was the biggest gossip in Greater Los Angeles, yet people still told him everything.

  “You celebrating tonight or what?” Duncan asked. Shawn could hear the grin in his voice.

  “What’re you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about Jung-Ja Han.” He laughed.

  “What about her?”

  Duncan took his time, delighted to have him in suspense, and Shawn wanted to knock the news out of him.

  “She got capped!” he finally answered. “In her own store and everything.”

  Shawn walked to the curb and sat down, planting his feet on the dark asphalt of the street. The night sky, brushed with faint stars, took on a precarious tilt. It was cold outside his body, and the warmth inside him was dizzying. He felt his heart pump heavily, the blood crying out.

  “Yo, Shawn, you there?”

  “Where’d you hear this?”

  “It’s going around, man. It’s all over Twitter.”

  “You sure it was her?”

  “I’m just telling you what I heard, but it sounds legit. There’s some Koreans on here spilling all kinds of tea. She changed her name, but she stuck around. There’s one girl swears her dad’s been friends with this woman since the eighties. Started going by Yvonne Park in the nineties.”

  “Yvonne Park,” Shawn echoed.

  There was a week, about fifteen years ago, when a rumor went around that Jung-Ja Han was back in South Central, running another liquor store. There were flyers taped onto telephone poles, telling folks to get down to King Market and smoke her out. When Shawn went to see for himself, there were two people in front, telling anyone who went by that the rumor wasn’t true. They were a black woman and her teenage daughter, and they said the store owner was a woman named Sa-Eun Ahn, who hired neighborhood help and was forgiving with credit.

  Shawn went in anyway. He bought a bottle of milk and looked her in the eye. When she looked back at him, he saw fear—she saw him see it and looked away. The change was on the counter, waiting for him to pick it up and walk out. Instead he stood there, in silence, studying her. She was just about forty, the right age, her short black hair straight and thin, a third of it gray, but in the same
limp, blunt-cut style Jung-Ja Han wore in ’91.

  But by ’92, Han’s hair was different—longer, softer, a more feminine look to go with the ripe protrusion of her pregnant belly. A year after the shooting, she’d no longer looked like the woman in the video; she was already planning to give that woman the slip. Shawn took his change and walked out. He didn’t know what he would’ve done if it had really been her.

  “Who did it?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” said Duncan. “Probably don’t want to be advertising his name. You know police are gonna be looking for whoever shot a poor defenseless Korean lady.” His voice grew mocking and babyish in a way that sounded jarring coming from a man in his forties, but Duncan had a point.

  Nothing Jung-Ja Han could ever do would neutralize the shield of her fragile little Asian lady persona. She had the stamp of a victim, someone in need of heroism and protection. This was true when she murdered Ava and sobbed and blubbered as the police arrived. This was true when she sold her story of self-defense, testifying in tearful, shaky English, her dome of a stomach on full display. Unless she murdered a white girl, it would always be true.

  “Where was she?” Shawn asked.

  “A drugstore. In Northridge.”

  The chill got him now. That was where she’d been hiding out all these years? Northridge—where he went to work every day, commuting in from the Antelope Valley at the crack of dawn? How could he have been so near her and not have known?

  And it was so close to the old neighborhood, not even thirty miles away from Figueroa Liquor Mart. He’d run farther than that.

  Shawn pictured Northridge, the suburban streets, the bland, bloated houses. He remembered one move he did there, a Korean family moving into a flashy modern mansion in a gated community at the top of a hill. The mother, like most Korean women between thirty and sixty, made him think of Jung-Ja Han.

  Was that where she lived? In a house on a hill with armoires and custom cabinets, a grand piano Ava would’ve wept with joy just to play, without a dream of owning?

  He knew Jung-Ja Han never saw a day in prison, and yet he had always told himself she couldn’t possibly live well. She had to be an outcast, an exile, doomed to a life sentence of dullness and hatred, success and happiness forever out of reach.

  She deserved so little. Ava died at sixteen. All that time she should’ve had, the experience, the happiness—it had all turned to nothing in the flash of a gunshot. It wasn’t fair for Jung-Ja Han to have more than that.

  Until now, Shawn had been able to think of her—as he did often, in spite of himself—as a fugitive and a vagabond, marked for life in an unknown hell. But now he knew where she’d been—a bullet put her back on the map, running another store within the borders of Los Angeles. All these years, she’d lived in Shawn’s city, free while he was imprisoned, prosperous while he struggled.

  “Feels good, don’t it?” Duncan asked, probing against Shawn’s silence.

  The light turned off, leaving Shawn in thick darkness.

  “I don’t know, man. This is too weird,” he said. “I feel like I’m dreaming.”

  “You ain’t dreaming, cuz. Somebody got Jung-Ja Han. Served some justice cold.”

  Justice—was that what this was, after all this time? He closed his eyes and waited for the feeling of satisfaction to rise.

  Instead, he saw a courtroom, a podium, a face—all of it flashed brightly from a ready corner of his mind, the images crisp and vivid. The judge, a long white face jutting out from a heap of black robe, perched behind her bench, looking down at the rest of the room, where Shawn sat, small as a pill bug, looking up, up, up. He still remembered exactly what she looked like, handing down her decision with the power of God. When, years after the trial, he saw her picture in a book, he was surprised that it didn’t match his memory. It didn’t change what he saw.

  He opened his eyes with a start. “Is she—?”

  “Dead?” Duncan provided. “Don’t know that, but from what I heard, it ain’t no scratch. She’s in bad shape. Why”—his tone teasing—“you want her dead?”

  The question buzzed in Shawn’s ear. “I gotta go, man,” he said, and hung up. This was not a conversation he was about to have with Duncan.

  He wasn’t sure how long he sat there before he heard the door open.

  “Shawn?”

  He turned his head without getting up. Jazz stood behind him, arms crossed against the cold, her brows knit with concern.

  “Monique’s knocked out now. What’re you doing out here?”

  The motion sensor kicked in as she approached, and the light came back on, pouring on Jazz, on the house behind her.

  This was his life now: this place, this woman, that child. He stared at Jazz; she was worth staring at, always, no less astounding than she was when they first met. She was beautiful, there was that—satin skin, sultry eyes, and lips that looked heavy with sweetness—but his marvel rose from a deeper recognition. Shawn had gotten used to the idea that if he wanted something, he had to chase it down, and chase it down, and keep on chasing it down. Not women, or not just women—nothing in Shawn’s life had ever been fixed; the rules had always been changed on him, the goalposts dug up and moved. And then Jazz showed up, and after the first months of fumbling lust, he discovered her body—that tall, sturdy woman’s body—was not just a body but a pillar. He relied on her dependable warmth, her unwavering promise of home. She was, without question, the best thing that had ever happened to him.

  And yet he hadn’t surrendered himself to her, not in the way he knew she wanted.

  “Baby?” she asked, when he didn’t answer her. “Did something happen? Are you okay?”

  She hurried over to him. Her slippers slapped the ground.

  When she stood next to him, he reached for her and hugged her, his arms around her knees, his head dropped against her thighs.

  Jung-Ja Han might be dead or alive, but either way, she was back. He’d locked it all away—the woman, the murder, his sister—and now, against his will, the seal had been broken. Shawn felt Jazz’s hand on his head, and he trembled.

  The doorbell rang just before midnight, when they were finally in bed. Shawn was still awake, and the sound jolted him upright. He felt Jazz rise to attention beside him.

  “Baby, was someone coming over?” she asked.

  He shook his head and shifted his feet to the ground. “Stay here.”

  It would’ve creeped him out most nights, hearing the doorbell when he wasn’t expecting anyone. Shawn didn’t like late-night surprises—no one did, not where he was from. But tonight, it felt extra ominous. Jung-Ja Han was back—who knew what else was at the door?

  He didn’t keep a gun anymore. Couldn’t, legally at least, but he had no desire to either. He remembered too well what it felt like to run around packing. The thrill of knowing how little it would take for him to shoot it.

  He glanced around for some other weapon to hold while he answered the door, but he gave that up—he wasn’t really afraid of a burglar.

  The doorbell rang again, followed by loud knocking.

  “Shawn!”

  Shawn relaxed—it was just Ray. He rushed to the door and opened it.

  “You’ll wake Monique up,” he said quietly, hoping to set the tone.

  Ray didn’t take his cue. He spoke high and fast and exasperated, almost out of breath, as if he’d run the two miles from his house. “You weren’t picking up your phone.”

  “Sorry,” Shawn said, letting Ray inside. “I was talking to Jazz, and my phone kept buzzing. I turned it off.”

  “She wasn’t picking up either.”

  “We were talking.” Shawn warmed, thinking of the last two hours. She’d known his history, of course, so why had he spent all this time avoiding it? Jazz’s quiet patience, her undivided attention—it had been good medicine.

  “About Ava.”

  Shawn nodded. “So you heard, too.”

  “Course I heard. What, you think no one’s blowing
up my phone?” He sounded offended, possessive, like Shawn was trying to fence him out.

  “That why you’re here? You know I gotta work tomorrow.”

  Ray frowned at him. “I’m here ’cause I thought something happened to you, you ingrate. But as long as I came all the way over, how ’bout a drink?”

  Shawn thought about objecting, but Ray was already entering the kitchen, and he followed. “I thought you might be police,” he said. The admission gave him a light-headed feeling, and he sat down while Ray opened up the fridge. “There’s beers in there. Grab me one.”

  “Jazz asleep?”

  Ray handed him a cold beer and Shawn took a swig. “No,” he said. He knew she could hear them in the kitchen and that she’d pretend to sleep until Ray was gone. “She’s just giving us a minute.”

  Shawn thought about going to get her, but he was grateful to her and suddenly relieved that Ray had come, that they could share this strange hour. Other than Aunt Sheila, they were all the blood left that ever cared for Ava. It was extraordinary, in its way—their cousin and sister, who’d be over forty now, finally avenged.

  “So you thought I was a cop, huh?” said Ray. “And I thought your ass got arrested. Let’s knock on some wood.”

  They chuckled, half-heartedly, and rapped the linoleum counter—close enough.

  “So where were you tonight?” Ray asked.

  Shawn shrugged. “Here.”

  “Let’s try it this way. Mr. Matthews, where were you on the night of the twenty-third, between seven and eight P.M.?”

  “Like I said, I was here.”

  “With Jazz and Monique?”

  Shawn nodded.

  “Your woman and her toddler. I guess it could be worse.”

  “I wasn’t in Northridge, that’s for sure.”

  “Better be ready to prove it,” said Ray. “When they figure out who she is, they gonna wonder why some sweet old Korean lady got herself shot. They gonna ask if she got enemies. And here we are, two black-ass felons with a blood grudge.”