Off the Clock

Brett Battles Off the Clock

Jonathan Quinn was angry and frustrated when he returned home to Los Angeles. To say the job he’d just been on hadn’t gone according to plan would have been doing the colossal disaster an injustice.

Lives had been lost, unnecessary ones, a list that could have very easily included his own name. That he got away uninjured was due purely to luck, and had nothing to do with his skill. It had been a badly planned mission right from the start, one that finished with the body Quinn was supposed to have gotten rid of still alive and well and walking around.

Not his fault, but his jerk client didn’t seem to be on the same page when Quinn called him from the airport while waiting for his flight home.

“Why should I give you the full amount when you didn’t clean anything?”

Quinn, whose specialty was making bodies disappear, held his anger in as best he could. “Terminating the target is not my job. I laid out the rules at the beginning. Whether you end up using me or not, once you hire me, you pay me.”

“You’re going to make it very hard for me to ever hire you again,” the idiot said.

“No. I’ll make it easy. You will pay me, and you will never call me again. I have no interest in working with amateurs.”

“Who the hell do you—”

“And,” Quinn said, “if you think you can just skip out on your obligation, think again. It’s not just me who will stop working for you. I’ll spread the word as quickly as possible, and once that happens, good luck getting anything done.”

“You don’t have that kind of power.”

“Go ahead and think that. There’s one way to find out, though.”

It still remained to be seen whether the guy was going to pay him or not. By the time Quinn landed in Los Angeles, the final payment of his fee had yet to be transferred into the appropriate account. He almost hoped the money wouldn’t show up. His threat wasn’t an idle one, and eventually his former client would figure that out, but by then it would be too late.

Why couldn’t all Quinn’s clients be like Peter at the Office? While Peter might be a little gruff at times, he was professional and always paid when he was supposed to. Hell, Quinn would be better off if he only took the Office’s assignments and said no to everyone else. God knew Peter had enough work.

He dumped his bags just inside the door of his Hollywood Hills home, and turned on the TV in hopes of finding something that might relax him. No such luck. He ended up pacing next to the floor-to-ceiling windows that lined the back of his house and looked out on the city. Only he wasn’t paying attention to the view.

What he really needed was to vent, and release some of his anger. But when you worked in a world of secrets, there weren’t a lot of people you could vent to.

In Quinn’s case, there really was no one.

If his old mentor Durrie hadn’t been killed at a warehouse outside Chicago on a job they’d both been on, maybe things would have been different. Not that Quinn would have talked to Durrie. His late boss was not big on chitchat. It was Durrie’s girlfriend, Orlando, who Quinn would have called.

Would have, but not now. Durrie’s death put a stop to that, driving a wedge between Quinn and Orlando that had kept them from speaking for nearly two years now. He wished he knew how to bridge that divide.

Eventually, he got in his car and drove, not sure where he was going. Or maybe he was and just didn’t realize it at the time, because as he pulled to the curb on a side street just off Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, he knew he’d come to the right place. Ahead on the corner was Taste of Siam, Quinn’s favorite restaurant in the city.

It was late, almost 10 p.m., a time when most restaurants in L.A. were closing or at least thinking about it. Not Taste of Siam. It sometimes stayed open until four or five in the morning, frequented in those later hours mainly by members of the local Thai population.

Even before he got to the front door, he could hear the karaoke machine playing a Thai pop song. He could even tell Ice was singing. She was one of his favorites, a waitress some nights, in charge of music on the others. Though her voice was a little nasal and high-pitched, she could carry a tune. Of course it helped that she was both kind and cute.

Hell, all of the waitresses at Taste of Siam were kind and cute. It was one of the reasons he liked going there so much. Beautiful, no. You had to go eat at another Thai restaurant, Chan Dara, for that. But Quinn would take cute over beautiful any day of the week.

Here he could partake in a little mindless flirting that would never amount to anything, and it worked well with his otherwise solitary existence.

The moment he opened the door, he was greeted with “Khun Jonathan! How are you?” from Natt behind the bar. Two other waitresses — Lek and Won — rushed over from the other half of the restaurant, smiling.

“Sawadee ka,” they said.

“Sawadee khrap,” he replied.

Even Ice gave him a wave as she continued to sing.

It was the kind of attention a man in his job usually shied away from. But this was the one place he allowed it. An escape from his personal reality.

Taste of Siam wasn’t large. Basically, it consisted of two rectangular rooms side by side with a half wall dividing them. Neither section was more than fourteen-feet wide. The first was home to a small bar on one side, and a few seldom used tables on the other. The back third of this rectangle was walled off and served as the kitchen. The only things walled off in the second section were the two bathrooms in the back. Otherwise, it was filled with ten tables and the elaborate karaoke set-up in the front window along Sunset.

When Quinn walked in there were two people sitting at the bar, and a dozen or so sitting at tables in the other section. Knowing if he sat at a table, he would just stew and allow his anger to escalate, he took one of the remaining two stools at the bar.

“Why you not come for a long time?” Natt asked as she filled a glass with Singha beer and set it in front of him. That’s what he liked about this place. He didn’t have to tell them what he wanted.

“Been away on business,” he said. Partially true, but mostly he knew he couldn’t afford to come here as often as he would like. Habits in his kind of life were a bad idea.

“You work too hard.”

He smiled but said nothing as he took a sip.

“You eat or just beer tonight?” she asked.

“Always eat. You know that.”

She did, but she always asked him.

“Pad kee mao?”

He shook his head. “Panang moo.”

“Okay. Panang moo. Rice, yes?”

“Yes.”

She disappeared into the kitchen.

This is exactly what I needed, he thought, feeling his tension fall away. The screwed-up job didn’t seem so important now. They happened now and again. He tended to forget that.

In the other part of the restaurant, Ice was walking around with the microphone, urging customers to join in on ABBA’s “Mamma Mia” to little success. Quinn looked over as he took another sip of the beer. When she noticed him, she held the microphone up, suggesting maybe he should try.

With a laugh, he shook his head. There was a twinkle in her eye, asking him again, almost daring him to give it a go. But before he could even respond, the front door opened, and the smile on Ice’s face vanished.

Ever the professional, Quinn casually turned back around, glancing at the new arrival as he did.

The man who had entered was five-foot-seven, Caucasian, with well-groomed hair and a salesman’s smile. He wasn’t bulky, but he had the look of a guy who went to the gym just enough so that he could admire his body in