Free No Way Back by Michael Crow Page A

drawl of hers. But she can’t stop a flicker of a grin.
    Which widens when her twin—well, almost, except this girl’s eyes are black, and aren’t just canted but also lack the lid fold—breezes into the room. Korean, I guess.
    “Well, hi, Nadya! This one has to be your latest squeeze, right?” Make that Korean-American. Her accent is one hundred percent Southern California. “Hi, you. I’m Eunkyong and we’re going to do some Korean stuff, okay?”
    “Hi, Yunk-jong,” I say.
    “No way. It’s Eunkyong.”
    “Uke-yung.”
    “Hello? Slowly now. Eunkyong, okay?” she says. She rolls her eyes at Nadya. “How come I get the hopeless ones? Is he this awful in Russian, too?”
    “Almost,” Nadya says.
    “Wait a minute,” I start, but Nadya’s already up and leaving.
    “Same time tomorrow, Luther?” she says.
    “Really,” Eunkyong sighs, settling into the dent Nadya’s left behind in the overstuffed sofa, but doing nothing that counters the odd hollow I feel now thatNadya’s no longer with me. “God, I guess I have to start at the start. Do you know anything at all about Korea?”
    “There’s two of them, and we don’t like one of them,” I say.
    She mutters something in Korean—curses, no doubt—then moves without a hitch into educated Valley-girl lecture mode, minus the “So I’m, like, totally bummed” she’s no doubt thinking. Her face is broad but neatly arranged, her smile is sweet the few times it appears, she’s a bit stocky but still lithe when she moves. Which is fairly often—getting up from the sofa, pacing around the room, sitting back down again—over the next two hours. At the end of which I can say to her satisfaction the Korean versions of “Hello”; “How are you?”; “I’m pleased to meet you”; “Yes, sir”; “Of course, sir, I will do it immediately”; “My pleasure”; “thank you very much”; and a few other phrases beyond the usual tourist’s “How much does this cost?” and “Where is the toilet?”
    She also makes me conscious of some key points of behavior and etiquette: always take your shoes off before entering anyone’s house; never blow your nose in public; avoid the number four (it’s unlucky, sounds like the word for death, and buildings skip from three to five in floor number); it’s polite to bow slightly at introductions and when saying good-bye, as it is in Japan; it’s impolite to point at anyone; and it’s “totally grotty” to write anything in red ink, or leave your chopsticks sticking vertically from your bowl—death signs, both.
    I get the impression Eunkyong wouldn’t mind drumming even more into my head, but she leaves without a word when Allison appears bearing two big mugs and nods Eunkyong out.
    “You’re about to have caffeine withdrawl symptoms, right?” she says, handing me one of the mugs. I sip. Exactly the way I like my coffee: almost as strong as espresso but cut generously with half-and-half, one spoon of sugar. I smile gratefully at her, light a Camel.
    “That is so unhealthy, man,” she says, then instantly bursts into what seems like genuine laughter. “Heard you left Terry slightly miffed this morning.”
    “Miffed? Yeah, well, now that I think about it. Nothing major. But, hey, you already know that.”
    “So how’s it going up here? With Nadya and Eunkyong?” Her Korean pronunciation’s much better than mine.
    “It’s going. Had some fun with Nadya, anyway.”
    “Let me guess. When she did her whore number, right? She’s so good at that one.”
    “Had me convinced,” I say, and Allison laughs again, mid-sip from her mug of what smells like chamomile tea. “Tried my best to convince her we ought to go up to my room, remove some of our clothes, make it more realistic.”
    “One-track mind, Luther. No, make that two-track in your case. Sex and violence. Just think of all the things in between you’re missing.”
    She’s off. Should be violence, full stop. Sex, full stop. Those are the