The story so far:K, an assassin-for-hire, and Lydia, his pre-teen protégé, have been hired by Lydia’s father Mr. Bohr to kill Rolf Klingman, a rival businessman. The deadly duo arrived in Las Vegas to undo Klingman during his vacation, but instead found out he had gained access to the data system of the Alphabet, an assassination agency K is connected with. K meets with Thomas, an Alphabet representative, who tells him the organization’s leadership wants K to deal with the situation the only way he knows how. Only one question remains: how?
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“Why did we have to come here?” Lydia groaned as waiters clad in red vests set plates and pots full of food on the table in front of her. As the sickly sweet and sour aromas of Chinese food reached her nostrils, she felt her stomach turn and gripped her knees even tighter, scrunching up her dress behind the purple velvet tablecloth.
“I like Chinese,” K said as he stuffed a napkin down his shirt collar and eyed at the banquet in front of him. He felt a satisfied smile crawl on his lips as he acknowledged his own impeccable taste. Lydia, not being a psychic, took the smirk as schadenfreude, and knit her arms across her chest.
“I don’t. This whole place stinks,” she snapped after making sure the waiters were out of earshot.
“Then you’ll need to expand your palate. It’ll grow character,” K said, calmly spooning soup into a small china bowl from a silver pot. “Besides,” he added quickly after seeing Lydia preparing for rebuttal, “Klingman will not be listening to us here.”
K reached across the table and set the bowl in front of Lydia.
“Eat.”
Lydia had been planning to go hungry rather than give in to K and for a while she glared at the soup with a sullen expression. However, the combination of K’s eyes drilling through her skull and the growling in her stomach soon eroded her resolve. With a defeated sigh, she picked up a spoon.
K leaned back with a smile on his face. “That’s my girl.”
He filled another bow with the creamy soup and had a spoonful himself.
“You should always be open to trying new things, Lydia. You’ll never grow up to be a lady of good taste if you just stubbornly stick to what you already like.”
“Then how come we never have to do anything you don’t like?” Lydia muttered between swallowing small mouthfuls of the soup.
“Nonsense. We deal with things I don’t like all the time,” K said, waving his hand as if to brush Lydia’s indignation aside.
“Yeah, we kill them.”
K threw an angry glare at Lydia, who crouched over her bowl, grumbling under her breath.
“A lady doesn’t mutter to herself, either,” he said. “Anyway, talking about that, how are we going to do Klingman?”
Lydia forced the last spoonful of thick broth down her throat and, once she had caught her breath after the effort, looked up at K in surprise. “You don’t have a plan?”
K shrugged as he loaded another bowl with rice and passed it to Lydia.
“Not in the slightest. I had figured we could just make this up as we went along. You know, like we did in Moscow?”
Lydia giggled at the memory.
“Exactly. But since Klingman apparently knows everything…” K slapped a piece of chicken onto a plate. “I don’t know what to do.”
With a sigh, K set the plate in front of him and ran his hand through his hair.
“I don’t even know where the bastard’s staying.”
Lydia broke into a wicked smile, despite the fact that she was loading what she thought was beef smeared in some kind of yellowish-brown liquid onto her plate.
“The top floor suite at Caligula. He’ll be there until next week’s Sunday,” she said.
K’s chopsticks bounced off his plate with a clatter.
“How the f-“ he began, but broke out in maniacal laughter before he could finish his sentence. “Don’t tell me, don’t tell me. Good job, Lydia. That simplifies things.”
Lydia set her plate in on the silken tablecloth and grinned at K. She was slightly disappointed at the fact that K hadn’t wanted to know how she came across the information, as she had been planning to make him crawl at her feet, but the face he had just pulled almost made up for it. She had overheard the reception staff during her expedition through the hotel’s ground floor while K had been engaged in his daily grooming session. Satisfied with herself, Lydia reached for her utensils. Her smile took a dive out of the third-floor restaurant’s window as she touched two wooden sticks.
“Chopsticks,” she hissed.
K ignored Lydia as she began to sulk and complain again and let his eyes wonder around the nearly empty restaurant. He thought it strange the place was so empty, even if it was a little late for lunch, and made a mental note to look into whether the restaurant was no longer among the top ten in Vegas. The large windows on the far wall from K brought his musings back to Klingman. With a disapproving grimace he took a sip of water from a crystal tumbler.
“I can’t shoot him,” he mumbled into his glass. The Caligula was the highest building of its surroundings. If Klingman was staying on the top floor, there was no place around from where to get a clear shot. Unless Klingman had a balcony and happened to be standing right at its edge.
Lydia was struggling to get the chopsticks to obey her fingers. “Good. Sniping is boring,” she said as a piece of beef slipped once again from her grasp. She dropped the chopsticks on her plate and, pouting, brought her heels onto the chair and hugged her legs, resting her chin on her knees.
K glanced at Lydia over his glasses and stocked up on more chicken. “Sit properly. It’s the single most efficient way to take out a target.”
“Not if you miss.” Lydia stuck her tongue out at K.
“Keep that thing behind your teeth. And I don’t miss,” K said, stabbing towards Lydia with his chopsticks. “Finish your food.”
Lydia threw her arms up in the air and slumped down onto her chair, closing her eyes. “Well, you can’t shoot him anyway,” she hummed to the tune of a nursery rhyme K couldn’t quite recognize. Lydia opened one of her eyes and, seeing K staring at her, sat upright with a sigh.
“He’s too far up high,” Lydia said as she again picked up her chopsticks and resumed her earlier ordeal. “And that wouldn’t be fun. We should just poison him.”
K sniffed at the thought. “And how would you do that?”
The piece of beef flopped onto the white porcelain plate just as it almost made it to Lydia’s mouth.
“Invite… Him to… Dinner,” Lydia stammered as she fought to get the chopstick to align right in her hand. “Say you want to make up for being so rude to him earlier.”
K sipped from his water glass and found himself actually considering the plan.
“No good.” K he set the glass down. “He’s not stupid enough. And there’s that... Crony of his.” K shuddered at the thought of the smiling, pony-tailed man.
Lydia frowned, though K wasn’t sure if it was because he mentioned the smiling man or because of the chopsticks.
“Oh yeah. He probably knows about stuff, right?” Lydia said, stretching her cramping fingers. “He’s a creep.”
K said nothing, but he couldn’t have agreed more with Lydia. Just a short while ago K could’ve thought of only one man who terrified him more than his own reflection in the morning. He wished that was still the case. He shook his head, brushed a strand off his face, and ran his hand through his hair.
Lydia groaned in frustration and began to furiously stab at the pieces of meat on her plate with the chopsticks.
“So let’s just kill them both,” she screeched from behind her gritted teeth. She slammed her chopsticks on the table, panting with exhaustion. K leaned over his plate, his elbows on the table and his chin resting on crossed fingers, and absentmindedly stared into the pot of rice. Lydia was right. Should Klingman die, the ponytailed man surely had orders to make everything he knew public, in addition to making K’s life short and miserable. And not only his. K lifted his eyes at Lydia. She was right, they both had to die. A grin that would have given Jeffrey Dahmer nightmares spread across K’s face behind his crossed fingers.
He’d begin by seeing how long the ponytailed man could maintain that smile after K got his hands on him.
Lydia stared at the mushed up pieces of meat on her plate with damp eyes.
"I wish that was Klingman. Maybe then we could go to a real restaurant."
