Perry's Killer Playlist

by Joe Schreiber

  “Are you all right?” she asked.

  “I’m fine… ?” My voice went up at the end, sounding like one of the Chipmunks’. I put my hands behind me and tried to pull myself free, but her knees had pinned the bathrobe to the mattress. “I’m just kinda naked under this thing?”

  “Perry.”

  “What?”

  “I need your help.”

  I looked into her eyes. “You need me?”

  “I am not joking.”

  “Sure,” I said, “whatever I can do.”

  And then the Louis Vuitton trunk started to move.

  9. “Run (I’m a Natural Disaster)”

  —Gnarls Barkley

  I sat up fast, looking around so quickly that I felt my neck pop.

  “Wait—” I stared back at the steamer trunk, where something was definitely thumping around inside. “Is there somebody in that thing?”

  Gobi sighed and climbed off me, sliding from the bed in one graceful move. With the resigned air of a woman going about some onerous but necessary task, she opened the drawer of the nightstand next to the bed and pulled out a pistol, screwing the silencer onto the barrel as she walked over to the trunk.

  “Wait, what is that? What are you doing?”

  Gobi pointed the gun at the steamer trunk and pulled the trigger. The silenced gunshots weren’t particularly loud—three metallic champagne corks—and whatever was inside gave a shuddering howl and collapsed to the bottom with a thump. In the frozen moment of realization, I saw smoke drifting out of the bullet holes in the trunk, uncurling like ghostly pigtails in the tastefully recessed lighting.

  I floundered off the bed and across the room to my wet pile of clothes, the bathrobe flopping open as I tried to get backwards to the door. Behind me, Gobi’s voice was quiet and stern.

  “Perry.”

  “What?”

  “I told you that I need your help.”

  “Yeah, well, dead bodies are kind of a deal-breaker for me in that department.”

  That was when the pounding started outside the door.

  10. “Police and Thieves”

  —The Clash

  “Who is that?” I was standing in the corner by the door, trying to put my jeans back on, but they were too wet and I couldn’t even get one foot through the leg hole. I finally just gave up and tied the bathrobe tight around my waist, all too aware that I was naked underneath it. “What the hell is going on?”

  “This way.” Gobi was dragging the trunk away from the wall with one hand, holding the pistol in the other. “Come on.”

  “There’s a person in there!”

  “Was, yes. Is dead person now.”

  “No. No—I’m not—”

  Wham-wham-wham! Heavy, authoritative fists hammered louder on the door of the suite, seeming to make the air shake around us. I stumbled forward, my spine suddenly electrified inside me, shooting down from the base of my brain all the way to wherever humans’ vestigial tail had dropped off two million years ago. Right now I was ready to dive back into the primordial ooze and take my chances with the single-celled organisms—maybe they had the right idea, staying where they were.

  Voices from outside, angry, urgent—soldiers or cops, it sounded like, shouting in Italian.

  “Oh, shit, who’s that?”

  “Carabinieri, probably.”

  “Carbon who?”

  “I will explain to you later if we are still alive,” she said. “Right now, you need to… How do you say it? Hold up your end?”

  BANG! BANG! BANG! More angry voices, giving orders, making demands in voices that sounded more and more like Mussolini’s Blackshirts on a bender.

  “What am I supposed to do?”

  She hoisted the steamer trunk by one of its straps, dragging it toward the balcony. “Lift. Now.”

  “What? Why?”

  She gestured over the balcony, down to the canal.

  “Oh, no. No way. No.”

  “We must get rid of the body before…” She nodded at the door where the knocking and the shouting had fallen abruptly, ominously silent.

  “Forget it!”

  She pointed the pistol at me. “It was good to see you again, Perry.”

  “Wait, hold on. I’m not getting involved in this.”

  “Already you are involved.”

  Click. Safety off. Argument over. I gripped the leather strap and hoisted up my end of the trunk. As I lifted, I felt something inside do a slumping barrel roll over to my end, which got suddenly heavier, and we heaved it up onto the balcony, balancing it on the wrought-iron railing. For just a second I looked down, four stories, where the Grand Canal shimmered below in the darkness, jewels of light reflected from the hotels and buildings on the other side. Venice never looks lovelier than when you’re using it to dispose of a body.

  Then she shoved the trunk over the edge and it fell.

  There was a long silence followed by a splash below just as the hotel door swung open behind us. When I looked back at Gobi, she was already climbing over the railing into the night.

  “What are you doing?”

  She let go of the railing and disappeared.

  11. “Jump”

  —Van Halen

  My decision to go over the railing was pure hot-stove reflex, not involving much in the way of rational thought. It was more like a series of images, bold and simple—Kabuki risk assessment, not recommended to anyone who might ever need to justify their actions afterward to the authorities.

  From the other side of the suite, I saw men pouring through the open door—they wore black long-sleeved T-shirts and black pants, and carried automatic weapons, machine pistols, heavy artillery. If these guys were cops, then Venice had a serious paramilitary budget. I could still see the copper wires dangling from the key-slot where they’d disabled the electronic lock.

  The man in front looked straight at me, his face instantly familiar. Unlike the others, he was wearing a suit.

  So you found it.

  Your little tourist trap.

  The next thing I knew, I was over the railing, the hotel bathrobe billowing out around my bare legs in the chill night air while my wet toes curled and skidded along the outer rim of the balcony.

  The man in front shouted in Italian, swinging his gun up toward me.

  I let go.

  Spilling back through the open air, pinwheeling my arms in wild, frantic circles as if I might suddenly remember how to fly, I seemed to fall for a long, long time, long enough to think, I left my bass up there, and then, This is really going to hurt, while they kept yelling at me from up above.

  And then pain, which is basically the same in any language. The water flattened me, punching the air out of my lungs—I swear for a second I actually bounced. Then my legs went numb, seemed almost to disappear, and I may have blacked out.

  The water around me was freezing, squid-ink black, and I was thrashing around, wondering if anything was broken and guessing it probably wasn’t if I was swimming. But I couldn’t breathe. When I did, things started to make a little more sense.

  The steamer trunk had bobbed to the surface in front of me, kind of swaying up and down in the water. The latch had burst open on impact. I felt a hand brush past my arm. I took it blindly, pulling hard.

  “Perry!”

  Gobi’s voice drifted from somewhere off in the distance. It didn’t occur to me to wonder how she could be so far away when I had her arm right here.

  I pulled harder on the arm, clamping on to it with both hands, and that was when a man’s body floated out of the trunk and straight at me. He was older, bald, dressed in black, wearing a white priest’s collar, which had come loose when he’d hit the water and now stuck out on one side. His lips gawped, water from the canal washing in and out of his mouth, and then I saw his eyes pop open, and he looked right at me.

  “Shit!” That’s what I was trying to say—it’s certainly what I was thinking, but it probably came out more like “Aiiiggghhghh!” I shoved back from h
im, flailing my arms in the water. “Oh shit, shit!” I tried to say, but this time all that emerged was a spew of bubbles. Glubb-blitt-bripp.

  “Perry!”

  Now Gobi sounded worried. Gunfire rattled from overhead—a series of flat, popping cracks like somebody snapping rolls of the world’s deadliest bubble wrap—hitting the water like hail, splashing it up around me. When I looked up I saw two men on the balcony. Gaudy bouquets of orange and yellow muzzle-flash splattered around them.

  I flung my arms out and started flurrying them hard in the direction of Gobi’s voice, paddling like hell for the stone bridge in front of me. At least it was dark under there. Grabbing a deep breath, I plunged low and kicked as hard as I could.

  The sudden roar of a diesel engine filled the space beneath the bridge, above and below the surface, overtaking everything. I bobbed up to see the low white hull of the vaporetto closing in over me, too fast to dodge. I slapped the bow, tried to push myself off, and felt something grab the soaked collar of the sopping hotel bathrobe that clung to my bare skin, hoisting me out of the water to land hard on the deck. An abrupt bundle of dry fabric fell over my head.

  Gobi’s eyes flashed from the shadows like a pair of unaffordable earrings in a darkened jeweler’s window.

  “Hold still.”

  “You…”

  “Shut up.”

  “ . . . shot . . .”

  “Are you deaf?”

  “ . . . a priest?”

  Gobi reached up and clapped her hand over my mouth. I realized she’d wrapped a trench coat over my soaking wet bathrobe.

  “Keep your head low.”

  “You’re insane.”

  She didn’t argue. I wondered where she’d gotten the dry trench coat and decided not to ask—it probably meant there was some tourist on the boat sprawled out unconscious or worse. The vaporetto lurched forward, spewing diesel fumes, its engines roaring behind us as it nosed its way toward the next stop. When it hit the shore, I could already hear the two-note European sirens dopplering up the canal, blue lights flashing from a police boat headed in the opposite direction, the night waking up around us.

  “This is our stop.” She put her arm around me, pulling me upward, giving me the bum’s rush down the floating platform.

  “Forget it, I’m done.”

  “Idiot.” Nobody did exasperation like she did—you’d think she’d invented it. Tilting slightly to one side, she cocked her right leg, simultaneously sweeping her right hand back, and when it reappeared I saw the knife, six inches long and flickering brightly in all that remained of the light. “No more Perry Stormaire bullshit.” She pronounced it bool-sheet.

  “Wait,” I said, “now there’s a type of bullshit named after me?”

  “Come now.”

  “Or what, you’ll cut my throat?”

  “Not necessary.” She considered. “Maybe I just sever Achilles tendon and leave you here helpless in the alley for whatever comes along.” I didn’t like the sound of that any more than the sirens that were warbling from up the canal. “Those police, they are not the only ones looking for a stupid American boy tonight, you know.”

  “Those guys back in your hotel room were the same ones who beat me up in the alley outside Harry’s.”

  “They followed us.”

  I flashed on the body floating out of the steamer trunk. “You shot a priest.”

  “Monash?” She shook her head and made a noise like “pah.” “Was no priest.”

  “He sure looked like one to me.”

  “Yes, and once upon a time you thought I was just a foreign exchange student.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “You should learn to use your eyes.”

  “I was actually too preoccupied trying not to drown.”

  “There is more work to do.”

  “Oh, no. No more. No way.”

  “You should know better,” Gobi said, and kept the knife where I could see it. “With me it is never just one.”

  12. “Here I Go Again”

  —Whitesnake

  “He’s not dead, you know.”

  Gobi stopped walking. She’d been leading me down a narrow cobblestone walkway, through an arched gate between two high stone buildings that looked half a millennium old—although “leading” is probably too gentle a word when you’ve got a knife wedged tight against your ribs, close enough that its tip keeps jabbing you through a wet hotel bathrobe.

  “What are you saying?”

  “That guy in the water,” I said. “Monash, or whatever his name was? I saw him open his eyes.”

  “Was reflex. I shot five times.”

  “Three.”

  “What?”

  “You shot him three times.” I could still hear the shots in my head. “One, two, three.”

  “I had already shot him twice before I even put him in trunk. Is no way could he still be alive.”

  “Whatever,” I said. “Just let me go. It’s not like I’m going to be able to drive you around Venice in a gondola to kill more people. I can’t even water-ski.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “How did you find me, anyway?”

  “Website for your band, what is it? Itch-worm?”

  “Inchworm.”

  “Your tour schedule is posted online.”

  “You were stalking me?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Perry, please. Do not flatten yourself.”

  “Flatter,” I said. “Is it possible your English is actually getting worse?”

  “I have a friend at Harry’s. I gave him your picture and told him to call me when you turned up.”

  “When I turned up… ?” I stared at her. “Now who’s flattening themselves?”

  She gave me a look, half smile, half head shake, like I’d simultaneously amused and disappointed her.

  “What,” I said, “you think I couldn’t help myself? I was supposed to go straight to the hotel with the rest of the band.”

  “Yet you did not.”

  “I got lost. I needed somewhere to dry off.”

  “You were hoping that I would be there. Admit it.”

  “No, I—” What was the point of arguing? Gobi glanced up, and when I saw a slight smile on her face, I realized that in some perverse way she was enjoying this.

  “Perry. This is good.”

  “Yeah, it’s awesome.”

  “We work well together, I think—a good team, yes?”

  “Great.” We had stopped in front of a towering old church, its cathedral rising up into the night. “How many more priests do you have to kill?”

  “I told you, he was not a real priest.”

  “All right, how many more guys?”

  “Only two.”

  “Are you sure about that?”

  Ignored. Turning away from the church, we followed the shadows around the open piazza, turning right down an even narrower alley. A lit sign ahead hung in the darkness, the curved letters spelling out TRATTORIA SACRO EPROFANO. Even with my nonexistent Italian I could figure that one out: the Trattoria of the Sacred and the Profane.

  Gobi stopped and looked over her shoulder in the direction of the church, then back at the front of the restaurant. With its stone façade and pillars flanking the entrance, the café almost looked like a cathedral in miniature. A cigarette vending machine stood just outside the door, gleaming softly in the rain.

  “Do you even know where we are?” I whispered.

  She didn’t say anything. I thought about New York, when she’d had the BlackBerry with its maps and built-in GPS, none of which we had now. Up till now I’d assumed she was familiar with Venice, but till this moment she didn’t seem so sure of herself.

  “Wait, are we lost?”

  She stared at me blankly, and for a second it was as if she didn’t recognize me at all. That was when I noticed something under her nose, a dark spot trickling downward over her upper lip.

  “You’re bleeding,” I said. Which was odd, given that nobody
had attacked us in the last ten minutes. Gobi touched her finger to her upper lip, then wiped it on her jacket.

  “Is nothing.” But she sounded a little dazed and distant, not herself at all, and when she looked at me again it still was almost as if she didn’t know who I was.

  I had seen her like this before, back in New York. When she’d come to live with my family as a foreign exchange student, back when I thought that’s all she was, she’d told us she had epilepsy—it had prevented her from learning to drive, and every so often she had seizures. Not the big, twitching, swallow-your-tongue kind, but more like blackouts. For a second I thought she was going to black out on me now, go into one of her petit mals.

  But she’s never bled like that before, a voice murmured inside my head. That was new. I was pretty sure that epilepsy didn’t give you nosebleeds.

  It didn’t matter. My legs tensed. If she went into one of her spells, I was definitely making a break for it.

  But Gobi just dabbed the rest of the blood away with the back of her hand, grabbed the door handle, and hustled me into the Trattoria of the Sacred and the Profane.

  13. “Church of the Poison Mind”

  —Culture Club

  Inside, I smelled sawdust and wet marble, like the basement of a Renaissance cathedral. Shadowy figures huddled at the tables, sipping wine by candlelight—locals or lost tourists, I assumed, at this hour of the night. The only touch of modernity was the unattended video slot machine next to the door with a handwritten sign on it that probably said OUT OF ORDER.

  “Stay still,” Gobi said, and started walking toward the bar. She sounded like her usual self again. My eyes had just started to adjust to this deeper, subterranean darkness. I looked again at the figures seated around us, and when I saw who they were, I felt a cold, rubber-gloved hand of dread tightening over my stomach.

  The whole room was full of priests.

  I went over to the bar, getting as close as I could to Gobi, leaning forward to whisper in her ear. “What are you doing? We’re in a priest bar.”