“Do not try my patience. I have heard of your, shall I say, after-hours activities.”
“Whatever you’ve heard isn’t true.”
“All of it? Even the fact that two years ago, you eliminated several members of an Asian street gang in a Jersey City warehouse, along with Mr. Frank Lazzaro?”
Her mouth was suddenly dry. She wished she had a glass of water. Or better yet, booze.
“That’s horseshit.” She didn’t play poker, but as far as she knew, she had no tells. “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”
“You are lying, poppet.”
There was that word again “What the heck’s a poppet?”
“A term of endearment. I am growing quite fond of you.”
“Wish I could say the same. Look, you can believe whatever stupid shit you want about me. Bottom line, I’m not playing.”
“But you are. You have no choice but to do as I say.”
“Is that so?”
He nodded complacently. “Indeed, yes. I hold your little life in my hands. And do not lean forward, please. I would prefer it if the gun under your desk is not within your reach.”
She sat very still. “You’re on to the gun? How’d you pull off that trick? You can’t see it from where you’re sitting.”
“I did not need to see it. Your body language betrayed its presence.”
“Think I got any other guns around?”
“In your handbag.”
“My body language gave that away too?”
“No. It is self-evident. You wear no shoulder holster, yet a woman in your line must be armed at all times. Ergo, the handbag.”
“Ergo,” she said quietly. “So how exactly do you hold my future in your hands?”
“I have not researched you on a whim. It was my job to find you.”
“I’m not that hard to find. People do it every day.”
“But in this case, I had little to work with. I began only with word of a female assassin. Blonde, from somewhere south of Jersey City. No name, no other details. I dug through many rumors and pursued many false leads before I found her.”
“You still haven’t found her. I’m another dead end.” Her mouth twitched. “So to speak.”
“I found her,” he said again, “and now she will do as I ask.”
“And why’s that?”
“Because if she does not, I will give her to Streinikov.”
Again, this would have been a perfect time for a knuckle crack, and again he missed his cue.
“Who?” she asked.
“My employer. Streinikov. You have heard of him?”
“Nope.”
He looked disappointed. “He is an important man. He is most anxious for me to deliver you to him.”
“Why?”
“For a conversation.”
“About what?”
“I suspect it has something to do with that warehouse.”
“I told you, I didn’t have a damn thing to do with that.”
“And I told you that you are lying.” Gura showed her a wide smile made of too many teeth. Most were cracked and yellow. Dentistry had not been a big part of his life.
“So you’re supposed to hand me over to the boss man, but you’re willing to say you couldn’t find me, as long as I help you out with Clarissa Lynch?”
“This is the bargain, yes.” He steepled his hands. “I have you in a trap, poppet. No way out.”
She looked down at the printouts of Clarissa’s Facebook page—a few selfies of a smiling woman with gray eyes and ash blonde hair.
“So it’s her or me,” she said in a monotone. “I trade her life for mine.”
“That is business.” He shrugged. “For people like us, anyway.”
“You know something, Pavel? I don’t think I like you.”
“Your opinion is of no significance. Do we understand each other?”
Bonnie didn’t answer. She was afraid she understood Pavel Gura only too well.
7
Bonnie sat at her desk for a long time after Gura left. She found herself staring at the poster of her historical namesake. She had the unsettling impression that her namesake was staring back.
She was under no illusions about the original Bonnie Parker. The girl hadn’t been any trailer trash saint, much less a Faye Dunaway look-alike with a retro fashion sense. She’d been a bony, dirt poor, hash-slinging waitress without a future, who remade herself into a gang moll and went on a multi-state crime spree that left a lot of innocent people dead. Bonnie could hardly blame the authorities for blasting the hell out of the roadster that she and Clyde Barrow had taken on their last ride. A photo of the bullet-riddled wreck occupied another wall of her office, as a reminder of where the first Bonnie Parker’s path had led.
Still, she felt a curious connection with that other Bonnie, the one who had worked so hard at becoming a tough bitch that she had ended up really being a tough bitch. A blonde blue-eyed girl who had never been a winner, but who had been a survivor—at least up until the time when her luck ran out and her blue eyes were closed for good.
And though Clyde’s Bonnie was a bad girl who came to a bad end and deserved it, today’s Bonnie couldn’t help feeling sorry for her. Sorry—and something more.
She didn’t believe in reincarnation. At least she didn’t think she did. But sometimes she would wake from a dream in which she was with Clyde and the Barrow Gang, pulling a bank job or outrunning pursuit or simply idling by the side of the road, and sometimes she dreamed of gunfire and breaking glass, an ambush laid by the law, blood in her lap and Clyde screaming.
Sometimes she thought she and the original Bonnie Parker were just roles played by the same actress, and the actress behind the scenes was the only real part of her.
Crazy stuff. But she’d always been a little weird.
Right now, of course, it wasn’t the law that worried her—at least not primarily. It was her new friend Pavel. She was pretty sure he hadn’t told her the whole truth, but she didn’t know which parts of his story were bullshit. Whatever his story, he was sharper than he looked, and not a guy to be underestimated.
It probably didn’t pay to sell the Russian mob short, in general. Not that she was any expert on the subject. There wasn’t a whole lot of Russkie action in Millstone County. Any place with this many pizzerias and Italian delis was bound to be more of an old-school Cosa Nostra territory.
Still, she kept current on this stuff. It was part of her job—due diligence, and all. She knew the basics. In Russia, ever since the Berlin Wall came down, the mob had pretty much run the whole show. They were nasty boys, a murderers’ row of psychopaths masquerading as biznesmeni, hulking brutes in black suits and opaque sunglasses, with close-cropped hair and scowling mouths, their bodies decorated in prison tats.
Ukraine, a separate nation now, was a hotbed of ROC influence. The Ukrainian mob was tight with the SBU, the security service that had replaced the KGB. The big bosses, or vory, ran the gambling houses, drug dens, and brothels, and a lot of other enterprises, too. She’d read that they were even into the archaeology trade, selling Greco-Roman antiquities on the black market.
In the US, they were concentrated in Brooklyn and Miami. They smoked cigars and dressed well and carried Makarov pistols and lethal little banana knives with curved blades, usually sheathed in the small of the back. They spoke Russian among themselves, and they did not trust outsiders.
Now one of the vory was after her. And it had something to do with Frank Lazzaro and the warehouse. Why the hell a vor would give a damn about Lazzaro, Bonnie had no clue. But somehow this guy Streinikov had found out about her and put Gura on her trail. If she didn’t cooperate, Gura would hand her over to his boss—or just kill her himself and deliver proof of her death.
Of course, he might do that anyway. Even if she did as she was told, he could still snuff her when it was convenient. And he probably would.
She puffed up her cheeks and blew out a big breath. As her
pal Pavel had said, he had her in a trap, and she saw no obvious way out. She was like a wolf in a snare without even the option of chewing her own leg off.
The chair creaked irritably as she pushed it away from the desk. Suddenly she felt the need to get moving. Maybe it was the lingering memory of Gura in this room, or maybe it was the sense that the original Bonnie Parker was staring down at her from the wall in pity and disdain. You’re in it now, girl, she seemed to say.
“Fuck you, bitch,” Bonnie told the poster.
She slung her purse over her shoulder and left the building. A couple blocks down the street was the Main Street Diner, where she could get a proper breakfast. The food wasn’t great, but on the plus side, it was really overpriced.
She hadn’t gotten very far when she saw a white Dodge Grand Caravan with the words Beach Cab bannered across the side panels, discharging a passenger outside a shoe store. She strolled around to the driver’s side and stuck her head in the window.
“Yo, Felix.”
The cab driver smiled at her. He was a skinny guy with a broad, flat face, and he stood maybe five feet tall on tiptoe. She’d never been sure of his age. Somewhere between twenty and forty-five—that was the most she could narrow it down.
“Bandida,” he said with a crooked smile. “You’re up early.”
“And you’re up late. Aren’t you normally in bed by now?”
“Gotta go the extra mile today. Got stiffed on a big fare last night.”
She squinted, her face turning hard, and just like that, thoughts of breakfast were gone. “Who stiffed you?”
“Aw, don’t worry about it.”
Her voice was cold. “Just give me a name.”
“It was that dude Alonzo. You know ...”
“Uh-huh. I know.”
“It’s no big thing,” Felix Ramirez said nervously, watching her face.
She liked Felix. He was her type of guy. He worked mostly at night, and a lot of his clients were, not to put too fine a point on it, lowlifes. Drug dealers and their customers, pimps and their johns, people who needed quick transportation to one of the no-tell motels on the highway. You didn’t hold on to a job like that unless you could keep your mouth shut about the people you’d chauffeured and the things you’d overheard and seen.
Felix, who’d crossed the border some time ago—illegally, no doubt—to make his fortune in Los Estados Unidos, could be deaf, dumb, and/or blind as circumstances warranted. The police had learned not to bother interrogating him. He never knew anything. His command of English was conveniently unreliable. His memory was just plain awful. It was amazing how little he noticed or recalled. As far as the authorities were concerned, poor Felix lived his life in a daze, unaware of any activities, criminal or otherwise, that were taking place around him.
“I thought you said it was a big fare,” Bonnie pressed.
“Well, yeah. I mean, I take him over to the Roach House and wait around for like half an hour while he does business inside. Next we go to Alcatraz, and I wait there too.”
The Roach House, more properly the Coach House, was a low-rent motel known for hot and cold running hos and convenient exchanges of cocaine for cash. Alcatraz was a bar.
“He comes out drunk, makes me take him home. This is why he hired me, see? Too many DUIs, so he don’t drive after drinking no more. Which is okay, but when we get there, he just walks away. I tell him he owes me, and he yells at me to go fuck myself. He’s an asshole,” Felix added unnecessarily.
“Yeah, that’s the word on him.” She knew about Alonzo Duchenne, small time dealer and big time jerkoff. “Where’s he live? In Maritime, right?”
“Bandida, you don’t need to know.”
“Gimme his address.”
“Never mind. Just forget I say anything.”
“I can get the info in other ways, Felix.”
“I don’t want no trouble.”
“Like I would ever cause trouble. Come on, you know me.”
“Yeah, I know you. That’s the problem.”
She was losing patience. “Quit dicking around and tell me where he sleeps.”
Reluctantly Felix gave up an address in Maritime, close to the hospital, only a few blocks from where she’d done Gil Krauss last night.
“Good enough. I’ll be in touch.”
“You don’t need to do this, bandida,” Felix called after her as she walked away.
But she did. That was the thing. She really, really did.
8
Gura sat in his Mercedes in the parking lot of the Pussycat Cabaret, advertised as “a club for gentlemen,” until 10 AM, when the club opened its doors. Business was minimal on a Saturday morning. He joined a handful of other patrons, none of whom appeared to be gentlemen in any accepted sense of the word, as they filed into a dimly lit room where sad, exhausted women performed on stage in skimpy lingerie.
It was not too early for a drink, or several. Gura drank vodka. He had an unlimited appetite for the beverage and never got drunk.
He was a man of animal-like habits and inclinations. He liked food, liquor, and women. Spiritual interests were as foreign to him as the carvings on an Egyptian sarcophagus.
He watched the scantily clad dancers and thought about this morning’s meeting. He was pleased with how it had gone. Any doubts he’d had about Bonnie Parker had vanished. She might be a mere wisp of a thing, crude in her manner and speech—he’d noted the obscene text on her shirt, a childish bid for attention—but she was indeed a killer, and probably capable enough. Skill in that area was not dependent on breeding, manners, or taste.
She reminded him in certain ways of the woman called Clarissa Lynch. Both young, both blonde, both superficially glib but with a darker underside that spoke of past hardships. Neither was quite what she seemed to be. And neither had more than a few hours left to live.
A new song came on, but the dancers went on gyrating listlessly, their rhythm unchanged. Gura wondered if they even heard the music. He ordered another drink.
He had lied about where he’d met Clarissa. It was not at the Tropicana, but in a club like this one. Yes, it was in Atlantic City, but he had not gone there to play blackjack. He had no facility for card games. He had lied about that, too.
Soon Clarissa would die, and Parker would follow. And what did matter? No life was precious, not even his own. A life was worth what you were paid for it. Parker herself knew this. Gura had known it since he was twelve years old, when he agreed to kill a man for fifty of Mykola Petrovic’s hand-rolled cigarettes.
The man was Dmytro Stavitsky, a drunkard who had raped Mykola’s mother, a widow with no man to defend her honor. Afraid of Stavitsky, she had not reported the crime to the police or spoken about it to anyone. Mykola himself knew of it only because he’d found her bruised and weeping after Stavitsky stumbled out of their house. Mykola had sworn vengeance but lacked the confidence to do the job himself.
Pavel took the job. Though he was two years younger than Mykola and his experience as an executioner was limited to beheading the chickens that ran in his yard, he knew instinctively that he could do it. His only uncertainty involved method. After some thought, he settled on the hatchet that he had used on the chickens. The blade was rusty and dull; he took care to sharpen it.
He lived in a little windswept village in the Donbas, in eastern Ukraine. A miserable, hardscrabble life—a peasant’s life, unchanged for centuries. Men tilled the land and herded goats and mowed down the high grasses with scythes. Squalor and privation were everywhere. Running water was unheard of. Every home had an outhouse and a banya—a makeshift bathroom where a bucket of well water, heated on the stove, could be ladled into a tub. Pavel Andreivich Gura bathed twice a month, and only because his mother insisted. His father, a shambling, sleepy-eyed hulk whose calloused fingers were permanently engrained with the dirt of the fields, did not care.
On the fatal night, long after bedtime, Pavel crept out of his house, hatchet in hand, and made his way across open land
under the first sliver of a new moon, the slender sickle known as the molodyk, an auspicious sign. It was snowing—he remembered that detail, and remembered worrying that his trail of footprints would lead the authorities back to his house. But as the snow kept falling, he realized that any tracks he made would be erased by morning. God was with him. God—or the devil; to him it was all the same.
He avoided the one road that led through the village, though there was no local traffic other than state-owned tractors and a few horse-drawn carts. He gave a wide berth to the home of old Orysia, the babka who treated ailments with herbal concoctions and sometimes by more mysterious means. To diagnose illness, she would drip wax from church candles into a pail of cold water and interpret the resulting shapes. She was said, too, to have the uroky, the evil eye. Pavel was not sure he believed this, but he was a prudent boy.
Dmytro Stavitsky lived in a dilapidated shack. He had been a farmer, tilling a communal plot, until beer and vodka had consumed what little there was of his industry.
Breaking into the house was not difficult. There were no locks on the windows and no reason for any; the house offered nothing worth stealing. Stavitsky lay asleep on his bed, fully clothed. His boots, wet with snow, had left a puddle on the wooden floor. He was drunk—Pavel could tell as much from his stertorous breathing and the reek of alcohol on his clothes.
Seeing him this way, Pavel altered his plan. The hatchet was unnecessary. Better to smother the inebriated fool with his own pillow. That method would leave no mark.
The only complication was that the man’s head lay on the pillow. Pavel had to work it loose, worrying the whole time that the movement might awaken his victim. But though he grumbled in his sleep and smacked his lips behind a mat of beard, Stavitsky remained asleep.
Until the pillow was pressed over his face. Then he was shocked awake, hands flailing, legs kicking. Pavel straddled the man, fighting to hold him down as the big body thrashed under him.
That was the worst part—the struggle, and the uncertainty of the outcome. Had Stavitsky broken free, he would have had the advantage. Even armed with the hatchet, Pavel might not have been able to subdue him.
Bad to the Bone (Bonnie Parker, PI Book 3) Page 5