Bad to the Bone (Bonnie Parker, PI Book 3)

by Michael Prescott

  She wanted very much to light another cig, but somehow she couldn’t get her hand to reach for one.

  “Tell me something,” she said slowly. “Have you been talking to the Long Fong Boyz?”

  “I? No.”

  “But you know who’s been taking them out, right? Besides Lazzaro’s people.”

  “It is possible I know something of this,” he said blandly.

  “Was Streinikov a friend of Frank Lazzaro?”

  “Streinikov is a friend of nobody.”

  “But he was plenty pissed off when Lazzaro died, right?”

  “He may have been.”

  “And he blamed the Long Fong Boyz. Until lately—when he started blaming me.”

  Gura said nothing. He didn’t have to. It was the only version of events that made sense.

  “There’s a story going around about your boss. Word is he’s been spayed. You know what that means, right?”

  “I have heard the term.”

  “Is it true?”

  “You would have to ask him.”

  “Well, here’s the funny thing. I’m told one of the Boyz recently got neutered. Not by choice.”

  “Tsk, tsk. Yours is such a violent country.”

  “Yeah, it’s a jungle out there. So does clipping this kid’s nut sack sound like something your boss might do?”

  “It is possible.” Gura stamped out his cigarette. “It would be in keeping with his sense of humor.”

  “Funny guy.”

  “He will do far worse things to you, Bonnie Parker.”

  “Worse than that? He’d have to be awful creative.”

  “He is.”

  He gave her some time to think about that. Ribbons of smoke from the two extinguished cigarettes coiled around her like an enveloping net.

  When she spoke, her voice was lower than before. “Even if I do the job, I won’t be off the hook. When you tell Streinikov you couldn’t find the hitter from the warehouse, he’ll just send someone else looking.”

  “Nyet. The matter will be closed.”

  “How can you arrange that?”

  “It is simplicity, poppet. I will convince Streinikov that Clarissa Lynch was the woman he wanted all along. I will pin the warehouse incident on her.” He spread his hands. “It is plausible enough. Streinikov knows only that the killer is a blonde female who keeps a low profile while conducting illegal activities. This describes Clarissa Lynch as well as it does you.”

  “You think you can sell that?”

  “I know I can.”

  Maybe he could. It was clear he’d planned it all out. There was even a small chance she could live through this thing, as long as the woman who called herself Clarissa did not.

  “I really don’t wanna do this,” she said tonelessly.

  “As your Clark Gable would say—frankly, my dear, I do not give a fuck.”

  “I think you got that quote pretty wrong.” She sighed. “I don’t have any choice, do I?”

  “None.” He folded his meaty hands in satisfaction. “It is decided.”

  “Yeah. I guess it is.”

  “Then you will require a retainer. How much?”

  The question surprised her as much as anything he’d said. It took her a moment to get her brain in gear and remember numbers and procedures. “Um ... For a job like this, I normally charge three upfront, thirty on completion. But I was sort of assuming you’d want it done gratis.”

  “The laborer is worthy of his hire. Do you know this saying? It is from the Bible.”

  “I wouldn’t have pegged you as the religious type.”

  “I am not. My mother was.”

  He removed a billfold from his vest pocket and peeled off a series of hundred-dollar bills, stacking them neatly on the dashboard. A methodical man.

  “Blood money,” he said, seeming to enjoy the words.

  Mrs. Krauss had said the same thing. Bonnie hadn’t liked it then.

  She liked it even less now.

  14

  The Garrett Township public library was part of a municipal complex on Iron Town Road. Bonnie picked up a parking pass at the gate. It would cost her two blocks to drive out. Worth it if she could calm Joy the fuck down. She noticed a security camera at the gate, which she wasn’t too crazy about, but there were no cameras in the lot itself.

  Looking for an available space, she mused on the injustices of life. Here she was, your ordinary small-town PI and part-time hitter just trying to get by, and all of a sudden her client was losing her nerve and a made man in the Russian mob was setting her up for probable termination. The Russian thing was bad enough, but Joy’s threat to go all True Confessions was what had really put the kibosh on her weekend. That kind of move was just willfully fucking stupid.

  Finally she parked the Jeep under a leafless maple in a far corner of the lot. Before going inside, she climbed into the backseat, where she kept a hit kit.

  Nothing fancy, just an untraceable .22 and a screw-on silencer. She’d hidden it inside the seat cushion, which was easy enough to do, since the cushion was already badly ripped and liberally patched with duct tape.

  She stripped off some of the tape, extracted the gun, attached the silencer, checked the magazine, and stashed the item in her purse. She left the purse on the passenger seat. She wasn’t going to take it with her. There was no point in toting a piece around in a place where schoolkids congregated. She wasn’t going to use the gun in the building anyhow. With any luck—please, God—she wouldn’t need to use it at all.

  Ordinarily she wouldn’t have risked a personal meeting with a client while the police were actively working the case. There was always a chance the client was under surveillance and the meeting would be observed. Under the circumstances, it couldn’t be helped. She needed a face-to-face to get Joy under control—if that was even possible.

  She entered the library through a sliding door and made a casual circuit of the interior. She found Joy in aisle nineteen of Reference and Nonfiction, making a poor show of studying a row of history books. Bonnie went down aisle twenty and positioned herself across from her. Through a gap in the books she could see a rectangular slice of the woman’s face. In the wan fluorescent light she looked haggard and scared.

  One good thing about a library was that you could talk in a whisper without drawing suspicion. While pretending to peruse a book on America’s colonial past, Bonnie said quietly, “Good to see you, Joy. How you holding up?”

  “How do you think?” The reply was snappish, irritable. This was a lady at the end of her string.

  “Okay, dumb question.” She put back the book and selected another one at random. “The main thing is you haven’t made any mistakes that can’t be fixed.”

  “They know I did it. Dan Maguire—”

  “Dan’s had a bug up his butt about me for years. He thinks I’m behind every bad thing that goes down in Millstone County.”

  “Why are we meeting like this? Do you think the police are watching me?”

  “Anything’s possible. But I cased the joint pretty thoroughly, and I didn’t spot anybody who seemed to be taking an interest in you. Didn’t see any cop cars in the parking lot, either, and I can always pick ’em out, even the undercover rides. So I think we’re okay.”

  “I don’t see how it came to this.”

  “It didn’t have to. If you woulda lawyered up like I told you ...”

  “I thought it would look guilty. And then everything happened so fast.”

  “It always does.”

  A woman toting two kids came down Bonnie’s aisle. The tykes began pawing through books on the American Revolution. Bonnie moved to the far end of the aisle and stared at the wall, which displayed a chart of the Dewey Decimal System and a portrait of astronaut Russell Schweikart, for some reason. She waited for Joy to catch up on the other side.

  “You said you had an idea,” Joy whispered.

  That was good. She was interested, which meant she hadn’t lost all hope.

 
“Yeah, I do. You already told the cops Gil was getting threats, right?”

  Joy’s head bobbed behind a row of presidential biographies. “They didn’t believe me. Why should they? I couldn’t give them any details. It sounded made up.”

  “Of course it sounded made up. It was made up. But now you can flesh it out a little.”

  “How?”

  “Tell them it was the Russian mafia.”

  “The Russian ...?”

  “That’s all you know. Somebody from the Russian mafia was trying to muscle their way in on Gil’s business.”

  “That’s crazy.”

  “No, it isn’t. The Russkies are into a lot of oil and gas stuff. I happened to be reading about them just today.”

  “But Chief Maguire—”

  “All Maguire knows is that your hubby was asking questions about me. Maguire just assumes that’s because Gil tumbled to you hiring me. So you give him a new reason. You say Gil must have been making inquiries about local PIs because he was looking for help outside the law. He was afraid to open up about his problem to the police, so he was exploring different avenues. He must’ve hoped a PI could get the Russians off his back. Or he was just desperate and clutching at straws. Whatever. Bottom line, he didn’t move fast enough and got whacked.”

  “They’ll want to know why I didn’t explain all this earlier.”

  “You didn’t even know about the PI part. Gil was doing that on his own, trying not to alarm you. But now that you’ve been told about it, you can see how it makes sense.”

  “They won’t be satisfied with that story.”

  “Not forever. But it’ll hold ’em for a bit. It gives ’em a new bone to gnaw on.”

  “And when it doesn’t pan out—”

  “Maybe it will pan out.”

  “How can it? It’s not true.”

  Bonnie let the question go unanswered. “Did the subject of Gil’s wristwatch come up?”

  “His watch ...” The woman sounded faraway, lost.

  “Focus, Joy. Has anyone mentioned it?”

  “They asked if he wore a watch. I guess it went missing.”

  “I took it. It was supposed to be a robbery, and robbers take stuff like that. Do the cops know about the engraving on the back?”

  “Yes. They had me describe it.”

  “Good. That’s real good, Joy.”

  “What does Gil’s watch have to do with anything?”

  “It’s going to substantiate your story. Just leave everything to me.”

  “I don’t know. It’s hard, Bonnie—it’s so hard.”

  “Hey, it’s no pony ride for me either.”

  “I just don’t know ...” Her voice slid into a moan on the last word.

  Damn. The woman was getting all weak-kneed again. “Joy, you gotta trust me. Or we are both going down. Okay?”

  “I’ll do the best I can.”

  Her best wasn’t going to be good enough, not the way she was acting. Right now there was still a fifty-fifty chance Joy Krauss would open up to the next cop who looked at her cross-eyed.

  And if that was the case, the only option was to go nuclear. Wait by Joy’s car in the parking lot—Bonnie had identified it before coming in—and finish her with one silenced shot as she slipped behind the wheel.

  Cold-blooded? Yeah. But sometimes you had to do what you had to do.

  Bonnie didn’t want it to go that way. There was a fine line between being an antihero and a full-out bad guy. Clipping her own client to shut her up was a pretty sure way of crossing that line. But she would do it if she had to.

  Still, there could be a better way.

  She took a breath, then came around the end of the aisle and faced Joy directly. If someone was watching, she was screwed. But hell, she would probably be screwed anyway; the old talking-through-the-stacks routine was unlikely to fool any investigator outside of a Hardy Boys novel.

  “Look, Joy.” She kept her voice even, her gaze fixed on the woman’s face. “We need to work as a team on this. We’re compadres, you know? Partners in—” Crime, she almost said, but caught herself. “We’re partners. You took a risk hiring me. I took a bigger risk for you. I told you up front that it could get hairy, and we’d have to keep our nerve. Remember that?”

  “I remember,” Joy said in a tone of deep sadness.

  “You’re feeling guilty because you think we did something wrong. But Gil was going to murder you, honey. He was trolling for hitters. He was ready to hire me last night. He asked me for my price.”

  “Just like I did when I hired you,” she breathed.

  “You hired me in self-defense. He started it. You finished it.”

  “Yes ...”

  She still didn’t sound sure. Bonnie thought about the guilt in her voice and took a shot. “How’d he treat you, Joy?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Did you cheat on you? Did he hit you?”

  “Cheat—I don’t know. Possibly.”

  “And the other thing?”

  She lowered her head. “Sometimes.”

  “He slapped you around, gave you what-for?”

  “That’s just what he called it. Giving me what-for.”

  “And you forgave him.”

  “I didn’t ... I—I don’t know.”

  “You stayed with him. You cooked his meals and slept in the same bed.”

  “Yes.”

  “And pretended to your friends that everything was hunky-dory.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you felt ashamed.”

  Joy didn’t answer.

  “You felt ashamed,” Bonnie said again, “because you knew you oughtta walk away, and you didn’t. Why didn’t you?”

  “I ... don’t know.”

  “I think it’s because part of you thought you deserved it.”

  Joy’s eyes flashed. “What is this, a therapy session?”

  Bonnie liked that answer. It showed a spark of something other than fear.

  “Sort of,” she said. “You can’t live the life I’ve lived without learning a little about human nature.”

  “So you think I’m ... weak?”

  “I think you’re inclined to blame yourself for things that aren’t your fault. He beat you up, and you felt bad about it. Now for the first time you didn’t let him get away with it. You made him pay. Got that, Joy? You made him pay.”

  “I guess I did,” she said slowly.

  “For once in your life you said he wasn’t going to treat you like shit. He could take everything else from you, but he wasn’t going to take your life. You turned the tables. You showed him who he was messing with. And he knew it, too. I made sure of that.”

  “You told him it was me?”

  “You betcha.”

  Joy’s face worked itself into a reluctant smile. “Oh.”

  “He knew, Joy. After all the crap he dished out, he finally learned there was a point where you just wouldn’t take it anymore.”

  “I’m glad,” she said, more to herself than to Bonnie. “I’m glad he knew.”

  “It was a long time coming. He deserved it. You broke free. It’s a very big deal. Now, do you really intend to throw it all away and let that miserable wife-beating bastard win?”

  Joy stared at the green slice of short nap carpet between her shoes.

  “I’ll bet he laughed when he beat you,” Bonnie whispered. “You gonna let him get the last laugh?”

  Quietly: “No.”

  “He fucked with you six ways from Sunday. You did what you had to do. You stood up for yourself. For the first time ever—you stood up.”

  Joy lifted her head. “I did.”

  “And the police—fuck ’em. Dan Maguire—he’s an asshole. I’ve played games with that dipshit for years, and I always win. Follow my playbook, that’s all I ask.”

  “Okay ...”

  “You trust me?”

  “Yes.”

  “You with me?”

  “Yes.”

  “All the
way? I want to hear you say it.”

  “All the way,” Joy whispered, reaching out to grasp Bonnie’s arm. “It’s like Ben Franklin said. If we don’t hang together, we’ll hang separately.”

  Bonnie had never heard this quote before, but it seemed curiously appropriate for the American history section of the stacks.

  “Good enough,” she answered. “Tell the cops about the Russian mafia. You didn’t mention it before because you were scared and confused. But you’re saying it now. Russian mob. That’s what Gil told you. That’s who was riding him.”

  “Russian mob,” Joy repeated obediently.

  “Atta girl. We’ll talk later. Keep your chin up.”

  Bonnie walked away, out of the stacks, out of the library, into the cold clear air. She was smiling in satisfaction and relief.

  For the second time in as many days, she had saved her client’s life.

  15

  In the greenhouse, among the orchids, Streinikov sat on his potting bench, pruning a Phalaenopsis amabilis.

  He grew several species of orchid. At least two varieties were in bloom in any given season, providing him with new blossoms all year long. Holding the terra-cotta pot in one hand, he carefully snipped the stem of the Phalaenopsis just below the node of the last bloom. The flowers on this specimen had faded, but with precise cutting he could induce a new bloom to set, extending the plant’s period of showy display by another six weeks.

  He handled the orchid tenderly, as he might have handled an infant. He was a rough man in most respects, but the plants in the greenhouse were his darlings, and he would never be unkind to them.

  It was good to sit here, in the humidified air, breathing the mist released by the automated sprayers—to sit in shirtsleeves, surrounded by tropical luxuriance, in a temperature of eighty degrees, while beyond the walls of tempered glass, winter hung on, sullen and desolate.

  The greenhouse, though spacious, was overcrowded with foliage, a consequence of his unapologetic liberality when acquiring new plants. Along with the rows of potted orchids, bromeliads, and miscellaneous exotic blooms, there were hanging baskets of epiphytes swaying gently in the breeze from the circulation fans. Big leaf tropical plants bumped up against the benches and glass walls—ferns and palms predominated—while dense stands of bamboo rose like pillars to the ceiling.