Up ahead a likely candidate came into view. The sign identified it as the Magic Carpet Motor Inn and promised such enticing amenities as “cable TV” and “continental breakfast.” To judge by appearances, the TV wouldn’t work and the breakfast would consist of a stale mini-donut and day-old instant coffee.
In other words, it was her kind of place.
One thing was certain. She wasn’t going home. Her turf was off-limits until she got this whole mess straightened out. If it could be straightened out ...
She thought it could. In fact, she’d already come up with a plan. Like most of her plans, it was reckless and probably stupid and unlikely to succeed. But something beat nothing, and right now it was all she had.
She parked the Civic out of sight so the desk clerk couldn’t get a look at her stolen wheels. The room cost her $85, probably more than it was worth. She was not asked to sign a guest register.
The motel appeared to be mostly empty. She unlocked her room, tossed the two handbags on a table, and took a quick tour of her accommodations.
She wasn’t a fan of motels. Hadn’t had good experiences with them. There was the dive in Pennsylvania where her parents had been shot to death while she hid in the bathroom, and the Roach House, where she’d had a not-so-fun late-night engagement involving her friend Pascal, a bathtub, and a car battery.
Now here she was in the Magic Carpet or, as she immediately dubbed it, the Maggot Armpit. Not exactly a five-star establishment. The smoke alarm dangled from a wire in the ceiling, having been disabled by a prior occupant. The carpet was littered with dead bugs, toenail clippings, and a condom wrapper. The bed had been slept in, and nobody had changed the sheets. The bathroom offered its own special ambience. She found mysterious stains on the towels and blood spatter in the sink.
All in all, this dump made the Roach House look like the Waldorf-Astoria. But she wasn’t complaining. It was still better than the greenhouse.
She badly wanted a shower, but the nozzle produced only a sad trickle of lukewarm water. Okay, no shower. She washed her face in the disgusting sink and dried it with the disgusting towels. Still not trusting her cell—sorry, Sammy—she went outside and hunted down a payphone near a busted vending machine. That’s right, an actual, honest-to-God payphone, like something Sam Spade would have used.
She called Felix Ramirez. “It’s me,” she said. “You busy?”
“I’m on duty.”
“Yeah, but are you busy?”
“Guess not.”
“Then I need you to pick up that bag I left at your place and deliver it to me.”
“Okay, I can do that.”
“It’s a little more of a favor than it sounds. I’m not at home. I’m in a motel called the Maggot—uh, I mean the Magic Carpet, on Highway Forty-Six in Ridgefield. Room twenty-three.”
“You need me to drive to Ridgefield?”
“Yeah. Pronto. I’ll pay you for your time,” she added.
“That’s not necessary.”
“Sure it is. But I can’t pay right this minute, so I’ll have to owe you. If ... well, if things work out, I’ll settle up tomorrow.”
“What do you mean, if things work out?”
“If I’m still alive. Can you do it?”
“Be there in a couple hours, bandida.”
She’d figured he would come through. He was that kind of guy.
Back in her room, she started going through Clarissa Lynch’s purse, methodically sorting the contents, looking for anything she could use.
In the girl’s wallet, she found a driver’s license bearing Clarissa’s photo and the name Trudy Welch. So that was who she really was. Now she was at the bottom of the ocean, wrapped in hotel towels and probably an anchor chain. Killed for no good reason. Brought into this whole mess merely to serve as a decoy, playing a part she’d never understood. Desperate enough to take a highly questionable job offered by less than reputable people. What the hell, she must have thought. At least she would get a boat ride out of it.
“Sorry, Trudy,” Bonnie said softly. “You deserved better. Probably.”
She put the wallet into her own purse. There was nothing else of value among Trudy Welch’s personal effects, and nothing that could identify the owner. She tossed the dead girl’s handbag into a wastebasket. Well, what else could she do with it? Make a shrine out of the damn thing?
She was no sentimentalist. Trudy Welch was dead, and Bonnie Parker—for the time being, at least—was still stubbornly alive.
26
Ilya Kvint picked up two shooters on his way from Edgewater to Brighton Cove. They were Barsky and Lukin, both family men—wives and kids—guys who drove minivans and mowed the lawn on Sundays. Lukin even attended church. Ilya had caught him praying once. And yet he killed people as casually as the average person took a shit. If he believed in hell, who did he think it was for, if not for people like him?
Ilya did not believe in hell. But he wished he did. An eternity of pain was preferable to oblivion. And he was self-confident enough to think that he would rise in Lucifer’s ranks. He could end up as a dungeon master, inflicting punishment on an infinite variety of victims. A pleasant prospect, he sometimes thought with a beatific smile. It was true what they said. Religion was good for the soul.
Sadly, he was a realist. His philosophy was simple. You killed and kept on killing until eventually somebody killed you. Then you were gone forever, and whatever pain and grief you’d caused didn’t matter at all. Nothing mattered. A human being was a bundle of meat and nerve endings. That bundle could be made to beg and scream and do other delightful things. There was pleasure—sensual pleasure, erotic pleasure—in eliciting those screams. Ilya enjoyed pleasure. There was no reason for him to deprive himself of it during his brief span of allotted years. That was all.
He had been raised in Donetsk and had hooked up with his boss when Streinikov purchased some local nightclubs. Ilya had been working at a club, dealing cards in games of blackjack and durak. He knew he could be useful to Streinikov. More important, Streinikov could be useful to him. A man like Streinikov would make enemies. Those enemies would have to be dealt with, sometimes in satisfyingly creative ways.
Unlike Barsky and Lukin, he had no wife or child and no lawn to mow. He had few possessions. He kept money in several bank accounts, but seldom touched it. He bought whores, not invariably female, and he read books. Serious books in his native language—Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev. Occasionally he put on headphones and listened to Prokofiev or Stravinsky. He had been known to attend the ballet, though he did not advertise the fact.
Alone among Streinikov’s men, he did not raise an eyebrow at his boss’s obsession with orchids. He did not see it as a weakness. He understood the need to balance ugliness with beauty. He was, he supposed, an epicurean—decadent, devoted to pleasure, believing in nothing. The Greeks had a saying: Know thyself. Ilya Kvint knew himself, even the deepest parts of himself, and he was content.
At three in the morning he pulled into Brighton Cove, steering his black Cadillac Escalade to Bonnie Parker’s office on Main Street.
“You really think she’ll be stupid enough to show up here?” Barsky asked, his tone faintly insolent.
“It’s not about catching her,” Ilya said. “It’s about sending a message.”
He shot off the lock on the front door and led his colleagues up the dark staircase.
“Place is a real shit hole,” Lukin observed.
“This girl Parker is strictly small-time,” Barsky said. “A fucking peshka, a nobody. She never should’ve caused this much trouble.”
Ilya heard an implied criticism in this statement. “The bitch is harder to kill than you would think.”
On the second floor he found the door marked Last Resort. He kicked it open.
“Do some damage.”
Lukin carried a Jati-Matic submachine gun in a briefcase. Barsky had a collapsible Brügger & Thomet MP9 in a shoulder holster under his coat. The Jati used a thirty
-round magazine; the MP9, forty rounds.
The two men entered, sweeping the office with both guns firing on full automatic. The noise was incredible, an avalanche of percussive sound punctuated by the tinkling explosions of the windows and the shattering wood of the desk, armchairs, and sofa. They blew the desktop computer into fragments, stitched uneven rows of bullet holes across the walls, and shredded the two tacked-up posters.
In ten seconds it was all over. Ilya retrieved one of the posters and looked at it in the light of his phone. A gun moll posing on an antique roadster. He didn’t recognize the image, but Barsky did.
“That’s Bonnie Parker.”
“No, it isn’t. I’ve seen her.”
Barsky assumed the condescending look he wore whenever he had an advantage, no matter how trivial. “I mean the original one. You know, Bonnie and Clyde.”
Ilya had no idea what Barsky was talking about, but he did not wish to reveal his ignorance. He nodded sagely. “Ah.”
Barsky pointed to the drooping remains of the other poster. “That’s the car they were shot up in.”
“Ah,” Ilya said again.
He caught Barsky smirking at him. Smug in his knowledge of Amerikosy gangsters who must have died decades ago, small-time hoodlums of no importance to anyone living. The man had always been full of himself. An arrogant mudak, who just possibly might be angling for Ilya’s job. As if a creature like him could ever qualify as Streinikov’s right-hand man.
He threw the poster aside and led his men out of the building. Lukin, taking the wheel of the Escalade, pulled away before the first patrol car arrived to investigate the noise.
“Where to?” he asked Ilya.
“Inland. Toward the railroad tracks.”
“What’s there?”
“Her house.”
27
Bradley Walsh was a little ticked off at his girlfriend. First she was working on Friday night and didn’t show up at his place until late. Then she suddenly pronounced herself busy on Saturday night, leaving him in the lurch again.
Yeah, it was true they couldn’t exactly paint the town red. With their relationship on the down-low, they had to avoid public places in Brighton Cove and the surrounding boroughs. But from time to time they’d gone dining and dancing in more distant spots—down on Devil’s Hook Island a couple of times, or up in north Jersey. It wasn’t easy, but it was doable. But lately she always had to work.
He wondered if she was getting tired of him. Or if she just wasn’t that much into the relationship.
Whatever. Having decided he wasn’t going to waste the night sulking, he’d volunteered to fill in for Stewart on the night watch—working the midnights, it was called. What the heck, he could use the money. And Stew, unlike himself, had a girlfriend who would appreciate his availability on a weekend.
That was how he found himself in the station house at midnight, eating a cruller from the Donut Hutch and filling out an incident report on a loud party. Exciting stuff. They should make a TV show about his life.
The phone rang. The watch commander, Sergeant Gathers, should have answered, but he was currently indisposed. More precisely, he was hanging out in the can after consuming a very questionable bean-and-cheese taco that had been in the fridge for an unknown length of time. Brad took the call.
It was Mr. Waverling on Second Avenue, reporting what had sounded like gunshots coming from downtown.
Brad dusted the remains of the cruller off his lips with a paper napkin and promised to look into it.
Fireworks, probably. It was almost always fireworks.
He got on the radio to Evans and Brace, who were riding patrol at the south end of town, and suggested they check it out. It was really the sergeant’s job to call the shots, but again—taco.
The phone rang a second time. Mrs. Glazer on Willow Avenue, between Second and Main, also reporting gunshots. He put her on hold to take another call. Mr. Bascombe, also on Willow, reporting the same thing.
If it was fireworks, it must’ve been a hell of a show.
He’d fielded three more calls by the time Sergeant Gathers finally emerged from the lavatory, hitching up his trousers. And those were only the calls placed directly to the station. The 911 operators, based in another township, were reporting a dozen calls or more. One caller had been very specific about the point of origin of the shooting. He’d said it came from the Clarkson Building at the southeast corner of Main and Sycamore.
Brad hadn’t been aware that it was called the Clarkson Building—it was amazing what some of these old-timers knew—but he was plenty familiar with the address. Bonnie’s office was there, on the second floor.
That was when he started to get worried. As casually as possible, he told Sergeant Gathers he thought he’d drive over and assist Evans and Brace at the scene. Gathers okayed the idea, seconding it with a burp. That taco was still eating at him.
Tonight’s duty had Brad riding solo. He was climbing into his squad car when the radio sputtered with the other unit’s report. The door to the building had been forced open, and the office of the Last Resort detective agency had been shot to hell by what looked like machine-gun fire. No casualties were reported, and the perpetrators had fled the area.
Machine-gun fire?
“God damn,” Bradley whispered. It was the strongest oath he allowed himself.
Someone had gone after Bonnie at her place of business. Not finding her there, their next logical stop ...
Would be her house.
He pulled out of the parking lot at high speed, racing west, while he fumbled his phone out of his pocket and speed-dialed her number. Her cell, of course; she didn’t have a landline.
He counted four rings, five, and the call jumped to voicemail. He hung up. She wasn’t answering—or she couldn’t.
Her duplex appeared in his headlights. The front door was open. The lights were off.
Though he was worried, he was still a professional. He wasn’t going to barge in on a crew of bad guys. He checked out the area, saw no unfamiliar vehicles. He was sure they’d been here—the open door proved it—but almost equally certain they’d gone.
Before leaving the car, he called in his position. “Looks like there’s been some trouble here too,” he said. “Better send another unit.”
Was there another unit? Oh yeah, Thompson and Harris were working tonight. Last he’d heard, they’d been patrolling the beachfront. They wouldn’t get this far inland for a few minutes. He wasn’t going to wait.
He got out of the car and approached the duplex at a run, pausing at the doorway to listen for noises from inside. He heard nothing.
The door had been kicked open—the dusty outline of a footprint was visible on the surface—after the high-quality lock had been shot off. The intrusion must have triggered the silent alarm, but the alarm system wasn’t connected to the police station or to any monitoring service. The signal went straight to Bonnie’s cell phone.
He snapped on his flashlight and held it well away from his body, while in the other hand he gripped his police-issue Beretta nine. He went in.
The flashlight beam ticked methodically across the living room, illuminating patches of broken glass and dozens of spent cartridge cases. Machine guns for sure. Somebody had fired off fifty or more rounds in here, blasting at random, wrecking everything.
He risked a shout. “Bonnie?”
No answer.
Too late, he realized he should have checked the garage before coming in. If her Jeep was there—
But he hadn’t thought of looking, and he couldn’t turn back now. He let the flashlight guide him down the short hallway into the bedroom. Though they usually met at his place, he'd been here once or twice. This was the first time he’d ever been afraid of what lay at the end of the hall.
The circle of light danced over the unmade bed and the hardwood floor. There were many more shell casings and plenty of damage, but no Bonnie. He cleared the closet, the bathroom, and the rest of the house, finishin
g just as a second squad car pulled up outside.
She wasn’t here. And he didn’t believe she’d been kidnapped. Whoever had come into the duplex firing on full automatic hadn’t been of a mind to take prisoners.
He met Thompson and Harris out front. As they went in to look for themselves, he circled around to the garage and peered in a side window. No Jeep. But there was a car in the other space, a Toyota Camry.
Duplex. Two homes. Right.
He ran to the door of the adjacent unit—safely closed and locked—and laid his finger on the doorbell until a light came on in the window and the resident appeared. An elderly woman wrapped in a heavy robe like a shawl, her eyes wide, her face bloodless and shocked.
“I’m so glad you’re here,” she said.
“You all right, ma’am?”
“I think so, yes. I think so.”
She didn’t seem certain. He sat her down on the sofa and looked for any sign of injury.
“I don’t think you were hit,” he said finally.
“No, I’m sure I wasn’t. I’m just—well, just scared.”
He called for an ambulance anyway. It wouldn’t hurt to have the paramedics check her out.
Her name, she told him, was Mrs. Eleanor Biggs. A few minutes ago she’d been startled awake by a horrendous racket from next door, a sound like dozens of nails being driven into the wall. Once she understood that the nails were bullets, she’d huddled in her bed, under the covers—“like a frightened child,” she said—until the noises stopped and the men sped away.
“Men? Did you see them?”
“I didn’t see anything. I was under the blankets. But I heard voices. Muffled voices through the wall.”
“How many men?”
“I couldn’t say. Two, at least. There may have been more.”
“Could you make out any words?”
She shook her head. “They weren’t even speaking English. It was some foreign language. Russian, I think. Something guttural like that.”
Russian. What the hell had Bonnie gotten herself mixed up in? “You said they sped off. You heard their vehicle?”
Bad to the Bone (Bonnie Parker, PI Book 3) Page 16