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

by Michael Prescott

  “Yes, a great big vroom. But I don’t know what kind of car it was. I didn’t move a muscle, even after they were gone. I was afraid they would come back, and my heart was pounding. It’s a miracle, really, that I wasn’t killed.”

  Bradley examined the wall that abutted the unit next door. Quickly he found a more prosaic explanation for Mrs. Biggs’ survival. None of the rounds had penetrated, which could only mean there was a brick firewall between the two halves of the house. Without the firewall, the shots would have easily punched through the drywall, and Mrs. Biggs would probably be dead.

  Belatedly, Mrs. Biggs raised her head and asked, “What about my neighbor? Is she ...?”

  “She wasn’t home, ma’am.”

  “Then where is she?”

  “That’s a good question.”

  He pulled out his phone and redialed her number. This time he wasn’t expecting an answer. When the call went to voicemail, he left a cautiously impersonal message.

  “Miss Parker, this is Patrol Officer Bradley Walsh of the Brighton Cove Police Department. There have been break-ins at your residence and your office. Some damage was done. We need you to contact our department immediately, as we believe you may be in danger. You can reach me at this number or call the station directly ...”

  He rattled off the main number, then hesitated, wanting to say more. But he couldn’t say what ought to be said, because there was a good chance Bonnie’s phone records, including her voicemails, would eventually be obtained by the police as part of the investigation into her disappearance—or her death. He had pressed his luck leaving any kind of message at all.

  He ended the call and glanced out the window to see Chief Maguire arriving in his personal car with the ambulance right behind him. The chief had been off duty, of course, and probably fast asleep—but nobody in the Brighton Cove police force would be sleeping tonight.

  “The paramedics are here, ma’am,” he told Mrs. Biggs as he headed for the door.

  She didn’t seem to hear him. She stared down at her trembling hands.

  “I used to think it was rather glamorous to have a woman of mystery living next to me,” Mrs. Biggs said quietly. “It doesn’t seem glamorous anymore.”

  28

  Felix Ramirez showed up at midnight, gym bag in hand.

  “You’re in trouble, bandida,” he said as he plopped the bag down on the carpet. It landed with a thud. Heavy.

  “No more’n usual.” She considered this. “Okay, maybe a scoche more.”

  She’d been smoking and pacing for the past two hours as she awaited his arrival. For much of that time she’d found herself thinking about an acquaintance of hers, name of Sparky. Sparky was an amateur ghost hunter. She wasn’t sure she believed in ghosts. But maybe. She wondered what it was like to be a ghost. She wondered if she was about to find out.

  “Someone’s after you,” Felix said, appraising her.

  “Gee, how’d ya guess?”

  “I don’t got to guess. I hear Dispatch while I’m coming up here. All the drivers are being told to stay out of Brighton Cove. Someone’s been shooting up your town.”

  She paused in the act of lighting a new cigarette. “Yeah?”

  “They went to your office and your home. With machine guns.”

  She felt a chill, thinking of Mrs. Biggs. “Anyone hurt?”

  “Not that I hear.”

  “Good.”

  She didn’t get it, though. Why would the Russkies want to shoot up empty buildings? Unless Streinikov had croaked from the stab wound, and his people were all crazy for vengeance, running amok. Maybe. But she didn’t believe it. If he was dead, it would be every man for himself.

  “Somebody,” Felix said, “sends you a message. Very loud. They do not like you.”

  “Popularity’s overrated.” She finished lighting the cig. “Anyway, I’m working it out.”

  “With this?” His shoe kicked the gym bag.

  “Yep. You sneak a peek at what’s in there?”

  “No. But I have my ideas. I obeyed the speed limit all the way up.”

  “Smart move.” Getting pulled over with a duffel bag full of illegal firearms was never a good idea.

  “I’m glad to get rid of it. But not so glad to see you like this.”

  “Like what?”

  “Scared.”

  She made the sound halfway between a snort and a Bronx cheer. “Puh-lease. I’ve handled bigger problems than this without mussing my hair.”

  “Your hair is already mussed.”

  She checked herself in the mirror. He was right.

  “I see you,” he added, “and I think, a la gran chucha, she has been through a hell.”

  He was right about that, too. Her face was wild. She’d been scraped and torn and dirtied in her chase through the woods, and there was a crazy light in her eyes that only a shrink could love.

  “Well,” she said slowly, “maybe I’m a little worse for wear. But I’m not scared. I’m ... um ... kinda jazzed, is all.”

  He just looked at her, his mild, serious eyes saying that he knew better.

  “Psyched,” she added, uncertain if she was trying to convince him or herself. “You know, ’cause ya gotta get up for the big game.”

  “Is it a game?”

  Damn, the little guy was sharp. She’d never realized it before. “Look, I’ll be fine. Don’t worry about me.”

  “I’m not worried about you.”

  “Thanks. Or should I say, gracias?” She was pretty sure she’d mangled the Spanish word about as badly as possible.

  “Don’t say either. I’m not trying to give you a pep speech.”

  “Pep talk,” she said automatically.

  “I’m only saying the truth. You’ll come through this. I’m a good judge of such things.”

  “Are you?”

  He nodded gravely. “You know I grew up in Guatemala, right?”

  “I knew it was somewhere in South America.”

  “Central America.”

  “Right, right.” Geography, like history, was one of those things she was hazy about.

  “In Guatemala there is no safety. In my lifetime there never has been. When I was born, the war was still going on. Then it was over, and the drug lords came, and they were worse. In the high country, the jungle country, there is no law. The crime lords kill whole villages. I’ve seen piles of the dead, old people and children, babies even, a well stuffed full of them, flowing over. Is this how you say it? Flowing over?”

  “Overflowing,” Bonnie said in a low voice.

  “Yes. This I’ve seen.” A crucifix glinted at his throat, somehow adding weight to his testimony. “And the blindfolded dead with their brains shot out, and the ones who lost their heads to the machete, and the ones burned alive. And many other things. I lived for twenty-five years in Guatemala, where life is always a battle. And so I learned to know them by sight. To know them with one look.”

  “Who?”

  “The survivors. I learned to know who would live and who would not. Some people will always make it through. They have a—what’s the word? A knock?”

  “A knack.”

  He nodded. “A knack for it. You have this knack.”

  She thought about a man named Pascal, and another man named Frank Lazzaro. “Maybe I do. Or maybe some people are just lucky.”

  “They make their luck. I watched them. The ones who survived were tougher, slyer. And they wanted it just a little more.”

  “Wanted what?”

  “To live.”

  She rolled the cigarette between her fingers. “If I wanted to live, I wouldn’t be smoking these things.”

  He only smiled at that. “It’ll take more than cigarettes to kill you, bandida. And more than men with machine guns, too.”

  She watched him drive off, hoping he was right.

  29

  At 1 AM the Miramar police found a Jeep registered to Bonnie Parker in the parking lot of the Miramar boat basin. The Jeep wasn’t hard to
spot. It was the only vehicle there.

  Brad was still at the duplex when Dan Maguire got the call. “I’m going over to check it out,” the chief said. “Walsh, you’re driving.”

  Dan had come to the scene in his personal car, and Brad guessed he didn’t want the Miramar cops seeing him arrive in anything so unofficial. He probably liked the idea of being driven into the lot in a squad car, especially since a reporter from the McKendree Park Observer was already at the duplex and was likely to follow him there. A chauffeur and a media escort—yes, that would appeal to the chief.

  Brad slid behind the wheel of his patrol car, with his boss on the passenger side. He didn’t use his lights or siren; that was Hollywood stuff.

  “What do you make of this?” Dan asked as they pulled away.

  “Don’t know, sir.”

  “That Biggs woman said the shooters were speaking Russian.”

  “She thought maybe that was the case. She wasn’t sure.”

  “Russian.” Dan shook his head. “You know what that means?” He answered his own question. “It means Russian mafia.”

  “In Brighton Cove?”

  “Where Parker’s concerned, nothing is impossible.” Dan stared out the window, his expression reflected in the glass, unreadable. “If the Russian mob is after her, she’s royally fucked.”

  “Isn’t that what you wanted?” Brad couldn’t suppress a note of bitterness. “To get her out of the way?”

  “I want her in prison. Not dead. Vigilante justice is her thing, not mine.”

  “Right. Of course.”

  “Has anybody thought of calling her cell phone?”

  Brad wasn’t happy about answering, but he had no choice. “I tried it. The call went to voicemail.”

  Dan turned to face him. “How’d you even know her number?”

  Brad shrugged. “It’s listed.” He hoped he sounded casual.

  “Oh. Well, good thinking. How long ago was this?”

  “Maybe an hour.”

  His boss was studying him in the chancy glow of passing streetlights. “You seem a little off tonight, Walsh. Preoccupied.”

  “I guess, uh, I’m kind of shaken up. I’m not really used to stuff like this.”

  Dan nodded slowly. “Yeah, it’s not every day people start shooting off machine guns in this sleepy little burg. Truth is, we had scarcely any violence to speak of—until she showed up. Since then, there was that shootout on the boardwalk, and Jacob Hart gunned down in cold blood, and a very questionable suicide right across the alley from Parker’s office. Other things, too.”

  “And you lay all that on her?”

  “Damn straight I do.”

  Brad thought about that. The rest of the drive passed in silence.

  They arrived at the marina, tailed, as expected, by the Observer guy. Bonnie’s Jeep was parked in the far corner of the lot, where it must have looked awfully lonely before three Miramar patrol units had encircled it. They’d left their light bars flashing. Showoffs.

  The red and blue glare made flickering ripples on the asphalt as Brad and Dan walked to the Jeep. There were the usual nods and handshakes. The Brighton Cove cops were out of their jurisdiction, but everyone knew this was their case. The only known crimes had taken place on their turf.

  The Jeep’s passenger door was hanging open. Dan looked at it. “Has the vehicle been searched?”

  One of the Miramar cops said there’d been only a brief visual inspection to be sure the Jeep was empty. Now they were waiting for a crime scene unit from the state police.

  “Mind if I stick my head in?” Dan asked.

  “Look, but don’t touch,” one of the patrol cops said, adding, “sir.”

  The journalist was held back. He contented himself with interviewing the Miramar patrol guys.

  Dan went around to the passenger side and shined a flashlight into the car. Brad peered over his shoulder.

  The interior was pretty much what Brad expected. His girlfriend wasn’t exactly a neat freak. She had a tendency to discard things in her Jeep, where they would remain untouched for weeks or months. Or years.

  The backseat was a clutter of fast food wrappers, empty water bottles, and loose change. The front compartment was much neater. There was only a small scrap of paper on the floor below the passenger seat.

  Dan’s flashlight beam rested on the scrap. “Parking stub,” he said, squinting. “Garrett municipal complex. One-twenty PM yesterday. What would she be doing over there?”

  Brad shrugged. “Library?”

  “Parker strike you as a big reader?”

  “I wouldn’t know, sir.” This was a lie. He knew perfectly well that Bonnie’s reading habits were limited to the occasional feature article in Guns & Ammo. He’d never seen her read a book. He’d once asked, only half joking, if she could read.

  “Well, you were just in her house. You see any books there?”

  “No,” he answered truthfully.

  “She’s not a reader.” Dan was talking to himself now, with Brad merely serving as an audience. “If I’m right about her background, she never got past the eighth grade.”

  Brad was surprised. He knew something about his girlfriend’s past—enough to know she'd dropped out of school for a while—but he'd always assumed she’d gone back to get her diploma. “Doesn’t a PI license require at least a high school degree?”

  “Not in this state. No educational requirements except some professional training or, in lieu of that, on-the-job experience.”

  “Even so, you’d think she’d want to graduate.”

  He wasn’t really talking to Dan, but Dan answered. “She didn’t exactly have a normal upbringing. Her folks got killed in a motel in Pennsylvania. They were petty criminals, drifters, always involved in something dirty. After they got shot, their little girl struck out on her own.”

  Brad knew that part of it. He’d seen it in a file he’d procured for Bonnie a couple of years ago. And in the same file he’d seen Dan’s theory that fourteen-year-old Bonnie murdered the three men responsible for her parents’ deaths—shot them down in cold blood. But Dan’s investigation had stalled out, and Brad had always assumed there was nothing to it.

  “Parker denies it, of course,” Dan added indifferently. “Says she had a very wholesome childhood. School prom, cheerleader practice, the whole nine yards. Bullshit. She lived on the street, and she was a killer from an early age.”

  “A killer? You can prove that?”

  “Of course I can’t prove it. If I could prove it, she’d be in jail already. I had a witness who could place her near the scene of a multiple homicide, but he chickened out on me. Parker got to him, intimidated him. How she found out about him, I still don’t know.”

  Brad knew. The witness was listed in the file. At the time he thought he'd been doing the right thing in passing on the info. Now he wasn’t so sure.

  Bonnie was always telling him Dan was full of crap, an obsessive type with a paranoid fixation. Maybe there was more to the story.

  “Take me back to the duplex,” Dan said, moving away from the Jeep. “I want to pick up my Buick.”

  “Yes, sir. You going to her office next?”

  Dan shook his head. “I’m going to the police station in Garrett. That’s in the municipal center too.”

  “Want me to tag along?”

  “You? No. You go downtown and secure the scene.”

  Brad nodded. It had been a stupid question. He had no business in Garrett.

  But suddenly he found himself intensely interested in whatever the chief could find out about Bonnie Elizabeth Parker.

  30

  Streinikov was in pain. The initial shock of the stabbing had worn off long ago, and his body was now vociferously objecting to the insults inflicted on it. Vasnev, arriving with his little black bag three hours earlier, had recommended Percocet. Streinikov had refused. His sole concession to pain was a bottle of Yarpivo beer, a Russian import. He sipped it slowly as, nearby, Vasnev fussed with his
instruments, looking anxious and pained.

  The greenhouse remained a shambles. A plywood board had been hastily installed in the broken window by the door. It kept out the winter cold, at least. Dozens of his beauties lay scattered on the floor in a litter of terra-cotta shards. Had he been mobile, he would have gathered up the plants and begun the process of repotting. As it was, he could only curse Gregor and Gura for their oafishness.

  So much waste. So much chaos. Noise, too—enough noise that shortly after Ilya left on his mission, a policeman had inquired politely, via telephone, about scattered reports of shots and screams heard in the vicinity of his address. Streinikov had indicated that it would be best not to pursue the matter. And that had been that. He hadn’t lied to Bonnie Parker when he said no one could touch him. He owned the police. He owned everyone of significance in this state.

  He leaned back in his chair by the potting bench and shut his eyes. Music played over hidden speakers distributed throughout the greenhouse. He had selected Bach. It soothed him. He despised Russian composers; they were far too excitable and overdramatic, much like Russians in general.

  His phone rang. It was Ilya.

  “We made some noise, like you wanted. We got the locals out of bed.”

  “So I understand. There is already a statewide BOLO on our Miss Parker as a person of interest in the shootings. Many eyes will be looking for her. Where are you now?”

  “On the parkway, heading back.”

  “Good. Come here directly. I want all hands on deck.”

  There was no telling who might be needed before the night came to an end. Already things were moving very fast. All three elements of his strategy were well underway.

  First, there was Ilya and his crew. By shooting up Parker’s town, they had brought the police into the picture. Even the dullest small-town cop had to realize that the PI had been targeted by dangerous persons. For her own protection, if nothing else, she would have to be taken into custody. And no matter where she was stashed for safekeeping, Streinikov had ways of getting to her. He had informants scattered throughout the state police, the county sheriff’s departments, and the larger municipal forces. The moment she was in the hands of the police, she was a dead woman.