BLOOD IN THE WATER
Michael Prescott
www.michaelprescott.net
Blood in the Water
By Michael Prescott
Copyright 2014 by Douglas Borton
All rights reserved
Smashwords edition
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The road was so dimly lighted.
There were no highway signs to guide.
But she made up her mind
If all roads were blind
She wouldn’t give up ’til she died.
—Bonnie Parker, “The Trail’s End” (1933)
CHAPTER 1
Bonnie Parker drove through torrents of slashing rain, into the teeth of a hurricane, in pursuit of a dead man.
Well, okay, he wasn’t dead yet. But that was a technicality. He’d been as good as dead for the past two weeks, and today, with any luck, she would make it official.
A line of traffic blurred past her as she gunned the Jeep across Cohawkin Bridge onto the beckoning finger of land called Devil’s Hook. Everybody with any sense was leaving the island. Naturally, she was headed in the opposite direction. In her line of work, a little thing like the storm of the century wasn’t a deterrent. How did the postal thing go? Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night …
She was kind of like a postman, in a way. You know, if your average mail carrier toted an unregistered Smith .38 with the serial number filed off, and killed people for money.
The bridge dumped her onto a two-lane stretch of Route 35, known in this vicinity as Lamplight Road. She went south. Traffic wasn’t an issue; all the other vehicles were in the northbound lane, clearing out. A lot of them were cop cars. The island was thick with local law enforcement, assisting in the evacuation. Happily, the authorities here, unlike the ones in Brighton Cove, didn’t know her.
Under other circumstances she liked coming to Devil’s Hook Island. This place had more of a shore-like feel than her part of Millstone County. Boats, marinas, marine supplies and repairs, bait-and-tackle shops. Sand and gravel instead of lawns. Water was everywhere, hemming her in on both sides; the island was only a half mile wide at its widest point, narrowing at times to a few hundred yards.
Today there was more water than usual. Parts of the road were already flooded. She navigated around ditches swollen with rainwater, past scattered traffic cones and the occasional tree branch. To her left, beyond the eroding beach, the gray Atlantic seethed. To her right, visible through breaks in the rows of buildings, the waters of Shipbreak Bay roiled and chopped.
She liked the names around here. Shipbreak Bay—from the Dutch word for shipwreck, because the bay’s sandy shoals had run many vessels aground. Devil’s Hook—meaning devil’s corner, because the island’s southern end took a wicked jag that had foundered still more ships.
There had always been a lot of death in Jersey. The hurricane would only add to the toll.
And soon, with any luck, so would she.
Not that she was looking forward to it or anything. She wasn’t some kind of sicko. She was just as sane as any other gal who worked as a PI and moonlighted as an assassin. Which, come to think of it, wasn’t saying a whole hell of a lot.
A trashcan spun at her, turning cartwheels in the wind. She tapped the brakes and let it tumble past.
Halfway to the end of the island now. Another ten minutes.
Truth was, she must be at least a little bit crazy to go out in this mess. Not that she’d wanted to. But duty called. In this case, literally. Thirty minutes ago her cell phone had played a special ringtone, Clint Eastwood’s theme from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. She’d downloaded it herself. Hitman humor. The flurry of high, whistling notes told her that the motion sensor she’d placed in Alec Dante’s cottage had been activated.
She’d been waiting two weeks for Dante to visit the cottage. Of course, it was possible that a gust of wind had blown apart a window and sent debris flying across the sensor’s field. Or maybe the police had entered the house to be sure nobody was defying the evacuation order.
Only one way to know: make tracks to the southern tip of Devil’s Hook Island and hope Dante was there. And if he was …
Well, a girl had to earn a living in all kinds of weather.
It wasn’t even her first job of the day. She’d gotten started early. At 8:00 AM she’d been hiding inside a store in Algonquin that sold teddy bears. Just teddy bears. Go figure.
Her presence in the store was strictly illegal; the place didn’t open for business till ten, and today, given the weather, it might not open at all. She’d gained admittance through a back door and stationed herself in a rear store room, at a window overlooking an alley. Across the way was the employee entrance of Brown’s Fish Market.
She smoked three Parliament Whites before the assistant manager arrived to open up the fish store. She watched, taking an occasional photo, as he carried a large cooler into the shop and emerged a couple of minutes later, the cooler visibly heavier in his arms. He deposited it in the rear of his SUV and disappeared inside with a second cooler, thoughtfully leaving the SUV’s rear door open. Bonnie approached it at a brisk walk and flipped up the lid of the cooler. To her not very great surprise she found a large glassy-eyed tuna staring up at her in a nest of dry ice.
“Well, it beats stealing cable,” she said to herself, taking another drag on her cig.
She’d snapped a couple more photos, and then her cell phone had played the spaghetti Western theme, and suddenly she’d had other things on her mind. Before leaving, she’d taken the precaution of closing the cooler so the guy wouldn’t know he’d been made. She hadn’t wanted him disposing of the evidence in a panic. Not that it really mattered, since she had the pix, but it would have been a waste of some perfectly good fish.
She plowed through a flooded intersection, water fanning past her on both sides like the parting of the Red Sea. The Jeep’s dashboard radio, which had been busted for most of the past six years and only recently repaired, was tuned to a news station. According to the newscasters, Hurricane Sandy wouldn’t make landfall for hours, but already the tidal surge had drowned Atlantic City in waist-high floodwaters, and rising winds were taking out trees and power lines.
Bonnie drove on, half hypnotized by the drone of the radio, the steady thwack of her windshield wipers, the drumbeat of rain on the Jeep’s canvas roof. She was moving fast—too fast for a road that was nearly washed out, studded with new potholes, strewn with windblown debris. But if Dante was at the cottage, she had no idea how long he might stay.
Two weeks ago she had determined that the cottage presented her best opportunity. It was lonely and isolated, a beachfront retreat walled in by scrub pine and seagrass-tufted dunes. There were no close neighbors, which meant no witnesses. In the off-season—and October was definitely the off-season for the Jersey shore—the island’s population was only a fraction of what it would be in summertime.
Days of surveillance had established that Dante was alone in life. No significant others, no one likely to accompany him to his island hideaway. If he went there, he would go alone.
In his day-to-day activities he was tougher to get at. Not exactly a hardened target, but a tricky one. He lived in a Jersey City high-rise with doormen stationed 24/7 at the lobby door. He ate at crowded restaurants, though always by himself.
He took public transportation in the city. She could have executed the hit, but she wasn’t sure she could do it without being eyeballed.
But the cottage—identified as his via an online search for properties in his name—would be ideal. She’d visited the place and easily defeated the do-it-yourself alarm system. In the foyer she’d attached a thumbnail-size motion sensor to the baseboard molding; it was hardwired into the main current and equipped with a backup battery. In a hollow behind the baseboard she’d wired up a throwaway cell phone which would dial her number and activate her special ring tone if the sensor went off.
During the two weeks since she’d installed the device, the sensor hadn’t noticed a damn thing. She was beginning to think it had malfunctioned, or maybe Dante never used his cottage out of season. It might be necessary to do the job in Jersey City, after all. She’d been mulling possible scenarios for an urban hit—until her phone alert offered her a better option.
“Just be there, you asshole,” she told Dante as she steered the Jeep past a twenty-foot awning that lay flapping in the street. “I really don’t wanna make this trip for nothing.”
The newscasters were still yakking. As of now, Sandy was expected to make landfall by 8:00 PM at close to hurricane strength. It looked like Devil’s Hook—and Brighton Cove to the north—would be right in the crosshairs.
And speaking of crosshairs …
Up ahead, the turnoff for the street to Dante’s cottage came into view. Gravesend Road, it was called. Poetic irony, or poetic justice, or something poetic anyway.
She tooled down the rutted lane, the Jeep’s shocks complaining with every bounce. The beach that fronted the house was shedding sand at a furious rate. A shower of grit set her windshield shivering.
As she steered past the cottage, she glanced down the driveway and saw a Porsche Boxer sitting there. Dante’s ride. Good news—for her, at least.
For him, not so much.
Parking at the house was out of the question. She drove fifty yards down the road and hid the Jeep in a stand of pines. The muddy forest floor made for poor traction, and the tires shimmied alarmingly, but she managed to avoid crashing into any trees. She jerked the Jeep into park and killed the engine.
Before taking off on foot, she checked her purse. Her .38, the compact Bodyguard model, was still safely tucked away in its special compartment, loaded with five rounds that she’d handled with gloves so as to leave no prints on the shell casings. Unlike a semiautomatic, a revolver couldn’t be fitted with a silencer, but that didn’t matter. The whole point of doing the job out here in the boonies was that no one would be within earshot.
The rest of her junk was in there too—flashlight, cell phone, lockpicks, glass cutter, and, for some reason, a Swiss Army knife. Dan Maguire, police chief of Brighton Cove, would be very happy to get his mitts on her right now. The unlicensed gun was good enough for a conviction, and the burglary tools only sweetened the pot.
Well, Brighton Cove was miles away, and so was Danny boy. At this moment she needed to forget about him and get her head in the game. Alec Dante might not be the toughest guy she’d gone up against, but he was violent and amoral and possibly crazy, and she needed to take him seriously.
Leaving the Jeep, she plunged into the storm. Steely pellets of rain jabbed at her like needles. She jammed her hands into the pockets of her nylon windbreaker and sprinted through the forest to the beach, keeping her head down, eyes half shut against the blinding wetness.
Killing Alec Dante was the kind of thing that might have given some people pause—if not from pangs of conscience, then at least from fear. She was pretty much past fear these days, and as for conscience … she wasn’t sure she’d ever had one, or much of one, anyway. She’d been fourteen years old when she’d learned about killing, first as a witness, then as a practitioner of the art. Her philosophy was simple. Pencils needed erasers, and some people just needed to be rubbed out.
And what gave her the right to do the erasing? Well, shucks. Somebody had to do it. Anyway, she’d been playing the game by her own rules her whole life, and she hadn’t lost yet. As career choices went, it might not be ideal, but it beat sacking groceries at Stop & Shop.
She was twenty-eight years old, and what with smoking Parliaments, chugging Jack ’n’ Coke, shooting people, and her general lifestyle, she reckoned she faced long odds in making it to thirty. Even so, she was having a hell of a ride. And if her sideline made her feel dirty and low at times—more and more often, it seemed, in the past year or so—well, that was the price she paid for doing her job. She couldn’t expect to do this kind of thing on a regular basis and not have it affect her.
Exactly how it might be affecting her was something she preferred not to think about. Not now. Not ever. Introspection wasn’t her thing. Besides, there was plenty of Jack Daniel’s in the world—enough to drown any doubts. Wasn’t there?
At the edge of the woods she crouched in a thicket of bayberry and beach plum, glassing the cottage with binoculars from the Jeep’s glove compartment. She panned the windows, saw no movement. Dante had to be inside, because no one but an idiot—you know, someone like her—would be outdoors on a day like this. But he was nowhere in sight.
She stood and approached the cottage at a walk, making no attempt at concealment. If by chance he spied her, she wanted him to think her intentions were purely benign. She could be a traveler stranded in the storm, or a policewoman checking the progress of the evacuation.
The front door was the closest entry point, and she’d defeated the lock once before. That time she’d used a technique called lock bumping—effective but noisy. This time, with stealth at a premium, she took out her pick set and inserted a pick and an L-shaped tension wrench into the mechanism. She got the door unlocked within a minute.
Before opening the door, she pulled on gloves and drew the .38 from her purse.
Entering the house was the largest risk. If he’d seen her coming or heard her scratching at the lock, he would be waiting. And this guy could be armed. He fit the profile of someone who’d be carrying.
She nudged open the door with her foot and hung back to see if he would fire. He didn’t. Peeking would do no good, so she pivoted inside the doorway, sinking to her knees to make herself small.
The house was surprisingly dark for midmorning. It took her a moment to realize that the power was out. The dismal day and the absence of electric light added up to a study in gloom.
No one was there. She straightened up, listening. From somewhere in the house, she heard a faint clanging intermixed with sotto voce curses.
Irrelevantly she remembered that old Christmas movie where the dad was always beating his wrench against a balky furnace and saying things like “Flabgabbit!”
Alec Dante wasn’t saying “Flabgabbit!” He was cursing like a drunken sailor, or like Bonnie herself on a bad day. Or on any day, really.
His voice was distant enough to give her confidence. She shut the door and followed the stream of profanities like a bloodhound following a scent.
Having explored the cottage on her last visit, she was familiar with the layout. It was a decent-sized one-story place with an eat-in kitchen and a patio facing the beach. Unlike last time, the sliding glass doors were a mess of rain and packed sand and gluey leaves, and the patio’s wooden flooring was beginning to come apart.
From the direction of the kitchen rose Dante’s voice. Oddly, it seemed to coming from below. Either someone had done her job for her and the schmuck was already in hell, or the house had a basement, a feature that had escaped her notice last time.
She checked out the kitchen. A branch had splintered off a maple tree and punched a hole through the window, ramrodding the fridge sideways and jerking a plumbing pipe out of the wall. Probably the pipe had been hooked up to an ice maker or something. Anyway, it was broken in two, and water was gushing out, pooling on the floor and streaming through an open doorway.
She hadn’t paid any attention to that particular do
or on her first visit. Now that it stood open, she could see that it led downstairs.
She moved through the kitchen. Her sneakers, already wet, sopped up the ankle-deep water. She wondered what would happen if the power suddenly came back on. She could be electrocuted in the water, maybe. Now that would be a stupid way to die.
At the basement doorway she bent low and took a look.
Water cascaded down the stairs in a foaming Niagara. More water poured from the basement ceiling. It was percolating through the kitchen floorboards to produce a steady indoor rain.
The pipe must have broken some time ago. The water in the basement was already knee-high. She could see the whole room clearly enough in the gray illumination from a row of casement windows along the ceiling.
In the far corner stood Alec Dante, his back to her, a wrench gripped in both hands. His voice and the wrench’s clangs came back at him in slapbacks of echo from the cement walls as he struggled with a plumbing valve. “Turn, motherfucker. Turn!”
Bonnie was no handyman—she was, in fact, neither handy nor a man—but she had a fair idea of what was going on here. Dante had come to the cottage ahead of the storm in order to salvage some of his belongings, only to find that the place was being flooded. Now he was trying to stop the flow by closing the main shutoff valve. But the damn thing was stuck.
She could see right away that he wasn’t carrying. His T-shirt was pasted to his torso, leaving no room for a concealed weapon. And he sure as hell wasn’t wearing an ankle gun below the waterline.
Even so, she took care to make no sound as she removed her windbreaker, then slipped out of her sneakers and socks and rolled up her pants legs to her knees. She left all those items, along with her purse, on a kitchen table before she descended the stairway.
Had she been the philosophical sort, she might have pondered the mystery of what she was about to do. The man before her was alive and thinking, and there was blood in his veins and breath in his lungs. In another minute or two she would take all of that from him and leave him a corpse adrift in the water.
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