Blood in the Water

by Michael Prescott

  He nodded, satisfied that he’d gotten his point across, though his last words had been addressed to a corpse. The spirit, he knew, would hover close to the body for a short time after death, before it was borne away into the next world. And in that earthbound state, the spirit could hear his words.

  What the hell. It was never too late to learn.

  Frank fisted his hand over the knife handle and wrenched it free. The heart had stopped, and the blood that emerged was sluggish and molasses-thick. It puddled around Proud American’s head, a glossy halo.

  He wiped the blade on a headrest and slipped it into its sheath, reminding himself to score a new notch in the mahogany. He checked his raincoat and found it mostly unspotted. Already the beast, having fed, was retreating into its cave, where it would hibernate, waiting with a predator’s infinite patience until it was called again.

  Carefully he withdrew from the SUV and surveyed the area, blinking raindrops out of his eyes. Nobody had been around. Nobody had seen a thing.

  He pushed Proud American entirely into the cargo area, folding the legs to make sure the body fit, then shut the rear door. With luck, the dumb bastard would remain unnoticed until closing time.

  Frank returned to his car, walking casually, unafraid of being caught. Long ago he had grasped a great truth, that anything is possible to a man without fear.

  He replaced the knife under the driver’s seat. These days he didn’t keep it strapped to his arm. New Jersey’s statutes on carrying a concealed weapon, even a fucking blade, were the toughest in the country. The authorities already had a hard-on to run him in. He wouldn’t give them a reason.

  Before putting the Mercedes in gear, he drew a cleansing breath, collecting himself. As he drove out of the parking lot, he called his nephew again. Still no answer.

  It was getting worrisome. The last he’d heard, Alec Dante had been on his way to his cottage on Devil’s Hook, and Frank hadn’t been able to reach him since.

  CHAPTER 4

  The assistant manager’s SUV was still parked at the back of Brown’s Fish Market. Two coolers were inside, camouflaged by a blanket. Mr. Brown’s Cadillac wasn’t there, which meant the boss hadn’t come in yet, a development that suited her purposes just fine.

  Bonnie put on a hat before going inside. She felt strongly that everybody should have a thing. Her thing was hats. This one was a snappy little Panama that worked pretty well as a rain shield.

  She went around to the front of the store and asked to speak with the guy in charge. She found him in a back office yakking it up with someone on the phone—a supplier, she gathered, probably one of the commercial fishermen who sailed out of the Miramar marina. The office smelled of fish. Actually, the whole establishment smelled of fish.

  While waiting, she took a seat and lit a cigarette. The assistant manager might not want her smoking in here, but although he didn’t know it yet, he was in no position to complain.

  When he hung up, he leaned across the desk and shook her hand, making brief but sincere eye contact, just the way he’d been trained. “Walt Churchland. And you are …?”

  “Name’s Bonnie Parker,” she said without smiling. “I’m a private detective.” She handed him a business card bearing the name of her agency, Last Resort.

  He retreated into his swivel chair, visibly nervous. Guilt would do that.

  “Bonnie Parker?” He handled the card with fidgety fingers, foxing the edges. “Hey, that’s like Bonnie and Clyde, right?”

  “Yeah.” She exhaled a long feather of smoke. “I’m Fay Dunaway.”

  “Your folks name you after a criminal on purpose, or didn’t they know?”

  “My dad knew.”

  “And he still thought it was a good idea?”

  “Why not? He was a criminal himself.”

  Walt made a funny face, halfway between a smile and a wince. He couldn’t tell if she was joking. She wasn’t.

  “Well, um, what can I do for you, Miss Parker?”

  “Nothing. It’s more about what I can do to you.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Yeah, you do, Sparky. Your boss hired me to investigate pilferage. Somebody’s been filching fishies. He thought it was one of the minimum wage guys, sneaking ’em out at closing time. The Mexicans, as he put it. But I spied on the Mexicans, and I didn’t see any funny business. Then it occurs to me, maybe the fishes aren’t going missing when the store closes, but when it opens. So I watched you today. I took photos. Wanna see?”

  She scrolled through the shots on her cell phone, ending with the glassy-eyed tuna in the cooler.

  Walt was working the swivel chair like he was doing aerobics. “That doesn’t mean anything. I was just taking them for safekeeping. There’s a storm on the way, and we could lose power …”

  “I think that’s what we call a fish story, Sparky.”

  “Why do you keep calling me that?”

  “I dunno. You just look like a Sparky.”

  “What I told you about the inventory—it’s true.”

  “Want me to confirm it with Mr. Brown?”

  His downcast eyes gave her the answer.

  She let him tell his story in fits and starts. It seemed he had an arrangement with the chef at the Mute Swan. Every day, several pounds of fresh fish found their way to the kitchen. The chef got the merchandise at less than cost, and Walt pocketed a steady stream of cash.

  “So it works out great for everybody,” Bonnie said. “Except poor Mr. Brown. He kinda gets the fuzzy end of the lollipop, huh?”

  “I thought he’d never miss them.”

  “He did.”

  “There’s always waste and spoilage in this business.”

  “Not this much. I guess you got greedy. It’s the old story, Sparky. You went a fish too far.”

  He shut his eyes, his face going pale. “Oh shit.”

  “You just think of something nasty?”

  “My wife.”

  “Well, I’m sure she’d appreciate that.”

  “No, what I mean is—I’ll have to tell her. I’ll lose my job over this, and she’ll have to know why.”

  “So she’ll find out you’re a schmo. She probably already knows.”

  “She’ll never forgive me.”

  “You’re breaking my heart. Next you’ll be telling me you only stole the goods to raise money for your kid sister’s eye operation.”

  “No, it’s for ghost hunting.”

  “Come again?”

  “I needed a prosumer camcorder that can shoot infrared video. You know, so you can film in pitch darkness. The one I bought is a Panasonic. I got it off eBay for twelve hundred bucks. It’s the same one they use on Ghost Hunters on SyFy.”

  “You bought a $1200 camera so you can shoot videos of ghosts?”

  He nodded. “In my spare time. I’m hoping I can get something good and parlay it into a TV job. I don’t intend to work in retail forever.”

  “Sounds like a plan.” She sighed. “Maybe I should’ve gone directly to your boss about this.”

  “Why didn’t you?” His face assumed a sly expression. “You thinking we can work out an agreement?”

  “No, Sparky, I’m not thinking that. Look, you got a good job here, and apparently you’ve found a girl dumb enough to marry you. So how about you stop desperately seeking Casper, quit ripping off old Mr. Brown, and go back to being a good little boy?”

  “And if I do?”

  “Then nobody has to know. I’ll tell Mr. Brown the situation’s been handled. He’ll want details, but I won’t give him any. But if the inventory starts swimming away again, he’ll only need to ring me up once. And then I think you know what’ll happen.”

  “I’ll be saying so long and thanks for all the fish?”

  This was apparently a joke. She didn’t get it. “You won’t get a second chance, Sparky. I’m already giving you more of a break than you deserve.”

  She rose to leave. He stopped her with a question. “Why?”

&n
bsp; “Huh?”

  “Why are you going so easy on me?”

  “Let’s just say I like your face.”

  She left the store, taking the rear exit, and returned to her Jeep. His face, of course, had nothing to do with it. She just didn’t expect a lot from people. They did stupid shit and expected to get away with it. They always thought they were smarter than they really were. Some could be scared straight. She was betting Walt was that sort.

  Besides, she didn’t want to see him tossed out on the street. He might never get another job, especially with the rep he’d acquire from Brown, and his marriage might fall apart, too.

  All so he could hunt ghosts. Jeez.

  Didn’t he know it was never a good idea to disturb the dead?

  CHAPTER 5

  She ate lunch at the Main Street Diner, located in what was known optimistically as downtown Brighton Cove. There were model train sets with bigger commercial districts. Still, the four-block area was large enough to house a variety of knickknack shops and art galleries, an old-fashioned five-and-dime, too many real estate offices, and one detective agency, belonging to Bonnie herself.

  According to the clock in the town square, the time was only 11:45, but she was already hungry as hell. It was kinda twisted, but she always worked up an appetite after doing a hit. Sometimes it made her a little horny too. Oh yeah, she was the picture of mental health.

  The diner was crowded with people getting in a last restaurant meal before a bitch named Sandy shut everything down. Bonnie found a small table in the back and ordered clam chowder with lots of those crumbly little crackers. Oyster crackers, she thought they were called. She hoped they weren’t fattening. Watching your weight wasn’t easy in an area that boasted more pizza parlors and Italian delis per square mile than Sicily. Luckily she was a heavy smoker. It kept the pounds off.

  The place had Wi-Fi, allowing her to spend some quality time with her phone. It was a Samsung, and its name was Sammy. Well, actually this little guy was Sammy II, son of Sammy. His dad had suffered a cracked screen during her run-in with Pascal and had to be humanely put down. Given how close she’d come to getting decommissioned herself, she couldn’t complain about the loss of a piece of hardware. At least she’d salvaged the DayGlo pink case.

  As she scrolled through her email inbox, she became aware that some of the other patrons were looking at her. Since developing a local reputation, she’d always gotten some stares. Lately it had gotten worse because of Dan Maguire’s whisper campaign. The police chief was just jonesing to find something on her and put her away. Failing that, he could at least make her life hell.

  That was the thing about small-town living. She’d settled in Brighton Cove—the first place she’d ever settled, in fact—six years ago. The spot had its charms: a two-mile stretch of boardwalk, fine Victorian homes in the wealthiest part of town, a lake where folks went ice-skating in winter. But there were drawbacks, especially for someone like her.

  In a city nobody knew you. You could walk the streets and dine out and shop in glorious anonymity. Brighton Cove, population 7,000, was a different story. Here, enough people knew her, or at least knew about her, to ensure that she seldom went unrecognized in public. And since a lot of what they’d heard wasn’t too complimentary, she got a lot of nervous glances, usually accompanied by whispered conversation. Like now, for instance. About ten percent of the patrons had identified her, and were breathlessly gossiping to the other ninety percent.

  The waitress, Lizbeth, returned with a bowl of soup. She was one of the few locals Bonnie counted as a friend, but she’d been strangely standoffish in recent weeks.

  “Everything okay, Liz?” Bonnie asked as the soup was set down.

  “Hunky-dory.” But her eyes were darting.

  “You seem a little antsy around me these days.”

  “Well, it’s just … You know how people talk.”

  Did she ever. “They’ve been talking like that for a long time.”

  “It’s different now. Ever since that thing on the boardwalk last August. They found bullets all over the place. Must’ve been a real shootout.”

  It had been. Bonnie could attest to that personally, not that she intended to.

  “What’s that got to do with me?” she asked evenly.

  “Nothing. But some people …”

  The words faded out into uncomfortable silence.

  Bonnie mashed up some crackers and stirred them into the soup. “You know I’m no desperado, don’t you, Liz?”

  “Um, sure, Bonnie. Sure. I know.”

  She watched the waitress walk away. She’d counted two sures and an I know. That was a lot of affirmatives in response to a simple question.

  If even Lizbeth had turned against her, she really was the town pariah. Well, fuck ’em. She really didn’t care what other people thought of her. She only cared that they just might be right.

  That was the thing. They hated her and feared her and saw her as a freak. So be it. But there were times when she hated herself. Feared herself. Saw herself as a freak. And that, she didn’t like.

  Maybe it was inevitable that she would end up this way. Maybe being an outcast and a lawbreaker was built into a girl’s destiny when she was named after America’s most notorious female outlaw. Her dad, a penny-ante criminal rogue named Tom Parker, had christened her in honor of the cigar-chomping, pistol-toting twenty-something matriarch of Clyde Barrow’s gang, a mere slip of a girl who’d robbed banks, shot it out with lawmen, and terrorized and titillated the whole country for a brief time during the grim Depression years. There was even a slight physical resemblance—the original Bonnie had been wiry and blond and arrestingly blue-eyed, just like the modern edition.

  Sometimes she thought she just might be the first Bonnie reincarnated. Like Sammy II, she might be Bonnie 2.0. It could explain why violence and orneriness and being on the wayward side of the law came so naturally to her. Of course, genetics could have played a role—an inheritance from her ne’er-do-well pop. Or it might have had something to do with the hectic mess that was her childhood, which had been spent in constant flight, moving from motel to motel until she was fourteen, and then—well, then childhood became a luxury she couldn’t afford anymore.

  Any way you looked at it, she’d been fated to go off the rails, at least as far as polite society was concerned. And vigilantes were never too popular with law-abiding folks, were they? Especially in Jersey, a state so nannyish its citizens weren’t even trusted to pump their own gas.

  Her clients—the special ones—probably assumed she’d gotten into PI work purely as a cover for her illegal activities. Not so; she’d been a boring old bona fide PI for three years before branching out, and she still did plenty of ordinary gumshoe work, like the fish market job. She’d started using extralegal methods when she found that working within the law didn’t always work. Corrupt people could use the law to their advantage, hide behind it, even wield it as a weapon. Sometimes direct action was needed. It wasn’t pretty, but it had to be done.

  And it wasn’t like she was some kind of friggin’ serial killer. She only took jobs that satisfied her personal requirements—jobs where she really was, to borrow the phrase painted on her office door, the last resort. She plugged loopholes in the law, that’s all. She was a fixer, and there were things in this world that needed fixing.

  So if people came to her when all other options were off the table, having heard a rumor somewhere that Bonnie Parker could make their problems go away, could anyone really blame them?

  When she thought of it that way, it all seemed very clear.

  But then she remembered Alec Dante floating in a widening circle of his own blood while the echoes of the gunshots splashed back at her from the cellar walls, and suddenly she wasn’t so sure.

  CHAPTER 6

  Frank Lazzaro was a big man, six foot four, tipping the scales at 270. Much of that bulk was fat, but enough of it was muscle. He might have hit the half-century mark on his last birthday, b
ut he hadn’t gone soft. In his business a man couldn’t afford to get soft.

  His head was small and oval, bullet-shaped, cushioned by a pillow of fat at the back of his neck. He had his hair shaved close in a crew cut once every two weeks by a barber named Angelo who told dirty jokes and kept a stash of Penthouse magazines for his customers. Frank’s hair had been thick and black in his youth, but as he’d gone gray, he’d cut it shorter and shorter, until now it resembled a thin spread of iron filings. Even his eyebrows were gray. They flickered over small eyes tucked away inside wrinkled folds of fat.

  Those eyes were narrowed in worry now, as he drove south to Devil’s Hook.

  For the past few days, his nephew had been pestering him with voicemail messages, insisting he had something important to talk about, something that required a face-to-face. Frank had ignored the kid as long as possible. Alec was always getting enthused about something. Mostly he wanted to get in on the action, join the organization, an option Frank had steadfastly refused. He was a good judge of talent, and he knew his nephew didn’t have the stuff for that kind of life. He would never be a player, only a wannabe.

  Probably the recent spate of calls was about the same fugazy bullshit. It made his head hurt just to think about it. But he hadn’t been able to dodge his nephew forever. Today he’d agreed to a sit-down after the kid got back from the cottage; they would connect by phone and work out the details of a meet.

  But Alec hadn’t called, hadn’t answered Frank’s calls, hadn’t returned Frank’s messages. This was troubling. There was no answer at the cottage, and according to news reports, the island had been completely evacuated. Frank was going there anyway.

  Frank knew the cottage well. He’d bought it himself and given it to Alec. The transfer was not an example of his largeness of heart. It was basically a ruse. If the feds ever came after him with that RICO shit and tried to seize his assets, it wouldn’t hurt to have some property tucked away in another person’s name.