Lou’s feet thumped on the kitchen floor.
She shoved the mag back into place and cranked back the slide to cycle a new round into the chamber—hopefully without a misfeed this time. She couldn’t be sure, though.
Lou took a step forward, squinting in the dark.
If the mag was defective, the gun still might not fire. There was only one way to find out.
Bonnie stood, took aim, and squeezed the trigger twice.
The .45 was a big gun, and it made a big noise. Lou went down in a clumsy heap.
There had been no other sound. She hadn’t given him time to scream.
She moved forward, the gun in both hands, and glanced out the window. Paulie wasn’t there. She was wondering what happened to him when she heard the thump of the front door swinging open, probably caught by a gust of wind.
Reaching down, she took Lou’s piece, a K-frame Smith .357 Magnum with three rounds left in the cylinder. The .45 went into her purse. Until she knew why it had malfunctioned, she couldn’t trust it.
She left the kitchen and approached the living room, hugging the wall. In the darkness she heard footsteps and ragged breathing.
Then a whisper:
“Lou? You get her?”
“He didn’t get me,” Bonnie said, and gripping the gun in the Weaver stance, she fired twice into his center mass.
He fell backward and didn’t get up. She closed on him and checked him out. He was alive, though just barely. Like a half-crushed cockroach, he twitched feebly.
She took him out with a head shot. The .357 did a vicious job, opening the man’s skull like a cantaloupe.
Her wrists were numb. The Smith had a wicked kick. But it had done the job.
Kneeling, she pried the pistol out of the dead man’s hands. In his pocket she found a spare magazine. She checked him for an ankle gun, but he wasn’t carrying one. Too bad. She could have used a new ankle gun.
The driver’s license in his wallet identified him as Paul Belletiere of Jersey City. She wondered if he’d been married, had kids. Probably. The thought didn’t reach her, didn’t mean anything.
She was feeling okay. More than okay. She’d beaten them in a contest of life and death—beaten them cleanly, by speed and skill. They were bona fide bad guys, probably made men in the organization, which meant they had killed before. She had no regrets, no second thoughts. Not now, anyway. Those thoughts might come, but not this soon.
She returned to the kitchen. The second man, thankfully, did not require another bullet. One of her shots had caught him in the face, wiping out most of his forehead and all of his nose. She took a speedloader from one pocket and his cell phone from another, depositing both items in her purse. Then she checked his ID. Louis Rocca, also of Jersey City.
Two dead mobsters. Working for Frank Lazzaro, a man who knew her name.
At least she didn’t have to worry that the shots had been heard by the neighbors. The whole island had been evacuated. Even if anyone had stayed behind, the noise of the storm would have drowned out the gunfire.
In no hurry to leave, she took the time to wipe down any surfaces she’d touched. There was a good chance these killings would be covered up the same way Alec Dante’s had, but if the police did investigate, she wasn’t giving them any leads.
She was on her way out the front door when it occurred to her that Alec Dante was the type of guy who just might keep a few guns of his own lying around. Right now she needed to rebuild her arsenal, and she wasn’t choosy about how she did it.
If he was anything like her, he’d want a gun in his bedroom. She always took the gun from her purse and slipped it under her mattress at bedtime. She’d found this policy made for sweet dreams.
Detouring into the bedroom, she conducted a quick search by flashlight. In the nightstand drawer she found a nice shiny Walther .22 with eight rounds in the ten-round magazine and one in the chamber.
The missing round might have been the one that killed Joey Huang. A careful assassin would have disposed of the murder weapon, but Alec Dante hadn’t been careful.
She dumped that piece into her purse also. As she was turning to go, her flashlight’s beam shifted to the wall over the bed. A painting hung there, a stylized interpretation of a wolf on a rocky bluff, the moon big at its back. Lambent eyes swirled with miniature whirlpools. Silver fangs gleamed. Other wolves shimmered in the background, ghostly shapes, a silent army. More and more of them came into focus the longer she looked, until she was left with the impression of a limitless horde materializing out of the darkness—predators everywhere in an unending parade of death.
Bonnie stared at the painting, and stared and stared. It said a lot of things to her, and none of them was good.
CHAPTER 21
Before returning to the Jeep, Bonnie planted the ticket stub in Alec Dante’s Porsche. The cops would show up eventually. When they found the stub, maybe she could get the Long Fong Boyz off her ass for good.
She drove off the island and headed north on the state highway. Along the way she spotted a bar called Finnegan’s that was somehow open despite the storm and the power outage. A drink sounded pretty good right about now. She parked out front and stashed her newly acquired guns under the blanket in the rear compartment, leaving only Alec Dante’s .22 in her purse.
The bar was lit by candles. A boom box played some kind of Top 40 bullshit. The barstools were occupied by a motley assortment of yuppie burnouts and Duck Dynasty rejects. They looked pretty much like the kind of patrons you’d expect to find in a bar at one thirty on a Tuesday morning during a hurricane.
Bonnie couldn’t criticize. She was there too.
“Yeah, we’re open,” the bartender said in answer to a question she hadn’t asked. “No power, so no ice, and the beer is warm.”
“Suits me fine. Jack ’n’ Coke, and make sure it’s got a kick.”
She would have liked a cigarette to go with it, but you couldn’t smoke in bars anymore. Whole damn country was going to hell.
As she was waiting for her drink, Sammy started singing “A Hard Day’s Night.” It was her standard ringtone, and it had never seemed more appropriate.
The caller was Des. “I was getting a little worried,” he said. “You okay?”
“Never better.”
“How’d your trip to Devil’s Hook go?”
“Uneventful.” This was perhaps not entirely truthful.
“You coming back here?”
“Um, I dunno. Things have gotten complicated.”
“What do you mean, complicated?”
She meant a lot of things, but all she said was: “There’s a lot of heat on me coming from all directions. It wouldn’t be safe.”
“I’m willing to chance it.”
“I’m not. The volume on this situation just got turned way up.”
“You can’t be more specific?”
“Not here.”
“Where’s here, anyway? And what’s that music? Are you at a bar?”
“No, I’m at a friggin’ symposium. Look, I got stuff to do. I’ll be in touch.”
She clicked off, aware that she hadn’t been quite civil. At the moment she didn’t have the energy to practice the social graces. She needed to think. And she did her best thinking with some hard liquor in her system.
Fortunately the bartender chose that moment to serve up her drink. She raised her glass to him. “Here’s to swimmin’ with bowlegged women.”
He didn’t even reward her with a grin. Not working for tips, evidently.
She sipped the cocktail—okay, chugged it—and reviewed the problem before her. Having done her homework on Alec Dante, she knew a good deal about his uncle, and it was all coming back to her now.
Frank Lazzaro, a legitimate businessman operating out of Jersey City, was involved in a variety of moneymaking ventures that included gunrunning, narcotics distribution, and auto theft. He was a stone killer with a pronounced paranoid streak, a guy whose fixation on eliminating all real or p
otential enemies made Thuggee stranglers look like Hare Krishnas.
Desmond had told her that scientists these days looked on evolution less as survival of the fittest and more as mutually beneficial cooperation. She couldn’t remember what point he’d been trying to make—something about why she ought to be less of a hard-ass, probably. Anyhow, whatever the latest theories, Frank Lazzaro was definitely a throwback to the survival-of-the-fittest model. Peaceful cooperation was not in his DNA.
You could ask George Fratto. Except actually, you couldn’t, unless you had a Ouija board. Frank had gotten pissed off at Fratto for some reason no one seemed to know, and had exhibited his displeasure by having Fratto kidnapped and taken apart, piece by piece—first an index finger, then a middle finger, and so on, until all the fingers were gone, at which point he’d continued disassembling the man bone by bone—arms, legs, ribs. Kind of like a Lego set. At some point in this ordeal, which evidently had lasted longer than a month, Fratto must have expired. No one could say just when. All that his friends and business associates knew was that parts of him kept turning up, day after day—an envelope pushed through a mail slot, bearing a severed thumb; a gift-wrapped box left on the doorstep, with a lower leg inside; a collarbone surreptitiously planted in the fish tank at his office. By the time his head made its appearance, nested in a Halloween pumpkin on his wife’s front porch, nobody was really surprised. Well, maybe the wife.
“Buy you a drink, honey?”
She glanced up. An unshaven guy with a rhinestone ear stud had taken the barstool next to hers.
“Fuck off,” she said tonelessly.
He wasn’t deterred. “You’re trouble, huh?” He leaned closer. “I like trouble.”
“This kind?” She opened her purse and let him see the Walther.
He moved off without a word.
And some people said a well-armed citizenry was no longer necessary in the modern world.
So anyway, that was Frank Lazzaro. He was, not to put too fine a point on it, bad news. Bonnie didn’t know how smart he was. Tough, yeah; psycho, sure—but it didn’t necessarily take a lot of brainpower to make money moving heroin, which was the principal import in Lazzaro’s import-export business. Exactly how he obtained it and got it past customs wasn’t clear, but he was doing a bang-up job of distributing the product—cut with quinine, or sometimes baby powder—to Jersey City and parts south, all the way to Atlantic City.
Lazzaro was believed to be the underboss of the mob’s Jersey City faction, meaning that the capos reported to him, and the foot soldiers in the street reported to the capos. He was a big brawling bear of a man, and he was reputed to be lucky. In his entire career he had spent not more than four hours in a jail cell. Twice he’d been brought up on charges; twice he beat the rap, making the prosecutors look like fools. He did not lack for confidence, and he was greatly feared. One former associate was quoted as saying, “He kills people the way the rest of us go take a shit.”
He lived in a mansion in Saddle River, a very high-rent district. He was forty-nine years old and had a thirty-two-year-old wife and two baby boys. She forgot the kids’ names. Didn’t matter—it wasn’t like she was going to be added to his Christmas card list.
She sighed. It had all gone to hell, hadn’t it? If not for the hit on Joey Huang, the Long Fong Boyz would never have had any reason to find out about her, and Frank Lazzaro would never have had any reason to talk to the Boyz. Now that he had talked to them—or to one unfortunate kid named Chang—he’d connected Bonnie to the hit on his nephew, a connection he could not have made otherwise.
Best laid plans of mice and men, she thought soberly, or maybe not quite soberly at this point.
The worst of it was that there was nothing she could do except wait and see what Frank would do next. And meanwhile she had the Long Fong Boyz still suspicious of her, not to mention Chief Maguire’s stroll down memory lane.
She finished her drink and ordered another. She had a feeling she was going to need it.
CHAPTER 22
Bonnie spent the night in her Jeep, parked behind Finnegan’s, sleeping fitfully in the driver’s seat as the storm howled. It wasn’t the greatest arrangement, but she knew she wouldn’t feel safe at home or in the office, and she still didn’t want to go back to Des’s place.
When she woke at daybreak, the storm had passed. There was a strange stillness everywhere.
Mindful of the checkpoint in Brighton Code, she took the Walther .22 out of her purse and stuck it under the seat. It occurred to her that at least three of the firearms she was carrying—the .45, the .357, and the .22—could be linked to homicides. Ordinarily she would have tossed any gun used in a killing, but under the circumstances she couldn’t afford to give up any of her arsenal. She would just have to take her chances. Arrest was not at the top of her list of worries right now.
On her way into town, she remembered some unfinished business—Mr. Brown’s Fish Market. She called the owner’s cell phone. She thought she might wake him, but he was already up and frantic. There was still no power in his shop, and the fish were in danger of spoiling.
“Sorry to hear that,” she said, not actually giving a damn. “I thought you’d like to know your pilferage problem has been resolved.”
She expected him to inquire as to the culprit’s identity, but he was too stressed out to ask. “This is a disaster. I could lose my whole inventory.”
“Throw a block party. Fry up all the fish and invite the neighborhood.”
“I’m not running a soup kitchen, for Christ’s sake.”
“Then you figure it out. Not my circus, not my monkeys.”
That was another expression she’d picked up somewhere. She’d been waiting for a chance to use it.
Two minutes later, the cell she’d lifted from the late Louis Rocca started to buzz. The screen identified the caller as Frank Lazzaro.
“Getting worried about your boys, Frankie?” she murmured.
She didn’t take the call.
- — -
Bonnie expected the worst at the checkpoint, but she got a break. Maguire wasn’t there. Bradley Walsh was handling it. He gave her Jeep a perfunctory once-over, not even asking for her ID. Then he leaned into the open window and produced a thick manila envelope from under his windbreaker.
“Some light reading,” he said as he handed it over. She started to open it. He stopped her. “Not here.”
A suspicion took shape in her mind. “What is this?” she asked slowly.
He looked away. “The police station was pretty much deserted last night. Everybody was out on patrol. The place was running on generator power. Not a lot of juice, but enough for the copy machine in the chief’s office.”
“You didn’t.”
“Burn after reading. We never had this conversation.”
He cocked a finger at her and sauntered off, leaving her amazed.
It was Maguire’s file on her, obviously. His investigation into Buckington, Ohio. Something she never could have gotten hold of on her own.
The best place for it was probably her office. She could hide it there until she’d digested the file and figured out what to do about it. She headed into downtown, driving slowly to avoid scattered branches and windblown shingles.
Millstone County was one of nine New Jersey counties that were now federal disaster areas. In daylight the reasons were obvious. Streets were strewn with seaweed and driftwood and blocked by hills of sand; others were cordoned off with sawhorses and traffic cones because of fallen power lines. The whole south end of town was off-limits and flooded out. She saw toppled chimneys and caved-in roofs, heaps of waterlogged furniture stacked up along curbs, concrete benches that had once lined the boardwalk now lying two or three blocks inland, cast there by the tidal surge. Patrol cars prowled everywhere. Sirens blared in the distance. National Guard helicopters fluttered overhead.
According to the radio, more than eight million people were without power, a situation that might last as long
as ten days. Gasoline was becoming scarce; the service stations couldn’t use their pumps without electricity. Oh, and most of the boardwalks, including Brighton Cove’s, had been completely destroyed.
That was kind of a sucker punch. The town’s boardwalk had been obliterated by Hurricane Irene just last year, and now, after a massive rebuilding effort, it was gone again. It sort of spoke to the pointlessness of the human condition. Or the pointlessness of building flimsy wooden structures along the coastline, at least.
Twice Bonnie circled the building that housed the Last Resort office, checking for any sign of unwanted visitors. It was possible the Long Fong Boyz had changed their minds, or that Frank Lazzaro was waiting for her at her place of business. She didn’t think a hit was likely in daytime, but she wouldn’t bet her life on it.
She saw no unfamiliar vehicles, no loitering strangers. She parked in the alley, as usual, and replaced the Walther in her purse.
The building door was unlocked—not surprising, since some of the more optimistic tenants were open for business. Before climbing the stairs, she checked out the second floor hallway, partly visible from the lobby.
Someone waited there, hanging back, in the shadows.
All of a sudden she was awfully glad she’d brought the Walther along.
She retreated into the niche under the staircase, where the visitor couldn’t get a clear shot at her, and called out, “Who’s up there?”
She might have expected almost anything in reply—a man’s voice, a hail of gunfire, dead silence. Anything but the answer she got.
“Miss Parker?” A woman’s voice. “My name is Victoria Lazzaro.”
Frank’s wife.
Bonnie took a moment to register this development. She doubted Frank had sent the missus to do his dirty work. Cautiously she emerged from under the stairs.
The woman in the hallway had moved forward into clearer view. She looked tired and wet and windblown, much like Bonnie herself.
“Hey, Mrs. Lazzaro,” Bonnie said. “You bring your husband along?”
She shook her head. “He doesn’t know anything about this.”
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