Blood in the Water

by Michael Prescott

  She stood, wanting to end the encounter. “You’d know about rats. That’s your nickname, isn’t it—the Ratcatcher? I’m guessing it’s not because you got a mind like a steel trap.”

  She thought that was a pretty good shot, but it didn’t land. Inexplicably, he became calm.

  “No,” he said, a sudden smile riding his lips. “That’s not the reason.”

  “Yeah? Then what is it?”

  “Wait and see.”

  She knew it was time to go, but she really hated leaving him with that beatific smile on his puss. “Don’t try to follow me. You’ve lost the element of surprise.”

  She started to walk away. Behind her, he got in the last word.

  “I wouldn’t be too sure about that, Parker. There could be one or two surprises left.”

  CHAPTER 29

  “You sure that’s Lazzaro?” Eng asked.

  He pressed the binoculars to his eyes, watching the lobby, where Bonnie Parker sat in conference with a fat old man.

  Patrick Chiu nodded. “I’ve seen him around.” He had no need for the binoculars. His eyes were owl-sharp.

  “Bitch is fuckin’ meeting with him,” Lam said in astonished outrage.

  Chiu and his two right-hand men had located Parker’s Jeep less than three minutes ago, and now their Cadillac Escalade was serving as a front row seat to her lies and betrayal. It was everything he could have hoped for.

  Now they just had to make the snatch. A tough job in daylight on strange turf, but he was confident his guys could handle it. He believed in the men he’d recruited. To outsiders, they might look like scrawny teenage boys, but every one of them was a straight nightmare, worthy of the great days of the tong wars and the salaried soldiers.

  Chiu had made a study of that era. He’d read rare books and musty old newspaper articles, and he’d spoken with those few elders who still remembered the old days. It had been a romantic age. The term “hatchet man” had been coined for the boo how doy, a tribute to their skill with the short-handled hatchet. They’d also used long and short guns, hand grenades, homemade bombs, and any other available method of mayhem and murder. Heroes like Mock Duck and Little Pete had played the role of ceremonial warriors, even while profiting from the female slave trade and opium parlors and gambling dens.

  Patrick Chiu sighed. Had he been born a hundred years earlier, he could have been one of them. Then he really could have made something of himself.

  “You really think that fat fuck hired the PI to chill Tommy?” Lam asked. “Why would he?”

  Chiu shrugged. “Why do those crazy linguine shitters do anything? We’ve been pushing into Lazzaro’s territory. Maybe he decided to push back. Maybe he used Parker so he’d have deniability. Maybe he’s planning to knock her off so she keeps quiet. Who knows?”

  “So she takes Lazzaro’s cash to whack Cricket. Then lays the hit on his nephew.” Eng’s voice was pitched an octave higher than normal. “She a dog. She a low-down lying dog.”

  Unlike his men, Chiu was neither indignant nor surprised. He’d assumed all along that Parker was lying. He hadn’t expected her to lead them to Lazzaro this soon, but he’d never been one to question his own good fortune. All that remained was to see that both she and the Italians paid the price.

  “What d’we do, dai lo?” Eng asked, chewing his lower lip.

  “We wait for her to bounce, and we take her.” A snatch in broad daylight. Not easy, but worth the risk.

  “Alive?” Eng was disappointed.

  “Alive. She’ll tell us all about Cricket and Fish Face, and what the Italians are up to.”

  “What about Lazzaro?” Lam asked, sounding nervous.

  “That’s for later.”

  To start a war with the Italians was not a small undertaking. It wasn’t something to be done on the fly, in a crowded parking lot in daytime.

  Parker, on the other hand, was no big deal. To the Italians, she would be expendable. That must be why they’d hired her in the first place.

  “She’s getting up.” That was Eng, still glassing the window.

  Chiu leaned forward. “All right. Get us back to the Jeep. Kicker, you’re on point. You wait for her to show and take her by surprise like I did last night. Then we’ll hustle her into the Caddy and go for a drive.”

  Lam was already steering the black SUV through the parking lot. A few hotel guests were visible here and there, making their way through the drizzle.

  “If there are witnesses when we grab her?” he asked.

  “Make them dead,” Chiu said. It was the answer Mock Duck would have given, and he felt good about that.

  CHAPTER 30

  Bonnie left the hotel via a different door than the one she’d used when entering. Always do the unexpected. This was a good rule of thumb in almost any situation, and especially when dealing with a homicidal psychopath like Frank Lazzaro.

  Her little diatribe in the lobby had been unplanned, and poking the bear wasn’t smart. Then again, when the bear in question was already dead set on sticking you in a steel drum, it probably didn’t make much difference.

  The meeting had proved productive in one respect. She’d decided Victoria Lazzaro was right. Frank was too dangerous to be allowed to make the first move. He had to be dealt with proactively.

  It was his uncanny smile at the end of their little interview that convinced her. She didn’t know what that smile was all about, and she had a feeling she didn’t want to know.

  So it’s on, girlfriend, she told the absent Mrs. Lazzaro. It’s on like Donkey Kong.

  Frank was going down tonight. He would die in his bed—but not peacefully. All she had to do was work out the details.

  She was twenty yards from the Jeep, walking fast through a peppery drizzle, when she glimpsed a blur of jet black cruising behind a row of cars like a shark’s fin breaking the water.

  A Cadillac Escalade. Moving away from the spot where the Jeep was parked.

  Last night the Long Fong Boyz had ambushed her in her Jeep. And bad guys had a way of repeating themselves.

  She hooked left, cutting between parked cars, staying clear of the Jeep.

  It could have been a coincidence. There were a lot of Escalades in the world. But she hadn’t lived this long by being an optimist.

  - — -

  “Aw, shit.” Lam peered through the windshield. “I think she made us, dai lo.”

  “Park this thing,” Chiu said.

  “There’s no spaces.”

  “Ditch it anywhere.”

  Lam pulled to a stop, blocking in three vehicles. “What now?”

  “We go after her on foot. Chase her down and take her fast. She’s carrying, so don’t fool around. As soon as we flank her, it’s guns out, guns in her face.”

  “How about Kicker?”

  “Let him stay by the Jeep in case she doubles back.”

  - — -

  Bonnie was on the move, keeping her head down and using the parked cars as cover.

  She became aware of someone looking at her. A guy unloading suitcases from his Lexus.

  “Everything all right?” he asked dubiously.

  “Just looking for a quarter. I know I dropped it around here someplace.”

  She duckwalked on, leaving him to construct whatever psychological diagnosis he saw fit.

  One row of cars ended, and another began. Navigating the lot without being seen meant cutting from aisle to aisle, taking unpredictable zigs and zags, like a lab rat in a maze.

  She was weaving between a parked Honda Civic and an ancient Mustang when she caught sight of a reflection in the Honda’s side view mirror. A skinny young guy with jet-black moussed hair was following her. And yeah, he was one of her friends from last night.

  If one of them was around, there would be more. Gangs were like roaches that way.

  She kept walking. Her pulse had quickened, but not by much. Getting all panicky was the worst thing you could do in a predicament like this.

  Without turning her he
ad, she used her peripheral vision to check for movement. There, on her left. From the guy’s languid stride she identified him as Patrick Chiu. He’d let her walk away on the beach, but apparently the truce was off.

  Gangbanger behind her, gangbanger on her left, probably one or two others closing in. She had a gun, but she wasn’t keen on starting a shootout in a parking lot, and she didn’t think she could take out the whole bunch of them anyway. All in all, it seemed like a good time to make herself scarce.

  She slipped between another pair of vehicles, one of which was a van with airbrushed side panels that displayed a DayGlo pink tropical sunset. As she came even with the rear bumper, she ducked behind the van, dropped to the ground, and rolled underneath.

  With any luck, no one had seen her disappearing act. But since the underside of the van was the first place anyone would look, she needed to relocate.

  And fast. She heard a clatter of running footsteps. Chiu and his henchman were on their way.

  On elbows and knees she wriggled under an adjacent pickup truck. The next vehicle in line was a sports car, low to the ground, a tight fit, but by belly-crawling in a decent imitation of an inchworm, she made it. She was about to try for the car that came next when she heard the footsteps come up short, yards away.

  She lay still, looking over her shoulder. Two pairs of legs were visible by the rear of the van.

  Her pursuers kept their voices low, and she couldn’t make out what they were saying. But she could guess. Their quarry had vanished, and they couldn’t figure out where she’d gone.

  Predictably, Chiu’s right-hand man bent down and peered cautiously under the van.

  Moving as little as possible, Bonnie reached into her purse and closed her hand over the .22. If the bastard spotted her, she would open up on him and his boss. She could bust up their ankles, anyway. Not that a broken ankle would stop them from shooting her dead.

  After a moment that went on much too long, the guy straightened up. He hadn’t seen her.

  More unintelligible conversation. The four legs shifted restlessly. She had the sense that Chiu and his pal were getting antsy, ready to move on.

  Then Sammy started to sing.

  At first she didn’t understand what was happening. She heard a muffled melody, which she recognized as a Beatles tune, “A Hard Day’s Night.” Her ringtone.

  Her fucking phone.

  She crammed her hand into her purse, fumbling for the cell phone and the volume control on the side. She muted the damn thing.

  Then she lay motionless, waiting.

  The bad guys had stopped shifting around. They were rigid, listening.

  “You hear that?” a voice asked, just loud enough for the words to come through. Chiu’s voice.

  The answer was indistinct but affirmative.

  No more talk. No movement.

  If they looked under the van again, they might see her this time.

  She tightened her grip on the gun and waited to find out if she would need it.

  - — -

  “I think it came from over there,” Lam said, pointing down the line of cars that ran north of the airbrushed van.

  Chiu wasn’t sure. The sound had been faint. It might have originated anywhere. It might have been someone else’s phone—not Parker’s at all.

  “All right,” he said slowly. “Here’s the plan. We split up, check out the cars in both directions. Look under each one. She’s armed, so—”

  “Oh, man,” Lam said, staring past him with an expression of disgust.

  Chiu turned and saw Eng jogging their way, his face flushed, the MAC machine pistol barely concealed under the loose folds of his rain poncho.

  “She’s on to us, dai lo,” he said. “She never showed.”

  Chiu rarely got angry, but at this moment he felt an urge to strike Kicker across the face. He suppressed the impulse with effort.

  “You were instructed to stay by the Jeep,” he said, raising his voice in his only concession to emotion.

  “I told you, she figured it out—”

  “Like we don’t already know that?”

  “I just thought—”

  “Don’t think. Don’t ever think. If she knows the Jeep is unguarded, she’ll make a run for it.”

  Lam pointed. “She already is.”

  - — -

  Bonnie had caught enough of the conversation to know one of the guys had left his post. That was enough for her. She scrambled out from under the sports car and broke into a sprint.

  The Jeep was dead ahead, easily identifiable by its vomit green coloring. There were advantages to driving a vehicle that was ugly as shit.

  She cut across a long open stretch of asphalt, closing on her ride. When she looked back through, she saw three figures in black coming after her.

  Fuckity-fuck fuck.

  The movies knew how to make the most of a situation like this. The victim was always fumbling with her keys, dropping them, then having trouble starting the car, and meanwhile the bad guys were inexorably closing in.

  Bonnie didn’t have time for that Hollywood bullshit. She got the door open and the engine running inside of two seconds, and then she was reversing out of the space, throwing the Jeep into forward gear, tearing away with a shriek of tires. She kept her head down, expecting gunfire, but the Long Fong Boyz apparently weren’t any more eager than she was to open up with their firearms in a public place.

  She skidded out of the lot and onto the first on-ramp she could find.

  - — -

  Chiu and his men said nothing until they were back in the Escalade. Then Eng hung his head and muttered, “My fuck-up, dai lo. It’s all on me.”

  Chiu had calmed himself by now. He patted Kicker gently on the shoulder. “Today wasn’t the day to take her. Wrong place, wrong time.”

  “Little shit has nine lives,” Lam said bitterly.

  Eng was eager to make amends. “We can chase her down right now. Catch up to her, no problem.”

  “No.” Chiu had already allowed impatience to master his better judgment. He would not repeat the mistake. “We wait for nightfall. Let her have the sunlight. In the dark she’ll be ours.”

  “She shouldn’t live that long,” Lam said.

  “Don’t sweat it. There’s a kill clock ticking. And we can find her again any time.”

  Lam pursed his lips, pouting. “I wanna dome her. Just lemme take the shot.”

  “First we rip her with the machine gun,” Eng said, patting the MAC-11.

  “Yeah, okay,” Lam said, “but before she bleeds out, I want the head shot. Wanna put a Hydroshock in her brainpan. I wanna look into her bright blue eyes and kiss her dead.”

  Chiu smiled indulgently. “You’re a crazy little motherfucker, ain’t you, Monkey? Shit, you can take the shot. It’s yours.”

  Lam grinned, mollified, and Chiu shook his head in amusement. It took very little to make his guys happy.

  Really, they were so much like children sometimes.

  CHAPTER 31

  Bonnie drove twenty miles at high speed before deciding the Long Fong Boyz weren’t still on her ass. At that point she slowed down a little, lit a cig, and checked Sammy to see who’d been rude enough to call at the most inconvenient time.

  Des. Of course.

  She wasn’t sure she wanted to talk to him, but she returned his call anyway. “What’s buzzin’, cousin?”

  “Just checking in. Where are you?”

  “In motion. As usual.”

  “Things settle down yet?”

  “Oh, sure. Everything’s hunky-dory. I got a mob wiseguy on my ass, plus the Asian gang I told you about. And my latest client just got snuffed.”

  “What?” He sounded as if he hadn’t heard, or just couldn’t take it in.

  “The guy who hired me for the job I did yesterday. Kaput.”

  The startled silence on his end lasted five long seconds. Bonnie counted.

  “But,” he said finally, “but how … how could that happen?”
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  “People get killed in this game, Des. That’s something you oughta know by now.”

  “Yes … sure …”

  “Don’t let it throw you. I got a master plan to make it all copacetic. Just let me do my thing, and you’ll hear from me when you hear from me.”

  “You’re still not sleeping over?”

  “Nuh-uh. I’m kind of a bullet magnet right now. Anything else you wanted to talk about?”

  There was a beat of silence on the line. “That new cop, Bradley Walsh, came by the gallery a little while ago.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a purely official visit. The vibe I got is that he knows about us. And he’s interested in you.”

  “Everybody’s interested in me. I’m friggin’ irresistible.”

  “I’m serious. I had the impression he was checking me out, sizing up the competition.”

  “He’s a kid, Des.”

  “I don’t know. He seems like a decent enough guy. And he clearly cares about you.”

  She thought of the Xeroxed file. More than you know, she thought. “You trying to set me up with him or something?”

  “No, I’m just saying …”

  “What?”

  “That you might be better off, that’s all. A young, healthy guy like him …”

  “An action figure whose moving parts are still moving? That it?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Jeez, Des. I never took you for a guy with a critical shortage of self-esteem.”

  “It’s not that, exactly. It’s … Never mind.”

  She had an idea of what he wanted to say, but this wasn’t a talk they could have on the phone. “Look, I gotta get off. My connection’s breaking up.”

  That was a lie, and she figured he knew it.

  “Okay, Parker. Take care.”

  “Always do.”

  Another lie. That made two in a row.

  She clicked off and fired up another cig.

  - — -

  As she approached the parkway’s Maritime exit, she placed a call to Mama Blessing. “Yo, Mama. Doing business today?”