Blood in the Water

by Michael Prescott

  The distance wasn’t great, but she missed on her first attempt, the bullet plowing into a plasterboard wall. He turned, dropping the bottle, which shattered in a foaming geyser on the floor, and from his waistband he plucked a sleek semiauto pistol, a weapon much nicer than hers.

  If she missed him a second time, he would kill her. This thought was absolutely clear in her mind as she took aim and squeezed the trigger once.

  The second shot caught him high in the chest, just below the collarbone. He went down in a tangle of jerking limbs. From the other room came a stampede of footsteps. His two friends, charging this way.

  Bonnie closed the distance between herself and the dying man in two long strides. She plucked his gun from the floor where he’d dropped it. She’d never fired a semiautomatic before. Luckily for her, he’d already released the safety. She wouldn’t have known how. She only knew it was a better gun than the antique revolver she’d brought to this show.

  The other two appeared at the end of the hall, weapons drawn. Beer and rage had made them invincible, or so they thought. And their adversary was only a little girl.

  They rushed her, howling, and she snapped off four shots and brought the lead man down.

  The one at the rear sobered up in a hurry. He spun, retreating. She steadied the gun and shot him squarely in the back.

  Blood everywhere, and low moans, and her ears ringing. She remembered being surprised that gunshots were so much louder indoors.

  The first man in the hallway was Lucas Hatch, the one whose picture had been in the paper, the one whose prints were on the cartridge cases, the one who’d murdered her folks. He was gutshot and stunned, but still alive until she calmly aimed the gun at him at point-blank range and drilled the coup de grâce through his forehead.

  The other man had died instantly, the bullet stopping his heart. Sheer luck, but she would take it.

  She knew there was no chance the shots would bring the police—not in a location this remote, in a rural area where people fired off guns at foxes and deer. She took her time cleaning herself up—there was blood on her, but not her own—and making sure to wipe down any surfaces she’d touched. It had never occurred to her to wear gloves.

  When she was done, she searched the house and found some money, which she took, and more cash in her first victim’s pocket. She took that also.

  Before leaving, she spent a minute looking at the three corpses she had made. Her first victim had taken the longest to die—a slow, rasping, gurgling death as he lay flat on his back, eyelids fluttering like moth wings. Now he lay still, as did the others. Three lives wiped out in less time than it took to tell it. She wondered how she felt about that. She gave the question serious thought, rejecting several possible answers. The word she settled on was: satisfied.

  Yes. It was satisfaction she felt, the sense of a job done. A dirty, miserable job, maybe, a demeaning and ugly job, but a necessary one. Nobody else would have done it for her. The police had scarcely looked for these three, had scarcely cared. The authorities talked a good game, but you couldn’t count on them. Couldn’t count on anyone except yourself. On this night she’d proved she could take care of business even if no one else would or could. She could take a life, and another and another, and calmly wash up afterward, and wipe down the walls and fixtures, and walk away.

  She left the farmhouse and hiked back into town, where she found a diner. She downed two cheeseburgers and a milkshake. It was the best meal she’d ever tasted, and she paid for it with a dead man’s cash.

  So that was what had gone down in Buckington, Ohio, fourteen years ago.

  Nothing ever changed. Tonight she would break into the farmhouse again.

  CHAPTER 34

  The bedroom curtains were shut, lights off. A white noise machine hissed on the nightstand, camouflage for the caterwauling of the twins down the hall.

  Frank Lazzaro knelt on the hardwood floor, naked, his bare knees resting on polished mahogany. Around him flickered a semicircle of votive candles. They were black, the color of protection and vengeance, and they were planted in tall glass jars inscribed Muerte Contra Mas Enemigos. Death to My Enemies. Their flames cast a dim wavering glow over the shrine to Santa Muerte.

  It was a low altar bedecked with flowers, bearing an effigy of the saint in miniature, carved out of ironwood by a sculptor in a Newark barrio, the wood painted white as bone. Vestments of velvet robed the figure; a silken shawl hooded the skull. In the chancy firelight, the crevices and hollows of the face seemed to twitch with stirrings of life. A gilt-edged oval mirror, propped behind the statue, caught Frank’s own face and threw it back at him, and somehow the two faces blended, merged, like images in a fever dream.

  “Holiest Death,” Frank whispered, “deliver my enemy into my hands. Give me the one who seeks my life. Let me teach her pain. All this I ask, as your faithful servant.”

  On the floor beside him was the knife from the car, the blade already purified in a thread of candle flame. He lifted the knife and drew the blade across his the palm of his left hand, opening a thin seam, then held the hand over the shrine and let dark red drops patter into a bowl.

  “A blood offering,” he said solemnly. “My blood for hers.”

  He knew his appeal would not go unheard. His dark angel had never failed him. Throughout his life, some power greater than himself had been looking out for him, directing his steps, keeping him whole. And preserving within his heart of hearts his greatest asset, the uncomplicated will to hate.

  People talked all the time about the power of love. They hardly ever acknowledged the power of hate. Yet for Frank’s money, hate could be one hell of a motivator. Hate founded empires, crushed enemies, built riches. Hate made sheep into wolves and meadows into battlefields. Frank loved hate. He nurtured it. He drew strength from it.

  Hate would give him the edge. It was why he would destroy Bonnie Parker. The girl didn’t have enough hate in her. She thought she was tough. But she didn’t know what real toughness was, the toughness that would make a man with a broken back crawl over needles with a knife clenched in his teeth, for the pure pleasure of revenge.

  For all her street smarts, she was an innocent compared to him. She had no idea what she was up against, or what lay in store for her. If she knew, she would put her gun into her pretty mouth and squeeze the trigger right now.

  “Holiest Death,” Frank intoned again, “deliver my enemy …”

  He repeated the prayer. There was a shit storm coming at him from all directions, and he needed more than mortal resources to see it through.

  Parker was only one of his problems. There was the coming war with the Long Fong Boyz. And the A&P thing. It was possible that witnesses would place him at the store after he’d denied being there. But maybe no wits would come forward. And if any did, he could use his police contacts to learn their names, and then he would find a way to make them change their story or, failing that, to disappear.

  It could all be handled. Nothing could bring him down.

  He wished the supermarket thing hadn’t blown back on him, though. It had never occurred to him that the killing might be connected with the hit on Leo Rambaldi, a twenty-year-old job that should have been long forgotten. He’d assumed the police would regard the murder as entirely random.

  Random …

  A voice penetrated his thoughts. Bonnie Parker’s voice.

  You might be good enough to take down an orthodontist or some random schmuck at the grocery store …

  The words had flown right past him in the lobby of the Sheraton, but he zeroed in on them now. How the hell could she have known anything about a grocery store?

  She sure as shit hadn’t made the connection with Rambaldi, a hit that took place when she was still in elementary school. Hell, she couldn’t have known he was even at the A&P. No one knew. No one but him … and his wife.

  He raised his head. Deep within him, the black beast stirred.

  Down the hall, the babies had quit yowling. V
ictoria must have finally soothed the damn kids to sleep.

  He thought about her. She’d been increasingly distant and difficult. She’d even dared to suggest divorce.

  But she couldn’t be working against him. No way. Even if she’d somehow found out about Parker, she would never hook up with an assassin. Would never try to take out her own husband, the father of her children.

  Would she?

  The beast was prowling now. Slinking out of its cave, sniffing the air. Restless. Hungry.

  Frank stood. He turned on the lights but left the curtains shut, the candles burning. He applied a Band-Aid to his hand, then dressed himself, taking the time to fasten his French cuffs and knot his tie. He wound his belt slowly through all eight belt loops, enjoying the feel of the soft leather and the hard stainless steel buckle.

  Leaving the bedroom, he descended to ground level. He found Victoria in the kitchen, stirring a pot of marinara sauce. The housekeeper, Gabrielle, had left early, and Frank and his wife were the only adults in the place.

  “I heard you went out today,” Frank said. “Gabby mentioned it.”

  This was a lie. She had said no such thing.

  “Oh,” Victoria said. “Yes. I was out for a while.”

  Frank leaned against the counter, watching the ladle as it made slow spirals in the sauce. “Where’d you go?”

  “Lydia’s.” There was a pause. She seemed to feel the need to say more. “They don’t have power. She asked for help cleaning out the fridge.”

  “What’d you do with the food?”

  “Had to throw it out.”

  “You could’ve brought it here. We have room.”

  “I guess so. I didn’t think of that. It wasn’t very much anyway.”

  “If it wasn’t much, why’d she need your help?”

  “I think the storm had her kind of shook up. She wanted someone to talk to.”

  “You were out for a long time, Gabby said. Hours.”

  “Was I?”

  “Wouldn’t have thought you’d spend that much time with Lydia.”

  “I guess I didn’t notice the time.”

  He watched her hands. One hand on the ladle, the other holding the long handle of the pot.

  People thought liars gave themselves away with their eyes. Frank knew better. It was the hands. It was always the hands.

  “Go anywhere else?” he asked.

  “No. Just drove around a little.”

  “Drove around? In this mess?”

  “Looking at the damage.”

  “Along the shore?”

  “In that direction.”

  The ladle stirring, stirring, its actions jerkier than before. The other hand gripping the pot too tightly. Knuckles going pale with pressure.

  “You didn’t go south?”

  “South?”

  “To Brighton Cove?”

  “No. Why would I go there?”

  Her hands were trembling, palsied. A liar’s hands.

  That low warning rumble only he could hear—it was the black beast’s growl.

  “Frank?”

  He didn’t answer.

  Slowly he unbuckled his belt and began to slide it free.

  CHAPTER 35

  Bonnie took a last look at herself in the Jeep’s rearview mirror, steadying her nerves.

  Stripes of eye-black scored her cheeks like war paint. A navy blue watch cap helmeted her hair. A zippered warm-up suit, navy also, concealed the rest of her. She wore black sneakers and black leather gloves.

  A shadow among shadows. That was the idea. She might not cut quite the same stylish figure as Anne Hathaway in her Catwoman getup, but she was going for the same general effect.

  The Jeep was hidden in the dense pine woods behind the Lazzaro house. She’d gone off-road and stashed it among the evergreens as the sun was setting. Now the sky was turning purple, the stars and moon blotted out by a carpet of heavy cumulus. Forecast: cloudy with a chance of bullets.

  She slid out of the driver’s seat and opened the Jeep’s rear compartment, where all her goodies were stored under a blanket. For now, she didn’t need the TEC-9 machine pistol or the infrared camcorder. She took Alec’s gun, the Walther .22, and stuck it in her waistband. The rest of her gear was already stowed in a blue-black backpack. Dark blue, as any good burglar knew, made better nighttime camouflage than pure black.

  A yard from the Jeep, a footpath snaked through the woods. Google Earth’s satellite photo had clearly shown the path’s circuitous route, a route that terminated at the rear gate of the Lazzaro residence.

  Using her keychain flashlight, she hiked the path until Frank’s property came into view. By Saddle River standards, it was a modest home, not one of the monster mansions put up by Wall Street bad boys to prove they had the biggest dicks on the planet. The house occupied a large parcel of land protected by a high wrought-iron fence. Lights burned in windows on the ground floor and the second story; Victoria had said the place was running on a generator hooked up to a natural gas line. The backyard was checkered with strategically placed ground lighting that showed off a kidney-shaped pool, presently covered by a winter tarpaulin, and a gazebo draped in ivy. Blown debris lay everywhere, a gift from the storm.

  There was the requisite three-car garage, the rooftop satellite dish, the landscaped beds of fall flowers. The whole setup was a visual lesson to the younger set: Yes, kids, crime really does pay.

  In the breezy night, amid the softly stirring pines, Chez Lazzaro actually seemed like a pretty nice place to live.

  Except for the screams.

  Bonnie didn’t hear them at first. They were faint, muffled by distance and double-pane windows. Then the wind shifted, and they reached her—a woman’s cries, part shriek, part sob.

  Victoria’s cries. They had to be.

  Bonnie’s intention had been to wait until the windows were dark, the house asleep. It looked like her plans had changed. Frank was doing something awful to his wife, and it had to stop.

  At the hardware store in McKendree Park, she bought a bolt cutter, which she’d stashed in the pack. She applied it to the padlocked chain, severing one of the links, then opened the gate wide enough to slip through.

  Quickly she crossed the dangerous open ground of the backyard and caught her breath, huddling against the rear wall of the garage, just as she’d huddled against the farmhouse in Ohio fourteen years ago.

  At this distance, she could hear the screams more clearly, along with some garbled, plaintive words. It sounded like Victoria was begging her husband to stop. He wasn’t listening, of course. The words were interrupted by an ugly percussive noise, the sound of impact. He was beating her.

  From her phone conversation with Victoria, Bonnie knew that the way into the house was through the garage. She placed duct tape on a side window, shattered the glass with her elbow, and peeled away the shards along with the tape. She climbed through, finding herself in an unlit space occupied by a Mercedes and a BMW. His-and-hers luxury autos. Sweet.

  The door at the other side of the garage would lead her into the house. The only obstacle was the alarm system. The garage wasn’t on the system, but all access points to the house itself were always armed.

  Victoria had described the setup in detail. The door was on a thirty-second delay. The keypad was just inside. Bonnie didn’t care about the keypad. Entering the passcode would make it obvious that the hit was an inside job, which was the very thing she wanted to avoid. What she was after was the main control box, which would set off the alarm siren and send a telephone signal to the police via landline thirty seconds after the door opened.

  It was standard procedure to separate the keypad from the system control panel. In her duplex Bonnie had hidden the alarm system’s control box at the back of her bedroom closet, behind a sheet of plywood that created the false wall. Frank had been less clever—or less paranoid. The control box for his system was mounted in a hall closet just ten feet past the door to the garage.

  Easy peas
y, except for one little hitch. The ten-foot stretch of hallway was covered by a motion detector—and it had no built-in delay.

  The alarm system operated on different zones, and according to Victoria, her husband typically activated the ground floor level when the two of them had gone upstairs for the evening. Which meant the hallway sensor might be working right now.

  Happily there was a workaround. From Victoria, Bonnie had learned the make and model of the alarm system, as well as the helpful fact that all the motion sensors were wireless. After that, she’d spent time searching the web to track down the proprietary radio frequency used by the system’s manufacturer for their wireless connections.

  Now here was the beauty part. Two years ago, when working a particularly challenging surveillance job that had required a little B&E, she’d purchased a signal jammer—a box the size of a cigarette pack that could be adjusted to interfere with a range of frequencies. At present it was set to 319.5 MHz. If her research panned out, it would render the motion sensor incapable of communicating with the master control. She could stroll right past the sensor without fear.

  All she had to do was get the door open, sprint down the hall to the closet, and tear the master control out of the wall. With the wires disconnected, the system would be completely disabled.

  That was the theory, anyhow. If she was wrong and the signal wasn’t jammed—or if she didn’t reach the control box in time to beat the countdown—then a very loud siren would start blaring. The police would be called too, but she didn’t care about them. It was Frank who worried her. The siren would spoil any chance of taking him by surprise.

  She produced the pick set from her pack and went to work on the door. She could have done the job more quickly by bumping the lock, but that method was noisy.

  As it was, she needed less than a minute to drop the pins into the right configuration to unlock the door. She entered the house, moving fast because she now had less than thirty seconds to kill the alarm.