Cold Around the Heart, Page 2

  “I’ll put it on my to-do list.”

  “You should. Get a preview of your next twenty years. A twelve-by-twelve cell with a bull dyke for a roommate. An hour of exercise in the yard every day.”

  “I thought you said the jury would be swayed by my self-defense plea.”

  “I said it was possible. It’s also possible you could go away for the duration. If this state still had the death penalty, you could even get the needle.”

  “Good thing they repealed it, then.”

  “Sure is, Parker. You have such delicate wrists. It might be hard to find a vein.”

  He left. She stared down at the plate of scallops, not so hungry anymore. But to leave them uneaten would be to give him a kind of victory. She ate them all, feeling them slide down her throat like cold dead things.

  “You and Danny don’t get along so well, do you?” Lizbeth asked when she refilled the lemonade glass.

  Bonnie wondered how much the waitress had heard or guessed. How much anyone in town really knew. “He’s an asshole.”

  “Don’t I know it. Thinks he’s God’s gift. Always been that way. I knew him since I was a kid. He grew up next door to me.”

  “Yeah?”

  “His family had this dog, a Dalmatian. Pepper, her name was. Do you know they kept that dog locked in a shed out back, day and night, all year long? And they never cleaned it out. I mean, she must’ve been ankle deep in her own shit. It was Danny’s job to feed her. He’d open the shed a crack, toss in some dog chow, and you’d hear him slam the door, bam! Animal cruelty is what it was.”

  “Nobody reported it?”

  “You know how it is in this town. No one wants to make waves. And with his dad on the force ...”

  “Yeah. I know how it is.”

  “That’s the thing about Danny, though. He wasn’t just lazy or careless about the dog. I think he got a kick out of keeping her shut up in there. I think he liked it.”

  “Great guy to have as chief of police.”

  “I wouldn’t cross him, that’s for sure. He’s not the brightest, but he’s bullheaded as all get-out. And I think he still likes it—slamming that door.”

  Bonnie thought about that as she finished her dinner. What she’d learned about Dan didn’t come as any shock. Cruelty and evil rarely surprised her; she didn’t hold a high opinion of human nature to begin with.

  Still, while she might not like people all that much, she did like animals. And what Dan Maguire had done to his dog Pepper really toasted her Pop-Tarts.

  She left Lizbeth a nice tip, as always, then took a stroll to the pet store down the street. In the alley behind the store, she found plastic bags of animal waste in a trash bin. She took a good-sized bag and sauntered over to the police station on High Street, just off Main. Dan’s car was in the parking lot. His personal car, a shiny new Buick Regal. It was locked up tight, but the front window on the driver’s side was open a few inches.

  “You can smell my stink, huh, Danny boy?” Bonnie tore open the bag. “Well, smell this.”

  She poured the bag’s contents through the gap in the window, piling up a noxious brown hill on the leather seat.

  As she walked away, flies were already swarming around the Buick, fighting for a piece of the action, and life was good.

  CHAPTER 2

   

  Pascal had enjoyed cutting the woman’s throat.

  There was an art to it. Too deep a cut would produce a fountain of arterial spray from the carotid. The mess would be considerable. Pascal disliked messes. Too shallow a cut, on the other hand, would leave the victim with enough strength to cry out and perhaps fight back.

  An amateur would simply jam the blade into the neck and rip it sideways. This was mere butchery, of no aesthetic value whatsoever. The expert, the man who took pride in his work, understood the importance of self-control. The knife, like any other weapon, was an extension of one’s own body, and the body was the avatar of the mind. A calm and focused mind would do neat and careful work.

  Pascal had been supremely calm as he touched the knife edge to the woman’s throat, applying the perfect degree of pressure while he guided the blade in a light semicircle that opened a deceptively thin seam in her white skin. It had looked like nothing, that seam, barely more than a paper cut, except for the sudden spill of blood in a thin but steady flow. She had clutched her neck, trying to speak, her eyes huge and frightened, her throat weeping red tears. And he had watched, appraising his work with a connoisseur’s eye and judging it good.

  That was yesterday, in Manhattan. The job had gone well, leading him one step closer to his objective.

  It was seven PM when he arrived in Brighton Cove and checked into the only motel on the highway, the Coach House, an L-shaped cluster of single-story units huddled behind a dilapidated Vacancy sign. As the establishment’s sole amenity and selling point, the sign boasted CABLE TV.

  He parked the Lexus outside the office and dinged the bell at the registration desk, summoning the sweaty overweight manager. He paid in cash, requesting a room without neighbors—a request easily met, as the motel was largely empty. There was a moment when Pascal looked up from his wallet to find the manager studying him with shifty, worryingly alert eyes. But it was only a moment, and then the man’s features relaxed into indolent indifference.

  Pascal gave it little thought. His face often drew stares.

  In his room, he laid his suitcase on a wheezing luggage rack. Inside were several changes of clothes, recently laundered at a public laundromat, neatly folded and stacked. Years of traveling had made him an expert at packing with maximum efficiency. There were also multiple pairs of black leather gloves, sheepskin leather lined in cashmere, identical to the pair he was wearing. He wore gloves nearly always. He had to.

  In addition to the suitcase, he carried a duffel bag stocked with gear. The contents of the bag made commercial air travel impractical. He relied on an expensive but discreet service that could send a private aircraft to any landing field in the western hemisphere on short notice.

  His work had taken him all over the world. He loved cities, the rush and crush of crowds, the anonymity of urban life. In a provincial backwater such as this, a man with his features stood out too sharply. He disliked being noticed, preferring to pass unseen and unremembered.

  Still, his appearance had its advantages. Some of his employers had been known to call him El Diablo, and he did not think the nickname was spoken entirely in jest. They regarded him with something akin to superstitious fear. That was good. Fear was always good.

  Most of his assignments had taken place south of the border. Seldom had he visited the United States, and for that he was glad. He despised the effete degeneracy of this country, the softness of its people, their arrogance and complacency. Their ancestors had been men of parts, but these moderns were bloodless parvenus. Eunuchs—infantilized, permanently needy, shirking responsibility, fearing hardship—the useless products of a fin-de-siecle culture.

  He was a man of a different spirit and a different age. To his employers he might be a devil, but when he looked into the mirror he saw a wandering privateer, a knight errant. Every era had its freebooters, its bandits, its mercenaries—the men who belonged to no country, who survived by strength and skill, shifting for themselves, accepting isolation, deprivation, and danger. Those few were truly alive. The rest were bloated slugs battening on pap—the burghers and rentiers. Today there were more of them than ever, and fewer men like him.

  He had visited a fortuneteller once, a white-haired lady in a Sao Paulo apartment crawling with cats. She told him he had been a knight in the Crusades. Fired with zeal, he had slaughtered the infidels in many battles before falling at the gates of Jerusalem. Toward the end of his life, she said, he had begun to doubt the virtues of war. Had he lived, he might have become a spiritual seeker. But it was not to be—not in that lifetime. Perhaps in this one.

  He could not say how much he believed of her story. But he did think he
was moving along a spiritual path. He might be a monster—most people would say so—but if so, he was a self-aware monster. Like Prospero taking ownership of Caliban, he could say of himself, “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.”

  Whether or not the fortuneteller had read him truly, he was certain this lifetime was not his first. He saw his essential self as a river flowing through many lands. Different terrain, different people crowding the banks, but always the same river, the constant current of his being. He had worn other lives like so many suits of clothes, and there were more lives to come, a wearying succession of them, with never an end. He did not think there was a higher purpose or ultimate meaning to it all. He did not think it was part of a master plan. It was just how things were. There was no point to it, except to exist and to go on existing, forever and ever, amen.

  People called him crazy when he talked like that, so he had learned not to talk of it. He knew, though. What the dull-witted understood as reality was no more than a glimmer of light on water. True reality was not the object of contemplation, but the mind that contemplated. He had known only one other person who understood. She had been lost to him for years, yet she was still more real than anything around him, more truly present than any passing strangers. His Beatrice, his Galatea, his morning and evening star.

  He hung his suit in the closet and placed a few items around the room, but left most of his belongings in his luggage. In the event of a hasty departure he would have no time to repack. His satchel, bearing several items of a high-tech nature, remained stowed in the Lexus. He did not expect to need it. From years of experience, he had developed a sixth sense about such things. He knew when he was on the verge of success. He could feel it in his nerve endings, taste it at the back of his throat. His intuition had never failed him. It would not mislead him now.

  Soon, very soon, his work would be done, and he would be on his way out of this decadent country, and for the first time in his life he would be free. Finally—free.

  His gloved hands flexed, and he felt his mouth stiffen in a smile.

  CHAPTER 3

   

  The Tenth Avenue Freeze-out in Miramar was an ice cream parlor named after an old Bruce Springsteen song, which the locals would know, because while to most people Springsteen might be just another washed-up sexagenarian rocker, around here he was a graying, frog-voiced demigod. The place offered a variety of sundaes and cones with Springsteen-inspired names like The Boss and The E Street Shuffle, none of which made any sense in the context of ice cream. Bonnie ordered a Thunder Road, two scoops of dark chocolate in a sugar cone.

  She hung out in the parking lot, working on the cone and chuckling occasionally as she imagined Dan Maguire’s reaction when he found a load of dog poop in his car. She was a big chuckler, did it a lot. At times it was more like a chortle. Like now, for instance.

  She’d needed a pick-me-up. Things had been rough lately. Her income was down, way down. The chief’s whisper campaign was working. As word got around that Bonnie Parker was involved in some ugly business that had gotten a client killed, she found herself less likely to get the small, everyday jobs any PI could handle—spying on a wayward spouse, tracing a runaway kid. Milk runs, but they paid the bills.

  Without the usual scut work, she was reduced to waiting for another one of her special cases, the kind that called on her particular, unadvertised skill set. Not that she was exactly itching to put another notch in her gun, but, hell, a girl had to eat.

  She could hardly advertise her custom services in the Yellow Pages, and her clients, knowing they were accessories, weren’t likely to talk; but somehow word got around. There were rumors. In a small town there were always rumors. The previous police chief, a graying grandfatherly type who knew how the world worked, had been willing to look the other way. Dan Maguire was less understanding. He didn’t like anyone freelancing on his turf.

  She found herself licking the cone faster in a losing battle to consume it before it dripped all over her arm.

  Anyway, another job would come along. There was a steady demand for her expertise. Since opening her PI shop, she’d taken care of five people. One of the five had been put down in self-defense, and the other four had been eliminated proactively, so to speak. What the hell, if the government could start a preemptive war, she was entitled to do some preempting of her own.

  Things would work out. Or she would end up dead, and all her worries would be over. It wasn’t so far-fetched. She was twenty-eight years old and figured there was an excellent chance she wouldn’t make it to thirty. Like her namesake, she seemed fated to die young, and not in bed. But like the original Bonnie Parker, she would have had a hell of a run.

  ***

  On her way home from Miramar, she took a detour to Atlantic Avenue, parking a few doors down from number 44, the home of Mr. and Mrs. Andrew Wright and their daughter, Sienna, a sophomore at Holy Cross High School.

  She got out of the Jeep. The tree-lined street was growing dark. The trees creaked in the wind, heavy branches swaying.

  Next to 44 Atlantic was a vacant lot, large and overgrown. She hiked through a tangle of pine trees and holly bushes, binoculars swinging from her neck.

  A fence divided the Wrights’ backyard from the empty lot. Back in January, Bonnie had climbed the fence, shimmied up a tree outside Sienna Wright’s bedroom, and forced the window. No one had been home, making it easy for her to install a UHF transmitter inside the smoke detector in the ceiling. The detector was hardwired into the main current, and she had run the bug off the current also.

  The transmitter had a range of two hundred yards, more than adequate to reach the oak tree where the receiver-recorder mechanism was concealed in a knothole. The receiver ran on a lithium-ion battery which had to be changed weekly.

  She replaced the battery, then yanked the 2GB thumb drive from the receiver’s USB port and slapped in a new one. The old one went into her pocket.

  Before leaving, she raised the binoculars and scoped out the upstairs window on the far left. The curtains were open and the girl was inside, talking on her cell phone. She looked relaxed and happy. Bonnie smiled.

  A lot of the time she found herself feeling dirty. But not now.

  Watching Sienna, she felt clean.

  ***

  Her place on Windlass Court was as compact as a gingerbread house in a fairy tale, but with a bigger mortgage. The house was originally a single-family residence, but sometime in the ’70s, when real estate values started to soar, the owner had the inspiration of dividing it in two, making a duplex out of it. Bonnie owned the west side of the building, which put her marginally farther from the ocean than her next-door neighbor, Gloria Biggs.

  Proximity to the ocean was not much of a selling point in any case, since the house was located eight blocks inland, a hundred yards from the railroad tracks. At night, instead of hearing the roar of the surf, she could listen to the rumble of commuter trains and the occasional howl of the town fire siren. Good times.

  She parked the Jeep in the garage, which was rigged with a high-intensity overhead light that came on when the door opened. The light allowed her to see every inch of the space before she pulled in. Unlike other people, she didn’t pile up cardboard boxes or old furniture in her garage. Clutter was dangerous. It offered concealment for the kind of person who wanted to be concealed.

  The garage was separate from the house. She walked along a path that had been overgrown with shrubbery when she bought the place. She’d convinced Mrs. Biggs the yard would look neater if all those sprawling, messy plants were cleared out and replaced with a few flowerbeds. She didn’t give a crap about landscaping. She just didn’t want somebody jumping her from behind a hedge.

  Mrs. Biggs was outside now, watering the flowers. The watering can had lady bugs painted on it. Mrs. Biggs’ sweater—yeah, she wore a sweater in August—was also adorned with lady bugs. Big lady bug fan, was Mrs. Biggs.

  “Hey, Gloria,” Bonnie said, sketching a wave.r />
  She looked up from her roses. “That man called again.”

  Bonnie stopped. “Did he? What’d he say this time?”

  “He wants to know what you did with the gun. The thirty-eight, he said. That’s a revolver, isn’t it?” She might be seventy-something years old, but she was still sharp as hell.

  “Yeah.”

  “He said it could be in a landfill or a lake, or you might have held on to it. He told me to ask if you have it hidden in the house.”

  “I don’t.”

  “No need to tell me. I wasn’t actually asking. And there was one other thing.”

  “Okay.”

  “He said he knows why you did it. You were protecting the girl.”

  She crossed her arms. “He said that?”

  “Yes. Just that way—the girl. No name. I asked, what girl? He only laughed and hung up. He’s a sly one, isn’t he, or at least he thinks he is.”

  “Caller ID?”

  “Unknown party, same as always. I star-sixty-nined him, but all I got was a recording that said the service wasn’t available for that number.”

  It wouldn’t have mattered. He had to be using a burner—a throwaway cell phone, the kind that couldn’t be traced. The only hope of IDing him was to hear his voice. Bonnie had thought about asking Mrs. Biggs’ permission to hook up a recording device to her landline. But she didn’t want her neighbor more involved than she already was.

  “Okay, thanks, Gloria. I guess you’re wondering what this is all about.”

  “None of my beeswax. Which is exactly what I tell people when they ask about you.”

  “People ask?”

  “Oh yes. I say you’re quiet and you keep to yourself.”

  That was what neighbors always said about the killer in their midst. “Sorry if I’m making things awkward.”

  “Not at all, dear. I’m happy to have you around. It’s like having a superhero next door.”

  “I’m no hero, super or otherwise.”

  “Well, it’s certainly more interesting than living next door to a CPA or an insurance salesman. There’s just one thing that puzzles me. It’s a rather personal question, if you don’t mind.”