Cold Around the Heart, Page 4

  For twenty minutes he cruised the dark boulevards of the small beach towns. In a community called Miramar, he found an Italian restaurant that appeared acceptable. The decor was understated, the lighting dim, and the menu posted in the window offered a pleasing range of entrées at prices sufficiently high to promise adequate culinary quality. He allowed the hostess to seat him at an out-of-the-way table. As a solitary diner, he would naturally be exiled to some remote corner of the room; such was the unspoken rule at all dining establishments. He did not mind. He valued privacy.

  It had been some time since he had indulged his appetite for fine food and drink. When on an assignment he was strict with himself, maintaining spartan discipline. At all other times he walked a middle path between the self-denial of the ascetic and the self-indulgence of the sybarite. He was a connoisseur. He believed in enjoying the good things of body and soul, but always in moderation. Anything could be done well, done expertly, and when done to perfection, it was an expression of eternal truths. Even the simple act of eating could reflect a refinement of spirit and rise to an expression of art.

  As could the act of murder, of course. He was no moralist. He drew no normative distinctions.

  He spent some time studying the menu and chewing a breadstick, before informing the waiter that he would like the Chilean sea bass. It felt like the proper, patriotic dish for him to order.

  “I have not seen your wine list,” he added, “but perhaps a good Riesling ...”

  “I’m sorry, sir. This is a BYO place.”

  “A what?”

  “Bring-your-own. We don’t serve alcohol here. We don’t have a liquor license.”

  “No spirits? Not even wine?”

  “Sorry. But there’s a liquor store right down the street. You can buy anything there and bring it in.”

  “I must do my own shopping?” he asked incredulously.

  The waiter shrugged. “It’s the law, sir.”

  “Very well. Hold my table.”

  Pascal found all this most ridiculous. A restaurant in this price range that did not serve wine—madness. But symptomatic of American society, where the population no longer objected to laws that treated them like children. Quite the opposite—they wanted to be coddled and cocooned, diapered and burped by their smiling, officious overlords.

  He would not miss this decadent country when he departed. And he would never come back. He promised himself that.

  The liquor store was three doors down, a tawdry little shop with blinking lights in the windows and cases of beer stacked on the dirty tile floor. Beer and hard liquor were its mainstays, but there was wine at the back. In a refrigerated cabinet he saw an acceptable chardonnay.

  The cabinet worried him, though. He feared refrigerators. Did not use one in his home. Consumed only fresh foods stored at room temperature.

  But surely he could reach inside and grab the bottle. He had his gloves on. It would be all right.

  He opened the cabinet and retrieved the bottle, and there was no problem. The blast of cold air troubled him briefly, but the gloves did their job, and now he was retracing his steps through the store, toward the clerk at the checkout counter.

  But the bottle itself was cold, colder than he’d expected, and its chill began to invade the fingers of his right hand. He switched the bottle to his left. No good. Now he felt it in that hand also, felt it through the glove’s leather, or perhaps it was only his imagination, perhaps he was deceiving himself ...

  “You okay, mister?” the slovenly, sleepy-eyed clerk inquired.

  He tried shifting the bottle back to his right hand, but his fingers wouldn’t work and it slipped free and hit the floor with a crack. Nothing dramatic, no explosion of shards, merely a sharp percussive noise and the bottle rolling, a narrow seam open in its side, amber liquid spilling out.

  “Hey,” the clerk said.

  Pascal looked at the spreading puddle on the floor and felt ashamed, like a child who had wet himself. He stepped away from the puddle, toward the door.

  “Pal, you gotta pay for that.”

  Pascal wasn’t listening. He could feel the first needles of pain probing under his fingernails like bamboo shoots. He knew what was coming. He had to get out.

  “You break it, you bought—hey!”

  Out the door, down the street, running past the restaurant with its stupid, incomprehensible policies, onto the side street where he had parked the Lexus. He needed all his remaining coordination to insert the key into the door lock and then into the ignition slot.

  The SUV rumbled to life. He pulled away from the curb and drove east for a mile, arriving at the boardwalk, where he parked. He turned up the heat, set the blowers on high, and struggled to peel off his gloves.

  His hands came into view, the skin shading from dead white to cyanotic blue. For the moment all circulation past the wrists was cut off. The pain was an electric burn.

  He held his bare hands in front of the vents, letting hot air wash over them in a healing stream. The car’s interior grew hot, unbearably hot and close, stifling in the summer night, but he didn’t care. His hands needed warmth. Like hothouse flowers, they must be cleansed of the fatal chill.

  After several minutes the pain began to subside. His hands tingled as blood began to circulate again. The attack had been blessedly short-lived. He was not always so fortunate. Some attacks could last for several hours. One terrible episode had tormented him for a full day.

  He had consulted doctors around the world. All agreed that he suffered from a rare circulatory malady in which exposure to cold caused the blood vessels of his hands to spasm, restricting blood flow and leading to pain, numbness, and loss of muscular control. During a severe attack his fingers could become spastic, useless.

  That was all they could agree on. Every possible underlying cause had been considered. Hypothyroidism, Raynaud’s disease, scleroderma, diabetes ... Tests ruled out each possibility, leaving him with a mystery ailment that persisted despite all his efforts to find a cure.

  He had tried natural remedies, overcoming his skepticism of such things. He had applied homeopathic ointments and gobbled ginkgo biloba capsules. He had even visited a healer once, a shaman with a reputation for working miracles.

  Nothing had helped. His only relief was obtained by wearing gloves to protect his hands and warm them. In private, sometimes, he removed the gloves to massage his fingers. His hands were ugly things, scabby with old cuts and slow-healing sores; his poor circulation left him vulnerable to ulcers of the skin and impeded the healing of even minor lacerations. But he had grown accustomed to their appearance.

  What he never quite got used to was the cold. Even sheathed in black leather, his hands were cold. Sometimes merely chilly, sometimes freezing. He felt the cold always, and on rare occasions when another human being touched his bare fingers, that person felt the cold, as well. One woman—the one special woman of his life—had told him that it was like taking a corpse’s hand. She had not said it unkindly, but her words stayed with him.

  At times he wondered if he was not a corpse already, or some eldritch thing between cadaver and man. He wondered if the essential coldness of his nature, the very quality that made him so good at his job, had not migrated to his hands, as it would, in time, migrate to other parts of him, creeping over him and through him until eventually, like Shakespeare’s dying Falstaff, he would be cold all over, as cold as any stone.

  He shook his head, retreating from such thoughts, and focused on practicalities. He could not return to the restaurant, of course. It did not matter. He had lost his appetite.

  For now he needed rest, an hour or more of rest in a darkened room, to calm his mind and soothe his nerves.

  Before commencing the drive to the motel, he pulled on the gloves to hide the ugly travesties of his hands. He couldn’t help smiling at himself. All this, because he had insisted on wine with dinner—because he had been in a celebratory, even romantic mood.

  “You are an old fool, Pasca
l,” he said aloud in his native language, emphasizing the point with a cluck of his tongue.

  Forty-six was not old for any normal man. But it was ancient for a man in his line of work. He had outlasted all his rivals. He might as well have been a hundred years old, and just now he felt those years, a century’s worth.

  “It is good that this is the last job,” he whispered, putting the Lexus into gear.

  Yes, good for the knight errant to hang up his scuffed and dented escutcheon, his creaking and tarnished armor.

  And better still to do it after his boldest triumph, the attainment—soon—of his holy grail.

  CHAPTER 6

   

  Gillian Hart was telling the truth. Bonnie was almost sure of it. But if Gillian hadn’t talked, who had?

  There was nobody—nobody who was still alive.

  She lounged in the parked Jeep, her eyes half closed, hat tilted back, a lazy stream of smoke curling from her cigarette. The night was fully dark and the wind was picking up. The surf sounded rough. She tried to think of anybody who would know the things her phantom phone caller knew. Business associate of the Harts? Friend of Kurt Land? A hunter in the Pine Barrens who’d witnessed the shooting and put things together?

  None of those options seemed likely. But she couldn’t come up with anything else.

  She finished her cigarette and headed home. At her front door she punched a six-digit code into a control panel to disarm the security system. The system covered every access point. High-end locks on the doors and decorative bars on the windows completed her defenses. The half-duplex she called her own might not look like much, but it was a fortress. Nobody was getting in without her say-so.

  Paranoid? You bet. But she’d learned early that eternal vigilance wasn’t just the price of liberty; it was the price of staying alive. The world was a rough, unforgiving place, and it made you scratch and claw for every morsel, and it never let you drop your guard.

  The house was quiet now; Mrs. Biggs generally retired early, which was a good thing, since while she was up she tended to engage in her hobby, which, as best Bonnie could tell, was banging things against the wall. The bad thing was that she also rose early, the better to get a head start on the day’s wall-banging.

  In a way Bonnie preferred the morning’s racket to the dead silence that settled over the house at night. The silence had the texture and weight of loneliness. It wasn’t so bad, though. She was accustomed to loneliness. Loneliness—and darkness. That was her life.

  Kill or be killed, that was how she rationalized her way of doing business, but part of her couldn’t help wondering why she’d chosen a profession that pretty consistently placed her in that position to begin with.

  Sure, she filled a need. There were holes in the justice system, and it was her job to fill those holes. She was sort of like caulk, except she spent less time in the bathroom.

  But she had no illusions. What she was, ultimately, was a killer for money. It didn’t exactly put her in the same category as Mother Teresa.

  And when she told herself she was different from other killers because she tipped Lizbeth the waitress, or because she got a kick out of playing dress-up and wearing hats, or because she set boundaries for what she would and wouldn’t do, she knew it might be only so much smoke. Yeah, she had standards. But everybody had standards. The prisons were crammed with guys who drew the line at executing a child, a woman, a cop, a priest. Standards like that were no proof of humanity. They said nothing about the heart.

  The heart. That was the real issue. Did she have a heart? Or was she a sociopath, like Dan Maguire said?

  She didn’t like that question, because she feared the answer.

  Briskly she undressed and tossed on pj’s and a robe, then went into her dining room, which she had converted into a home office by the simple expedient of setting her laptop on the dining table. She took out the thumb drive she’d retrieved from the knothole and popped it into the computer, then opened the audio files. The transmitter and recorder were voice-activated, so she didn’t have to wade through a week’s worth of ambient sound from an empty room. Roughly eight hours of content had been recorded, most of which was the girl’s TV or stereo. She fast-forwarded through hours of junk, pausing to sample any conversations the bug had captured. Talks with mom and dad didn’t interest her, but phone conversations with Sienna’s friends were worth hearing. The chats were gossipy and silly and mostly innocent, with only a few allusions to a particularly hot make-out session with a senior in a McDonald’s parking lot. That was okay. Bonnie wasn’t trying to fit the kid for a chastity belt.

  An hour of listening convinced her that things were still cool. She spent some more time on her computer, not buying anything, just window shopping. If she’d had the bucks, she would’ve sprung for a new speed-loader, a shoulder harness, maybe a Taser. You know, girly stuff.

  A few minutes after nine, her phone rang. It was her cell, the only phone she had; as an economy measure she’d dispensed with her landline. It was either that or give up pizza, and she loved pizza.

  Her phone was a Samsung Galaxy, and it was named Sammy. It had a shocking pink case and a ring tone that was the opening bars of “A Hard Day’s Night.” She’d equipped it with a Caller ID app that displayed names and addresses, even for callers using cell phones. Tonight’s call was from Alan Kirby of 133 Old Road, Farmdell. She didn’t know him.

  “Parker,” she said into the handset.

  “Bonnie Parker? The private detective?” His voice was hushed and urgent.

  “That’s what it says on my business card.”

  “I need your help.”

  “You can see me in my office tomorrow—”

  “You don’t understand. I need your help now.”

  “It’s getting kinda late. Can’t this wait till morning?”

  “By morning, Miss Parker, my whole family could be dead.”

  CHAPTER 7

   

  Bonnie made good time to Union Avenue, replaying the phone conversation in her mind. It hadn’t lasted long. Alan Kirby had to meet with her, but not at his house. His wife and kid, gender unspecified, were asleep, apparently unaware of their impending demise.

  She’d arranged a rendezvous at the little gazebo on the boardwalk near the Union Avenue entrance, then tossed on the first clothes she found in the hamper, unsure offhand if they had been washed or not—a pair of black denim jeans and a pullover shirt with tiny print across the breasts that spelled out If you can read this, you’re too damn close. She’d stuck her feet into a pair of white Nikes, grabbed her handbag, and picked out a hat, settling on a powder blue bucket cloche. It never hurt to be stylish.

  When she arrived, he was already there, sitting in the gazebo. Only one vehicle was parked nearby, a Honda minivan, just right for a family man.

  The boardwalk and beach were nearly empty. Way down the beach, one of those big sweepers was combing the sand, the driver working late.

  She settled onto the bench opposite Alan Kirby, keeping her purse on her lap. In a special compartment of the purse was a sweet little Walther P99. Just knowing it was there made her feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

  She looked him over. He was about forty, nervous and chinless, with darting eyes and a tongue that flicked at the corner of his mouth. Sort of like a lizard.

  “So,” she said, “what’s the deal, Neil?”

  He looked confused. “My name’s not Neil.”

  “It’s a rhyming thing. Like, what’s the plan, Stan? Or, what’s the story, Maury?”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  “Besides, nothing rhymes with Alan. Or Kirby. Except maybe furby, but I don’t know how I’d work that in.”

  “I don’t think I told you my name.”

  “My phone did. Told me where you live, too. Farmdell. Nice area. No ocean breezes out there, but the property values are way more reasonable.”

  He nodded, but she wasn’t sure he was taking it in. He seemed distracted, looking past her,
staring at shadows.

  The wind was stronger now, but the rain was holding off. On the far horizon, silent flashes of blue and white lit up a stack of fat thunderheads. The moon was up, but playing peek-a-boo behind scudding clouds. The breakers thrashed themselves against the jetties, sending up cascades of foam that sparkled on the rocks.

  “I think we’re alone here,” he said after a long pause.

  “Why wouldn’t we be?”

  “I was afraid of being followed.”

  “We’re alone. Relax, okay?”

  He focused on her for the first time. “You’re prettier than I expected.”

  “Aw, you’re sweet. But I’ll bet you say that to all the gumshoes.”

  “Sorry. I didn’t mean any offense. It’s just that I was expecting somebody, you know, tough.”

  “You wanna call the whole thing off, just say the word.”

  “No. No, of course not. I’m just wondering ... Well, I’ve been told you offer certain special services.”

  She liked the sound of that. “Maybe.”

  “And somehow, you don’t look like the type.”

  “What type is that?”

  He licked his lips. “I don’t know. Forget it.”

  “I can get the job done, Alan. If that’s what you’re worried about.”

  “How long have you been a detective?”

  “Six years.”

  “Not exactly an obvious career path. Why’d you choose it?”

  “It was more interesting than joining the steno pool. Also, I don’t think they have steno pools anymore.”

  “What’s the real reason?”

  “The real reason is I didn’t have a college degree, or even a high school diploma, so what the hell was I gonna do? I had street smarts. I played to my strength. Or did you want me to say I got into detective work so I could help people?”

  “Didn’t you?”

  “Shit, no. I hate people.”

  Alan laughed. She liked him a little better for that.

  “And how long have you been doing ... this other thing?”

  “Three years.” She lit a cigarette, ignoring his disapproving wince.