Perry's Killer Playlist

by Joe Schreiber

  Then the typing sounds continued and I heard a voice coming from across the room, from the computer monitors hooked up to Paula’s iPad.

  It was my father’s voice.

  29. “Family Man”

  —Hall & Oates

  “I don’t know where she went,” Dad was saying through the speakers. “I don’t know when she’s coming back.”

  I peered over Erich’s shoulder at the monitor. On the screen, Mom, Dad, and Annie were still sitting on the floor of the same dirty white room they’d been photographed in earlier, none of them looking at the camera. Annie was asleep, and Mom was holding her head and shoulders in her arms, cradling her like a baby. If you didn’t know any better, you might have guessed they were three stranded travelers in the United terminal at O’Hare, waiting for the weather to clear. Dad had rolled his shirt sleeves up. The newspaper that he had been holding earlier lay in a rumpled gray pile next to him, along with some empty plates and wrappers and Evian bottles. That made me feel a little better. At least someone was giving them food and water.

  Mom glanced at Dad. “Are you going to try to talk to her?” she asked, in a low voice, as if she didn’t want to disturb Annie, but the microphone picked it up clearly.

  “I don’t know what you expect me to say,” Dad said.

  “You certainly didn’t seem to have any problems with that earlier.”

  He looked at my mom. “Really, Julie? We’re really going to get into this now?”

  “I should have known,” Mom said tonelessly, staring at the floor, rubbing her temples, a gesture that I associated with a very specific moment in their marriage, two years ago. “I should. Have. Known.”

  “Oh, like you’ve been a saint yourself lately,” Dad said, loud enough that Annie stirred on my mom’s lap.

  “Keep your voice down. What’s wrong with you?”

  Dad didn’t say anything, and that only seemed to make Mom madder.

  “Don’t you dare try to make this about me,” she said. “This has nothing to do with that.”

  My dad reached up and ran his hands through what was left of his hair. “Julie, we’re locked in a room with no idea who’s doing this or when they’re coming back. I don’t particularly give a shit what old boyfriend you’re flirting with on Facebook.”

  “Wait.” I looked at Erich. “Is this live?”

  “No,” Erich said. “It is a Quicktime file. An attachment. It came through the iPad just a few minutes ago.”

  “Can you get any idea of where it came from?”

  “There is more.” Erich clicked on the PLAY triangle again.

  I immediately wished that he hadn’t.

  “Your son’s girlfriend,” Mom was saying. “Tell me, Phil, just out of curiosity, is there a depth to which you wouldn’t sink?”

  Dad took in a breath and let it out. Maybe it was the angle, but he didn’t look like himself at all anymore. “I already told you, nothing happened.”

  “And I’m supposed to believe that?”

  “Right now, honestly, I don’t care what you believe.”

  It was the wrong thing to say on every possible level, and I wanted to reach through the screen and strangle him for it. Meanwhile, Mom’s whole body sort of folded in on itself and she just started crying. It was a terrible sound, hoarse and scratchy, like she was coming down with a cold. In her sleep, Annie shifted a little on her lap, drew her knees up, and tucked in her arms but didn’t wake up. I just hoped she was really asleep.

  “Look,” Dad said, “that’s not what I meant.” When he reached over to try to put his arm on my mother’s shoulder, she jerked away.

  “Don’t touch me.”

  “Julie—”

  “Don’t.”

  “Okay,” he said, sounding tired. “But I want you to listen to me. I don’t know why this is happening. I don’t know what we’re doing here. Obviously Paula isn’t who she said she was.”

  “Obviously.” The bitterness dripping through my mom’s voice at that moment could’ve melted the insulation off the speaker wires.

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  Mom found some invisible point off-camera and stared at it. “What was she saying about getting out of here tomorrow?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “You acted like it meant something to you.”

  Dad shook his head. “I was trying to get her to tell us something. Anything. Maybe about Perry.”

  Mom straightened, looked back at him. “You think they have him somewhere?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Would she tell you, if you asked?”

  “Probably not.”

  “You should try.”

  “All right.”

  “He doesn’t even have a passport anymore,” my mom said, and she sounded like she was going to start crying again. “He doesn’t have anything.”

  “I’ll see what I can find out when she comes back. But you have to believe me, Julie, as God is my witness, there was never anything between me and that woman.”

  Mom didn’t say anything for a long time. When she finally did, her voice was cold and distant.

  “I agree,” she said.

  “You do?”

  “About the fact that it doesn’t matter right now,” she clarified. “Right now I just hope Perry’s all right.”

  Dad looked at her, but she didn’t say anything else.

  The clip ended there.

  30. “Timebomb”

  —Beck

  I stood perfectly still behind Erich, staring at the screen. The funny thing about equilibrium is that you don’t realize how much you rely on it until something comes along and yanks it out from under you. Somewhere in front of me, he was leaning forward, typing on the keyboard, little clicks adding up to something, or nothing, at the moment, I really didn’t care. I barely felt Gobi’s hand on my shoulder.

  “I am sorry, Perry. Your father—”

  “Yeah.” I turned, or at least my legs decided to, taking the rest of me along for the ride. Suddenly I didn’t want to talk about it. Talking about it meant thinking about it, and it didn’t take too much thought to realize how easily Paula could have used my dad the way she’d used me, as a way of gathering information about Gobi, and earning his trust, until eventually he’d leave himself and his family vulnerable. I tried to imagine my dad resisting Paula’s advances—I wanted to visualize him pushing her away, saying how wrong it was, she was dating his son. How he could never do something like that. There was wrong, and there was wrong, and there was this.

  But I knew him too well.

  And Gobi did too.

  I tried to make my voice as calm as possible. “How much more time until you can pinpoint where this was sent from?”

  “Not much longer,” Erich said, clicking in a new set of commands and watching the screen flash back at him. “They’re somewhere in western Europe. I’ll have the location soon. We may have to wait a few more minutes.”

  “That’s okay,” I said. “Now I really do want to hit something.”

  The plank in Gobi’s hands was three inches thick and just wide enough for me to picture my dad’s face on it. I watched it turn into Armitage’s, then Paula’s, then back to my dad’s, then a screwball combination of the three. I curled my fingers into a fist. With every second I waited, I could feel the desire to lash out and punch it building up inside me, all the way from my shoulder down my arm until it had formed a buzzing electrical current.

  Erich stood next to me, his voice patient and unhurried. “With tae kwon do,” he said, “the key is to focus on a point beyond your target, so that you are actually punching through it. In order to break that board, your hand will have to be traveling about thirty feet per second when it makes contact. Think of your fist as a bullet fired from a gun. Visualize it passing through the board. Are you ready?”

  I nodded, checked my stance, and made a fist, cocking one knuckle out slightly like he’d shown me. I could feel the blood pounding in my templ
es. Putting all the force of my body into the punch, I swung at the block of wood. There was a sharp thwack as my knuckles smashed into it, and a bright bolt of pain ricocheted back up my arm to my shoulder, where it erupted into a throb of pure agony. I doubled over, clutching my hand and trying not to pass out or pee myself.

  “You are not focused.” Erich’s voice floated in from far outside the pain. “Anger is not focus.”

  “Yeah,” I managed. “Thanks.”

  “Check your pulse.”

  I put the fingertips of my good hand to the side of my neck. It was throbbing almost too fast to count. I took deep breaths, willing myself to slow it down, until it was in the sixties.

  “Try again.”

  “No thanks.” I shook my head. “That plank is unbreakable.”

  Erich looked at Gobi again, then set his feet parallel with his shoulders. An expression of absolute focus, almost serenity, came over his face. I saw him draw back and swing his fist directly at the plank.

  The whole wall exploded in front of us.

  31. “Blow Up the Outside World”

  —Soundgarden

  “RPG,” Erich shouted, his voice barely audible over the aftershock.

  I scrambled backwards, and all the geek inside me could think was, They’re attacking us with role-playing games?

  Gobi shoved me out of the way as a wide sheet of orange flame erupted through the gym. Bits of plaster and shreds of steel and glass fragments drifted through on a bitter cold wind, and through the hole in the wall, I saw it was dark out. Night had fallen. There were no windows here, and until that moment, I’d had no idea what time of day it was.

  Erich again: “These outer walls are reinforced eighteen-centimeter steel. This is not supposed to happen.”

  “Oh, shit.”

  “Stay down.” Without bothering to glance back in my direction, he unlocked the wall rack of automatic weapons and started taking down what looked like an AK-47 and a banana clip of ammo, then jammed them together and tossed the loaded gun overhand across the room at Gobi. She caught it one-handed without so much as a backwards glance. Erich reached for the rack again and selected an even bigger machine gun for himself, snapped on the night-scope, then grabbed a pair of tactical vests and handed one to Gobi and held the other out to me. “Put this on if you don’t want to die.”

  It sounded like a good plan, at least the not-dying part. I reached for the vest and almost dropped it, then pushed my arms through its webbing, feeling twenty pounds of high-impact synthetic polymer settle on my shoulders and neck like a yoke. Maybe that was how they saved your life—once you put it on, you’d never be able to leave home.

  A second rocket-propelled grenade slammed into the already half-demolished gym with a lung-vibrating BOOM, this one coming directly up from below, and I felt my knees turn to Jell-O, shifting me off-balance. Somewhere to my left, a tall rack of barbells fell over, crashing against the floor, sending hundreds of pounds in weights rolling sideways toward the hole in the floor that hadn’t even been there ten seconds earlier. Whoever was down there, I hope the weights landed right on top of him.

  BOOM! A third blast, and all of Europe jumped and shook itself off like a wet dog. When my vision steadied I saw that Gobi and Erich had positioned themselves on either side of the hole in the wall, which was still actively blazing like a burning circus hoop about to spew a stream of Bengalese tigers. As if on cue, they both pivoted and started shooting down on the street. I’d seen them square off against each other, but I hadn’t seem them fighting together. It was like watching a soldier and his shadow moving at the same time in tight, concise, almost choreographed maneuvers. I couldn’t tell if I was more grateful or jealous.

  After emptying the first clip, Erich ducked back to reload, slinging a machine pistol over his shoulder, and I saw Gobi step in and fire off another thirty rounds into the darkness. For a second or two, everything was hugely, ear-ringingly silent. I couldn’t see who was down there, but whoever it was seemed undeterred by the counterattack, because the third fusillade of grenades came harder than ever. From overhead I heard the shriek of splintered metal as the ceiling caved in over Erich’s gleaming display of Samurai swords and masks.

  Gobi threw me a coat. “Time to go,” she shouted, while Erich took up his post at the wall.

  “Why do I need a—”

  “It’s flame-repellent.”

  I shoved my arms through the sleeves. “Where are we going?”

  “Down.”

  “What?”

  She grabbed me by the collar and we jumped through the hole in the floor. The twenty-foot drop turned gravity into a car crash, smashing us feet-first into the old wine shop, which was already on fire, empty glass bottles and wooden shelves splintering everywhere. Panic got me staggering to my feet, where I took in a lungful of smoke, doubled over, and suddenly forgot how to breathe, walk, or think properly.

  “Idiot!” Gobi shouted. She made the word sound like an exciting new energy drink, something maybe mixed out of equal parts taurine and extreme annoyance. “Where are you going?” Grabbing my arm from out of nowhere, she yanked me forward, my feet blundering through the debris. In the smoke, all I could see were chaotic splutters of automatic gunfire among the broken bottles, like a garden of strange orange and red flowers.

  We fell backwards through a hole in the wall, coughing and choking out onto wet concrete.

  “Come on.”

  I stared up at the blazing skeleton of the storefront, dizzy from the fumes. My consciousness was already wavering in and out. “What about Erich?”

  “He will be fine.”

  But she didn’t sound like she meant it.

  Don’t black out, I told myself. Just hold on.

  I tried to say something, and the world went dark.

  32. “Wake Up”

  —Rage Against the Machine

  “I’m here.” I lifted my head, cringing. “You don’t have to keep hitting me.”

  “That is inside of car door.” Gobi’s voice from far away, drifting in from somewhere on the far side of Greenwich Mean Time. “You keep knocking your face on it.”

  “Oh.” My head cleared all at once, like a fogged windshield sliced across by wipers. I hadn’t been unconscious, exactly, more like grayed out, a combination of carbon monoxide and a more than slightly heightened sense of reality, a kind of psychological altitude sickness. I realized that we were back inside one of Zermatt’s little shuttles, rattling along the main drag at sixty miles an hour, except this time Gobi was the one steering it.

  “How did they find us?”

  “Matter of time.”

  “Wait, you’re driving?”

  “I can drive.”

  If this was true, it was only in the broadest sense of the word. She was careening wildly from side to side up the narrow street, jerking the steering wheel back and forth like she’d learned how to drive from one of those old movies where they apparently projected the background behind the actors’ heads, blew air in their faces, and told them to steer.

  Up in front of us, I saw dozens of lights filling the street, heard music and noise—a parade in progress now disrupted by the onset of World War Three. Gobi was aiming right toward it, one-handed, which allowed her to lean out the window and keep shooting at whoever was coming up behind us.

  “Keep your head down.”

  “Where are we going?”

  She didn’t answer, and her eyes got very wide. I tried to think of anything that could actually take her by surprise, but I didn’t have to wonder for long. In front of us, hundreds of Bavarian Santa Clauses were standing in the street, watching the fire start to spread.

  “What the hell… ?” I looked back up at the colorful banner dangling overhead and remembered what it had said—CLAUWAU. We’d arrived here in the middle of some kind of international Santa Claus convention.

  There were Santas everywhere. Most of them looked as freaked out as I was, but in the chaos it was hard to tell. One of them
spun around as we blasted past, and I wondered if Paula and whoever else was after us had the foresight to dress their assassins as Saint Nick. Another grenade erupted up from somewhere with a WHOOSH and a hiss, and a mob of men and women in red suits with pillows tucked underneath scattered in every direction. As the street finally started to clear, I saw one particular Santa, screaming, his beard on fire, running for the alley. Reindeer—real ones this time, having broken loose from their harness—went sprinting off after him in every direction. It was Santageddon.

  Gobi swerved wildly around a second herd of Santas with matching Elvis pompadours and gold lamé boots that seemed just a few seconds earlier to have been scaling a tall wooden pole in some kind of contest. The pole had fallen over, and Gobi steered around it, thumping the car’s left tires hard enough that I heard something snap off underneath us.

  “Where are you going?” I managed.

  The answer was “Helipad.”

  “When we get to top,” Gobi said, “leave all talking to me.”

  “You actually think they’ll just let us fly out of here?”

  “I think, yes.” She held the machine gun up, then jammed her hand into her coat, brought out a wad of euros in a big metal money clip, and shoved it in my hand. “Hold on to this. In case we have to negotiate.”

  “Isn’t that what the gun’s for?”

  The question was rhetorical and we both knew it. We had arrived at our destination. I didn’t realize it at the time, even when I looked up and saw the big blue and white AIR ZERMATT garage opening in front of us to reveal a drive-in elevator the size of an aircraft carrier.

  We drove in and the elevator began to rise, the doors opening at the top, allowing us to roll out onto the roof.

  The helicopter was waiting for us.

  The fuselage was red with white call letters painted on the side. Its propellor was already running, making that unmistakable pop-pop-pop of the blades accompanied by the high-pitched whine of turbines. I’d read somewhere about Vietnam veterans who couldn’t stand the sound of rotors because it gave them flashbacks to the war, and at that moment I totally understood. Even though it was half a world away, the second I heard that familiar sound and smelled the exhaust, it was like I was right back in midtown Manhattan, gunfire and shouting, exploding glass and broken promises on the forty-seventh floor.