Bad to the Bone (Bonnie Parker, PI Book 3)

by Michael Prescott

  “What the fuck?” Lukin whispered, superstitious fear infecting his voice.

  “She’s taken cover.”

  “Where?”

  The hillside, Ilya thought. Amid the rocks and scrub. But it didn’t seem right. There was something he was missing, something so obvious that he couldn’t see it, though it was right under his nose.

  Under. Under his ...

  His gaze ticked to the landing, and the world exploded.

  The planks blew apart, splinters of wood driven into his legs, large-caliber rounds blasting upward. Lukin screamed and died, his stomach ripped open like a bag of blood. Ilya felt hot needles of pain in his thighs, his groin. He made no conscious effort to leap to safety, but somehow he found himself on the hillside, crawling, bleeding, the smell of cordite in his nostrils.

  Everything from his navel to his knees was a ragged tissue of gore. His balls—they were gone, just gone. He’d been castrated, like Streinikov. That was funny, somehow. A good joke. Damn good joke.

  It hardly mattered anyhow. He was sure to bleed out and die.

  But he would get her first.

  He had dropped his pistol, but it hadn’t fallen far. His groping fingers retrieved it. He turned on his side, lying parallel to the crawlspace under the landing which Parker had used as a blind. But she was no longer there. She’d moved on, taking cover elsewhere, on the far side of the staircase.

  He bellied forward, snaking over sharp rocks and plants like pincushions, bristling with thorns. It was cold out here, very cold. He hadn’t noticed the cold before, but he felt it now, deep in his bones, the cold like a tangible darkness eating away at his soul.

  Crazy thought. His mind was going. He must be leaking blood by the gallon. Couldn’t hold out long. But he only needed to spot her. If he knew where she was hidden, he could empty the gun at her. Take her with him, the bitch, whore, suka, blyad.

  The stairs rose over him. He pulled himself underneath the shattered landing into the spider hole where Parker had been concealed. As long as he was in motion, she would stay hidden. But if he huddled here, still and silent, she might show herself, and he would get her. He would get her, if he was still alive.

  Come on, Parker. Make a move, girl. All it takes is one mistake, and I’ll have you. Just one mistake.

  Brightness.

  An arc of fire pinwheeling through the sky. It touched down a yard from him with a shatter of glass and a gasoline smell and a flash of flame.

  Ilya knew what this was. It was a Molotov cocktail, a weapon he’d used himself in Donetsk when shopkeepers who refused to pay for krisha required a loss of inventory.

  Already the fire was hurrying toward him, devouring the dry brush, and another bottle smashed nearby, its contents setting the wooden stairs ablaze, and another, bursting like a hand grenade at his feet and spattering his trousers with gas. And now the fire was all around him, penning him in, raging above him and alongside him, climbing onto his body, advancing along his legs, finding his shirt and surging upward, undoing the buttons like an anxious lover, throwing hot kisses at his face, clawing at him with burning fingers. It was all over him now, engulfing him, crowding out the rest of the world as his skin peeled and his hair smoked, as his lips and gums dissolved and his teeth split and popped, as his eyelids burned away and his eyeballs roasted in their sockets, until finally in a last act of mercy Ilya Kvint turned his gun on himself.

  * * *

  Bonnie was off the hillside and back on the trail to the greenhouse even before she heard Sundance fire his last shot.

  He hadn’t screamed. That was the really remarkable thing. Even while being consumed by fire, he had stubbornly refused to cry out. She kind of had to respect him for that.

  Truth was, she’d gotten lucky this time. Sure, she’d meant for the pair to spot her and give chase, but she hadn’t expected those first shots to come so friggin’ close. One of the bullets had punched a hole through the top of her beret. An inch lower, and it would have been lights out even before she could get to the crawlspace under the stairs.

  But what the hell, close only counted in horseshoes and hand grenades. By luck or skill, she’d pulled it off. Eight down.

  And the doc was gone, too. She’d seen him running to his car while she was on the sun porch.

  By now the first responders would be gearing up. The initial gunfire would only have confused people. Residents of upscale neighborhoods weren’t used to hearing bullets fly, and Streinikov’s few neighbors within earshot were doubtless disinclined to call the police anyway. The Range Rover impacting the house would have gotten them out of bed, but they wouldn’t know just where the noise had come from. And the gunfire inside the house would have been muffled, perhaps inaudible at a distance.

  But the blaze of fire on the cliffside would rouse even the least vigilant citizens to action. By now 9-1-1 was being flooded with calls. She had to move fast.

  There was only one man left, but he was the most important one of all.

  * * *

  Streinikov saw the wavering red glow to the east, the false dawn. He didn’t know exactly what had happened, but he knew his men hadn’t set that fire.

  He found himself thinking again of the old fable. On the night when he’d recited the tale to Gregor, he hadn’t told it all. He’d left out the lengthy middle of the narrative, during which the czar sent each of his sons in turn to catch the trespassing Firebird. One by one, they had met with terrible misfortune. Only his youngest son, the last to be sent out, had prevailed.

  Perhaps he should have remembered that part of the story—the successive missions and successive defeats.

  Unlike the czar, he had no sons left to send. There was no one to defend him. No one to stand between him and this avenging angel, this blonde Valkyrie.

  Too late, he realized he should have commandeered a firearm from one of his men. He never carried a gun. It had never been necessary. He had weapons stored about the premises—in the garage and the residence, and even here in the greenhouse, under a bench in a distant corner. He did not think he could walk that far. He gave it a try, straining to rise from his chair. His knees shook. His fever raged. He was not strong enough. Should he attempt to walk, he would fall on his face, and she would find him prone on the floor. That fate was unthinkable. To die was acceptable. Everyone died. But to die without dignity was shameful, unforgivable.

  Slowly, Streinikov lowered himself into his seat. He sat for a moment, catching his breath and letting a swirl of vertigo subside. Then lovingly he picked up a potted orchid, a Cattleya violacea, one of his favorites, thankfully undamaged in the violence. He held the clay pot in one hand, while with the other he touched the tender, luminous blooms that spoke of summer and sun, two things he would never see again. And he waited.

  His wait was not long.

  40

  When it was all over, Bonnie went out on foot through the front gate, carrying her gym bag, which she’d recovered from the Cadillac Escalade in Streinikov’s garage. The goons at the Maggot Armpit had stuffed all her artillery and other junk into the bag and taken it with them, leaving it in the SUV. Her cash was in there too, all three grand. So the day wasn’t a total loss. Plus with all the running, she’d gotten in her cardio.

  She’d wanted the bag back, partly for the cash, partly for all the primo gear it contained, but mainly because she didn’t want anything with her fingerprints on it to be found at the scene. She’d covered herself pretty well by wearing gloves and, as necessary, a stocking mask, and she didn’t want to blow it now.

  In the garage she had seen two corpses lying against the wall. Gura and Butch. Gura didn’t look so bad, but Butch was in sorry shape.

  Sirens were closing in when she left the garage. As she ran along the driveway, she came across the sentry she’d run over. Though he wore tread marks on his back and was a mangled mess, he was still alive, moaning piteously. She shot him in the head and kept going. It was more kindness than he would have shown her.

&nbs
p; She made it off the property and into the shadowed safety of the Swansons’ yard before anybody showed up. The Saturn was waiting for her in the Swansons’ garage. She started up and hightailed it out of there. A fire engine passed her, charging to the scene.

  Dawn set the sky aglow. A morning she hadn’t expected to see.

  Now that it was over, she could admit the truth. She hadn’t really believed she would make it. She’d figured she would get two or three of them, maybe even four or five, but not the whole outfit. She wasn’t sure if she owed the outcome to tactical brilliance or dumb luck. A little of both, probably.

  Or maybe Felix was right. She was a survivor, just like Gloria Gaynor. Or a cockroach.

  As she hit the highway, she lit a cigarette. She checked herself in the rearview mirror. If she’d been a horror show before, she was something worse now. But she was alive. She found herself laughing, quietly at first, then more insistently, until she had to make herself stop or risk hysteria.

  Speeding south, she turned on the burner and phoned Joy Krauss. It was just past six o’clock, and Joy was probably asleep, but this news couldn’t wait.

  “Yes?”

  Apparently she wasn’t asleep. She’d answered on the second ring, sounding alert enough.

  “You can relax,” Bonnie said without preamble. “It’s all worked out now.”

  “Is it?” Joy sounded a lot less ebullient than she should have.

  “Yeah. You know that story you told about the Russian mob? Now there’s evidence to back it up.”

  “How can there be evidence? It—it wasn’t true.”

  “Yeah, I know it wasn’t true.” Her client was a little slow on the uptake this morning. Maybe she wasn’t so awake, after all. “I’m the one who made it up, remember? But I’ve arranged things so Gil’s wristwatch will turn up on the arm of a certain Russian crime boss.”

  “You gave it to him?”

  “It was no big deal. He was deceased at the time.”

  “Oh.” The single syllable dropped away into silence, like a pebble tossed down a bottomless well.

  “Hey, cheer up, kiddo. This is a big deal. It means the heat’s off. They can’t challenge your story now. We beat the system. We won.”

  “No, you didn’t, Parker.”

  That was a new voice, and it belonged to Dan Maguire.

  Though she was speeding at seventy miles an hour, Bonnie shut her eyes. “Crap.”

  “You can say that again.” Dan spoke slowly, as if wishing to draw out this moment as long as possible. “I heard everything you said. Thanks for the confession. Not that I needed it. Your accomplice already told me the whole thing.”

  “Joy, Joy, Joy,” Bonnie muttered. “You just couldn’t keep your mouth shut, could you?”

  She’d said it to herself, but Joy must have heard. “I couldn’t help it,” she wailed. “He went to the police station by the library. He checked the security camera footage from the parking lot. He can prove we were there at the same time.”

  “You could have talked your way out of it,” Bonnie said wearily. “I would’ve come up with something.”

  “Don’t bet on it,” Dan said. “I’m not that easy to fool.”

  “Sure you are, Danny boy. You’re a fuckin’ moron.”

  “Says the young lady who’s looking at a homicide rap. Maybe more than one. And what’s this I hear about a Russian mobster?”

  “You can’t take that seriously. I was just slingin’ the shit.”

  “If Mr. Krauss’s watch is found on the body, we can add that individual to your hit list. How long will you last in lockup if the Russian mob thinks you’re good for killing one of their own?”

  “That probably won’t matter. He wasn’t very popular, even with his fellow countrymen.”

  “Sure, you just keep telling yourself that. You’ll run, naturally, but you won’t get far. I’ll put out an APB—”

  “I’m not running.”

  “You telling me you’ll face the music?”

  “I guess so, if this was 1950 and people still talked like that.”

  “Will you surrender yourself or not?”

  “I’ll turn myself in at the Maritime police station at twelve noon.”

  “That’s nearly six hours from now. Why not sooner?”

  “Stuff I gotta do first.”

  “You’re trying to play me. It won’t work, Parker. I’m not as dumb as you think.”

  “Nobody could be that dumb. Twelve noon, Maritime. I’ll be there with bells on. On second thought, I can’t guarantee the bells.”

  She ended the call and powered off the burner, just in case Dan, or some smarter person, had the bright idea of trying to track the signal.

  She hadn’t been shining him on. She really would give herself up. But first she had to get a lawyer. Chase Benedict, probably. She’d recommended him to Joy Krauss, but naturally Joy hadn’t taken her advice.

  Joy. What a disappointment she’d turned out to be. “I probably should’ve killed her when I had the chance,” Bonnie said philosophically.

  Oh, well, you couldn’t kill ’em all.

  She finished the cig and patted down her pocket for another one. What she found was the top joint of Anton Streinikov’s index finger.

  Oh, yeah. She’d forgotten she still had that.

  She rolled down the window, tossed the fingertip, and drove on.

  41

  Bonnie spent a couple of hours at the ER in Maritime, getting her leg patched up. Happily the bullet had passed clean through, and she was able to explain the injury as a pellet gun wound, the work of an overenthusiastic eight-year-old who’d ambushed her in the house. And the small lacerations caused by broken glass? When the tyke shot her, she fell on a glass table, which shattered. And the dirt and grime and grass stains? Well, this had all happened in the garden. Come on, people, work with me here. The docs might not have bought it, but they pretended to. They saw worse stuff in Maritime every night.

  Despite her promise of voluntary surrender, the police were undoubtedly still looking for her. As a precaution she used the driver’s license from Trudy Welch’s purse as her ID. What the hell, one blonde gal looked pretty much like another. Trudy even had health insurance, which Bonnie put to good use.

  While triaged in the admitting area, she watched a rundown of local developments on News 12. Ordinarily she had minimal interest in current events—she was one of those people who couldn’t pick the vice president out of a lineup—but that morning she paid attention. The doings at Streinikov’s place merited two and half minutes of breathless speculation and shaky video shot through the fence. The bodies on the driveway had been discreetly shrouded. The whole place looked different in daylight, suffused in an orange glare.

  There was one other news item of interest, a little later in the broadcast. It seemed that a Maritime man, Alonzo Duchenne, had been found shot to death at an out-of-business gas station in Fort Lee.

  As dog-tired as she was, she didn’t even register the name until a mug shot of Alonzo’s scowling puss came up on the screen.

  What were the odds? Too high for it to be a coincidence. Alonzo must have gone after her, gotten mixed up with Streinikov’s crew somehow, and ended up dead. Tragic.

  When she was done at the hospital, salved and scrubbed and looking almost civilized, she got back into the Saturn. She was all out of cell phones that couldn’t be traced, so she hunted down a payphone and got Chase Benedict’s number from Information. Though it was a Sunday, she succeeded in arranging an appointment for later in the morning. A few scraps of information were enough to provide the lawyer with a powerful inducement.

  She stopped at a copy center and spent a half hour hour there, using up all the cash from Trudy Welch’s purse. With a little time left before her appointment, she took a detour to Pilgrim Grove and parked near Green Arbor.

  The residents were finishing their Sunday brunch. She helped herself to some eggs—okay, a lot of eggs—and sausage links and bacon and pa
ncakes and ... She was hungry, all right? She’d eaten nothing since the sub sandwich last night, and she’d expended a buttload of calories since then.

  With the plate on her lap, she joined Frank Kershaw on the glassed-in porch, where space heaters kept off the chill.

  “Looks like you came through unscathed,” he said.

  “Maybe a little scathed.” The bandaged wound on her leg was hidden by her jeans, and the blood on the fabric had dried dark enough to be hard to see. “But I’m still around.”

  “You can’t keep living like this, kiddo. One of these days, it’ll catch up with you. Did you give any more thought to what I said yesterday?”

  “A little.”

  “Still think you’ve found a loophole in the system?”

  She thought of her phone call to Brad. “No, I guess not.”

  He studied her. “But you’re not going to walk away, are you?”

  “Nope.”

  “You know what you’re signing up for?”

  “I think I do.”

  “There’s a lot of darkness in the world, kiddo. You don’t want to end up alone in it.”

  “What I want doesn’t matter. I just have to keep going.”

  “And keep fighting?”

  “It’s all I know.”

  “You can’t fight forever.”

  “It doesn’t have to be forever. Only until I lose.”

  He shook his head. “You’re too young to think that way. It’s not too late to reinvent yourself.”

  “I guess you know about that. Don’t you?”

  Something flickered in his eyes. She watched him as she unfolded a sheet of paper from her purse and handed it over. He looked at it for a long time.

  “Where’d you get this?” he asked finally.

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  “Well, it’s all true. I wasn’t always a forger. The first ID I faked was my own.”

  He started to hand back the paper. She waved him off. “You can keep it. Or better yet, destroy it.”

  “Is it the only copy?”

  “Far as I know.”