Norrie squinted at me suspiciously, and when he got close enough, he lowered his voice and whispered, “Wuh-Well?”
“Well, what?”
“You nuh-know what, Stormaire. Duh-Did you fuh-find her or what?”
“Dude…”
“Yuh-You totally did, didn’t you?” He shook his head. “Thuh-That’s why you duh-ditched us.”
“ . . . it’s a crazy, long story, and—”
“Nuh-Never mind. Doesn’t muh-matter. Guh-Guess what?” When he looked at me again, he was smiling, and just like that, his stutter was gone. “I wrote a new song.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. And it’s good. All it needs is a bass line.”
“No problem, man.” In spite of everything, I felt that sudden lift that came along with our songwriting partnership, that sense that somehow we’d lucked into knowing each other, way back before either one of us could’ve guessed what that meant. “Bass line, I can do.”
“Wuh-Wait a second.” Norrie’s eyes narrowed. “Wuh-Where’s your bass?”
“I kind of… lost it.”
“What?”
“Look,” I said, “if I told you half the shit that I’ve been through in the last twenty-four hours…”
“That’s all right,” a voice said. “I’m sure we can figure something out.”
I turned around and saw George Armitage standing there.
In person, Armitage was exactly as refined and charming as I’d imagined from talking to him over the phone. He was in his midfifties, tall and fit, his skin almost Mediterranean, with just a few artfully arranged wrinkles around his pale blue eyes. Everything about him felt polished and real at the same time, and there was a certain smell, like suede and Lear jet fumes, clinging ever so faintly to his clothes. So this is what a billion dollars smells like, I thought.
The bodyguards on either side of him stood silent, their eyes hidden behind mirrored sunglasses. I almost immediately started thinking of them as Ram and Rod.
After a brief introduction to the rest of the band, and to Linus, who for once seemed able to keep from making some kind of acerbic comment, Armitage led Paula and me across the square to the small café, where a table was waiting for us. Ram and Rod followed at a respectful but conspicuous distance.
“I won’t keep you long,” Armitage said. “I know you’ve got a sound check to get to.”
“It’s all right.”
“How do you like the city?” He spread his hands magisterially across the café, the cathedral, and the piazza full of pigeons behind us in the gathering dusk, as if he’d conjured all of this out of the ether, just for us. “My absolute favorite place on earth. She’s like a beautiful woman whose favor I’ve never quite managed to capture.”
“It’s really great,” I said.
“I think we should celebrate.” He signaled the waiter. “Villa Antinori, ’ninety-five.”
The waiter disappeared, and Armitage turned the full wattage of his attention on me. “Perry, I realize all of this must feel like it’s happening very quickly to you, but by now you know how much I love your music, and I think it’s time we discuss Inchworm’s first album.”
“Okay.”
“I’d like to get you in the studio as soon as this tour is over, if possible. In fact, we were talking about going directly to L.A. You blokes could certainly recuperate there, and when the time is right, we could start recording right away. How does that sound?”
“Like a dream come true.”
“Wonderful.” Armitage smiled and glanced at Paula. “Make a note to book some time at Sunset Sound, love, won’t you?”
“Taking care of it now,” Paula said. She took her iPad out of her purse and started typing something onto the screen.
The wine arrived, and Armitage poured a glass for each of us.
“That settles it, then,” he said, raising a toast. “Here’s to Inchworm and the great future that awaits them.”
I reached for my glass, and that was when I saw Gobi coming through the crowd, walking straight toward us with the shotgun.
21. “Sweetest Kill”
—Broken Social Scene
When I think back on that moment, I’m always amazed by how long it took me to react. Everyone else seemed to move before I did—Paula, the waiters, even the other patrons of the café.
Gobi took out the bodyguards from twenty feet away. I heard two quick, deafening noises—BLAM, BLAM—and saw them both pitch backwards in opposite directions, hitting the cobblestones on either side of the table. What I saw then couldn’t possibly be right—it had to be some kind of run-time glitch in the mainframe of the universe—because when I looked again, Gobi was less than a foot away, pumping another round into the chamber and pointing the shotgun right at Armitage’s chest, point blank.
Armitage opened his mouth to say something, but he never got the chance before Gobi pulled the trigger. There was a third deafening KAPOW, and the shotgun blast blew him backwards out of his chair hard enough to knock the whole table over with his knees, spilling wine and glass everywhere. Pigeons took flight and people screamed in that far-off way that voices sound after your eardrums have been assaulted by blunt-force audio trauma. My ears were used to it from years of speakers and amps, and it was still a backwards-sounding scream—the crowd almost seemed to suck it back inward—withering into a gasp, when they saw what had happened.
When I looked down again, Armitage was sprawled backwards on the pavement between his bodyguards, motionless in a huge and still expanding splatter pattern of his own blood. It spread out around him in all directions like the shadow of an object falling fast.
Without hesitating, Gobi reached down with her free hand and grabbed Armitage’s body, clutching his sagging weight under the arms, hoisting it up as if it were weightless, holding it in front of herself like a shield, all the while keeping the shotgun in her right hand. There was a distant CRACK and I saw another bullet hit the corpse in the chest. Looking around, I realized that the shot had come from somewhere far overhead, and that was when I realized there was at least one other person on a rooftop overhead, shooting down at us.
Gobi raised the shotgun one-handed and fired again, up at the top of the cathedral.
“Stand down.” Somewhere off to my right I saw Paula rise to her feet. I was expecting her to get out a phone to call the cops or an ambulance.
What came out instead was a pistol—polished, nickel-plated, and held with an expert two-handed shooting grip.
And pointed at me.
“Paula?” I asked.
Paula’s eyes stayed on Gobi. Her voice was absolutely calm. “That’s a Mossberg pump-action, isn’t it? Twelve-gauge, right? Nice gun.”
Gobi didn’t say anything.
“Only problem is, you’ve got to reload before you can shoot again. Move and he dies.”
In front of us, in front of the overturned table, Gobi stood frozen, still cradling the shotgun in one hand and Armitage’s corpse in the other. Even with my ears still ringing, Paula’s voice was crisp and totally clear, every syllable chiseled into the air. The realization came slanting at me sideways like a sudden cold rain.
My.
Girlfriend.
Paula.
Was.
Pointing.
A.
Gun.
At.
Me.
I stared at her. I couldn’t speak. Couldn’t breathe. Still.
In front of us, all at once Gobi chucked the shotgun, shoved Armitage’s body away from her, swiveled, and threw her leg straight up into the air, bringing it down in an ax-kick to Paula’s face. There was a crack and Paula went hard to the ground. Gobi grabbed her iPad, but Paula must not have dropped the gun, because through all the broken glass and blood and wine, she was already firing at us. I should know. I felt at least one of the bullets whining past my head.
My eyes rolled sideways in their sockets like overheated ball bearings, taking in everything at once. From the club ac
ross the square, I saw Linus and Norrie come running out. They took one look at what was happening and hit the ground.
That was when Gobi grabbed my arm, manacle-tight, a grip that I now knew exclusively accompanied those moments when it was either run or get shot. If I hadn’t run—if she’d still had a gun with live ammo—I think she would have threatened to shoot me herself.
“Go!”
She jerked me forward, swinging me when I wasn’t able to keep up. My feet were definitely not in charge—they were just trying to keep me from falling facefirst onto the pavement—and we cut across the piazza back in the direction of the cathedral. Vendors and tourists with no idea what was going on turned to watch us go sprinting across between the pushcarts toward a row of gondolas lined up along the water.
Up in the cathedral, bells started clanging through the square like God’s own security system. Somehow I still heard bullets caroming off the pavement behind us. They seemed to be coming from every direction at once, from up above and behind us. I felt my mind split cleanly in half, each side entertaining contradictory thoughts. On one side Armitage was still alive and I was sitting at the café with Paula, listening to him tell me what a genius I was. On the other side, the woman that I thought I had fallen in love with was trying to kill me.
I was beginning to detect a pattern here.
Then we ran out of pavement.
22. “Love Removal Machine”
—The Cult
I didn’t see the boat until we landed in it. It was sitting low in the canal on the far side of the concrete embankment, hidden among a row of blue tarped gondolas and a narrow water taxi with a glass canopy and a battered hull. My right foot plunged forward, my ankle twisting as the rest of my weight came down on it, and I slammed facefirst into one of the seats.
Blackness…
Wait.
I grabbed the moment and dragged myself back up into consciousness through sheer willpower. Momentum took hold of me and I rolled backwards across the deck, trying to hold on to something that wasn’t actively attempting to pull away from me. The blow to the face had made my eyes water, honing my senses to stinging awareness, and I smelled open seawater and the coppery odor of my own blood trickling from my nostrils. The boat’s motor was deafening. Up at the wheel, Gobi swerved through the canal. I sat up and saw the lights of the bridge coming up. It was too low for us to pass under it.
“I told you I had other targets in Venice.”
“Armitage?” I shouted.
Gobi jammed the throttle all the way forward so the bow of the boat spiked higher in the air, as if she could somehow intimidate the bridge into getting out of our way. For a second I thought about jumping out, but we were going too fast and I’d heard about people getting sucked back into the motor, which at this point might have been a blessing. I looked straight ahead, less than twenty meters from impact. At this distance, there was no question. We were either going to crash straight into the stone buttresses or decapitate ourselves—it just wasn’t high enough.
“Gobi!” I shouted, one last attempt. “Don’t!”
Then it was too late and we were underneath it, the cavernous low-hanging darkness lunging forward. I ducked, dropping down to my hands and knees, and heard the bridge rip off the top of the glass canopy, covering my shoulders and head in a brittle spray of glass, splintering metal and wood. There was a scraping screech and the boat stopped, stuck halfway underneath arching stone.
I breathed. It was dark under here, cold, the only light coming from the glow of the instrument panel. Up front, Gobi was still leaning forward, draped over the wheel.
Sirens.
I got ready to jump.
“Wait.”
I looked around. In the shadows off to our right, I saw a second boat floating just a foot or two away, tied to a ringbolt under the bridge. It had been sitting here the whole time.
Reaching over, Gobi pulled the knots, leaned in, and started the engine. She flicked a switch and I saw a red light blinking under the console of the other boat. Still leaning over, she nudged the throttle forward and sent it out the far side of the canal. As it disappeared I realized it looked like ours, the one we were in now.
I looked at her. The first wave of adrenaline had passed and left me feeling wrung out and shaky, full of questions that needed immediate answers.
“Why did you do it?” My voice was shaking so hard that I could barely get the words out. “Why did you kill Armitage? He didn’t—”
From out on the far side of the bridge, an explosion tore a hole through the world. It wasn’t so much loud as simply big—BIG—and it shook the entire canal, pulsed through the water around us, bouncing off the sides of ancient buildings so hard that I actually thought I saw them tremble. My mind flashed to the second boat that had been waiting here, the one that looked like ours, the one she’d sent out, the decoy. A moment later, I smelled smoke pouring up the canal, thick and acrid.
Gobi never took her eyes off me. I felt a jagged lump in my throat, filling my sinuses, pushing up into the bottoms of my eyes. There was only one question left, and I didn’t want to ask it. Not that it mattered.
“What about Paula?”
Gobi didn’t say anything.
“What about Paula?”
“She would have killed you.”
“Why?”
A slight shrug. “You had served your purpose.”
“What was that, exactly?”
“Drawing me into the open, so Armitage’s hired guns could take me down.”
I thought of the gunfire from above. “That sniper on the rooftop… ?”
“There was more than one. Armitage meant to turn the plaza into a killing box.”
“A killing box,” I said. “That’s great. A freaking killing box? Why?”
“Because he knew that I was coming for him.”
I glared at her and felt angry tears pricking in my eyes that had nothing to do with the smoke. They were rising up from the pit where my stomach had once been, a space that was now somehow hollow and sickly heavy at the same time, a deep aching place, like someone had kicked my heart in the balls.
“How long have you been … hunting him?”
“Kaya gave me assignment four months ago, after New York. But Armitage knew.”
I thought about the gunshots that had come from the rooftops overhead, snipers on the cathedral.
“Armitage knew it was you coming for him?”
Gobi nodded.
“For how long?”
“At least since August, he has been trying to draw me out.”
August. The sickness inside me folded over on top of itself like a map of conquered territory, and for a moment I was miserably sure I was going to throw up. My mind flashed to the night I’d met Paula at the party in Brooklyn, how fortuitous the whole thing had been, the way she had initiated our first conversation and everything afterward. How incredulous I’d been that such a hot woman would be interested in me. Drawing me in. Then the invitation to Europe. Then Venice. Then the gun.
Move and he dies.
“You were only a pawn, Perry,” Gobi said. “How do you say, leverage . . . for them to find me.”
My throat felt tight. I didn’t say anything.
“Is time to go.”
“No.” I took a step back and my heel bumped into something black piled under the seat in front of me. Diving suits and masks. Oxygen tanks. Regulators.
“Oh, no,” I said. “No way.”
Gobi was moving faster now, putting on the wetsuit.
“Screw that. I’m not doing this. I’m done.”
She spat in the mask and rinsed it with water from the canal, checked the oxygen gauge, and looked up at me. The sirens were very close now.
“It’s an island,” I said. “They’ll just keep looking for you.”
“Not now.” She nodded in the direction of the explosion. “We are dead. At least until they do not recover bodies.”
“We can’t just—”
>
Gobi thrust a pair of swim fins toward me.
“I’m not going any farther,” I said. “I’m calling my dad, he’ll get a lawyer. I’m going home.”
“That is not possible anymore.”
“Why not?”
She looked up at me one more time through the swim mask, staring right through me. I saw something new in her face then. Sadness.
That was when she held up Paula’s iPad.
23. “If There’s a Rocket Tie Me to It”
—Snow Patrol
The screen had cracked back at the café, but it still worked.
I stared at it and felt the world go sideways.
In the picture on the screen, my mom and dad and Annie were sitting on a wooden bench in a room with no windows. The walls behind them were dirty white, the color of March snow. It was a very clear image. The resolution was excellent. Dad was holding a copy of the New York Times up to the camera so I could see today’s date. His chin was already starting to show the beginnings of stubble. Mom’s eyes were bloodshot, the tip of her nose red, like she’d been crying. But Annie was the worst. She was wearing a dirty pink T-shirt and her favorite pair of jeans, hugging herself, and her face just looked blank, like inside her head she’d gone to find a place where she wouldn’t have to be scared anymore.
“Where are they?” I heard myself ask.
Gobi shook her head. “I do not know.”
“What?”
“Is Paula’s iPad,” Gobi said. “If I had not come tonight, she would have used this picture on you.”
“For what?”
“To get to me.”
I shook my head. “No.”
“Leverage, Perry. Think.”
The sirens were practically on top of us now.
I looked at the iPad again.
“Armitage did this?”
Gobi nodded.
“And you killed him.”
“It was assignment,” Gobi said.
Perry Stormaire 02: Perry's Killer Playlist Page 7
