The face in the rearview mirror was ghastly. It was a face in a nightmare.
Blood flecked the eyelashes, ringing her blue eyes in red rims. There was a spreading bruise on her jaw where one punch had landed, and a cluster of deep scratches down her neck, where clawing fingers had tracked ragged grooves in her skin. Glass splinters from the shattered carafe clung to her cheek. Her lips were bloodied and swollen—another punch—and two of her front teeth were chipped.
The rest of her wasn’t in any better condition. Without looking, she could feel the deep bruise on her forearm where the first kick had connected, and the blister on her midriff where Ringo’s cigarette had inflicted a burn. Her knuckles were skinned, her wrists badly chafed. And—oh, hell—she’d broken a nail.
“Yeah, I’m a mess,” Bonnie Parker muttered. “But you oughta see the other guys.”
It wasn’t a joke.
She sped south as the sun emerged from the river, putting distance between herself and the terminal before the authorities showed up. Someone was sure to stumble across the bodies before long.
She wasn’t worried about being connected to the scene. She’d wiped down both pool cues to remove any prints, and she’d retrieved Ringo’s pistol, along with her purse and hat. The Walther she’d left behind. She couldn’t take the time to look for it. The gun was unregistered, and it couldn’t be traced to her.
There were no security cameras on the ship, but there might be some on the pier. In a closet she’d found a sailor’s hooded jacket. It was too big for her, which was good; when the hood was up and her hands were in the pockets, she was completely unidentifiable. With the hat and purse concealed under the generous folds of oilskin, she wasn’t even recognizably female. As she’d walked down the gangway, then past the towering cranes loading the last containers, she might have been any random dockworker. Whatever images were caught on camera would provide the authorities no help at all.
Nobody had noticed her as she walked away. So far, the violence aboard the Mazeppa had made no impression on the outside world. The gunshots had been fired below decks or on the bridge, the reports muffled, drowned out by the racket on the pier.
She’d found the Jeep where she’d left it. At this early hour on a Saturday, she’d encountered hardly any traffic during the half-hour drive down the turnpike and parkway. Now the only thing left to do was dispose of certain items.
She took a turnoff to Red Cliff, a medium-size town on the ocean. Red Cliff was like that old movie: a river ran through it. She parked on the south bank and made her way down a thickly overgrown incline to the water’s edge.
By now the sun was up, the October day turning bright and pink, the weather still unseasonably mild. Shaded by trees, she sat on the bank and tossed Ringo’s Sig Sauer, watching it sink in a mist of silt. Then she reached into her purse and withdrew the first of several thick bricks of cash. Hundred-dollar bills, neatly bundled in rubber bands. She’d noticed them when she’d taken out her car keys. A lot of money—fifty grand, maybe.
She peeled off the bills in twos and threes and tossed them into the river. She spent a long time doing it, like a child casting flower petals on the water. The bills floated downstream, toward the sea, slowly darkening as they became waterlogged. They might sink when they were soaked through, or they might vanish into the Atlantic. Or maybe they would wash up on the shore of the barrier peninsula that extended along this stretch of coast.
It didn’t matter. She didn’t want that kind of money. She never had.
When the last bills had been dispersed, she climbed the hillside and got back into the Jeep and headed home, taking the ocean road. She was too tired to return to the parkway. She was more tired, she thought, than she’d ever been.
She lit a cigarette and pulled in a deep drag, ignoring the complaint of bruised ribs.
A long fucking night. And yet by the clock it had been ten hours, no more. Ten hours that had begun in Wonderland—and ended in hell.
*
They really did call it Wonderland. It was a six-block stretch of kiddie rides and games of chance on a wide section of boardwalk in Point Clement, New Jersey. Mobbed in summer, shut down in winter, and in October—well, it depended on the night and the weather.
Tonight was a Friday and the weather was decent enough. The sun was down and the wind was up, the wet, salty breath of the ocean. The locals were out in force, riding the Tilt-A-Whirl and pumping quarters into arcade games and cramming piles of cotton candy down their throats.
Bonnie detested cotton candy. It was like eating cobwebs. She wasn’t too crazy about amusement areas in general, or about this one in particular. But she wasn’t here for fun. She was on the job.
Ahead of her, making his way through the crowd, was a married man by the name of Bill Mitter, who was suspected of cheating on his wife. It was Bonnie’s job to turn suspicion into proof.
Yeah, it was a milk run, the only kind of assignment she’d taken on recently. Penny-ante stuff, straying husbands and background checks. Boring and not especially remunerative. No cases involving the special services she’d been known to offer as a sideline. Not anymore.
Bonnie felt sorry for Mrs. Mitter, first name Gloria. She was a dumpy middle-aged lady with bleached hair and an obvious facelift. She’d done what she could to hold her hubby’s interest, but instead he’d decided to go tomcatting around, probably with some bimbo half his age. It just wasn’t right. Though Bonnie herself had never been married, she was a stern respecter of monogamy in intimate relationships. She’d done a lot of things that weren’t exactly on the up and up, but she could honestly say she’d never cheated on a guy. Then again, given her solitary nature, she hadn’t had many chances.
In their meeting in Bonnie’s office two days ago, Mrs. Mitter had said Bill was working late way too often and acting funny about it. Of course, she’d added with a kind of wistful optimism, there might be nothing to it.
Bonnie knew there was something to it. There was always something to it. She’d named her PI agency Last Resort for a reason. Anyone who came to her had exhausted all other options.
She told Mrs. Mitter to call her the next time Bill said he would be working late. That call had come in this afternoon. She had staked out Bill’s office and followed him here when he’d left.
Now it was just a question of catching the bastard with his pants down. So to speak.
Her quarry was still progressing down the midway. His rumpled raincoat was easy to track. The getup made him look like that detective on old-time TV. Columbo, right? Like the yogurt.
She followed him past a miniature golf course, a bandstand where two women were playing keyboards and singing “YMCA,” and assorted game booths. He was moving fast, checking his wristwatch way too often. Like the white rabbit, Bonnie thought.
“He’s late,” she murmured. “He’s late for a very important date.”
Given the venue, it seemed appropriate.
Despite its name, there was nothing very wonderful about Wonderland, especially in the off-season. This late in the year, it was just about ready to go dark for the winter. Some of the rides were already closed. All the booths were still open, but that was hardly a selling point. She knew about carnies and their tricks, and she knew their games were a license to steal.
There was the basketball game—simple, right? Except the hoop was smaller than regulation size and was subtly bent into an oval. Kareem himself couldn’t make those shots.
The dart game. Puncture a balloon, win a prize. But the balloons were underinflated, and the darts had dulled points.
Throw a ball into the tub. Anyone could do it! Not really. The setup was rigged so the ball would always bounce out.
At least that was how it was in other places. Maybe in Wonderland the games were legit. Maybe here the targets weren’t gaffed and the prizes weren’t fifth-rate crap that would fall apart as soon as you got them home. But that wasn’t the way to bet.
Some folks, knowing the games were rigged, played anyway, just for fun. But the more trusting souls didn’t know. She’d seen a news story about a guy in some other state who’d lost a couple grand—his life savings, sadly enough—on the ball-in-the-tub scam. How much did you have to lose before you realized you couldn’t win?
She’d asked herself the same question earlier this year. And her answer …
Hold that thought. Her quarry had stopped.
Twenty feet ahead, Bill Mitter was studying a map of the amusement area in a kiosk. There was a chance he’d made her. He might be testing her right now. She didn’t think so, though. Any guy whose fashion sense ran to Columbo raincoats couldn’t possibly be sharp enough to spot a tail.
Anyway, she was as close to invisible as she could be. Before starting out for the evening, she’d changed into blue jeans and a navy windbreaker. Her sneakers were dark blue also. It was a little-known fact that navy blue blended into the night more completely than any other color, even black.
She held back, adjusting her hat—a soft denim newsboy cap, also dark blue—while pretending to read the menu in the window of a snack shack. The place offered Mad Hatter burgers, Cheshire Cat shakes, and side orders of Tweedledee (fries) and Tweedledum (onion rings). The Jabberwock dogs sounded pretty good.
Then her gaze slid from the menu to the whirl of reflections in the glass. Amid the kaleidoscope of moving forms, there was one point of stability. A female figure, immobile, directly across the midway.
Watching her.
It was a truism in her business that the most boring job could get interesting in a hurry. She was reminded of that truism now.
Because while she had been tailing Bill Mitter, someone else had been tailing her.