The Happy Mariner was a rambling one-story motel dating to the early 1960s, laid out in a horseshoe shape embracing a courtyard parking lot. The lot was nearly empty, and Bonnie was happy about that. She didn’t want a lot of people around.
She ditched her Jeep at the rear of the complex, behind a disorderly row of trash bins, where it wouldn’t be seen. Before leaving, she opened the glove box and removed a roll of duct tape, useful for patching rips in the seat cushions, and stuck it in her purse.
In the courtyard she reconnoitered with Kyle, advising her to park her Hyundai out in the open where Shaban would see it. “After that, check in. Get a room on the end. Pay cash. Don’t use your real name.”
“What if they ask for ID?”
“Take a hike, and we’ll find a less classy establishment.”
Bonnie waited outside, smoking yet another cigarette and watching the traffic on Route 35.
“They cleaned me out,” Kyle said, returning with a room key. “Eighty-five dollars, cash in advance.”
“Which room?”
“One-oh-one. Over there.”
She pointed to a corner unit. The windows next door were dark, and no vehicle was parked in the space out front. Most likely they had no neighbors. Good.
Bonnie took the key and opened up the room. It had been a couple of years since she’d been inside the motel she knew as the Crappy Mariner, but the decor had not improved. There were still the same dead bugs on the carpet, the same cobwebs in the corners, the same aroma of cat pee and puke. In short, it was her kind of place.
“Believe it or not, the desk clerk told me this was a nonsmoking room,” Kyle said, regarding the cigarette in Bonnie’s mouth with disapproval.
Given the cigarette burns plainly visible on the bedspread, Bonnie was pretty sure this policy wasn’t enforced. More to the point, she didn’t give a rat’s ass. “My body, my rules.”
She checked out the rest of the unit. Small bathroom, barred window. Sliding door that opened on a patio by a drained swimming pool. She fiddled with the door for a minute, then closed the drapes to cover it.
“You know what’s funny?” Kyle was saying. “People say, I have a body. When logically they should say, I am a body. Because that’s all they are, just flesh and bone.”
“Yeah, that’s hilarious. You should do stand-up.”
“I meant funny in a thought-provoking sense.”
“So you don’t believe in a soul, anything like that?”
Kyle made a disparaging grunt. “Superstition. No intelligent person buys that Cartesian dualistic crap.”
Bonnie didn’t know what Cartesian meant. She thought it had something to do with wells. “Guy I was talking to tonight is into it. He’s a ghost hunter.”
“I suppose you believe that nonsense.”
“What makes you suppose that?”
“You said you’d never been to college.”
Bonnie wondered what exactly they’d taught this kid at school. How to be a bitch, apparently. She found it strange that anyone would pay money to learn that skill. On the street she’d picked it up for free.
“As far as ghosts go,” she said, “I have no opinion.” She unscrewed the bulb from one of the two lamps on the bureau, cutting the light in the room by half. “You could be right about us being meat puppets. Or Sparky—that’s my ghost-hunter friend—he could be right about the Great Beyond.” She shrugged. “That kind of stuff is above my pay grade.”
“It shouldn’t be. Everybody needs to cultivate a philosophy.”
“I’ve been too busy just staying alive. You ever planning to take off that coat?”
Kyle hugged herself. “I’m still cold.”
“Of course you are. Okay, time to make the call. You know what to say?”
“Naturally.”
Bonnie didn’t ask if she could be convincing. Kyle Ridley was a girl of many talents, and lying was definitely one of them.
Kyle seated herself on the sofa and used the room phone, dialing her handler’s cell from memory.
“Shaban? It’s me. Don’t talk, all right? Just listen. I made a mistake today. It was stupid of me, really stupid. I don’t know what I was thinking. I want to make it right.”
Faintly, a male voice buzzed like a hornet. Bonnie couldn’t make out the words.
“I know, I know,” Kyle said. “But I’ve got the stuff. I put it someplace safe. I can take you to it. Come on, I’m taking a big chance, reaching out to you like this.”
More buzzing. Shaban was not appeased. Finally Kyle broke in.
“Do you want the product or not? … Then come and meet me. I’m at a motel, the Cra—I mean, the Happy Mariner on Route 35 in Maritime. Room one-oh-one. How long will it take you to get here? … All right. I’ll be waiting.” She hung up. “He bought it.”
“Probably.”
“Of course he did. I was totally persuasive.”
“Yeah, you’re a regular Sandra Bernhard.”
“I think you mean Sarah Bernhardt.”
“Whatever. The Oscar goes to you.” Bonnie circled around behind her and shut the curtains over the front windows.
“So where do you want me to be when this goes down?” Kyle rose from the sofa. “Can I watch it happen, or do you want me in the bathroom?”
“I don’t want you here at all.”
“Well, I’m staying. I need to be part of it.”
“You’re already part of it. You just shouldn’t be here when the Shinola hits the fan.”
“It’s nonnegotiable. I’m not going anywhere.”
“Then at least take off the damn coat.”
“I told you—”
“Yeah, you’re cold. What are you, ninety? You got some serious circulation problems, kid.”
Kyle made a bored noise and turned away. “My circulation is fine.”
“Not for long,” Bonnie said, and she seized the girl from behind, throwing her right arm around her neck, wedging her throat in the crook of an elbow.
And squeezing. Squeezing hard.
Kyle was quick. Instinctively she tucked her chin and flung up both hands to grab Bonnie’s arm. It was the right countermove to a rear chokehold. But it wouldn’t save her.
Pressure on her carotids would cut off the blood flow to her brain, inducing unconsciousness in less than ten seconds.
Her right leg jerked backward. She struggled to hook her foot around Bonnie’s ankle. Another smart move. If it worked, she could pivot and throw down her assailant, breaking the hold.
She hadn’t lied about her training. But she also hadn’t learned to fight dirty.
Bonnie slammed a sneaker down on Kyle’s foot, pinning it to the floor.
The girl made a final effort to break free, jabbing blindly behind her but missing her target. Then she sagged, a hundred pounds of dead weight.
The faint wouldn’t last long. Bonnie yanked the coat off the girl’s body and threw it aside, then stripped off a pillowcase, stuffed it into her mouth, and used the duct tape to hogtie her wrists and ankles. Already the girl’s eyelids were fluttering. Bonnie sealed her mouth with another strip of tape, then dragged her to the connecting door to the next room, leaving her on the floor.
By now Kyle was awake, her face red, eyes glaring. She looked angry, not scared, and Bonnie respected her for that.
“Keep cool, Croc. Everything will be okay.”
Bonnie retrieved a set of picklocks from her purse and got the connecting door open. The adjacent room was indeed unoccupied. She would have to hope it remained that way for the next hour or so. In a dump like this, there was always the chance of a late-night check-in.
Lifting Kyle by her feet, she dragged the girl into the other room, a mirror image of the first. With effort, she heaved her facedown onto the bed.
Kyle jerked and writhed like a landed trout. Bonnie lifted the wallet from her back pocket. “No worries, okay? I just need you outta the picture while I deal with Shaban.” She checked the other pockets for anything sharp. She didn’t want the girl cutting herself free. “You can bang the headboard on the wall and make some noise, but I wouldn’t recommend it.” She found a key set, the vape pen, and some coins. She took the keys. “Anyone who hears you will just figure the neighbors are doing the nasty. And if the desk clerk does come to investigate, he’ll probably call the cops, which wouldn’t be good for either of us. Capisce?”
Kyle grunted unintelligible syllables behind the gag. Some salty language, most likely. But she did stop thrashing.
Bonnie stepped away from the bed. “Now just lie still and save your breath. If everything goes according to plan, you’ll be untied as soon as Shaban’s been taken care of. If things don’t go as planned, and he takes me out—well, either he’ll find you in here and kill you, or the cops will find you and arrest you. So let’s hope it doesn’t play out that way.”
She left, shutting the door. Back in the first room, she went through the wallet’s contents. According to the driver’s license, Kyle Ridley was her real name, a fact confirmed by a student ID card, bank debit card, and Visa card. That was a little surprising. It had sounded like an alias. Then again, so did Bonnie Parker.
Her address on the driver’s license was an apartment in Bayonne. She was carrying only four dollars in cash—she hadn’t lied when she said that paying the room had cleaned her out—and a parking stub from Newark International Airport.
There were three keys on the chain—a car key, an apartment key, and a small key to a safe deposit box. That was another little surprise. Bonnie had assumed the story about the safe deposit box was a lie.
The red, white, and blue coat lay on the floor where she’d tossed it. She studied the lining in the light of a table lamp. It took her only a few moments to find the new stitching. A nice job. She’d read somewhere that the Turks were known for their stitching—rugs, towels, that kind of stuff.
She’d noticed right away that Kyle’s jacket was too big for her and too heavy for this mild weather. And the girl had kept it on in the bar. Even here, she hadn’t wanted to part with it.
Carefully she undid some of the stitches, peeled back a corner of the lining, and reached inside to finger the plastic pouches concealed within. Bags of heroin, sewn into the coat. Probably sprayed with special chemicals to mask the smell of the drugs.
Nobody had mugged Kyle at the airport. The only person who’d stolen Shaban Dragusha’s shipment was Kyle Ridley herself. She was no victim of circumstance. She’d planned the whole thing, knowing all along that she would need a hitter to eliminate her handler, the only member of the Dragusha organization who knew her name. Yeah, it was all very neat.
Bonnie hid the wallet and its contents in a drawer of the bureau, leaving the coat in plain sight. Then she took out the Walther, screwed in the suppressor, and settled down in the room’s one armchair, facing the front door.
She didn’t think she’d have long to wait.