Pascal had begun to respect Bonnie Parker.
She had shocked him in the tub, drawn blood in the farmhouse, and even, by some black magic, eluded him on the road. By all rights and all logic she should have been dead three times over, yet she persisted in staying alive. She was proving a worthy enemy.
This surprised him. His first impressions rarely led him astray. He had sized up Parker as a mere annoyance—a raw blister of a girl, uncouth and rash, a weed in a dunghill. And so she might be, but like a weed, she was tenacious, thorny, and frustratingly hard to pluck.
Still, he would get her eventually. He had to. For her to defeat him would go against all reason. It would violate the natural order of things.
He steered the Lexus onto Highway 35, using the wipers to flick away the ribbons of mud that festooned the vehicle. No purpose would be served by aimlessly cruising the streets in hope of spotting her. The ambush on Old Road had been his best chance of taking her. He had waited in a turnout, his left shoulder bleeding slowly under his jacket, the pain distant and unimportant. He had assumed she would escort the family to a new location now that their home was no longer safe. The Jeep, which he remembered from the motel parking lot, was a rusted, battered thing, and he had no doubt the new Lexus could outpace it on the road and outmaneuver it in the rain.
All odds had favored him. It should have been easy to intercept her from behind, kill her with a shot through the side window of the Jeep, then nudge the driverless vehicle off the road and finish things.
Yes. Easy. Except she had led him on a chase through a farmer’s field, then vanished like a ghost. She must have cut down a side road or concealed herself behind a barn or in the woods. He had no hope of finding her. And his wound demanded attention.
First he needed to find a place to park his car. Leaving it on the street was not a good option. It was a possible that someone at the motel had seen the vehicle and given a description to the police. A parking garage would have been ideal, but there seemed to be no parking garages in the area.
He took an eastbound road off the highway and returned to Brighton Cove’s beachfront. On Ocean Drive he found a massive three-story edifice that surely dated to the Victorian Era. A hotel, he assumed, as he could imagine no other purpose for the structure. At the rear was an ungated parking lot, crowded but not full. He parked the Lexus there. Camouflaged by other cars, it was less likely to draw notice.
He switched on the ceiling light and removed the first aid kit from his satchel. He shrugged off his jacket, wincing, and removed his shirt, then inspected the damage. It was not severe. The bullet was of small caliber—a .22, he believed—and it had passed cleanly through his shoulder, leaving a neat round hole in his deltoid muscle, but missing the thoracoacromial artery and cephalic vein. There was intense pain when he moved his left arm, but pain was of no consequence. He had long ago trained himself to tolerate pain.
With iodine and sewing thread, he set to work repairing the shoulder. He had been wounded many times. Of necessity he had learned of the rudiments of combat surgery. Every killer must be his own corpsman. On countless occasions he had tweezed bullets from his sinews, cauterized wounds, darned his own skin with needle and thread.
Now, at forty-six, he was seamed with scars, a patchwork thing. With every death he had dealt, he had surrendered a small part of himself.
It could not have been otherwise. He had the dharma of a warrior. To fight, to kill, was bred into his bones. Down a hundred lifetimes he had followed this path, and only now could he see its end. Respite from battle for the remainder of this life, and for every life to come. After endless soldiering, he was on the threshold of a new destiny.
There was only this girl still standing in his way, this one fascinating, damnable girl.
When the wound was closed, he applied a self-adhesive bandage, then tested his freedom of motion. Despite discomfort, he could work the arm freely. He was unimpaired. He was fortunate indeed that the shot had not caught him in the neck, severing his carotid or jugular, or cutting his spinal cord. The girl had surprised him with automatic-weapons fire. But she would not surprise him again.
The phone rang. Her phone, the stolen cell.
He dug it out of his pocket. He had expected her to call her own number, seeking some sort of parley, but not this soon.
He answered. “Yes?”
The voice that reached him was not the one he wanted to hear. “Did you do it? Is it done?”
Miss Parker’s telephone harasser. The drunken lout who had called him earlier. Pascal almost ended the call, then thought better of it. “It is not,” he said.
“She’s still not out of the way?”
“She is still very much in the way.”
“I thought you said she was as good as dead. Big man. Big fucking man.”
“Like a stubborn stain, she is more difficult to eradicate than one might think.”
“Then leave her to me. I’ll get her. I’ll put that bitch in the ground if it’s the last thing I do.”
That was good. That was what he wanted to hear. “Perhaps, my friend,” Pascal said slowly, “there is another way.”
“What way?”
“Perhaps the two of us can get it done ... together.”