She ate lunch at the Main Street Diner, located in what was known optimistically as downtown Brighton Cove. There were model train sets with bigger commercial districts. Still, the four-block area was large enough to house a variety of knickknack shops and art galleries, an old-fashioned five-and-dime, too many real estate offices, and one detective agency, belonging to Bonnie herself.
According to the clock in the town square, the time was only 11:45, but she was already hungry as hell. It was kinda twisted, but she always worked up an appetite after doing a hit. Sometimes it made her a little horny too. Oh yeah, she was the picture of mental health.
The diner was crowded with people getting in a last restaurant meal before a bitch named Sandy shut everything down. Bonnie found a small table in the back and ordered clam chowder with lots of those crumbly little crackers. Oyster crackers, she thought they were called. She hoped they weren’t fattening. Watching your weight wasn’t easy in an area that boasted more pizza parlors and Italian delis per square mile than Sicily. Luckily she was a heavy smoker. It kept the pounds off.
The place had Wi-Fi, allowing her to spend some quality time with her phone. It was a Samsung, and its name was Sammy. Well, actually this little guy was Sammy II, son of Sammy. His dad had suffered a cracked screen during her run-in with Pascal and had to be humanely put down. Given how close she’d come to getting decommissioned herself, she couldn’t complain about the loss of a piece of hardware. At least she’d salvaged the DayGlo pink case.
As she scrolled through her email inbox, she became aware that some of the other patrons were looking at her. Since developing a local reputation, she’d always gotten some stares. Lately it had gotten worse because of Dan Maguire’s whisper campaign. The police chief was just jonesing to find something on her and put her away. Failing that, he could at least make her life hell.
That was the thing about small-town living. She’d settled in Brighton Cove—the first place she’d ever settled, in fact—six years ago. The spot had its charms: a two-mile stretch of boardwalk, fine Victorian homes in the wealthiest part of town, a lake where folks went ice-skating in winter. But there were drawbacks, especially for someone like her.
In a city nobody knew you. You could walk the streets and dine out and shop in glorious anonymity. Brighton Cove, population 7,000, was a different story. Here, enough people knew her, or at least knew about her, to ensure that she seldom went unrecognized in public. And since a lot of what they’d heard wasn’t too complimentary, she got a lot of nervous glances, usually accompanied by whispered conversation. Like now, for instance. About ten percent of the patrons had identified her, and were breathlessly gossiping to the other ninety percent.
The waitress, Lizbeth, returned with a bowl of soup. She was one of the few locals Bonnie counted as a friend, but she’d been strangely standoffish in recent weeks.
“Everything okay, Liz?” Bonnie asked as the soup was set down.
“Hunky-dory.” But her eyes were darting.
“You seem a little antsy around me these days.”
“Well, it’s just … You know how people talk.”
Did she ever. “They’ve been talking like that for a long time.”
“It’s different now. Ever since that thing on the boardwalk last August. They found bullets all over the place. Must’ve been a real shootout.”
It had been. Bonnie could attest to that personally, not that she intended to.
“What’s that got to do with me?” she asked evenly.
“Nothing. But some people …”
The words faded out into uncomfortable silence.
Bonnie mashed up some crackers and stirred them into the soup. “You know I’m no desperado, don’t you, Liz?”
“Um, sure, Bonnie. Sure. I know.”
She watched the waitress walk away. She’d counted two sures and an I know. That was a lot of affirmatives in response to a simple question.
If even Lizbeth had turned against her, she really was the town pariah. Well, fuck ’em. She really didn’t care what other people thought of her. She only cared that they just might be right.
That was the thing. They hated her and feared her and saw her as a freak. So be it. But there were times when she hated herself. Feared herself. Saw herself as a freak. And that, she didn’t like.
Maybe it was inevitable that she would end up this way. Maybe being an outcast and a lawbreaker was built into a girl’s destiny when she was named after America’s most notorious female outlaw. Her dad, a penny-ante criminal rogue named Tom Parker, had christened her in honor of the cigar-chomping, pistol-toting twenty-something matriarch of Clyde Barrow’s gang, a mere slip of a girl who’d robbed banks, shot it out with lawmen, and terrorized and titillated the whole country for a brief time during the grim Depression years. There was even a slight physical resemblance—the original Bonnie had been wiry and blond and arrestingly blue-eyed, just like the modern edition.
Sometimes she thought she just might be the first Bonnie reincarnated. Like Sammy II, she might be Bonnie 2.0. It could explain why violence and orneriness and being on the wayward side of the law came so naturally to her. Of course, genetics could have played a role—an inheritance from her ne’er-do-well pop. Or it might have had something to do with the hectic mess that was her childhood, which had been spent in constant flight, moving from motel to motel until she was fourteen, and then—well, then childhood became a luxury she couldn’t afford anymore.
Any way you looked at it, she’d been fated to go off the rails, at least as far as polite society was concerned. And vigilantes were never too popular with law-abiding folks, were they? Especially in Jersey, a state so nannyish its citizens weren’t even trusted to pump their own gas.
Her clients—the special ones—probably assumed she’d gotten into PI work purely as a cover for her illegal activities. Not so; she’d been a boring old bona fide PI for three years before branching out, and she still did plenty of ordinary gumshoe work, like the fish market job. She’d started using extralegal methods when she found that working within the law didn’t always work. Corrupt people could use the law to their advantage, hide behind it, even wield it as a weapon. Sometimes direct action was needed. It wasn’t pretty, but it had to be done.
And it wasn’t like she was some kind of friggin’ serial killer. She only took jobs that satisfied her personal requirements—jobs where she really was, to borrow the phrase painted on her office door, the last resort. She plugged loopholes in the law, that’s all. She was a fixer, and there were things in this world that needed fixing.
So if people came to her when all other options were off the table, having heard a rumor somewhere that Bonnie Parker could make their problems go away, could anyone really blame them?
When she thought of it that way, it all seemed very clear.
But then she remembered Alec Dante floating in a widening circle of his own blood while the echoes of the gunshots splashed back at her from the cellar walls, and suddenly she wasn’t so sure.