Bonnie’s duplex was no messier than it had been last night, after the Long Fong Boyz ransacked the place. She locked and bolted the door, not that it would prove much of a deterrent if they came back. But she didn’t think they would—not this soon. The attack in the parking lot had obviously been improvised. Now that it had failed, she would expect them to wait until dark. Predators were nocturnal. She ought to know.
She spent some time on the phone with Victoria Lazzaro, working out a few details. After that, she switched on a tablet with a cellular connection and used Google Earth to perform a thorough aerial reconnaissance of Frank’s property in Saddle River. Then she searched the web for any local hardware store that was still open. She found one in McKendree Park and made a mental note to stop there on her way north.
Her plan for tonight was simple. First she would take care of Frank Lazzaro at home. The Long Fong Boyz would be monitoring her movements, but the GPS tracker wouldn’t be accurate enough to pinpoint the Jeep if she hid it in the woods behind Frank’s place. And they probably wouldn’t come after her in Frank’s neighborhood, anyway. They would wait for a better opportunity.
She intended to give them one. After leaving Frank’s house, she would lead Chiu’s gang into an ambush. With the Jeep parked in some deserted location, she would wait for their arrival, then open up with the TEC-9. With any luck she could blip them all in one three-second burst.
Sparky’s camcorder would come in handy after that—if she made it that far.
She had two advantages over the gang. Number one, she knew about the GPS and they didn’t know she knew. Number two, she had a machine gun. They didn’t know about that, either.
Even so, the odds weren’t exactly on her side. But hell, when were they ever?
Someone knocked on her door. The noise startled her. She thought maybe she’d been wrong about Chiu’s posse waiting till nightfall. No, that couldn’t be it. The Long Fong Boyz wouldn’t knock.
The face in the peephole belonged to Bradley Walsh. Bonnie opened the door and saw his squad car parked at the curb a few doors down. Apparently he didn’t want to advertise his visit to her house.
“Hey, Bonnie. Saw your Jeep parked outside.”
“Just passing by?”
“I’ve been swinging past pretty regularly. You know, just to keep an eye on the place.”
“Thanks. You wanna come in?”
“Just for a sec.”
He entered the living room and stood there shifting his feet like a man walking in place.
“I’ve gotta thank you again,” she said. “For what you did. It was super helpful.”
“Don’t worry about it.” He looked down at his shoes. “Bonnie … I read the file.”
“Did you?”
“Yeah. While I was running off the copy last night.”
“Then you know what Maguire suspects me of.”
“I know. And if you did it—not that I want to know, one way or the other—but if you did, I wouldn’t blame you.”
“That’s kind of a strange attitude for a law enforcement officer to take.”
“Maybe I’m not a very good law enforcement officer.”
“Or maybe you’re wise beyond your years.”
He smiled at that. A bashful smile. But his face turned serious when he said, “I overheard the chief on the phone a couple hours ago. He’s talked the state police in Ohio into deposing the gun shop owner.”
“When?”
“Tomorrow, it sounds like.”
“Okay. Thanks for the heads-up. You don’t have to keep sticking your neck out for me.”
“Maybe I like it.”
“Yeah, it’s all fun and games until somebody gets hurt.”
“You’re the one I’m worried about getting hurt.”
“I can take care of myself, Bradley.”
“Brad.”
“Huh?”
“Only my mom calls me Bradley.”
“Right. Okay, Brad. I appreciate your help, but I’ll take it from here.”
“You going to get a lawyer?”
“I may not need one.”
“I don’t know. Once the gun guy talks …”
“Maybe he won’t.”
“He talked to the chief.”
“That wasn’t official. Maguire has no jurisdiction in Ohio.”
“Tomorrow it’ll be official.”
“Tomorrow is still a long way off. And Maguire’s had some real bad luck dealing with me. It could be he’s about to have some more.”
“You’re a cool customer, Bonnie Parker.”
“In these veins—ice water.”
“I believe it. Hey, I don’t know if I should say this. I mean, I don’t exactly know what your situation is.”
“My situation?”
“Desmond Harris. You know.”
“Oh.”
“Maybe I’m out of line, but—well, I guess you know I’m interested.”
“I might’ve picked up on that.”
“Yeah. So if your deal with Harris isn’t too serious, or if anything changes—”
“Sorry, Brad. It’s not gonna happen.”
“Because of Harris?”
He was offering her a way out, but she wouldn’t take it. “Because of me,” she said firmly. “You don’t want to get involved with me. I’m not a good person.”
“I think you are.”
“You don’t know me the way I do. Maguire is probably right. I probably should be locked up. I do bad things, and I don’t even feel bad about it. I … hurt people. I hurt them in all kinds of ways. I would hurt you too, if you ever gave me the chance.”
“You can’t talk me out of the way I feel.”
“That’s your hard luck.”
She liked him. She was grateful to him. But she would never hook up with him. For once in her life she would be kind. And though he didn’t know it, the greatest kindness she could show him was to keep him at the distance.
It wouldn’t be hard. She kept everyone at a distance. Everyone except Des.
“I’m not giving up on you,” Bradley said.
“You should. Because it’s never gonna happen, kiddo. You can take that to the bank.”
He flashed that smile again. “We’ll see.”
“I appreciate everything you’ve done. Even if it was a little crazy of you to take this kind of chance.”
“I like to go a little crazy every once in a while. See you, Bonnie.” He tipped his cap to her as he walked out the door.
She watched him go. Then she shut the door, relocked it and re-bolted it, and released a long-held breath. Nobility didn’t come easy to her. It kind of cut against the grain of her basic asshole-ishness.
She could have led him on, kept him on the line. He meant well, he was willing to overlook a whole lot of things about her, and—okay—he was young and studly and fuckable. But none of that mattered. Let him find some normal girl to romance. Someone whose life wasn’t a hedge maze strewn with land mines. Someone who didn’t kill people for money—and get people killed, people like Aaron Walling.
No one was safe around her. Not her enemies, not her friends. It had been that way since the farmhouse. It would always be that way.
The farmhouse. She’d been so young then, a kid. Young enough to believe she was ending something. Young enough to believe she could kill three people and just walk away and go back to her life.
- — -
It happened in the winter. She remembered snow on tree branches. Early dusk. She’d arrived in Buckington and holed up in an abandoned barn. She’d learned to find such places. This one was inhabited by squirrels and spiders. She stole food from a neighborhood market, stuffing loose items into her pockets as she warily watched the counterman. In the barn on the evening before the killing, she gulped candy bars, chewing hard, sucking down sugary energy to power her resolve.
She was scared. She had never killed anyone. Had never pointed a gun at anyone until the gun shop owner followed her into the parking lot. She was only fourteen, and she’d lived on the street, fending for herself, since her parents had been murdered in the motel. She’d learned to steal and hide. Twice she’d sold her body for cash. She’d given a nervous guy a blow job in a toilet, and allowed another guy to put his dick between her legs. Afterward she’d worried about herpes, AIDS, getting pregnant. She hadn’t done it again.
She’d met other kids, runaways, but never bonded with them. They were into booze and drugs; they just drifted, with no purpose. She had a purpose. She would find the ones who killed her parents.
Why? She couldn’t say that she’d loved her parents or that they’d loved her. It wasn’t about vengeance, much less justice. It was because—because the men in the motel had scared her. She couldn’t shake free of the memory of huddling in a bathtub behind a shower curtain, terrified of discovery. They had reduced her to helplessness and fear, and she couldn’t forgive them for that. And the only way to lose the fear was to face them and put them down.
They were older than she was, nearly as old as her dad had been. They were experienced at killing. She could tell that much from their casual brutality in the motel room. And she knew they wouldn’t hesitate to kill her if they caught her in the house. But first they would rape her. A gang rape, ritual humiliation. Running a train on her—that was what it was called. She wouldn’t let it happen. If things went that way, she would use the gun on herself.
But she didn’t intend to die that night. She intended to make the three of them dead. It would be dangerous and rough, but she’d been steeling her nerves for six months, and she was ready.
The farmhouse ranged lazily on a spread of fallow land hemmed in by yards of chicken wire strung between stubby, paint-flecked posts. She had no trouble crawling under the wire and onto the property. Lights in the windows were on, and from inside came the babble of the TV and drunken laughter. She hoped they really were drunk or high. Anything that slowed their reactions would give her an edge.
A quarter moon played tag with scudding clouds. She waited for an interval of darkness, when the moon was hidden. In that temporary blackout, she darted across the field to the back door, where she crouched, hugging the wall, expelling feathery clouds of breath. Her heart was beating fast and hard, fairly knocking at her ears, and she was cold and lonely. Part of her wanted to turn back. But it was only a small part, easily ignored.
She tested the door. Locked. She had neither the tools nor the skills to pick a lock. But the nearest window, though shut against the cold, was unlatched, or maybe the ancient latch was broken. Whatever the explanation, she shoved it up, straining with both hands, worried by the low squeal of protest as the sash grated against the frame.
When it was up, she waited, afraid someone had heard and would come. But no one came, so she gathered her strength and climbed through, alighting on a threadbare carpet in a storage room.
What happened after that seemed to take forever, yet it was all over in less than a minute. A single minute, hardly any time at all, but long enough to end three lives.
She emerged from the storeroom just as one of the three ambled out of the kitchen, a beer bottle in his hand. He was making conversation with his friends in the other room, shouting something about how they had to make a beer run tomorrow because their stash was running low. She was grateful to him for speaking, because she recognized his voice. He was one of the three who had been at the motel—not Lucas Hatch, the triggerman identified by the police, but one of his friends. Her last doubt was erased, and it was actually easy for her to point the gun and shoot.
The distance wasn’t great, but she missed on her first attempt, the bullet plowing into a plasterboard wall. He turned, dropping the bottle, which shattered in a foaming geyser on the floor, and from his waistband he plucked a sleek semiauto pistol, a weapon much nicer than hers.
If she missed him a second time, he would kill her. This thought was absolutely clear in her mind as she took aim and squeezed the trigger once.
The second shot caught him high in the chest, just below the collarbone. He went down in a tangle of jerking limbs. From the other room came a stampede of footsteps. His two friends, charging this way.
Bonnie closed the distance between herself and the dying man in two long strides. She plucked his gun from the floor where he’d dropped it. She’d never fired a semiautomatic before. Luckily for her, he’d already released the safety. She wouldn’t have known how. She only knew it was a better gun than the antique revolver she’d brought to this show.
The other two appeared at the end of the hall, weapons drawn. Beer and rage had made them invincible, or so they thought. And their adversary was only a little girl.
They rushed her, howling, and she snapped off four shots and brought the lead man down.
The one at the rear sobered up in a hurry. He spun, retreating. She steadied the gun and shot him squarely in the back.
Blood everywhere, and low moans, and her ears ringing. She remembered being surprised that gunshots were so much louder indoors.
The first man in the hallway was Lucas Hatch, the one whose picture had been in the paper, the one whose prints were on the cartridge cases, the one who’d murdered her folks. He was gutshot and stunned, but still alive until she calmly aimed the gun at him at point-blank range and drilled the coup de grâce through his forehead.
The other man had died instantly, the bullet stopping his heart. Sheer luck, but she would take it.
She knew there was no chance the shots would bring the police—not in a location this remote, in a rural area where people fired off guns at foxes and deer. She took her time cleaning herself up—there was blood on her, but not her own—and making sure to wipe down any surfaces she’d touched. It had never occurred to her to wear gloves.
When she was done, she searched the house and found some money, which she took, and more cash in her first victim’s pocket. She took that also.
Before leaving, she spent a minute looking at the three corpses she had made. Her first victim had taken the longest to die—a slow, rasping, gurgling death as he lay flat on his back, eyelids fluttering like moth wings. Now he lay still, as did the others. Three lives wiped out in less time than it took to tell it. She wondered how she felt about that. She gave the question serious thought, rejecting several possible answers. The word she settled on was: satisfied.
Yes. It was satisfaction she felt, the sense of a job done. A dirty, miserable job, maybe, a demeaning and ugly job, but a necessary one. Nobody else would have done it for her. The police had scarcely looked for these three, had scarcely cared. The authorities talked a good game, but you couldn’t count on them. Couldn’t count on anyone except yourself. On this night she’d proved she could take care of business even if no one else would or could. She could take a life, and another and another, and calmly wash up afterward, and wipe down the walls and fixtures, and walk away.
She left the farmhouse and hiked back into town, where she found a diner. She downed two cheeseburgers and a milkshake. It was the best meal she’d ever tasted, and she paid for it with a dead man’s cash.
So that was what had gone down in Buckington, Ohio, fourteen years ago.
Nothing ever changed. Tonight she would break into the farmhouse again.