Joe Schreiber - Perry's killer playlist

“Perry?”

I opened my eyes and tried to sit up, then remembered that I couldn’t. My shoulders were on fire, and my neck ached like I had iron rods running down from the base of my skull. Off to the right, there was a rattling sound as the heavy curtains swung open and daylight exploded in my face. It was blinding enough that I could barely make out the female silhouette poised in front of it.

“Okay,” I managed, “we’ve established that it’s morning. Can you please untie me now?”

My eyes adjusted, and I got my first real look at the woman standing over me.

It was Paula.

She was standing by the window, wearing the coat that she’d no doubt arrived in, and her briefcase was still in one hand and her suitcase in the other. For a moment, we just stared at each other. I realized that the blankets were pulled down to my waist, just far enough to reveal that I wasn’t wearing anything underneath them, and I was now acutely aware of my position on the bed.

“I–I finished early in L.A.” She blinked exactly once. The words were dropping out of her mouth like stale candy falling out of a vending machine, just lying there between us. “I got on a plane. I wanted to surprise you.”

“Officially surprised.”

“Yeah.” Another word that just lay there. “Me too.”

“Thank God you’re here,” I said. “Gobi-”

“Gobi?” Her eyebrows went up even higher, if that were possible. “Gobi is here?”

“Who do you think did this?” I tugged on the cords, as if I needed to draw more attention to the fact that I was still tied to the bedposts. “Can you cut me loose?”

Paula looked at Gobi’s clothes strewn around the room, a blouse on the nightstand, something lacy and red dangling from the doorknob. Some dazed part of me realized that Gobi must have gotten up early and gone shopping, then come back here to change while I lay sound asleep. Couldn’t she have at least picked up after herself?

When Paula’s eyes returned to me again, they were harder to read. The surprise was gone, and there was something else there instead, a kind of keen, businesslike efficiency, as if she were suddenly seeing this from a completely different set of contact lenses. “Of course.”

“Paula, wait-”

“I’ll be right back. I’m just going to go see if they have anything sharp at the front desk.”

The door closed. I lay there staring at the ceiling for what felt like a very long time, trying to identify various stains. One of them looked like a fish. One looked like a bird. One looked like my future imploding.

I looked at the digital clock on the nightstand and saw that it was somehow already two in the afternoon. If Linus and the band had started searching the hotel for me, they hadn’t gotten around to breaking down random doors yet.

Finally Paula came back with a pair of very lethal-looking scissors. She reached over the bed toward my arms. Now she wasn’t making eye contact with me at all.

“Hold still.”

“Look,” I said, “Paula-”

“I’m actually here for a reason.” Snip-snip. “Armitage is flying in this afternoon.” Snip. “He wants to meet you personally before tonight’s show.” She finished with the first cord and moved on to the second one. “So I guess I don’t have to ask how the tour’s going so far.”

“Stop it,” I said. “Just listen, okay?”

Snip-snip. “I’m not upset, Perry, all right? I’m a grownup. I get it.”

“But I haven’t told you anything.”

“You don’t have to.”

“Hold on-”

“I read what you wrote about her, remember? In your college essay?”

“Okay,” I said, “but that isn’t-”

Snip. “I should never have sent you to Venice.”

“I’m not-”

Snip. “I ought to have my head examined.”

“Paula, she’s killing people again.”

The scissors froze midsnip, and Paula straightened up and looked at me. “What?”

“Gobi. She’s working for somebody named Kaya. He’s got something on her, I don’t know what, but he’s forcing her to do some new assignment. The targets-one of them was dressed as a priest. She made me help her get rid of the body last night and dump it into the canal from her hotel balcony.”

“You helped her get rid of a body? ”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Last night she bought a shotgun at a restaurant and kept it pointed at my back all the way here. We have to call the police right now, before she gets back.”

Paula cut the last cord and my left hand was free at last. I stretched my arm back, working the pins and needles from my shoulder until the circulation came flooding back. She still hadn’t said anything. Looking at her eyes, I could see her mind working fast, evaluating the situation and analyzing her options.

“You said you helped her?” she asked.

“No! I mean, yeah, but-”

“Did anybody see you?”

I thought about our standoff with the carabinieri at the Trattoria Sacro e Profano. “Well, yeah, but-”

“The police?”

“Yes.”

“And they saw your face.” Paula sighed. “So you’re already an accomplice.”

“What?” I stood up. “ No! I told you, she had a gun to my-”

“Perry,” Paula said, “listen to me. I believe you, obviously. But you have to look at it their way. Right now you’re just an American kid on a rock-and-roll tour, and the last time they saw you, it was this Bonnie and Clyde shootout with a gun-toting psychopath. An international incident like this can go south fast. Even if there was no video surveillance footage of you, they probably already have your Identi-Kit facial composite to Interpol right alongside Gobi’s.” She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “Before we do anything, you need a lawyer-or the next place you’re going to end up is in an Italian jail.”

“Jail?” I felt my stomach lurch downward with a sudden nauseating heaviness. All at once I couldn’t breathe. It was like my lungs had just sort of gotten stage fright and forgotten how to do their job. Every movie I’d ever seen with a guy-ends-up-in-a-foreign-jail-cell plot went through my brain all at once, and I was already wondering how many packs of cigarettes I’d be worth on the open market.

When I finally managed to draw breath, my voice sounded wheezy and faint, like an asthmatic gasping down a clogged garden hose. “I can’t go to jail,” I said. “My dad-”

“I know.”

“What do we do?”

“For now, we need to get you out of here.”

“And then what?”

Paula frowned. “It’s possible that Armitage can help us.”

I looked at her, allowing myself to feel the faintest spark of hope. “How?”

“Well, for one thing, he’s a billionaire. People like him don’t go anywhere without a fleet of attorneys. And for some reason, Stormaire, he’s taken a liking to you.” She smiled a little. “There’s no way he’ll get Inchworm into the studio for their first album if their bass player and songwriter is rotting in a cell somewhere in Venice, right?”

“So what next?”

“We go somewhere and lie low.” She looked at her watch. “We’ve got a little over six hours till we meet him tonight. And then all you have to do is play a gig so amazing that Armitage will do whatever it takes to keep you out of jail.”

“I gotta tell the guys I’m here.”

Paula shook her head. “No offense to Linus, but at this point the last thing we need is his particular brand of high-pitched rhetoric. We’ll deal with him soon enough.”

I saw her point. “Okay, but-”

“First things first.” Her gaze moved back to me, one eyebrow raised. “Where are your clothes, anyway?”