Joe Schreiber - Perry's killer playlist

The terminal clock said it was just past seven a.m. Outside the station, the first early skiers and tourists were already on their way to the slopes. The main drag had no actual cars, just these little diesel vehicles and electric mini-taxis shuttling people past chalets and still closed alpine shops full of overpriced watches, postcards, and cuckoo clocks. A decorative red and green banner blowing in the wind over the street advertised some kind of festival:

ClauWau Fest!!-25-27 Nov

I handed one of the drivers a twenty-euro bill from Gobi’s bag and asked him to drive us to the Hotel Schoeneweiss.

“Wohin?” He gazed at me blankly, a grizzled middle-aged man in a golf cap with windburned hangdog jowls, watery gray eyes, and a gunslinger’s mustache hanging off his upper lip.

“Is there a problem?” I asked, trying to support Gobi’s head without making it look like that’s what I was doing.

“There is no such hotel in Zermatt, mein Herr. ”

“There has to be.” I held up the key that I’d found in Gobi’s bag so he could read the label. “Look.”

The driver inspected the key for a long moment and gestured gloomily for us to climb in.

At the far end of the main street, past all the other inns and shops, the taxi pulled up in front of a small wooden storefront that seemed to be built directly into the side of the mountain itself. The shop window was full of dusty wine bottles. The hand-carved sign above the low arched door read VINOTHEKE-WEINE-SPIRITUOSEN.

“Looks like a liquor store,” I said. With its low, cavelike entrance and folksy decor, it looked like where Bilbo Baggins might drop by for a bottle of eiswein. “Are you sure this is it?”

The driver grunted and pointed above it, to an even smaller row of windows above the wine and spirits shop. A tiny hand-carved shingle no bigger than a license plate was creaking back and forth in the breeze: SCHOENEWEISS.

I looked at the darkened front door. “Where do we check in?”

“The Hotel Schoeneweiss never has any guests.”

“Sounds like a great place,” I muttered, and when I opened the back door to help Gobi out of the cab, she slouched over sideways and tumbled forward into my arms. I barely managed to catch her, and when I did, I saw how much worse she’d gotten.

Her half-lidded eyes were glazed and glassy, like she’d forgotten how to blink. Her cracked lips hung slightly parted, and at that point I honestly couldn’t tell if she was breathing or not. Her nose and mouth had started to bleed again, not much, but enough to drizzle down over her chin. I knelt down over her and glanced back up at the driver.

“Is there a hospital around here?”

The driver took one glance at Gobi, decided that he’d done his part for the cause, and hit the gas and sped off, leaving us there at the end of the street. The enormity of my bad decision-making-my misplaced trust in others and myself-settled over me like one of those smallpox-infected blankets that the U.S. Cavalry supposedly handed out to the Plains Indians. Why hadn’t I just taken my chances with the Italian police?

Some bleak inner-Perry gave voice to my darkest suspicions: Because they would have arrested you, and she would have died, and your family would never have been found.

The cold reality of it shot through me, a steel instrument tapping a raw nerve. Every second that I hesitated, every moment that I let slip away, meant that my dad and mom and Annie were getting that much closer to-

To death. You know it. That’s exactly the word.

I was trying to decide if I should just start looking around for some kind of emergency clinic somewhere when a cold hand gripped the back of my neck, thumb and forefingers pinching the tendons there, and a sharp bolt of pain shot down both arms just before they went completely numb.

The German voice in my ear was calm, almost a whisper.

“Let me see her.”

“Let me guess,” I said. “Kaya?”

The man standing behind me didn’t answer. I put him mid-to-late-thirties, handsome in a sloppy kind of way. He was wearing brown wool pants with a faded flannel shirt, sleeves rolled up to his forearms, with a two-day stubble and thick black hair that tumbled across his forehead. He had quick, searching eyes and the kind of sharp upper lip and chin that could have made him a late-night movie star from the fifties, except right now he didn’t seem to give much of a shit what he looked like at all.

“Help me get her inside,” he said, in that same low German voice. And then, touching Gobi’s chin gently, turning her head: “It is all right now, Zusane. I’m here.”

We carried her inside the empty wine store, a cramped rectangle of darkness that looked as if nobody had bought champagne or anything else here in years. As we walked past the front counter with its hooded cash register, I noticed that each shelf held exactly one row of bottles, enough to give the outward appearance of a well-stocked market. Not only were most of the bottles empty, but they were covered in about an inch of dust.

In the back, the shop gave way to a set of double doors that opened onto a narrow stairwell. I was holding Gobi’s legs and the guy took her arms, backing his way carefully up the steps while I did my best to keep her feet from dragging.

“How long has she been like this?” he asked.

“Since last night.” I looked up at him. “Who-”

“Through here.” At the top of the stairs we stepped through a doorway into a blinding expanse of light. In contrast to the gloomy booze shop below, the second floor was a spotless pine-floored room with a back wall that was one gigantic mirror.

It took me a second to realize that it was a gym.

We carried Gobi past weights and barbells, an arrangement of parallel bars, beams, tumbling mats, even a pommel horse, with a floor-to-ceiling climbing wall occupying the wall behind it. Boxing gear-heavy bags, throwing dummies, speed bags-dangled from the ceiling. The far end was dedicated to all kinds of increasingly dangerous-looking martial arts stuff, sparring gloves and masks and projectile weapons, swords, knives, and an enormous padlocked gun rack gleaming with enough well-oiled automatic firepower to blow this corner of Switzerland off the map. The cumulative effect was like taking an evolutionary speed-tour of the ultimate adolescent revenge fantasy, from “first I’ll get strong” to “then they’ll be sorry.” Taken in all at once, it was more than a little disturbing.

“Where do you keep the nuke?” I asked.

Ignoring me, the man opened a door on the opposite side of the gym. Inside, I glimpsed the residential decor, marble floors, a long leather sofa, steel and glass end tables, recessed light fixtures. I thought I heard a Hawaiian steel guitar playing somewhere softly inside.

“Stay here.”

“Now hold on-”

He took Gobi inside and shut the door in my face.

Which was very uncool.

I wandered restlessly around the gym, checking out all the black iron and chrome and not really seeing any of it, thinking of all the things that had gone wrong so far and waiting for the guy to come back out. When he didn’t, I went back to the other door leading back downstairs, but the handle wouldn’t budge. Apparently on top of everything else, I was now locked inside the biggest, most lethal workout room in the universe.

My empty stomach swung open its vaults with a growl that wasn’t so much hunger as an overall complaint about conditions in general. Sometime in the middle of the night I’d gnawed on some strangely shaped Bavarian chocolate cookie that came in a purple plastic egg, and chased it down with two cans of some sticky-sweet German energy drink, but when was the last time I’d eaten real food?