Joe Schreiber - Perry's killer playlist

“Oh.” My head cleared all at once, like a fogged windshield sliced across by wipers. I hadn’t been unconscious, exactly, more like grayed out, a combination of carbon monoxide and a more than slightly heightened sense of reality, a kind of psychological altitude sickness. I realized that we were back inside one of Zermatt’s little shuttles, rattling along the main drag at sixty miles an hour, except this time Gobi was the one steering it.

“How did they find us?”

“Matter of time.”

“Wait, you’re driving? ”

“I can drive.”

If this was true, it was only in the broadest sense of the word. She was careening wildly from side to side up the narrow street, jerking the steering wheel back and forth like she’d learned how to drive from one of those old movies where they apparently projected the background behind the actors’ heads, blew air in their faces, and told them to steer.

Up in front of us, I saw dozens of lights filling the street, heard music and noise-a parade in progress now disrupted by the onset of World War Three. Gobi was aiming right toward it, one-handed, which allowed her to lean out the window and keep shooting at whoever was coming up behind us.

“Keep your head down.”

“Where are we going?”

She didn’t answer, and her eyes got very wide. I tried to think of anything that could actually take her by surprise, but I didn’t have to wonder for long. In front of us, hundreds of Bavarian Santa Clauses were standing in the street, watching the fire start to spread.

“What the hell…?” I looked back up at the colorful banner dangling overhead and remembered what it had said-CLAUWAU. We’d arrived here in the middle of some kind of international Santa Claus convention.

There were Santas everywhere. Most of them looked as freaked out as I was, but in the chaos it was hard to tell. One of them spun around as we blasted past, and I wondered if Paula and whoever else was after us had the foresight to dress their assassins as Saint Nick. Another grenade erupted up from somewhere with a WHOOSH and a hiss, and a mob of men and women in red suits with pillows tucked underneath scattered in every direction. As the street finally started to clear, I saw one particular Santa, screaming, his beard on fire, running for the alley. Reindeer-real ones this time, having broken loose from their harness-went sprinting off after him in every direction. It was Santageddon.

Gobi swerved wildly around a second herd of Santas with matching Elvis pompadours and gold lame boots that seemed just a few seconds earlier to have been scaling a tall wooden pole in some kind of contest. The pole had fallen over, and Gobi steered around it, thumping the car’s left tires hard enough that I heard something snap off underneath us.

“Where are you going?” I managed.

The answer was “Helipad.”

“When we get to top,” Gobi said, “leave all talking to me.”

“You actually think they’ll just let us fly out of here?”

“I think, yes.” She held the machine gun up, then jammed her hand into her coat, brought out a wad of euros in a big metal money clip, and shoved it in my hand. “Hold on to this. In case we have to negotiate.”

“Isn’t that what the gun’s for?”

The question was rhetorical and we both knew it. We had arrived at our destination. I didn’t realize it at the time, even when I looked up and saw the big blue and white AIR ZERMATT garage opening in front of us to reveal a drive-in elevator the size of an aircraft carrier.

We drove in and the elevator began to rise, the doors opening at the top, allowing us to roll out onto the roof.

The helicopter was waiting for us.

The fuselage was red with white call letters painted on the side. Its propellor was already running, making that unmistakable pop-pop-pop of the blades accompanied by the high-pitched whine of turbines. I’d read somewhere about Vietnam veterans who couldn’t stand the sound of rotors because it gave them flashbacks to the war, and at that moment I totally understood. Even though it was half a world away, the second I heard that familiar sound and smelled the exhaust, it was like I was right back in midtown Manhattan, gunfire and shouting, exploding glass and broken promises on the forty-seventh floor.

I glanced back down at Zermatt spread out below us, sirens and fire at the far end of the street, where, from the sound of it, the battle of the Hotel Schoeneweiss was apparently still in progress. Up above it all, the mountains stood almost lost in the distance except for a few faint beacons, tiny lights at their peaks.

Gobi and I got out of the car just as the chopper’s hatch opened.

The woman who stepped through it was familiar too.

“Hey, Stormaire,” Paula shouted across the helipad. She was wearing a black knit ski cap and parka, and grinning like she’d just won the Big Air competition at the Winter X Games. Even from here, I could see the bruise on her face where Gobi had ax-kicked her back in Venice. “Written any good songs lately?”

This time her pistol was pointed right at Gobi.

For a second, nobody moved. We all just stood there, our clothes flapping like windsocks in the rushing air high above the lights of Zermatt.

Then I saw a red dot appear on Gobi’s forehead, and traced it to a man in a long coat poised inside the helicopter, holding a rifle outfitted with a laser-scope, fifteen yards away. He was bald, with a long, almond-shaped face that tapered down to a trim silver-gray goatee, making him look vaguely satanic.

It took me a second to recognize him, but I made the connection soon enough. The last time I’d seen him he’d been wearing a priest’s collar in the Grand Canal, when he’d come bursting out of the Louis Vuitton steamer trunk and opened his eyes, alive despite all the bullets that had been fired in his direction. Gobi’s target, the one she’d failed to finish off. Right away I could tell that Gobi recognized him just by the subtle shift in her posture.

You should have killed him in Venice, I thought.

The man gave us both an amused glance, and in the chopper’s interior lights I saw his lips tightening at the corners, like the spontaneous pucker of a time-lapse scar. I looked back at the red dot on Gobi’s forehead. Counting the rifle and the pistol, she had at least two guns trained right on her, maybe more if Paula had another sniper waiting somewhere else. With the two of us standing out here exposed on the helipad, with all these mountains and rooftops around us, the idea didn’t seem the least bit paranoid.

It had started snowing. White flakes began to drift down, little sugar-spun strands and helices swirling almost weightlessly through the landing lights. Lit by the rifle’s laser-scope, they looked downright magical.

“Paula,” I shouted over the helicopter’s roar. “Where’s my family?”

“They’re safe,” she said. “For now.”

“Where?”

“You know, I was thinking maybe we should take some time apart.” Her eyes flicked to Gobi. “See other people.” She gave a sympathetic shrug. “It’s not you, it’s me.”

“Whatever you say.”

“Hey.” Paula wrinkled her nose at me. “It was fun while it lasted, though, right?”

I glanced at Gobi. She’d turned her head so I couldn’t see her expression, and even if I had, it would have been impossible to say what was going through her mind. She still had the machine gun from Erich’s place, but I didn’t know how much ammo she had left, and even if she was fully loaded, we were simply outgunned. She might have been able to take out one of the shooters, but not both of them, and that kevlar vest wasn’t going to do any good against a headshot at fifteen yards.