Joe Schreiber: Perry's killer playlist

“No. No way.” Shaking his head. “I cuh-can’t-”

“Yeah, you can.”

Norrie took in a breath, shook his head, and with a long-suffering, oh-Lord-I-can’t-believe-I’m-doing-this sigh of exasperation, turned and went back to the stage, where Caleb and Sasha had been studiously pretending they weren’t eavesdropping on our conversation. He murmured something to them as he got behind his drum kit, picked up his sticks, and fired off a three-click beat as Caleb ripped into the first notes.

The song-what he had of it-was ragged, unpolished, sloppy, all over the place… and unquestionably the best thing that Norrie had ever written. Midway through the second makeshift verse, unable to hold back any longer, I climbed up and grabbed the replacement bass that was sitting there, plugged it in, and started improvising a bass line on the spot, making my way up to the microphone to do backup vocals with Sasha.

When we finished, Gobi and Linus were standing there staring at the foot of the stage with matching expressions of amazement. I wiped the sweat out of my eyes and looked past Caleb, toward where Norrie had just finished pounding out the last beat of the song. He was gazing up me.

“Well?” he managed. “What do you think?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“I call it ‘Bullet Magnet.’”

I nodded. “Good title.”

“I thought so.”

“Me too.”

The applause from the back of the room startled us all.

“Stormaire?” Paula’s voice rang out loud and clear through the excellent acoustics of the empty concert hall. She pulled out a lighter and held it up. “Rock on, baby.”

I put down the bass and saw her at the back of the club. She was wearing a black wool coat and knee-high leather boots, standing by the bar, with Monash to her right in a gray business suit. Between them, the cadaverous Parisian bouncer that had let us in a few minutes earlier stood with his skinny tattooed arms crossed, cupping his elbows and trying really hard to look defiant and French, which could not have been easy given the pistol that Monash was pointing at his head.

“Listen,” Paula said. “I know you were planning something special for tonight, but Dad and I are kind of pressed for time here. Mind stepping out back with us for a moment? I really think you’ll want to see this.” She started to turn around, then glanced back almost as an afterthought: “Oh, and bring the freak.”

Gobi looked at me, and we followed Paula out of the club.

A white FedEx truck was parked in an alleyway next to a row of scooters. Rain had soaked the piles of trash back here, and the whole place smelled like raw sewage. Without a word, Paula walked around to the back of the truck and opened the doors, standing out of the way so that I could see inside.

And then, in real time, I saw them.

Three hunched figures sitting there on the floor against the inside wall of the truck, squinting up into the light. And all of a sudden I felt everything else lurch up inside of me and melt away to nothing.

“Mom,” I said. “Dad. Annie.”

My mother was the first one to react. She moved forward and threw her arms around me. “Perry, thank God.” Just hearing that tone in her voice, I realized that she was even more worried about me than she was for herself or Annie. Dad was on his knees, holding on to Annie, kind of helping her move forward out of the van.

“Are you guys okay?”

Dad nodded. “We’re fine.” His voice was quiet, different, broken somehow, without a trace of the confidence that I naturally associated with him. His stubble had grown into the beginnings of a beard, making him look completely different, younger and much older at the same time. “We’re tired.”

“Annie?” I gave her a big hug. “You all right, munchkin?”

She nodded and hugged me back so tightly that I could feel her heart racing. “I hate you, big brother.”

“Yeah,” I said, “I deserve it.”

“You owe me so big for this.”

“You’re right,” I said. “When this is over…”

“Just as long as it is over.” There were tears in her eyes. “That would be enough.”

“I want to thank you for holding up your end of the deal, Stormaire,” Paula cut in behind me, and when I turned, I saw that she had replaced the Glock that she’d lost to Gobi with something even uglier, some kind of customized Soviet-looking machine pistol pointed at Gobi’s face.

Monash had Gobi backed up against the alley wall under a quaint piece of Parisian graffiti depicting schoolchildren playing “Ring Around the Rosie” around a mushroom cloud. Rain from the rooftops was trickling down, making Gobi’s pale face shine in all kinds of radiant, unhealthy ways. “You brought her in to us, just like you said you would.”

Gobi’s eyes flashed over Paula’s shoulder and latched hard on to mine, magnet to steel, and I shook my head violently.

“No,” I said. “Wait a second, that’s not-”

“You made the right choice,” Paula said. “After all, who wouldn’t choose their own family over some girl he hardly knows?”

“That wasn’t how I planned it,” I said, but Gobi wasn’t looking at me anymore.

“We’re not going to lose her this time,” Monash said. It was the first time I’d heard him speak, not counting all the shouting inside the steamer trunk back in Venice. Now that he had a gun in his hand, his voice was refined, British American, the product of private school and board rooms, exactly the way you’d expect the father of someone like Paula to sound.

Tucking the weapon into a shoulder holster, letting Paula keep her gun pointed at Gobi, he started strapping a pair of plastic restraints around Gobi’s wrists. “And there’s going to be quite a lengthy reeducation process, isn’t that right, Zusanne?” And then, to Paula: “We’ve got an empire to rebuild, darling.”

Gobi lowered her head and said something under her breath.

“What’s that, love?”

“My name is Gobija.”

The restraints zipped tighter. At first I thought she was going to do the same thing she’d done in Zermatt, going quietly until she had a chance to assess the situation.

I was wrong.

The noise Gobi’s head made as it smashed into Monash’s nose was kind of a wet, muffled crack, like what you’d get if you pulverized a grapefruit inside a burlap bag. Monash didn’t get a chance to cry out. By then, she was already on him, looping her arms up and wrapping the restraints around his neck, crossing her wrists and jerking them tight. Something popped in Monash’s spine-something deep and fragile and important-sounding-and he let out a sharp glottal croak and started twitching frantically in his five-thousand-dollar suit.

Gobi whirled, still in motion, keeping Monash’s body upright in front of her, ramming him forward like a human shield into Paula, who had backed up, trying to get a shot. Even I saw that wasn’t going to happen. The alley was narrow, with even less space now that the FedEx truck was parked here, and no room to maneuver if Paula wasn’t planning on shooting Gobi through her father, who was arguably still alive and kicking. My parents and Annie had already jumped back up inside the truck.

“Hold it!” a voice shouted down the alley, and when I glanced back, I saw Nolan running toward us from up the alley from rue Oberkampf with two uniformed gendarmes coming up behind him.

I’ve watched the surveillance footage of what happened in the next nineteen seconds, from several different angles-the CIA made me go over it with them, and a bootleg version is also available on YouTube, and I still haven’t wrapped my mind around it.