Joe Schreiber: Perry's killer playlist

Gobi squirmed sideways, reared back, and released a kick to the face that spun the gendarme a hundred and eighty degrees around, hard enough to knock the riot helmet from the officer’s head, revealing a spray of blond hair.

Paula.

In less than a second, Paula had already caught her balance, recovering from the kick, and reached into the uniform she was wearing to pull out an automatic. She held it in the textbook two-handed grip, pointing it at Gobi.

“Paula,” I said.

She glanced back at the gendarmes. “Tonight I bought your lives-rented them for a few moments, anyway.”

“What do you mean?”

“When the reports came across the police band, I got out here as soon as I could.” Her eyes flicked back to the group of gendarmes on the far side of the platform, and Paula reached into her tunic and pulled out a laminated ID badge on a lanyard. “Interpol special hostage negotiation squad.”

“Very realistic,” I said.

“It comes in handy from time to time. The police have orders to stand down until I say otherwise.”

I tried to smile. It didn’t hurt too much. “I didn’t know you still cared.”

“You’re sweet.” Paula drew in a breath of night air. “But deluded as always.” She took a step toward Gobi. “Zusane. You know, the last thing my father said before he died today was ‘Make her suffer.’ I promised him that I would.” Paula regarded her with pity bordering on revulsion. “But… look at you. Christ. You’re half dead already. You can’t even stand up. You’re rotten with cancer. At this point, anything I do to you would be a mercy.”

Gobi didn’t say anything. Still keeping the pistol trained on her, Paula looked out to the southeast, at the long stretch of open, flat field leading off to the Tour Montparnasse. “You know what that is? The Champ de Mars.” She glanced back at Gobi. “Named after the god of war.”

“Then they should bury us both there,” Gobi said.

Paula shook her head again. “Just you.”

I held up my hand. “Paula-”

Paula squeezed the trigger.

The first shot slammed into Gobi’s chest, the second her belly, driving her backwards against the guardrail with the force of the gunshot. She didn’t make a sound, her expression not betraying a hint of what it must have felt like at that moment. It was as if she was just putting the pain somewhere completely away from her, a private place where all the hurt went. I saw her fingers grope for the railing as she tried to hoist herself up to keep fighting, and that was when Paula fired again, hitting Gobi in the left knee. Gobi’s leg went out from under her and this time she stayed down, palms upraised, fingers outstretched.

Her hands were empty.

Paula kicked the Glock aside and stood over her with her own pistol aimed point-blank at Gobi’s face. My hearing was gone in my left ear from the gunshots. Paula’s mouth was moving, shouting loudly enough that I could almost make it out, something about her father, something about the end of it all.

“Leave her alone,” I said, but I couldn’t hear myself, and then I realized that Paula probably couldn’t hear me either.

I stood up.

According to Erich Schoeneweiss, in order to successfully break a board or brick in tae kwon do, the hand has to be traveling about thirty feet per second when it makes contact. Mustering this kind of speed requires the puncher to be aiming beyond the object, punching through it in the direction of something on the other side.

I aimed for the back of Paula’s head.

I punched a hole in the night.

When Paula went down, it was all at once. The gun slipped from her hands and her face swung forward, deflected off the guardrail, snapped back, and came around showing me a dentist’s nightmare of blood and broken teeth. Yet somehow it was still a grin.

“Like father, like son,” she said. It came out a little mushy, but I could make out the words just the same through my one good ear. “Your dad liked to tussle too, Perry-did you know that?”

I tried to tell her to shut up and realized I needed to catch my breath. I’d put everything I had into the punch and it hadn’t been enough. While she was talking, Paula was already scrambling around looking for the gun, either hers or Gobi’s, but it was dark and the platform was black and one of her eyes was already swelling shut.

“I always thought it was funny. You were so nervous about taking me to bed”-she wiped the blood from her mouth with her sleeve-“when the whole time I was getting everything I needed from your old man. Ask him about it, Perry. Ask him how I was. Too bad you’ll never find out for yourself.”

I went over to where Gobi was lying and put my arms around her. I could smell a sheared copper smell coming from her wounds, a deep, wet, desperate smell like scorched fabric and cauterized skin.

“It’s okay,” I said. “You don’t have to do any more.”

“Perry.” She put her mouth right next to my good ear. “Lift me up.”

“Are you sure?”

She nodded. She was heavy, much heavier than I remembered from before, and the phrase dead weight sprang to mind, although maybe I was just weaker than I remembered-that was almost certainly the case. Somehow I got my hands underneath her arms and lifted her upright. I could feel the rough, ragged scrape of her breathing, her broken ribs rubbing together in her chest as I held her there.

A few feet in front of us, Paula rose up. Through the blood and the swelling, the fire in her eyes was a reflection of something fierce, some gaudy spectacle of vengeance that only she could see. She had both guns, Gobi’s in her right hand, hers in her left.

“Sorry,” Paula said. “This is it for us.”

I felt Gobi’s shoulders stiffen with anticipation. I braced my legs to support her. Leaning all her weight back against me, she swung her right leg straight up in the air, then brought it down on Paula’s neck.

The ax kick connected exactly where it had to, dead center across the base of the skull, and when Paula’s face hit the floor, it was with more weight than she’d ever carried when she was alive.

I looked down at her lying there in the rain, eyes open, blank, staring.

I caught Gobi and lay her down slowly beside me, running my hands through her hair. It was dark and it was raining, and that was how we stayed, the two of us huddled together next to the metal railing until the gendarmes came out and led us away.

“Hey, kid.”

I was sitting in the otherwise empty waiting room in the American Hospital in Paris with the television on. I didn’t have to take my eyes off the French version of Biggest Loser to see who had just walked in. Agent Nolan stood there in the doorway for a long beat, holding his briefcase, waiting to be acknowledged.

“You gonna say hi to me?”

“Sorry.” I turned my other ear toward him, the one that I could still hear out of. “Speak into this one.”

“Where’s the family?”

“In a hotel,” I said. It was basically true. I decided Nolan didn’t need to be informed that my parents were staying in separate hotels on opposite sides of the Seine. There were some things that even the CIA didn’t need to know.

“What about the band?”

“They went back to New York yesterday with our manager.”

“And you? Flying home soon?”

“Tomorrow,” I said, “probably,” and started to reach for the remote.

Nolan looked back up the hall toward the OR. “How long’s she been in surgery?”

“Thirteen hours. They’re finishing now.”

“They get all of it?”

“What do you care?”

“Crazy, huh?”