Perry's killer playlist

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?”

“I haven’t seen them since last night.”

“You’ve been naked since yesterday?”

“Except for a hotel bathrobe and a stolen overcoat,” I said, “yeah.”

“I’ll send the desk clerk out with my AmEx.” Paula shook her head, but she was still smiling. “I have to say, Stormaire, in spite of everything else, when I first saw you tied to the bedposts like that, it got me kind of tingly.”

“I’m glad to hear you say that,” I said. “Because the way you looked at me, I thought you might try cutting off something different.”

“Are you kidding? After waiting this long? I’d probably miss it more than you would.”

“I doubt that.”

She smiled, then folded up that smile and put it away, all business, all at once. It was uncanny how she could do that, but I couldn’t imagine not having her on my side.

“Can I ask one more question?”

Paula glanced up. “What?”

“How did you figure out what room I was in?”

“You checked in under the name Jim Morrison, Perry. You might as well have hung out a freaking sign.”

“I guess.”

“Now come on,” she said, and gave me a lascivious glance. “Let’s get you some clothes before I lose what’s left of my willpower.”

19. “Busy Child” — The Crystal Method

In a city like Venice, most of the nicer hotels claim to have been palaces at one time or another. But there were palaces and there were palaces, and the Gritti, where Paula said we had a room, was a silk-draped, marble-floored, gold-rimmed old-world marvel that didn’t exactly go along with what I imagined when I thought about lying low. The kid staring back at me in the lobby mirrors didn’t look like he belonged here, but then, at that moment, he didn’t look like he necessarily belonged anywhere.

“You can afford this?” I murmured, gazing across the mostly empty lobby.

“Armitage keeps a suite here.”

“Is he here now?”

“He’ll meet us later for dinner. Just relax, all right? Go stand by the elevators and wait for me.”

Paula went to check in while I hovered behind a pillar, trying to look inconspicuous. I was wearing skinny European jeans and a Venice T-shirt with a baseball cap and sunglasses. I had a garment bag over my shoulder, the one that Benito, the desk clerk at the Pensione Guerrato, had brought back for me before we’d slipped out.

When Paula came back with the key, we took the elevator up to Armitage’s suite, and I gazed out on the Grand Canal and the city beyond, trying not to think about how less than twenty-four hours ago, I’d been trying to get rid of a corpse from a similar height.

“You like the view?”

“It’s great.”

“Perry…”

I looked around. Paula was sitting on the bed, gazing at me in a way that I’d never seen before.

“We’ve still got a few hours to kill,” she said. “Any ideas?”

“We could send down for some champagne.”

“That sounds like a good start, but where do we go from there?”

I sat down next to her on the bed and we started kissing. Paula slipped her hand inside my T-shirt, and we sprawled backwards over the covers, and all I could think was This is it. You’re in Europe now, you’re alone in a hotel room, you can do whatever you want. I thought about how most guys, including my friends, had lost their virginity in the back seat of a car or on their girlfriend’s couch, hoping like hell that her dad didn’t come down and catch them. Compared to that, this was a dream.

Paula sat up and looked at me. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” I said.

“You seem distracted.”

“No, I’m totally fine, really.”

“I knew it.” Her eyes didn’t budge from mine. “It’s her, isn’t it?”

“What?” I shook my head. “Who, Gobi? Are you kidding?”

“I’m not stupid, Perry.”

“Wait,” I said, and grabbed her by the arm, “just listen to me, okay?”