Perry's killer playlist

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.

46. “Brand New Friend” — Lloyd Cole and the Commotions

“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?”

“What’s that?”

“She’s wearing a bulletproof vest up there, saving her life, and the whole time it was the tumor that was killing her.”

He started to say something, and I turned my bad ear back toward him. When he saw me do that, he walked straight in front of me, blocking the TV set.

“Listen, Perry. Maybe we got off on the wrong foot. Maybe you got a rough lesson in gunboat diplomacy-who knows?” He shrugged. “That part I asked you before about her… I was just being polite. I already talked to the neurosurgeons. They said she’s in a coma.”

“Induced,” I said.

“What?”

“It’s an induced coma. It’s what they do to protect higher brain function during and immediately after major neurosurgery.”

“Somebody’s been reading his Wikipedia.”

I switched off the TV and looked at him. “Why are you here?”

“As a matter of fact…” He sighed and sat down next to me, plucking at the seams of his suit pants. “I want to help.”

“Unless you can give me back the hearing in my left ear or…”-I almost said “save my parents’ marriage”-“undo what happened here, you’re pretty useless to me.”

“I never said I wanted to help you personally,” Nolan said. “Although in this particular situation, I might be in the position to do so.” He opened his briefcase and took out a thick stack of official-looking documents, some of them in English, others in French. “Nobody knows how your little Lithuanian princess is going to come out of surgery, or if she’s going to come out at all. Even the docs say it’s too soon to tell. But one thing’s for sure: At the end of the day, somebody’s gonna get stuck with a hell of a hospital bill. We’re talking millions in rehab, all that shit. She’ll be in debt for the rest of her life.”

“Let me guess,” I said. “You can take care of that.”

“The agency could. Probably.” He was looking at me out of the corner of his eye. “In exchange for certain considerations.”

“Forget it,” I said.

“Easy, kid. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. At this point we don’t even know if she’s going to make it. And if she does?” Another shrug. “She might not be able to shoot straight. But we’re willing to take that risk.”

“That’s big of you.”

“Hey, like I said, we do what we can. In any case, in the spirit of starting over, I want to just let you know, Uncle Sam’s got this one. Whatever it takes to get her back on her feet.” He grinned. “Alive and kicking, am I right?”

“Agent Nolan.”

“Yeah, kid?”