Hair of the Dog: Bonnie Parker, PI, #6

By Michael Prescott

There's an October chill in the air. A presidential election is coming up. Covid is spreading, and everybody's wearing a mask. And in the burned-out industrial city of Canaan, demonstrations turn violent as radicals clash with police.

 

In the midst of it all is Bonnie Parker, a small-town PI on the Jersey Shore, who's reputed to moonlight as an assassin when the need arises. For nearly four years, Bonnie's kept her head down and her hands clean, but that may be about to change, as she finds herself targeted by the activist group Red Front, a disgruntled local hitman, and a neo-Nazi "fixer" who remembers his past lives. Stir in a posse of homeless grifters and their psychopathic dog, add a conspiracy stretching from the newly formed Revolutionary Occupied Zone to the mansions of Cherry Heights, and top it off with the mother of all hangovers ...

 

It's enough to make a girl want to shoot somebody – or at least pour herself another drink.

 

Hair of the Dog is a 70,000 word thriller from New York Times and USA Today bestselling author Michael Prescott, whose books have sold more than three million copies worldwide. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Michael Prescott
• Release date: Feb 6, 2023
• ISBN: 9798201709167

Michael Prescott

Michael Prescott was born and raised in New Jersey and attended Wesleyan University, majoring in film studies. After college, he moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career as a screenwriter. In 1986 he sold his first novel, and has gone on to pen six thrillers under the name Brian Harper and ten books as Michael Prescott. He has sold more than one million print copies and is finding a large new audience through e-books. Fan-favorite character Abby Sinclair, the “stalker’s stalker” first introduced in The Shadow Hunter, has since appeared in three more books.

Book preview

1

She woke up to a pounding headache and the blurred ringtone of her cell.

Parker, she answered in her surliest voice, just to let the caller know she didn’t appreciate being awakened at the ungodly hour of—she checked the phone’s screen—11:45 AM.

Hey, it’s Walt. You okay?

Walt? Who the hell was Walt? She didn’t know any Walt.

Oh, right. Sparky.

Bonnie scowled hard, hoping he could sense her facial expression via the cellular signal. Why wouldn’t I be?

Well, it’s just the way things ended last night. I felt pretty bad letting you drive off.

What are you talking about? She rubbed her forehead with vigor, as if trying to remove a tattoo.

Well, you know.

"I don’t know, and stop saying well."

It’s just that you had a lot to drink.

Okay, headache explained. She supposed this information also accounted for the oddly muted sense she had of being underwater.

Suppose I did, she said, conceding nothing. What’s the big deal?

Well— He checked himself. I mean, I wasn’t sure you were okay behind the wheel.

I can handle alcohol just fine. The statement was pure bravado. She did not feel, at this moment, as if she could handle anything.

Not last night, you couldn’t. He said it with a nervous chuckle that pissed her off.

What, did I do something stupid?

You kinda went all Nebuchadnezzar on me.

Nebuchad-who?

When you were outside. You don’t remember that?

You’re getting on my nerves, Sparky. Just tell me what happened before I reach through the phone and shove your head even further up your ass.

It was when you left my place. You seemed okay until you got outside. Then I guess the night air hit you, and you fell down a couple times, and then you kind of wandered into the Sweeneys’ yard, and you fell down again, and you were, um, crawling around.

Crawling?

You know. On all fours.

Shit.

It was a little embarrassing to watch.

She’d been drinking more than usual ever since the whole Brad thing. It wasn’t her fault. She blamed country music. Every song in that genre advised her that copious ingestion of alcohol was the approved method of getting over a breakup.

Besides, there was this Covid-19 bullshit, and it was an election year, and there might have been a full moon last night. Plenty of reasons to booze it up.

There were always plenty of reasons. That was the problem.

You didn’t try to help me? she asked Sparky with a cold glare at the phone.

I tried, but you said something about shooting my dumb ass, so I backed off.

Empty threat. I wasn’t carrying.

You’re always carrying.

Okay, point taken. What was that thing you said with all the syllables? Nebu-nebu-something?

Nebuchadnezzar. He was an ancient king. Legend says he went insane and ended up walking on all fours and eating grass.

Did I eat grass?

Not that I noticed. But it was dark out. So I can’t swear to it. You really don’t remember any of this?

I think that scene was edited out of my movie. You must have the director’s cut.

Anyway, you got into your car, and I was concerned.

And again, you didn’t stop me.

Again, you had a gun in your purse, and you’re kind of a mean drunk. He paused to think about it. Actually, you’re kind of mean all the time. At least to me.

"It’s not just you."

Good to know. So you did make it home all right?

She looked herself up and down, noticing for the first time that she was fully clothed and sleeping in an armchair in the living room. She appeared to have all of her limbs and all the customarily attached digits.

Looks like it. Hold on a second.

With a lurch of vertigo, she pushed herself out of the chair and tottered to the window. Normally she parked her vehicle in the garage, but she had a feeling last night she’d left it sitting out. She was right. Her jet-black Mustang GT rested in the driveway at an undignified angle, with one of the front tires smooshing a bed of newly planted mums belonging to the owner of the other half of the duplex, Mrs. Biggs.

Last February the Mustang had replaced her cherished puke-green Jeep Wrangler, which had coughed out its death rattle in dejected obsolescence on its way to an emissions inspection, which it would have failed. The Mustang had been purchased brand spanking new and still had that new car smell, or so she liked to think. It was a thing of beauty, and she kind of hated it. She missed the Jeep.

But at least it was intact. Thank God.

I guess I didn’t hit anything, she said into the phone. Or anyone.

You wouldn’t necessarily know.

She almost snapped off a riposte but thought better of it. At present she did not occupy a position of moral superiority. Besides, he was right about not knowing. It wasn’t as if some random pedestrian would be sprawled on the vehicle’s hood like a hunting trophy.

Well, she said, then winced because she was doing the well thing now. I don’t remember any incidents.

"You don’t remember anything, though, do you?"

I have a vague recollection of seeing double through the windshield. And going very slowly.

I’m glad you’re okay.

Yeah. I’m great. See ya, Sparky.

Bonnie clicked off.

She was great, all right. Hungover, barely ambulatory, suffering from an alcoholic blackout, and for all she knew, presently digesting hunks of the Sweeneys’ crabgrass. And there was still the possibility, however remote, that she had left some innocent party bleeding on the side of the road.

She was supposed to be one of the good guys. Or if not a good guy, exactly, then at least an antihero you could grudgingly root for. And now she was behaving like one of those idiots who knocked back too many on New Year’s Eve and ended up driving on the sidewalk.

No, not like one of them. She was one of them.

Crawling on all fours, threatening violence to someone who offered an intervention. Nice. There’s a gal who really had it together.

She lit a cigarette, sat in her armchair, and took what the AA people called a personal inventory.

She’d turned thirty-six last spring. It was older than she’d ever expected to get. She’d been living on borrowed time since she was fourteen, and by all rights she should have been killed several times over by now. She’d easily outlived her namesake, the original Bonnie Parker, who died with her partner in crime, Clyde Barrow, in a fusillade of bullets that tore their roadster apart. A photograph of the destroyed automobile used to hang in her office, until the picture itself was ripped apart by bullets. Which was, if you thought about it, ironic.

Anyway, that Bonnie, the famous one, had been all of twenty-three when she bought it. What it came down to was that this Bonnie, the unfamous one, couldn’t gripe about having too many birthdays under her belt.

Still, whenever she looked in the mirror—which she did more often than she used to—she couldn’t help noticing a few threads of gray in her blonde hair. Not many of them, scarcely visible, but they hadn’t been there a year ago. And those crinkles at the edges of her eyes, the ones she used to get only when she laughed—well, she had them all the time now, and there wasn’t all that much to laugh about.

It had never occurred to her to worry about getting old. But lately she had started to wonder about her future. Suppose, against all odds, she actually survived into old age, a territory that in her mind was roughly demarcated by age fifty.

Financially she was okay. More than okay, in fact. She’d saved a ton of tax-free cash from her unpublicized pursuits, money she could launder through her PI agency, Last Resort. Unlaundered cash sat in a safe deposit box downtown and in a secret stash for emergencies.

So she could pay her bills for the foreseeable future. She could even retire. Trouble was, she didn’t want to retire, and she couldn’t picture herself still Nancy Drewing it at fifty. Then again, they said fifty was the new forty, and forty was the new thirty, in which case, by the transitive property—something she’d learned about while earning her GED last year—fifty was thirty. Or something like that.

If she meant to test this theory, she had better start taking more care of herself—not so much in terms of self-protection, an area she had pretty well covered, but in terms of basic health. The ABCs of nutrition, exercise, and moderation in all things. Well, most things. Her present lifestyle of binge drinking, cigarette-smoking—she glanced suspiciously at the Parliament White in her hand—coffeeshop cheeseburgers for dinner, and the occasional vibrator session for exercise probably didn’t fit the bill.

Okay, she said to the cigarette in a stern tone of voice, as if it had disagreed with her. But I’m not gonna change all that overnight. Baby steps.

The first baby step was obvious, and probably also the most difficult. Boozing it up had to stop. If last night wasn’t a wake-up call, nothing ever would be.

So she would quit. Sure. Just quit. Go cold turkey. People did it. Why not her?

Bonnie considered the question, which was far from rhetorical. Why not her? Answer: because her willpower was poor when it came to such matters. And she led a super-stressful life and booze helped her blow off steam. And how the hell was she supposed to spend time with a loser like Sparky unless she was wasted? Ten minutes with him when she was cold sober would be like being strapped to a chair and forced to watch the Hallmark Channel.

Also, she was really good at rationalization. She was, after all, still pointing to the split with Brad as a reason to drink, and it had happened nearly four years ago. Before Donald Trump—hoping to win a second term next month—was sworn in, before Meghan and Harry ditched the Royals and went plebe, before that four-eyed weasel Dr. Fauci became a household name. A lot had happened since 2016—too much to justify hanging on to the memory of a failed relationship, especially since she’d come to believe her life was complicated enough without adding love and intimacy to the mix. Being in love was a heady experience at first, but it quickly turned into a lot of work. She could get a similar rush from buying a new hat, without the long-term commitment and emotional wear and tear.

Or maybe what she thought was love really wasn’t. Maybe she wasn’t capable of actual love. She might be wound too tight, or shielded too thoroughly from emotional harm. Or maybe just too damn self-centered.

She had loved Frank Kershaw, though. Loved him more than she’d ever loved her parents, who’d only grudgingly played that role while pursuing other interests of an extralegal nature. Frank also knew his way around the greasy underbelly of the law, but unlike her folks, he’d actually cared about her. There was no reason for it. She was only a stray he’d adopted out of pity. Yet through the years, he had proved the one constant in her life, the mainstay, her father in everything but name. Even toward the end, in the nursing home called Green Arbor, when he couldn’t walk and would scarcely eat, he’d been there for her, always ready to listen and advise, never judging, never giving up on her—though he probably should have.

Now Frank was gone. So that was one less connection in her life, part of a trend that had resulted in a dwindling number of friends in general, leaving her with basically nobody but Sparky, real name Walt Churchland, to hang out with.

Okay, so she’d lost a lot. It didn’t mean she had to lose what little was left of her dignity. She didn’t have to turn into that Nebu-nebu guy, the one with the cow complex.

"I don’t wanna be Nebuchad-whozer," she said with sudden determination. The image of herself hunkered down on hands and knees and pawing at the grass like a confused ruminant did absolutely nothing to boost her self-esteem.

Well, then—there was that well again, God damn it—she would just have to quit. She would have to march into the kitchen and take out the liquor bottles and pour every ounce of their contents down the drain, the way Denzel Washington did in that movie where he played a high-functioning alcoholic. She remembered watching that movie and thinking it looked like criminal waste of good booze and feeling she was glad she wasn’t Denzel Washington.

But now she was Denzel Washington. She was the high-functioning alcoholic. Only not so high-functioning. Apparently not really functioning at all.

She took a step toward the kitchen, but only one step. There were a bunch more steps before she actually got there—it would be funny if they added up to twelve—and she wasn’t sure she was quite ready for that level of commitment. Besides, she was pretty sure that if she told herself she would never drink again, the prohibition itself would drive her to drink within an hour.

So okay, she said. "No big commitments. I just won’t drink today."

This particular pledge was easy to keep because, right now, with her tongue wadded up in her mouth like a hunk of gauze, she had no desire to imbibe alcohol in any form. Tomorrow might be a different story. But she would take it one day at a time.

She did have motivation. Next time she got wasted, she might really run over somebody. Or shoot Sparky, maybe. She couldn’t say she particularly liked Sparky, but she didn’t think she could justify shooting him just because he was kind of a priss.

That much decided, she made her way into the bedroom and from there into the bathroom and from there into the shower where, having discarded her apparel, she sagged under a steaming spray until the hot water finally ran out.

2

As always, Vogt’s dreams had refreshed him. Vivid dreams of green hills and gray waters and mountains of ice. His lungs were filled with cold, pure air. Behind him there was fire and smoke, a village burning, and the laments of the dying, like the keening cries of birds.

He was strong, the muscles of his legs pumping like pistons as he crossed the beach to the ships, the corded sinews of his arms drawn taut by the weight of the burden he carried. The burden itself was not always the same. Sometimes it was loot. Sometimes a woman.

He’d awoken at eight and spent the morning in Philadelphia, taking care of business.

At ten he stopped at the offices of El Dorado Consolidated Supply, open on Saturday by special request. Two employees, the only employees El Dorado had, were waiting for him in the state of nervous agitation. He came in wearing gloves and kept them on. The employees noticed.

Both of them were male. One was about forty, Vogt’s age, and the other was younger, barely out of college. Because it was a weekend, all the offices in the building were empty, except this one. There were no other tenants around. Vogt found this convenient.

He asked about yesterday’s botched shipment. Each man blamed the other. Vogt listened without interest. He was not interested in blame. Only in punishment.

It required only two shots from the silenced Walther. The gun was used at close range, blood spatter leaving blotches on his clothes. He changed in his van, where he kept several outfits.

His next stop was of a personal nature. He visited a camera shop that sold bootleg items under the table. The proprietor had something vintage set aside for him, a movie from the 1970s, thirteen minutes long, Super8 format. It was wound onto a large plastic reel, the white leader almost overspilling the rim. Of course, the proprietor said, it can be transferred to disk or thumb drive.

Vogt said no, he would take the film. He liked celluloid, the way some people liked vinyl records. Not a fan of the digital age. The new stuff had no soul.

He paid and left, having used cash, his name never mentioned and unknown to the proprietor. Back in the van, he added the new item to his collection. His tastes were ecumenical, encompassing Super8, VHS, Betamax, and choice examples of still photography.

By now it was early afternoon. He proceeded to the YMCA, where he took a shower, the first he’d had in some time. He was beginning to smell a little ripe.

Vogt stood under the steaming spray, feeling the sizzle of droplets on his shaved head and wide shoulders, watching soapy rivulets wind over the tattoos on his forearms and chest. As he cleansed himself, he silently repeated his mantra.

Strength, not weakness

Courage, not cowardice

Pleasure, not guilt

Honor, not shame

Freedom, not slavery

Values that were evergreen, as vital now as they had been on the shores of the North Sea a thousand years ago. He had lived there, in one of his many lives. He had been a warrior then, too.

Nothing ever changed. The world spun on its axis, monuments toppled, languages fell into disuse, but the warriors went on, through uncountable incarnations, a secret society, a tribe, a clan, a brotherhood of wolves. Norse raiders, Norman chieftains, Saxon kings.

He curled his right arm, admiring the flexion of the muscles, hard as forged steel. Sharp against the skin was an inked valknut, three interlocking triangles, symbol of Wotan, God of wolf and raven and war. An Aryan God. His God.

He had killed for Wotan many times, in many bodies, but always he had been himself.

3

Bonnie was getting dressed in fresh clothes that were free of grass stains and the smell of booze when someone started ringing her doorbell.

She considered ignoring it. She was not in a particularly social mood. Then again, she never was.

Her visitor proved distressingly persistent. When the bell failed to yield the desired result, a hand rattled the door, then pounded on it.

Parker! You in there?

Not a voice she wanted to hear right now, or at any other time, for that matter. Dan Maguire, chief of police of Brighton Cove, New Jersey.

Shit. Maybe she really had run someone over.

Fully clothed by now except for her bare feet, she approached the door with all the enthusiasm of a walk to the gallows. The rattling and pounding had given way to another round of doorbell chimes. Each new peal of the bell was an ice pick punching through her left eye.

Quit it! she yelled through the door. Just hold your damn horses.

She wasn’t sure where that expression had come from. It sounded like something Annie Oakley would say, not Bonnie Parker.

She opened the door, after noting with dismay that she had neglected to turn on the security system last night, thus leaving herself vulnerable to any of a hundred enemies who might have taken the opportunity to rub her out.

Dan stood there in the noontime sun, looking breathless and red in the face. Or at least what she could see of his face. Much of it was hidden by an antiseptic mask, the generic drugstore kind, which ballooned out around his cheeks with every exhalation. He wore his civilian clothes, and the car parked at the curb was his personal ride. Not an official call, apparently. Which was weird, because they definitely were not friends.

What do you want, Dan? she asked, planting herself in the doorway.

I need to talk to you.

That much is obvious. What about?

Something we can’t discuss outside.