When She Was Bad: A Thriller (14 page)

And when his belly could hold no more, he filled the capacious side pockets of his madras sport coat with miniature muffins and pastries for himself and Irene—the rest of the passengers on the Southwest Airlines flight from Portland to San Jose would have to make do with salted peanuts and stale pretzels.

“A little pocket lint never killed anybody,” Pender assured Irene as they joined the line shuffling sullenly toward the airport security checkpoint.

“I’m sorry, what?”

“Never mind—nothing important.” He transferred his carry-on to his other hand, slipped his arm around her, gave her shoulder a squeeze. “How’re you holding up there, scout?”

She looked up at him, her eyes bloodshot from worry and lack of sleep, her complexion drained of color save for a tubercular spot of red high on either cheek. “Do you think Lily killed that woman in the bathtub?” Alison hadn’t been sure one way or the other—while continuing to insist that the girl had saved her life, she had admitted reluctantly to a vague recollection of Lily saying she had to visit the john, and of her mother giving her and her escort directions to the guest bathroom upstairs.

Pender shrugged. “Let’s wait for the forensics.”

Something in the way he said it, perhaps the impersonality, set off a spark in Irene. “Well I don’t
care,”
she whispered fiercely. The line had started moving forward again, but Irene stayed rooted in place, her fists clenched at her sides. “I don’t care what she’s done or how involved she was, I won’t let them put her in prison, Pen. I won’t let them put her away again if I have to…I don’t know, if I have to sneak her out of the country myself.”

“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that,” said Pender—but he knew that if it did, he’d have himself one hell of a conflict of interest.

4

Lilith followed Lyssy, spotting him for safety as he stumped unevenly up the swing-down ladder and through the trapdoor into the attic dormer, a low-budget add-on consisting of one long, low-ceilinged room built of cheapjack pine and press-on veneer siding, running almost the length of the roof. Two dormer windows faced front, each housing a bulky air conditioner, only one of which still functioned.

The cracked and faded
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle
–themed linoleum, along with the twin beds, the twin child-size dressers, and a spray-painted baby-blue bookcase, suggested even to Lyssy’s inexperienced eyes that the room had once housed children. He asked Lilith if Carson and Mama Rose had had any kids; she told him no, that they’d bought the place furnished.

“They seemed like nice folks,” said Lyssy, sitting on the bed nearest the trapdoor.

“Actually, they’re stone killers, both of them. And Mama Rose already sold me out once—don’t think she won’t try it again, first chance she gets.”

“Then why did you bring us here?”

She sat down next to him, put her hand on his flesh-and-blood knee, and lowered her voice to a whisper. “For the same reason people rob banks—because that’s where the money is.”

Lyssy’s eyes widened, the gold flecks dancing in the dim morning light. “We’re gonna
rob
them?”

“We’re gonna need lots and lots of cash to live on the lam. You got a better idea?”

“No, but—”

“I didn’t think so,” she said wearily. The lack of sleep was starting to catch up to her. She closed her eyes and felt the room swaying; when she opened them again Lyssy was staring at her in alarm.

“Are you okay?” he asked her.

“Fine—I’m fine,” she mumbled, swinging her legs up onto the bed. “Just need…couple hours…good as new.”

She was asleep atop the covers by the time her head hit the pillow. Lyssy took off her sneakers for her, then limped over to the other bed, stripped off the blanket, covered her with it, and sat down again on the edge of the bed to watch over her while she slept.

5

Mama Rose barely made it to the stove in time to save the bacon from burning. “Sweet Jesus forbid you should get up from the fucking table,” she muttered to Carson as she set the plate down in front of him.

“One of these days, woman…. “He made a fist, brandished it threateningly.

“You and what army?” she replied, sliding into the chair across from him. Both threat and response were pro forma—he’d only struck her in anger one time, when they were newlyweds. She’d bided her time, then whacked him across the back of the head with a shovel. Concussion, no fracture. Lesson taken.

“That gimp Lyssy, he look familiar to you?” she asked Carson.

“Kinda.”

“I could swear I’ve seen him before someplace.”

“I know what you mean. You get his last name?—we could Google him.”

“He wasn’t very talkative.”

“And she didn’t tell you who or what they were on the lam from?”

“Whoever owned that Rover, I’m guessing.” Mama Rose pushed herself back from the table. “Listen babe, I’m beat, I’m gonna turn in. Just leave the dishes in the sink, I’ll take care of ’em later.”

A cavernous yawn from Carson, a phony-looking, ham-actor stretch. “I think maybe I’ll join you—I’m getting too old for these fucking all-nighters.”

In addition to running the chop shop to which the Rover had been removed, the Redding Menace were mid-level players in the new triangle trade—drugs, firearms, and cash. All night long, on any given evening, dealers and couriers came and went, arriving with large quantities of one of the aforementioned substances, and departing with (ideally) smaller quantities of another.

It was often a complicated dance: player A might have to be hooked up with players B and C, while B had to be kept apart from C, with D waiting in the wings, and so on; meanwhile all the players had to be entertained, plied with weed or coke or brandy, topped up with coffee.

So the exhausted hosts had been on their way to bed when their last two visitors arrived unexpectedly. And now Carson, who hadn’t approached his wife with amorous intent for ages, wanted to make love. Mama Rose was no fool: she knew what was up, and why it was up—he’d had a letch for Lilith ever since Sturgis—but reminded herself that it didn’t matter where a man worked up his appetite, so long as he ate at home.

She grabbed a quick shower and changed into her sexiest nightgown, making only one concession to jealousy: If Carson even closed his eyes, much less called out Lilith’s name, Rose would have his nuts for earrings.

When Mama Rose emerged from the bathroom, Carson was at the computer. Like many another twenty-first-century wife, her first thought was that he was surfing for porn. Not that she minded—that appetite thing again.

“Hey babe, look at this.”

Mama Rose crossed the room, and standing behind him, resting her right breast on his left shoulder, she saw a picture of their new houseguest plastered across the front page of the cyber edition of the
Oregonian.
“Looks like we have a celebrity in our midst.”

She read past the headline to learn that the infamous serial killer Ulysses Maxwell had escaped from an asylum, leaving four dead bodies behind; a fellow patient, a minor, name withheld, was either a hostage or an accessory. “Got any bright ideas?”

“Fuckin’ A.” Carson leaned back in his chair, laced his hands behind his head. “Way I figure it, if there ain’t a reward for him yet, there will be; if there is, it’ll get bigger. So we find somebody we can trust, somebody with a clean record, that somebody takes Maxwell…shit, I don’t care, someplace far enough away from here, blows him away, makes up a good story for the cops, we split the reward. What do you think?”

“It might work,” said Mama Rose. “But what about the girl?”

“What do
you
think?” Same four words, but this time they chilled Mama Rose to the marrow.

6

No lights, mailbox stuffed, four days’ worth of rubber-banded
Monterey Heralds
on or around the porch steps—Pender might as well have put up a sign on his postage-stamp front lawn: Attention burglars: nobody home.

But burglaries were almost unheard of in The Last Home Town, as Pacific Grove officially styled itself—its other nickname was Butterfly Town, USA, for the monarchs that wintered over every year—and the annual murder rate hovered just above zero.

So Pender’s jet-black ’64 Barracuda was still in the short, weedy driveway when he hauled his bags up the mossy brick walk (he and Irene had taken the shuttle bus from San Jose to Monterey, then shared a cab from there) and his new flat-screen plasma TV was still on the wall of the front room—other than that, there wasn’t much worth stealing. (The kind of music Pender enjoyed sounded best in a car, second best on a boom box, the cheaper the better.)

Built in 1905, the cottage originally contained only three small rooms—parlor, bedroom, kitchen—lined up shotgun-style, front to back; a tiny bathroom with toilet, pedestal sink, and stall shower had been added on off the kitchen. Pender carried his luggage through the front room with its secondhand velour love seat, non-matching Naugahyde recliner, and hooked oval rug, dropped it off in the bedroom, where a queen-size bed took up most of the floor-space, grabbed a beer in the kitchen, and carried it out into the backyard.

Too small to qualify as postage stamp, Pender’s tiny yard was overhung and walled in on three sides by a gnarled and ancient fig tree, a spreading giant that also supported Pender’s only outdoor furniture, a low-slung, dispirited-looking mesh hammock. Lying in it, his big ass barely clearing the ground, Pender was still steaming about the disrespect with which the Portland police had treated him the night before. As a federal agent, he’d grown used to being regarded with suspicion or resentment by the local constabulary—but not with contempt, never with contempt.

And never mind that he and Irene had probably saved the Corder girl from death by suffocation—whatever happened to plain old professional courtesy? Even after he told the officer in charge who he was, all the supercilious sonofabitch had to say was that in that case, he should have known better than to even
enter
a possibly dangerous crime scene on his own, not to mention dragging a civilian through it—and are you
sure
you didn’t touch anything in the living room, Pops?

As for getting one of the Nike-town cops to listen to his theory that the fugitives might well head for “Lilith’s” old stomping ground in Shasta County, CA, lots of luck. Once they’d taken his statement, it was thanks for your cooperation and don’t let the door hit your fat ass on the way out. Even if you’re the world’s leading expert on Ulysses Maxwell
et al.
Even if you know that Maxwell had been locked up for the last three years, and isolated up on Scorned Ridge with his now-deceased stepmother/lover/accomplice for a dozen or so years before that. And that the only friend he’d made at the Juvie Ranch was also three years dead. So who the hell was
he
going to run to?

But according to Irene Cogan, the world’s leading expert on Lily DeVries
et al.,
Lilith had almost certainly been running the show for
her
syndicate last night—Lily, the original personality, would have turned into a basket case at the first sign of trouble. And what was it she’d said about Lilith the night before last? Something about Lilith serving as a protector alter?

King-hell of a job she’d done too, thought Pender, if she’d managed to keep both herself and Alison alive through last night’s massacre. And Lilith the protector did have someone to run to—those bikers.

The more Pender thought about it, the more sense his theory made. But how to act on it? He’d just about decided to call the Shasta County Sheriff’s Department and lay it out for one of their homicide detectives when he realized that except for his own eyeballing of a redheaded, middle-aged biker mama, he had almost no information about the bikers to pass on to said homicide dick.

That was because Mick MacAlister, the brilliant, if perpetually half-stoned skip-tracer who’d set up the rendezvous in Weed, operated on a strictly need-to-know basis, and as far as MacAlister was concerned, all Pender and Irene had needed to know was the location of the coffee shop and what time to be there. “Trade secret,” MacAlister would say if pressed for details—now Pender decided it was time to pay MacAlister a visit and persuade him to cut loose with a few of his trade secrets.

Assuming he could fight his way up from the hammock, of course.

7

Lilith awoke to the hum of the air conditioner. Lyssy lay asleep on the other bed, an open book resting facedown on his chest, rising and falling with every baby-soft breath.

Seeing him vulnerable like that, Lilith was overwhelmed by a strange new sensation, a feeling of tenderness so intense it was almost painful. “Don’t worry, I won’t let anything bad happen to you,” she whispered, unconsciously—or perhaps subconsciously—echoing Irene Cogan’s broken promise to Lily.

Lyssy opened his eyes and smiled when he saw her watching him. “Hi.”

“Hi. Whatcha reading?”

He looked confused for a moment, then discovered the book on his chest. “Something about the Hell’s Angels—I found it in that bookcase over there.”

“Oh yeah, I read that one when I was here before.”

Lyssy sat up. “How long were you here?”

“I dunno, couple weeks I guess.”

“And before that?”

“I joined up with Carson and Mama Rose at the big rally in Sturgis in July.”

“But when I met you, you were Lily, right?”

“How the fuck should I know? When I met
you,
you were Max.”

Lyssy groaned—more of a grunt, really, like somebody’d just kicked him in the nuts. A phrase he’d heard or read someplace started bouncing around in his head:
Don’t ask, don’t tell.
But he had to know. “Did I tell you I don’t remember anything that happened last night? Before you came down the stairs to get me, I mean?”