When She Was Bad: A Thriller (16 page)

“Hey babe, what’s up?” he asked his wife.

“Everything okay on the homefront?”

“So far, so good—they don’t even know they’re locked in yet.”

“Good, good. Listen, I ran into Dennie in town.” Dennie, half full-blooded Aleut, half Okie pipeline worker, was Li’l T.’s immensely pregnant ol’ lady. “We’re thinking about grabbing some dinner.”

“No problem, long as you get back before nine o’clock.”

“Why nine o’clock?”

“That deal with those guys from San Berdoo? Remember, me and Li’l T., we’re supposed to meet ’em in town, drive ’em up to the shop?”

“Oh, right,” said Mama Rose. “It completely slipped my mind.” A purposeful lie—she’d needed to verify that Carson was still planning to go out that night, but had been afraid that a direct question might have aroused suspicion on his part.

“It’s just I don’t think we want to leave our friends in the attic home alone.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll be back in plenty of time.”

“Okay, see ya then.”

“Love ya,” said Mama Rose.

“You bet,” said Carson, whose thoughts had already turned back to the girl in the attic.

“Lyss?”

“Hmmm?”

“Want to get some fresh air?”

“I thought you’d never ask.” Lyssy sat up—they’d moved the two beds together for the second go-round—and started looking around for his leg, while Lilith slipped on her jeans, her brown cashmere sweater, and her sneakers, then bent over and grabbed the handle to the naked-looking wooden trapdoor set into the linoleum. It wouldn’t budge.

“Fuck a duck, it’s locked. They never locked it when I was here before.” She stomped on the closed hatch like a three-year-old having a temper tantrum. “Hey! Hey, the fucking door’s locked.”

They heard footsteps on the ladder, the click of a padlock. “Go ahead, open it.” Carson’s voice.

Lilith yanked. The trapdoor swung up and over, crashing top down against the linoleum; years of such abuse had worn a harelip-shaped gouge in the face of the Ninja Turtle with the blue headband. “You first, lamb chop,” called Carson, still wearing his bush hat, bathrobe, and flip-flops.

The ladder was steep, but the rungs sturdy and wide, of the same unfinished wood as the trapdoor. Lilith scrambled down, but before Lyssy could follow—he hadn’t found his pants or his leg yet—Carson sprang up the ladder. Waist-high in the attic, he waved a stubby-looking revolver in Lyssy’s direction.

“One customer at a time,” he said, keeping his eyes and the gun trained on Lyssy, while he felt around for the handle of the trapdoor. He raised the hatch to the vertical and held it up with one hand, dropped the gun into his bathrobe pocket with the other, then let go and ducked simultaneously. The trapdoor came crashing down, nearly crushing his jaunty bush hat.

Lilith watched from below while Carson reattached the padlock and snapped it closed.

“Lilith? Lilith, what’s going on?” There was panic in Lyssy’s voice.

“It’s okay,” she yelled, as Carson scooted nimbly down the ladder, skipping the last few rungs and landing lightly on his flip-flops. “We’ll get it straightened out, I promise.”

Carson laughed. “Oh, we’ll get it straightened out all right,” he said. “We’ll get it good and straightened out.”

1

No rewards for Maxwell had been posted by the time Mick MacAlister and E. L. Pender left Santa Cruz Thursday afternoon in a red Cadillac convertible with white upholstery and a Grateful Dead skull-and-roses bumper sticker. But Pender had already called Lily’s uncle to tell him they had a line on Lily’s whereabouts, and might need to offer a reward, and Rollie DeVries had informally agreed to pony up another ten grand.

This one wasn’t about the money for MacAlister, though. It was about glory—or its modern equivalent, celebrity. Bringing in Maxwell while the hot white glare of the media spotlight shone full upon him would all but guarantee Mick his allotted fifteen minutes of fame, which nowadays could be extended almost indefinitely.

As for Pender, who’d been driving through Moss Landing—quaint fishing village on one side of the two-lane highway, hellish power plant, like something out of
The War of the Worlds,
on the other—when MacAlister reached him on his cell phone, it had been a mixed bag of motivations, none of them financial, that inspired him to turn around and head back to Santa Cruz.

Rescuing Lily was foremost in his mind, of course. And capturing, or rather, recapturing Maxwell was high up on Pender’s list as well, but not for the publicity. Pender had already had his Warholian fifteen minutes of fame several times over, and had always been more relieved than disappointed when the spotlight had moved on.

Instead, Pender looked on the opportunity to bring Maxwell in again as a chance to redeem two of the worst mistakes of his FBI career. Through a moment of inexcusable carelessness on Pender’s part three years earlier, the psychopath had escaped from the Monterey County jail, at the cost of half a dozen additional lives. Then after the shootout on Scorned Ridge, when Maxwell lay injured, every instinct Pender had developed in three decades of chasing serial killers cried out for him to end it with a coup de grâce, or by letting Maxwell bleed out on the floor of the barn.

But although it was Irene Cogan who’d talked him out of it, then tied a tourniquet around Maxwell’s thigh, thereby saving his life, Pender still blamed himself. Witness or no witness, there were dozens of ways for a determined special agent
not
to bring his man in alive—and if he’d employed any of them, Patricia Benoit, Walter Smets, Alan Corder, and Cheryl Corder would still be alive.

Pender’s remaining motivations were less conscious. Chief among them were resentment for his treatment at the hands of the Portland cops—your basic “I’ll show
them”
state of mind—along with a severe action jones: at fifty-seven Pender was no better prepared to slip gracefully into his golden years than he had been when he reached the FBI’s mandatory retirement age two years earlier.

They drove with the top down and the CD player blaring Grateful Dead tunes. Pender, still wearing his grass-and-mustard-checked sport coat, nearly lost his hat when Mick put the hammer down on the superhighway running the length of California; he reached out to make a last-second, one-handed grab as the beret flew off his head. A few minutes later, Mick, wearing a casually matched jacket and jeans outfit of faded denim, took a joint-filled Sucrets tin from his pocket, and fired one up with a windproof butane torch.

“Don’t worry, I drive better stoned,” he told Pender, with the dangling joint glommed securely to his lower lip.

“You’re under arrest,” Pender replied.

“You got me fair and square, copper,” said the portly private eye, raising both hands over his head—at eighty-plus miles an hour, on a far-from-empty eight-lane highway.

“On second thought, maybe I’ll let it slide just this once,” Pender decided.

They made good time, stopping once for gasoline and a convenience-store chili dog that reminded Mick, a native New Jerseyan, of the sign on the old roadside greasy spoon/gas station in Tuckahoe:
EAT HERE AND GET GAS
. As they passed Sacramento, he lit up a second doob. Pender remonstrated, reminding him they still had a potentially hazardous job in front of them.

“What, you think I’m goin’ up against a psychopathic serial killer
straight
?” said MacAlister.

Which made so much sense to Pender that he found himself wondering whether he hadn’t inhaled a little secondhand smoke himself.

2

Alone now in the attic, Lyssy searched wildly for his leg, which proved to be under the bed.

Yeah, like that’s going to do a lot of fucking good,
said the voice in his head.

“Max?”

No shit, Sherlock. Now be a good little boy and go to sleep—I’ll take it from here.

“I’m not a little boy anymore.”

You’ll always be a little boy to me.

Lyssy clapped his hands over his ears. Max chuckled slyly.
I’m not out there, sonny, I’m in here. Now you know what you have to do—don’t make it any harder on yourself than it has to be.

“Never,” said Lyssy. “Never, never, never again.”

Okay, buddy-bud, you asked for it.

Lyssy heard the crackling sound, saw angry orange flames leaping up all around him. To fight them, he pictured Lilith—her hair the color of rich dark chocolate, her eyes big and dark in her sweet round face, her sweetly curved lips, her soft white rosy-tipped breasts, her velvet-soft belly, her creamy thighs and the dark mystery between them, her dimpled knees, strong calves, her toes arching in ecstasy. Then he worked his way back up, past her calves, thighs, bush, belly, breasts, and back up to her face, and he held her face there, he made himself
see
it, ten times larger than life, back-lighted by the leaping flames. Which weren’t leaping quite as high now, or burning quite as hot.

You’re making a mistake,
said the voice, sounding less sure of itself.
You’re nothing without me. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing….

The flames were gone. Lyssy found himself alone in the tiny attic room, sitting on the edge of the bed with his prosthetic leg in his hands. “Who’s nothing now?” he said aloud. But for all his bravura, he couldn’t help cocking his head to the side and listening, as if he weren’t at all sure there wouldn’t be an answer.

3

The problem was, Mama Rose
liked
the girl, had liked her from the moment she’d first set eyes on her, snapping and snarling like a she-wolf in a trap as she faced down the bikers back in Sturgis. And having a surrogate teenage daughter around, especially one who was as tabula rasa as Lilith, had meant a lot to the childless older woman. She’d had fun during that first visit, showing Lilith the ropes, passing on a little hard-earned practical wisdom.

But Mama Rose was nobody’s fool: she had seen her walking hard-on of a husband growing more infatuated with the kid every passing day. Not that the prospect of Carson knocking off a quickie had her particularly worried—but what if it turned into a full-blown midlife crisis? He wouldn’t have been the first man to trade in a middle-aged wife for a firm young mistress.

So she’d quietly cut a deal with the private eye, MacAlister, put the reward money into her secret “Fuck You” account—a safe-deposit box at the Bank of America down in Redding—and told Carson that Lilith had gone off with some folks she’d met in Weed. And while Mama Rose
had
missed her company—the warmth of her greeting this morning had been genuine enough—she was more determined than ever that Lilith had to go.

But not to
die
—that seemed a little extreme to Mama Rose. In the absence of a compelling threat to herself or Carson (Lilith had already proved she could be trusted to keep her mouth shut about the chop shop and the little pink house, if only because Swervin’ Mervin was buried in the nearby woods, and both Carson and Mama Rose had witnessed his death) Mama Rose could not allow Carson to kill the girl.

As for Lilith’s boyfriend, though, Mama Rose had no objection to terminating
him.
They certainly couldn’t let him go: if captured, he could lead the cops straight back to them—the same cops who’d been trying in vain to find Carson for fifteen years. And never mind how sweet Lyssy had seemed to be during breakfast: judging by what she’d read about him in the newspapers, anybody who knocked off Ulysses Maxwell would be doing the world a favor.

Hence the tangled web Mama Rose had been weaving all afternoon. First she’d cut another deal with MacAlister in return for another contribution to the Mama Rose Fuck You fund. The private eye and the backup he’d insisted on bringing along were to rendezvous with Mama Rose at a coffee shop in Mt. Shasta, follow her to an undisclosed location out in the boondocks, lend her two pairs of handcuffs, and wait for her to return with a manacled pair of fugitives.

And the only difference between their relative expectations, Mama Rose’s and MacAlister’s, was that
he
assumed that both fugitives would be alive when she handed them over.

4

Lilith’s breasts, white and round as scoops of meringue, floated above the burbling, steaming water of the redwood hot tub on the narrow patio behind the house. On the other side of a trellis twined thinly with haphazardly blooming rose vines, the hillside rose sharply, buttressed by old tarry railroad ties. The late afternoon sun was hot as ever as it sank toward the crest of the hill, but the shadows were lengthening rapidly.

Carson slipped the revolver, a snub-nosed .38, under a pile of clean towels on the whitewashed, round wrought-iron patio table, and switched on the boom box. This radio, although it was connected to a long orange extension cord plugged into the same outlet that powered the Jacuzzi motor, was kept on the table, out of arm’s reach of the tub, to prevent stoned bathers from accidentally electrocuting themselves. Carson fiddled with the dial until he found his favorite heavy metal station, then with the radio blaring post-Sabbath Ozzie, he took off his bathrobe and climbed in after her wearing only his bush hat. Groaning long and loud, he lowered his dangling privates into the steaming water until he was submerged to his neck, beads of sweat already forming on his brow.

Lilith held her nose, bent her knees, and submerged herself. Underwater, the echoic rumble of the Jacuzzi jets sounded almost peaceful. Hearing a distant splashing sound, Lilith opened her eyes underwater, found herself staring down the barrel of Carson’s hard-on. She rose like Venus, hair plastered flat against her sleek round skull, water dripping from her full, round breasts. “I like your cock,” she whispered, pressing the length of her body against his, front to front.

“Me too,” he replied hoarsely.

“Could I change the fucking station?” The radio was blaring that annoying McDonald’s jingle:
I’m loving it, I’m loving it.

“Hunh, what? Oh—sure.”

She climbed out hurriedly, before he could change his mind, and trotted over to the table shivering, with her arms crossed in front of her. “Where’s a good station?”

“Try the FM band,” he said easily—but his glance had flickered briefly to the pile of towels on the table. Shit, she thought: obviously he’d remembered where he’d left the revolver. Which meant her chances of grabbing the gun, finding and releasing the safety, pulling back the hammer, and squeezing off a shot before he could leap from the tub and cross the five or six feet to the table, were not exactly encouraging, Lilith decided, as she absentmindedly fiddled with the radio dial.

Then suddenly it dawned on her, with all the force and clarity of revelation, that the revolver wasn’t the only weapon on the table. Or even the deadliest—pistols misfire, bullets miss their targets. She turned her face away, hiding a savage grin as she traced the length of the orange extension cord with her eyes to make sure it lay free, with enough slack so it wouldn’t tangle or catch on anything. Picking up the boom box in both hands, she raised it over her head.

Mentally and emotionally drained after the struggle with Max, Lyssy strapped on his leg, still in its gray sock and black sneaker, then dressed hastily in the same oversize white T-shirt and button-fly jeans Lilith had given him before they left Dr. Al’s. After tying his other sneaker, he tried to raise the trapdoor, again to no avail.

There has to be another way out, he thought, glancing around the long, narrow attic—there just
has
to be. He examined the double-sashed dormer windows jutting out onto the roof in the front of the house. They were both nailed shut on top and sealed so tightly around the air conditioners below that no light showed around them. But only one of the machines was running; the short three-pronged power cord of the other dangled limply.

Lyssy seized hold of the unwieldy gray-brown box with his fingertips, and began rocking it. It was lighter than it appeared to be, and held firm at first. But as Lyssy continued to rock it back and forth to the pounding rhythm of the ungodly music blaring from around the back of the house, lengthwise cracks like miniature geological fissures began to form in the dessicated gray putty that held the box in place.

Encouraged, Lyssy threw all his weight into the effort, working the awkward load up and down, side to side, until it was loosened enough for him to get a good grip with his clawlike hands. After three strong heaves it broke free, tilted, and began sliding back into the room. Lyssy stepped back just in time to avoid getting his toes crushed when the air conditioner crashed to the floor, corner first, gouging a furrow in the linoleum.

Listening for a response to all the racket he’d made, Lyssy heard only the infernal howling of the radio. He cleared the gaping hole of clinging cobwebs and active spiderwebs decorated with mummified flies and sticky egg sacs, stuck his head through, looked down, and beheld his next challenge: though the drop to the roof was only four or five feet, there were but eighteen inches or so of steeply pitched composition shingles between the base of the dormer and the edge of the roof to use as a foothold, then an eight-to-ten-foot drop to the ground, or rather, the front doorstep.