When She Was Bad: A Thriller (18 page)

Now that he too knew what it was like to love someone, Lyssy, concealed behind the living room curtains, felt awful for Mama Rose. He wondered whether it would be a bad thing to just shoot her right then and there and save her a truckload of heartbreak.

But his first responsibility was to himself and Lilith. “Don’t move,” he called, stepping out onto the patio, gun in hand.

“You did this?” she said unbelievingly.

“Where do you keep the money?”

Mama Rose’s lips pulled back in an uneven snarl. “Not a chance in hell, you dickless piece of shit gimp motherfucker.”

“Look, I understand you’re upset, but we really need the money, so please, if you could just tell me where you keep it, and give me the keys to that pickup out front, we’ll get out of your hair.”

“Jesus fucking Christ, you’re even crazier than they said you were.”

“Actually, I test more or less normal,” he said, limping toward her. “Normal? You’re a nut job, you’re a fucking wacko. And as for that fucking cunt that brought you here, when I get my—”

This time he was ready for the kick of the .38; the shot whanged off the concrete at Mama Rose’s feet, sending up a puff of cement dust. “There’s no use calling names. It’s
his
fault.” Tilting his head toward the hot tub. “If he hadn’t tried to rape Lilith, none of this would have happened. And now
I
have to take care of
her.
And
you
have to tell me where the money is, because if you don’t, I have to do some stuff to you I don’t even want to
think
about. Because I really don’t want to hurt you. Really.”

It wasn’t that she didn’t believe him—she simply didn’t fucking care. Like an incoming tide, shock and anger had carried her as far as they could, then receded, leaving her high and dry on a desolate beach. “Eat shit and die,” she said without heat.

The usage was new to Lyssy. Eat, shit, and die, he thought—what’s that, everybody’s life story?

Inside the house, the toilet continued to flush.

6

After sunset, Pender and MacAlister strolled back down the hill to the Cadillac. Mick raised the top to protect the leather upholstery from the evening dew, then opened his laptop again to keep an eye on the Sportster.

For most people, sitting in a parked car for two hours would have been stultifying, but for the ex-cop and the private investigator it was just another day at the office. They watched the green dot not moving, talked about sports, about old girlfriends and even older cases, then watched the green dot not moving some more.

At nine forty-five, MacAlister turned to Pender. “I sink ve’ve got ein problem, Professor,” he announced in a stagy German accent.

“Give it another few minutes—and why are you talking like Dr. Strangelove?”

“Was I? Maybe I
should
lay off the weed for a while.”

At ten o’clock—the transponder was still broadcasting the same coordinates—they agreed that a look-see was definitely in order.

With MacAlister driving and Pender navigating by the green glow of the laptop screen, they rolled slowly along the back roads of Shasta County for close to half an hour. As they neared the designated axis, Mick pulled over to the side of the road and turned off his headlights. All was darkness—no lights, no dwellings. He double-checked the coordinates on the laptop against the Caddy’s onboard GPS system, looked over at Pender, and shook his head, baffled. State-of-the-art technology was assuring him they were within two hundred feet of the transponder, while his eyes were insisting they were alone on a dark country road.

“Mama Rose probably spotted the bug, tossed it into the weeds,” said Mick.

“Ssh!” A faint noise from the hillside looming up on their left had caught Pender’s attention. He signaled for Mick to turn off the engine, then closed his eyes and held his breath, listening for all he was worth and hearing at first only the rasp of crickets and the soughing of wind in the treetops. “Never mind, you’re probably right,” he whispered—then he heard it again, a faint groaning sound, like water rushing through pipes.

So did Mick—he reached across Pender, unlocked the glove compartment, took out a nine-millimeter Czech automatic with a flat black Stealth finish, popped in a fifteen-round clip, and jacked a round into the chamber, but left the safety on.

“Does your friend have a friend for me?” Pender asked him, nodding toward the pistol.

“You’re not packing?” It was too dark to see MacAlister’s face, but he
sounded
surprised.

“I’m retired, remember?”

“What’s that got to do with anything? This is America, goddamnit—
everybody
’s supposed to have a gun. It’s in the constitution or something.” MacAlister handed Pender a long, heavy six-cell flashlight. “Here, take this.”

Pender hefted it. “You call this a weapon? What am I supposed to do, hit him over the head?”

“Actually, I call it a flashlight—I was hoping maybe you could sort of shine it around so we could see where we’re going.”

“Wise guy,” muttered Pender. He climbed out of the car, closed the door quietly behind him. The piney air was cool and thin; somewhere out there a cricket was going batshit. Shielding the beam with his palm, he shined it back and forth, waving it slowly and carefully like a Geiger counter, until it picked out a dark paved surface climbing steeply upward from the road. Leaning forward against the pull of gravity, Pender preceded Mick up the face of the asphalt mountain. When he next heard the noise, he was close enough now to identify the sound of a toilet flushing—he was reminded of Archie Bunker’s noisy crapper in
All in the Family
—and water groaning through old pipes.

Neither Pender’s rubber-soled Hush Puppies nor Mick’s rubber-soled, negative-heeled Earth Shoes made any noise as they padded up the asphalt. There was a pickup truck parked at the top of the driveway, but no sign of Mama Rose or her bike. The garage door was locked. They walked around the side of the garage, saw Mama Rose’s Sportster parked next to a much larger Harley. Mick stooped to retrieve the transponder from the gas tank, then followed Pender around to the back of the darkened ranch house.

Pender shone the flashlight around the narrow patio, illuminating, in turn: a trellis twined with pink roses, a wrought-iron patio table lying on its side, a redwood hot tub with a plywood cover, and when he trained the flashlight straight down, a puddle of some thick, black, half-congealed substance pooled in a shallow declivity in the concrete at their feet.

Pender stooped, touched his forefinger to the sticky stuff, and brought it to his nose. The smell of blood was dreadfully familiar—his head jerked away from it so violently he almost sprained his neck.

Ka-whoooshhh!
The toilet again. Mick signaled for Pender to turn off the flashlight, then sidled through an open, sliding-glass doorway flanked by curtains. Pender followed. The house was even darker inside than out. From the end of a short hallway to their left came an indistinct grunting sound. Moving in lockstep, one behind the other like a baggy-pantsed vaudeville team, MacAlister and Pender followed the noise to the open doorway at the end of the corridor on the left.

Inside, candlelight flickered. Mick signaled for Pender to wait in the hall, then slipped into the room sideways to present a slimmer target profile. A fat candle burned on a saucer on the bedside table; Mama Rose lay mummified on the bed, cocooned in winding sheets from neck to ankles, with a strip of torn linen serving as a gag, through which she grunted frantically, rolling her eyes toward the adjoining bathroom.

Ka-whoooshhh!
Mick held his pistol in a braced, two-handed firing position as he approached the open bathroom doorway. The DeVries girl, all but lost in an orange, hibiscus-pattered muumuu several sizes too large, was standing over the toilet, aiming a pencil flashlight straight down into the tank and watching in rapt fascination as the water level rose. She didn’t appear to have noticed Mick.

“Pender, in here!”

Pender hurried into the bedroom, caught sight of the girl in the bathroom. “Lily,” he called. No response. “Lily, it’s Uncle Pen.”

Still no response. Pender put his arm around her and gently ushered her out into the dim light of the bedroom, where Mick had put his gun down, and was sawing through Mama Rose’s gag with his pocket jackknife.

Goddamn pothead, thought Pender, seeing the gun lying useless on the bed. “For shit’s sake, Mick—”

But it was too late. “Hands up, please!” called a high-pitched male voice, from the doorway.

They all froze in place like a kid’s game of Statues, their shadows dancing nervously in the flickering candlelight. “Take it easy there, son,” said Pender, standing just outside the bathroom door with his arm still draped around Lily’s shoulders.

“I
said,
everybody put your hands
up,”
Lyssy called petulantly, turning the gun from MacAlister to Pender and the girl, then back to MacAlister. But when Pender raised his hands, the girl darted into the bathroom and slammed the door behind her. Lyssy’s eyes flickered toward the sudden movement and noise. Seeing him distracted, Mick dropped the jackknife and dove for the gun.

Lyssy whirled, his finger tightening on the trigger.
Blam, blam, blam, blam
—four shots. Blue flashes like lightning lit the room. A gobbet of something wet flew past Mama Rose’s head and hit the candle; the flame sizzled and died.

“How come nobody ever
listens
to me?” Lyssy whined in the darkness, as the toilet began flushing again in the bathroom. “Nobody
ever
listens to me.”

7

Irene had no appointments scheduled for Thursday afternoon—according to her original schedule, she was still supposed to be in Portland. Her spirits somewhat buoyed by Pender’s mid-afternoon telephone call (from what she’d been able to make out over what sounded like the roar of a hurricane, he and MacAlister had an extremely promising lead and were driving up to Shasta to check it out), she’d spent the day catching up on a myriad of chores—correspondence, revisions for the new edition of her textbook on dissociative disorders, a little dusting, a little gardening.

After supper (a prepacked salad of wilted baby greens, glazed pecans, crumbled feta, and dried cranberries from Trader Joe’s that had been in her fridge since Sunday—hence the wilted greens), Irene went outside to water her prize-winning Cecil Bruner roses, then ran the vacuum cleaner and did a load of laundry: as an eco-conscious, energy-saving Californian, she always did her watering and ran her major appliances in the evening.

Irene locked up the house and went upstairs to bed around ten o’clock. She set her alarm, laid out her jogging outfit, changed into her last surviving pair of Frank’s oversize pajamas—she had to turn the sleeves and legs up several inches—and climbed into bed with the new issue of
Psychology Today,
which for her constituted light reading.

At eleven, she switched off the light and turned on the TV at the foot of the bed to watch the news. KSBW, the NBC affiliate in Salinas, led with the story of last night’s murders in Oregon, hitting hard on the two local angles—Lily’s Pebble Beach address and Maxwell’s previous rampage in Monterey County.

But there was no real clarification of Lily’s status. “Portland police say they still aren’t clear as to whether the young woman from Pebble Beach was involved directly with any of the killings, but stressed that until they know more, both fugitives should be considered armed and dangerous,” cautioned the sad-eyed, folksy anchorman with the David Letterman widow’s peak.

“Oh, shut up,” said Irene, switching off the television. She lay there in the dark for another few minutes, then climbed out of bed and went back downstairs to double-check whether she had indeed locked both doors.

As it turned out, she had—for all the good it would do.

8

“C’mon, Lilith, we have to find that money and get out of here.”

Although she seemed to be unharmed physically, the girl’s repetitive, almost robotic preoccupation with the workings of the toilet had continued while Lyssy cuffed Pender to the brass rail of the headboard (“Is that too tight? Let me know if it’s too tight.”), gagged him with torn strips of sheeting (“I know it’s uncomfortable—there, is that better?”), then wrapped him with winding sheets (“Here we go round the mulberry bush.”) and left him lying there next to Mama Rose, similarly gagged, cuffed, and bound; they looked like two mummies lying with their hands raised in surrender.

“C’mon, please?” There was no indication that Lilith recognized Lyssy. She seemed scarcely aware of his existence, or rather, of his existence as a fellow sentient being—for all the notice she took of him as he tugged her out of the bathroom, he might have been a mechanical device to which she was attached, a winch or a block and tackle.

He closed the bathroom door, led her into the middle of the bedroom, and let go of her, just to see what she’d do. With the door closed, she appeared to have forgotten about her beloved toilet—out of sight, out of mind. Instead she glanced around the bedroom, where half a dozen candles now flickered and glowed, then made straight for the antique brass apothecary scale on the dresser, stepping over the denim-clad, ponytailed body of the dead interloper as if it were a log.

Soon she was engrossed in balancing the counterpoised trays with the tiny brass milk-bottle–shaped weights; everything else, including Lyssy, had apparently ceased to exist for her.

“Lilith, we have to go,” he said again, dumping the scale and weights into the pillowcase, along with Carson’s revolver, which he’d reloaded from a box of shells he’d found in the drawer of the bedside table. There was another pistol with a wooden handle in the other bedside table, but Lyssy decided to take the dead man’s gun instead. It was lying where it had fallen, inches from the outstretched hand of the now-faceless corpse. He picked it up and popped the clip to see how many rounds were left. There were fourteen, with another round in the chamber: Mick hadn’t fired a single shot.