When She Was Bad: A Thriller (24 page)

After her shower, Irene had changed into a pair of roomy black cargo pants with plenty of loops and snaps and pockets, a navy pullover, and a pair of black-on-black Chuck Taylor high-tops; her damp hair was wrapped in a high towel turban. “Wrong, wrong,” she said, making two check marks in the air; she had just finished her second cup of high octane dark roast. “One: you
have
to take me with you—otherwise I won’t tell you where they are, not that you could find it by yourself even if I did. And two: you’re exaggerating the threat level. Lyssy’s frightened and confused, but he’s not dangerous.”

“Oh really?” Pender’s big bald head, rosy in the glow of the chandelier, wagged stubbornly from side to side. “Try telling that to Mick MacAlister.”

“That was self-defense. If MacAlister hadn’t gone for his gun he’d still be alive—you told me that. But as far as shooting someone in cold blood? If Lyssy were capable of that, we’d both be…” Her voice trailed off as a new possibility occurred to her. “Oh, no! Please say it ain’t so, Pen.”

“Okay, I’m lost.” He spread his hands helplessly. “What am I supposed to say ain’t so?”

“That you were planning to just…gun him down. Sneak up on him and gun him down. That that’s why you don’t want me there this time around—you don’t want any witnesses.”

Pender had to force himself to keep his eyes trained on hers. “I’m not saying that’s not an option—I mean, if the opportunity presents itself. But if that looks to be the safest way to get Lily out of that cabin unharmed, your being there or not is not going to make a difference one way or the other.”

“But it will!” Irene exclaimed. “I can
talk
to them—they’ll listen to—” Then, with a sinking feeling: “Hold on, Pen—I never said anything about a cabin.”

“Not until now. But don’t feel bad—I was about seventy-five percent sure when you said I couldn’t find it on my own anyway. I’m thinking, that’s got to be out in the wilderness someplace—which would account for why they ransacked your kitchen. Then I remembered about…what did Lyman and Dotty call that place? El Guard-o, something like that?”

Irene’s fingernails dug painfully into her palms. Don’t be too hard on yourself, she thought—he’s a cop, this is his métier. “Please, Pen—I owe it to Lily to be there. If I’d fought for her a little harder in the first place, she wouldn’t be in the situation she’s in. I let that child down once—I won’t do it a second time.”

On the off chance she was bluffing, Pender countered with a bluff of his own. “You’re not leaving me much of a choice,” he said, slowly removing his cell phone from his pocket. “I have to call in the cops—
they’ll
be able to figure out where the cabin is.”

“No!” Irene raised her voice for the first time. “If you bring in the police, it’s going to be Bonnie and Clyde all over again.”

“We don’t know that.” Even more slowly, Pender’s sausage-thick fingers drew out the antenna. “There are plenty of nonlethal alternatives—tear gas, flash-bang grenades, Tasers, rubber rounds. Deadly force is always supposed to be a last resort in these situations.”

Irene sneaked a peek at Pender over the rim of her half-empty cup. Between the cold shower and the hot coffee, she was starting to feel more like herself again. And more critically, to
think
like herself again. “Okay, well, you’re the expert,” she said. “If you think calling the police is the best thing to do, who am I to question you?”

“All right, then.” He pretended to press the green Call button, then stared down at the phone in his palm, waiting for her to fold.

“That’s a nine followed by two ones,” Irene prompted.

“Ah, shit.” Pender jammed the antenna closed against his palm and dropped the phone back into his pocket. “Remind me never to play poker with you.”

8

Lily stared in horrified disbelief as Fano’s lower limbs twitched feebly for a few seconds, like a frog in a biology experiment; then he was still. Behind her, she heard hollow, uneven footfalls crossing the porch, descending the plank steps. The clearing spun dizzily around her; she felt the strength draining from her legs, and had to squat on her hams to keep from toppling over.

“Why?” she moaned as Lyssy approached her, holding Mick MacAlister’s stealth-black nine-millimeter pistol at his side. “He wasn’t going to say anything—he gave me his word.”

“Better safe than sorry,” he replied, his voice high-pitched and almost cheerful as he stuffed the pistol into the waistband of his jeans, then reached down and helped her to her feet.

“But—but he was my
friend.
”

“News flash, baby: we don’t
have
any friends anymore, except each other.” He glanced from the body lying facedown in the dirt, to the cabin window from which he’d fired, and back again, estimating the distance. “You have to admit, that was one
hell
of a shot.” Then, offhandedly: “He didn’t have any family, did he? Or a girlfriend, somebody who’s going to notice he’s among the missing?”

Momentarily stunned by a sudden, heart-sinking realization, Lily could only shake her head no. It wasn’t his voice that had clued her in—the voice was perfect, the voice was Lyssy—but rather the casualness of the afterthought, the utter lack of compassion, even humanity, that told her what she’d rather not have known.

“Great. Let’s get him out of the open before somebody else comes bopping a—What’re you looking at me like that for? I only did what had to be done, what you were too chicken to…Hey, what the…?”

She had tried to keep the fear from showing in her eyes; it was her feet that betrayed her, taking a backward baby step, then another.

“It’s only me, Lyssy. Just Lyssy—no reason to be scared.”

Still shaking her head—no, no, no—she retreated across the clearing, her eyes wide and her heart pounding. He limped after her, swinging his artificial leg out wide for more speed. She fumbled for the pistol sticking out of the waistband of her jeans—and dropped it onto the carpet of fallen needles at the edge of the firebreak.

9

Pender tried to avoid gunning the Barracuda’s engine while they were still in town—the low-pitched rumbling had a tendency to set off car alarms. But the ’Cuda was in her element once they hit the highway, and so was Pender, leaning back like a low-rider, one hand on the wheel and the other on the stick, his Hush Puppies tap-dancing gracefully on the pedals.

Soon sheer cliffs rose to the left, and fell away so sharply to the right that driving down Highway 1 was like driving along the edge of the world. The only distinction between the dense blackness of the Pacific Ocean below and the velvety blackness of the sky above was that there weren’t any stars in the ocean.

“I once came down here with a friend who was a CalTrans engineer,” Irene shouted to Pender, over the shriek of the engine and the rush of the wind. “When I asked him why they hadn’t installed guardrails on some of these curves, he said it would only make the drivers overconfident.”

Pender cranked up his window and signaled for Irene to do the same. With the windows closed, the ambient noise inside the car dropped so suddenly and profoundly that it felt to Irene as if they had driven into the eye of a hurricane—the ’Cuda was that tight. “Speaking of overconfidence,” he said, “we ought to get some ground rules established.”

“What sort of ground rules?”

“To begin with, once we get there, if I look things over and decide it’s too risky to go ahead, that’s it, we’re out of there.”

“Mmm-hmm?” said Irene, noncommittally.

“And if I do decide this thing has a chance, you have to let me call the shots. If I say stay behind me, you stay behind me. If I say wait here, you wait there. And above all, once we’re in earshot, you can’t say
anything
unless I give you the green light. If this goes south, having Maxwell believe I’m alone could be—” Your best shot at getting out of there alive, he was about to say, but changed his mind for fear she’d dismiss it as too melodramatic. “Could be the only advantage we have.”

“That sounds reasonable enough,” Irene said, and if technically her reply fell short of a promise, it was only because she understood, as a highly trained mental health professional (don’t try this at home, kids), that in the absence of power, passive-aggressiveness could be a viable life strategy. “But I still think you’re exaggerating the danger. Which could be dangerous in itself—we already know Lyssy’s only a threat when he feels threatened.”

And Max is only a threat when he’s breathing, thought Pender, downshifting into a reverse-banked curve. Better to be overcautious with Lyssy than undercautious with Max. Or, since they share the same brain, why not put a couple rounds through it and let God sort them out?

When they reached the bridge over Little Bear Creek, the smooth hum of tires on concrete changed to a noisy, metallic chattering on the steel-reinforced grid. “Okay, start slowing down,” said Irene; from the urgency in her voice she might have been talking Pender through landing a crippled jetliner on a too-short runway. “Better put on your left turn signal…slower, slower…get ready to turn at the other end…now! Here!”

“Hang on, Sloopy!” said Pender, downshifting and cutting the steering wheel to the left, then accelerating hard, sending the Barracuda darting across the northbound lane of the highway. He jammed on the brakes as a three-railed wooden gate suddenly materialized in the headlights; the ’Cuda came to a shuddering stop with its front bumper only inches from a
PRIVATE ROAD
,
NO ADMITTANCE
sign nailed to the top rail of the gate and dotted with reflective disks.

A bicycle lock secured the gate to the gatepost. Irene got out and felt around between the sign and the rail for the key that was usually wedged there. But not tonight; she spread her hands wide, squinting into the glare of the headlights. “They must have taken it with them,” she called to Pender.

“Either that, or you were dead wrong about them coming here.” Pender yanked the emergency brake and left the car juddering in neutral while he climbed out and examined the lock, then rocked the gate back and forth, testing its strength. “We might be able to force it.”

“I’m not sure it would worth the trouble,” Irene told him. “It’s only a mile from here to the cabin, maybe a mile and a half. If we don’t want them to hear us coming, we’d be better off leaving the car here and hiking in anyway.”

Pender thought it over, shrugged. “I’m game if you are,” he said. “Of course, you might have to carry me the last half-mile or so.”

When he returned from jockeying the ’Cuda to the side of the driveway and locking it up, Irene had pulled her black knit watch-cap over her damp, fair hair and was tucking in the stray ends. In her dark clothes and high-tops, she reminded Pender of a kid dressed up as a night commando for Halloween—all she lacked was eye-black and a toy Uzi.

Pender too had dressed for a night march before leaving Pacific Grove, trading in his plaid shorts for a pair of big-ass corduroys, his logan green Hush Puppies for the black pair he wore on formal occasions, and donning a black Members Only windbreaker he’d bought in 1985 over his gaudy Hawaiian shirt and calfskin shoulder holster; a stiff new baseball cap, black with a Green Iguana logo, covered his expansive scalp.

Before leaving, he ducked under the fence and walked down the dirt road a few yards, then ejected the clip from the Colt Mama Rose had given him, and made sure the chamber was clear before dry-firing to test the trigger pull. He held the gun two-handed, arms extended, elbows slightly bent. The hickory grip was smooth against his palms, but not slippery. He squeezed the trigger—
pyeww!
went his lips. He squeezed it twice more—
pyeww! pyeww!

The pull was far too light—in the old days Pender had used a thirteen-pound trigger in lieu of a safety. So he’d have to keep his finger
off
the trigger until he was ready to fire, he reminded himself, as he reinserted the clip and slipped the Colt back into the too-snug holster, which had been custom-fitted both for his old SIG-Sauer
and
his old figure. When he looked up, Irene was watching him over the fence and shaking her head with tolerant affection.

“Pow, pow?” she said.

“Think of it as a visualization,” he told her—Pender had only been in California a few months, but he was already starting to learn the lingo.

10

Most people think of patience as a virtue. He has the patience of Job, they say, the patience of a saint. But then, most people were fools. It never occurred to them that Hitler was patient, too. Or Ted Bundy—no one was more patient than Ted Bundy stalking a coed.

Except possibly for himself, thought Max. After his failed coup in the attic yesterday, he had retreated into co-consciousness, waiting for Lyssy to fall asleep. It had taken a little longer than Max had planned—nearly thirty hours—but what were thirty hours to a man who’d sat out nearly three years of double incarceration, self-imprisoned in an imprisoned body?

The first thing he’d realized upon opening his eyes was that he was alone in bed—the girl was gone. Then, scrambling around for his leg and clothes, he realized that she’d taken the .38 with her. Quickly he’d retrieved the other gun, the longer-barreled black automatic, which turned out to be a blessing in disguise when he peered through the shutters next to the front door and saw Lily talking to a little Mexican-looking guy.

Because when the man turned to leave, Max had to take his shot from where he stood, some twenty, twenty-five yards away—a difficult enough shot with the longer-barreled nine millimeter, and probably impossible with the snubnosed revolver.

Now he stooped to snatch up the .38 she had dropped. “Naughty, naughty,” he said in his own voice, stuffing the gun into his back pocket with a piratical grin. “Like the man said, either we hang together, or…”