When She Was Bad: A Thriller (26 page)

“Oh, good. Dr. Cogan, it’s Lyssy. Lyssy and Lily. We want to come down and talk things over, but I’m scared your friend there is just going to shoot me the first chance he gets—could you get him to maybe just point his gun away a little?”

Max’s eyes were beginning to adjust to the moonlight; looking over the girl’s shoulder, he could see Pender bracing the gun against the roof of the car, twenty yards away.

“Lyssy!” he called. “I give you my word I won’t fire first.”

“You bet he won’t,” Max whispered to Lily. “Not while I have you for a shield.”

“Well that cheers the shit outta me,” Lily murmured as she started down the steps.

“Okay, that’s far enough,” Pender called, when the other two had crossed the clearing to within ten feet of the Infiniti, Lily trudging along in the lead with the hood of her sweatshirt pulled up, Maxwell limping behind her, wearing an old canvas knapsack containing their money and a few supplies. They were standing not far from where Fano had died; behind them, his blood was a dark stain in the moonlight.

“Hi, Dr. Cogan,” said Max, in Lyssy’s ever-hopeful voice. “We’re sorry we put those sleeping pills in your juice, but we couldn’t think of any other way to get a head start.”

The voice, the timid stance, what she could see of his expression as he half-crouched behind Lily, all seemed to Irene to support his claim to be Lyssy. “No harm done,” she told him, then turned to Lily. “Are you all right, dear?”

The girl nodded curtly, but it was Pender she was staring at, as though she were trying to telepath him a message. He thought he knew what it was, too. “Lyssy, I need to see both your hands. You can stay there if you’d like—just show me your hands.”

“If you want to know do I have a gun, the answer is yes. But I’ll ditch mine if you’ll ditch yours.”

“You first.”

Half obscured by his human shield, Maxwell shrugged. “Dr. Al always said I was a trusting soul,” he said, holding up the .38 with which he’d killed MacAlister, then clicking on the safety before tossing it away. “Your turn.”

“Sorry, I can’t do that,” said Pender. That was a lesson every cop was taught in the cradle: No matter how bad it is, there’s no situation that can’t be made worse by surrendering your weapon.

“But—but you
lied
!”

The childish disappointment and disbelief in Maxwell’s voice, the air of naiveté, went a long way toward convincing Pender that this might be Lyssy after all. He did not, however, lower his own gun or let down his guard. “Sorry I had to mislead you, son. Now put your hands in the air for me. Lily honey, you come on over here.”

But before she could move, Maxwell snaked his left arm around her throat, drew MacAlister’s automatic from the waistband of his jeans with his right hand, and pressed the muzzle against her right temple. “Drop your gun, or I blow her head off.”

“Go ahead,” Pender told him calmly. “You’ll be dead before she hits the ground.”

4

Being in the dark place is like being deaf, dumb, blind, paralyzed, and buried alive. Nothing here. Nothing but yourself and your thoughts. Crazy-making. Unbearable to contemplate. To think too closely about it is to risk becoming an endless scream resounding through the void.

Far easier to give yourself up to the darkness…

(but what about Lily?)

To surrender rather than risk the flames…

(but what about Lily?)

Because Max is so much stronger…

(but is he?)

And if you only let go…

(don’t let go!)

If you give yourself to the darkness…

(again)

You’ll never even hear her screaming…

“I do believe we’ve reached another stalemate, Agent Pender.” Max had dropped Lyssy’s simper; it was a relief to him to think that he’d never have to employ it again.

“Let the girl go and we can settle it the way we did the last time,” said Pender, referring to the shoot-out in the barn at Scorned Ridge three years ago.

“I don’t think so.” When he was amused, Max’s eyebrows tended to peak devilishly, like Jack Nicholson’s. “I seem to be running out of legs.”

“Then leave the girl behind—I give you my word I’ll let you walk.”

“I believe we’ve already established what your word is worth, Agent Pender. Oh, wait—I see where the problem lies! You think I’m abducting the young lady.” He eased his crook-armed hold on the girl’s neck, chucked her cheek affectionately, and swung the muzzle of his gun from her to Pender. “Tell them who you are, darlin’.”

She coughed a few times, pulled down the hood of her sweatshirt and tugged the neck away from her throat, working her jaw and rolling her head like Rodney Dangerfield on speed. “They’re so fucking smart, let them figure it out.”

“Ohmigod—Lilith?” Irene said, rising from her crouched position.

“Fuckin’ A,” replied Lily, executing a mock curtsy and momentarily leaving Maxwell’s head exposed. But Pender was like an old prizefighter: he could see the openings, but his reflexes were no longer fast enough to take advantage of them. C’mon baby, he thought—one more curtsy for Uncle Pen.

Instead she turned her head and whispered over her shoulder to Maxwell.

“Sorry I had to mislead you, son.”

Never before had Lyssy struggled so hard against surrendering himself to the darkness. But it was worth it to realize he was no longer alone. “I’m the one who misled you, Dr. Al. I should have been honest, I should have told you about the voice and the dark place.”

They were in Dr. Al’s office—sort of. No walls, no floor, just an archetypal psychiatrist’s couch and chair suspended in featureless space, surrounded by darkness. Lyssy was lying on his back on the couch; Dr. Al was behind him to his right, just out of his line of sight. “It’s not your fault—you were in an untenable situation.”

“At least that’s better than an un-eleven-able situation.”

Dr. Al chuckled. “What I mean is, we, ah, put you in a situation where you would be punished for telling the truth, but rewarded for hiding it. But that’s all water over the dam. Would you like to tell me why we’re here today, and what you’re hoping to accomplish in today’s session?”

Lyssy felt a twinge of panic—for a moment he couldn’t even remember where here
was,
much less what he wanted to accomplish. Then it came back to him. “I’m worried about Lily—I’m worried something’s going to happen to her.”

“Something like this?” said Dr. Al, leaning forward in his chair until Lyssy was able to see his face. Or what was left of his face—it had been cut literally to shreds, raked from hairline to jawline with dozens of savage strokes. One eye was gone entirely; the lid of the other had been sliced raggedly away to reveal the eyeball, round as a marble, red-veined around the edges, pulsing in its dark socket.

Lyssy wanted desperately to look away, but he knew somehow that if he did, he would be lost. “Help us, Dr. Al,” he said. “Tell me how to stop him.”

The torn lips parted in a bloody smile, revealing slashed gums and shattered teeth. “If I knew the answer to that,” said the phantom, “would I look like this?”

5

Pender took advantage of the whispered conference between Max and Lilith long enough to shake out his left arm, which had gone all pins and needles. The conference ended with Max nodding his head. Pender resumed his position, half-crouched, with his forearms resting on the roof of the car.

“Much as I hate to break up the party,” said Max, “my partner here has suggested it may be time for us to make a strategic withdrawal. But keep in mind, you two—this is a postponement of our final reckoning, not a cancellation. Someday there will come a knock on your door or a tap on your window—”

“Can the Snidely Whiplash act,” Pender broke in. “No point acting tough when you’re hiding behind a woman.”

But Max and Lily had already begun sidling to their left, toward the mule, which was parked facing the cabin. They circled around to the passenger’s side. Lily climbed up to the raised bench seat ahead of Maxwell, then slid over behind the wheel, keeping her body between Max and Pender.

“Lilith,” called Irene. “Lilith, stop—take a moment to think this over.”

Lily who’d been driving the mule since she was twelve, was busily pretending to study the rudimentary dashboard. (She’d told Max earlier that she’d seen another route out of the canyon on the USGS map; when he’d asked her if she could figure out how to operate the mule, she’d told him if she could drive a Harley, she could drive anything.)

“I
have
thought it over,” she called down from the cab, then pressed the starter button with her thumb and opened the choke wide. “And this is the best way for everybody.” Then, with her back turned to Max, she mouthed the words
I love you
to Irene.

The engine back-farted bluish smoke, then sputtered to life as she gingerly fed it gas. The mule shuddered and puffed until she’d turned down the choke, then waited, trembling—
pocketapocketapocketa
—while she released the floor-mounted hand brake.

Expertly, she depressed the clutch and shifted into reverse, leaning out of the cab and glancing over her shoulder as she steered the mule backward. She cut the steering hard, guided the narrow, ten-foot-long vehicle through a tight backward turn, then shifted out of reverse and gunned the mule up the dirt track and into the cover of the trees before Maxwell could get off a clear shot.

“That was Lily,” said Irene. “Dear God, that was Lily.”

“It’s getting so you can’t tell the players without a scorecard,” Pender muttered under his breath as he slid behind the wheel of the Infiniti. He turned to Irene as she climbed into the passenger seat. “Keys?” he said, extending his hand toward her, palm up.

6

“Doesn’t this thing go any faster?” said Max. He’d tossed his knapsack into the back of the mule, and was facing rearward, with the barrel of the pistol braced on the railing behind the bench seat. But the way the mule was bucking along up the rutted track, he’d have been lucky to hit the taillight—if the mule had
had
a taillight, that is; it possessed only a single, center-mounted front spotlight.

“Yeah, right, I’ll switch on the fuckin’ afterburners,” said Lily. Being Lilith was second nature to her by now—she hardly even had to think about it. “Look, don’t sweat it—where we’re going, they ain’t gonna be able to follow in that fancy-ass Infiniti.”

Max’s head whipped around sharply. “How would you know?”

Whoops, thought Lily, almost jocularly—somehow, the longer she impersonated Lilith, the more of Lilith’s qualities she began to take on. “Dotted line on the topo map,” she improvised confidently. “Should be coming up right…about…Yeah, here it is. Hold on tight.”

She jerked the wheel hard to the left and steered the vehicle through a steep, uphill, J-turn onto a rutted track only a little less narrow than the mule itself—one side of the vehicle almost scraped the rocky cliff as the mule jolted up the side of the canyon, while the other nearly overhung the steep drop-off.

“Where does this come out?” Max asked her.

“According to the topo map, it swings north back up toward Big Sur,” said Lily, improvising hurriedly as she guided the mule through the first of a series of hairy-looking switchbacks.

“It goddamn well better,” said Max.

Pender slumped forward with his head resting against the top of the steering wheel.

“I’m sorry,” Irene said. In a way it would have been less painful if she’d simply forgotten to bring along her key ring. (Lyssy and Lily had thoughtfully taken only her spare car key.) But she
had
brought it along: it was in her Coach bag, which she’d left in the Barracuda. “I don’t suppose there’s any way you could…what do you call it, hot-wire it?”

By way of answer, Pender banged his head lightly against the padded wheel—
thud, thud, thud
.

“No, I suppose not,” said Irene.

“Oh well.” Pender sighed. He sat up again and reached for the door handle. “You know what the Chinese say about a journey of a thousand miles, don’t you.”

Irene: “It begins with a single step?”

Pender: “Bingo!”

But they hadn’t gone much farther than that first step when Pender pointed to the lonely light winding its way up the side of the cliff, a hundred feet or so above the canyon floor. “I thought you said that way doesn’t lead anywhere but the top of the ridge?”

“It doesn’t,” said Irene, taking off her watch cap.

“Does Lily know that?”

“Of course.” She ran her fingers through her damp, flattened hair. “What could she be
thinking
, Pen?”

“You’re the shrink, you tell me.”

“I don’t
know
!” Despairingly. “Sometimes I think I don’t know
anything
anymore.”

“Knowing one knows nothing is the beginning of wisdom, Grasshopper,” said Pender.

Irene smacked him across the arm with her sweaty watch cap. They started off again, and again hadn’t gotten far when Irene tripped over something small and hard. When she saw what it was—the snubnosed revolver Max had tossed away earlier—she knelt down and, under the pretext of tying her sneaker, slipped it into the roomy front pocket of her cargo pants before Pender could decide to pull rank again and take it away from her.

Dr. Al is as gone as the day before yesterday. In his place, a dreamlike sense of motion—bucketing along, rising and falling, swaying, a roller-coaster ride through sheer undifferentiated blackness. Then a vision coalesces out of the blackness, a soundless, slightly skewed, camera’s-eye vision, which Lyssy can neither control nor direct, of a narrow dirt road winding dead ahead through the darkness along the side of a cliff.