When She Was Bad: A Thriller (27 page)

Suddenly the camera’s-eye view rotates to the left. Lyssy catches a glimpse of Lily in profile, the hood of her sweatshirt thrown back, her eyes narrowed in concentration and her lips pressed resolutely together as she wrestles with the steering wheel.
Lily,
he wants to shout—
Lily, I’m here.

But before he can figure out whether it’s a dream, or his first experience of co-consciousness, the view rotates around to the right again, then shifts downward, and instead of Lily, Lyssy finds himself looking down at a black pistol gripped tightly in a clawlike, fire-scarred hand.

7

They left the clearing at a fast walk, then by mutual and unspoken agreement broke into a trot as the trees began to close in overhead until they could no longer see the tiny light clinging doughtily to the side of the canyon.

Irene, a veteran jogger, started to pull ahead, shining her flashlight in front of her. Pender called to her to wait; he was breathing hard when he caught up. “What is it?” she said.

“It could be…a trick…. Max could have…bailed out, he could be…hiding in the bushes waiting to…pick us off.”

She extinguished her flashlight and they started off again, Pender walking ahead of her, gun in hand. When they reached the fork in the road Pender turned to Irene. “Guess what?” he whispered, his big hand resting on her shoulder.

“Forget it,” said Irene.

“One of us
has
to go for help.” The top half of his face was in deep shadow; against the dark background, the green iguana logo on his baseball cap seemed to be floating an inch or two over his head. “You’re a faster hiker, I’m better with this.” Indicating the Colt in his other hand.

“But—”

“You know I’m right, don’t you?” he whispered, almost tenderly.

Seconds ticked by while she tried to think of a reason to say no, but all she could come up with was an atavistic need to
not
be alone, and an unreasonable fear that if she left now, she’d never see Pender or Lily again. “Is this one of those Davy Crockett moments?” she said, looking up at him, feeling dwarfed by his height and bulk in the dark as she never had in the light.

“Yes, ma’am,” said Pender, in his best frontier drawl. “Yes ma’am, Ah reckon it is.”

“I reckon we’d better go ahead, then,” said Irene.

The last switchback was the tightest, the steepest, and the most severely banked. As it jolted upward the mule tilted precariously to the right, sending Max sliding sideways across the cracked vinyl padding of the bench. At the last second he managed to hook his elbow over the railing behind him, and found himself leaning out over empty space, staring down into the abyss.

“Jesus
fuck,”
he said, hauling himself back to safety as the mule righted itself. “You trying to get us both killed?”

No, just you, thought Lily. “Looks like we’re over the worst of it,” she told him, as the track began to level off. They traveled briefly northward along the ridge at the top of the canyon, then turned due west, the mule bumping across the gentle rise of a broad, grassy, humpbacked meadow dotted with widely spaced live oak and madrone.

The road itself, though, seemed to have petered out. Behind them were two shiny tracks made by moonlight refracted off the blades of grass flattened under the mule’s tires; ahead there was only virgin grass. Then the mule topped the rise and Max saw that the grass ended abruptly at the edge of the continent. Far below, beyond the meadow, there was only the flat black expanse of the Pacific, stretching onward beneath a dome of stars toward a nearly indiscernable horizon.

Pender walked ten, jogged ten, walked ten, jogged ten, while his internal Rock-Ola played an appropriate medley of oldies: I’m walkin’, yes indeed: walkin’ in the rain, walkin’ to New Orleans, walkin’ back to happiness, these boots are made for walkin’, and you’ll never walk alone.

Pick ’em up, lay ’em down, pick ’em up, lay ’em down. The footing was treacherous, the incline pitiless, the ache in his thighs relentless. Whether he walked in or out of the ruts, his ankles, unsupported by the Hush Puppies loafers, threatened to turn at every step. Cursing himself for all the miles of exercise he’d blown off riding in golf carts, Pender soon abandoned even the pretense of jogging.

The first time he went down (what looked like shaley rock in moon-shadow turned out to be a shelf of dirt that crumbled underfoot), he landed hard on his left side and lay there in suspense, waiting to see how badly he’d fucked up his ankle.

Not at all, as it turned out—the shooting pain he’d been anticipating never materialized. So he picked up his gun, picked himself up off the ground, and resumed the upward trudge, his infernal jukebox kicking in with “Twenty-five Miles.”

But it soon felt like he’d already gone fifty miles. His breath coming harder now, his stride degenerating to an oldster’s shuffle, at first Pender attributed the pain in his left arm to his earlier tumble. He flexed his shoulder, worked the arm around in a circle. The pain sharpened, grew jagged, turned a screaming crimson. A steel band tightened around his chest. He saw the fireflies again, points of dancing, colored light, then the world tilted crazily onto its side.

8

Lily had toyed with the idea of driving the mule over the edge of the cliff and jumping out at the last second, but every time she took her foot off the accelerator, the mule slowed, with the obvious intention of rolling to a complaisant halt. And even if it didn’t, what was to stop Max from bailing out as well?

So she shifted into neutral and engaged the hand brake. The vehicle shuddered and trembled,
pocketapocketapocketa,
until Max leaned over and switched off the engine by closing off the choke. The mule backfired and fell silent. The vista, even at night, was magnificent: the domed, starry sky; the endless ocean; the faint glow marking the vast arc of the horizon.

“I thought this was supposed to be the back way to Big Sur,” said Max, turning toward Lily and placing the muzzle of his gun against her right temple.

“I musta misread the map,” said Lily evenly. The Lilith persona was coming to her effortlessly now—she no longer needed to ask herself what Lilith would do or say, how Lilith might react—but something in Max’s eyes told her the distinction was rapidly becoming irrelevant to him. “Think about it. Why the fuck would I bring you up here? What do
I
have to gain?”

“I don’t know yet,” said Max. “But I’m going to find out.” His left hand shot out, grabbed the bunched hood of her zippered sweatshirt, rammed her head against the steering wheel, yanked her upright, jammed the pistol against the side of her head again. “Now, what are you trying to pull?”

It was all
so
like a dream—a sense of gliding movement, of a perpetual nightscape, of darkness around the edges, and of helplessness. Heartbreaking helplessness when his (no, Max’s, he reminds himself ) hand slams Lily’s head against the steering wheel. But Lyssy knows better. It’s not a dream, it’s co-consciousness. He’s seeing through Max’s eyes. And hearing now—distantly but clearly, although there’s a hint of disconnect between what he sees and what he hears. It’s not as severe as a streaming video: more like watching singers trying to lip-synch on TV.

“Put the fucking gun down,” Lily is saying….

Dazed and angry, with a trickle of blood descending from her hairline, Lily said, “Put the fucking gun down, Max, before I take it away and shove it up your ass—assuming there’s room for it with your head up there.”

Max twisted the bunched hood, choking her with her own sweatshirt. “Don’t try to out-badass me, girl.”

“I wouldn’t…think of it.”

“Think anything you like—just
do
exactly what I tell you to do.” It felt so good, so right, to have a live body wriggling in his grasp again. A warm, intensely familiar feeling washed over Max. It was the closeness, a sense of connection, a feeling almost of oneness, of love turned inside out, that the sadist develops for the masochist, the torturer for the subject, the psychopath for his victim, which supersedes all other considerations. Suddenly he
had
to have her.

“Get out—no, this way.” He climbed backward out of the mule, good leg first, hauling her with him by the hood of her sweatshirt. Still holding the gun to her head, he shuffled to his left, dragging his right leg, and Lily, all the way around to the back of the mule. He ordered her to unsnap the plastic webbing that served as a tailgate. When she’d done so, he pressed himself tightly against her from behind, gently pushing the hair back from her ear with the barrel of his gun.

“Drop your drawers and bend over,” he whispered. He wasn’t hard yet—like many psychopaths, Max had trouble achieving erection. Still, there were always alternatives to an erect penis: he was holding one of them in his right hand, it had a nice long barrel, and when it came, it came with a bang.

Circling around the wagon, or whatever it was, dragging/shoving Lily by her sweatshirt, Lyssy watching from a Max’s-eye view, thinking stop, thinking don’t, thinking let her go, goddamn you, let her go.

Then he hears Max say, “Drop your drawers and bend over.”

No, thinks Lyssy, you can’t, I won’t let you. But he’s powerless…or is he? If he could hear Max talking to him when
he
was conscious and
Max
was in co-con, then maybe there’s a way to make
Max
hear
him.
He fills his mind the way you fill your lungs, then: no, stop, let her go! Screaming the thought, thinking the scream. Stop, let her go, leave her alone….

It had seemed so
simple
at the time, Lily remembered: lead Max away from Uncle Pen and Dr. Irene, give him the slip, then outrun him—he’s a cripple, after all.

But somehow the right moment had never presented itself. Or if it had, she had missed it—one minute she was driving the mule, the next he had her by the hood of her sweatshirt and was holding a gun to her head—slip
this,
smart girl—and now here she was, bent over the back of Fano’s mule and apparently out of options.

Except of course for the old reliable: give in. They’re big, you’re little, they have all the power, you have none. And if you cry or struggle, they’ll only hurt you worse.

Only this time it wasn’t working. She’d been tasting what it was like
not
to feel helpless all the time,
not
to feel an emptiness at your very core,
not
to define yourself by what had been done
to
you, or lose yourself in the delicious, unabashed self-pity of childhood—in short, what it was like to be Lilith—long enough to realize that
that
avenue of retreat had been closed to her forever. She could no longer lose herself in the old familiar sadness—nor did she really want to.

So up
your
ass with a piece of glass, Max, she thought to herself as he shoved her head down toward the oily-smelling boards. And twice as far with a Hershey bar. If you want to actually
do
anything to me, sooner or later you’re gonna have to let go my hood or put down the gun. And then you’ll find out what it means to fuck with me and Lilith.

Me and Lilith—she kind of liked the way that sounded. Like she wasn’t alone, like she had an ally.

Then suddenly she sensed Max growing distracted. He muttered something under his breath…she felt the absence of the constant pressure of the gun muzzle against her temple…but he still had that death grip on her hoodie.

Next time, she promised herself—once again he had shoved the muzzle against the side of her head—next time she’d be ready. Slowly, she began unzipping the sweatshirt, her mind running faster and clearer than ever, thinking up and dealing with contingency after contingency: if he says anything, tell him you thought he told you to get undressed. Be ready to go when he moves the gun again. Whatever you do, don’t let him get your pants down. If he does, get them all the way down, step out of them. He won’t stop you. Because he can’t fuck you if—

But the moment had arrived: Max was talking to himself again, and the gun was no longer pressed against her temple. No more hesitating: Lily threw herself violently to her left, her arms stretched straight out behind her like a high-diver, wriggled free, and ran for her life, leaving Max holding her empty sweatshirt by the hood.

9

For some reason—or maybe for no reason: he didn’t seem to be thinking all that clearly—sitting up had become of immense importance to Pender. It felt as though lying there in the dirt was the same as giving up—and he already knew that giving up was the same as dying.

So he dragged himself over to the side of the road and pulled himself to a seated position with his legs outstretched and his back against the cliff wall, feeling like a beached whale. What with all the pain, he couldn’t even get the ol’ jukebox working right, though there were so many songs about hearts breaking it would take days to get through them all. Instead he found himself listening to that old Beatles song, the one about turning off your mind, relaxing, and floating downstream.

Tempting—oh so very tempting. Except for this friggin’ tyrannosaur crushing his chest between its jaws.

It wasn’t until she was over the rise of the humpbacked meadow that Lily stopped feeling the tingling in her spine, dead center between her shoulder blades, and was finally able to banish the image of Fano throwing his arms into the air and pitching forward, dead.