When She Was Bad

stealing. (The kind of music Pender enjoyed sounded best in a car, second best on a boom box, the cheaper the better.)

Built in 1905, the cottage originally contained only three small rooms-parlor, bedroom, kitchen-lined up shotgun-style, front to back; a tiny bathroom with toilet, pedestal sink, and stall shower had been added on off the kitchen. Pender carried his luggage through the front room with its secondhand velour love seat, non-matching Naugahyde recliner, and hooked oval rug, dropped it off in the bedroom, where a queen-size bed took up most of the floor-space, grabbed a beer in the kitchen, and carried it out into the backyard.

Too small to qualify as postage stamp, Pender’s tiny yard was overhung and walled in on three sides by a gnarled and ancient fig tree, a spreading giant that also supported Pender’s only outdoor furniture, a low-slung, dispirited-looking mesh hammock. Lying in it, his big ass barely clearing the ground, Pender was still steaming about the disrespect with which the Portland police had treated him the night before. As a federal agent, he’d grown used to being regarded with suspicion or resentment by the local constabulary-but not with contempt, never with contempt.

And never mind that he and Irene had probably saved the Corder girl from death by suffocation-whatever happened to plain old professional courtesy? Even after he told the officer in charge who he was, all the supercilious sonofabitch had to say was that in that case, he should have known better than to even enter a possibly dangerous crime scene on his own, not to mention dragging a civilian through it-and are you sure you didn’t touch anything in the living room, Pops?

As for getting one of the Nike-town cops to listen to his theory that the fugitives might well head for “Lilith’s” old stomping ground in Shasta County, CA, lots of luck. Once they’d taken his statement, it was thanks for your cooperation and don’t let the door hit your fat ass on the way out. Even if you’re the world’s leading expert on Ulysses Maxwell et al. Even if you know that Maxwell had been locked up for the last three years, and isolated up on Scorned Ridge with his now-deceased stepmother/lover/accomplice for a dozen or so years before that. And that the only friend he’d made at the Juvie Ranch was also three years dead. So who the hell was he going to run to?

But according to Irene Cogan, the world’s leading expert on Lily DeVries et al., Lilith had almost certainly been running the show for her syndicate last night-Lily, the original personality, would have turned into a basket case at the first sign of trouble. And what was it she’d said about Lilith the night before last? Something about Lilith serving as a protector alter?

King-hell of a job she’d done too, thought Pender, if she’d managed to keep both herself and Alison alive through last night’s massacre. And Lilith the protector did have someone to run to-those bikers.

The more Pender thought about it, the more sense his theory made. But how to act on it? He’d just about decided to call the Shasta County Sheriff’s Department and lay it out for one of their homicide detectives when he realized that except for his own eyeballing of a redheaded, middle-aged biker mama, he had almost no information about the bikers to pass on to said homicide dick.

That was because Mick MacAlister, the brilliant, if perpetually half-stoned skip-tracer who’d set up the rendezvous in Weed, operated on a strictly need-to-know basis, and as far as MacAlister was concerned, all Pender and Irene had needed to know was the location of the coffee shop and what time to be there. “Trade secret,” MacAlister would say if pressed for details-now Pender decided it was time to pay MacAlister a visit and persuade him to cut loose with a few of his trade secrets.

Assuming he could fight his way up from the hammock, of course.

7

Lilith awoke to the hum of the air conditioner. Lyssy lay asleep on the other bed, an open book resting facedown on his chest, rising and falling with every baby-soft breath.

Seeing him vulnerable like that, Lilith was overwhelmed by a strange new sensation, a feeling of tenderness so intense it was almost painful. “Don’t worry, I won’t let anything bad happen to you,” she whispered, unconsciously-or perhaps subconsciously-echoing Irene Cogan’s broken promise to Lily.

Lyssy opened his eyes and smiled when he saw her watching him. “Hi.”

“Hi. Whatcha reading?”

He looked confused for a moment, then discovered the book on his chest. “Something about the Hell’s Angels-I found it in that bookcase over there.”

“Oh yeah, I read that one when I was here before.”

Lyssy sat up. “How long were you here?”

“I dunno, couple weeks I guess.”

“And before that?”

“I joined up with Carson and Mama Rose at the big rally in Sturgis in July.”

“But when I met you, you were Lily, right?”

“How the fuck should I know? When I met you, you were Max.”

Lyssy groaned-more of a grunt, really, like somebody’d just kicked him in the nuts. A phrase he’d heard or read someplace started bouncing around in his head: Don’t ask, don’t tell. But he had to know. “Did I tell you I don’t remember anything that happened last night? Before you came down the stairs to get me, I mean?”

“I figured as much.”

“So where was everybody? Didn’t we have escorts? How come they let us just drive away?”

She sat down beside him on the edge of the bed and rested her hand just above his prosthetic knee; the quadriceps muscle was quivering like an idling engine. “Me and Max, we did what we had to do, Lyssy.” Remembering the terrible gurgling noise as Patty lay jackknifed over the rim of the bathtub while Lilith was washing her hands at the sink-luckily, Lilith hadn’t seen the dying woman’s face. “And if I had to, I’d do it again.”

“I want to know everything that happened,” said Lyssy. “Everything.”

Lilith, singsong: “I don’t think so.”

“Okay then-I have to know.”

She took awhile to think it over. Contrary to Irene Cogan’s opinion-that alters were basically single-faceted identities-Lilith’s personality, less than a month old, was accruing in complexity with every decision and every human interaction, the way crystals magically form themselves around a starter-seed.

Of course, protect yourself at all times was still her prime directive, but she was beginning to understand that sometimes other people’s lives got so mixed up with yours that in order to protect yourself, you had to consider what was best for them as well. Even more confusing, sometimes what was best for somebody might also be hurtful to them. “You’re not gonna go all weepy ’n’ shit, are you?”

Lyssy shook his head.

“And you understand, no matter what happened, there’s no sense freaking out about it, ’cause there’s nothing you can do to change it?”

To Lyssy, that sounded like an equally good reason to freak out. But he nodded and listened, interrupting only twice. They were lying on their backs on the narrow bed, their bodies pressed together from shoulder to thigh. “Kinch,” he said, when she got to the part about Max going crazy with the knife.

“Kinch?”

“That’s who went crazy with the knife-Kinch, not Max. Max would have wanted to kill them slowly.”

And when she told him how she’d hidden Alison from the berserk alter, he broke in to thank her.

“I didn’t do it for you,” she said.

“I wasn’t thanking you for me.”

When she’d finished, they rolled over onto their sides, facing each other. “Is there anything more?” he asked.

“That’s about it. How’re you doing?”

“I don’t think it’s completely sunk in yet-I’m not even sure I want it to.” There was so much to process, as Dr. Al would have phrased it. He missed the Corders, especially Dr. Al-it hurt to know he’d never be seeing him again, and hurt even worse to realize that he’d