When She Was Bad

Carson and Mama Rose had witnessed his death) Mama Rose could not allow Carson to kill the girl.

As for Lilith’s boyfriend, though, Mama Rose had no objection to terminating him. They certainly couldn’t let him go: if captured, he could lead the cops straight back to them-the same cops who’d been trying in vain to find Carson for fifteen years. And never mind how sweet Lyssy had seemed to be during breakfast: judging by what she’d read about him in the newspapers, anybody who knocked off Ulysses Maxwell would be doing the world a favor.

Hence the tangled web Mama Rose had been weaving all afternoon. First she’d cut another deal with MacAlister in return for another contribution to the Mama Rose Fuck You fund. The private eye and the backup he’d insisted on bringing along were to rendezvous with Mama Rose at a coffee shop in Mt. Shasta, follow her to an undisclosed location out in the boondocks, lend her two pairs of handcuffs, and wait for her to return with a manacled pair of fugitives.

And the only difference between their relative expectations, Mama Rose’s and MacAlister’s, was that he assumed that both fugitives would be alive when she handed them over.

4

Lilith’s breasts, white and round as scoops of meringue, floated above the burbling, steaming water of the redwood hot tub on the narrow patio behind the house. On the other side of a trellis twined thinly with haphazardly blooming rose vines, the hillside rose sharply, buttressed by old tarry railroad ties. The late afternoon sun was hot as ever as it sank toward the crest of the hill, but the shadows were lengthening rapidly.

Carson slipped the revolver, a snub-nosed.38, under a pile of clean towels on the whitewashed, round wrought-iron patio table, and switched on the boom box. This radio, although it was connected to a long orange extension cord plugged into the same outlet that powered the Jacuzzi motor, was kept on the table, out of arm’s reach of the tub, to prevent stoned bathers from accidentally electrocuting themselves. Carson fiddled with the dial until he found his favorite heavy metal station, then with the radio blaring post-Sabbath Ozzie, he took off his bathrobe and climbed in after her wearing only his bush hat. Groaning long and loud, he lowered his dangling privates into the steaming water until he was submerged to his neck, beads of sweat already forming on his brow.

Lilith held her nose, bent her knees, and submerged herself. Underwater, the echoic rumble of the Jacuzzi jets sounded almost peaceful. Hearing a distant splashing sound, Lilith opened her eyes underwater, found herself staring down the barrel of Carson’s hard-on. She rose like Venus, hair plastered flat against her sleek round skull, water dripping from her full, round breasts. “I like your cock,” she whispered, pressing the length of her body against his, front to front.

“Me too,” he replied hoarsely.

“Could I change the fucking station?” The radio was blaring that annoying McDonald’s jingle: I’m loving it, I’m loving it.

“Hunh, what? Oh-sure.”

She climbed out hurriedly, before he could change his mind, and trotted over to the table shivering, with her arms crossed in front of her. “Where’s a good station?”

“Try the FM band,” he said easily-but his glance had flickered briefly to the pile of towels on the table. Shit, she thought: obviously he’d remembered where he’d left the revolver. Which meant her chances of grabbing the gun, finding and releasing the safety, pulling back the hammer, and squeezing off a shot before he could leap from the tub and cross the five or six feet to the table, were not exactly encouraging, Lilith decided, as she absentmindedly fiddled with the radio dial.

Then suddenly it dawned on her, with all the force and clarity of revelation, that the revolver wasn’t the only weapon on the table. Or even the deadliest-pistols misfire, bullets miss their targets. She turned her face away, hiding a savage grin as she traced the length of the orange extension cord with her eyes to make sure it lay free, with enough slack so it wouldn’t tangle or catch on anything. Picking up the boom box in both hands, she raised it over her head.

Mentally and emotionally drained after the struggle with Max, Lyssy strapped on his leg, still in its gray sock and black sneaker, then dressed hastily in the same oversize white T-shirt and button-fly jeans Lilith had given him before they left Dr. Al’s. After tying his other sneaker, he tried to raise the trapdoor, again to no avail.

There has to be another way out, he thought, glancing around the long, narrow attic-there just has to be. He examined the double-sashed dormer windows jutting out onto the roof in the front of the house. They were both nailed shut on top and sealed so tightly around the air conditioners below that no light showed around them. But only one of the machines was running; the short three-pronged power cord of the other dangled limply.

Lyssy seized hold of the unwieldy gray-brown box with his fingertips, and began rocking it. It was lighter than it appeared to be, and held firm at first. But as Lyssy continued to rock it back and forth to the pounding rhythm of the ungodly music blaring from around the back of the house, lengthwise cracks like miniature geological fissures began to form in the dessicated gray putty that held the box in place.

Encouraged, Lyssy threw all his weight into the effort, working the awkward load up and down, side to side, until it was loosened enough for him to get a good grip with his clawlike hands. After three strong heaves it broke free, tilted, and began sliding back into the room. Lyssy stepped back just in time to avoid getting his toes crushed when the air conditioner crashed to the floor, corner first, gouging a furrow in the linoleum.

Listening for a response to all the racket he’d made, Lyssy heard only the infernal howling of the radio. He cleared the gaping hole of clinging cobwebs and active spiderwebs decorated with mummified flies and sticky egg sacs, stuck his head through, looked down, and beheld his next challenge: though the drop to the roof was only four or five feet, there were but eighteen inches or so of steeply pitched composition shingles between the base of the dormer and the edge of the roof to use as a foothold, then an eight-to-ten-foot drop to the ground, or rather, the front doorstep.

Lyssy lowered himself backward through the hole. His left foot, arching downward, touched the slanting shingles first. Gripping the window frame with his deformed hands, he began to sidle to his left, keeping as much weight as possible on his real foot. It seemed to take forever, but at last he rounded the corner of the protruding dormer, and had room to drop to his hands and knees.

The heavy metal music from the radio had given way to a McDonald’s commercial by the time Lyssy reached the apex of the roof. He spread-eagled himself against the shingles and crept with a sort of swimming motion headfirst down the other slope. Just as the patio came into view, he heard the urp-beep-fleep- floop sound of someone dialing swiftly through the channels on a radio. Peering over the edge of the roof, he saw Carson directly below him, reclining naked in a hot tub; Lilith, also nude, stood a few feet away, holding a boom box above her head with both hands.

Carson had only an instant to realize what was coming. He struggled to his feet, opened his mouth to scream. Lyssy’s own scream caught in his throat as the radio sailed through the air, then everything was blue sparks, popping noises, bubbling water, and a weird, high-pitched shriek, like a lobster makes when you drop it live into a boiling pot.

Suddenly hatless, his hair sticking straight out from his head and his body jerking like Sonny Corleone at the tollbooth, Carson lurched around the tub with his arms extended-think Frankenstein’s monster-until the strain on the circuits blew the fuses.

Seconds later, all was quiet. Carson floated faceup, hair fanned out and bobbing gently, with an erection you could have pitched horseshoes at. Lilith lay naked, crumpled on her side at the edge of the patio, a good fifteen or twenty feet from the tub.

Lyssy scrambled frantically across the length of the roof, grabbed the aluminum rain gutter with both hands, and lowered himself over the edge, bracing himself for a nasty fall. But instead, the gutter began to bend, nails and rivets popping as it pulled free from its moorings and swung him down gradually.

When his flailing feet touched the concrete, he let go, swaying unsteadily for a moment, then regained his balance and limped across the patio to Lilith. He knelt beside her and rolled her onto her back, relieved to see that she was breathing. “Lilith? Lilith, you okay?”