When She Was Bad

Her eyelids fluttered open. He stroked her cheek with the back of his hand; she jerked her head away sharply, looking not at him, but past him.

“Lilith? It’s Lyssy. Talk to me-can you talk to me?”

She might as well have been deaf and dumb. Blind too, as far as Lyssy was concerned-try as he might to insert himself into her line of vision, her eyes failed to focus on his face.

Lyssy said her name a few more times-no response-and was trying to figure out his next move when he heard the roar of a downshifting Harley growling as it climbed the steep asphalt driveway in low gear. Panic mounting, he glanced around wildly, wadded up one of the white towels strewn around the patio to cushion Lilith’s head, and covered her with another-he couldn’t just leave her lying there like that.

Someone was coming around the side of the house. As he climbed to his feet and looked around for a place to hide, Lyssy spotted Carson’s revolver lying on the cement, a few feet from the overturned patio table. He snatched it up, slipped it into the waistband of his jeans, limped around the hot tub, keeping his eyes averted from the sickening sight of Carson’s scalded corpse, and crouched behind the tub.

“Fuck, it stinks back-” The bearded troll Lyssy had met that morning-felt like a whole lifetime had passed since then-rounded the corner of the house. He saw Lilith first, broke off in mid-sentence, started another sentence that began with “What the…?” and trailed off when he caught sight of the hot tub with its grisly contents.

What happened next would seem strange only in retrospect: Lyssy, who’d never knowingly handled a gun before, drew the.38 from his waistband, flicked off the safety, cocked the hammer, and rose, calling, “Put your hands up,” in as deep a voice as he could manage.

“You!”

“I said, put your hands up!”

“You killed Carson.”

“Darn right,” said Lyssy, happily taking on Lilith’s guilt. “And I’ll kill you too if you don’t put your stupid hands up.”

“Fuck you,” said the troll, so Lyssy shot him. Not a whole lot of thinking had gone into it-he’d pointed the gun toward the troll’s knee and tightened his finger experimentally, just a hairsbreadth or so. Apparently that was far enough.

But Lyssy hadn’t counted on the upward kick-the bullet struck at the intersection of leg and groin, severing the troll’s femoral artery, and blew a fist-size hole in his buttock on its way out. The troll didn’t seem to realize at first that he’d even been hit. He took a step toward Lyssy, frowning and reaching behind himself to grab his ass, as if he’d pulled a glute. His hand came away wet; only then did he look down to see dark arterial blood spurting from the hole in his overalls.

“You should have put your hands up,” said Lyssy as the bearded man took one more step, then crumpled to the ground. It took the puzzled-looking troll only a minute or so to bleed to death, unnoticed by Lyssy, who stood frozen in place, staring at the spot where Lilith had been lying, and from which she had somehow magically disappeared, leaving him alone on the patio with two dead bodies.

5

With a little help from her very pregnant friend Dennie, Mama Rose had manged to kill the rest of the afternoon and the early evening hours smoking dope, hitting the thrift shops, dining at a Mexican restaurant on Mt. Shasta Boulevard-but the time had died slowly.

It dragged even more slowly after Dennie left. Sipping espressos on the patio of the coffee shop where MacAlister was to meet her, Mama Rose couldn’t get her mind off the unpleasant task which lay before her: shooting Maxwell in cold blood. Very cold blood: her plan was to handcuff him first, walk him around the side of the house, then shoot him in the head.

But nasty as that was to contemplate, it still beat thinking about what she’d tell Carson when he came home later that night and discovered that Lilith and Maxwell were gone. In a way, she thought, it might have been better to let Carson fuck the girl at least once-at the very least, it would have made it more difficult for him to lay any self-righteous guilt trips on her.

The sun was low in the sky when Mama Rose caught sight of a red Cadillac convertible pulling up in front of the coffee shop. As MacAlister had requested earlier, she made no sign of recognition, but she did make such a show of “casually” finishing her coffee-smacking her lips, shaking her head regretfully, and patting her lips with a paper napkin before pushing her chair back from the sidewalk table, pulling on her helmet, and zipping up her leather jacket-that if he had had her under surveillance, Pender whispered to Mick, he’d have been looking around to see who’d just arrived.

Just in case, MacAlister waited a full minute before following her. They caught up to the baby-blue Sportster waiting at a stop light at the edge of town and followed it discreetly for four and a half miles, to a derelict wood- frame gas station with two red, round-shouldered pumps out front, from which the hoses had been cruelly amputated. She rode around the back of the barnlike building; by the time they pulled up she was already off the bike, shaking out her thick red hair and combing it with her fingers.

“You made good time,” she said, as Mick climbed out of the Caddy-Pender waited in the car, his face averted, his beret tugged low over one eye.

“Zoom, zoom,” replied Mick.

“Any progress on the reward?”

“Ten thou, same as last time. Only thing is, I don’t have the cash with me this time-you’re just going to have to trust me.”

“How do I know you won’t try and screw me?”

“Lady, if I wanted to screw you-in that sense of the word-you’d have found a Michigan sandwich in that bag the other day.” A Michigan sandwich, also known as a Michigan roll or brick, was a thick sheaf of bills with twenties or hundreds on the outside, depending on the size of the con, and singles or green paper cut to the size of currency on the inside.

“Okay, here’s the situation,” said Mama Rose. “You’re gonna have to wait here for a couple hours. Carson’s going out around nine-as soon as the coast is clear, I’ll get Maxwell and the girl out of the attic, bring ’em back here, then they’re all yours. You can make up any story you want for the cops, as long as you leave us out of it. If you rat us out, though, you’re a dead man.”

“Don’t worry, I won’t rat you out. But are you sure you can handle them?”

“I can handle them.”

“Then we’ve got a deal.” MacAlister shook Mama Rose’s hand, then turned his attention to the Sportster. “That’s a beaut,” he said, walking around the bike, squatting to admire it at close range. “What year?”

“An original ’57.”

“Engine?”

“Fifty-five-cubic-inch overhead valve XL.”

“Wow,” said Mick, standing up and stepping back after surreptitiously affixing the miniature, magnetized GPS transponder to the underside of the teardrop-shaped gas tank. He handed her the two sets of handcuffs she had asked him to bring.

“Zoom, zoom,” Mama Rose replied, donning her helmet, zipping her jacket, and kick-starting the Sportster on the first try.

Mick bustled back to the car, grinning. He grabbed a laptop computer from the backseat, balanced it on the center console. Pender leaned in from the other side and together they followed the Sportster’s progress via a green dot superimposed over a scrolling onscreen map. Seventeen minutes later the signal went stationary; Mick tapped a few keys to save the coordinates in case Mama Rose failed to return.

By then the sun was nearly at the horizon. Mick and Pender climbed the rise behind the garage, where somebody-another pothead, Mick would have been willing to bet-had dragged the backseat of an old Chevy and positioned it facing due west in order to catch Mother Nature’s crepuscular light show. Mick sat down, took his Sucrets tin from the pocket of his Levi’s jacket, fired up a joint, offered Pender a toke.

“Maybe you ought to lay off that shit til this is over,” said Pender.