When She Was Bad

Once again the Creator had demonstrated his utter disinterest in the battle between good and evil.

Tough shit for them, thought Max, tender shit for me. Then he’d learned that Dr. Cogan had gone off alone to contact the police and was herself on foot, and a situation that had seemed at first hopeless, then barely survivable, had turned rosy as a whore’s cheek: all Max had to do was pretend to be Lyssy, and hang on for the ride.

From that point on, things couldn’t have gone more smoothly if he’d planned them out months in advance. “What we’re going to do now,” he said over the chugging of the engine, tracing the curve of Lily’s ear with the end of the gun barrel, “as long as we have a little more time to spare than I thought we had, we’re all going back to the cabin to get to know each other a little better.” He glanced over his shoulder. “How’s that sound to you, Dr. Cogan?”

“Whatever you say, Max,” Irene said evenly, her hand stealing into the front pocket of her jeans. She felt almost relieved, now that he’d unmasked himself. No more uncertainty, no more paralysis by analysis. All complexities, moral or otherwise, pared down to the stark geometric simplicity of the spatial relationship between a cylinder and an arc, between the muzzle of Max’s gun and the side of Lily’s head.

Lily too experienced a moment of frozen clarity, during which she was, briefly, neither Lily, nor Lilith, nor Lily pretending to be Lilith, but only herself, all tangled up with conflicting emotions, feeling heartsick over losing Lyssy again, foolish for allowing herself to be tricked, righteously angry at having been betrayed, afraid for all the obvious reasons, and at the same time determined to think of something, to do something.

But for Lily too the possibilities began and ended with the gun muzzle pressing against the side of her head. So when Max turned back to her after his brief exchange with Dr. Irene, and said, “You heard her-get this thing turned around and let’s get going,” it seemed pure common sense to refuse him at least that much.

“Not until you point that thing someplace else,” she told him.

It must have made sense to Max, too; it was the last thing that ever would. He tilted the barrel upward, pointing toward the sky. “You satisfied now? Okay, let’s get-”

Crack! Crack! Crack! Crack! Jagged muzzle flashes lit the night. Lily threw herself backward as Max toppled sideways off the bench. Irene, who’d fired the.38 from a seated position, holding it in both hands in emulation of Pender, now scrambled to her feet, aiming the gun straight downward at Max, who lay head- down, crumpled into the narrow, V-shaped space between the dashboard and the front seat with his neck twisted at a grotesque angle, his cheek jammed against the floorboard, and his artificial leg sticking out sideways.

And yet he lived. Shot three times at close range, his neck broken in the fall (or to be precise, the sideways landing on his head), Max stared hungrily toward the pistol, lying only a few inches away from his left hand, and was still trying to will the hand into motion when a red haze washed over his vision.

Standing over him, holding the revolver in both hands and pointing it straight down at Maxwell, Irene glanced to her left and saw Lily lying on her back a few feet from the mule. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I just got the wind knocked out of me,” the girl replied, sitting up gingerly. “Is he…dead?”

“Not yet,” said Irene grimly. “Get his guns.”

Lily rose, brushing dirt and damply clinging spears of grass from her jeans, walked over to the mule, picked up the black pistol, then boldly plucked Pender’s wooden-handled Colt from the waistband of Max’s jeans. It was impossible to be afraid of him any longer-with his neck bent and his leg sticking out like that, he looked to her like a broken doll some spiteful little girl had tossed into the trash.

She cut the mule’s engine. “Give me your cell phone,” she told Irene. “I’ll go get help.”

Irene hadn’t realized how badly the constant chugging and shuddering had been getting on her nerves until it was gone and relative quiet had descended over the hillside. “Tell them we have two critically injured people that need to be evacuated by helicopter,” she said. “You can tell them one of them is Ulysses Maxwell, but try not to say too much else until we know how things stand with you, legally speaking, if you get my drift.”

She tossed the phone down to Lily, who caught it deftly. “I’ll be right back,” she said. “Take good care of Uncle Pen.”

“I will,” Irene called after her, then turned to Pender again, kneeling beside him and pressing two fingers against the side of his neck again. She felt his pulse, weak but steady, and watched his great chest rising and falling, rising and falling. “Don’t die on me,” she told him. “Don’t you dare die on me.”

Pender opened his eyes. “I’ll drink to that,” he said with a wink, then closed his eyes again, and let the darkness wash over him.

EPILOGUE

EIGHT MONTHS LATER

1

The People’s Posse ended tonight, as it did every week, with host Sandy Wells alone in the spotlight, seated on a three-legged stool on an otherwise darkened soundstage, with a stark, textured black drop cloth for a background. He was wearing his trademark leather jacket and his silver hair was razor- trimmed to perfection; as the theme music faded, he turned to face the camera in three-quarter profile-his best angle, all his media mavens assured him.

“And so ends the bloody saga of Ulysses Christopher Maxwell,” Wells declared, his gunslinger eyes narrowed and his bulldog jaw outthrust. “There are, as always, many questions that remain unanswered. Forensics and ballistics can only tell us so much-we may never know, for instance, exactly why or where veteran private investigator Mick MacAlister met his fate, or how his tarpaulin-covered corpse wound up in the back of a pickup truck parked only a few blocks from his office, riddled with bullets fired from the same revolver that eventually terminated Maxwell’s monstrous reign of terror.

“But this much we do know….” As he did every week when it came time to deliver his closing homily, Wells turned to his left to face camera three. The sudden move had the effect of a theatrical aside, adding an inclusive intimacy, as if he had been addressing a wider audience, but was now speaking directly to the individual viewer. “Ulysses Maxwell was not born a monster. It was the extreme abuse he suffered as a child, from parents who had no doubt been abused themselves as children, that turned him into one. Ultimately, of course, each of us is responsible for his or her own actions-still, it’s incumbent upon each of us to do what we can to break the chain.”

As he spoke, camera three had been tightening in on him; by now he was in extreme close-up, his exquisitely barbered face filling the screen. “If you were abused as a child, I urge you to get professional help- break the chain. And if you know someone who was abused, a spouse, a friend, a relative, encourage them to do the same and break the chain-you’ll find plenty of links to mental health organizations on our website, www dot peoplesposse dot com. And most crucially, if you suspect someone of child abuse, but want to protect your anonymity, we’ve set up a brand-new dedicated tipline at 1-800- NOCHAIN-it’s a free call, guaranteed confidential-drop a dime and stop a crime. Break the chain.”

Wells turned back to camera one. “So until next week, I’m Sandy Wells, and you are The People’s Posse. Take care and be safe.”

“You too, Sandy,” Irene Cogan muttered from her living room sofa. It had been a slightly disconcerting experience, watching herself being interviewed by a man she’d never met or even spoken with. But at least they’d withheld Lily’s name, and the unknown actress who’d played Lily during the “re-creations” had been a buxom blond in her early twenties. The unknown actress who’d played Irene looked more like Matt Damon in drag, and wore a shiny reddish-blond wig that kept threatening to fall off during the chase scene at Scorned Ridge.

It had also felt kind of weird to see Scorned Ridge again. The dilapidated cabin, the domed Plexiglas drying shed where Maxwell and his foster mother used to keep the strawberry blonds-reexperiencing it all through the filter of the boob tube, with actors and actresses playing herself and Maxwell, had an oddly distancing effect. Irene