When She Was Bad: A Thriller

by Jonathan Nasaw

  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 been at least indirectly involved with their murders. If he’d been honest with Dr. Al about the dark place and the occasional voice in his ear, his surrogate father would still be alive.

  But on the other hand, he, Lyssy, would still be locked up, and facing a lifetime of incarceration at best, so what was that all about?

  Then there was the whole question of his relationship with the alters. He’d always gotten mixed signals from Dr. Al, who’d tell him in one breath not to feel guilty about the terrible things the alters had done, and in the next breath assure him that the alters were not separate beings, but dissociated aspects of his own personality.

  He explained all this to Lilith as best he could (it probably would have been easier for Lily to understand), concluding with the biggest paradox of all: even knowing how their escape had been accomplished, and at what cost, Lyssy told Lilith he couldn’t honestly say he wished that he could take it all back, that it had never happened—not if it had brought him here to this room, to this bed, with her.

  She told him it was the sweetest thing anyone had ever said to her. Their first kiss, though it took forever for their lips to come together, had an inevitability about it nonetheless; afterward, for instance, neither of them would recall having intentionally closed the distance between them.

  8

  Mick MacAlister worked out of a one-room, second-story walk-up located above a bowling alley only a few blocks from the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk.

  Pender parked the ’Cuda in front of the bowling alley and walked around to the side of the building, the wall of which had been given over entirely to graffiti—Death to the Ass-Licking Sons of the Dying Regime was the predominant sentiment.

  Mac
Alister & Associates

  Private Investigations

  Discreet and Effective

  read the business card taped next to the button marked 2-C, one of three set into the side of the recessed doorway. Pender pressed the buzzer and a few seconds later the door lurched open a few inches.

  The smell of urine faded as Pender climbed the stairs, wearing a single-breasted sport jacket of grass green and mustard brown over a lavender polo shirt and plaid slacks; a brown Basque beret, argyle socks, and beige Hush Puppies completed the ensemble. He knocked on the wooden door marked 2-C, then let himself in.

  The office walls were covered with Grateful Dead posters, and though there was nothing burning at the moment, the air was still layered with tobacco/cannabis smoke and cheap strawberry incense. MacAlister, seated at a rolltop desk placed sideways to the room like an upright piano on a stage, was a charter member of the gray ponytail brigade; a burgeoning belly strained his tie-dyed KPIG T-shirt. “Sorry, no refunds,” he said. “How about a cigar instead.” Nodding toward a cherrywood humidor.

  “Try one of mine.” Pender offered MacAlister one of his Green Iguanas, a mild, stubby Dominican cigar named for its olive-green claro wrapper. He had started smoking cigarettes again during his second wife’s illness. After her death he had switched to cigars in an effort to wean himself from the cigarettes—Pender’s doctors had been promising him a coronary for years if he didn’t lose weight, get more exercise, and give up the gaspers—and wound up hooked on stogies.

  Giving the Iguana a dubious glance, MacAlister instead flipped back the top of the humidor and turned it so Pender could see inside. It was full of Macanudos, genuine hecho a mano Havanas, each of which probably cost as much as a twenty-stick box of Pender’s Dominicans. “Gift of a grateful client,” he said.

  “Go ahead, twist my arm,” murmured Pender, dragging a wooden chair closer to the desk.

  The snip of the cutter, the snick of the lighter, cigar heaven. They smoked wordlessly for close to a minute; then through a haze of blue smoke MacAlister asked Pender what he wanted.

  “I need to know more about those bikers.”

  “Sorry, trade—”

  Pender cut him off. “Not today, Mick—four people died last night.”

  MacAlister blew out a perfect smoke ring, waited for it to break up. “Aw, what the hey—why hide my light under a bushel?”

  “Why indeed,” agreed Pender, holding the cigar between his teeth while he took out his pocket notebook and a stubby pencil.

  “Okay,” MacAlister began. “Second week of the search, I get a credit card hit in Sturgis, South Dakota. That’s where they have the big motorcycle run every summer. I’m there the next day. Nobody at the restaurant where I got the credit card hit remembers anything, so I paper the town and the encampments with flyers, and hook up with the Wharf Rats—that’s a gang of clean-and-sober Deadhead bikers I knew back in Berkeley, in the old days.

  “One of the Wharf Rats tells me this story that’s going around, about some girl who bit the nose off some shit-heel during a gang bang. It never occurs to me that it’s our gal from Pebble Beach—I mean, Pebble Beach, gimme a break!—but the next day, the last day of the run, I’m out pounding the pavement, where there is pavement, and two gals who put up a hot dog and loose joint stand in Sturgis every year tell me about a girl who looks “kinda like” the girl on the flyer, and how somebody with her made that old joke about “you don’t want to see laws or hot dogs being made,” and how the girl joked that at least it tastes better than that asswipe’s nose.

  “I figure it’s worth a trip to the county hospital, where of course everybody remembers the guy who got his nose bit off. Turns out he gave a phony name and address, but I track down the triage nurse, and she remembers their colors. The Redding Menace. One-percenters out of Shasta County. Head of the gang is a mucho mysterioso figure named Carson. Sumbitch keeps a lower profile than a snake in Death Valley. Dirty as can be, has his fingers in everything from meth to money laundering, and forget about finding him—the local cops don’t even know whether Carson is his first name or his last name. So I decide to let him find me. I rent a motel room in Weed, put the word out in every bar and biker hangout in Shasta County that I’m looking for him.”

  Gently, he broke off the silvery, inch-long ash from the Havana into a blackened glass ashtray on his desk. “I tell you, a week in Redding in August is enough to make a man turn religious.”

  Pender flicked the ashes off his stogie with his ring finger, George Burns style, and like Burns was quick with the straight line. “How so, Mr. MacAlister?”

  “Because after it, Mr. Pender, you’ve had enough hell to last you an eternity. (Thank you, no applause, just throw money.) Anyway, on Saturday I finally get the call I’ve been waiting for. Woman asks me why I’m trying to find Carson. I tell her. She says maybe she knows something, maybe she don’t, what’s it worth? I tell her about the ten-G reward. All of a sudden she’s pretty goddamn sure she can work something out, only the reward’s gotta be in cash—no checks, no money orders, no paper trail. We set up the meet for the motel coffee shop on Monday morning, and the rest is skip-tracer history.”

  “Did you get a phone number from her?”

  “Negatory—she always called me from a pay phone.”

  “License plate on her Harley?”

  “Sorry.”

  Pender looked down at his notebook, where he’d scribbled Sturgis, Wharf Rats, Man w’out nose, Menace, Redding, and Carson. Not much to go on, but perhaps it would mean more to the Shasta County sheriff. “Thanks, Mick, I appreciate the help.”

  “No problemo. Here, take one for the road.” He tilted the humidor toward Pender.

  “Don’t mind if I do,” said Pender. “You’ll call me if that woman gets in touch with you again?”

  “You bet. Drop by anytime.”

  MacAlister showed Pender to the door and locked it behind him, then retrieved Alice, the office bong, from her customary hiding place inside a hollowed-out boxed set of Remembrance of Things Past, selected for the honor because nobody but nobody ever browsed Proust. Shaped like a voluptuous nude with a carburetor hole in the side of her headless neck, Alice had been banished from the MacAlister domicile by wife #3.

  Mick was on his second toke when the phone rang; he coughed out the hit and answered it as his nonexistent French receptionist. “MacAlister and Associates, zis is Gabrielle, ’ow may I direct your call?”

  “Mr. MacAlister, please.”

  “’Oo may I say is calling?”

  “He wouldn’t recognize my name.”

  “What is zis in reference to?”

  “Just tell him it’s about Lily DeVries.”

  “’Old ze line, please.” MacAlister, a little surprised at how little surprised he was, put the phone down while he filled his KPIG mug with lukewarm black coffee from the thermos on his desk. “The monkey’s got the locomotive under control,” he whispered to Alice before picking up the phone again. “MacAlister here. What can I do you fer?”

  9

  Lyssy stared in wonder at the naked, sleeping girl. He thought back to the first time he’d laid eyes on her in the arboretum. He felt as if he’d known even then that she was fated to be a part of his life.

  But how deep a part, he could never have guessed. Since they’d made love, clumsily at first, then with increasing skill as instinct and muscle-memory took over (for both of them), every inch of her had somehow become precious to him, verging on holy, the curve of her breasts and buttocks no more or less so than the curve of her calves or earlobes.

  She stirred and rolled over onto her side; a snore bubble formed and popped on her perfectly shaped lips. In this position, he could see the dark shadow between her legs. Lyssy grew aroused again, realized he had to pee.

  The bathroom facilities in the attic consisted of a toilet and a low sink hidden behind a blanket at the far end of the room. Before Lyssy could put on his prosthetic leg—he’d taken it off earlier, at
Lilith’s insistence; she’d said it was like having somebody else in bed with them—Lilith sat up and hugged him from behind.

  “Is that a bullet hole?” she asked him sleepily, gently tracing the round, indented scar in the hollow of his left shoulder with her fingertip.

  “Nine millimeter, they told me in the hospital.”

  “Does it hurt real bad, getting shot?”

  “I don’t remember getting shot—just waking up in the hospital with this shoulder all bandaged, and a thing like an upside-down basket over my knee.”

  Lilith changed the subject. “If you want, we could do it again. There’s lots of ways, you know.”

  Lyssy could feel himself blushing. “Sure, maybe. I have to pee first, though.”

  “No you don’t,” said Lilith mischievously.

  “I don’t?”

  “No, you have to pee second,” she told him, hopping out of bed butt-naked and racing for the toilet.

  “Hurry up,” called Lyssy, frustrated but laughing; obviously, sharing a bathroom was something else he was going to have to get used to.

  Carson was still in bed when Mama Rose called from town. He smiled when he heard her voice, remembering their spirited romp that morning. Whoever said more than a handful of titty was a waste must have had some big goddamn mitts, he decided. But despite the conjugal workout, he still hadn’t changed his mind about tucking into that sweet Lilith at least once before he had to kill her—now that would have been a real waste.

  “Hey babe, what’s up?” he asked his wife.

  “Everything okay on the homefront?”

  “So far, so good—they don’t even know they’re locked in yet.”

  “Good, good. Listen, I ran into Dennie in town.” Dennie, half full-blooded Aleut, half Okie pipeline worker, was Li’l T.’s immensely pregnant ol’ lady. “We’re thinking about grabbing some dinner.”