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?”
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 t
he 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.
“C’mon, it’s gonna be shooting ducks in a barrel.”
Pender reached into his sport coat pocket, took out the Havana Mick had given him earlier. Patting through his trouser pockets, he found his oval-shaped, double-bladed cutter, clipped the cap of the Macanudo. “Why do you think they call it dope?”
“Why do they call anything anything?”
Pender patted through his pockets again, took out an orange Bic. He rotated the cigar as he held the flame to it, puffing vigorously until the tip was a uniform cherry red. “Forgive him, Harry J. Anslinger,” he said between puffs. “He knows not what he does.”
MacAlister made the sign of the cross at the mention of the man who had almost single-handedly caused marijuana to be declared illegal in America, and while great clouds of cigar and cannabis smoke drifted over the meadow, glowing pinkish-brown against the backdrop of the setting sun, the retired FBI man treated the hippie-dippie private eye to a flawless rendition of Brewer and Shipley’s “One Toke Over the Line.”
Alone on the patio, kneeling next to the dead troll, Lyssy experienced an upwelling of despair so acute it was almost physically painful. For a few wild seconds he considered putting the gun to his head and pulling the trigger; then he heard the homely, familiar sound of the loudest toilet in northern California.
“Lilith? Lilith, where are you?”
No answer. He opened the sliding-glass door and hurried into the living room, which was dominated by a huge flat-screen television. With the power off, the house was so quiet he could hear the gurgling of water through the pipes as the noisy toilet refilled itself. He followed the sound down a corridor and through a bedroom, and found Lilith standing naked next to the toilet, looking down into the tank, from which she’d removed the heavy porcelain cover.
Seemingly unaware of his presence, she pushed the lever to flush the toilet, staring intently down into the bowl, fascinated by the swirling water, then turned her attention to the tank, to watch the red rubber ball bobbing atop the rising water level. Then, when it was high enough, she pushed the lever, and the process began again.
“Lilith, we have to get out of here.”
There was still no indication that she was aware of Lyssy’s presence, and when he grabbed her elbow and began tugging her away from the toilet, her resistance—she leaned her full weight in the opposite direction—was disturbingly impersonal, as if she were pulling against a rope tied to a cleat.
He tugged her as far as the bedroom, but as soon as he released his grip on her arm, she darted back into the bathroom. “Okay, just stay there,” he called, limping for the doorway. “Don’t go anyplace—I’ll be right back for you.”
Ka-woooshhh!
The trick to climbing the macadam driveway on a motorcycle was to maintain enough speed coming out of the turn to carry you up the slope without having to downshift. Mama Rose executed it perfectly, slewing the Sportster to a stop at the relatively level top of the driveway, next to a red GMC pickup recently released from the chop shop.
The house was completely dark. Must have had another power outage, she told herself. Rather than try to raise the electric door manually, she walked the Sportster around to the side of the garage—leaving a bike visible from the road was a definite no-no—and parked it next to Li’l T’s custom chopper.
“Power out again?” she called as she lowered the kickstand and hung her helmet from the handlebars. No answer. She continued around the side of the house, heard a toilet flushing inside, smelled something burnt and nasty, then saw Li’l T lying in a pool of blood on the cement patio.
Reality took a sudden lurch; slowly, with a nightmarish sense of powerlessness, Mama Rose raised her eyes to the hot tub and saw the thing that had been Carson floating motionless on the still surface of the water.
Now that he too knew what it was like to love someone, Lyssy, concealed behind the living room curtains, felt awful for Mama Rose. He wondered whether it would be a bad thing to just shoot her right then and there and save her a truckload of heartbreak.
But his first responsibility was to himself and Lilith. “Don’t move,” he called, stepping out onto the patio, gun in hand.
“You did this?” she said unbelievingly.
“Where do you keep the money?”
Mama Rose’s lips pulled back in an uneven snarl. “Not a chance in hell, you dickless piece of shit gimp motherfucker.”
“Look, I understand you’re upset, but we really need the money, so please, if you could just tell me where you keep it, and give me the keys to that pickup out front, we’ll get out of your hair.”
“Jesus fucking Christ, you’re even crazier than they said you were.”
“Actually, I test more or less normal,” he said, limping toward her. “Normal? You’re a nut job, you’re a fucking wacko. And as for that fucking cunt that brought you here, when I get my—”
This time he was ready for the kick of the .38; the shot whanged off the concrete at Mama Rose’s feet, sending up a puff of cement dust. “There’s no use calling names. It’s his fault.” Tilting his head toward the hot tub. “If he hadn’t tried to rape Lilith, none of this would have happened. And now I have to take care of her. And you have to tell me where the money is, because if you don’t, I have to do some stuff to you I don’t even want to think about. Because I really don’t want to hurt you. Really.”
It wasn’t that she didn’t believe him—she simply didn’t fucking care. Like an incoming tide, shock and anger had carried her as far as they could, then receded, leaving her high and dry on a desolate beach. “Eat shit and die,” she said without heat.
The usage was new to Lyssy. Eat, shit, and die, he thought—what’s that, everybody’s life story?
Inside the house, the toilet continued to flush.
6
After sunset, Pender and MacAlister strolled back down the hill to the Cadillac. Mick raised the top to protect the leather upholstery from the evening dew, then opened his laptop again to keep an eye on the Sportster.
For most people, sitting in a parked car for two hours would have been stultifying, but for the ex-cop and the private investigator it was just another day at the office. They watched the green dot not moving, talked about sports, about old girlfriends and even older cases, then watched the green dot not moving some more.
At nine forty-five, MacAlister turned to Pender. “I sink ve’ve got ein problem, Professor,” he announced in a stagy German accent.
“Give it another few minutes—and why are you talking like Dr. Strangelove?”
“Was I? Maybe I should lay off the weed for a while.”
At ten o’clock—the transponder was still broadcasting the same coordinates—they agreed that a look-see was definitely in order.
With MacAlister driving and Pender navigating by the green glow of the laptop screen, they rolled slowly along the back roads of Shasta County for close to half an hour. As they neared the designated axis, Mick pulled over to the side of the road and turned off his headlights. All was darkness—no lights, no dwellings. He double-checked the coordinates on the laptop against the Caddy’s onboard GPS system, looked over at Pender, and shook his head, baffled. State-of-the-art technology was assuring him they were within two hundred feet of the transponder, while his eyes were insisti
ng they were alone on a dark country road.
“Mama Rose probably spotted the bug, tossed it into the weeds,” said Mick.
“Ssh!” A faint noise from the hillside looming up on their left had caught Pender’s attention. He signaled for Mick to turn off the engine, then closed his eyes and held his breath, listening for all he was worth and hearing at first only the rasp of crickets and the soughing of wind in the treetops. “Never mind, you’re probably right,” he whispered—then he heard it again, a faint groaning sound, like water rushing through pipes.
So did Mick—he reached across Pender, unlocked the glove compartment, took out a nine-millimeter Czech automatic with a flat black Stealth finish, popped in a fifteen-round clip, and jacked a round into the chamber, but left the safety on.
“Does your friend have a friend for me?” Pender asked him, nodding toward the pistol.
“You’re not packing?” It was too dark to see MacAlister’s face, but he sounded surprised.
“I’m retired, remember?”
“What’s that got to do with anything? This is America, goddamnit—everybody’s supposed to have a gun. It’s in the constitution or something.” MacAlister handed Pender a long, heavy six-cell flashlight. “Here, take this.”
Pender hefted it. “You call this a weapon? What am I supposed to do, hit him over the head?”
“Actually, I call it a flashlight—I was hoping maybe you could sort of shine it around so we could see where we’re going.”
“Wise guy,” muttered Pender. He climbed out of the car, closed the door quietly behind him. The piney air was cool and thin; somewhere out there a cricket was going batshit. Shielding the beam with his palm, he shined it back and forth, waving it slowly and carefully like a Geiger counter, until it picked out a dark paved surface climbing steeply upward from the road. Leaning forward against the pull of gravity, Pender preceded Mick up the face of the asphalt mountain. When he next heard the noise, he was close enough now to identify the sound of a toilet flushing—he was reminded of Archie Bunker’s noisy crapper in All in the Family—and water groaning through old pipes.
When She Was Bad: A Thriller Page 16