When She Was Bad: A Thriller

by Jonathan Nasaw

  Far easier to give yourself up to the darkness…

  (but what about Lily?)

  To surrender rather than risk the flames…

  (but what about Lily?)

  Because Max is so much stronger…

  (but is he?)

  And if you only let go…

  (don’t let go!)

  If you give yourself to the darkness…

  (again)

  You’ll never even hear her screaming…

  “I do believe we’ve reached another stalemate, Agent Pender.” Max had dropped Lyssy’s simper; it was a relief to him to think that he’d never have to employ it again.

  “Let the girl go and we can settle it the way we did the last time,” said Pender, referring to the shoot-out in the barn at Scorned Ridge three years ago.

  “I don’t think so.” When he was amused, Max’s eyebrows tended to peak devilishly, like Jack Nicholson’s. “I seem to be running out of legs.”

  “Then leave the girl behind—I give you my word I’ll let you walk.”

  “I believe we’ve already established what your word is worth, Agent Pender. Oh, wait—I see where the problem lies! You think I’m abducting the young lady.” He eased his crook-armed hold on the girl’s neck, chucked her cheek affectionately, and swung the muzzle of his gun from her to Pender. “Tell them who you are, darlin’.”

  She coughed a few times, pulled down the hood of her sweatshirt and tugged the neck away from her throat, working her jaw and rolling her head like Rodney Dangerfield on speed. “They’re so fucking smart, let them figure it out.”

  “Ohmigod—Lilith?” Irene said, rising from her crouched position.

  “Fuckin’ A,” replied Lily, executing a mock curtsy and momentarily leaving Maxwell’s head exposed. But Pender was like an old prizefighter: he could see the openings, but his reflexes were no longer fast enough to take advantage of them. C’mon baby, he thought—one more curtsy for Uncle Pen.

  Instead she turned her head and whispered over her shoulder to Maxwell.

  “Sorry I had to mislead you, son.”

  Never before had Lyssy struggled so hard against surrendering himself to the darkness. But it was worth it to realize he was no longer alone. “I’m the one who misled you, Dr. Al. I should have been honest, I should have told you about the voice and the dark place.”

  They were in Dr. Al’s office—sort of. No walls, no floor, just an archetypal psychiatrist’s couch and chair suspended in featureless space, surrounded by darkness. Lyssy was lying on his back on the couch; Dr. Al was behind him to his right, just out of his line of sight. “It’s not your fault—you were in an untenable situation.”

  “At least that’s better than an un-eleven-able situation.”

  Dr. Al chuckled. “What I mean is, we, ah, put you in a situation where you would be punished for telling the truth, but rewarded for hiding it. But that’s all water over the dam. Would you like to tell me why we’re here today, and what you’re hoping to accomplish in today’s session?”

  Lyssy felt a twinge of panic—for a moment he couldn’t even remember where here was, much less what he wanted to accomplish. Then it came back to him. “I’m worried about Lily—I’m worried something’s going to happen to her.”

  “Something like this?” said Dr. Al, leaning forward in his chair until Lyssy was able to see his face. Or what was left of his face—it had been cut literally to shreds, raked from hairline to jawline with dozens of savage strokes. One eye was gone entirely; the lid of the other had been sliced raggedly away to reveal the eyeball, round as a marble, red-veined around the edges, pulsing in its dark socket.

  Lyssy wanted desperately to look away, but he knew somehow that if he did, he would be lost. “Help us, Dr. Al,” he said. “Tell me how to stop him.”

  The torn lips parted in a bloody smile, revealing slashed gums and shattered teeth. “If I knew the answer to that,” said the phantom, “would I look like this?”

  5

  Pender took advantage of the whispered conference between Max and Lilith long enough to shake out his left arm, which had gone all pins and needles. The conference ended with Max nodding his head. Pender resumed his position, half-crouched, with his forearms resting on the roof of the car.

  “Much as I hate to break up the party,” said Max, “my partner here has suggested it may be time for us to make a strategic withdrawal. But keep in mind, you two—this is a postponement of our final reckoning, not a cancellation. Someday there will come a knock on your door or a tap on your window—”

  “Can the Snidely Whiplash act,” Pender broke in. “No point acting tough when you’re hiding behind a woman.”

  But Max and Lily had already begun sidling to their left, toward the mule, which was parked facing the cabin. They circled around to the passenger’s side. Lily climbed up to the raised bench seat ahead of Maxwell, then slid over behind the wheel, keeping her body between Max and Pender.

  “Lilith,” called Irene. “Lilith, stop—take a moment to think this over.”

  Lily who’d been driving the mule since she was twelve, was busily pretending to study the rudimentary dashboard. (She’d told Max earlier that she’d seen another route out of the canyon on the USGS map; when he’d asked her if she could figure out how to operate the mule, she’d told him if she could drive a Harley, she could drive anything.)

  “I have thought it over,” she called down from the cab, then pressed the starter button with her thumb and opened the choke wide. “And this is the best way for everybody.” Then, with her back turned to Max, she mouthed the words I love you to Irene.

  The engine back-farted bluish smoke, then sputtered to life as she gingerly fed it gas. The mule shuddered and puffed until she’d turned down the choke, then waited, trembling—pocketapocketapocketa—while she released the floor-mounted hand brake.

  Expertly, she depressed the clutch and shifted into reverse, leaning out of the cab and glancing over her shoulder as she steered the mule backward. She cut the steering hard, guided the narrow, ten-foot-long vehicle through a tight backward turn, then shifted out of reverse and gunned the mule up the dirt track and into the cover of the trees before Maxwell could get off a clear shot.

  “That was Lily,” said Irene. “Dear God, that was Lily.”

  “It’s getting so you can’t tell the players without a scorecard,” Pender muttered under his breath as he slid behind the wheel of the Infiniti. He turned to Irene as she climbed into the passenger seat. “Keys?” he said, extending his hand toward her, palm up.

  6

  “Doesn’t this thing go any faster?” said Max. He’d tossed his knapsack into the back of the mule, and was facing rearward, with the barrel of the pistol braced on the railing behind the bench seat. But the way the mule was bucking along up the rutted track, he’d have been lucky to hit the taillight—if the mule had had a taillight, that is; it possessed only a single, center-mounted front spotlight.

  “Yeah, right, I’ll switch on the fuckin’ afterburners,” said Lily. Being Lilith was second nature to her by now—she hardly even had to think about it. “Look, don’t sweat it—where we’re going, they ain’t gonna be able to follow in that fancy-ass Infiniti.”

  Max’s head whipped around sharply. “How would you know?”

  Whoops, thought Lily, almost jocularly—somehow, the longer she impersonated Lilith, the more of Lilith’s qualities she began to take on. “Dotted line on the topo map,” she improvised confidently. “Should be coming up right…about…Yeah, here it is. Hold on tight.”

  She jerked the wheel hard to the left and steered the vehicle through a steep, uphill, J-turn onto a rutted track only a little less narrow than the mule itself—one side of the vehicle almost scraped the rocky cliff as the mule jolted up the side of the canyon, while the other nearly overhung the steep drop-off.

  “Where does this come out?” Max asked her.

  “According to the topo map, it swings north back up toward Big Sur,” said
Lily, improvising hurriedly as she guided the mule through the first of a series of hairy-looking switchbacks.

  “It goddamn well better,” said Max.

  Pender slumped forward with his head resting against the top of the steering wheel.

  “I’m sorry,” Irene said. In a way it would have been less painful if she’d simply forgotten to bring along her key ring. (Lyssy and Lily had thoughtfully taken only her spare car key.) But she had brought it along: it was in her Coach bag, which she’d left in the Barracuda. “I don’t suppose there’s any way you could…what do you call it, hot-wire it?”

  By way of answer, Pender banged his head lightly against the padded wheel—thud, thud, thud.

  “No, I suppose not,” said Irene.

  “Oh well.” Pender sighed. He sat up again and reached for the door handle. “You know what the Chinese say about a journey of a thousand miles, don’t you.”

  Irene: “It begins with a single step?”

  Pender: “Bingo!”

  But they hadn’t gone much farther than that first step when Pender pointed to the lonely light winding its way up the side of the cliff, a hundred feet or so above the canyon floor. “I thought you said that way doesn’t lead anywhere but the top of the ridge?”

  “It doesn’t,” said Irene, taking off her watch cap.

  “Does Lily know that?”

  “Of course.” She ran her fingers through her damp, flattened hair. “What could she be thinking, Pen?”

  “You’re the shrink, you tell me.”

  “I don’t know!” Despairingly. “Sometimes I think I don’t know anything anymore.”

  “Knowing one knows nothing is the beginning of wisdom, Grasshopper,” said Pender.

  Irene smacked him across the arm with her sweaty watch cap. They started off again, and again hadn’t gotten far when Irene tripped over something small and hard. When she saw what it was—the snubnosed revolver Max had tossed away earlier—she knelt down and, under the pretext of tying her sneaker, slipped it into the roomy front pocket of her cargo pants before Pender could decide to pull rank again and take it away from her.

  Dr. Al is as gone as the day before yesterday. In his place, a dreamlike sense of motion—bucketing along, rising and falling, swaying, a roller-coaster ride through sheer undifferentiated blackness. Then a vision coalesces out of the blackness, a soundless, slightly skewed, camera’s-eye vision, which Lyssy can neither control nor direct, of a narrow dirt road winding dead ahead through the darkness along the side of a cliff.

  Suddenly the camera’s-eye view rotates to the left. Lyssy catches a glimpse of Lily in profile, the hood of her sweatshirt thrown back, her eyes narrowed in concentration and her lips pressed resolutely together as she wrestles with the steering wheel. Lily, he wants to shout—Lily, I’m here.

  But before he can figure out whether it’s a dream, or his first experience of co-consciousness, the view rotates around to the right again, then shifts downward, and instead of Lily, Lyssy finds himself looking down at a black pistol gripped tightly in a clawlike, fire-scarred hand.

  7

  They left the clearing at a fast walk, then by mutual and unspoken agreement broke into a trot as the trees began to close in overhead until they could no longer see the tiny light clinging doughtily to the side of the canyon.

  Irene, a veteran jogger, started to pull ahead, shining her flashlight in front of her. Pender called to her to wait; he was breathing hard when he caught up. “What is it?” she said.

  “It could be…a trick…. Max could have…bailed out, he could be…hiding in the bushes waiting to…pick us off.”

  She extinguished her flashlight and they started off again, Pender walking ahead of her, gun in hand. When they reached the fork in the road Pender turned to Irene. “Guess what?” he whispered, his big hand resting on her shoulder.

  “Forget it,” said Irene.

  “One of us has to go for help.” The top half of his face was in deep shadow; against the dark background, the green iguana logo on his baseball cap seemed to be floating an inch or two over his head. “You’re a faster hiker, I’m better with this.” Indicating the Colt in his other hand.

  “But—”

  “You know I’m right, don’t you?” he whispered, almost tenderly.

  Seconds ticked by while she tried to think of a reason to say no, but all she could come up with was an atavistic need to not be alone, and an unreasonable fear that if she left now, she’d never see Pender or Lily again. “Is this one of those Davy Crockett moments?” she said, looking up at him, feeling dwarfed by his height and bulk in the dark as she never had in the light.

  “Yes, ma’am,” said Pender, in his best frontier drawl. “Yes ma’am, Ah reckon it is.”

  “I reckon we’d better go ahead, then,” said Irene.

  The last switchback was the tightest, the steepest, and the most severely banked. As it jolted upward the mule tilted precariously to the right, sending Max sliding sideways across the cracked vinyl padding of the bench. At the last second he managed to hook his elbow over the railing behind him, and found himself leaning out over empty space, staring down into the abyss.

  “Jesus fuck,” he said, hauling himself back to safety as the mule righted itself. “You trying to get us both killed?”

  No, just you, thought Lily. “Looks like we’re over the worst of it,” she told him, as the track began to level off. They traveled briefly northward along the ridge at the top of the canyon, then turned due west, the mule bumping across the gentle rise of a broad, grassy, humpbacked meadow dotted with widely spaced live oak and madrone.

  The road itself, though, seemed to have petered out. Behind them were two shiny tracks made by moonlight refracted off the blades of grass flattened under the mule’s tires; ahead there was only virgin grass. Then the mule topped the rise and Max saw that the grass ended abruptly at the edge of the continent. Far below, beyond the meadow, there was only the flat black expanse of the Pacific, stretching onward beneath a dome of stars toward a nearly indiscernable horizon.

  Pender walked ten, jogged ten, walked ten, jogged ten, while his internal Rock-Ola played an appropriate medley of oldies: I’m walkin’, yes indeed: walkin’ in the rain, walkin’ to New Orleans, walkin’ back to happiness, these boots are made for walkin’, and you’ll never walk alone.

  Pick ’em up, lay ’em down, pick ’em up, lay ’em down. The footing was treacherous, the incline pitiless, the ache in his thighs relentless. Whether he walked in or out of the ruts, his ankles, unsupported by the Hush Puppies loafers, threatened to turn at every step. Cursing himself for all the miles of exercise he’d blown off riding in golf carts, Pender soon abandoned even the pretense of jogging.

  The first time he went down (what looked like shaley rock in moon-shadow turned out to be a shelf of dirt that crumbled underfoot), he landed hard on his left side and lay there in suspense, waiting to see how badly he’d fucked up his ankle.

  Not at all, as it turned out—the shooting pain he’d been anticipating never materialized. So he picked up his gun, picked himself up off the ground, and resumed the upward trudge, his infernal jukebox kicking in with “Twenty-five Miles.”

  But it soon felt like he’d already gone fifty miles. His breath coming harder now, his stride degenerating to an oldster’s shuffle, at first Pender attributed the pain in his left arm to his earlier tumble. He flexed his shoulder, worked the arm around in a circle. The pain sharpened, grew jagged, turned a screaming crimson. A steel band tightened around his chest. He saw the fireflies again, points of dancing, colored light, then the world tilted crazily onto its side.

  8

  Lily had toyed with the idea of driving the mule over the edge of the cliff and jumping out at the last second, but every time she took her foot off the accelerator, the mule slowed, with the obvious intention of rolling to a complaisant halt. And even if it didn’t, what was to stop Max from bailing out as well?

  So she shifted into neutral and engag
ed the hand brake. The vehicle shuddered and trembled, pocketapocketapocketa, until Max leaned over and switched off the engine by closing off the choke. The mule backfired and fell silent. The vista, even at night, was magnificent: the domed, starry sky; the endless ocean; the faint glow marking the vast arc of the horizon.

  “I thought this was supposed to be the back way to Big Sur,” said Max, turning toward Lily and placing the muzzle of his gun against her right temple.

  “I musta misread the map,” said Lily evenly. The Lilith persona was coming to her effortlessly now—she no longer needed to ask herself what Lilith would do or say, how Lilith might react—but something in Max’s eyes told her the distinction was rapidly becoming irrelevant to him. “Think about it. Why the fuck would I bring you up here? What do I have to gain?”

  “I don’t know yet,” said Max. “But I’m going to find out.” His left hand shot out, grabbed the bunched hood of her zippered sweatshirt, rammed her head against the steering wheel, yanked her upright, jammed the pistol against the side of her head again. “Now, what are you trying to pull?”

  It was all so like a dream—a sense of gliding movement, of a perpetual nightscape, of darkness around the edges, and of helplessness. Heartbreaking helplessness when his (no, Max’s, he reminds himself ) hand slams Lily’s head against the steering wheel. But Lyssy knows better. It’s not a dream, it’s co-consciousness. He’s seeing through Max’s eyes. And hearing now—distantly but clearly, although there’s a hint of disconnect between what he sees and what he hears. It’s not as severe as a streaming video: more like watching singers trying to lip-synch on TV.

  “Put the fucking gun down,” Lily is saying….