Jonathan Nasaw - When She Was Bad

Rescuing Lily was foremost in his mind, of course. And capturing, or rather, recapturing Maxwell was high up on Pender’s list as well, but not for the publicity. Pender had already had his Warholian fifteen minutes of fame several times over, and had always been more relieved than disappointed when the spotlight had moved on.

Instead, Pender looked on the opportunity to bring Maxwell in again as a chance to redeem two of the worst mistakes of his FBI career. Through a moment of inexcusable carelessness on Pender’s part three years earlier, the psychopath had escaped from the Monterey County jail, at the cost of half a dozen additional lives. Then after the shootout on Scorned Ridge, when Maxwell lay injured, every instinct Pender had developed in three decades of chasing serial killers cried out for him to end it with a coup de grace, or by letting Maxwell bleed out on the floor of the barn.

But although it was Irene Cogan who’d talked him out of it, then tied a tourniquet around Maxwell’s thigh, thereby saving his life, Pender still blamed himself. Witness or no witness, there were dozens of ways for a determined special agent not to bring his man in alive-and if he’d employed any of them, Patricia Benoit, Walter Smets, Alan Corder, and Cheryl Corder would still be alive.

Pender’s remaining motivations were less conscious. Chief among them were resentment for his treatment at the hands of the Portland cops-your basic “I’ll show them” state of mind-along with a severe action jones: at fifty-seven Pender was no better prepared to slip gracefully into his golden years than he had been when he reached the FBI’s mandatory retirement age two years earlier.

They drove with the top down and the CD player blaring Grateful Dead tunes. Pender, still wearing his grass-and-mustard-checked sport coat, nearly lost his hat when Mick put the hammer down on the superhighway running the length of California; he reached out to make a last-second, one-handed grab as the beret flew off his head. A few minutes later, Mick, wearing a casually matched jacket and jeans outfit of faded denim, took a joint-filled Sucrets tin from his pocket, and fired one up with a windproof butane torch.

“Don’t worry, I drive better stoned,” he told Pender, with the dangling joint glommed securely to his lower lip.

“You’re under arrest,” Pender replied.

“You got me fair and square, copper,” said the portly private eye, raising both hands over his head-at eighty-plus miles an hour, on a far-from-empty eight-lane highway.

“On second thought, maybe I’ll let it slide just this once,” Pender decided.

They made good time, stopping once for gasoline and a convenience-store chili dog that reminded Mick, a native New Jerseyan, of the sign on the old roadside greasy spoon/gas station in Tuckahoe: EAT HERE AND GET GAS. As they passed Sacramento, he lit up a second doob. Pender remonstrated, reminding him they still had a potentially hazardous job in front of them.

“What, you think I’m goin’ up against a psychopathic serial killer straight ?” said MacAlister.

Which made so much sense to Pender that he found himself wondering whether he hadn’t inhaled a little secondhand smoke himself.

Alone now in the attic, Lyssy searched wildly for his leg, which proved to be under the bed.

Yeah, like that’s going to do a lot of fucking good, said the voice in his head.

“Max?”

No shit, Sherlock. Now be a good little boy and go to sleep-I’ll take it from here.

“I’m not a little boy anymore.”

You’ll always be a little boy to me.

Lyssy clapped his hands over his ears. Max chuckled slyly. I’m not out there, sonny, I’m in here. Now you know what you have to do-don’t make it any harder on yourself than it has to be.

“Never,” said Lyssy. “Never, never, never again.”

Okay, buddy-bud, you asked for it.

Lyssy heard the crackling sound, saw angry orange flames leaping up all around him. To fight them, he pictured Lilith-her hair the color of rich dark chocolate, her eyes big and dark in her sweet round face, her sweetly curved lips, her soft white rosy-tipped breasts, her velvet-soft belly, her creamy thighs and the dark mystery between them, her dimpled knees, strong calves, her toes arching in ecstasy. Then he worked his way back up, past her calves, thighs, bush, belly, breasts, and back up to her face, and he held her face there, he made himself see it, ten times larger than life, back-lighted by the leaping flames. Which weren’t leaping quite as high now, or burning quite as hot.

You’re making a mistake, said the voice, sounding less sure of itself. You’re nothing without me. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing….

The flames were gone. Lyssy found himself alone in the tiny attic room, sitting on the edge of the bed with his prosthetic leg in his hands. “Who’s nothing now?” he said aloud. But for all his bravura, he couldn’t help cocking his head to the side and listening, as if he weren’t at all sure there wouldn’t be an answer.

The problem was, Mama Rose liked the girl, had liked her from the moment she’d first set eyes on her, snapping and snarling like a she-wolf in a trap as she faced down the bikers back in Sturgis. And having a surrogate teenage daughter around, especially one who was as tabula rasa as Lilith, had meant a lot to the childless older woman. She’d had fun during that first visit, showing Lilith the ropes, passing on a little hard-earned practical wisdom.

But Mama Rose was nobody’s fool: she had seen her walking hard-on of a husband growing more infatuated with the kid every passing day. Not that the prospect of Carson knocking off a quickie had her particularly worried-but what if it turned into a full-blown midlife crisis? He wouldn’t have been the first man to trade in a middle-aged wife for a firm young mistress.

So she’d quietly cut a deal with the private eye, MacAlister, put the reward money into her secret “Fuck You” account-a safe-deposit box at the Bank of America down in Redding-and told Carson that Lilith had gone off with some folks she’d met in Weed. And while Mama Rose had missed her company-the warmth of her greeting this morning had been genuine enough-she was more determined than ever that Lilith had to go.

But not to die -that seemed a little extreme to Mama Rose. In the absence of a compelling threat to herself or Carson (Lilith had already proved she could be trusted to keep her mouth shut about the chop shop and the little pink house, if only because Swervin’ Mervin was buried in the nearby woods, and both Carson and Mama Rose had witnessed his death) Mama Rose could not allow Carson to kill the girl.

As for Lilith’s boyfriend, though, Mama Rose had no objection to terminating him. They certainly couldn’t let him go: if captured, he could lead the cops straight back to them-the same cops who’d been trying in vain to find Carson for fifteen years. And never mind how sweet Lyssy had seemed to be during breakfast: judging by what she’d read about him in the newspapers, anybody who knocked off Ulysses Maxwell would be doing the world a favor.

Hence the tangled web Mama Rose had been weaving all afternoon. First she’d cut another deal with MacAlister in return for another contribution to the Mama Rose Fuck You fund. The private eye and the backup he’d insisted on bringing along were to rendezvous with Mama Rose at a coffee shop in Mt. Shasta, follow her to an undisclosed location out in the boondocks, lend her two pairs of handcuffs, and wait for her to return with a manacled pair of fugitives.

And the only difference between their relative expectations, Mama Rose’s and MacAlister’s, was that he assumed that both fugitives would be alive when she handed them over.