Jonathan Nasaw - When She Was Bad

Before leaving, he ducked under the fence and walked down the dirt road a few yards, then ejected the clip from the Colt Mama Rose had given him, and made sure the chamber was clear before dry-firing to test the trigger pull. He held the gun two-handed, arms extended, elbows slightly bent. The hickory grip was smooth against his palms, but not slippery. He squeezed the trigger- pyeww! went his lips. He squeezed it twice more- pyeww! pyeww!

The pull was far too light-in the old days Pender had used a thirteen-pound trigger in lieu of a safety. So he’d have to keep his finger off the trigger until he was ready to fire, he reminded himself, as he reinserted the clip and slipped the Colt back into the too-snug holster, which had been custom-fitted both for his old SIG-Sauer and his old figure. When he looked up, Irene was watching him over the fence and shaking her head with tolerant affection.

“Pow, pow?” she said.

“Think of it as a visualization,” he told her-Pender had only been in California a few months, but he was already starting to learn the lingo.

Most people think of patience as a virtue. He has the patience of Job, they say, the patience of a saint. But then, most people were fools. It never occurred to them that Hitler was patient, too. Or Ted Bundy-no one was more patient than Ted Bundy stalking a coed.

Except possibly for himself, thought Max. After his failed coup in the attic yesterday, he had retreated into co-consciousness, waiting for Lyssy to fall asleep. It had taken a little longer than Max had planned-nearly thirty hours-but what were thirty hours to a man who’d sat out nearly three years of double incarceration, self-imprisoned in an imprisoned body?

The first thing he’d realized upon opening his eyes was that he was alone in bed-the girl was gone. Then, scrambling around for his leg and clothes, he realized that she’d taken the.38 with her. Quickly he’d retrieved the other gun, the longer-barreled black automatic, which turned out to be a blessing in disguise when he peered through the shutters next to the front door and saw Lily talking to a little Mexican-looking guy.

Because when the man turned to leave, Max had to take his shot from where he stood, some twenty, twenty-five yards away-a difficult enough shot with the longer-barreled nine millimeter, and probably impossible with the snubnosed revolver.

Now he stooped to snatch up the.38 she had dropped. “Naughty, naughty,” he said in his own voice, stuffing the gun into his back pocket with a piratical grin. “Like the man said, either we hang together, or…”

He raised his hand over his head and a few inches to the side, holding on to the rope of an imaginary noose, then cocked his head and made a terrible gurgling sound deep in his throat. “Well, you get the idea.”

But his cleverness was wasted on the girl. Quivering, she backed away, fists clenched at her sides, tears welling in her big doe eyes. Suddenly, instinctually, he loathed her for her weakness and uncertainty, for the aura of victimhood she had gathered around her like a cloak.

Even worse, from a strictly practical standpoint, she was all but useless to him in this particular incarnation. He didn’t need another victim-there were plenty of victims out there-but rather an ally. Lilith, he thought, I need Lilith.

He decided to take a try at it, arranging his features in a deadly scowl and advancing on the retreating girl. “Where is she?” he demanded.

“I–I don’t know what you mean.” Still backing away, her hands spread helplessly.

“Then you’d better figure it out pretty goddamn quick, before I reach down your fucking throat and pull your lungs out through that lying mouth. Now where is she?”

“Who-where is who?” Her back fetched up against a giant, uncaring redwood.

“Lilith. I want Lilith. Come on dowwwn, Lilith !” Chanting now as he closed the ground between them, dragging his right leg behind him like the original Mummy, until his face was only inches from hers. “Get me Lilith or I will fucking kill you,” he said evenly, his voice coldly menacing, not at all heated. “Get me Lilith or you will fucking die.”

The road to La Guarida curved downward to the canyon floor, then turned due east, narrowing to a rutted dirt track that ran alongside and a few yards above the south bank of Little Bear Creek. The going was easy enough at first, but when the redwood canopy closed in overhead, Irene rediscovered two things she’d forgotten about the wilderness at night: how bright and numerous were the stars, and how utterly dark it was in their absence.

For the next three-quarters of a mile or so, she and Pender allowed themselves the luxury of flashlights. Walking single file between the ruts, shielding the beams with their palms, they could hear the creek chuckling and murmuring below them to their left; to their right loomed the south wall of the canyon.

“Pen?”

“Hmm?”

“Do you think we’re doing the right thing?”

Pender was in the lead; he moved to his right and let Irene catch up. “You’re probably too young to remember the Davy Crockett craze.” With Irene walking the hump and Pender in the rut, their heads were almost level.

“Before my time. I’ve heard about it, though.”

“It was huge. When I was around ten, myself and every kid I knew, we’d have killed for a coonskin cap.” Pender dropped into line behind her and unzipped his windbreaker.

“Anyway, this one time, I remember I’m lying on the living room rug watching Walt Disney on our old Sylvania Halo Light, it’s the episode where Davy tells his friend Georgie that his motto has always been Be sure you’re right, then go ahead. And my father, he’s an ex-jarhead, Semper Fi to the max, he’s sitting behind me in the armchair we always called Daddy’s chair, smoking his Camels and drinking his Genny-that’s Genesee beer-and I hear him grumbling, ‘Nobody was ever surer he was right than Ol’ One-Ball’-which was the only way he ever referred to Hitler.”

“Smart man, your father,” said Irene, smiling to herself-she was trying to envision Pender as a ten-year-old, but the only picture that came up for her was a fat bald kid in a coonskin cap.

As the canyon widened, the creek curved away to the northeast, while the road continued to hug the canyon wall for another quarter of a mile before branching off. Irene stopped when they reached the fork, holding up her hand like a scout on point. They switched off their flashlights.

“The cabin’s that way,” Irene whispered, pointing toward the wide, grassy lane sloping downward to their left, descending through the trees toward the faintly audible murmur of the creek.

“How far?” Pender whispered breathlessly, bent over like a winded football player with his hands resting on his knees; little points of colored light, the kind you see when you rub your closed eyes, were swimming in the blackness.

“Maybe a hundred yards to the clearing, then another, I don’t know, fifty, sixty feet to the house?”

Pender gestured toward the other, narrower fork. “Where does that lead?”

“All the way up to the ridge-on a clear day, you can practically see Japan.”

“But is there a way to get back out to the highway?”

“From the ridge? Only by jumping off the cliff-it’s several hundred feet straight down. Other than that, this road is the only way in or out.”

Excellent, thought Pender-not having a back door to cover greatly simplified the mission and improved their prospects. And more good news: he was starting to get his second wind. “Wait for me here,” he told Irene. “I want to scope out the cabin-I’ll be back in a couple of minutes.”