James Patterson - The 8th Confession

“My head?”

Candy looked at her, nodded dumbly.

Yuki lifted her hand to the left side of her scalp, felt stubble, a prickly line of stitches.

“Oh nooooo. A mirror. I need a mirror. ”

Candy dug into her purse, located a two-by-two plastic clamshell case, and handed it to Yuki. Yuki opened the mirror and angled it, staring at herself wide-eyed and disbelieving, finally getting the complete picture.

Her head had been shaved in a three-inch-wide swath starting at her left temple, then swooping in a long, graceful curve all the way behind her left ear. Black stitches, like a prickly caterpillar, marched along the center of that neatly sheared road.

“Look at me! I’m a freak! ” Yuki shouted to the reporter.

“On you, freaky looks cool. Lean on me, honey. I’m driving you home.”

IT WAS ANOTHER freaking brilliant night at Aria. The Wurlitzer was pounding out mob hits and opera classics, tourists were giddy on killer martinis, and the regulars were high on gin and tonics, on seeing and being seen.

“Pet Girl” sat alone at the crowded bar, nursing her secret like it was a just-hatched baby bird.

She was a petite brown-eyed blonde, looked ten years younger than her thirty-three years, a woman who could slip in and out of a room like she was wearing a cloak of invisibility, like she was a freaking superhero.

That was the silver lining.

Pet Girl left a ten on the bar. Taking her Irish coffee, she drifted back to the VIP room, where McKenzie Oliver, the recently deceased rock star and her former boyfriend, lay in state, his bronze coffin squared up on the pool table.

Pet Girl’s love affair with McKenzie had lasted for six months or twenty-seven years, depending on how you counted it, but anyway it ended badly a few days ago.

That sucked. And she still didn’t totally understand why. She’d loved him, the real person he was, the kid with a concave chest and flat feet, that way he had of looking cool and scared at the same time, just like in their sandbox days, when he was Mikey and she was his friend.

Clearly none of that had counted with him – evidence the underage, weeping junkie waif with tattoos on her face and rings in her nose, McKenzie’s “real” girlfriend, whom he’d been seeing the whole time she’d been seeing him, and Pet Girl had been the last to know.

When she’d caught them in the act, McKenzie had given her that look that said, Come on. Look who I am. What did you expect?

He hadn’t even said “I’m sorry.”

Now Pet Girl peered into the satin-lined casket and had to admit that McKenzie looked good. He looked clean, anyway – in both meanings of the word. She felt her nose prickle, her eyes fill up, a shot of grief slamming into her heart – what she’d least expected, when she’d least expected it.

She swiped at her tears with the palm of her hand, slipped his front-door key into the breast pocket of his leather suit jacket, whispered to the dead man, “ Bite me, asshole.” Then she signed the guest book before dropping into a sofa so she could watch the party from the sidelines.

And what a party McKenzie was having.

The guys from his band were snorting lines off the pool table. Bono huddled in a corner with his manager. Willie Nelson dropped by to pay his respects, and all the others blah-blahed about the tragedy, the people she’d known her whole life, people who thought they knew her but who didn’t really know her at all.

Pet Girl closed her eyes and listened to J’razz, the lead vocalist from McKenzie’s band, sing “Dark Star,” McKenzie’s tribute to himself. After the applause, J’razz lifted his glass to the corpse, saying, “Too bad you died so fucking young, man.”

The lights went out. Candles glowed. Everyone joined J’razz in singing “A Hole in the Night,” McKenzie’s friends and fans all thinking it was the drugs that killed him.

But Pet Girl knew that the drugs had nothing to do with it.

McKenzie Oliver had been murdered.

She knew, because she had done it.

PET GIRL SAT on the floor of the children’s former nursery, her back against the wall. She was wearing welder’s gloves and steel-tipped boots, had her precious Rama safe inside her bag. And she listened to the Baileys’ muted shouts through the plaster.

“Pig!”

“Slut!”

“Shut up, shut up, shut up!”

The fools didn’t even know she was sitting ten feet away in the dark, that she’d been waiting for hours for them to come home and screw themselves to sleep.

She’d used the time well, ran the Grand Plan through her mind again. She was prepared. She knew their habits, the floor plan, the best way in, the quickest way out.

And she knew the code.

It was a good plan, but Pet Girl also had a Plan B – what to do if she got caught. And she had the nerve to do even that.

On the other side of the wall, Ethan Bailey accused his wife of screwing around, and Pet Girl didn’t doubt that she had. Isa had been a pretty competent flirt when they were in class together at Katherine Delmar Burke School.

And since then, Isa had truly mastered the art of casual seduction. Like Gwyneth Paltrow on a really good day.

But that wasn’t why Pet Girl despised Isa.

It was deeper than that, had to do with when her life had shattered to pieces – when Pet Girl was ten and her dad had died, and Isa had hugged her hard at the funeral and said, “I’m sooooo sorry. But don’t ever forget that I love you. We’re best friends forever. ”

“Forever” had lasted a couple of weeks.

Once her dad’s fortune and protection shifted entirely to his real family, it was as if Pet Girl and her mother had never existed. No more private school or dance classes or birthday parties on Snob Hill for her. Pet Girl had plummeted through the delicate web of those who had it to the flat and dismal plains of “Who cares?” – where the bastard daughter of a married man belonged.

Isa, on the other hand, had graduated at eighteen and married Ethan Bailey in a hand-beaded Carolina Herrera gown at twenty-two, a wedding attended by the entire West Coast Social Register. And everything else followed: her two clever children, her charities, her place at the gleaming peak of high society.

Pet Girl’s mother had said, “Move, sweetheart. Start over.” But Pet Girl had her own roots in this city, deeper and more historic than even Isa’s midnight-blue bloodlines.

And so, this was Pet Girl’s life after the fall, working for the Baileys and their revolting ilk, walking their neurotic dogs, taking their disgusting furs into cold storage, addressing invitations to their snobby friends, people who called her “Pet Girl” and who talked about her when she was close enough to hear.

For so long, she thought that she was handling it.

But if she’d learned anything from McKenzie Oliver, it was that “handling it” was overrated.

Pet Girl stared around the room, filled now with racks of outrageous, never-worn clothes and mountains of unopened boxes of pricey purchases bought on a whim.

It was sickening. The decadence of the very rich. The twenty-four-karat-gold crap.

Inside the bedroom, the shouting stopped. Pet Girl pressed her ear to the wall, listened to the Baileys grunt and groan, Isa calling out, “Oh yes, that’s good, oh!” the two of them making what they called love, Isa’s voice giving Pet Girl even more reason to bring her down.

And then there was silence.

Pet Girl gripped the handle of her canvas bag.