Vengeance to the Max (38 page)

The flashlight lit his face from below, leaving shadows across the planes of his cheeks, his upper lip, and his brow. “I offered you the truth so often, Max. You should have taken it before we came to this.”

“I wasn’t willing to pay the price.”

“The price is higher now, Max.”

“Before it was sex, now it’s my life, is that it?” Even if she had to pay with her life, this man would die.

“The outcome is determined. You did that when you refused me and went to Michigan. You should have let it alone, Max.”

“Like Cameron should have let it alone when he found you during the Walter Spring case.”

He gave the softest of snorts. “It was never my intention to harm him, Max. But he recognized me.” He raised his shoulders, then let them drop. Max’s gaze centered on the shifting of the gun. “I knew he’d never let it go.”

Cameron never let anything go. “So
he
had to go.”

Bud smiled whimsically. In the filtered light of the flashlight, he resembled a satyr. “He’d become a liability. But my method was deficient. I should have known it would come back to haunt me. But I was in a rush, no time to plan.” He lowered the gun and tapped her knee with it. “If I’d had time, I would have chosen
you
as the instrument, Max.”

Her eyes widened, spoke to him.

“People are so easily manipulated. All I needed was a little time to show you what he was. A private investigator’s report. A little nudge here. A little nod there. You would have killed him in a rage over his affairs.” The word cut like a newly sharpened knife. He knew it and enjoyed it. “So much cleaner, Max. I wouldn’t have had to keep track of those imbeciles all these years.” He tapped the gun to his own chin. “I should have killed them after the job was done.”

“Not your style,” she croaked. And Cameron’s style wasn’t affairs.

“No, I agree. And neither is this.” He pulled his head back, staring at the gun in his hand. “So messy, Max. Killing them. Planting Cameron’s things to point to you.”

Manipulation was his preferred modus operandi. But he was stuck with what he’d created. With Max in the cross hairs.

“I found the ring.” As if it made a difference now when he had her all the way.

He smiled. “Your implication being that it no longer presents you a problem. Don’t worry, Max. This new plan works so much better.” He stroked the barrel down her cheek. “I never wanted it to come to this, my darling.” He breathed deeply, orgiastically, as if she’d caressed his balls. “My God, Max, you don’t know how sorry I am to have to kill you before we can be together.”

Maybe he truly was sorry. It no longer mattered. Tonight, one of them was going to die.

Yes, tonight, one of them would die. Max didn’t intend to be the victim. She didn’t know how she’d make it happen, but tonight would be Bud’s last night on earth, not hers. “This confrontation was destined to happen the day you killed Cordelia.”

“It was night, actually.” There, Bud admitted it, before God, before Cameron who hovered somewhere close in the night.

“A pillow over her face?” she asked.

He heaved a great sigh and moisture glistened in his eyes. “The moment I saw that beautiful little girl, I knew Cordelia would never let me have her.” He tilted his head to regard Max. “Not the way I wanted her.” Max wished she’d killed him that afternoon at Belladonna’s. Her fingers ached for it. Bud went on without a care. “Cordelia was a fighter. She wasn’t like Madeline.”

“Who wouldn’t marry you but still turned a blind eye to your affair with her daughter.”

“Cordelia loved me.” He shook his head. “What do you find wrong in that?”

He was incapable of understanding. She touched the barrel of his gun as it pointed straight at her. “Now you want me to take the final step in all this by killing ... Dennis?”

His nostrils flared. His voice dropped. “Vengeance, Max. It can be yours for everything he did to you.”

“You were the one who told him to kill Cameron.”

“I didn’t tell him to rape or beat you. He did that on his own.”

Poor Bud. He believed he knew her so well, yet he didn’t have a clue. She would gladly have died that night. What Bootman had done to her had never been the worst.

A car engine roared to life, close by, right outside the door. Bud jumped, took two steps back, and turned.

Max recognized the rumble of the old Rolls. Bud didn’t. In the three seconds afforded her by his shifting attention, she pulled Witt’s gun from her pocket and aimed it at the back of Bud’s head. She could have wished for the melodramatic click of the trigger being cocked, but a Glock didn’t work that way. Instead she said, “If you don’t want me to blow your fucking head off, I suggest you bend down slowly and put your gun on the floor.”

Surprise didn’t register in his eyes as he turned. “It could be Dennis, Max. We can take him together.”

“It isn’t Dennis. Put the gun down.”

He did exactly as she said, and when it was on the floor and out of his hand, he laughed. “I don’t usually make this many stupid mistakes, Max, but you’ve nonplussed me from the beginning.”

“Bo—” she cut herself off. No need letting Bud know the ways in which Bootman
had
affected her. “Dennis was an instrument, Bud. You’re the scourge of the earth.”

He eyed the steadiness of the gun in her hand. “Why, Max, I do believe you intend to kill me.”

She tilted her head and imitated him. “Why yes, Bud, I believe I do.” Then she snarled. “For Cameron. For Wendy. Cordelia.” She went through the list. Bethany, Walter, Jada, and Virginia, the whole damned Spring family. And on and on. For all the ones she didn’t know about. “For Angela.”

“You were too partial to that girl, Max.”

She felt like the idiot killer in a B-movie who kept talking until the good guy rode to the rescue. “I can’t allow you to hurt anyone else.”

With a deep breath, he puffed up his chest and rose to his full height where moments before he’d stooped, fingers extended toward his gun on the floor. His eyes shone, reflecting the beam of the flashlight still sitting on the crate. “You are my destiny, Max. You truly are. I’ve wanted you from the moment I first saw you. Perhaps subconsciously I knew you would be the mechanism of my death. Perhaps I’ve welcomed it.”

“You’re
my
destiny,” she whispered.

“You want me in hell, but to send me there, you have to step into it yourself.” He held out a hand. In the dim light, his gray hair turned dark, the lines of his face disappeared into shadow, and he could have been the BJ that Cameron knew almost thirty years ago. The devil that held his hand out to a family and destroyed them.

Max’s fingers numbed. Bud glanced at his watch. “You don’t have much time, Max. Dennis will be here soon. I have to be dead before he arrives. Or you’ll have to fight us both at once.”

“It’s a little after one, Bud, plenty of time.”

“Don’t dawdle, Max. Take the bull by the horns. Do it.”

His words drowned in the roar of her ears. She shook her head to clear it. The gun wavered. She trued it up. Her upper lip grew wet with the idea, the need, to shoot, shoot to kill. She’d thought about his death, dreamed about it, planned it, wanted it.

His voice went on relentlessly. “I believe in the afterlife, Max. We’ll be together. Send me there. I’ll wait for you.” He sighed, an erotic sound. “We’re so alike. You don’t even know it. But we are.”

He stroked the air with a finger. She felt it as if he’d actually stroked her breast. Moisture beaded on her brow, bled down into her eyes. She wanted to kill him, oh yes, she did, if for no other reason than to shut him up.

“I know you’re capable of pulling that trigger. I admire it. No one, not my daughter, not Cameron, no one has been capable of what you are, Max. I envy that. You could accomplish so much more than I ever will. I wish I had time to teach you what I know.”

She swallowed, his voice a refrain she couldn’t get out of her head. “I’m not like you.”

“If you aren’t now,” he whispered, “you will be after tonight, Max. First me, then Dennis. You can take us both down. It seems easy, doesn’t it?”

Easy, yes, pop off a round right at his heart. Watch the bright red blood explode. A tap of a finger, hardly any effort at all.

He took a step closer, the muzzle of the gun now inches from his chest.

Her arm shuddered. She imagined an eruption of blood spewing from his forehead. Like Cameron. Brains and tissue splattering the machinery behind him, globs dripping down the metal.

“God, I see the lust in your eyes, Max.” A mirror image shone in his. He licked his lips. “You want to kill me so badly, don’t you?” His voice mesmerized.

Yes, she wanted his death. For all the wrongs committed. She wanted him to pay, even for the things her uncle had done, for the child he’d forced her to murder when she was thirteen, for everything men like them had stolen.

Her mouth tasted of cotton wool. The swallow she took barely soothed the dry membranes of her throat. First Bud, then Bootman. She’d lie in wait, a man’s dead body at her feet, his blood and guts soaking her shoes.

“Yes, that’s it.” He read her thoughts in her eyes, on her face. “Never tell me you don’t understand me. That’s why I frighten you, Max.”

There was only him and the gun in her hand. Nothing else existed. With another small step, the gun rested against his shirt.

“Go ahead, shoot me. Seal our fates together.” He raised his arm, drew a finger down her cheek, her skin shriveling beneath the touch. “You are my reflection, Max.”

She thought of Cameron saying one day she’d turn out like Bud. She couldn’t breathe. She thought of making love with Witt that very night. Her vision dimmed. She thought of Ladybird and Horace. Her blood pounded inside her head.

Cameron wouldn’t ask for their help in a plan to murder Bud.

He would never expect her to avenge his death by committing murder. He didn’t truly believe she had anything in common with his murdering uncle.

“I’m not like you, BJ Tyler.” She wasn’t sure where the voice came from. It didn’t sound like her, yet the pain of uttering the words tore the inside of her throat.

His lips moved almost in a kiss. “Pull the trigger, Max.”

Cameron wouldn’t use Ladybird. He wouldn’t use
her
.

Killing Bud had never been the plan.

“I’m not like you,” she mouthed, Bud’s plan as clear as Cameron’s. Reverse psychology. “I’m not like you.” Her voice grew stronger. She knew what Bud wanted to accomplish. To force her to back down by making her realize if she killed him, she
was
as bad as he was. “No matter what I do, I’ll never be like you.”

“Pull the trigger and find out,” he urged.

Pull the trigger and she’d lose her soul. Finally. Irrevocably. That’s what Cameron had wanted her to learn.

Bud read the thought on her face and allowed the tiniest of smiles to form on his lips. A triumphant glitter sparked his eyes. “You can’t do it, Max.”

“
Won’t
do it.” The difference of choice. She pulled in her aching arms, cradled the loaded gun against her breast like a child. “You aren’t worth it.” His cold flesh brushed her cheek. “Get your hand off me. And get out.”

He tacitly agreed to the first by dropping his hand to his side. “The win is too easy, Max. Will you shoot me in the back?”

“I’m going to let you think about it while you walk away.”

Tell him to take my gun with him
.

“Are you crazy?” she snapped without thinking.

The air moved as Bud backed away, beyond the beam of the flashlight. He was nothing more than a dark shadow, a voice. “Maybe I am crazy, Max.”

Trust me. Make him take the gun
.

Trust me. The same words she used on Witt, the same he’d used on her. She tried to grasp all the ramifications, but couldn’t. Her head ached, and her eyes teared with indecision.

Karma, Max. There’s a plan for BJ, too. God’s plan
.