When She Was Bad: A Thriller (29 page)

The constant, uneven vibration of the engine rumbling under the boards prevented Irene from getting a pulse, but she could see Pender’s chest rising and falling in shuddering increments. She took out her flashlight, trained the beam up and down his body, then around it, looking for blood or bullet holes, finding only a scraped elbow and a skinned knee. “Can you hear me, Pen?”

His eyelids fluttered, but did not open. She pulled them up one at a time, shined her flashlight into them, watched the pupils contract. Equal and reactive, she thought, the phrase coming back to her through the mists of time—except for a little first aid, Irene hadn’t treated anybody for a physical illness since her residency, almost twenty years ago. She slipped her hand into Pender’s big meathook, told him to squeeze. His fingers tightened around hers—it was an excellent sign, if Irene remembered correctly, an indication that oxygen was still getting to his brain.

“How is he? Is he going to be all right?” asked Lily, turning around in the driver’s seat; Lyssy had climbed in beside her.

“He will be if we get him to a hospital soon,” said Irene. She took her cell phone out of her pocket, snapped it open—still no dial tone. “Drive us up to the top of the hill—it’ll probably work there.”

“Okay—hang on, everybody!” Lily turned back, patted the dashboard. “Just a little farther, amigo,” she said, talking to the mule, thinking about Fano. At least it was almost over, she told herself, depressing the clutch and reaching for the gearshift. Almost over, and thanks to her, no one else had gotten killed.

Then a claw-like hand clamped over hers; once again she felt the cold steel of a gun barrel pressing against the side of her head. “Change of plans,” announced a dry-as-dust, unbearably intimate voice, and for Lily the words
almost over
took on a terrible new meaning.

12

“I’ll take that.” Max’s left hand shot out, snatched Pender’s gun from Lily’s waist, and slipped it into his own waistband. It was a glorious moment for him—until a few minutes ago, when Lily had spotted Dr. Cogan trudging up the hillside, he’d been convinced the cops were already on their way, and that even if he managed to avoid being shot down, he’d have to settle for a hasty closing of accounts and a quick getaway.

But now he had all the time in the world, he realized. Not since he’d taken his revenge on the deputy sheriff who’d arrested him in Monterey three years ago—the late deputy
and
her late lover—had Max had two women so completely under his thumb. Oh, the games they could play back at the cabin! And this time he wouldn’t have to worry about someone hearing their screams.

Nor would he have to share them with the other alters. There were no
others
anymore, except for Kinch, who was helpless without a knife in his hand, and Lyssy, whose earlier attempt at a palace coup had ultimately proved a failure. True, he had managed to distract Max long enough for the girl to get away—but that had been due largely to the element of surprise. As soon as Max had realized what was going on—that the shouting in his head emanated from Lyssy in co-con—he was able to ignore it, treat it as so much white noise.

Even so, it was with a crushing and unfamiliar sense of failure that after trying unsuccessfully to get the mule started up again, he’d left the ridge alone, on foot, his shoulders hunched against the sky, expecting with every step to hear the
whap-whap-whap
of the police choppers and find himself bathed in the glare of their searchlights.

Limping down the dirt track, scrambling down the switchbacks on his ass, Max had come closer to despair than he cared to remember. He’d even begun thinking about putting an end to the farce, and had gone so far as to draw the gun from his waistband, when he’d spotted Pender and the girl by the side of the road.

And when he discovered that it was Pender’s heart attack that had saved him, Max, who was a big fan of irony (like many psychopaths, it was what he had in place of a sense of humor), was almost giddy with delight. Once again the Creator had demonstrated his utter disinterest in the battle between good and evil.

Tough shit for them, thought Max, tender shit for me. Then he’d learned that Dr. Cogan had gone off alone to contact the police and was herself on foot, and a situation that had seemed at first hopeless, then barely survivable, had turned rosy as a whore’s cheek: all Max had to do was pretend to be Lyssy, and hang on for the ride.

From that point on, things couldn’t have gone more smoothly if he’d planned them out months in advance. “What we’re going to do now,” he said over the chugging of the engine, tracing the curve of Lily’s ear with the end of the gun barrel, “as long as we have a little more time to spare than I thought we had, we’re all going back to the cabin to get to know each other a little better.” He glanced over his shoulder. “How’s that sound to you, Dr. Cogan?”

“Whatever you say, Max,” Irene said evenly, her hand stealing into the front pocket of her jeans. She felt almost relieved, now that he’d unmasked himself. No more uncertainty, no more paralysis by analysis. All complexities, moral or otherwise, pared down to the stark geometric simplicity of the spatial relationship between a cylinder and an arc, between the muzzle of Max’s gun and the side of Lily’s head.

Lily too experienced a moment of frozen clarity, during which she was, briefly, neither Lily, nor Lilith, nor Lily pretending to be Lilith, but only herself, all tangled up with conflicting emotions, feeling heartsick over losing Lyssy again, foolish for allowing herself to be tricked, righteously angry at having been betrayed, afraid for all the obvious reasons, and at the same time determined to think of
something,
to do
something.

But for Lily too the possibilities began and ended with the gun muzzle pressing against the side of her head. So when Max turned back to her after his brief exchange with Dr. Irene, and said, “You heard her—get this thing turned around and let’s get going,” it seemed pure common sense to refuse him at least that much.

“Not until you point that thing someplace else,” she told him.

It must have made sense to Max, too; it was the last thing that ever would. He tilted the barrel upward, pointing toward the sky. “You satisfied now? Okay, let’s get—”

Crack! Crack! Crack! Crack!
Jagged muzzle flashes lit the night. Lily threw herself backward as Max toppled sideways off the bench. Irene, who’d fired the .38 from a seated position, holding it in both hands in emulation of Pender, now scrambled to her feet, aiming the gun straight downward at Max, who lay head-down, crumpled into the narrow, V-shaped space between the dashboard and the front seat with his neck twisted at a grotesque angle, his cheek jammed against the floorboard, and his artificial leg sticking out sideways.

And yet he lived. Shot three times at close range, his neck broken in the fall (or to be precise, the sideways landing on his head), Max stared hungrily toward the pistol, lying only a few inches away from his left hand, and was still trying to
will
the hand into motion when a red haze washed over his vision.

Standing over him, holding the revolver in both hands and pointing it straight down at Maxwell, Irene glanced to her left and saw Lily lying on her back a few feet from the mule. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I just got the wind knocked out of me,” the girl replied, sitting up gingerly. “Is he…dead?”

“Not yet,” said Irene grimly. “Get his guns.”

Lily rose, brushing dirt and damply clinging spears of grass from her jeans, walked over to the mule, picked up the black pistol, then boldly plucked Pender’s wooden-handled Colt from the waistband of Max’s jeans. It was impossible to be afraid of him any longer—with his neck bent and his leg sticking out like that, he looked to her like a broken doll some spiteful little girl had tossed into the trash.

She cut the mule’s engine. “Give me your cell phone,” she told Irene. “I’ll go get help.”

Irene hadn’t realized how badly the constant chugging and shuddering had been getting on her nerves until it was gone and relative quiet had descended over the hillside. “Tell them we have two critically injured people that need to be evacuated by helicopter,” she said. “You can tell them one of them is Ulysses Maxwell, but try not to say too much else until we know how things stand with you, legally speaking, if you get my drift.”

She tossed the phone down to Lily, who caught it deftly. “I’ll be right back,” she said. “Take good care of Uncle Pen.”

“I will,” Irene called after her, then turned to Pender again, kneeling beside him and pressing two fingers against the side of his neck again. She felt his pulse, weak but steady, and watched his great chest rising and falling, rising and falling. “Don’t die on me,” she told him. “Don’t you dare die on me.”

Pender opened his eyes. “I’ll drink to that,” he said with a wink, then closed his eyes again, and let the darkness wash over him.

1

The People’s Posse
ended tonight, as it did every week, with host Sandy Wells alone in the spotlight, seated on a three-legged stool on an otherwise darkened soundstage, with a stark, textured black drop cloth for a background. He was wearing his trademark leather jacket and his silver hair was razor-trimmed to perfection; as the theme music faded, he turned to face the camera in three-quarter profile—his best angle, all his media mavens assured him.

“And so ends the bloody saga of Ulysses Christopher Maxwell,” Wells declared, his gunslinger eyes narrowed and his bulldog jaw outthrust. “There are, as always, many questions that remain unanswered. Forensics and ballistics can only tell us so much—we may never know, for instance, exactly why or where veteran private investigator Mick MacAlister met his fate, or how his tarpaulin-covered corpse wound up in the back of a pickup truck parked only a few blocks from his office, riddled with bullets fired from the same revolver that eventually terminated Maxwell’s monstrous reign of terror.

“But this much we
do
know….” As he did every week when it came time to deliver his closing homily, Wells turned to his left to face camera three. The sudden move had the effect of a theatrical aside, adding an inclusive intimacy, as if he had been addressing a wider audience, but was now speaking directly to the individual viewer.
“Ulysses Maxwell was not born a monster.
It was the extreme abuse he suffered as a child, from parents who had no doubt been abused themselves as children, that turned him into one. Ultimately, of course, each of us is responsible for his or her own actions—still, it’s incumbent upon each of us to do what we can to
break the chain.
”

As he spoke, camera three had been tightening in on him; by now he was in extreme close-up, his exquisitely barbered face filling the screen. “If you were abused as a child, I urge you to get professional help—
break the chain.
And if you know someone who was abused, a spouse, a friend, a relative, encourage them to do the same and
break the chain
—you’ll find plenty of links to mental health organizations on our website, www dot peoplesposse dot com. And most crucially, if you suspect someone of child abuse, but want to protect your anonymity, we’ve set up a brand-new dedicated tipline at 1-800-NOCHAIN—it’s a free call, guaranteed confidential—drop a dime and stop a crime.
Break the chain.
”

Wells turned back to camera one. “So until next week, I’m Sandy Wells, and you
are
The People’s Posse. Take care and be safe.”

“You too, Sandy,” Irene Cogan muttered from her living room sofa. It had been a slightly disconcerting experience, watching herself being interviewed by a man she’d never met or even spoken with. But at least they’d withheld Lily’s name, and the unknown actress who’d played Lily during the “re-creations” had been a buxom blond in her early twenties. The unknown actress who’d played Irene looked more like Matt Damon in drag, and wore a shiny reddish-blond wig that kept threatening to fall off during the chase scene at Scorned Ridge.

It had also felt kind of weird to see Scorned Ridge again. The dilapidated cabin, the domed Plexiglas drying shed where Maxwell and his foster mother used to keep the strawberry blonds—reexperiencing it all through the filter of the boob tube, with actors and actresses playing herself and Maxwell, had an oddly distancing effect. Irene found herself wondering which version she’d be seeing in her next nightmare.

As soon as Wells had signed off, the screen split vertically in two, silently rolling the TPP credits on the right half, while the left half ran a visually elongated promo for the show coming up next on The Crime Channel. It was a two-year-old documentary about a DID patient up in Washington whose alter had attacked his therapist.

Irene, who’d seen it before, turned the volume down and began channel surfing idly, her mind a thousand miles away again. She was thinking about her upcoming trip to Salem, the Oregon capital, to testify before a committee looking into the alleged abuses of electroshock therapy protocol at the Reed-Chase Institute. Irene had at first been reluctant to participate in what looked like a very public flogging of a very dead horse, but eventually she’d decided that
someone
had to speak up for poor Al Corder, if only to point out that however misguided his methods, he might very well have been on to something.

Exhibit One, of course, was the astonishing improvement in Lily DeVries’s condition. As soon as the legal hassles were behind her (in light of Alison Corder’s testimony that Lily had saved her life, the Portland DA had decided to go the slam dunk route and charge Maxwell with all four Oregon murders), she’d enrolled full-time at CSUMB—California State University Monterey Bay, also known jocularly as UFO, the University of Fort Ord, because it was situated on the vast, decommissioned military base.

The university was currently on spring break, Irene was reminded, when she looked up and discovered she had channel surfed her way from The Crime Channel to MTV’s
Spring Break Party—Cancún.
Lily had been frantic for permission to attend the event with a few of her college girlfriends, but after conferring with Irene, now counseling Lily on an as-needed basis, Uncle Rollie had made a counteroffer of an all-expense-paid trip to Washington, D.C., for Lily and a friend.

And judging by the goings-on currently being aired, thought Irene, they’d made the right decision. The overheated atmosphere, the girls in their skimpy tops and butt-floss thongs, the bare-chested, sweating boys, the orgiastic dancing, the overt sexuality, the whole suds-and-Ecstasy subculture, would surely have been—

Ohmigod! thought Irene, doing a full Wile E. Coyote double take, jaw dropped, neck outstretched, eyeballs all but popping out on springs. “Pen!” she shouted. “Pen, get down here quick!”

Pender had never much enjoyed watching himself on television. He’d been up in his study, formerly the spare room, playing poker on the Internet when he heard Irene shouting. He tore off his computer glasses like Clark Kent turning into Superman, grabbed a 3-iron from the golf bag leaning against the wall, and was out the door and down the stairs in seconds, hauling ass faster than he’d hauled it in years.

But then, there was a lot less ass to be hauled. The Grim Reaper is a hell of a motivator—Pender had lost fifty pounds since his heart attack, given up cigars, and cut way down on the Jim Beam. He’d also kept his promise never to use a golf cart again, and coincidentally or not, had lowered his handicap two whole strokes—it was now under the drinking, if not the driving, age.

“What is it?” he called, racing into the living room.

“Take a look at this.” Without turning around, Irene nodded toward the television.

Pender circled around behind the sofa, sheepishly dropping the 3-iron behind it, and sat down next to her. The two had been living together for almost seven months—Irene had insisted on Pender moving in with her while he was recuperating from his heart attack, and once they’d become lovers, it hadn’t seemed to make sense for him to pay rent elsewhere when they were sleeping together every night anyway.

“What is this, some kind of a test?” he asked her incredulously. In Pender’s experience, women Irene’s age—or any age—did not customarily insist upon their boyfriends watching nubile, half-naked college girls shaking their hooters.

“Wait, she just moved out of the picture…watch the right side of the screen…there! There she is—red top.”

He had already spotted the well-developed girl in the red top—he just hadn’t looked up at her face. “Oh shit, oh dear,” he said, feeling like a dirty old man. “I thought she was supposed to be in D.C., taking in all the fine educational sights.”

“So did I,” said Irene.

“She does seem to be enjoying herself,” said Pender after another few seconds.

“She does, doesn’t she?” Neither of them had taken their eyes from the screen.

“Are you going to tell Rollie?”

The show cut to commercial. Irene hit the Mute button on the remote. Her heart (to use a nonpsychiatric term) was so full she couldn’t find words to express what it meant to her to see Lily dancing, happy, surrounded by kids her own age. Pride was in there somewhere, parental and professional. Also awe, and a little understandable trepidation. She turned to Pender with tears in her eyes. “Sweetheart,” she said softly, “if I’d had boobs like that when I was her age, I’d have been shaking them, too.”

2

“Good evening, Mr. Maxwell—and how’s my strong silent type this evening?” Swingshift nurse, fat, cheerful, sloppy in white. Max, paralyzed from the neck down, followed her with his eyes, mentally gagging and hog-tying her.

“Ooo—if looks could kill,” she said forbearingly. “Look here, I’ve brought your dinner. Let me see now, we have…sirloin steak, medium rare, peas, mashed potatoes, garlic bread, Caesar salad, hold the anchovies….”

All nonsense, of course. Max received his nutrition through a nasogastric feeding tube. He tried to stop her from talking by the sheer force of his loathing, but all she had to do was move out of his direct line of sight and she would disappear. Max could no more have turned his head than he could have tap-danced his way out of the state-run shit hole to which he’d been confined since his extradition to Oregon, pending a dozen trials that were now unlikely to ever take place.

For one thing, Max’s lawyers could now legitimately argue that he was unable to aid in his own defense—the doctors were split on whether his continued mutism, even when the feeding tube was removed, was physical, voluntary, or psychosomatic. For another, not many prosecutors were all that keen on trying a man who’d have to be wheeled into the courtroom tied to his wheelchair, with urine dripping into a baggie at his side and his respirator, plugged into a permanent tracheostomy hole, going hiss-
suck!,
hiss-
suck!
every five and a half seconds.

So the view from the antique, horizontally rotating Stryker frame never really changed. It only shifted between the discolored, water-stained, off-white ceiling tiles and the one-foot-square, black-and-white floor tiles whenever the staff got around to clamping a canvas stretcher on top of him and spinning him around like a pig on a spit. There was a window somewhere off to one side, but all he could see of it was the waxing and waning of daylight.

As if being sentenced to life without parole in his own body weren’t punishment enough (only the State was debarred from cruel and unusual punishment: nature practiced it on a regular basis), every so often Max would be stricken by a headache. For the able-bodied, even the able-bodied migraine sufferer, it’s hard to fathom the effects of a headache on someone who only has sensation from the neck up—let’s just say that old cliche about being in a world of pain had never been more applicable.

And there was another factor that exacerbated his suffering: Max had skated through most of his existence without having to endure even prolonged discomfort—that, after all, had always been Lyssy’s job. From youthful boredom to third-degree burns, from gas pains to gunshot wounds, from aches to amputations, the system had always had Lyssy as its scapegoat.

But Max could no longer summon Lyssy at will. He’d tried, those first few months, fucking Jesus how he’d tried. Raging, cajoling, threatening, promising—nothing worked. Even worse (dear God and all the angels in heaven and all the devils in hell, how many layers of “even worse” were there in this stinking onion of existence), Max himself had been unable to retreat to the dark place—it was as if Lyssy had somehow locked the door behind him. The door in the wall that didn’t exist.

Sleep was the only refuge left to Max—but with sleep came dreams even less bearable than his waking hell. He could never fully recall them when awake, but they must have been pretty awful if he could wake up to all
this
with even a transitory sense of relief.

There were only two things that kept Max going, or rather, that kept him from letting go of his tenuous hold on sanity. One was that it couldn’t last forever: when he’d first arrived, he’d overheard a doctor telling the nurse that on the life expectancy charts, a C-3 quadriplegic fell somewhere between a hamster and a house cat.

The other thing standing between Max and the Big Scream was that he still hadn’t given up on Lyssy. The little bastard was in there, all right, and Max remained convinced that sooner or later he’d come up with a way to get him out, to swap places. A few minutes ago, in fact, he’d come up with what felt like a very promising approach, but one that would require his complete concentration.

So he waited for the nurse to leave before closing his eyes.
Lyssy!
he called.
Lyssy, it’s Lily. I’m in trouble—I need your help.

And again:
Lyssy, it’s Lily. I’m in trouble—I need your help.

And again and again and again, without a hint of a response. Unable even to sigh unless he timed it to the hiss-
suck!
of the respirator, Max opened his eyes again and settled in for another long night in hell.

3

Lyssy, it’s Lily. I’m in trouble—I need your help.

Utter darkness. Lyssy was afraid for a moment—then he heard the creek burbling and remembered where he was. He opened his eyes. It must have been around sunset—the inside of the cabin was all lit up with a rosy, comforting glow.

“Lyssy, it’s Lil.” He couldn’t see her—her voice was coming from the porch.

“So who else vould it be?” A credible imitation of the querulous old man played by Billy Crystal in
The Princess Bride.

She laughed. “I need your help.”