But oh what a fiasco (Fucked In All Seven Common Orifices, as the folk etymology had it) the two of them had perpetrated. They couldn’t have blown it any worse if they’d been on Maxwell’s payroll—and Pender didn’t even have the excuse of being stoned. Yes, it had been Mick who’d put the gun down so he could free Mama Rose, but surely Pender should have been watching for Maxwell instead of hurrying to Lily’s side.
Then when the firing began, Pender remembered with deep shame, his response had been to hit the floor. If only he’d done something, anything: charged Maxwell, thrown the flashlight at him, run for the door, dived for the bedroom window. Mick might still be dead, but Pender wouldn’t be tied up here like a Christmas goose—and Maxwell wouldn’t have a six-hour lead. Or twelve, or twenty-four, or however long it took before somebody dropped by the pink ranch house.
Lying next to Pender with eighteen inches or so of space between them, Mama Rose lost the battle with her bladder in the first few hours, which meant that in addition to the dire thirst, the muscle cramps, the headache from rebreathing stale air, and a rapidly worsening case of claustrophobia—a disorder that had never troubled her before—she now had a new problem to worry about. Diaper rash, she told herself, with a harsh mental laugh. Okay, Rosie, what’s next?
But although she had, like Pender, managed to loosen her gag far enough to be able to breathe through her mouth, unlike Pender Mama Rose never stopped struggling with it, worrying at the fabric, until eventually—around two or three in the morning, at a guess—the linen strips had gone damp and slack enough to enable her to shove the gag out of her mouth with her tongue.
“Hey,” she said.
“Mmmf,” replied Pender.
“I got an idea.”
“Mmmf?”
“Can you get any closer?”
Wriggling, writhing, he humped sideways as far as the cuffs securing his hands to the headboard would permit. Mama Rose did the same; they met in the middle of the bed. “Try to turn onto your side,” she told him.
He couldn’t, not without dislocating his shoulders. “Okay, just your head, turn your head toward me.”
He did, and discovered that she had succeeded where he’d failed, and was lying on her side. They looked into each other’s eyes for a few seconds—her eyes were a darker blue than his, puffy and red-rimmed from crying for Carson; she had a tiny white scar on the bridge of her nose. She strained toward him. Her face came closer, closer, her mouth open, her teeth bared, her breath foul. For a few seconds he thought she’d gone bonkers and was going to start kissing or biting him; he flinched away.
“Hold still,” she told him, then seized his gag in her teeth and started chewing.
2
Irene Cogan rarely dreamed about her late husband. When Frank did make an appearance, it was as a nebulous figure on a busy sidewalk, or across the room at a crowded party, his face in deep shadow. Sometimes she’d realize he was there and try to fight her way across the room, or catch up with him as the current of the crowd swept him along, but always in vain.
Until tonight, that is. The party scenario again. Just as she recognizes Frank, he turns away and starts for the door. Frantically, she calls his name, struggles to catch up to him. He turns back just as she reaches him. His face is blue with cold, his beard rimed with frost.
“Frank! I thought you were—”
“Zip it,” he whispers harshly, touching his skeletal forefinger to his lips.
She turns to scream; the hand clamps over her mouth.
“Don’t be scared, I’m not going to hurt you.”
A boyish voice. The dream hand was still clamped over her mouth. Irene opened her eyes, saw Ulysses Maxwell’s face floating above her, filling her field of vision.
“Promise me you won’t scream?”
She nodded. He removed his hand from her mouth; she took in a great gulp of air. The bedside lamp was on, the bedroom curtains closed. Next to the clock-radio on her bedside table, the cradle for the cordless phone lay empty.
“Remember me, Dr. Cogan?”
Panic rose like a swelling tide; part of her yearned to lose herself in it, to make a clean psychotic break. But something in his pleading tone, in the earnestness with which his gold-flecked brown eyes searched her own, encouraged her to hold on just a little longer. “Yes, of course, Lyssy. How did you get in?”
“I squeezed through that little sliding window in the downstairs bathroom. You’re Lily’s doctor, right?”
“Ohmigod, Lily!” Irene sat up, fully awake. “Is she all right? Where is she?”
“In the next room. But there’s something wrong with—”
Irene, still wearing Frank’s pajamas, scrambled out of bed and hurried into the spare bedroom with Lyssy close behind.
Lily was sitting cross-legged on the floor, her back to the door, busily cranking the handle of a plastic coin sorter. Irene knelt at her side. “Lily? Lily, it’s Dr. Irene.”
When there was no response, she passed her hand across Lily’s line of vision. The girl’s dark eyes failed to track. “How long has she been like this?”
“Since last night.”
Irene kept her eyes trained on Lily—it was easier to fight off the panic if she didn’t look at Maxwell. “Was there something in particular that set her off?”
“A shock—she got an electric shock. Can you help her?”
Irene saw a glimmer of hope. “Y-yes—but we have to get her to a hospital right away,” she lied, after a short hesitation.
“Why?”
“Why?”
“Yeah, why? Why a hospital? What are they going to do for her?”
“A brain scan, for one thing.”
“You know the police are after us, right?”
“I—yes, I know.”
“Both of us.”
“Yes.”
“Do you know what they’ll do if they catch us?”
“Send you back to Reed-Chase, I imagine,” replied Irene, after another telltale hesitation.
“You’re not a very good liar, are you?” said Lyssy.
“I suppose not.”
“Me neither. Can you help her?”
“I think so, but…” Her voice trailed off.
“But what?”
Irene forced herself to look directly into his eyes. “I’m not sure I’d be doing her much of a favor.”
3
Talk about your Odd Couple: compared to Pender and Mama Rose, Oscar Madison and Felix Unger were practically clones. But lying next to each other during the course of that endless night, the former G-man and the biker mama discovered they had something in common after all.
“I lost my wife a little over six months ago,” confided Pender, after learning about Carson’s death.
“How long were you together?”
“Not even a year—she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer not long after we were married.”
“Over twenty years for me and Carson,” said Mama Rose. “I don’t even remember what it felt like to be single.”
“I know it sounds stupid, but I sort of envy you,” Pender mused.
“What do you mean?”
“I’d have sold my soul for twenty more years with Dawson—no matter how it had to end.”
“Did she…?” Her voice trailed off.
“Did she what, suffer?”
“Skip it—I guess it was my turn to say something stupid.”
“A hideous couple of months—but the end was peaceful.”
“What’s his name, Lyssy, promised me Carson never even knew what hit him.”
“Thoughtful little bastard, ain’t he?”
“That’s the weirdest part,” said Mama Rose. “How careful and gentle he tied us up, like he was a fucking nurse or something.”
“Makes sense when you think about it,” Pender told her. “The hospital is all he knows—who else does he have as role models?”
Time ticked by slowly—but not as slowly as it had before they were able to converse.
“How long do you think it’ll be before somebody finds us?” Pender asked eventually.
“Depends. Normally nobody would bother me and Car until late afternoon—they know we usually sleep in. But he would have missed an important meeting last night, so somebody might be by to check about that. Then there’s L’il T., the guy who got shot on the patio? His wife Dennie is like twelve months pregnant; this’d probably be the first place she’d come looking for him.”
While Pender was thinking that over, his stomach gave out with a long, loud grumble. “Quiet down there,” he said.
“How long since you ate last?”
“Lunch yesterday—I had a chili dog,” said Pender—then he chuckled.
“What’s so funny?”
He told her Mick’s story about the Jersey shore diner: EAT HERE AND GET GAS. “How about you?”
“I had dinner in town with Dennie, and a piece of mud pie at the coffee shop before you guys showed up.” Then, after another minute or so: “Shit.”
“What?”
“I wasn’t hungry until we started talking about food—now it’s all I can think about.”
“Let’s change the subject—what’s your favorite song?”
“It’s kind of obscure—you probably never heard of it,” said Mama Rose.
Pender grinned. “Care to make a little wager about that?”
4
After driving hundreds of miles, when as far as he could remember he’d never driven a car before, navigating via the onboard GPS, and solving a zillion other quotidian mysteries along the way—the self-serve gas pump, the coin-operated vending machine, the hot-air restroom hand-dryer—Lyssy was not about to be deterred by the misgivings of one stubborn psychiatrist.
“Just fix her.”
“And if I refuse?” she asked stiffly.
She was all but daring him to frighten her into cooperating. Same as Mama Rose. He remembered the knife on the bed, the terrifying flashback—and suddenly he realized something he must have known all along, deep down: to frighten somebody else, you first have to frighten yourself. You have to plumb the depth of your own fear and haul up the worst horror lurking down there. “Then you get what everybody gets when they cross me,” he said, as harshly as he could manage.
“And what would that be, Lyssy?”
“Kinched. You get Kinched.”
Lyssy was half-right, anyway. In the end, it wasn’t his threat, but rather the fear she read in his eyes that persuaded Irene. He looked like a little kid who’d just dropped the F-bomb on his parents—proud and apprehensive in equal measure. Look what a big boy I am; please don’t punish me.
Irene also knew enough about Maxwell et al., however much the system had evolved (or was it devolved?) over the last few years, to understand that it was to her advantage, and Lily’s as well, to do all she could to reinforce Maxwell’s relatively benign original personality.
Besides, the psychiatrist didn’t really believe what she’d said about not doing Lily a favor by bringing her back to consciousness. Irene had seen this unnamed autistic alter only once before, when Lily was first brought to her for a consult by a pediatric psychiatrist who was sharp enough to recognize that autism didn’t just pop up full-blown at the age of four, however textbook the symptoms.
It hadn’t taken Irene long to diagnose dissociative identity disorder, especially as Lily’s parents had recently been convicted of child abuse in its ugliest form—the standard marker for this particular dissociative disorder. And happily, the symptoms of autism had disappeared, along with the unnamed alter, as soon as Irene put the girl under hypnosis.
But now Lily was once again in her own little world. True, it was a world without fear or pain, but also without joy or understanding or volition, and Irene could no more have left her there than she could have lobotomized her.
Still, hypnotizing an autie was a tricky proposition. Irene turned to Lyssy. “Help me bring her downstairs to my office.”
Gone like magic was the pasted-on scowl. “Great, great, thanks. C’mon there, honey, let’s take another little walk.” He wrested the coin sorter from the girl’s grasp and lured her out of the bedroom as though she were a donkey, and the toy a carrot.
Irene preceded them into the office and quickly cleared her desktop, on which she placed a small wooden metronome from her drawer. “Pull that chair over to the desk,” she told Lyssy. “Now sit her down…good, good.”
“I just want to tell you, I’m sorry about, you know, threatening you before, I just—”
Irene cut him off. “Never mind that now—let’s focus on the job at hand, shall we? I want you to take the coin sorter away from her now…. It’s okay, dear, it’s okay, look here, look what Dr. Irene has for you.” She turned on the metronome, set it to the highest speed—tick tick tick tick. The girl ceased her squirming and mewling and leaned forward, focusing her attention, her very being, on this new and fascinating object. She wasn’t just watching it, she was becoming it. Breathing rapidly, eyeballs following the rapid motion, pulse racing, tick tick tick tick.
Irene waited a full minute, then slowly began lowering the metronome’s speed, one setting at a time, and with it the girl’s breathing. And as her breath rate slowed, her heart rate slowed…and slowed…and slowed….
“Lily?” whispered Irene. “It’s all right, dear, everything’s okay, you’re safe now, it’s safe to open your—There you go, that’s my girl. Hello, Lily.”
5
“Anybody home?” a female voice called from the living room. “Carson, Mama Rose?”
Lying on their backs, their hands cuffed through the headboard railing, Mama Rose and Pender exchanged complex, profoundly meaningful glances. We made it! was the primary message in both sets of eyes, but a sincere acknowledgement of the ordeal they’d gone through together was also in there someplace, along with a mutual recognition that their lives were about to get seriously complicated again. “Back here, Dennie!”
Footsteps; then a mahogany-skinned, pie-faced, burstingly pregnant woman, shirtless under faded overalls, appeared in the doorway, staring in horror from the denim-and-tie-dyed-clad body on the floor to the mummified couple on the bed. “Mama Rose? Mama Rose, what happened?”
She doesn’t know, thought the older woman. Doesn’t know L’il T.’s dead. Doesn’t know she’s a widow, doesn’t know that kid inside her is never gonna see his father. “Cut us loose, then I’ll tell you all about it,” she croaked through dry, cracked lips.
It wasn’t quite as simple as it sounded. Big-bellied and awkward, Dennie had to kneel and go through the corpse’s pockets until she found the universal cuff-key in the watch pocket of his jeans, then climb onto the bed and lean across Pender to reach their handcuffs, her swollen, blue-veined breasts swinging free inside the overalls. Ever a gentleman, and unable to avert his glance, he closed his eyes until she had finished.
It took several minutes for sensation, in the form of a thousand agonizing pinpricks, to return to their unused limbs. In the meantime, it was Dennie who cut through their linen mummy wrappings with a pair of shears, and Dennie who held a glass of water to Mama Rose’s parched lips, tenderly cradling the back of Rose’s head on what remained of her lap while the older woman sipped noisily, greedily, water dribbling down her chin.
Then Dennie eased Mama Rose to a sitting position, propped her up with the bed pillows, rolled up Mama Rose’s pant legs, and began massaging her calves with both hands to restore the circulation. “Now will somebody please tell me what’s going on around here?” she asked. “Teddy never came home last night and he’s not answering his cell phone.”
Rose glanced imploringly at Pender, who was busily chafing his crossed wrists with his tingling hands. He refused to acknowledge her unspoken plea: You tell her. She turned back to Dennie. “Worse than that,” she said.
“Is he…is he hurt?”
Tough-talking Mama Rose, who had always scorned euphemisms, found herself unable to get the d-word out. “Teddy’s…he’
s gone, Dennie. Carson, too—they’re both gone.”
Dennie kept working, head down, rubbing the life back into Rose’s legs. Mama Rose thought for a minute the pregnant girl hadn’t heard her, or had misunderstood; then the tears began plopping down onto her bare shins, and she remembered something Dennie had told her once: that Eskimo babies were taught to cry silently.
She longed to take the younger woman into her arms, but they weren’t working yet; she longed to cry for Carson—and for herself—but somehow the long night of horror had robbed her of tears. Which was just as well, because with a cry of surprise Dennie suddenly left off massaging Rose’s legs, and pressed her hands to her own great belly.
“What? What is it, honey?”
“I think I felt a contraction,” said the newly widowed mother-to-be.
“Well that fucking figures,” said Mama Rose. “That goddamn fucking well figures.”
6
Daylight crept reluctantly through the cracks in the blinds. Outside the darkened office, the small town stirred to life. A newspaper thudded onto a front porch; a neighbor’s dog barked to be let out; a crow on the back fence angrily greeted the new day.
Inside, despair. “It’s not fair,” Lily moaned, rocking back and forth on the couch, her knees drawn up to her chin and her hands clasped around her shins. “I never did anything wrong, I never hurt anybody.”
Lyssy sat next to her, his hand resting lightly on the nape of her neck. “We know, believe you me, we know,” he murmured soothingly. His posture and manner, his facial expressions, even that believe you me, were so eerily reminiscent of Al Corder that if Irene hadn’t known better, she’d have sworn there was a family resemblance.
The rocking slowed; Lily turned her tear-streaked face toward Irene, who was sitting in a side chair drawn up in front of the sofa. “What happens next, Dr. Irene? Where do we go from here?”
When She Was Bad: A Thriller Page 18
