The Girls He Adored

28

“Excuse me?” Irene spoke for the first time in nearly an hour. “We're getting low on gas.”

They were still on Highway 1, just south of Big Sur. Barbara was huddled in the far left corner of the backseat, her skin crawling, trying vainly to shrink away from the tip of her abductor's wickedlooking boning knife, with its outcurved, razor-sharp, nine-inch blade. Max had pulled up the hem of Barbara's T-shirt and was idly tracing a figure eight along her love-handle. He could feel Kinch yearning for control.

You'll get your turn, Max told him. Don't you always get your turn?

He still hadn't decided what to do with Barbara yet. He couldn't just let her go, but if he were to let Kinch hack her, Irene might find it impossible to warm up to Max. It seemed unfair somehow-still, he'd find a way to work around it. “What's the gauge show?” he asked Irene.

“About an eighth of a tank.”

“How much did we have when we left?”

“I didn't look.”

“That was a mistake,” he said quietly. “Sins of omission are punished the same as sins of commission. Are we clear?”

“We're clear.” She echoed his own words back to him, to calm him. “What do you want me to do?”

Maxwell looked out the window, saw the gated entrance to the Henry Miller Library on the left. He closed his eyes and activated Mose's extraordinary memory. “The next gas station is down in Lucia. Pull over and pump it yourself. Use this credit card.” He reached into the carpet bag he'd taken from Terry and Aletha's house and handed her Terry's Visa card-he'd wanted to leave a trail pointing south anyway.

The stretch of coast highway between Big Sur and Lucia is as spectacularly scenic as any road on earth. The rocky cliffs and crags, the crashing surf hundreds of feet below, the blue slate Pacific stretching endlessly to a wide, curved horizon, the gold and silver play of light on the water-no one in the Volvo paid the slightest attention to any of it. Irene drove grimly, both hands on the wheel; Barbara cowered against the left rear door, trembling, eyes shut tight; Max was lost in plans and contingencies.

As they crossed Big Creek Bridge, with four miles to go until Lucia, Max leaned forward and spoke confidentially into Irene's ear, just loud enough for Barbara to overhear. “Do you know what Paula Ann said when she died?”

Irene had to force her mind through a reasoning process-she could no longer respond unself-consciously. So: what exactly had been asked? What would be an appropriate response, one that would neither encourage nor anger him?

“No, I don't.”

“She said ‘Oh.’ Just ‘Oh.’ Isn't that pitiful? I mean, of all the things she might have said.”

“She was probably in shock.”

“Well, my goodness, can you blame her?”

Facetious, thought Irene-he was bantering. Did he want her to banter back? She decided to take him literally instead-less danger of setting him off. “No, I can't.”

“Me either. I'll expect better of Barbara if I have to kill her, though. I mean, if you try anything the least bit funny at the gas station. You know, try to signal anybody, or leave a note.”

“I won't-I promise.”

“Keep in mind, Irene, I don't have anything to lose. If they catch me, they're already going to execute me for Paula Ann. So what are they going to do, give me two lethal injections? One in each arm? I think not.”

Max sat back, leaned even closer to Barbara. “Just in case Irene does anything stupid, you might want to get some last words ready. And try to do better than ‘Oh.’ ”

He stroked her side with the flat of the blade. “You could try something funny-you know, like, ‘You can't say I don't have any guts.’ Or something nice and chilling. You know what my favorite last words are?”

Neither woman responded.

“They were from a girl who was dragged out of her tent by a grizzly in Yellowstone twenty years ago. It was in the paper-I was fascinated by that sort of thing when I was a kid. Her last words, as the grizzly's dragging her off into the bushes to eat her, she calls out, ‘I'm dead.’ Not ‘Help,’ or ‘Ouch,’ just, ‘I'm dead.’ Has quite a ring to it, don't you think?”

Again, no response. He jabbed Barbara with the tip of the knife, not quite hard enough to break the skin. “I said: quite a ring to it, don't you think, Babs?”

“Quite a ring,” Irene answered hurriedly for her friend, who appeared to have gone into shock.

The pit stop passed without incident. Maxwell lay across the backseat with his head in Barbara's lap and the knife between her legs. Irene used Terry's credit card at the pump. No bells or whistles went off, but Max knew a record of the purchase would show up on the Visa computer.

But he still needed one more dot for the cops to connect, one more clue that would point them south, away from Scorned Ridge. When Barbara started blubbering again as they pulled away from the gas station, he decided to kill two birds with one stone. Leave the superfluous brunette behind. Someplace where she would be found-but not right away.

Max tried to think back. Christopher, then Ish, had been driving, so Max had only a vague memory of the route. He closed his eyes and brought Mose up to co-consciousness. Together they studied the roadside as Mose recalled it from traveling north with Paula Ann Wisniewski a month ago.

The turn-off. What marked it?

Sign: a flame with a bar through it.

But we're approaching from the opposite direction. What's north of the turn-off?

Mose narrated the scene for Max. Girl in the front seat crying. Ish driving. To the highway. Wait for a white van to pass, pull out behind it. Landslide cleared to the right-bulldozer tracks. Steep chalk cliff on the right. Caltrans porta-potty across the road on the left.

Good man, Mose. That'll do. Max opened his eyes, leaned forward. “When you see a yellow porta-potty on the right, Irene, slow down and get ready to hang a left across the highway.”