When She Was Bad

6

No lights, mailbox stuffed, four days’ worth of rubber-banded Monterey Heralds on or around the porch steps-Pender might as well have put up a sign on his postage-stamp front lawn: Attention burglars: nobody home.

But burglaries were almost unheard of in The Last Home Town, as Pacific Grove officially styled itself-its other nickname was Butterfly Town, USA, for the monarchs that wintered over every year-and the annual murder rate hovered just above zero.

So Pender’s jet-black ’64 Barracuda was still in the short, weedy driveway when he hauled his bags up the mossy brick walk (he and Irene had taken the shuttle bus from San Jose to Monterey, then shared a cab from there) and his new flat-screen plasma TV was still on the wall of the front room-other than that, there wasn’t much worth stealing. (The kind of music Pender enjoyed sounded best in a car, second best on a boom box, the cheaper the better.)

Built in 1905, the cottage originally contained only three small rooms-parlor, bedroom, kitchen-lined up shotgun-style, front to back; a tiny bathroom with toilet, pedestal sink, and stall shower had been added on off the kitchen. Pender carried his luggage through the front room with its secondhand velour love seat, non-matching Naugahyde recliner, and hooked oval rug, dropped it off in the bedroom, where a queen-size bed took up most of the floor-space, grabbed a beer in the kitchen, and carried it out into the backyard.

Too small to qualify as postage stamp, Pender’s tiny yard was overhung and walled in on three sides by a gnarled and ancient fig tree, a spreading giant that also supported Pender’s only outdoor furniture, a low-slung, dispirited-looking mesh hammock. Lying in it, his big ass barely clearing the ground, Pender was still steaming about the disrespect with which the Portland police had treated him the night before. As a federal agent, he’d grown used to being regarded with suspicion or resentment by the local constabulary-but not with contempt, never with contempt.

And never mind that he and Irene had probably saved the Corder girl from death by suffocation-whatever happened to plain old professional courtesy? Even after he told the officer in charge who he was, all the supercilious sonofabitch had to say was that in that case, he should have known better than to even enter a possibly dangerous crime scene on his own, not to mention dragging a civilian through it-and are you sure you didn’t touch anything in the living room, Pops?

As for getting one of the Nike-town cops to listen to his theory that the fugitives might well head for “Lilith’s” old stomping ground in Shasta County, CA, lots of luck. Once they’d taken his statement, it was thanks for your cooperation and don’t let the door hit your fat ass on the way out. Even if you’re the world’s leading expert on Ulysses Maxwell et al. Even if you know that Maxwell had been locked up for the last three years, and isolated up on Scorned Ridge with his now-deceased stepmother/lover/accomplice for a dozen or so years before that. And that the only friend he’d made at the Juvie Ranch was also three years dead. So who the hell was he going to run to?

But according to Irene Cogan, the world’s leading expert on Lily DeVries et al., Lilith had almost certainly been running the show for her syndicate last night-Lily, the original personality, would have turned into a basket case at the first sign of trouble. And what was it she’d said about Lilith the night before last? Something about Lilith serving as a protector alter?

King-hell of a job she’d done too, thought Pender, if she’d managed to keep both herself and Alison alive through last night’s massacre. And Lilith the protector did have someone to run to-those bikers.

The more Pender thought about it, the more sense his theory made. But how to act on it? He’d just about decided to call the Shasta County Sheriff’s Department and lay it out for one of their homicide detectives when he realized that except for his own eyeballing of a redheaded, middle-aged biker mama, he had almost no information about the bikers to pass on to said homicide dick.

That was because Mick MacAlister, the brilliant, if perpetually half-stoned skip-tracer who’d set up the rendezvous in Weed, operated on a strictly need-to-know basis, and as far as MacAlister was concerned, all Pender and Irene had needed to know was the location of the coffee shop and what time to be there. “Trade secret,” MacAlister would say if pressed for details-now Pender decided it was time to pay MacAlister a visit and persuade him to cut loose with a few of his trade secrets.

Assuming he could fight his way up from the hammock, of course.