When She Was Bad

3

The problem was, Mama Rose liked the girl, had liked her from the moment she’d first set eyes on her, snapping and snarling like a she-wolf in a trap as she faced down the bikers back in Sturgis. And having a surrogate teenage daughter around, especially one who was as tabula rasa as Lilith, had meant a lot to the childless older woman. She’d had fun during that first visit, showing Lilith the ropes, passing on a little hard-earned practical wisdom.

But Mama Rose was nobody’s fool: she had seen her walking hard-on of a husband growing more infatuated with the kid every passing day. Not that the prospect of Carson knocking off a quickie had her particularly worried-but what if it turned into a full-blown midlife crisis? He wouldn’t have been the first man to trade in a middle-aged wife for a firm young mistress.

So she’d quietly cut a deal with the private eye, MacAlister, put the reward money into her secret “Fuck You” account-a safe-deposit box at the Bank of America down in Redding-and told Carson that Lilith had gone off with some folks she’d met in Weed. And while Mama Rose had missed her company-the warmth of her greeting this morning had been genuine enough-she was more determined than ever that Lilith had to go.

But not to die-that seemed a little extreme to Mama Rose. In the absence of a compelling threat to herself or Carson (Lilith had already proved she could be trusted to keep her mouth shut about the chop shop and the little pink house, if only because Swervin’ Mervin was buried in the nearby woods, and both Carson and Mama Rose had witnessed his death) Mama Rose could not allow Carson to kill the girl.

As for Lilith’s boyfriend, though, Mama Rose had no objection to terminating him. They certainly couldn’t let him go: if captured, he could lead the cops straight back to them-the same cops who’d been trying in vain to find Carson for fifteen years. And never mind how sweet Lyssy had seemed to be during breakfast: judging by what she’d read about him in the newspapers, anybody who knocked off Ulysses Maxwell would be doing the world a favor.

Hence the tangled web Mama Rose had been weaving all afternoon. First she’d cut another deal with MacAlister in return for another contribution to the Mama Rose Fuck You fund. The private eye and the backup he’d insisted on bringing along were to rendezvous with Mama Rose at a coffee shop in Mt. Shasta, follow her to an undisclosed location out in the boondocks, lend her two pairs of handcuffs, and wait for her to return with a manacled pair of fugitives.

And the only difference between their relative expectations, Mama Rose’s and MacAlister’s, was that he assumed that both fugitives would be alive when she handed them over.