When She Was Bad

2

Okay boys, who’s next?

Ten days had passed since Lilith had spat out what was left of her attacker’s nose and issued her challenge to the circle of ogres in that reeking tent outside Sturgis, South Dakota. Nor would there have been any shortage of takers if a bosomy, leather-clad, middle-aged redhead carrying a double-barreled shotgun hadn’t stepped through the tent flap just then and announced that the party was over.

“Hey, c’mon, Mama Rose,” a squat, troll-faced biker had whined, as two of his buddies helped their mutilated colleague to his feet. “We bought her fair and square.” And so they had, from the biker who’d originally picked “Lilah” up in Seaside-to his surprise, three days of her constant sexual demands had been about as much as he could stand.

“I got rock salt in one barrel and triple-ought buckshot in the other,” the biker mama had replied calmly, cocking both hammers of the twelve-gauge side-by-side. “Fucking thing is, I’m not sure which is which.” Then, turning to Lilith: “Get your clothes on, honey.”

“Carson? How ’bout it, man?” Troll-face turned to a tall, lean man with a Viva Zapata mustache, a fringed buckskin jacket, and a leather cowboy hat, standing quietly in the shadows, leaning against a tent post. “You gonna let the cunt get away with that?”

Mama Rose had swung the shotgun around and trained both barrels on the speaker. “You best not be referring to me, Li’l T.,” she said.

“I meant the girl,” he’d replied quickly, without taking his eyes off Carson. “She bit Merv’s fucking nose off, man.”

Carson, who was obviously the alpha male of the pack, had narrowed his eyes; a hint of a smile lifted the toothpick in the corner of his mouth. “Good thing he don’t wear glasses.”

The Sturgis run had lasted another three days, during which the childless Mama Rose took the dazed, penniless amnesiac under her wing. She bought Lilith clothes to replace the tattered hooker outfit, taught her how to ride a motorcycle, loaned her a.22 pistol and taught her how to shoot it, and when it had become apparent that the girl had nowhere else to go, brought her back to Shasta County after the run.

To Lilith, saddle-sore after riding pillion for close to a thousand miles, the isolated, pink-sided ranch house on a scrubby hillside north of Redding had been a veritable paradise. For the next few days she’d done little but eat, sleep, take hot tubs, and sunbathe.

Then the biker known as Swervin’ Mervin had shown up at the front door in a surgical mask, demanding revenge on the girl who’d de-nosed him. Annoyed, but curious to see how it would all play out, as if Lilith were a fascinating new pet or toy, Carson invited him in, then called Lilith down from the attic dormer where she’d been napping.

“Man oh man, you just don’t know when to quit, do you?” Lilith had remarked dispassionately, upon seeing him. Then she’d produced Mama Rose’s Lady Beretta from behind her back and shot him in the face before he could rise from his chair.

They’d buried Swervin’ Mervin in the woods below the house that night. A Coleman lantern cast giant shadows between the pines. Mama Rose had recited the Twenty-third Psalm while Carson chunked dirt upon the uncovered corpse. When she got to the part about Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, Lilith broke into a triumphant grin.

“Who’s the meanest motherfucker in the valley now?” she’d asked the dead man, shining the lantern down onto his rude grave and laughing when she saw that his eyes were crossed comically above the bloodstained surgical mask, as if he were trying to sneak a peek at the neat little bullet hole that had blossomed between them.