Vengeance to the Max (39 page)

God hadn’t been doing so hot in a while and certainly not for her. She opened her mouth, snapped it shut, then open again.

Bud still held his hands stiff and away from his sides, like a scarecrow. “You look like a fish, Max. Get whatever it is off your chest, and I’ll be on my way.”

It started with a splutter, as if the words were forced from her lips. “T ... take the gun with you.”

He raised one brow and gave her a delighted smile. Bending at the knees to search the concrete floor with his hand, his gaze never left her face. “What if I turn the gun back on you, Max?”

She trained hers on him once more. “Then it’s self-defense when I shoot you. A whole new ballgame.”

His fingers found the metal barrel. “I can still pin Dennis’s death on you. I can still bring you down another day.”

She didn’t refute it. She repeated Cameron’s words. “Karma. What goes around, comes around. In the end, you’ll get yours.”

He rose, keeping the gun down. “I doubt it. You’ve foiled me again, Max. We’ll live to play the game tomorrow.”

“Go,” she whispered, the temptation to shoot gnawing at her.

“I’d salute you, Max, but you might think I’m pointing the gun at you and shoot.”

“Get out,” she told him. “While you still can.”

She turned slightly, reached back for the flashlight and pointed it at the floor beside him. Bud followed the trail of it amongst the dead machinery. Max’s heart pounded with the need to run after him, to end it no matter what the cost, even if it meant her soul.

When he was at the edge of the entryway, she clicked the light off and stood frozen in the darkness. He turned, silhouetted in the light of the moon, for a last lingering look.

Then he was gone.

Christ, she was a fucking idiot. The flashlight flew from her fingers as she ran for the door. Tripping without falling, she slammed her knee into metal, forcing herself on despite the pain.

A shot rang out before she made it to the doorway.

Without caution, she flung herself out into the night.

Bud Traynor lay on the ground beside the Rolls, a dark stain on the concrete beneath him. Cameron’s gun rested in his hand.

Bootman stood beside him, the gun he’d used to kill Bud now aimed at Max’s forehead.

It was too damn anti-climatic, even with a gun in her face.

Bud Traynor was dead. His eyes wide and staring, blood seeped into the cracks in the concrete beneath him. She didn’t need to touch him to know. She didn’t need to hold a mirror in front of his face to make sure he wasn’t breathing.

Dead.

Max stared at Cameron’s killer, at both his killers, and the gun. She was less than five feet from them, and her world view narrowed to those five feet.

She should have been scared, but numbness dulled everything beyond her physical senses.

The scent of coppery blood at Bootman’s feet and old blood on his hands. An acrid odor, the spent bullet. The stench of unwashed clothes, an unwashed body, decaying leather boots, Cameron’s blood still marking them. Moonlight or streetlight gleamed on Bootman’s now bald head and on the barrel of his gun. His breath rattled in his throat as if he’d smoked too many cigarettes or he was dying of cancer. Two years of dissipation had destroyed his angel’s face. A rock dug into her soul, bitterness swelled her tongue, the inside of her cheek stung with her bite, and the gun she held two-handed, pointed at Bootman’s chest, weighted her down like lead.

She thought of his cold, barren eyes when he’d shot Cameron in the head, the rabid glitter of them as he’d dragged her from that last glimpse of her husband.

“Who do you think will be faster?” Her voice not much above a whisper, it carried in the night’s stillness.

His lids twitched. Nothing cold there now, his eyes filled with the hot spark of fear. A torn pocket hung from his once navy jacket. Specks of white spittle clung to the corners of his mouth. His nostrils flared with each harsh breath. His hand trembled, and the gun shook. They both knew who would be faster.

“No matter what you do right now, you’re a dead man.”

Dilated pupils obliterated any trace of his irises. Without his voice, he looked neither as big nor as tall as she remembered. Nor as frightening. The only thing remaining of the man who’d shot her husband were his boots. Those bore the rankness of putrefying flesh, the leather cracked, the soles worn to scraps.

“The cops will find you soon.” She widened her stance, bent her knees an equal amount, readied for his move. “In your apartment, I think.” Something flickered in Dennis Martin’s eyes. She went on. “You hate that place, don’t you? The cracks in the walls, the overhead light that’s merely a bulb hanging from the ceiling.” She saw it all, as if images jumped from his head to hers, as if someone had turned on that overhead bulb inside her head. “The walls are the color of dirt. The carpet stinks like cat piss.”

His head tilted like a dog’s, first this way, then that. She saw his life as if she stood inside his head, in the very room where he spent his days and his nights.

“But that’s not the worst of it. No, the worst is that damn green couch, the one you sleep on, the one that smells like the old guy who died on it before you moved in.” She let her voice drop intimately. “Can’t get the stench out, can you, no matter what you do? The puke, bowels letting loose. Wish Dickie hadn’t told you all the details with such relish, huh?”

“That’s bullshit.” Flecks of spittle flew with his words. His eyes darted in fear.

She lowered her voice, both the pitch and the level, let it surround him, mingle with his dread, then she set a torch to it. “When you hear the cops coming for you, you’ll go out that window, the one at the foot of the sofa, the one the old guy used to spit his tobacco through. Out you go, only you can’t go down, can you, Dennis?” she said with a purr. “No, you can’t go down because they’re at the bottom of the fire escape, too. So it’s up, up, to the roof.”

“What the hell is going on with you, bitch?” His voice quavered, and the gun shimmied. He’d lost his power long ago.

She stomped his nerves the way he’d stomped her ribs, beneath the spiked heel of her shoe. “The roof, Dennis. You run and you run, but ... where the hell are you gonna go? Jump, it’s your only chance. You think it’s not so far to the next building. You think you can fly, and if you don’t quite make it, you’ll surely be able to grab the ledge and pull yourself up. Yeah, Dennis, think you can do it. You have it all planned as your escape route.” She paused, licked her lips, savored the panic quaking through his thin body made frail by drugs and lack of conscience. “But guess what?”

His eyes wide like the saucer of tuna she fed Buzzard, Dennis Martin couldn’t move if his life depended on it.

She let him hear it all, sealed his fate with words. “Guess what, Dennis. You’re not going make it. You’ll jump and...” She let one hand fall from the grip of the gun. “
Splat
. It’ll take them weeks to clean you off the concrete.”

“You’re a sick fuck.” He chomped his bottom lip to hide the tremble.

She smiled, and it was the closest she’d come to being like Bud Traynor. “
Sssssplattttt
.” He jerked at the sound. “Don’t worry, Dennis,” she whispered like a night creature. “I don’t think it’s going to hurt much.”

Max watched him run. He took the fence with a two-handed climb, disappearing beyond the rim of light.

Max fell to her knees with her face in her hands.

* * * * *

Max managed to cross the freeway, then her limbs shook so badly, she knew she’d have an accident if she didn’t pull over. Couldn’t crash Sutter’s SUV. She parked beneath the glow of a street lamp, wedging the car between an old Maverick and a sparkling Beemer.

Her eyes burned. Oil stained her skirt and jacket. Her tights were torn at the knees. Sweat and blood reeked on her hands. She’d touched Bud, had to make sure he was dead, because it didn’t seem possible. Too fast, too other-worldly. Karma. She’d left Cameron’s gun in his hand. Now she couldn’t get the stink of his bodily fluids out of her nostrils or off her fingers. She wiped them down her ruined skirt.

“You’re okay, Max.”

She almost cried with the feel of Cameron’s voice inside her, his peppermint scent settling over her.

“You feel lost now. But you’ll find yourself again, I promise.”

Lost, yes, and somehow diminished with the knowledge that Cameron’s death, too, had been part of a plan. Bud’s plan. It wasn’t random. Without randomness, her gut screamed she could have done something to stop it.

“What could you have done?”

She didn’t know. The road beside her was devoid of moving cars, of people and noise and life. Emptiness echoed inside her.

“Only
I
could have stopped it.”

“How?” she asked without voice.

“By leaving it alone, like you said, by walking out of that interview with him and never giving him a second thought.”

“But he would have gotten away with Cordelia’s murder.” And all the others he’d committed or manipulated since.

“Karma,” Cameron whispered.

If Cameron hadn’t pursued Bud, he wouldn’t have been the man she loved.

“I sealed my own fate.” Then a heartbeat later, “You have to seal yours.”

The cell phone chirped on the seat beside her. She couldn’t remember leaving it there nor turning it on. Maybe she hadn’t. Maybe ghosts were capable of far more than she understood. Sutter would know about that; she had the gift.

Picking it up, she punched a button, murmured
hello
as a question.

A harsh release of breath she recognized as Witt, a crackle of airwaves between them, then his voice. “You’re alive.”

“Yes.”

“Traynor?”

“He’s dead.” Then she answered what he hadn’t asked. “I didn’t kill him. I didn’t have to use your gun.”

He waited for more, accompanied by the gentle buzz of cellular, the rumble of an engine, and the faint tinkle of music. He had the radio on. He was driving.

“You’re not with Ladybird.”

“Didn’t need me anymore.”

Ladybird hadn’t needed him in the first place. “Where are you going?”

“Got some business,” he said, his usual enigmatic self.

“How long will you be gone?” She imagined a week, a month, a year, and ached.

“Not long. A few hours. Meet me at home later.”

Home. His place. Relief clogged her throat. She didn’t ask what his business was, giving him the trust she’d asked from him earlier. “His name is Dennis Martin.” She expected Witt to know she spoke of Bootman. “He killed Bud. No one knows I was there but him.” The shot hadn’t brought the cops. “He’s not dead, Witt. I didn’t kill him either. He lives in the city, in the Tenderloin.” She gave him the address. Her vision, or whatever the hell it had been, told her that as well. She swallowed, eyeballs aching, nose stinging. “He’ll be in apartment 452.”

Silence, then, “Been there all along, hasn’t he?”

“Yes.” The connection, the meaning of the number.

Heaviness marred his voice. “I’m sorry.”

“There’s no way you could have known.”

“I’ll take care of him.”

She didn’t ask how, moved on from that promise the way she had to move on with her life. She’d lived in the past far too long.

“Come home soon.” The rightness of the word, the enormity of it, rushed through her. “I’ll be there in time to see the lawyer tomorrow.” The cops wouldn’t know she’d been with Traynor, but there was Scarface and Tattoo and nothing to prove her innocence unless ... “Cameron’s gun is with Bud. It should be a match for the other two murders. If the cops know to try to match markings.”

“They will.” He’d make sure.

A car came up on her, slowed, a cop car with an eagle eye spotting her in the SUV. “I have to go. A cop’s looking me over.”

“Leave the phone on.”