“Don’t fucking touch me.” Christ, he was insane. He was in some strange way confessing to murder and attempting seduction at the same time.
“Come into the back with me, Max.” To the restrooms where he could lock the door and have his way with her. They both thought of Tiffany, she knew by the glitter in his gaze. Tiffany, the exhibitionist, the one who thrived on the fantasies in other peoples’ minds. “Come outside to my car.”
She wasn’t seduced, the furthest thing from it, but she saw the opportunity and took it with both hands. “First tell me why you did it. Why you married Evelyn instead of Madeline. What you did to Cordelia and Cameron.”
“How many times have I said I’d tell you everything you want to know, Max?” He gave her a smile, a breath, in one beat of her heart. “All you have to do is come”—his tongue lingered over the word, dipped and softened—“with me first, then I’ll tell you whatever you want.” He licked his lips. “I’ll even tell you how you can save yourself, Max.”
“I already know how to do that.” She thought of the gun she no longer had. She thought of Witt’s gun in its shoulder holster. She thought of the ways she could get to it, the things it would do to Bud’s skull. “And I don’t need to know why. All I need to know is that you did.” She lifted the white napkin from her lap and laid it across her silverware.
“And do you know?”
She stood, smoothed her long jacket over her turtleneck, her pants. “I think I always have, but I didn’t understand what I was hearing.” She pivoted on her heel, turned back at the last minute. “That’s Evelyn in the picture in your den, isn’t it?”
She’d broken into his house looking for proof of his guilt and seen that picture. Bud had caught her. She was still searching for hard evidence. She’d hound him until she found it.
“Of course, Max. One should never tell a lie one doesn’t have to.” He’d told her it was his wife, and it was. He’d told her Wendy’s mother died in childbirth, and she assumed he’d been speaking of the woman in the picture. He was a master at twisting even what a person inferred from his words.
She should have realized the moment she saw Evelyn. There had been a familiarity in that face, though the picture she spoke of was almost thirty years old.
“I have a present for you before you go.”
If he expected her to sit again, forget it. “I don’t want any presents from you, Bud.”
“Oh, you’ll want this.” He reached inside his lapel, pulled out a small cassette tape, and laid it on the table.
Her heart beat faster, but she didn’t reach out to take it. “What’s that?” She was afraid she already knew.
“I played it for you once over the phone, Max.” He lowered his voice. “And I’ve come to the sound of it several times since. Your voice, Max, the sound of you taking a man’s cock in your mouth, well, it does something to me.”
Oh God. It was her. With Witt. In the back seat of a car. She hadn’t meant to take it that far, hadn’t meant to get carried away. It was supposed to have been for show. But she’d undone Witt’s pants and taken him in her mouth and forced him to come for her.
And Bud Traynor had been taping the whole thing. When she’d learned that, she’s almost thrown up. Then she’d tried to forget. Bud brought her shame home again.
“It’s yours. I know you’ve worried how I’ll use it against you. But I never planned to. Now I’m giving it back.”
She looked down at the monstrous black thing. “How do I know that is the only copy?”
“Because I’m telling you. I promised I’d never lie to you.”
He had promised. She knew Bud well enough to know that he would pride himself on keeping that promise while sticking it to her in a million other ways.
She took it, popped it in her pocket, though the damn thing felt hot enough to burn a hole. “Why give it back now?”
He blinked his black reptilian eyes. “My final gift to you.”
She’d thought he’d try to use the tape against her. Instead, he was cleaning house. Cleaning up his mess. Sealing her fate.
She wouldn’t go down so easily.
Bud raised his glass to her. “Till we meet again, Max.”
When they met again, she’d kill him.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Max sat in rush hour traffic on Highway 101, the heater blasting her toes. Unassociated with the fact that it was late fall, two days before Thanksgiving, and already dark though only shortly after five o’clock, a chill invaded her feet. Despite the burst of hot air, the virus climbed her legs to settle around her internal organs.
The guy in the car to her right had his index finger buried deep in his nose. A rear-ender right now would do damage to his brain. The car to her left had illegal tinting on the side windows and a sound system pounding against her chest despite the two layers of tempered glass and freeway noise between them.