Sweet Liar Read online

  It would be difficult to describe Maxie’s feelings at the time. She didn’t feel terror as she would have thought, only a dull heaviness, because she knew that her life was over. A man like Doc wouldn’t allow himself to be cuckolded without punishing the perpetrator, and she had no doubt that he knew about her and Michael. Maybe it’s what she deserved, she thought, because she had agreed to his rules and she had broken them.

  Silently, he stepped into the room behind her and locked the door with a big key that she hadn’t known existed. Wanting to be brave, wanting to face death with her shoulders high, Maxie turned to him, her back to the long, garishly lit cosmetic counter and faced him as he took a seat across from her

  “How did you find out?”

  With a little smile that made Maxie shiver, he shrugged, obviously not planning to enlighten her.

  He’s enjoying this, she thought, looking at him. My God! he’s enjoying this! Nothing else in life gives him pleasure or excitement, not sex, not food, not people who love him, nothing pleases him but this, knowing that he is going to kill someone—having absolute, life-and-death control over another human being.

  Knowing that now she had nothing more to lose, she said, “Why did you kill Joe?”

  Again Doc shrugged. “He was too clumsy and he was of no more use to me.”

  “As I am of no more use to you?”

  “Exactly.”

  Taking a deep breath, her hands behind her, she braced her body against the edge of the countertop and felt Joe’s blood drying on the front of her dress, stiff and loathsome. “You’d better get it over with. The girls’ act is almost finished and they’ll be in here soon.”

  Doc’s smile widened. “No they won’t.”

  It was as though the blood suddenly drained from Maxie’s body, and her first thought was of Michael. She didn’t know what Doc had planned, but she knew it involved Mike.

  Without thinking what she was doing, she lunged for Doc. He was little and scrawny, but he was strong, and with one backhand slap, he knocked her to the floor.

  Slowly, painfully sitting up, blood coming from the corner of her mouth, she looked up at him. “Kill me,” she whispered. “Do it now.”

  Still smiling, Doc said softly. “Not yet. You’re going to die more than once tonight.”

  At first Maxie thought he meant he was going to torture her, but in the next moment she heard the first blasts of the machine guns and the accompanying screams. In terror, at first uncomprehending, Maxie bolted for the door, meaning to go to Michael, but the door was locked. For a moment tearing at the knob, pulling frantically on it, she turned to Doc. “Give me the key,” she screamed, barely able to hear herself over the sound of the machine guns and the screams of both men and women coming from the ballroom floor. “If you have any mercy in you, give me the key!”

  But Doc just sat there with that enigmatic little smile, watching her, as though he were fascinated with her actions, as though he were a scientist observing a very interesting species of animal.

  The machine guns seemed to go on and on, while Maxie clawed at the door until she had no fingernails left, then crying great sobs that came from her belly, she slid to the floor, leaning back against the locked door.

  It was while she was crying, when she thought the pain in her would never be healed, that she saw what she at first thought was a mirage. On her right was Lila’s big, overstuffed bag that she carried with her, full of clothes and shoes and heaven knew what else. Sticking out of the corner was a tiny pearl-handled pistol. Once, Lila had said that she carried her own bodyguard with her and when the girls had laughed, Lila had shown them the little two-shot derringer.

  Maxie didn’t think about what she was doing. With a movement as lithe as a snake’s, she grabbed the derringer and, still sitting, spun around and fired. Years before, she’d made the mistake of aiming for a man’s head; this time she went for his belly, quickly firing two bullets into the exact center of him.

  She wasn’t a doctor and she couldn’t be sure, but from the way Doc’s legs collapsed under him, she thought she hit his spinal cord. While uttering a high-pitched scream, Doc slid from the chair, the .38 dropping from his hand to the floor.

  Maxie had no thought for Doc’s gun, for her only thought was to get to Michael. The guns had stopped now, but she still heard screams and moans of both pain and terror.

  While Doc looked up at her from the floor with eyes that blazed with pain and hatred, she rummaged in his pockets until she found the door key, then with shaking hands, she unlocked the door.

  Doc’s voice made her pause at the doorway, her back to him. “Please,” he whispered. “Please help me.”

  For a moment the humanity in her hesitated, but then she kept going, running toward the front of the club.

  She was not prepared for what she saw: blood and more blood. People with limbs missing. Lila was lying in a pool of her own blood, half of her face perfectly made up, the other half gone. Maxie saw three other girls, all three of them dead.

  Already the place was filling up with hospital people and Maxie knew that in order to get here this fast they had to have been notified before the massacre. Doc’s idea of compassion, she thought bitterly.

  Stepping around the people, ignoring the way her shoes stuck to the floor, she searched for Mike—and when she saw him a white-gowned man was pulling a blood-soaked sheet over Michael’s beloved face. Running toward him, the orderly caught her shoulders.

  “He’s dead and I don’t think you should look at him. They blew the bottom half of him away.”

  Twisting hysterically, Maxie tried to get away from the man and go to Mike.

  “Either you calm down or I give you something to knock you out,” the man said. “We have enough to deal with here without the uninjured going crazy on us.”

  For a moment Maxie could only stare at him. Uninjured? she thought. She was far from uninjured.

  “That’s better,” the man said when Maxie stopped struggling. “Why don’t you go home?”

  Go, she thought. That’s what she should do, because if she stayed here she wouldn’t be allowed to live another forty-eight hours. Right now she cared nothing for her own life, but she cared a great deal about Michael’s child that was growing in her womb.

  Mechanically, she turned away from the people writhing on the floor, looked away from all the blood and went back to the dressing room. Without so much as a glance at Doc lying on the floor, even though she could feel his eyes on her, she picked up her purse and the bag Half Hand Joe had given her. Somewhere inside her she knew that she should pick up Doc’s gun and kill him, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t put him out of his misery as one would do for a beloved pet; she wanted him to stay alive and suffer as she was going to suffer.

  Her eyes straight ahead, she walked out the back door of the club.

  36

  1991

  Samantha awoke as though coming out of a hypnotic trance, and suddenly she was no longer Maxie but herself and it was no longer 1928 but 1991. She had thought Mike was going to train someone to play Doc, but he hadn’t, for in front of her was the diminutive man himself—and he had that knowing little smile on his face. Everything had been played out as it had happened, nothing had changed with the passage of time.

  On that night in 1928, Maxie had shot Doc and severed his spinal cord, yet for two years he’d managed to keep secret the fact that he was crippled before he told the world that he had been hurt in a car accident. Maxie had taken away his mobility and she’d taken away all the money Half Hand, acting under Doc’s orders, had stolen from Scalpini. Doc, already eaten with hatred of Maxie for betraying him, made it his life’s quest to kill her and anyone who knew anything about her. In 1964, when he’d seen the photo of Maxie with her granddaughter, apparently happy, he’d nearly gone berserk. His mistake had been in calling her to threaten her. By the time he sent a killer for her, she had already left Louisville.

  By 1975, his days of power were on the wane so