Willing to Die (Alvarez & Pescoli)

“I didn’t hear a car or anything, but . . . well, it was kinda crazy, but I thought I heard a woman’s voice whisper, ‘In a few hours, it’ll all be over,’ or something like that, but the wind was blowing and it rattles the shingles up here and I was kind of dreaming about my mom, and I thought it was like her voice . . . and then I woke up, so maybe I imagined it.”

Pescoli started to sag, but Santana held her up and he felt her straighten, find some inner strength.

“Oh!” Mays said, as if he’d suddenly remembered. “There was a little bit of plastic that I saw on the kitchen floor and I picked it up, didn’t want the maid to get suspicious. It’s right here. . . .” With an eye on Santana still holding the gun, he went cautiously over to his snarl of bedding and clothes, knocked over a beer bottle that rolled across the floor, then found, under what looked to be a wrapper for a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup, a small bit of yellow plastic: a one inch in diameter ring. Once again Santana felt his wife sag against him.

“It’s Tucker’s,” she said, her voice strained. “The ring that holds his set of plastic keys.”

Santana’s throat closed. He remembered his son hanging onto the ring, swinging the colorful keys in one tiny fist. Pointing to the ring, he rasped, “That was here?”

“Yeah, by the refrigerator, kind of poking out from underneath it.”

“But you didn’t see the baby?” Pescoli pressed.

He lifted his palms. “That’s all I know.”

“You need to tell the police,” Pescoli said. “I mean officially. I’m with the Pinewood Sheriff’s Department, Detective Pescoli, but you need to go down to the station and tell the officers there what you know.”

“Pescoli?” Mays repeated. He brightened a little. “Then you must know Lucky, huh? Like you’re his sister or something, right? Sister-in-law?”

Every muscle in Pescoli’s body froze. “Lucky? You know Luke Pescoli?”

“Sure,” he said.

Santana thought of Lucky cruising down the street on the ridge where the Long Museum took up so many blocks of prime real estate.

“How?” his wife asked, her voice low, her eyes zeroing in on the man still holding the small yellow ring. “How do you know Luke Pescoli?”

“Remember I told you I got with some locals to help sort out how I’m related to the Longs?” Garrett Mays said. “The guy who helped me? Who actually looked him up? That was Lucky.”

* * *

Would that kid never shut up?

Padgett picked him up and jostled him, changed his diaper and fed him again. God, what did he want? She was second-guessing herself and hated it because things hadn’t gone completely as planned. She was confined by the kid so she really couldn’t enjoy all of Pescoli’s agony. Why the hell hadn’t she been on TV, standing next to her cop-friends and melting down, weeping and begging for “whoever took my baby” to please return him unharmed. Padgett needed to hear the desperation in Regan Pescoli’s clogged throat, see the fear and absolute dread in her eyes.

But things had gone screwy from the moment she’d decided that Boxer and Stillwell needed to be taken out. They’d been useful players in what had been the start of it all. But again, she’d misplayed her hand, thinking that Pescoli would be miserable when she found out her sister had been murdered.

That, too, hadn’t worked out exactly as planned. Yes, the killings had brought Pescoli into play, which Padgett had wanted, but she’d thought the cop would be more affected by her sister’s death. Originally Padgett had thought about killing the sisters one by one, closing in on Regan Pescoli, but that plan had been too complicated and took too much time. She’d been too impatient, wanted to get right to the heart of the matter so that Pescoli would suffer the longest by not knowing where her baby son was, or if the kid were alive or dead. Was he suffering? In the country? Spirited away?

Even now Padgett smiled at the thought of the torment she’d brought to the woman. Served her right. But now things had changed and she felt a little undone. Unsafe. She needed to leave Grizzly Falls with the kid. Maybe stop in various places and send pictures of the baby crying in distress from all over the country. Freak Pescoli the fuck out. Twist the knife.

But she’d have to make a getaway.

And there was one more loose end before she left town:

Ivy Wilde.

The girl could ID her and that would be bad.

Ivy would have to join her boyfriend and Ronny Stillwell in the deep beyond.

But also she saw now that she was going to have to give up her fantasy of making Regan Pescoli twist in the wind for the rest of her life. It was too dangerous. If Padgett got caught they’d send her back to that mental hospital, or worse yet the women’s prison in Billings. That would be no good. And there was capital punishment in this state. God, they wouldn’t actually put her on death row, would they? A woman?

Of course they would.

Women’s rights, gender equality.

And the needle.