“Yeah, your ex was a real barrel of laughs. I lost two years, sis, you lost eight.”
“I’m not saying it was all Ted’s fault. My career—”
“It wasn’t like he didn’t know that going in.”
Beth stopped thumbing the BlackBerry. “Get some shuteye, you’re going to need all your energy for Mom.”
CHAPTER 20
MACE WAS FLYING along the winding roads leading out to horse country where old money melded, often uneasily, with new. She was going to see her mother but was now lost. Backtracking, she became even more turned around. Finally she stopped her bike at the end of a dirt path surrounded by trees. As she was trying to get her bearings she heard something move to her right. When she looked that way her heartbeat spiked. She reached for her gun, but of course she didn’t have one.
“How the hell did you get out?” she screamed.
Juanita the Cow was waddling toward her, Lily White Rose with the nineteen teeth right behind. Juanita carried a wide smile along with a Smith & Wesson .40, while Lily White had her gutting knife. Mace tried to start her bike, but the ignition wouldn’t catch. The two women started to run toward her.
“Shit!” Mace jumped off the bike and sprinted to the woods, but her boot caught in a bump in the dirt and she fell sprawling. By the time she turned over the women were standing over her.
“No big-sis bitch to help you now, baby,” cooed Juanita.
Rose said nothing. She just cocked her blade arm back, waiting for the word from the queen bee to plunge the serrated edge into Mace’s jugular.
“Do it, Lily White. Then we got to get the hell outta here.”
The blade flew down with a speed that Mace was not prepared for. It hit her square in the neck.
“No!”
Mace fell out of the bed. She felt warm blood spurt out of her nose as it smacked against the nightstand. She landed awkwardly on the carpeted floor and just lay there.
Blind Man, who’d been asleep on the floor next to where she’d fallen, licked her face and gave off little mournful noises in her ear.
“It’s okay, Blind Man, I’m okay.”
She finally rolled over, sat up, and backed her way into a corner. She squatted there in a defensive ball, her hands made into fists, her eyes looking out at the dark, her breath coming in waves of uneven heaves. Blind Man lay in front of her in the darkness, his thick reddish nose probably taking in each and every dimension of her scented fear.
An hour later she was still there, her spine digging into the dry-wall that her sister had painted a soothing blue especially for her return. Only she wasn’t thinking of Juanita or the gut-chick Rose. Her images were of herself, strung out on meth, huddled in a corner, her body going through shit it had never suffered before.
She’d never seen any of them, none of the bandits who’d snatched her out of an alley where she had set up an observation post on a drug distribution center in Six D. After they’d injected her multiple times with stuff for three days running she didn’t even know her own name. The next thing she vaguely remembered was climbing in and out of cars, holding a gun, going into stores and taking what didn’t belong to any of them.
Once, shots had been fired. She recalled pulling the trigger on her weapon by instinct, only no round had come out of the barrel; turned out her weapon wasn’t loaded and never had been. She was finally arrested holding an unloaded Sig and enough evidence to put her away for a long time while the rest of her “gang” conveniently had disappeared.
So the little sister of the D.C. police chief was busted for armed robbery while caked on meth. Some dubbed her the Patty Hearst of the twenty-first century. The arrest, the trial, the sentencing, the appeals galloped by in a blur. Mona had gone for the carotid, and the female legal threshing machine had come within one appeal of putting Mace away for twenty years at a max a thousand miles away from D.C. She’d argued forcefully that Mace had gone so deeply undercover that she had eventually succumbed to the dark side. Mace remembered sitting in the courtroom watching the vitriolspewing DA pointing her finger at her and pounding the counsel table