Generation of Liars (43 page)

“The last time I schemed anything
with you, the only thing that got heavier was my foot, from the addition of a
lead bullet.”

“By the way, how is your foot?” I
asked.

“It’s mostly healed. You were right
about that doctor being very good.” Suddenly remembering how much he hated me,
Rabbit’s eyes got cold again. “Vivienne says you called us here because you
have some sort of plan to get the money back. So what’s the plan?”

“Yeah,” Vivienne broke in, “Alice
is going to get the money back just like I told you.” Her fluttering eyelashes
targeted me. “Right, Alice?”

“Just like I said, we aren’t
leaving here without that money.”

“How?” Rabbit was demanding to
know. “I don’t see Motley willingly handing it over.”

“Yeah, Alice, how?” Vivienne’s eyes
were wide and fluttering, like those of a cartoon princess.

“Motley had no idea I had that
money on me when we showed up here to rescue you that night. He doesn’t know I
dropped the money inside the hole. As long as he hasn’t had a reason to go down
there since the day you escaped, there’s a good chance it’s still sitting at
the bottom.”

“You make it sound easy,” Rabbit
said. “Do I have to remind you that we are about to step foot into the house of
a man who freaking shot me once already?”

“I have a way of taking care of
him,” I said.

“How?” Rabbit demanded to know.

“Have you ever heard the expression
ace in the hole
?”

“Sure.”

“That’s the strategy. Ace in the
hole. Except we aren’t leaving this time until there is an
ass
in the
hole. An ass named Motley.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, Alice, back up,”
exclaimed Rabbit. “Your grand scheme is to somehow lure Motley down into the
hole in the wine cellar?”

“Yeah, and then once we trap him
down there I am going to call the U.S. State Department and tell them they can
come pick up their trash.”

“Pray tell, Alice, how the heck
exactly are we going to lure Motley down there?”

“It may need to be more of a
push
than a luring. I’m working it out in my head right now. What do you
remember about the hole, Rabbit? How deep is it? Would a fall into the hole
kill someone?”

“Well, to be honest, Alice, I try
not to remember my time in the hole very often. All I remember about the hole
is that I was terrified and bleeding and that it was dark. Very dark. I was
barely even conscious when Moonboots threw me down there. I had been shot,
remember? The only time I was really awake in the hole was when you guys came
to get me out of it.”

“You don’t remember anything about
it at all?”

“Just that it was dark, oh, and
creepy as hell. Did I already mention dark?

“I think dark got mentioned
already, yes.”

He was scoffing now. “It does not
sound like we have a plan at all. What we have is a terrible, half-baked scheme
that is sure to get us all killed.”

“No, just hear me out.” By now I
was pacing around and abstracting a mental image of the cellar in my mind.
“Once we get inside the house, you and I will be visible and Vivienne will be
the wildcard.”

“Visible?” Rabbit interrupted. “You
mean bait, don’t you?”

I didn’t answer him.  I
pointed at Vivienne. “Vivienne, you’re going to get into the wine cellar and
crawl down into that hole and hide out. Meanwhile, Rabbit and I are going to
lure Motley to the cellar. As soon as we get him within striking distance, that’s
when you lasso the rope over Motley.”

Vivienne pet the rope she was
wearing stretched over her shoulders. “What do I do once I have him?”

“You pull him down into the hole
with you and tie him up.”

Her henna eyes were bubbling as she
envisioned the scenario. “So, let’s assume the plan works up until that point.
Once I have Motley incapacitated, you want me to crawl back up with the money,
right?”

“Exactly,” I said.

A sigh flared from her nostrils.
“Why do I have to be the one who goes down the hole? I don’t like holes. I had
a bad experience with a hole once.”

“Can the prima donna shtick,
Vivienne. This is the plan.”

The blazing glow of a pair of
headlights cut across the length of Motley’s driveway.

“Look who just got home,” Rabbit
announced. His eyes followed the black Bentley zipping up the driveway. The
overhead door lifted and the car disappeared inside.

I was positioning myself to run.
“Let’s see if we can beat him inside.”

We ran through the yard and onto
the two-tier palazzo-style patio in the back of the house. The exterior door
led into the kitchen. Rabbit pulled a key ring from his pocket. “One of the
perks of being Motley’s favorite all this time.” He unlocked the door and we
rushed inside. We heard the sound of the garage door creak open and the sound
of Motley kicking off his shoes in the entryway.

“Faster,” I whispered. The three of
us began jogging and made our way down the familiar hallway that led to the
wine cellar. I carefully creaked open the door to the dimly lit cavern and we
piled inside.

“It looks like the place has been
cleaned up,” Rabbit said, taking in the view. I observed that the floors had
been mopped clean of sticky wine and there were no signs of shattered glass.

“Let’s hope the money is still in
that hole,” I said.

“Here’s to finding out,” Vivienne
said. She rushed to the entrance to the hole and slid the grate carefully out
of place without making a sound, and the way she did it was nothing short of
acrobatic. She leveled one foot into the hole and then descended down using the
rope and disappeared. I looked at Rabbit, who was nervously tapping his foot,
and I held my breath while we waited for her to call up and report her findings
from the hole.

I let a moment pass before calling
to her. “Viv? You find anything down there?” There was no response. I turned to
Rabbit. My eyes were round as planets.

“Vivienne?” he echoed my call. The
nerves were obvious. His exploding irises let me know that if any harm had come
to Vivienne, he would kill me.

“Jackpot!” she cried out from the
hole.

I looked over at Rabbit and noticed
that a smile had managed to crack his stiff lips for the first time that night.

“Now we just have to wait for
Motley to show up,” I said.

“I doubt he is just going to get an
urge to come down and grab a bottle of wine,” Rabbit conjectured. “He could
already be asleep for all we know.”

Vivienne banged on the limestone
wall inside the hole. “Maybe we should do something to get his attention.”

“Good idea.” I set my eyes on
Rabbit.

“What?” he asked, knowing me well
enough to deduct that an evil thought was brewing in my mind.

I launched both hands at his thin
chest, shoving him into one of the wine racks. His body fell backwards and
knocked over several bottles, sending cascading splinters of glass shattering
all around us.

He quickly straightened himself up
while crunching glass beneath his feet. “What the hell did you do that for? You
need to check your anger issues, Alice.”

“I don’t have anger issues. I just
needed to make a little raucous so that Motley hears us and comes down to
check.” A sudden rush of footsteps could be heard patting down the grain of the
hallway. “Looks like it worked.”

The door to the wine cellar flew
open, pouring in light from the hallway. In a millisecond, a large, billowy
figure dissipated the light into scattered beams against the surface of the
shiny bottles in the room.

It was Motley. He was pissed.

He was standing in the doorway with
his feet agape and his arms balled into fists at his side. His irises had an
unhealthy butterscotch tinge floating in them. Before I knew it, he was a bull
on parade, charging towards me.

Chapter Forty-five: The Story of Pat Leor

“H
EY
THERE,
OLD friend
.” It was fun to taunt him. I positioned myself with my
legs apart and my shoulders out so that my body concealed the open hole behind
me. I was counting on his anger to blindside him.

“You!” Motley gave an animalistic
snarl and hastened towards me with his arms out in preparation to choke me. He
smashed into me with all of his weight and we crashed onto the floor together.
He rolled on top of me and spread his hands over my throat with his thumbs
pressuring my air pipe. I kicked my knee into his spine as I attempted to
loosen him off. I completely underestimated his raw, rabid strength.

“Ra-bb-it,” I gurgled through my
constricted throat, “help me!”

Rabbit got behind Motley and tugged
at his arms from behind, trying to pry his red, throbbing fingers from around
my neck.

In the midst of the commotion, a
cutting light bathed over us as the door to the wine cellar swung open again.
Motley eased his grip on me just long enough to turn his head towards the door,
and I strained my eyes to the side and saw a pair of bare feet with a halo of
green jade surrounding them. My eyes followed the legs upward, and I saw
Cleopatra, dressed in a green silken robe, with her hair celestially tied in a
gathering down the side of her face.

“What is
this
?” she demanded
to know. She was gazing down at Motley and I rolling on the floor. She rushed
towards us. The ties on her supple robe came undone in the front, breezing in
the air behind her like a majestic cape. Frantically, she pulled a bottle of
wine from the shelf and hefted it into the air and swung it at the back of
Rabbit’s head. He fell backwards and hit the ground with a thud. Without
Rabbit’s obstruction, Motley was able to dedicate his full strength to
throttling my neck. “What the heck is all this?” Cleopatra demanded to know
again, as she stood over our intermingled bodies. The frilly hem of her robe
tickled my nose like moth wings.

I barely had any breath left in me.
I knew it was now or never. “Now! Vivienne!” I rasped. Coming up behind Motley,
I saw a circle of rope fly up from the hole like a cobra rising. The rope made
a vicious hiss as it sliced through the air and dropped over Motley’s
shoulders. As the rope snagged his shoulders, his eyes bulged in disarray and
confusion. Vivienne performed a swift tug which sent him sliding backwards into
the face of the hole. He disappeared like he had been sucked down a wind
tunnel. 

I crouched like a spider to steady
my balance. I looked up at Cleopatra looming above me, the bell sleeves of her
robe draped down beyond the arch of her shoulders, revealing the frankness of
her bare skin. “You’re really going to pay for that,” she screamed. Her red
hair, tied up in that loose gathering over her shoulder, looked like an exotic
vine against the luscious green silk robe. She began charging towards me, her
seductive eyes having transformed into something maniacal.

My hands were roving behind my
back, tracing along the trestles of wine to find a glass neck to grab, and when
I found one, I pulled it out and swung it at her.

Cleopatra ducked. Something about
the bottle caught her eye, and she gave it an engrossing look. “Do not destroy
that bottle,” she commanded. The comment seemed out of place.

“Why not?” I wanted to know.

“Because,” she said, perhaps
suddenly aware of the indecency caused by her cleaving robe as she brought the
ends of the belt together and retied it, “it’s important to me. Sentimental, if
you will.”

“This bottle is sentimental to
you?” I was bringing the bottle into the orbit of my face to read the wording
on its resplendent silver label.
June 21
^st
1997. Leon and
Patricia Leor.

“Please don’t smash it,” she said.

“Who is Patricia Leor?” A creeping
feeling was swirling through my body from the astronomical strangeness of
holding a bottle with the same name as the alias I had purchased from the cart
dealer in London.

“You don’t need to know
that.” 

“This looks like a keepsake from a
wedding,” I remarked. “Why would this be in Motley’s wine cellar? Does Motley
know the Leors?”

“It is from a wedding, Alice. But
the Leors aren’t friends of Motely.”

Rabbit moaned on the floor and one
of his arms jerked as he regained consciousness. “What happened?”

“Shhh, Rabbit,” I harked. I didn’t
want the fact that he was awake preventing Cleopatra from telling me more. I
turned back to Cleopatra. “Why would you be concerned with whether or not I
destroy this bottle?”

 “Because it’s from my wedding
day.”

“You’re Patricia Leor?”

“I am. And Motley is Leon Leor. Or
at least he was in his past life. In his real life.”

Rabbit propped himself up by the
elbows, his barely-there eyebrows scrunched together, and he exclaimed, “
You’re
the ex-wife Motley hates?”

Cleopatra passed him a scathing
look. “We were recently reconciled.”

“I’ve been you,” I said. “I’ve been
Patricia C Leor.”

“What the heck are you talking
about, Alice?”

“I bought your old passport from an
identity broker in London.”

Cleopatra shook her head, as though
the information I was relaying was completely intolerable. “That scum bag,
Wally, probably recycled my identification after I swapped it out for the one I
bought from him. I knew I shouldn’t have trusted him.”

“He is known for some less than
virtuous business practices,” I remarked.

“I’m surprised it took you so long
to figure out my name,” she said, tugging the bottle from my grip and gazing at
it with neither affection nor hatred. “I got the name Cleopatra by mixing
around some of the letters in my real name.”

“So you’re the wife Motley hated so
much,” I affirmed. “I guess it doesn’t really surprise me. Tell me, is that key
you always wear around your neck on a velvet string the key to Motley’s heart?”