Generation of Liars (50 page)

The boat was now gliding into clear
view. Cleopatra cut the engine. Motley jumped off. The brown Smith & Wesson
hanging from his wrist was already pointed between my eyes. Cleopatra was
strutting behind him, still draped in the resplendent jade robe she had on
earlier, which had turned gem-like in the moonlight. She had an exotic lily
flower tucked into her ear, no doubt plucked from one of the greenhouse gardens
housed inside the park. I wondered how long they had been trailing us.

“Hello, Alice,” Motley said. So
casual. So pompous. “Funny meeting you here.”

“How did you know to find us?” I
asked. This showdown was the last thing I wanted.

“That strung out friend of yours,
Spicy Cinnamon.”

“You mean Sara?”

“I visited her in Pigalle about a
week or so ago, while you were still hiding, and I gave her a necklace I told
her that if she ever saw you again to make sure she gave it to you. I told her
I would give her money if she did it. She didn’t know there was a GPS tracker
imbedded inside the necklace, but even if she had, I’m sure she would have sold
you out for her next junkie fix regardless.”

I cupped the pendant around my
neck. “A GPS? No wonder it’s so heavy. I thought it was real diamonds.”

“When you showed up on my radar
tonight, I hopped on the boat, and once I monitored your journey through metro
I deducted you were headed for Citroën.”

I hardened my knees, which were
prone to buckling at the weight of his voice. “It’s over, Motley. You can’t
hurt me anymore.” I ripped the chain from around my neck and flung it into the
water.

“
Tsk
, Alice. You always were
an ungrateful one when it came to gifts. I mean look at the way you double
crossed me after all I did for you. I think you’ve double crossed a lot of
people so far in your short little life, haven’t you, girl?”

“Just go away, Motley. I told you,
it’s over.”

His eyes slid to Pressley. “Alice,
does this boyfriend of yours know who are you? I mean who you
really
are?”

“Of course he does,” I replied. “He
is probably the only person in the world who does.”

“Are you sure, Alice? When you came
to my house and so rudely trapped me inside my own cellar, I stumbled upon
something of yours after our little struggle.” I braced myself because I knew
exactly what he was going to say next. “It was a piece of paper.”

“Shut up, Motley.”

“This piece of paper had some very
interesting information written on it. It really gave me some insight into just
what kind of person you really are, Alice.”

“Shut up,” I repeated.

“I wonder,” Motley said, pleased
with himself and pivoting on the blockish heel of his alligator loafer, “if
your boyfriend here knows what was written on that piece of paper.”

“What is he talking about, Alice?”
Pressley couldn’t mask his concern.

“Oh?” replied Motley. “Looks like
he doesn’t know.”

My tongue was almost too frozen to
speak anything in my defense as Pressley asked, “What piece of paper, Alice?”

“It’s nothing, Pressley. He’s just
trying to scare me and to get you all riled up.”

“Oh, am I, Alice?” Motley asked.
“Why don’t we let your boyfriend here decide what is or isn’t
worth
getting riled up over, since luck of lucks, I just happen to have the note you
left behind. It’s right here in my pocket.” The crinkly sound of his hand
reaching into his pocket and pulling out the battered and ripped piece of paper
sounded like the crushing of bones.

“What is on that paper, Alice?”
Pressley wanted to know so badly. His eyes paced between my pale, shocked face
and the note in Motley’s hand.

Motley stole the opportunity to
answer for me. “It’s a confession. A murder confession, penned by your
girlfriend.”

“Murder?” Pressley asked. I noticed
his voice quaking beneath its rough veneer. “What’s this about? Alice?”

Motley was licking his lips and
spreading the note out. “Now, Mr. Connard, do you mean to tell me that you were
never curious of the real reason Alice ran away three years ago? You didn’t
just think it was because she was bored with you, did you?”

Pressley was trying his best to
keep calm, but his distress crept over the thin veneer of machismo calm.
“Alice, what the hell is he talking about?”

My mouth was too dry to swallow and
I still couldn’t get any words out amidst the cotton-like state of my tongue.

“Alice is a little tongue tied, it
seems,” Motley gloated. “Here, let me go ahead and read the note for her.” He
licked his lips before tearing into the words:
If found dead, please contact
the parents of Heather Gilmore at the following phone number and share the
enclosed information
.

If you are reading this letter I
am dead. My name is Margaux Grace Fix and on the evening of the cyber attack
against the United States, I killed a girl. That girl’s name was Heather
Gilmore. I have been running ever since. Her parents deserve to know who killed
their daughter. Please contact them at the phone number at the top of this
letter and let them know it was me.

Pressley eyes were glued to me.
“Alice? Is what he is saying true?” I opened my mouth and only a squeak came
out. “Damnit, Alice, we don’t have a lot of time here, I need to know the truth
right now.” I suddenly became aware once more of the sound of the bomb ticking.
The sound grew all around me. I couldn’t distinguish its sound from the sound
of my heart thumping inside my chest.

Finally, I was able to open my
mouth and get the words out. “Yes, Pressley, it’s true. It’s all totally true.
Except the part about Heather being dead. It turns out, she’s not. She’s fine.
She walked away with some minor scrapes.”

Motley’s eye scrunched up like he
tasted a bitter lemon. “You can’t slip by on that one, Alice. You thought you
had killed a person and then you ran away. The facts are here.” He was rattling
the paper in his hand like a torch of indictment.

“Alice, did you really walk away
from what you thought was a murder scene?” Pressley asked.

“I was scared, Pressley.” I could
feel a ribbon of hot tears flood-bursting down my cheeks. “I didn’t know what
else to do.”

“If it was an accident, why didn’t
you go to the police and tell them? Why didn’t you at least come to me? I could
have helped you.”

“I tried to,” I said. “That day
when I told you to meet me in the lawn on campus, the day you keep asking me
about, I planned to tell you then.”

“That’s why you called me there?
This whole time I thought you asked me there so you could break up with me. I
figured you lost the nerve to do it person so you just ran away instead.”

“No, Pressley, no, I never wanted
to leave you. But once I saw you that day I lost the nerve to tell you. I
thought you would look at me differently if you knew what I had done.”

“I’m looking at you a whole lot
differently right now. That’s for sure.”

Motley brushed his shoulders
against Pressley’s. “So, Mr. Connard, can you still love Alice knowing who she
really is?”

Pressley eyes were glistening with
embroiled hatred. “Listen, Motley, you may think know who Alice really is, but
I know all about you. I know all about Leon Leor, the Leor family fortune back
in Las Vegas, and your fall from grace. I know why you want the dynamite stick
back so desperately. If the feds ever find you, you’re toast.”

“But Alice and I, we’re both one in
the same - both murderers.”

“Alice may have panicked and run
away from an accident scene, but you intentionally murdered and tortured dozens
of innocent women.”

“What?” I gasped. I was dizzily
trying to cope with what had just been said. “Murdered dozens of women?”

“Alice,” Motley said, “I told you
the day we met that I hadn’t been a free man in a very long time. That day we
met at Grand Central, I had just escaped from Rikers Island after being handed
a life sentence on six counts of first-degree murder. Only six counts because
they never found the other sixteen bodies.” He said it like he was proud, like
it was an achievement.

My hand flew to my chest. All the
air seemed to evacuate my lungs. “You’re a serial killer?”

“It’s true, Alice,” Cleopatra
interjected. She had been so silent up until now, so organically concealed in
the dock’s creeping daylight, that I had forgotten she was there. “He was Leon
Leor, rich-boy heir to the Fool’s Luck playing cards franchise, handsome as a
movie star, and a spoiled psychopath to boot. Forgive me for saying so, honey,”
she said, bracing a delicate hand on Motley’s shoulder. “He got his kicks out
of torturing and killing women from the Vegas strip and burying their bodies in
the sands of the Mojave Desert. Some coin hunter with a metal detector found a
dismembered hand full of cheap metal rings buried beneath a cactus plant. There
was a joker card lying beside the badly decomposed body. They dug up six more
bodies by the time the search was done, all with a joker card close at hand.
All the lawyers paid for by his granddaddy’s casino money couldn’t save Leon
once he got caught. The cops on the beat gave him the nickname The Fool, on
account of his trademark of leaving the cards beside his victims.”

“You know all this and you stay
with him still?” Pressley blurted.

“What can I say? I’m the type of
woman who can love a monster. We met at one of the hotels his granddaddy built.
I was just a hungry girl in feathers and glitter, trying to Can-Can my way into
the credits of a b-movie, when we met and fell in love. We had only been
married three months when the police knocked on our door one morning and I
found out about his grizzly secret pastime. I stayed by his side all during the
trial and sentencing; but being separated for so long while he was in prison
was just too much. I left him. I did my own thing, amassed my own fortune in
stolen diamonds, and eventually found my own trouble. Then my beloved Fool came
to me calling himself Motley and told me about using the dynamite stick to get
immunity and how we could live together again, free from the shackles of
prison. That’s when I came onboard.”

Motley turned his eyes onto me. “So
you see, Alice, we’re like two peas in a pod, you and I. Both murderers. Except
the pod is getting a little crowded and now it’s time to eliminate you.”

“You can’t touch me anymore,
Motley.” The defiance in my voice excited me, my chest was rising and falling
with a puff of nervous exhilaration. “It’s over. I told you I didn’t really
kill anyone, so I have nothing to run from anymore. I don’t care if you know my
real name. I can get protection for me and my family, the police would love to
make sure a serial killer like you doesn’t get near us.”

Motley gave a cold-eyed smile. “I
told you when you signed onboard, Alice, that this job would lead you down a
very dark hole. I told you that day on the train. But you were so desperate to
get away from your own secret that you didn’t care. You couldn’t see the forest
from the trees. It’s your blind spot. Even David tried to teach you about it
that time in Rio with the black briefcase and the white briefcase.”

“What do you know?” I asked. I was
feeling very uneasy all of the sudden, uneasy that he would mention my mentor,
David Xad. “You weren’t even there when David taught me in Rio.”

“No, Alice, I wasn’t, but I sent
you down there for a very specific reason.”

“What reason?” I asked.

“David had been assigned to kill
you.”

“I don’t believe you. David had
every chance to kill me when I was in Rio. I was inside his house and he didn’t
lay a finger on me.”

“I didn’t send you there so he
could kill you that day. That was only part of the preparation. David is all
caught up in that garbage about being a noble warrior. He told me he could only
slay you the noble way, by giving you a chance to correct your blindsides
before battle.”

“I don’t believe you. David is my
mentor. He would never hurt me.”

“Alice, why did David tell you he
was down there in Rio?”

“He said he was training for a
battle. A battle against a certain adversary.”

“That adversary was you, Alice.”

“What do you mean? You’re saying
I’m
the opponent David mentioned he was down there training to defeat?”

“That is exactly what I’m saying,
Alice. David wasn’t training down in Rio, so much as he was preparing the
conditions of battle. He insisted that you needed your flaws pointed out before
he could destroy you. He said I had to give you a fighting chance before he
killed you.”

“Well, David isn’t here, and after
tonight I am going to disappear.”

Motley let his head tilt back onto
his neck. He was laughing, spastically, like it was bringing him some sort of
physical relief to get the sound out of his body. “I have a surprise for you,
Alice.”

Chapter Fifty-five: The Sword

“S
URPRISE?”
MY PALE lips eked out.

“You’re so preoccupied with
worrying about this confession in my hand that I’ve been stalling you here just
long enough for another boat to arrive.”

As if on cue, the low hum of an
engine began approaching in the darkness. A trail of skids formed on the water
and my eyes followed them up to see a black speedboat with David Xad behind the
wheel. David emerged from the boat dressed in a white linen suit and his hair
was slickly pressed back into a ponytail. “Hello, Alice.” My name was so gentle
on his pale lips that I could easily forget he was an assassin who had come to
kill me. He slithered towards me with steps that made no sound.

“David? How could you?” My lips
were difficult to pry apart in their dryness.

 “Do you remember during our
time together in Rio, I told you that I was preparing for a very specific
adversary?”

“I remember.” My teeth were shaking
behind my lips.