Mad Dogs

by Brian Hodge

“That’s when he turned on me,” Robbie said. “He looked up and saw me through that window that used to be there. It was the Face of Death on him. The Grim Reaper coming to call. I saw him raise that big-ass gun and I dove right across the counter soon as he started trying to take me out too. Bullets were flying, man, and so was I.”

  “Same gun, different gun?”

  “Oh, same gun. It was a big silver one, it caught the sun pretty good.”

  Boyle’s Colt Python, sounded like. “Had he taken time to reload?”

  “No, it was like immediate. Kill the cop, kill the witness. He was the Terminator.”

  “So you’re telling me he empties the gun into Boyle and then starts shooting at you. With an empty gun.”

  Robbie blinked and scratched his jaw. “Well…I guess maybe he did leave a couple for me. Planning ahead. Wow. That’s really cold-blooded.”

  “And when he fired those shots at you,” Andy went on, “it’s not possible you’d suddenly switched places, is it? He’s inside and you’re out there on the lot?”

  “No. Why would you think a thing like that?”

  “Because I’m confused by all the glass on the outside of the building and almost no glass inside. Just the way I’d expect it to look if the first shots had come from…well, from about where you’re standing right this moment.”

  Robbie’s eyes slowly tracked to the floor, the rubble of glass. “I guess what happened is…it must’ve fell funny.”

  “Okay. And when I look at the tapes from the security cameras,” Andy said, “what they’ll show me happening is exactly the way you’ve described it, right? Or do you want to think hard and see if there’s anything you might’ve forgotten to add.”

  Robbie’s eyes went bovine. “Security cameras…?”

  “Yeah, those black things up in the corners of the ceiling with the lenses on the front of them. They’re going to back you up, right?”

  “Could I have my lawyer now please?”

  “Robbie, look at your wrists. Do you see any handcuffs there?” He waited for the kid to check. “If you had yourself a gun stashed, if you popped a shot at this guy, as far as I’m concerned that’s between you and the county. And seeing as how you were just trying to do right by one of their own, I myself would be downright amazed if they did anything other than pin a shiny medal on you.”

  “Well, it is a dangerous job. And…maybe I did plink a couple at him.”

  “First?”

  “Uh huh. Oh man. I hope they don’t make me pay for that window.”

  “Did you hit him?”

  “I wish. He just shot back and got in his car and took off.”

  “And your gun. Where is it now?”

  “I think I might have accidentally put it in the office file cabinet.”

  “I’m going to have to take it with me,” Andy said, thinking God help this poor bozo if by some fluke it turned out it had been one of his bullets that caught Boyle. That until that point all that had been going on with Sheppard was a scuffle.

  He retrieved and bagged Robbie’s gun, a cheap .38, and after finishing up with him Andy rejoined the sheriff.

  “Your impression?” Beech said.

  “If he ever goes on the stand, the only way the prosecutor’s going to get him through the same story twice is with cue cards.”

  “Well, don’t think too bad of him. I heard he grew up next to a toxic landfill.” Beech waved a sheet of paper. “Deputy brought this in a minute ago. From the DMV.”

  They ran the photo printout under Robbie’s nose: “Recognize him?”

  Robbie nodded. “That’s Jamey, all right. His hair’s a little longer now, is all. Kind of falls over his forehead now, on his collar in back.”

  Andy studied the photo, the numbers. Twenty-nine years old; he’d be thirty in a few weeks. Eyes, blue. Hair, black. Five feet, eleven inches, a trim 160 pounds. He’d been outweighed by Boyle by half a person, was shorter by half a head. True, Boyle was twice his age, but even in the face of wily youth, experience was a great equalizer. Maybe Sheppard had picked up some martial arts along the way.

  Nice-looking kid. If it was true that he was in commercials, he had the face for it—pleasant rather than drop-dead handsome, the boy-next-door. He had the sensitive, oval looks that teenage girls called “sweet”—he’d probably gotten sick of seeing the word in his high school yearbook inscriptions. A guy that girls would confide in about all their heartaches involving other guys with much thicker necks.

  But it seemed to be a face in transition, a long adolescence finally at its end, and out of the gentler contours Sheppard’s real face was emerging, its angles and planes more defined, more male, than they might have been three years ago. His eyes were wide-set and guileless, his nose thin and straight, and he had a joker’s crooked grin.

  It just wasn’t a face you’d associate with someone capable of slipping a frisk, much less taking away a deputy’s gun and dropping him with it. Lots of people could kill—enough jealousy, enough rage, on the one day of the year that could twist them into doing something they never would’ve dreamed of doing the other 364—but cop killers were a breed apart. You couldn’t miss that cold, hard jailhouse stare, or the way they looked at you like shit to be scraped off a shoe. You could feel the embers of an anger so fundamental they no longer even knew what it was, that burning cinder in place of their hearts, honeycombed with loathing and dead space.

  Usually, anyway. Somebody always refused to fit the pattern.

  From outside he heard a gritty skid of tires and the slam of a car door, a shouting voice. Andy glanced through the doorway, saw Fleming and a handful of others swarm toward another man in civilian clothes. Fleming got shoved and the others bunched together even tighter, all elbows and sweaty shirt-backs.

  “This is gonna be a jockstrap full of prickly pears,” Beech said. “You’ll excuse me.”

  Andy trailed out after him, as Sheriff Beech jostled in and clamped a hand on the man’s shoulder. Everybody held the guy back from bulling through the cordon and trampling the crime scene. For a moment he went boneless, gaze locking onto Boyle’s body, then he wrenched away with a despondent curse.

  Andy circled around back to Schreiber. “One of yours?”

  “Russell Pellegrino?” Schreiber said. “ You never met him?”

  Andy shook his head. Around sixty uniforms in this county, he couldn’t know them all.

  “Boyle took him under his wing, back when.”

  Sheriff Beech talked to him nose-to-nose, got Pellegrino to at least channel the wrath elsewhere, harmlessly kicking at the outer wall of the convenience store. He was another tall one, like Boyle, but in his mid-thirties and still sinewy. He was wearing shorts and a T-shirt, as though an hour ago he might have been home on his day off, saddled in a hammock with a beer, maybe a pellet rifle to shoot crows for fun. His skull was long and narrow, his dark hair clipped short and receding on the sides, the top brushed forward so it came to a point aimed at anyone he was facing. He kicked the corner of the building until he wore himself out, red-faced and slick with sweat.

  Beech was back a minute later. “Hell, I’m surprised he took it as well as he did.” He mopped his cheeks with a handkerchief. “Marvin was sort of a father to him.”

  Andy nodded. “I figured it might’ve been something like that.”

  “Marvin was real good about that. Pellegrino, he’s a second-generation officer, but his own dad, he lost him…twenty years or more ago, would’ve been.”

  “Killed on the job?”

  Beech hesitated, then shook his head. “Off duty. He was drunk. Ran into a highway resurfacing crew one afternoon and didn’t stop until he hit the steamroller. Took four others with him. One of the first accidents I ever responded to, and I was green as a lime. Godawfulest mess, those busted-up bodies in hot tar and asphalt, I’ll never forget that. If Hell’s paved, I know what the road looks like. And Russell, well…you can imagine.”

  Pellegrino had wandered away from the corn
er of the building and entered the dead man’s cruiser. Just sitting inside that oven of a car, slumped behind the wheel and staring through the windshield at nothing. Andy wondered if he could smell the older man as though he were still in the car, the closest thing to a spirit. Smell his sweat, or some cheap brand of aftershave that Boyle would have used forever. A scent like that refused to be forgotten.

  A few minutes later Beech told Andy that they’d gotten in touch with the dispatcher who’d clocked off-shift minutes before Boyle had been killed—the last person to talk to him, presumably, other than Jamey Sheppard. A routine radio call to run a check on those California plates. After finding out that both the car and owner were clean, Boyle had asked, cryptically, if there had been any reported sightings of Duncan MacGregor in the region. Telling her, after a moment, never mind, then breaking contact.

  “Maybe he didn’t wait because Sheppard was already on his way out the door, you think?” Beech said.

  “That’d be my guess,” Andy nodded. “You’ve got computers in your cars, don’t you?” Beech saying that they did. “So why was Deputy Boyle running these requests through a dispatcher? Why’s he wasting time like that?”

  “Marvin…he didn’t adapt real well to computers. Been around so long, he was accustomed to things a certain way. You couldn’t argue with him. You just ended up letting him have his own way on the little things.”

  Andy refrained from saying what an error in judgment that had been. The man knew already, didn’t need to hear it. “Duncan MacGregor, he said?”

  “I know that name but I don’t know why…”

  It took a minute before Andy felt the pieces click. “About a year ago, late summer, fall, wasn’t it? Wasn’t he one of those two guys did that string of beauty salon robberies?”

  Sheriff Beech began to nod. “That’s the one. Him, and his cousin was the other guy. Now I remember—finally killed some people in one. Then he shot his cousin and left him there.” Beech’s voice plunged with disgust. “Beauty parlors. Can you imagine. That’s got to be one cowardly breed of outlaw.”

  “So these two guys look alike, was that it?” Andy said. Thinking out loud. “I don’t quite get this. Your man mis-IDs Sheppard for MacGregor”—when a simple computer check might’ve set him straight—“but valid ID, clean record…it should never have gotten this far. Sorry for the inconvenience, have a nice day. Unless Sheppard’s a bona fide badass in his own right who’s managed to fly beneath the radar until now, but in that case: Why’d he panic instead of keeping a cool head?”

  “It’s screwy, I’ll give it that.”

  “Yeah, and sometimes that’s the best answer you’re ever going to come to,” Andy said. “Ever seen DNA? Human beings are screwy at a very root level.”

  3

  IT took Jamey six tries to get his cell phone dialed correctly. He had Sherry on speed-dial and it was still like trying to remember launch codes while the missiles were flying.

  “Avalon Agency,” said Sherry’s assistant. Vicky, the guy’s name. All sorts of gender identity issues going on there.

  “It’s Jamey Sheppard,” he said. “I need to talk to Sherry.”

  “I’ll see if she’s in.”

  “It’s kind of an emergency. Life and death.”

  “Of course it is,” Vicky told him, the way you’d talk to a four-year-old.

  He’d counted to ninety-four and circled the car eight times before Sherry Van Horn came on the line.

  “You’ve got to know some lawyers, right?” Jamey said.

  “Divorce lawyers, I presume? Your marriage lasted all of, what, forty-eight hours? Not to worry, I think you’re still in the annulment zone.”

  “No, you don’t understand, I’m not even there yet. I only left L.A. this morning.” It would be a miracle if Samantha ever set eyes on him again without smeared plexiglas between them. Samantha in tears, Jamey with the sorest ass in the universe. “All I did was stop for coffee and gas and now they think I’m a cop-killer. I play this thug on TV last month and now I’m supposed to get a lethal injection for it?”

  Dead silence, Sherry realizing he was serious. “Jamey…where are you?”

  Good question. He swiveled a slow three-sixty. On speeding away from the convenience store, he’d only wanted to put some distance between himself and everyone who had awakened this morning with a shoot-first disposition. He’d made random turns when he felt he had driven in a straight line long enough. No pattern to it, and not much recollection of the route, either. How long—thirty minutes of this? Forty-five?

  “Western Arizona,” he said. “Really, I don’t exactly know.”

  He’d come to the edge of some scuffling little community. Cluster a few trailers, staple together some prefabs, and elect a mayor. From the air it would resemble handfuls of trash strewn across the desert floor, a scrapyard contained by distant rims of rock. In the distance rose a few derelict structures that looked to be the last peeling remnants of a mining or quarrying operation. Jamey saw that he’d parked beside the brick shell of some bygone real estate agency, windows opaque with dust and its name scouring away with time.

  When Sherry pressed him to tell her what had happened, Jamey hardly knew how to begin. Imagining Sherry wouldn’t believe him, that she would assume he was weaving half-truths, complete lies. The same way everyone would be regarding him from now on: method actor, must think he’s the second coming of Brando—could’ve been a contender, if only he hadn’t gotten so caught up in that one forgettable role.

  “This is considerably worse than an annulment, I’d say,” Sherry told him. “Look, I won’t pretend to be your best qualified advisor on something like this. You know me, I won’t even jaywalk out here.”

  “I don’t expect you to plead my case in court, just a little go-between is all.”

  “My point is,” she said, “all the lawyers I know are entertainment lawyers.”

  “Then get a referral! What do you think, all of Robert Downey Junior’s drug pleas were handled by somebody in Contracts?”

  “Jamey,” she said sharply. “Attitude check.”

  Fuming, he bit his tongue. He couldn’t afford to start alienating allies right now. Allies were almost nonexistent for fugitive actors who had rarely seen a five-figure paycheck. If their end was suitably grotesque—especially if photographs were taken—all they got was a paragraph in some stomach-churning exposé of Hollywood’s seamy underbelly, compiled long after their demise.

  From Sherry’s end he could hear a monotonous mechanical whirring, a slight breathlessness to her voice. He’d caught her on her treadmill again, headset phone clamped on as if she were working an air traffic tower. Guiding careers the way controllers guided planes, juiced with adrenaline over how many she could juggle at once, crash free, at her steady four-miles-per-hour clip.

  “And I expect I’ll be the one who has to put down the retainer?” she said.

  “Unless you want to throw me at the mercy of a public defender.”

  “I could call your sister.”

  “No, no, that’s a bad idea.”

  “Two words, Jamey: beggars, choosers.”

  “Really, I don’t want Melissa involved with this. She won’t be any help. She’ll find this all very entertaining. Besides, money, forget it. As far as I know, she’s still working as Mickey Coffman’s assistant—how much can she be making right now?”

  “All right, you win, just no more of this sob story, puh-leaze.” Soft thud of clockwork footsteps, whine of oiled gears. “Now, what I want from you is a promise that the moment you ring off, you’ll find someone or someplace where you can turn yourself in. You can’t run even the least little bit more—you know how that looks, don’t you?”

  “Like I’m guilty.”

  “You turn yourself in, you make your phone call to me, and by then I hope to have you a lawyer ready to move as soon as we know where you’re being held. But until she or he gets there, just be polite, maintain your innocence, and don’t answer any qu
estions. You know your rights, so don’t let anyone intimidate you into waiving them because they think you’ve killed one of their own. Promise me that?”

  “I promise.”

  “And Jamey?” she said. “If that deputy really was drunk on duty, you might have a huge civil case against the county. So let’s keep that in mind too. But whatever you do, don’t get cocky and use it as a threat while you’re waiting. It won’t impress them and they may hit you with phone books.”

  “Thank you, Sherry,” he said. “I feel like I’m in good hands.”

  “That’s what I keep telling you children, isn’t it?”

  The call over, Jamey decided to indulge in a few final moments of freedom before moving along to the inevitable. He leaned back against the car’s front end and stared off toward the distant hills through air so hot it could’ve come from a kiln. The sun slanted in at a low angle, no longer as searing as it had been earlier; he shut his eyes and reduced it to a soft peach glow on the other side of his lids.

  As long as he was at it, he knew he should place one more call, to Flagstaff this time, tell Samantha and her family that he was going to be detained. Detained in the sense of leg-irons and Miranda warnings. Every debasing detail of which he would eventually have to volunteer to them.

  Stinking of jail, fingerprint ink in the creases of his hands—this was not how he’d planned to walk through the carved walnut door of the Emerson family’s home. A colorful entrance, maybe, but not the best first impression. He’d met her parents when they had visited L.A., but now he would be facing the entire extended tribe. He imagined the latest version of his résumé that Samantha would recite as she introduced him around: This is Jamey, my fiance. Jamey the itinerant actor—maybe you’ve seen his work as Radical Dude Number Three? Jamey the mad-dog cop killer. Oh yes, he’s highly versatile. Grandmothers would eye him with mistrust, keeping an eye on the good silver. Elder males would stake out the gun cabinet, just in case, while bratty cousins would ask if he’d been inside long enough to get turned into some fur-backed reprobate’s jailhouse bitch.