by Brian Hodge
“So you know about this already?” Andy said.
“Know about it?” She made a derisive little coughing noise. “Yesterday’s headlines! He called me immediately after it happened and we started arranging his surrender. Explicit instructions to find the nearest man, woman, or child with a badge and go forth with his arms raised and his mouth shut.”
“He called you from where?”
“He had no clue, so I couldn’t very well have one, could I? I’ve had a lawyer on standby for the past, what is it now, sixteen hours, and there’s been nothing but radio silence the whole time.”
“Ma’am,” Andy tried. “Miz Van Horn,” but she steamrollered right over him. Some peculiar sound in the background, mechanical, the whine of it cranking higher and higher, faster and faster.
“I was assuming that that was because it’s been taking you people that long to match your fingertips with the proper keys on your typewriters for all the forms you need to fill out, but now you tell me you’ve lost him?”
“I’m telling you we never had him. There’s been no surrender.”
“Are you sure?” Talking to him like a five-year-old with dirty hands, insists he’s washed them. “Have you checked? Because what I heard yesterday does not speak well for the Arizona law enforcement community. For all I know, maybe even for all you know, at this very moment he’s hung upside-down and naked in some festering sewer with his feet beaten bloody. I’ve seen Midnight Express, you know. He’s had —”
Andy having no luck trying to interject. Sitting there wondering how this woman had put him on the defensive.
“— more career interest, from real players, since I started work this morning than he’s had in the entire time he’s been beating the bricks out here, players with names like Oliver Stone and Mickey Coffman, so you’d better pray to whatever god you believe in that he emerges from this unscathed. So before we proceed, let me ask you a question. No, two questions. One, are you sober? And two, do you know the difference between television and reality? Because that drunken imbecile who accosted Jamey yesterday sure didn’t.”
Andy’s fist began to slowly clench. If Boyle wasn’t dead already…
“Sheppard told you the deputy had been drinking?”
“Not right in front of him, no, but the man had to exhale, didn’t he?”
“And what was that about the difference between TV and reality?”
She made her rude little cough again. “You still don’t know what this was about yesterday?”
“What I’ve got is a dead man, and another guy nobody can find. Neither one of them has been doing much talking.”
“There’s a show,” she began. “On television. Reality-based. Called American Fugitives. On every Sunday night. Isn’t it part of your homework or something?”
“I’ve seen it. Not habitually, but —”
“If you’d seen it a few weeks ago, you would’ve seen Jamey Sheppard on there,” she said. “Not as one of your garden-variety desperados, but as a working actor, in the reenactment segments, merely portraying a garden-variety desperado named —”
Duncan MacGregor, he mouthed along with her, and by the time she finished her tirade it only made him want to drive back to La Paz County, find Marvin Boyle, wherever he was stretched out now, and shoot him all over again.
****
They freed Jamey again in midafternoon, let him use the toilet. Heeding his complaints of soreness and stiffness, this time they allowed him a break outside, under guard. Like a convict allowed his one precious hour per week in the yard.
He walked in circles, squatted and bounced, rolled his head. He twisted his spine and stretched his torso and made chicken wings of his arms, trying to touch his elbows behind his back. Silly looking, but captors aside, he was as alone out here as he’d ever been. The next car he heard would probably be Sadie, returning from her trip to sniff out news of a reward. He faced away from the brothers, away from their hovel and its archipelagos of rubbish, and fixed his gaze on the horizon. When he shut his eyes, he understood how hermits could come to hear voices in the wind.
This time yesterday he had been crossing the eastern barrens of Southern California. Whole life ahead of him—a woman to whom he would be bound, whose arms could hold back the midnights of despair when he began to hear a whisper telling him he’d wasted nearly a decade of his life on a fool’s ambitions, that he wasn’t what people were looking for and never would be.
Once Jamey had stretched his legs, he judged that he wasn’t too sore to make a run for it. Jasper and Rupert may have been even younger than he was, ostensibly in their prime, but they both had the fledgling guts of men who’d begun to age hard and fast and prematurely. Ten more years and they would be sedentary blobs of appetite and rancor. He could outrun them. He could never outrun the truck, but somewhere along the path back to the trailer door, their scrapyard would surely serve up enough of a weapon to buy him a head start.
But could he do it without getting shot? After the donut incident, there could only be one bullet left in the revolver, at most. Maybe now it held nothing but spent casings. On its own, worth the risk…but Jasper had also salvaged an antique-looking rifle that had probably seen a world war. Maybe it worked no better than yesterday’s shotgun. Worth the gamble to find out, when it was possible that they could be handing him over to the law within hours?
He turned to look at them. Rupert was oblivious, practicing quick-draws with the revolver, snapping a bead on random targets. Jasper ignored him and focused on Jamey instead, toking on a thin joint. Seeming to suspect what was going through Jamey’s mind, rifle cradled in his arms as though he knew its feel by heart, plenty of practice on desert hares and coyotes.
There was no bluff to be called here, Jamey feared. And it was probably just as well. This was no place to be on foot with no sense of your location.
So he restricted himself to a patch of ground, pacing like a neurotic bear in a zoo, until he heard footsteps from behind and Jasper dropped the joint’s ashen roach and stubbed it into the dirt and told him that it was time to go back inside. Back to the chair, the chains. Jamey talked them into giving him a couple of pillows, one to sit on, one to lean against.
Later, when Sadie returned, she stomped through the doorway, seething with such outrage that windows rattled. Remarkable for someone who looked so dried-up that one hard gust of wind could whisk her away like a kite.
This, thought Jamey, is not good.
“So how much’ll we be making off him?” Rupert asked.
“There was a reward.” Sadie’s voice became a snarl. “Was. See, that one’s the important word: was. Some friends of the deputy put up three thousand on his head and we missed it by one day.”
“Now wait a minute—how can that be?” Even Jasper appeared flummoxed. “Nobody else could’ve turned him in. He’s been right over there the whole time.”
“He had an expiration date and you two let him go stale on us.” Sadie let them absorb this while she snatched a can of tea from the refrigerator. “They took back the reward offer this morning. Turns out he didn’t kill that deputy. They’re saying it was accidental now. So there’s no reward.”
For a moment Jamey felt giddy, free, as if all he need do was stand and the chains would fall away. Until he noticed Rupert, across the room, glowering at him in disappointment and betrayal.
“Well you lyin’ sack of shit,” Rupert said. “How come you let us go on thinking you shot that guy? You think that’s funny?”
“Seems like I remember bringing that up four or five times yesterday and not getting very far. Anybody else remember that?”
“Sure as hell didn’t bring it up with me when I got home,” Sadie huffed.
“Well this is just great.” Jasper scowled at the floor, fist grinding into his chin. He pulled his fist away and stared engrossed at the knuckles, as if residue from the joint he’d smoked outside fluttered through his brain. The moment passed. “Gotta be some way to turn a profit on th
is.” Looking at Jamey now. “You from a rich family?”
“Hardly.”
“How about rich friends, got any of those?”
“Not yet.”
“There’s nobody who’d pay to get you back? Nobody?”
Briefly he thought of Sherry Van Horn. Probably they would be happy with whatever Avalon had lying around in petty cash, consider it a wildly successful caper. Except Sherry, being herself, would be unable to resist the urge to try bargaining with them.
“The best I’ve got is my sister Melissa,” he said. “And she’d probably pay you to keep me here.”
Jasper’s eyebrows lifted. “Worth a try…”
“Oh, he’s just yanking your chain,” Sadie told him. “You can’t see that?”
Leaned back against the couch with his thick arms stretched wide, Rupert had yet to stop studying him, mean little raisin eyes mashed to slits. “I say we strip him down and sell him for parts. It’s what we do all the time anyway, right?”
“He’s not a Buick, Rupert,” his brother sighed.
“Now hear me out! I saw on TV how there’s sick people, sick rich old people, they’ll pay good money for new kidneys and livers and hearts.” He gestured toward the kitchen. “We got room in the freezer, just pack it all next to the popsicles.”
“Then what?” Sadie asked. “You toss his giblets in a cooler and start going door-to-door?”
“There’s no call to talk so mean to me, Mom,” Rupert said. “It was just a idea.”
“Well, forget it. I’ve seen the kind of mess you leave for me to clean up, just dressing down a rabbit for the skillet. You don’t exactly have the hands of a surgeon.”
“How about this?” said Jamey. “Why don’t you quit while you’re ahead and let me go? And I won’t say anything. I’ll just forget about it, be like I spent the night at a motel. Better for you too, because if somebody else finds out about this, you could all find yourselves on trial for kidnapping.”
They looked at him as though he were from Neptune.
“Kidnapping,” snorted Rupert. “Citizen’s arrest is what that was.”
“Menace to society,” Jasper said. “They said so on the radio.”
“Well, whatever it is you come up with for him, you come up with it fast, and get him hustled out of here,” Sadie told her boys. “I got the diabetes! I shouldn’t have to be living with this too!” She smoldered for a moment, slugging at her tea, then glanced at the clock on the wall. “It’s time for my insulin,” she said, and hurried toward the back of the trailer.
And the clock ticked on. Jasper appeared to be deep in thought, a process causing so much pain he looked ready to chew his own hand away. On any other face the expression would have been pitiful. On Jasper’s it was horrifying.
“Hey,” he murmured softly. He sat up straighter, head lifting with a semblance of pride in accomplishment. “I think I got something…”
Jasper leaned over his brother and grabbed the deputy’s revolver from the far end of the couch. Jamey started to sweat anew, afraid he’d decided that a citizen’s arrest could rightly proceed to execution.
“Yeah, I think I’m onto something big here.” Jasper swung the revolver’s cylinder open to dump five empty casings tinkling to the carpet. “Gonna have to get some refills for this first, though.”
9
SHE fine-tuned the propane torch’s brass nozzle, yanked the filtration mask up over her nose and mouth, and played the hissing blue tongue of flame around the groom’s head until it began to char. His scalp bubbled with black tumors; his beady eyes disappeared into crust; his vacuous smile shriveled and sagged into a runny yawn of agony—all deserved, of course, for the future to which he would have subjected his betrothed. Then she turned the hellfire on the bride, crisping her dainty feet to nubs, because the dumb bimbo should’ve known better.
“There,” she told them through the bulbous white mask, and set the torch aside. “The only kind of cake you two are going on now is devil’s food.”
With her balcony awash in the fumes of scorched plastic, Melissa took another matched pair. She softened their middles and shoulders, then deformed them into hunchbacks, stooped under the weight of vows soon to be broken.
And for what seemed like the hundredth time today, the phone began to ring. For the hundredth time she ignored it.
“How many more times will you be forcing me to listen to this desperate man?” Kristophe shouted from inside the condo. “He is becoming very tiresome!”
She poked her head toward the opened sliding door. “So turn the volume off, why don’t you!”
“But then I wouldn’t know if it was for me,” he pouted. Melissa could hear him grappling with the answering machine. “If I must listen to this all day, so must you!”
Peeking inside, she saw Kristophe braced in front of the bar, arms aloft as he elevated the machine over his head at the limits of its cords.
“You’re pissing off a woman holding about fifteen hundred degrees in her hand. You know that, don’t you?” she said.
“Oooo, stop,” he mocked. “You scare me.”
He’d maxed the volume, too. Fourth infernal ring and the machine did its duty. She heard her voice rip from the tiny speaker; a beep, and Mickey Coffman resumed where he’d last left off all of twenty minutes ago.
“I COMMAND YOU TO PICK UP THAT PHONE!” Mickey, suffering myocardial infarctions in the comfort of his office. She loved it, hoping for a thud and silence. “YOU THINK JUST BECAUSE I FIRE YOU THAT YOU CAN DROP OUT OF CONTACT? NOT A CHANCE, MELISSA! I OWN YOU, MELISSA! FOREVER AND EVER, YOUR HEART IS IN MY FIST AND BEATS ONLY ON MY CONTINUED PERMISSION!” He paused; all she could hear was breathing. By now he had to be close to running out of threats. “WELL, THAT’S IT—YOU’VE DONE IT NOW! YOU’VE CALLED DOWN THE WRATH OF THE GOD THAT IS ME! THAT PAIN IN YOUR CHEST YOU’RE FEELING RIGHT ABOUT NOW…? THAT’S ME SQUEEZING MY FIST—”
“I can’t stand this anymore,” Melissa said. She closed the torch nozzle’s valve to snuff the flame and yanked the mask down, reached through the doorway. “Gimme.”
Kristophe returned the answering machine to the bar and brought her the cordless receiver. She cut in on Mickey while he described how thoroughly he was going to ruin her in this town, how by the time he was finished she wouldn’t be able to get hired as a fluffer on the set of the sleaziest porn video.
“Why aren’t you in this office?” he demanded. “Why am I having to rely on lowly secretaries to assist me in my higher functions?”
“You said it yourself a minute ago,” she told him. “You fired me on Tuesday.”
“What, that little tiff?” he cried. “Haven’t we danced this tango before? You should know better by now—how many times have I fired you? What kind of a life can you have been having since then anyway?”
“It’s given me plenty of time to get back to working on my art.”
“Art,” he said flatly. “Still scorching the genitalia off brides and grooms?”
“Yeah, but this time I’m pretending the grooms are you.”
“That’s not art, that’s a behavioral disorder.” Had to admit, this was the great thing about Mickey. You could say anything to him except no. Merely be snide, no problem, water off a shark’s back. It couldn’t possibly be worse than what critics had been saying about him for years, their ears beaten bloody by the high-decibel movies he produced, and indignant over how the more lopsided their ratio of dialogue to noise, the higher the box office grosses. Infuriating. Western civilization writhed.
“Listen,” he went on, “put away the dolls and start playing with the grown-ups again. Consider yourself re-hired. In fact, consider the past few days vacation. Paid vacation.” Ouch. That would’ve hurt him. Something out of the ordinary had to be going on, not just secretaries who couldn’t toast his bagels just right or fix his lattes to perfection. “Tuesday was a dream. Click your heels three times and wake up here.”
“But suppose I don’t want to wake up ther
e anymore.” Melissa being careful not to say no.
“But suppose you had a brain and decided you did. Then suppose there might be something in it for you besides my golden name on your résumé.”
“Such as?”
“How does the possibility of an associate producer’s credit sound? Yours for the earning.”
Good thing she was no longer holding the torch—she would have dropped it. Not cool. So not cool. “I’m listening.”
“I want your brother. I want the rights to his story.”
“My brother? He has no story. So there can’t be any rights. He’s a total nonentity.”
“Your brother’s Jamey Sheppard, right?”
“It was an accident of birth, but yeah.”
“And didn’t you tell me he did a Mountain Dew commercial last year? Bit parts on ER and NYPD Blue and some others? Some no-budget indies?”
“Among other equally underwhelming things.”
“Then he’s the one I want. He’s the one a lot of people want. But they’re not going to get him, are they. Not in this life. Because they don’t have you on their team.”
“Jamey. My brother,” she said. Trying to get it through her head that he could have achieved a status as commodity. She leaned on the balcony’s wooden retaining wall. Three floors below her, the semi-shady streets of Sherman Oaks. She looked down on willows, on the tops of palm trees and joggers’ heads. “Mickey, I had CNN on earlier and nobody said one word about hell freezing over.”
“So you really are out of the loop on this. You’re telling me you have no clue what’s been going on with him?”
Few were the lies that she could not tell with flawless sincerity. People, men in particular, always wanted to believe whatever they were told by someone who looked as fine as she did. An ego thing, thinking they were beyond being lied to. It was a big advantage. But this? This was nothing she could fake. Worse, that Jamey was being actively sought was a sure sign of something gone terribly wrong in the cosmos.