by Brian Hodge
“He owned car keys, the last I knew. That would’ve been when I was ten.” He stopped a moment, flipping through the years. “Got a couple of cards from him when I was still a kid. Birthdays, he remembered them awhile. So he must’ve owned some stamps. Car keys and stamps.”
She shut her eyes a moment, to listen to the sound of so much silence, and in the silence, the sound of her whole life changing. Not such a bad thing at all.
“Hold up your hand,” she told him, and reached across the table with her palm flat, her fingers splayed. “Let me see your hand.”
****
He sat up and rubbed the sleep from his eyes. Listened to the lulling highway drone coming up from where the tires met the road, and to the music that Dawn had playing low: a drowsy strum of guitars and eerie weeping pedal steel and murmured vocals that sounded as though the girl was looking down some roads of her own.
Through the windshield, no more interstate, just two-lane blacktop unrolling ahead of them into the night, and for now they had it to themselves.
“Where are we?”
“I made the turnoff at Walsenburg a few miles back.” Lit smooth and blue in the dim dashboard glow, Dawn looked over at him. “You did it on purpose back there, didn’t you. With Kyle. You did that on purpose.”
“No,” he told her. “I really wanted to hit that apple.”
“That’s not exactly what I mean, Duncan. Okay, so you meant to hit the apple, and if you’d swung lower and lopped off the top of Kyle’s head you’d feel awful about it, I don’t doubt that. I’m just saying that something other than a carnival game frame of mind got into you. And if it hadn’t been the thing with Kyle, it would’ve been something else before long. This thing with the actor, that’s just a bonus. You were ready to leave, you just didn’t have a good enough reason until tonight.”
“Let’s say maybe you’re right. Would you be mad?”
“Do you see me throwing any fits?” In the gloom, she flashed a sly little smile. “I hate to break it to you, but you’re not the only one who gets bored.”
He had to wonder if this wasn’t one of the main reasons he’d come to love her: because she recognized things for what they were before he even knew they’d arisen.
“Sammy the Bull,” he said. “You know who he is?”
“The name rings a bell, but…”
“A mob guy, he was the underboss of the Gambino Family in New York, and ended up flipping for the feds. He was the one who testified against John Gotti and got him sent to Marion for life. Put away close to forty other guys, too. The government ended up wiping the slate clean for him and he went into Witness Relocation. Got to disappear, start a new life, new identity. He wound up in Phoenix.”
“Ah,” she said. “Hometown boy. That’s why I know the name.”
“And this is a guy with nineteen or so killings to his credit. It’s probably the greatest second chance in history that anybody ever got handed to him. And he blew it. He ended up running designer drugs, ran the Ecstasy trade for the whole state of Arizona. Every hit of X sold, fifty cents went to him. He was clearing twelve-and-a-half grand a week.”
“Wow,” said Dawn. “That means I must’ve put a few bucks in his pocket myself.”
“He just couldn’t stay away from the life. When I heard about this, the thing that really stuck with me was somebody’s comment that the worst time in his life wasn’t after everything in New York fell apart and the FBI was leaning hard and he was in prison and it was starting to look like Gotti was trying to set him up to take the fall for everything. That wasn’t it. The worst five years of his life were after he went to Phoenix and had to pretend to be some guy named Jimmy Moran. He couldn’t do it. He was still Sammy the Bull Gravano.”
“You don’t have to explain a thing to me. It makes perfect sense,” she said with a wily grin. “Why do you think I really named you ‘Darrell’ back there?”
13
AS soon as Jamey had tantalized the brothers with the euphoria to be had from shooting up with what was essentially a more potent version of bongwater, Jasper and Rupert scrambled for everything they would need. From a hiding place in the back of the trailer came a baggie stuffed with leafy green; then they raided the bathroom for one of Sadie’s insulin syringes. Rupert stripped off its wrapping with the eagerness of a five-year-old with a candy bar.
“God bless that woman’s disease!” Jasper called from the stove. “You see the beauty of this, don’t you? We can do it this way any time we please—”
“—and Ma won’t ever be able to smell the smoke on us,” Rupert finished.
“How long should I cook this down, anyhow?” Jasper then called to Jamey.
“Give it fifteen minutes, dude. That oughta do it.”
“It’s starting to look like spinach, kind of. Is that right?”
“Radical,” was all Jamey could think to say.
He had no idea what it should look like, or how long it should simmer. Only once had he heard of this intravenous ploy being attempted—last year on the set of a TV show on which he’d had a bit part, a second-hand tale passed along to account for the last-minute replacement of one of the other bit players. The story had it that the guy had tried this on a dare, and that the results had made the Hong Kong Flu look like the sniffles. A day later, he could still barely crawl to telephone his agent.
Jasper brought the saucepan in from the kitchen. Rupert uncapped the syringe and plunged the needle’s tip into the water, drew back the plunger. The plastic barrel began to turn pale green.
“How much?” he asked.
Jamey scrutinized the panful of herbal slop. “Fill that bad boy all the way.”
“Better give it a minute to cool down, though,” Jasper said. “Hurts bad enough to scald yourself on the outside.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Impatient, Rupert started to blow on the full syringe.
Jasper turned to Jamey. “Some for you? It’s only fair.”
Jamey’s eyes went wide. “Are you kidding? Three on a pan’s just like three on a match: gnarly bad luck.”
He watched them do it. They knew from observing their mother to point the tip upward and spritz out enough to remove any air. Big strong boys with thick muscular arms, their veins seemed to rise like plump worms, eager for the hit. Rupert’s pulse jetted a thread of bright red backwash into the syringe, diluted into the green murk and then returned beneath his skin. Then Jasper’s.
For several moments they sat quietly, expectant and unsure but plainly pleased with themselves. Waiting for the bliss to arrive.
Rupert’s mouth went suddenly slack. “I…” he said. His cheeks seemed to sag two inches down his face. “I don’t feel so pretty good.”
“Ride it out, dude.” Jamey, playing guru. “Just riiiide it out.”
And he tried. It looked as though Rupert truly tried, knowing he was supposed to feel euphoric but his abused system insisting otherwise. For Rupert, a mind-body argument was no contest, but even Jamey was unprepared for how explosive the resolution was. Rupert uttered a final groan of misery before everything he’d ingested all day erupted in a foamy geyser that blasted as far as Sadie’s console organ.
“Jesus God!” Jasper cried. He looked helplessly at Jamey. “Is that normal?”
It was all Jamey could do to keep his stoner’s smile fixed into place and nod. “It’s just like the Indians, you know…when they chow down on peyote and start tripping? But first you gotta make it through that Pepto-Bismol moment.”
Jasper too was now turning as green as the boiled leaves.
“No big deal, dude,” Jamey soothed. “Bruce Willis really lost it his first time too.”
Then Jasper was swamped by his own nausea, christening the top of his fallen brother’s head before he managed to sling an arm around Rupert’s shoulders and haul him upright. They retched and fouled each other back-and-forth, lurching desperately toward the bathroom, spewing and splashing the hallway walls as they went.
Once they wer
e gone from the room Jamey went loose with relief. He’d been betting that the grade of weed they could afford out here in the ass-end of nowhere was as low as it came—brew it like tea and out would leach a trace element hotshot of cheap fertilizers, pesticides, and generally evil crud. All of which were now chugging through their every vein, artery, and internal organ.
He called out to cheerfully ask how they were doing. But they were beyond answers. Jamey could hear only moaning and thuds and a collage of liquid sounds.
He first tried to wrest himself free by thrashing within his chains, in hopes that this might force the chair’s cracked spindle the rest of the way. It didn’t want to give, though, and he had no leverage to make it happen.
So he rocked, throwing increasing momentum into it until the chair, on the forward lunge, was standing almost on the tips of its runners. He pitched his weight ahead, careful not to overshoot, and brought himself onto the soles of his shoes. There he stood for a moment, hunchbacked into the shape of the chair—wearing it now instead of sitting in it—and made sure he had his balance.
Jamey hopped and waddled for the trailer door, thigh muscles burning after two-and-a-half days of immobility. The solid inner door they’d left standing open to allow in the air of the cool desert night; the screen door was latched, but not locked.
Near his neckline, the back of the chair flared out like a pair of sawn-off wings. Jamey bent at the waist, chopping down at the screen door’s handle with the stumpy right wing. It slipped, it bounced…then he caught it just right and the door popped open. He bulled forward before it could close again.
Bolted to the outside of the trailer were wrought iron steps with a landing four feet square. He stood atop it as triumphant as if he’d climbed a mountain. Five steps. Five steps to ground level, and from here, knowing what he had to do, they looked as steep as a mountain, too.
Jamey waddled to within inches of the edge, then spun a slow one-eighty to turn his back on it. A few deep breaths, a few flexes at the knee. He visualized the take-off, the fall, the smash-landing—
Then he shoved backward, up, and out as hard as he could, hoping yesterday’s mercy pillow stuffed between his spine and the chair would cushion the worst of the impact. He flung his upper body weight back, tucked his chin toward his chest to save the back of his skull from a knock as hard as a mugger’s blow.
Stars above him, then stars in front of him as he fell, then hit with a massive jolt that felt like being rear-ended by a truck. Air burst from his lungs, and he heard the cracking of wood.
For moments he lay wrapped in chains and kindling, afraid to move—that a few vertebrae would have realigned, or that he’d see broken spindles jutting through his chest. He tested himself from extremities inward. Nothing broken, no punctured lungs. Sore as hell, but he’d gotten that way from sitting for so long. The chains had gone slack, so he wriggled out of them, one limb at a time until he could roll off and leave them woven through the shattered remnants of the rocker.
Jamey tottered onto his feet, got his balance beneath more stars than he could ever recall seeing. And as much as he didn’t want to, he returned to the trailer.
The kitchen, greased and cluttered: a plastic wall clock read after two a.m. Sadie would be home from the bar before much longer—nothing he wanted anything to do with, but he wasn’t leaving here without using a phone.
He assumed that Samantha was still with her family in Flagstaff. Before leaving on Wednesday, he’d jotted their phone number on a note, then logged it into his cell phone while on the road. He hadn’t tossed the paper, just slipped it into the wallet that the brothers had confiscated, along with everything else in his pockets. Jamey had watched where they’d stashed this meager haul. Unless they’d moved it, everything should be here in the kitchen. He ransacked cabinets until his wallet and Sam’s car keys and his Oakley shades turned up—everything but his phone, but there was no time to hunt for it. It would have to be the trailer’s landline.
He glanced at the clock again. After midnight—Saturday now. In a few more hours he was supposed to be getting married. Until this moment it hadn’t occurred to him that today was the day.
In Flagstaff, the phone rang and rang. He took it as a hopeful omen that they had left the answering machine off, that they were waiting to hear from him, from someone. It rang until he heard her father’s voice, low and steady enough to take the news of a stock windfall or a dead son-in-law in equal stride.
“Jamey. Good of you to call.” The man’s sarcasm was glacial. “Your bachelor party ran a little long, did it?”
Jamey told him that Samantha could fill him in, that he didn’t have time to explain more than once. He could hear her father moving through the house, the thud of his feet down hallways with the cordless phone dangling at one side. A muffled rustling as the phone was transferred, then Jamey closed his eyes and soaked in the sound of her voice, groggy and tense and wounded though it was.
“Are you hurt?” Samantha asked.
“No. A little banged up, but no.”
“Then this must be—Daddy, could you leave, please?” she said abruptly. “Please leave.” Waiting until her father cleared out. “Then I guess this must be the part,” Sam began again, “when I tell you this better be good.”
“You know I didn’t kill that deputy.” Jamey peered down the length of the trailer to watch for any resurrection of the Brothers Hardesty. “They’ve told you that by now, haven’t they?”
“Yes, they’ve told us that much. But that’s not all of it. We got another call, Jamey, and now they want to talk to you about some drive-by shooting at a place called Alamo Lake.”
He winced. That was it. His latest worst fears realized, that some ballistics tech would make the connection before he could surrender, put this right.
“None of which sounds like you, I know, but—”
“Have they found your car by now?” he asked.
“Uh huh, then it got towed to Phoenix.”
Jamey ran through what had happened, starting with when he’d run out of gas. All the highlights until five minutes ago. Then he listened to the silence as she absorbed.
“Do you have any idea how all of that sounds?” Sam said. “I mean, try to imagine hearing it for the first time.”
“When I have to come back to testify against this family, you can come along and see them for yourself. Believe me, I couldn’t begin to make up people like this.”
“I miss you,” she said, in a voice more hurt than he could stand hearing right now. “They ruined our day, didn’t they? They all got together and ruined it.”
“How about when I finally make it there, we elope? Otherwise it might be too tempting for somebody to speak up at that part about objections.”
“Okay,” and she managed a little laugh. “My room’ll be the one with the ladder outside the window.”
He’d never seen it, this room from which she now spoke to him. Never with his own eyes, just pictures from years ago that had evolved over time, as she moved from toys to boys. He had looked forward to stepping into someplace so saturated with her history and her younger essence, which had sheltered her during all those years he’d never known she existed. To surrounding himself with the walls that had been privy to her hopes and secrets and her tears, so he could listen closely for whatever they might whisper to him of who she had been growing up.
That room. He wanted to be in that room.
“As soon as you leave there,” she said, “you’re turning yourself in, aren’t you? Until you get your life back, I’m not going to feel like I’ve got mine back, either.”
“Yeah—but once I leave here, it’ll take me awhile to get my bearings. I don’t know where I am.” Jamey checked the window, the night full of coyotes and strange roads. “They had me face-down in the floorboards while they drove here.”
“I’ve got a number here you should call. This guy with the state police. He’s the one who went over the video from the store cameras and decided th
at deputy shot himself accidentally. It’s his pager, he said. He was on your side as of Thursday, but after that drive-by at the lake…I don’t know.”
“I’m not worried about that. I’ll be leaving behind a whole trailerful of DNA that should back up my side of it. What’s the number?”
“Wait, it’s downstairs…”
He could hear Samantha on the move, losing the image he held of her sitting in her old bed. He couldn’t picture her anywhere else in the house, so he clung to Sam alone. Long and limber—you’d expect that of a yoga instructor—with glossy brown hair that she wore loose except while teaching, when she wore it in a braid halfway down her back. The rest of her seemed almost antidotal to what he’d come to think of as L.A. clichés. He’d seen so much spillover of artificial cleavage that he revered the streamlining of Sam’s more modest endowments. He’d seen, fresh from out-patient surgery, enough bruised eyes and bandaged noses that he hoped nobody ever tried convincing her that hers was a millimeter or two too thick across the bridge; liked the way it offset her eyes, so wide and clear that she seemed beyond duplicity.
“Found it yet?” he asked.
“I think so—I don’t have my contacts in, though, and I’m still kind of fuzzy from sleeping.”
“Try. Please.”
“Your voice,” she said, and her own had sharpened. “Is somebody coming?”
“Could be.” He could see a moving glimmer of headlights in the distance.
“Connolly, Andy Connolly,” then she read off a number.
He jotted it down with a gnawed pencil that he found on a cabinet, then shut his eyes. Hardest words he was ever going to have to say: “I have to go now.”
“Are you on your cell?” She sounded near tears. “Take me with you, so I’ll know you got away.”
“I’m not. I can’t.” He told Samantha that he loved her, that they would be talking again by the light of the next day. Just a few more hours. Maybe face-to-face by sunset.
After he hung up the phone, he looked at the silver revolver that the brothers had set on the kitchen table when they’d returned an hour ago. Beside it, a box of bullets. How he wanted to pick it up, to reload it if it was empty. Nothing to worry about from any of them if he was holding it.