Mad Dogs

by Brian Hodge

  But all three, Jasper and Rupert and Sadie, had wrapped their hands around it since he had. Better to leave it that way for the crime lab techs who could prove him innocent. Especially since he had no idea where they had taken the gun tonight, if this time they’d left someone dead.

  Jamey hunted for the keys to the truck—hadn’t seen them tossed anywhere in the living room, but couldn’t find them here in the kitchen either. After another check on the distant headlights, he guessed he had about one minute to vacate, and rushed along the brothers’ mucky trail back to the bathroom.

  When he saw them, Jamey wished he had time to just stare and laugh. Jasper and Rupert had folded themselves together in the bathtub, coiled heads-to-feet like a yin-yang symbol. Their worst nausea had passed but its residue was everywhere. They moaned and they quivered, as stinking wet as if they’d been dredged from a sewer, and when Jamey kicked the side of the molded plastic tub they began to whimper.

  “Who’s got the keys to the truck…dudes?”

  They croaked and gurgled. They had lost the power of speech altogether.

  Jamey held his breath and leaned over to pilfer their pockets. Jasper’s first, then he was about to give up on Rupert too when he saw Rupert’s arm creeping up from one side. Rupert wheezed with a vacant grin, then gaped and aimed a shaky fist at his maw. He was trying to eat his own keys. Jamey whacked him over the skull with a bottle of shampoo and snatched the keyring from his slimy fingers.

  Sadie’s car pulled up outside while he rinsed his hands and the keys at the faucet. He left it running and dried everything on his shirt while he made for the trailer’s back exit, set in the hallway wall across from the bathroom. He flung the door open—no steps and no landing, just a four-foot drop. He slipped down to the ground, then eased the door shut.

  Jamey paused, flushing the stink from his nose with the cool air, letting his eyes grow accustomed to the night. Light bled from the windows, but the surrounding grounds were such a maze of scrap metal and mortally wounded antiques that the place might as well have been booby-trapped.

  He crept around the back end of the trailer, crouched at the corner and watched Sadie brooding over her rocking chair with a wrath that boiled up from the sour depths of a lifetime of deprivation and resentment. She fumed, tapping her foot as she worked herself into a fury, then stooped to grab the chain and one of the broken armrests.

  And into the trailer she stormed.

  While creeping out of hiding, Jamey could clearly hear her as she tore through the trailer from one end to the other, voice keening ever higher with the discovery of each new outrage. A savage clamor erupted at the culmination of her search—the impacts of missed blows, the chain and wood swung against the walls and tub, and the meatier whacks of blows that found their mark. Hate them though he did, Jamey winced at the brothers’ feeble cries.

  He picked his way to the truck, stopped a few yards away. Propped against the scabby hulk of an old washing machine was an even older pickaxe. A vintage mining relic, maybe. When he hefted it, the handle felt weathered and runneled. He tested the fit of its head—wobbly, but not ready to fly off just yet.

  He carried it to the truck, eased the door open and slid behind the wheel, held his breath as he cranked the ignition. No way was this going to pass unheard in the trailer. He pumped the gas pedal, grimacing at the starter’s reluctant grind.

  And here she came, a shadow rippling across the living room window blinds. He slid low as the screen door banged open. Sadie barged onto the landing, waving the deputy’s revolver, yet something possessed him to step back outside. He dug in behind the truck’s open door and cocked the pickaxe high, poised to hurl it end-over-end.

  “You wanted me gone?” he shouted. “I’m going, that’s all!”

  She jabbed the pistol in accusation. “Grand theft truck!”

  “You don’t think kidnapping’s worse than a stolen truck?”

  She clamped her mouth shut. Then a sneer and her old standby: “Nothing I could do about that! I got the diabetes!”

  “Yeah, and next you’re gonna have a head wound!” he shouted. Didn’t know who he was channeling now, in what role, but it was working. “How’s your aim, Sadie? Think you can drop me before I whip this thing at you and pin you to the door?”

  Sadie seemed to have as little taste for doing him harm as he had for her, but he was putting up the better front. She lowered the pistol with a disgusted sigh, looking first at him and then the scraps of wood littering the baked earth between them. He wondered what she had been like once, before marrying what must have been the biggest loser she’d ever met. Before she had come to the desert to raise cretins and shrivel in the sun.

  “Sadie,” he said, quietly now, “why don’t you go back in and help clean up your boys. Go turn the shower on them.”

  “I don’t think—” She wavered in the doorway. “…Jasper’s doing all that well.”

  He’d been so focused on the revolver he hadn’t noticed that she still held the clublike chair arm at her side. Though the light was poor, it looked wet and stained.

  She seemed to forget about him, turned and slid her bony birdlike frame down to sit inside the doorway. When she took the pistol in both hands and popped the barrel into her mouth, he saw light in the center of its bleak silhouette, a thin glow around the cylinder. Don’t, he said, or tried to—his own mouth had gone so dry—and before he could try again he heard the dead metallic click. She pulled the trigger with her thumb a second time, then after hitting the third empty spit the gun out and into her lap, where she stared at it and shook her head.

  She flung the chair arm through the open doorway with a crash, then pushed up to her feet and trudged in after it. Kicked the door closed behind her.

  Jamey slid back into the truck, twisting the key until the motor caught with a ragged roar. He left it idling while he hopped out and ran the pickaxe over to her sedan. Didn’t know what Sadie was doing inside and didn’t care to, but in case her rage took one more twist, he didn’t want her reloaded and five minutes behind him.

  He braced himself into a wide stance before her car and swung the pickaxe, punched its curved iron spike through the grill and into the radiator. It ruptured with a jet of steam and the hot thick stink of coolant.

  Back in the truck, Jamey popped on the headlights, then stomped the gas and wheeled around toward the first of however many roads it would take to find the way.

  14

  SATURDAY morning—a chance to act like a bona fide family man for an entire unbroken day. Swing a hammer, throw a ball, flip some steaks, or just breathe the same air as the people he loved…any of them sounded worthy of the hours.

  Andy Connolly had been up for all of ten minutes, had his coffee in hand and was three steps from the sliding door to the deck when the pager went off behind him.

  On the other side of the glass he could’ve been listening to birds, lawn mowers, the squeak of swing-set chains. Neighborhood sounds, sane and tranquil.

  He ignored the pager until it stopped.

  Barefoot, in boxers, he stared past the redwood deck and across the lawn. Maria was pushing Miguel in one of the swings, both of them in shorts and sleeveless tops, thin-limbed and caramel-skinned and their hair as dark as crows’ wings. The boy favored her. If he shared any of his biological father’s features, Maria had never remarked on it. Andy had seen a few photos of the man, but no point in scrutinizing them, hunting for the man that Miguel might one day be.

  Andy had entered the picture before Miguel had turned two, was the only father he could remember, and so far the boy had been color blind. Not yet wondering why he and his mother looked Mexican while his father had blue eyes and fair skin handed down by ancestors who must’ve lived through an awful lot of cloudy days.

  It couldn’t last. One day Miguel would notice, maybe start thinking of him as gringo before he thought of him as papa. Maybe get angry with his mother, too, for marrying one of them, when it was one of them who’d killed his fa
ther, his real father. Not for being a bad guy. Instead, for being a nice guy who’d stopped at night to help a stranger change a flat tire. A nice guy who’d walked up with a tire tool and brown skin and an offer to help, and ended up shot by a stranger who wasn’t a bad guy either, just frightened and stupid and armed. A thing like that, there could never be any explaining it to a boy’s satisfaction. It just gave him one more reason for his eyes, already as dark as obsidian, to become as hard, as well.

  But today was Saturday, and Miguel was five, and he laughed a lot, and his eyes were like his mother’s. You wouldn’t think a day like that should be so hard to hold on to.

  Again—the pager.

  The number in the display wasn’t anything Andy recognized. The 520 area code, but all that did was rule out the Phoenix metro area. He returned the call from the kitchen phone. Whoever was on the other end answered in three rings—male, with a rush of breath that sounded as though he might’ve sprinted to grab it.

  “This is Connolly.”

  “You’re the state cop?”

  “And who’s asking?”

  “You gave your number to my fiancée, to give to me,” the guy said. “This is Jamey Sheppard.”

  Andy watched Miguel strain for the sky, and there went Saturday. Just gone.

  “You’re the one who cleared me after looking at security tapes?” Sheppard said. “I’d say that calls for a thank-you.”

  “You can thank me later,” Andy said. There were still those dozen or so slugs dug out of Winnebagos at Alamo Lake. “You ready to emerge above ground again and get this worked out?”

  Sheppard told him this was the only thing he’d been wanting since Wednesday afternoon, and Andy said fine, that this was good…but thinking that you’d never know it by the guy’s actions.

  “I can guess what must be going through your head. It’s not like that,” Sheppard said. “You know where my car was found—or Samantha’s car, I mean, where it was found out of gas? About a half-mile from there I got grabbed off the side of the road. By two guys in a beat-up old truck with a sawed-off shotgun. Their name is Hardesty…Jasper and Rupert Hardesty. They’ve got a mother named Sadie.”

  Well, that explained a lot. Volumes. “I know of the family.”

  “I sort of picked up in conversation that their father’s in prison.”

  “Yeah. I know of the family,” Andy said. Zack Hardesty was only the single dumbest murderer doing time in the Arizona penal system. In the law enforcement community, at least, the guy was a legend. “We’re on the same page here, Jamey.”

  What Sheppard had to say next about the Hardestys of Mohave County only sounded like par for the family. Snatch up a guy for a reward, and when it turns out there is none, most people would cut him loose and start praying he doesn’t file a civil suit on top of a criminal complaint. But not the Hardestys—no, they were determined to turn shit into gold.

  “They’ll be taken care of, don’t doubt that,” Andy said. “Right now, your main concern is to get yourself in under my roof.” He stopped for a moment, then: “How’d you get out from under theirs?”

  When Sheppard told him, he had to put a fist to his mouth so he wouldn’t laugh out loud. That entire family was writing its own chapter in the record book.

  “You might want to send somebody by their place,” Sheppard said. “When I left, it wasn’t good. Their mother came home right after I got loose and she went after them with a chain and a hunk of wood. They were too far gone to fight back. I could hear it from outside. I think she hurt one of them pretty bad. The last thing I saw, she had the deputy’s gun in her mouth.”

  “You left the gun there with them?”

  “I haven’t touched it since Wednesday afternoon. It’s got three days’ worth of their fingerprints on it since I touched it, and I wasn’t about to mess that up.”

  “If you’re clear of there, where are you now?”

  “I don’t know. It’s like a rest stop, a state route rest stop, that’s the best I can tell. It’s got a phone and a water fountain and those were the top two things I wanted to find.” Andy could hear him take a breath, collect himself. “When they grabbed me, they put me face-down in the floor of the truck, so I never even saw where they were taking me. I got away in the middle of the night, I drove awhile, and once I figured I was far enough from their place, I parked off-road so I could get some sleep. I didn’t want to start moving again until after daylight, so I could at least see where I going. Which brings me here. Wherever here is. I don’t have a map and I really don’t know the state.”

  “My guess is,” Andy said, “you might be somewhere along Route 93.”

  There just weren’t that many places he could be, based on the driving times involved and the general desolation of Mohave County, especially the southern half that bordered La Paz. Sheppard couldn’t have gotten as far north as I-40, because he’d know an interstate when he saw it. And for sure he would’ve known if he’d strayed back into California, because there could be no missing the Colorado River.

  “Tell you what,” Andy said. “I’ve got your phone number here. Let me call it in, find out where it is so we can get you pinpointed. I find that out, I’ll call you right back.”

  “Then you’ll come meet me here? And I mean you, and not someone else.”

  Andy had known it would come to this. No one else would do, the guy bonded to him now—the savior who’d watched a videotape and called off the dogs.

  “Because at this point, I would really rather just stay put,” Sheppard told him. “My only option away from that trailer was a truck that’s been used in one drive-by shooting and maybe more. So I’m not all that keen to drive around in it any more than I have to. I don’t want to run into any more deputies like that guy on Wednesday.”

  “All right, Jamey. No problem. You’ve got yourself a ride in.”

  “And you know what’s got me worried right now? It’s that before you can get here, a patrol car’s going to come rolling through this place, see this truck, see me, and it’s going to be the same thing all over again.”

  Andy had been monitoring the guy’s voice, Sheppard sounding hot, worn out, knocked around, and frayed at the edges. Maybe he was innocent of everything and maybe there were some gray areas, but either way, the last thing anyone needed was one more confrontation. Throw another cowboy like Marvin Boyle at him—or even someone who merely reminded him of Boyle—and it would go badly.

  “If you’re still in Mohave County like I think you are,” Andy said, “I’ve got to notify the sheriff there anyway, about the Hardestys. I’ll have his people steer clear of your position until I can get there. Will that help keep you calm?”

  “It won’t hurt.”

  “Then stick by the phone until you hear back from me.” Adding, just in case Sheppard needed some help staying on track, “It’s Saturday morning. Let’s see if we can’t still get you married off before the weekend’s out.”

  He punched up a new dial tone, speed-dialed the DPS substation and gave them the word on the Hardestys, then had them run Sheppard’s phone number. He’d nailed the location: it belonged to a pay phone at a rest stop on Route 93 south of a little town called Wikieup. Desolate country, all right, like one long sun-blasted corridor between two ranges of low mountains to the east and to the west.

  His next call went to Kingman. The Mohave County sheriff, a man named Pike, had only elation for the suspects in his county’s latest crime spree.

  “Then this is the day I’ve been waiting for,” Pike said. “So Zack Hardesty’s boys finally stooped low enough to meet their potential? There’s a couple of apples that fell so close to the tree they hit the roots.”

  “Did you have any more trouble overnight?” Andy asked. “My informant says they went out gunning again last night but he didn’t know where.”

  A beat. “I’ll be dipped in shit. That was them too?”

  “What’d you have?”

  “A rancher near Lake Havasu. Found a few of hi
s stock dead in the field this morning. Each one shot in the head.” Sheriff Pike heaved a sigh. “Cows, Andy. They went executing cows.”

  “Let me warn you ahead of time,” Andy said. “When you get to their place, I think you’re going to find a mess, it’s just a question of how big a mess.” He skimmed the highlights of Sheppard’s last few days and how the Hardestys had figured into them.

  “That,” said Pike, “is one hard-luck story.”

  “And I’m all for ending it on a yawn today, so I could use a favor…”

  Andy followed through on his promise, told Pike where Sheppard had phoned from and requested that he send out a dispatch for the rest of his department to give the place a pass for the next couple of hours.

  “Sounds to me like you’re not entirely convinced he isn’t dangerous.”

  “I’m just saying under the circumstances there’s nothing to be gained from provoking him. He reached out, he wants this over. But I don’t know how straight he’s thinking by now. People have been acting stupid around him for half a week, and I don’t want it rubbing off on him at the last minute. He’s an actor, how stable can he be? So if he’s got a few hornets in his head by now—and in the same situation, I might myself—it’s no good to poke at him with sticks.”

  “Hey, actor, that reminds me,” the sheriff said. “Didn’t happen to see Jay Leno last night, did you?”

  After Connolly called him back—sit tight, no worries, he’d be there in ninety minutes or so—Jamey hung up the phone and leaned against the wall until the relief settled into his bones.

  The phone carrel and water fountain hung on the front of a little brick building that housed his and hers toilets and nothing else. Scattered to either side were a few pale gray concrete picnic tables, each one shaded beneath a two-sided enclosure and overhang. An ugly little oasis in the middle of a searing pan of desert, and for the moment he had it to himself.