Mad Dogs

by Brian Hodge

  If Zack had simply left well enough alone after wiping his prints from the gun and placing it his late employer’s hand, he might have gotten away with it. The dead man’s scalp had been starred by a contact wound, and there was powder residue on his hand—probably because he’d been trying to wrest the gun away from his head when it went off.

  But in his panic, Zack had decided that the staged suicide was a no-sell unless it came with a note. He spent the next two hours fabricating one, and photocopies had been circulating on the sly ever since:

  I done it cause I was sad. This old life sure is hard & Ive had enuff of it. & if anyone was to heer I had any disagreemints with Zack Hardesty and it was him that drove me to this sorrow theyd shure be rong. That Zack is a good hard worker & i will miss him. Someone should give him a better job but not me cause now Im going to shoot myself for being so sad.

  Even for someone of Zack’s intellect, the note should never have taken two hours to write. But he hadn’t written it. Not by hand. He’d at least had the presence of mind to realize someone would notice that his boss’s neat penmanship looked nothing like the ragged scrawl of Zack’s handwriting.

  But Zack couldn’t operate the company’s computers to compose and print the note that way. In a burst of inspiration, he’d taken magazines from a lobby table and a pair of scissors from the receptionist’s desk, then pieced it together from clippings, like a ransom note. It was better than a signed confession—certainly more entertaining—even before factoring in the fingerprints left in the tape’s adhesive.

  How’d you know it was me? Zack Hardesty was alleged to have asked over and over again when they showed up to arrest him. No, really, how’d you know?

  And now his legacy was alive and well and festering on without him.

  A few more miles up the road Andy grabbed the radio, figuring that by now the DPS would’ve reached the family’s trailer. Better he know exactly what had been found before meeting Jamey Sheppard. While there was no reason to doubt that one or both brothers was in rough shape, all he had was Sheppard’s word on how it happened, that the mother had snapped in a big way. Given the family, it was plausible. But if they pointed their fingers back at Sheppard, he might have a new set of problems.

  A couple of minutes later, it was obvious this wasn’t going to be an issue.

  Puke everywhere—that was one of the main impressions of the trailer. Rupert, the younger brother, had at some point dragged himself bruised and chain-whipped into the back bedroom to sleep off his hangover. The older brother, Jasper, was found cold and stiff in the tub, his swollen head glued to the molded plastic by dried blood. As for the mother, she’d been sitting still and vacant-eyed in the kitchen—across her lap, a broken length of arm from a rocking chair, one end shellacked with blood and hair; on the table in front of her, a nickel-plated revolver that everyone knew would turn out to have been Marvin Boyle’s.

  After the gun had been bagged, she’d twice asked for someone to kill her, and when they’d asked why she would want anyone to do a thing like that, Sadie, with a voice as flat as if she were half-dead already, told them.

  Andy thanked the guy on the other end of the radio and racked his handset. News like that, you couldn’t cheer it, exactly. A part of you wanted to laugh, but it wasn’t a laughter that felt good. Another part of you was so repulsed that you wanted to torch the scene on your way out and leave nothing but scorched earth, as though trying to cleanse it of a contagion.

  Good news for Jamey Sheppard, at least. Good news for other travelers who one day might have crossed this family’s path. And that was about it, really.

  Andy had heard a quotation once—Each man’s death diminishes me—and didn’t remember who’d said it…but anyone who could feel that way must have lived an enviably sheltered life.

  ****

  Whenever a car came wheeling in off the two-lane, Jamey would give it his undivided attention until the driver stepped out and obviously wasn’t right. Easy to tell when you were waiting for a state cop. Saturday morning and the roads were filled with slouching guys who looked as though they had gotten lost on their way to afternoons of softball and beer, doing good just to waddle from the car to the toilet. Jamey wondered how they would ever make it around the bases.

  When the right guy arrived, Jamey knew he was the one as soon as he stepped from his car. Casual clothes, jeans and a green shirt—right, he was doing this on his day off—but trim as an air force cadet. Everything about his bearing said he was somebody official and knew it. It was in the way he held his stare as he crossed the parking lot. It was in his lean and stony face, and even if he did wear a baseball cap he didn’t seem to be in any mood for games.

  Jamey didn’t much get the one black glove, though, especially in this kind of heat. This didn’t look like the kind of guy who went in for fashion statements.

  “You’re Jamey Sheppard?”

  He rose from the picnic table where he’d been sitting and offered his hand to shake. “Detective Connolly, isn’t it?”

  The man simply stood there, scrutinizing. There was no sense of his eyes at all, nor what was going through his mind, just the impenetrable green of the reflective sunglasses he wore. Jamey could see himself in them, warped by their curve, could see the ridge of mountain behind him, a jagged stripe bending across each lens.

  Overall, Connolly had seemed a lot more personable on the phone.

  “So what’s next?” Jamey tried. “I’m traveling light…so anytime you’re ready…”

  No response. It was getting unnerving. Another gut-churning audition, expected to say the right things in the right way to win over a stranger.

  Tires on pavement—Connolly looked back over his shoulder and followed the sound as a Range Rover passed without slowing. After it dwindled into the distance Jamey was left facing those buggy green shades.

  Then, without warning, he was once more facing a gun.

  “Is that really necessary?” Jamey tried to keep his voice steady, although he couldn’t help feeling betrayed. This man had lied to him, lied to Samantha, lied to the media. Make him think his worries are over, that’ll flush him out of hiding. “I called you, remember. I’ve been sitting here waiting. Am I that much of a risk?”

  Connolly ticked his head toward the building. “Get yourself over there behind the shithouse.”

  “I thought you were going to take me in for my statement,” Jamey said, wary.

  “Yeah, in a minute. First I got to frisk you, so get your ass over there and lean up against that shithouse wall.”

  Jamey balked. There was no reason he couldn’t be patted down right here as easily as he could twenty-five feet away. If he had to lean against something, the blocky overhangs for these picnic tables would serve as well. The only difference was that over there was—

  Was completely out of view from the road.

  Something here was very wrong.

  “When you called Flagstaff the other day with your beeper number,” Jamey tried, an ad-lib test, “how long did you tell Sam this would take before I’d be released?”

  For a moment, not a muscle moved on that hard, narrow face, but Jamey bet if he could have seen the eyes, they would have flickered with uncertainty.

  “I don’t recall as I made him any promises one way or another. Now move it.”

  Him? The Connolly he had spoken to earlier had remembered enough to remark on his getting married before the weekend was out.

  “Who are you really?” Jamey asked. Scared now, thinking that his best chance was to keep the man talking. Every few seconds meant that another car might pull in. Every few seconds was that much longer for the real Connolly to arrive.

  Through clenched teeth and a mouth curled into an ugly snarl: “Get your ass over to that wall.”

  “Is this about the other afternoon?” Jamey realizing now that what he had here was a self-appointed judge and executioner. Friend of the dead deputy, or a vigilante who refused to accept what had actually happened on
Wednesday.

  The not-Connolly took a swing at him with his gloved hand. Jamey tried to slip it but wasn’t fast enough, worn down by four bad days and there was only so much adrenaline left to spare. He saw out of the corner of his eye that the guy hadn’t even made a fist, was going to slap him, of all things, how hard could that —

  Plenty. Plenty hard, the side of his head erupting white and molten. The man had a palm like a brick. Jamey’s legs folded, and he caught himself on hands and knees, enough left in his arms that he broke his fall before he was lying flat on the earth.

  The man seized a fistful of shirt collar in his gloved hand and began dragging him through the dust. Jamey in his head now—and why not, at the moment his own was a terrible place to be. The guy could shoot him and be done with it, but he’s so accustomed to being obeyed he can’t tolerate a change in plans. And after giving the order four times already, then by god Jamey was going over to that wall.

  Jamey clasped the imposter’s arm with one hand and tried digging the other into the dirt, but there was nothing to grab hold of. Leaving five furrows in the dirt while the wall got closer, closer.

  “I’m sorry about the other day,” his voice sounding thick and muffled, “but it was an accident, the video even showed it was an accident.”

  “Shut your mouth.”

  “The guy’d been drinking—”

  “No he hadn’t,” a feral hiss from above, then the guy hit him again, another devastating whack with the glove on the side of Jamey’s neck. “He didn’t drink, he did not drink on duty.”

  And in the scuffle they must have missed the sound of a car pulling in off the two-lane. The first hint Jamey had of anyone else being here was the thud of a car door. His hopes were buoyed—maybe the real Connolly was here—but with the second door his hopes just as quickly sunk. As far as he knew, Connolly was coming alone.

  The imposter stooped to his ear and whispered, “Not a word, not a sound. Or whoever it is, I’ll shoot them first and you’ll watch it and know whose fault it is.”

  So they waited, two dusty statues. Jamey tried to quell his ragged breathing. Because what if it was a family? He listened for the sound of children, who more than anyone would be likely to run back here to see what there was to discover.

  But when a short young woman stepped around the corner and stared a moment, then started to laugh with embarrassment, he realized how they must have looked. Jamey down on his knees, the other guy standing and hiding the gun while he held Jamey’s hair with a black leather glove…at first glance this would not look like a murder.

  “Oh come on, fellas,” she said.

  It would look like a rest stop romance.

  “At least have the decency to take it inside the toilet.”

  She disappeared around the corner, and with her snap-judgment had come a perfection of farce that few lives could achieve in so few days. This was it. He could die now, and the universe could congratulate itself on a job well done. Let the bullet come.

  Then, abruptly, she was back, her head and outstretched arm easing around the corner of the building. If he’d seen no more of her than this the first time, he might have thought her just a girl, with a face that looked perhaps sixteen, and a choppy headful of hair as soft and blonde as a baby chick. Best of all, she was armed, whoever she was, but by now he was getting accustomed to that in people.

  “You think hard on something, bitch,” the not-Connolly said. “Ask yourself if you really want a piece of this. Because if you had a clue, you wouldn’t.”

  “You don’t know me,” she said. “So don’t tell me what I want.”

  He lifted the gun from the back of Jamey’s neck, aiming it toward her now. With the pressure off, Jamey craned his neck around and stared up into the imposter’s nose, and an instant later saw the strangest thing yet: a shaft of steel, bright and clean against the sky, coming down flat across the man’s shoulder, as if he were being knighted from behind. A good twelve or fourteen inches of blade sat level beside his neck, looking like a sword…only wavy.

  “What about me?” asked a disembodied voice. “What do you think I want a piece of?”

  The not-Connolly kept his mouth shut. Wouldn’t like to speak unless it was from a position of power.

  “Officer, is it? Deputy—whatever you are?” said the voice. “This poor thespian you were about to shoot? Why don’t you give him the gun.”

  The cop hesitated, had to be prompted once, twice, before finally giving in.

  “All right, shithead,” and he cuffed Jamey on the ear with his terrible glove, something that hurt more than these newcomers would ever realize. “Get up.”

  Jamey wobbled to his feet and reached, felt the revolver brush his fingertips, but then it was withdrawn and the brick-like hand crashed into the back of his head to shove him stumbling at the short blonde as she eased out from behind the corner of the building. She tried to sidestep him, his equilibrium gone and his vision blurred, but they tangled and went down together.

  He looked back, caught a blurry view of the cop frantically hopping out of range of the sword. The other guy lunged in close enough to connect, a wide arc of his blade hitting the cop squarely across the middle, but the sound was wrong, a dull whack as though he were made of canvas and plastic. He popped off two wild shots just as the swordsman spun away, then whirled back in swinging the blade up from below this time, a golfer’s swing, and now the cop made a different sound—a grunt, ragged and wet and pained.

  The girl was clambering off Jamey, scrambling in the dirt for her gun. He blinked, saw that the tip of the wavy blade was punched into the inside of the rogue cop’s thigh…then ripped out at an angle as the swordsman slipped and fell. The cop reeled backward into the wall and the huge wound under his groin gushed red.

  Everybody was on the ground now. Jamey didn’t move, the girl didn’t move, the swordsman didn’t move. Watching as the cop drained into the dust, femoral artery sliced for sure. Slack-faced and looking confused, he slapped weakly at the gash. Saying nothing, not even reaching for his pistol in the dirt. He looked at his hands, as thickly coated as if they’d been dipped in paint. His head tilted up, down, roved right to left, then he slumped slowly over onto his side.

  His last breath—Jamey heard it leave him. Hear that sound once, as he had the other day, and you would always recognize the drawn-out finality of it.

  “Dawn…?” said the other guy. “You aren’t…are you?”

  “I’m fine,” but you’d never know it by the trembling in her voice.

  “What about him?”

  “I…I can’t tell.”

  Cheery thing to hear about yourself, with so much pain and the world in a spin. Jamey tried to sit, couldn’t take his blurring eyes from the corpse. The dead man had lost his cap and mirrorshades, didn’t seem half as intimidating without them. Without his life.

  “Oh god, second one in four days,” Jamey groaned.

  The swordsman got to his feet. As he stepped closer, Jamey watched the details of his face swim into focus and gave a laugh of numb surrender. Maybe the cop had killed him after all. Maybe hell started off looking like the place in which you died.

  Duncan MacGregor pulled the woman he’d called Dawn to her feet. Jamey tried rising too, but his legs wanted no part of it. He heard his rescuers babbling on either side of him. Felt their arms slide around his back, felt their shoulders beneath his own.

  Then his reluctant feet were tripping and dragging along the ground, and there was all that remote tranquil blue above him, and a car door swung open and as far as he knew he never made it as far as the waiting back seat.

  PART

  TWO

  “Sherry, my boss—that’s Jamey’s agent, you know—when this first started she said he just wouldn’t have it in him to kill anyone. But I was never so sure about that. I mean, isn’t the buzz on the quiet ones that they’re the ones you have to watch out for?”

  —Vicky Sawyer

  Assistant, the Avalon Agency


  Entertainment Tonight

  17

  YO yo yo, man, so what I been hearing ’round,” the fish was saying, “is that you kilt a motherfucker wit’ a rubber band.”

  “Have, huh.” Jordy Rabin tried to not sound too impressed with himself. At least not until he knew what the fish’s game was. “Where’d you hear that?”

  “Ever’where, man. From ever’body. ’Cept it be like they sittin’ on a secret and won’t tell me no more, know what I’m saying? They say, ‘Hey, Lil’ Pun, you want the rest of the story, you go ask the man hisself.’”

  Midday Monday out in the yard with this new fish who’d come in over the weekend, first time he’d graduated up from short-term county sentences. It had been only half a year since Jordy was the fish—his own first time behind the tall walls and razor wire, too—but no way, with triple-homicide in his jacket, that he didn’t have gallons more juice than this dinky jackboy. Boosting cars out from under their drivers’ fat suburban asses…it didn’t much impress a guy who’d had to plead out his own case to narrowly avoid a padded crucifix full of straps and a lethal needle.

  “So I’m askin’,” he said. “Kill a motherfucker wit’ a rubber band—what’s up wit’ dat?”

  And that name. When he’d come in on Saturday, he’d started telling guys to call him by his street handle: Little Punisher. Little Pun, for short. Even shorter, Lil’ Pun. Bad enough, Jordy thought, that he had to share the same prison with this clueless dickhead—but the same cell? The only upside was a home-court advantage to the betting action on when Lil’ Pun would get taken down, and whether the Brothers or the Aryans did the shanking or the stomping. Jordy had five packs on Thursday, by multiple skinheads.

  “Man, that’s just talk,” Jordy told him. “That sound like anything that’s even possible? A rubber band? I mean, listen to what you’re saying.”