by Brian Hodge
“He shouldn’t even be talking to you,” the woman protested. “It’s a violation of his parole.”
“That’s just in-person they mean by that,” Jordy said. Truthfully, he had no idea what did and didn’t qualify as associating with known felons. “All this is is a friendly call to see how he’s getting along. Is he there?”
When she still balked, he had to smooth it through. Asking her what possible harm he could do her brother by showing he still cared about the guy. And it wasn’t like they could ever meet up again on the outside, was it?
She caved. Probably worried about her brother not making friends easily.
And it really did a man’s heart good knowing someone like Cro-Mag. Never in Jordy’s life had anyone sounded so happy to hear from him. Bouncing off the walls like a kid wound up on sugar. A kid with a trench along his skull and convictions for assault and battery.
Jordy smalltalked for a couple minutes, giving the sister time to drift away if she’d been eavesdropping. There was also a risk that some C.O. was listening, too—they snooped in on random calls—but if they overheard, what was the worst they could do? Tack a few more years onto three life sentences?
“Listen,” Jordy said, getting down to business, “remember that idea we cooked up, just joking around, how a guy might change addresses, if he had the balls to live with it?”
Cro-Mag said he did.
“I’ve decided I got the balls. So that means the next part’s up to you.”
Silence. This was big, even for Cro-Mag. The key was what Jordy had told Lil’ Pun earlier, in stressing the volatility of Cro-Mag’s nature: But me he likes, and if he likes you, he’d kill for you. For the least little reason, too.
“It might help you get the job done, knowing what I’m about to tell you,” Jordy said. “I mean, don’t be going nuts in front of your sister or anything when you hear this…but Mom and Dad used to beat holy hell out of me the whole time I was growing up.”
18
DETAILS came slowly, one and two at a time. Daylight, muted at the curtained window. Air conditioning—central, judging by the vents on the cream-colored wall. Dull pain, virtually all of it now above the shoulders. Topped off with a dose of déjà vu, as though he’d discovered all this already, but hadn’t quite managed to retain it.
“Hey. You’re awake.”
Jamey swiveled his head toward the voice coming from the doorway. The right side of his neck felt like a rusty hinge.
“You plan on staying that way this time?” she asked. “Or are you just going to sleep the rest of your life away?”
“I’m sure there must be some good reasons why I shouldn’t.” His voice sounded as creaky as his neck felt. He groped for the glass of water on the nightstand.
“Well, let’s see,” she said…the same compact little blonde from the rest stop. Hair like a baby chick. It was coming back to him now. She raised a hand and started ticking things off one finger at a time. “Alive. Celebrity status. And I swear I haven’t heard a thank-you yet out of you…but since you’ve spent most of the time either snoring or drooling with your eyes rolled back in your head, I’ll let that slide.”
Jamey blinked. “I don’t snore.”
“Oh? Get that on good authority, did you?”
He blinked again, vision still fuzzed and crusty. “And you are…?”
“I’m Dawn,” she said, and stepped in beside the bed. “I’ve been the one doing all the checking up on you, because I thought it might not make you so agitated if you woke up and the first person you saw was short and female, instead of…”
“An adult male wanted for murder, who I’ve probably inconvenienced by playing him on TV.”
“He didn’t kill anybody, okay?”
“And did you get that on good authority?”
“Why, I do believe I did. Eyewitness,” she said. “I was there for a cut and blow-dry, twenty feet away when his cousin started shooting. And Duncan was the one who stopped him. He saved lives that day by doing what he did. That’s pretty much been overlooked in all this.”
Jamey nodded. He decided against offering the observation that lives wouldn’t have needed saving at all had the two cousins not gone in to rob the place.
“For a guy who hasn’t killed anybody,” Jamey said instead, figuring he could get away with this much, “it sure seemed like he did a job on that guy at the rest stop.”
“Someone could make the argument that it was you he was saving then. But what do I know—I was only there helping.”
Disjointed fragments of memory drifted in: Dawn peering around the corner from behind a gun, holding it on the deputy holding Jamey’s life on a short leash. Dawn walking behind the rest stop and her startled reaction, little sputter of laughter, Oh, come on, fellas…at least have the decency to take it inside the toilet. It occurred to him that she might make a decent actress, able to improv that well under pressure.
He decided she was right about that thank-you. It was deserved.
“Is it still…today?” he asked then.
“If by ‘today’ you mean Saturday afternoon, then no, that was more like three days ago.”
“That’s not even funny.”
“You don’t believe me?” Dawn didn’t appear terribly concerned if he didn’t. “Then go turn on CNN and look at the little square in the corner.”
Tuesday? This was Tuesday? He’d lost three days? That would explain the feeling of starvation.
He skimmed a cautious hand over the spots that hurt worst. Thick knots on the right side and back of his skull; the right side of his neck stiff, probably bruised; left ear puffy as a boxer’s. Probably should have been taken to a doctor, but no—these were people who would’ve written off much of the behavior the rest of the world considered normal. He seemed to have a knack for attracting people like that lately.
“How could one guy hit so hard?” Jamey asked. “He wasn’t even making a fist.”
“He was cheating. Remember that wicked-looking glove?” Dawn raised her hand, flexed her fingers. “Inside, it had lead in the palm. Duncan checked it out. He’d heard of gloves like that, but hadn’t ever seen one. He really wanted to take it, too, just to have it, but figured it’d be better to leave it on the cop’s hand. More proof that how things turned out was justified. You know, go somewhere wearing a glove like that, it’s obvious you’re not out to spread love and good cheer.”
“Do you know who he was?”
A deputy named Russell Pellegrino, from the next county south, Dawn told him, and that in his car they’d found road flares and kerosene. The guy off duty, out of his jurisdiction, obviously out to avenge. If things had gone as planned, Jamey realized he might simply have vanished. Doused in fuel and charred to a husk in the desert—someone had hated him enough to do that to him. Planned it out in advance. Drove dozens of miles intent on making it happen. The feeling was extremely creepy.
And it was bizarre enough that Pellegrino had managed to locate him during such a narrow window of opportunity. But Duncan MacGregor and this Dawn person? Uncanny, and to his mind impossible…although as she explained, it had been less a matter of telepathy than tuning in to a police band radio. Right there, for all of Mohave County’s law-and-order voyeurs to hear: his location and a steer-clear order. At least the state cop, Connolly, had kept that promise.
“We’d driven into the area straight through from Denver, after…well, let’s just call it a strange Friday night there,” she said. “Hey, did you know Jay Leno joked about you guys on that night’s Tonight Show?”
Jamey let an exasperated glare answer for him.
“Yeah, that was kind of the way Duncan reacted, too,” she said. “The most he was planning on was getting into the general vicinity, your last known whereabouts, and then—because it was obvious you were innocent—just hang around and catch up with you after everything got cleared up and you were free to go. But then, hear a thing on the scanner like right where to find you…” Dawn grabbed his glass of wa
ter from the nightstand and downed a good portion of what remained. Clacked the glass back into place. “Well, it’s like Oscar Wilde said: ‘I can resist everything but temptation.’”
“Why?” Jamey asked.
“Why what? Why couldn’t Oscar control himself?”
“You know what I mean.” He had a feeling that Dawn liked to antagonize. Not out of maliciousness; just sport. “Why catch up with me at all?”
Because, so far, none of this seemed to be retribution over the American Fugitives episode. You don’t risk your own neck to save someone’s life and then tuck him into bed for three days if you’re operating from malevolence.
And he still couldn’t get a fix on where they had him stashed. All he could see was four walls, a door, and a curtained window, but nothing felt like a motel, not even a bedroom in a larger suite. No phones anchored by thick cords into the baseboard; no prints of paintings or pictures, only clean bare walls. His bed wasn’t even fully made up—just a sheet and a blanket and a single pillow. The way things look during those first jumbled days when you move into a new place.
“Especially,” Jamey added, “if you had to drive all that way to do it.”
“You mean that doesn’t massively stroke your ego? Come on, you’re blowing my preconceptions. Like the old light bulb joke? How many actors does it take to screw in a light bulb?”
He gave her a blank stare. It wasn’t acting.
“One. He holds the bulb and the rest of the world revolves around him.”
“If you really want to know,” Jamey confessed, “from where I am right now, this whole thing has Misery written all over it. Remember? James Caan wakes up after his car wreck and there’s Kathy Bates standing over him…‘I’m your number one fan.’”
And she laughed. Dawn genuinely laughed, and he felt as though he’d scored a point by making it happen. Her guard lowered and for a moment he saw someone that he could probably come to like quite a lot.
Play the latest round of the what’s-my-motivation game: Dawn wouldn’t easily extend trust—maybe with anybody, or maybe just with men. Well, look at her. She looked like a child. A very well-developed child. And because of it, had a life history of nobody taking her seriously. Maybe the reason she kept her hair cut short and choppy. Wear it long and she’s somebody’s little china doll.
Now he understood why she’d liked that remark about Misery. It gave her all the power.
“I can see why you’d think of that, actually,” she conceded. “But if it’s big blunt instruments you’re worried about, don’t. We had to leave the sledgehammer behind in Denver.”
Sedona—that’s where they were, he soon discovered. A condominium in Sedona, Arizona. Dawn gave him a leisurely tour after he was up and around, and while he was still apprehensive about coming face-to-face with Duncan MacGregor, the inevitable was delayed a bit longer. According to Dawn, he was out on foot, getting a few new license plates for their car. Off other people’s cars, Jamey assumed.
Sedona, of all places. The more Jamey thought about it, the greater seemed the possibility that he wasn’t in the company of common fugitives, but fugitive savants.
He knew about Sedona, all right. Had never visited, but he’d been hearing it pop up in conversation for years. Come from L.A., especially the film industry, and references were bound to happen. Fall in love with a yoga instructor, adding her circle of associates to your life, and they became inescapable.
Sedona belonged to an altogether different Arizona than the Arizona called home by sun-fried abominations like the Hardestys. A mountain town, it sat several thousand feet above the searing desert floor, and one look out the condo’s picture windows proved that Sedona’s breath-stealing beauty was no empty rumor. Even through glass, the craggy vistas of red rock and blue sky and evergreens looked majestic and eternal. Nature had had huge ambitions here.
And then there were the vortexes.
Back in Los Angeles, all of the spiritual trend-hoppers he’d ever met spoke of this place with the same goggle-eyed awe that they might lavish on the higher altitudes of Tibet. Supposedly, Sedona was a nexus of electromagnetic energies, and thus drew New Age seekers the way lesser magnets drew iron filings. For as long as he’d been in L.A., Jamey had seen it happen: They fled the city like stressed-out refugees, came here and did whatever brought them peace, spent wads of money, and then returned home to gloat about how much more enlightened they’d become.
Savants, he marveled again. Because with such a large segment of the resident and tourist populations so attuned to higher frequencies, how likely was it that they would also tune in for something like American Fugitives? In the Sedona demographic, the show probably wouldn’t even register a faint blip on the Nielsen Ratings radar.
The bonus: This put him within thirty miles of Flagstaff, and Samantha. Assuming she was still there after another three days.
Dawn opened a road atlas and traced Saturday’s path here: northwest up Route 93 after leaving the rest stop, until they’d come to Interstate 40, near Kingman. Where they’d had to stop for gas.
“You should probably know that that’s where Duncan and you were recognized by an Alert Crimestopper,” Dawn told him. “Who—sing along if you know the words—went right home and called the American Fugitives toll-free hotline.”
“They know I’m with you now?” Starting to feel dizzy. “The entire world knows I’m with you now?”
“Do you really have to say that like you’re ashamed to be seen with us?”
“But you shouldn’t be seen at all. With or without me.”
“Well, we were. It happened. So deal, okay?” Her nonchalance was enviable. “Anyway, joke’s on them, because look at the path there. The natural assumption is that we’d be stupid and keep driving northwest, to Vegas.”
Instead, they had done just the opposite, doubling back to the east, toward the mountainous middle of the state, then dropping south again. Had to graze Flagstaff to do it. In the same town with Samantha and he’d slept through it.
“And the tipster, she must’ve been so excited about you and Duncan that she forgot to take a good look at me, because she hugely blew the description.” Dawn had a laugh. “But it’s really got me wondering what it would feel like to be five-six and red-haired.”
Jamey paced, getting a feel for the place: a vast living room bridged to the kitchen by a combination bar and work-counter, and overlooked by a sleeping loft accessed by a slatted stairway. A hall led back to two bedrooms and the bath, plus a tiny utility and laundry room. The place was clean but sparse, furniture pared down to basics. All very western looking, full of dark-stained pine intended to look rough-hewn but wasn’t, since no one who could afford views like this would willingly risk anything so rustic as a few splinters.
Of a conspicuous non-western motif were the two swords cross-mounted above the fireplace. Long wavy blade on one of them. Cleansed of blood now.
In nosing around, Jamey supposed he’d been looking for bodies, bound and gagged, because, well, wasn’t that what being on the run drove you to? Home invasion?
“Relax,” Dawn told him, reading his mind. “The place belongs to my father.”
Fine. As long as a hostage rescue team wasn’t about to come crashing through the door. Although…wasn’t he the hostage? Some lines had blurred here. The door was in sight but he felt no urge to run for it. If only because, at the moment, he mostly felt like a hostage to dirt. After rising from his epic slumber, he had returned to the same clothes he’d first put on a week ago, although at some point since Saturday they’d been mercifully stripped from him and laundered. No such luck for his skin and hair. From scalp to toes he felt absolutely acrawl.
“I need a shower,” he announced.
“Oh good,” Dawn said. “Your self-awareness has returned with a vengeance.”
Jamey boosted the water as hot as he could stand and let it sluice away the last week. Tender going with the shampoo around the contusions on his head. His hosts had had the
foresight to provide for him, too. A pack of disposable razors waited on the vanity, along with a toothbrush still in the wrapper. By the time he was through, it felt as though he’d scrubbed away five pounds of grime.
Fresh, clean, and energized—yet still, on stepping from the bathroom, he made no breaks for the front door. Just as well, since his odds of reaching it unimpeded had dwindled in the last half-hour.
“Well, it’s not exactly like looking in a mirror,” Duncan MacGregor told him to his face. “But then that TV show’s kind of one-sided anyway, don’t you think?”
19
CONSIDER this fair warning,” Blayne said. Through the viewfinder, with his golden-red hair snapping in the desert breeze and the morning sun blazing from his skin like flame off bronze, he looked achingly like the Viking he would surely have been a thousand years ago. “If you don’t stop pointing that Canon at me, I’m gonna take this cannon”—he brandished the machine gun— “and jam it down your throat and pull the trigger.”
Kristophe let the scene roll a moment and, because he could always edit the sound later, called out encouragement: “Wonderful! There was real fury there! Palpable! You have me almost believing you to be serious!”
“I am serious!” Blayne screamed. Maybe loud enough to be heard at the truck stops and motels a mile away. “It’s like you’re filming gay porn, but with guns! I don’t want to have anything more to do with it!”
The last action in the viewfinder was a flash of Blayne’s heroic arm, then a brown arc as coffee showered from the cup he’d just hurled.
“Okay…cut,” Kristophe said, and lowered the camera. He took a few steps across the scorched earth toward his temperamental co-star.
The day would come when he could banish prima donnas from his set and send them home quaking in fear of never working again. But this was not that day. There was no one else around to replace Blayne. There was no one else around, period. And the machine gun was his, after all.