Mad Dogs

by Brian Hodge

  “We have some problem here, yes?”

  An incredulous nod. “You bet we have a problem.”

  Blayne rose from the tan slab of rock where Kristophe had had him sit while oiling the gun. Shirtless, of course. The shot had been beautifully composed, with the arid landscape stretching back behind him in a slow rise toward the distant ridges of weathered stone, a few phallic cactuses studding the backdrop. The whole tableau had reeked of sweat and sex and danger. Spoiled now, because the scene had no greater payoff than a hissy fit with airborne beverages.

  “The problem is, your girlfriend’s still got us out here on call, and we’re no closer to getting this thing taken care of than we were before we left on Saturday. It’s bright and early Wednesday now, and all we’ve been doing out here is burning alive with our thumbs up our butts.”

  His complaints were not without merit, the two of them trapped in this Kingman place since Sunday because it was the last location Melissa’s brother had been spotted. Each night, on the phone, she insisted that there was no point in budging until they got another fix on where to find him—something she’d been working at through Jamey’s fiancée. Until that happened, Kristophe was finding it helpful to think of himself and Blayne as commandos deployed to foreign soil, waiting for the moment their target raised his head so they could spring into action.

  “I too hate it here,” said Kristophe, in case his partner had overlooked that they were in this together. “It is impossible to get good espresso in this hell-hole.”

  “The problem is,” Blayne not even close to finished, “every day we’re here is another bite out of that nice fat check Mickey Coffman laid on me the other day, when it’s supposed to go toward my club. The problem is I’ve got clients going soft on me, and if I don’t get back to them soon, they won’t be my clients anymore.”

  “Always, Blayne, there always will be more soft and flabby people for you—”

  “And the problem is,” raising his voice again, “that camera of yours has been running non-stop and you won’t even tell me why!”

  “Blayne, my friend,” Kristophe said. “These pectorals of yours. Did one day you just wake up and there they were, waiting for you?”

  Blayne snorted. “Please…”

  “Of course they weren’t. Because great rewards are not earned in a single weekend.” Actually, this was superb training for his directorial future. You could never have too much experience speaking the dialects of the ego. “So where in you now is that warrior who was able to bide his time…to endure the commitment and the pain…to hold to his glorious vision of what his pectorals might be?”

  Blayne spun off to walk in a tight circle, oily rag dangling from one hand and the machine gun from the other. He rolled his shoulders and sighed in surrender.

  “I’m just not used to living in a motel, you know?” he said. “Nothing to do but watch TV? I don’t even like TV. And I’m out here drinking shitty coffee when I thought I cut out that poison years ago.”

  “Today, then, if Melissa doesn’t call with news…?” At this point it would be wise to grant him a tiny concession. “We maybe can go into this town and find you a gym. And I will pay for your time there with my own credit card.”

  “Very generous. No filming, though. Stick that camera in my face there and I won’t be throwing any paper cups at you. It’ll be free-weights,” Blayne said. “Now. Level with me. What’s with the camera? We’ve been filming each other practically every moment except for taking a dump, and if there’s a point to it, you’re the only one of us who knows what that is.”

  “This is because I wish not to contaminate your performance with knowing the enormity of my vision. This is because I wish you to only be natural.”

  “But it’s not natural!” Blayne was back to screaming again. “It’s not one bit natural to sit on a rock that’s heating up like a frying pan while you’re cleaning a Heckler & Koch MP-5!”

  “Precisely.” Kristophe beamed with satisfaction. “You are natural…the scene is not. It is greater than puny reality.”

  Blayne rolled his eyes. “The enormity of what vision? Does this have something to do with that freakish exchange between you and Mickey Coffman?”

  “If you must know…”

  “Seven words, you whispered to him. Seven words that rocked his world but you’re not sharing them with anybody else. And I could tell, because Melissa looked like she was ready to cut your balls off. So what did you say to him? What else is it we’re doing out here besides Melissa’s dirty work?”

  Kristophe kicked at dirt, watching the tip of his black boot, scuffed and dusty now. No way around it—the time had come for Blayne to know. He had cooperated as much as ignorance would allow.

  “What would you say,” Kristophe began, “were the greatest two phenomena to sweep Hollywood in recent memory? Unexpected, I mean. Not two hundred million dollars to show a sinking ship or stupid hobbits. I mean coming out of nowhere.”

  “Just spill it. I’m not in the mood for Twenty Questions.”

  “Pulp Fiction… “

  Blayne nodded. “Okay. Makes sense. And…?”

  “The Blair Witch Project.”

  “Soooo…what you whispered into Mickey Coffman’s ear was…”

  “Pulp Fiction meets The Blair Witch Project.”

  Blayne groaned. “And this is what we’re out here doing. A demo reel for The Pulp Witch Project.”

  “Nein, nein. We have no witches at all.”

  “We’re going to film ourselves committing a murder.”

  “Nein, nothing like that. We are filming ourselves on the way to commiting a murder. See? Very real. Very gritty.” He scooped up a handful of desert and let it sift through his fingers. “See? Nothing here but authenticity. But the filmed killings…? These we will fake the normal way.”

  Poor Blayne, with his unilateral vision—he seemed stuck in circles. “We’re filming ourselves on the way to kill the guy whose story rights Mickey Coffman wants more than anything in the world right now, and you think you’re going to cut a deal with him for a rough-cut of this footage as some sort of high-concept hybrid?”

  “Blayne, my friend…is your heart so crushed by this ugly place that you can’t see how everything fits together? To Mickey it gives a dramatic ending to Jamey’s story. To Melissa it gives control of the rights. We all of us get money. And I have my first indie feature bought even without having to take it to Sundance and kiss ass.”

  “And without having to hire actual actors, too,” Blayne huffed.

  “Arnold Schwarzenegger had very humble beginnings too, don’t forget.”

  Blayne didn’t bite at that one the way Kristophe hoped he would. “Bottom line, you’ve got me out here co-starring in your insane little project with not only no compensation and no contract, but I’m the one paying most of the bills.”

  “Not true. Have vision! This small investment will pay you dividends forever. Think how many people will see you on the screen, or on their DVDs, and come running to Body By Blayne.”

  He rubbed at his chin. You could see the images glut his head—a tsunami of flab and money descending on his gym. “And you’ll give the club a thank-you in the end credits?”

  “Top of the list. Single column, too. Not that side-by-side format.”

  Satisfied, Blayne nodded, then shuffled forward, his head hanging with the discomfort of apology. “I didn’t really mean that about gay porn with guns.”

  “I know you didn’t,” Kristophe soothed. A true actors’ director, he would be. How they would love him. They would love him because he listened to their whining and gave them what they thought they wanted. “It was just the testosterone talking.”

  “Cool.” Blayne swung the gleaming black MP-5 up to rest its compact barrel against his shoulder. “So have we got a scene to finish shooting, or what?”

  “Take two. Places, everyone!”

  With easy confidence, Blayne strutted toward the slab of rock. Through the viewfinder,
he became a brooding and violent man who melded with this harsh, primeval landscape—he might be seared by it, but it could never master him. The scene would play even better this time. He was ever so much sweatier than before.

  “You know,” he called from his rock, “sometimes I don’t know if you’re a complete flake or a total genius.”

  “Well, I’ll let you in on a tiny secret,” Kristophe said. “When you’re not so sure, it always is better to err on the side of genius.”

  ****

  It was the visit he’d been expecting, only not quite this soon. Early afternoon, just a few hours after the buzz and clang of cage doors popping unlocked had echoed down the cellblock. Starting Wednesday off the same as the two hundred-odd days he’d already spent here. Same sound they expected him to wake up to for a lifetime.

  In their dreams.

  Independence Day, call this one—and not even forty-eight hours since he’d phoned Cro-Mag. He was sitting at a table in the day hall, playing poker with three other cons, when the C.O. came up and ordered Jordy on his feet, saying that he was there to escort Jordy to the chaplain’s office.

  “What the fuck for?” he said, annoyed. Had to play it cool, deal plenty of bullshit along with the cards. Nothing could ring the least bit false. He’d never had any use for priests before, nor preachers, rabbis, faith healers, witch doctors. No reason to start giving a different impression today. “I didn’t ask for a priest.”

  “Find out when you get there,” the guard told him.

  “He’s not one of them molesting priests, is he?” Jordy asked. Laughter from around the table. From around the nearby tables, as well. Most of the guys, anyway. The middle-aged Mexican with the scars across his eyebrows didn’t seem to think much of it. Took their priests seriously, those guys. “I know I’m pretty, but I’m a little too old for him to get away with that.”

  One of the card sharks laughed again. “Shit. I seen prettier dogs shot down for rabies.”

  Jordy let the guard stand there, cooling his heels until he wouldn’t take later for an answer. Sauntered with him down the corridors and up a stairwell, moving the way you move in prison unless there’s blood involved—slow, taking all the time in the world because that’s exactly how much you’ve got left to serve.

  “This got something to do with my cellmate? ’Cause I told you guys yesterday I don’t know dick about that.”

  “You deaf? You’ll find out when you get there,” the guard said again.

  Yesterday Lil’ Punisher had gotten himself rat-packed in the showers. Those Aryans sure loved their boots. The whigger was in an outside hospital now, a rubble heap of broken bones and missing teeth, with a pulped nose spread across his face—looked more Negroid this way, so he should like that. Somebody had also circumcised him, undeterred by the fact that the procedure had been performed once already, at birth. As he lay bleeding, crying, for a final touch they’d fired up matches to heat a makeshift metal stylus into a branding iron, and wrote 2 FOR 1 across his forehead.

  Or so Jordy had heard. Really—he’d had nothing to do with it.

  And when he walked into the chaplain’s office, that grim expression on the man’s face was just the thing he wanted to see. That was the ticket right there, Father Dallas thinking he was the bearer of bad news. Which he was. Which was exactly the point.

  “Jordy,” he said, “would you…have a seat, please?”

  He rolled his eyes, not even paying the chaplain much mind. Big bear of a guy, too—five pounds less hair, maybe, but otherwise Father Dallas might even have been a match for Wookie. In a normal parish, Jordy could see him being big into boxing, teaching those Catholic boys to lace on the gloves and be good sportsmen.

  He persisted until he’d gotten Jordy settled. Then started getting down to it.

  “What I need to tell you, Jordy, isn’t going to be easy to hear,” Father Dallas said. “Last night your family was killed.”

  He had, since Monday, thought a lot on how he should react, deciding that nobody ever believed a thing like this right away. A little stutter of laughter. Or you practically spit in the guy’s face and call him a liar. Challenging him, daring him to convince you. But with this scared look in your eye, too, like what if? A year ago he couldn’t have pulled it off, not that good an actor. But that’s what hard lockup did for you: honed your skills at wearing one face to hide another.

  “There’s no mistake, I’m afraid.” Father Dallas consulted a scrap of paper pulled from his pants pocket. Read off an address in Casa Grande to prove his point, asking Jordy if he recognized it.

  “That’s where I grew up.” Saying it in that faraway voice that comes when you begin to believe the worst. Then you start to sharpen, get demanding: “What happened? What happened to them?”

  “There was a fire,” the priest said. “They’re not sure yet how it started…”

  And the more Jordy heard, the more he went all hollow on the man, letting the news pull him to his feet and slowly press him back into the wall, where he slid down to tiled floor.

  “They’re dead? Both of them?” Saying it as though there could still be hope. “Neither one of them got out?”

  “I’m sorry.” Low, soft priest voice. “I’m so sorry…”

  But that look on Father Dallas’s face—this wasn’t finished. More terrible news to come. Something else that he hadn’t expected to be hearing.

  “Jordy, did you know your sister was back living at home?”

  “Shannon? No, no—she doesn’t even live in the state. She lives in Las Cruces.”

  “The neighbors…according to some neighbors she was back living with your parents pending a divorce.”

  The first thing to go through his mind was automatic: Shannon’s divorcing that asshole? Good for her. But what kind of sense did that make—she’d gotten caught up in this too. And now the weight on Jordy’s chest wasn’t just a credible job of fakery. It was genuine, it was heavy, and soon it was going to crush out his breath.

  He had, over the past year, painlessly resigned himself to the fact that he no longer had parents—that as long as he was dead to them, then they were dead to him as well. There was surprisingly little love lost. But he’d liked to think that as long as he had an older sister, he still had family. Real family, who had come to visit him a couple of times, had wept for him, for where he was and how he’d earned his way in here. Loyal family, not like a cousin who turned traitor at the first sign of blood, shooting him down and leaving him for the law.

  Shannon, gone now—dear god, how had this happened? How could she have been taken too, this last person on earth who might still have had love in her heart for him? In his own heart Jordy felt something break, like a cinder squeezed to shards.

  At least his tears, however few, were real enough now.

  “Is there anything I can do for you, Jordy?”

  People always asked that. Hardly ever meant it, but they had to ask. It was what he’d been counting on all along. Especially from a priest. Because a man with a collar was honor-bound to keep his word.

  “When’s the funeral?” Jordy asked.

  “I don’t know. I can check. The end of this week would be my guess.”

  “Yeah, there’s something you can do,” Jordy told him. Saying it in that brittle, cracking voice that comes from watching your entire world burn. “I know why I’m here, so I know it’s a lot to ask, but…be my advocate with Warden Foster, would you? I know there’s been a little bit of let-up in that policy of no furloughs, when it comes to extreme hardship cases, and this one’s about as hard as they come. So be my advocate, would you? I’ve kept my nose pretty clean since I been here, you can’t say I haven’t done that. Half a day’s furlough, that’s all I’m asking before I spend the rest of my life looking at these walls. Just half a day under guard, so I can at least look at these walls knowing I made everyone a proper goodbye…and did right by my family.”

  “This one was a total nightmare, as far as our hotline was concerne
d. We’d run a segment and then for the next twenty-four hours or more, our switchboard would be swamped. Calls from all over the country that would put this guy in a dozen places at once. People were seeing him because they wanted to see him. They wanted to be a part of this one like they never had with any other case we’ve aired. Just because of the stupid celebrity factor.”

  —Barry Lang

  Host, American Fugitives

  Rolling Stone

  20

  JAMEY remembered those two days’ work on the American Fugitives segment in mid-summer. Two nights’ work, actually, since they’d filmed after-hours in a hair salon on Van Nuys Boulevard that was standing in for the Phoenix original, with only a few quick exteriors shot during the day.

  He had looked over the script and felt that something was missing. Not that he’d been expecting much. Whoever wrote these Fugitives reenactments had a tin ear for dialogue and one overriding agenda: making the crimes and those who’d committed them come across as heinous as possible. Get people stirred up, call those hotlines. You couldn’t fault the show’s writers for that. The milk of human kindness did not gush from the sort of people they were trying to catch.

  Like Duncan’s cousin. Jordy Rabin had blown off a woman’s arm at the elbow. For a ring. Do something like that, and don’t you forfeit some part of your humanity?

  The actor they’d hired for Jordy had played him as a sneering, tousle-haired speedfreak—a couple witnesses had remarked that his pupils had been pinpricks—and that had been enough for Jamey’s rougher-hewn co-star to earn his paycheck without another thought. But it hadn’t been quite enough for Jamey, because there were gray areas here, conflicts between the accounts of what had happened. The main thing the people from the salon had agreed on about Duncan was that, at least until the shooting started, he’d seemed like a rather amiable guy.

  “What’s he like?” Jamey had asked the segment producer, because he’d never played anyone with a real-world counterpart before. “Duncan MacGregor. Does anybody know what he’s really like?”