Mad Dogs

by Brian Hodge

  “My guess, human plankton. So if you ever wanted to be a bad guy and chew the scenery, here’s your big chance,” was the answer. “Really, does it matter? Let’s get the asshole caught first, and if it still means that much to you, you can watch his trial on Court TV and see how close you got.”

  Even at the time, Jamey had known he was making too big a deal out of what was supposed to be quick money and little depth. Still, the scene didn’t make sense as scripted: Duncan gunning down his cousin, his partner in a string of similar though bloodless robberies, so he could take off with the loot all to himself. Why betray a partner that way, leaving him not only alive, but with ample reason to identify you? If Duncan was smart enough to vanish afterward, he had to be smart enough to realize you double-crossed your partner in private, and didn’t shoot to wound. See the right movies, you could learn that much by age ten. So the motivation was all wrong.

  But in the end, Jamey had played it as written, not feeling right about it but figuring that eventually he would consider it a minor footnote in his career.

  Logic like that, he had to laugh at it now.

  Last evening, it had taken hours before Duncan said much of anything to him about the portrayal…or about anything else. Jamey didn’t know if he was a captive or not this time, didn’t yet feel up to finding out the hard way.

  Duncan and Dawn had waited until after nightfall to inform him that American Fugitives, for Sunday evening’s episode, had aired a hastily produced update apprising viewers of the previous few days.

  “We recorded it. You are dying to watch, right?” Dawn had said. “You do want to see what your former employers are saying about you now, don’t you?”

  Jamey thought he had a pretty good idea already.

  The host and resident advocate for string-’em-up-by-the-balls justice was a one-time cop show superstar named Barry Lang whose career had fizzled fifteen years ago. Over the next decade he would occasionally turn up in some small role in an action film of direct-to-video or made-for-cable quality, and looking embarrassed about it.

  But then, in one of those freakish only-in-Southern-California developments, his third wife had been murdered in an unsolved Mansonesque break-in and orgy of bloodletting. Barry Lang had been in Pittsburgh at the time, walking through a bit part as a coked-up cop. Six months of mourning later, he was first choice with the producers of the soon-to-debut American Fugitives. The poolside jabs at Lang’s new role were as vicious as they were predictable—mostly riffs on how his wife’s dismemberment was the best thing to happen to his career since his hair transplant.

  Cue the DVD recorder and there he was, grayed to a virile salt-and-pepper and stern as an Old Testament prophet when it came to his show’s former guest star:

  “In an American Fugitives first… and to our great shame…one of our own re-enactors may have just crossed that line dividing the lawful…from the lawless.”

  Then followed a montage of film and video from a variety of sources. Clips from the original show were supplemented with local news stock licensed from TV stations in western Arizona: overviews of the crime scenes cordoned off at the convenience store and the rest stop; an exterior of the Hardestys’ trailer, with the confirmation that Sadie had battered her older son to death Friday night. They showed the gas station near Kingman, plus grainy security-cam footage of Duncan pumping gas—“In a bizarre development…” was how Lang introduced that bit. An electronic circle had been digitized around the fuzzy orb that appeared briefly in the car’s rear window and was alleged to be Jamey’s head. The segment concluded with a behind-the-scenes outtake from the hair salon reenactment, Jamey clowning with a prop pistol in front of one of the stylist’s workstations, where beveled mirrors caught twin reflections of him, two different profile angles as he whipped the gun at his own image. At the instant they chose to freeze-frame the film, he looked absolutely demented.

  “Of course, it’s still unclear to what extent Jamey Sheppard has been a victim, and what extent he’s been a victimizer.” Barry Lang doing his trademark grim wrap-up. “But first we need to bring him in before it can determined…just which face is which.”

  “So.” Duncan had turned to him and clicked off the VCR. “How does it feel, being on the other side of the show for a change?”

  Jamey had gotten over the dull shock before the segment’s midpoint. “After Jay Leno the other night, I’m kind of getting used to it.”

  Duncan grinned. “How about that line about the way death seems to follow you wherever you go. I’ve watched this three times now and that’s still my favorite.”

  Beside him on the sofa, Dawn shook her head. “It’s not the line, it’s a lame line. It’s that guy’s delivery. He can be so portentous.”

  Then Duncan had glanced at him as he sat in the recliner. “I noticed you didn’t play me as heavy as that guy who was playing Jordy.” Barely audible as he said it. “I appreciate that. You did get a few things right.”

  He was curious about the operations of the show, what it was like to work there, but Jamey had to confess he didn’t know much. That all this had been was just another job. Duncan seemed disappointed, admitting that for weeks he’d been wondering why the show had picked him to spotlight.

  “I don’t know if it always works this way,” Jamey had told him, “but for some of the case profiles they do, it’s because somebody writes in or calls, and begs them to consider it. Because they feel there’s some unfinished business.”

  “You mean like somebody from the salon—they would’ve done it.”

  “Or their relatives.” Not able to bring himself to say surviving relatives.

  “I wonder who it was.” Then, quieter yet, “I still remember their faces.”

  “Well, it wasn’t me,” Dawn said.

  “Nobody was supposed to get hurt. You know that, don’t you?” Duncan said. “It wasn’t just my imagination, was it, that you played that scene like you knew this?”

  “I didn’t know anything,” Jamey said. That’s what this was about—this guy had to justify himself to the actor who’d portrayed him? “And what’s it matter, anyway? Those people are still dead, aren’t they?”

  Angry now, in spite of who held the upper hand here, as he remembered a flash he’d gotten during filming. Actors lying on the floor spattered with stage blood, just enough to get the point across, but not nearly the slaughterhouse it must have been that day in Phoenix—this was for prime time, after all—and it had hit him hard that this wasn’t someone’s imagination at work. That for each of these bodies that would soon be getting up and going home to someone who loved them, there was somebody in the ground for real.

  Duncan hadn’t answered. Just stared for a few moments at the TV, dark and silent now, before saying, “I notice you’ve been looking at the door a lot. You can walk through it anytime you want. You’re not anybody’s prisoner this time.”

  “What am I, then?” Jamey had asked.

  “Well, you’re here. Maybe in five minutes you won’t be. And if you aren’t, then I guess five minutes after that, we better not be either, because I don’t intend for Barry Lang to be closing the case on me on next Sunday’s show. So what you are, I don’t know—you’ll have to figure it out for yourself. But you’re not anybody’s prisoner.”

  “At least not until I turn myself in.”

  “And then you take your chances. You see where it got you the other day.” Duncan met his gaze. “I know you’ll have to. But as far as Saturday goes, at that rest stop, I hope you’re not counting on Dawn and me being witnesses to help you clear that up. We bailed you out of it when it counted. Next time, you’re on your own.”

  “I think,” Jamey said, “I’ll just sleep on everything for tonight.”

  “Works for me.” Duncan nodded. Then brightened. “You want ice cream? I got Ben and Jerry’s today.”

  ****

  One night’s sleep later and nothing looked any clearer by the light of morning—the inevitable had only been postpon
ed another day. Which was no different than the way Duncan had been living for the past year. Surely he understood that nobody could run forever. That he would be caught eventually…and probably ruin Dawn’s life along with his own. But as long as he could greet each risen sun and tell himself No, not today, maybe that was enough to keep him moving.

  Twice during the morning Jamey tried calling Samantha, to give her first chance at judging whether or not he had any credibility left. But he refused to speak with her father, or leave a message on her parents’ answering machine, so he hung up both times without saying a thing. When he tried her L.A. number he got her machine, and this time left a few anonymous words in case she might check in later: “I’m fine. And I miss you. I want all this to be over…but things just keep getting in the way.”

  Refusing to be defeated by answering machines, next he called his agency.

  “God love you, Jamey! Even though He couldn’t possibly love you as much as I do!” Sherry Van Horn cried over the whirr of her treadmill. “Whatever you’re doing out there, keep it up, because you’re making my job a lot easier. If I didn’t know better, I would swear that somewhere in your prosaic Pacific Northwest background you graduated summa cum laude in marketing.”

  Typical Sherry Van Horn tactic, hitting you from a half-dozen directions at once. You could never refute, clarify, or challenge everything in total.

  Ignore it all, he decided: “Last week, before I got kidnapped—you knew that, didn’t you, that I was kidnapped by bounty hunters?—you were supposed to line up a lawyer for me. Back when all this was simple by comparison.”

  “Jamey,” she tried to interrupt.

  More volume: “So give me that lawyer’s number—”

  “Jamey, my lamb—”

  “—so I can have the firm start making arrangements for me to turn myself in through them instead. So I don’t have to risk another run-in with another psycho cop. So. Sherry. My lawyer, please.”

  He could hear the treadmill gearing down. Not just to a slower speed. Total silence. The most ominous thing he’d ever heard.

  “Jamey,” she said. Like a pal. “Can we postpone on that? Just a teensy bit?”

  “You never did it, did you?”

  “Oh, how you hopeful guttersnipes love to wound me with your lack of faith. Yes, I did it. I have for you a pack of absolute sharks, who are causing seismic tremors in Phoenix because of how enthusiastically they’re jumping up and down at the prospect of going after compensatory damages from not one but two county governments and possibly the state. Answer me one question first, though. Just between us. Even if it was self-defense—and I imagine it would have to be—did you harm that deputy on Saturday?”

  “No. It was the other way around, and he was worse than the first guy.”

  “In that case, you just keep making my day,” she said. “I assume that nastier bit of business was done by Mister MacGregor?”

  “I’d rather not say.”

  “Good good good, you’re learning the game. Or can you just not answer at the moment, is that it?”

  “That could be a slight problem, yes.”

  If this were a film, right now the editor would insert a cutaway shot of Duncan across the room, glancing up as he paused while sharpening his swords. As it was, the guy hadn’t even gotten out of bed yet. For sheer brute malevolence, there was only Dawn, kicked back in cutoff shorts with her bare feet, toenails gleaming metallic blue, propped up on the dining table and her PowerBook computer in her lap.

  “Fine,” Sherry said. “Eventually I’ll treat you to the world’s longest lunch and you can tell me every sordid detail, starting with the master stroke of how you and this renegade ended up in the same zip code.”

  “‘Eventually.’” Jamey didn’t like the sound of that word. “What’s the hold-up?”

  “You mean I have to spell it out for you? Haven’t you been following your own press?”

  “If you mean Sunday night’s American Fugitives—”

  “Who should be paying you a fat bonus for what happened to their Nielsens three nights ago. Twenty-share increase. Don’t let Barry Lang’s scowl fool you. You’re a godsend to them. They couldn’t have cooked up a better publicity stunt if they’d sat around a conference table for a month.”

  “Other than that, then, what is it?” he said. “You may find this hard to believe, but there hasn’t been much of a chance for me to go through my clippings. Even if I could find a copy of Variety in the middle of Arizona.”

  “Oh.” She sounded at a momentary loss. “You’re not in Vegas?”

  “Not even close.”

  “Oh, you are good! Brace yourself, then, and remember me in your prayers of thanksgiving when I tell you you’re the object of an undercurrent of cultlike adoration that I like to call ‘Jameymania.’”

  She meant well by the word, he could tell. But the sound of it made him queasy.

  “Could you break it down, exactly what you mean by that?”

  “I mean that even the ones who aren’t specifically interested in the rights to your ever-unfolding story are still interested in you. Example? Continue to keep your nose legally clean, and once this is over, you’re not just a joke told by Jay Leno. You’re in the chair next to him. Translation? You can be as busy as you want to be for the next year, and how busy you are beyond that depends on how well you deliver. Now: The ones who are interested in the rights to your story seem prone to escalating their dollar figures the longer you remain out there in the wild west behind the sagebrush.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “Oh, but I can. Mickey Coffman’s at the top of the list, up to a million-point-one, and only God knows what he’s spending on Tagamet. Oliver’s still very interested too, but he can be a cagey guy to pin down. But a huge plus here is that he absolutely loves the entire media-slash-reality aspect of what’s happened—it’s like Jamey Through The Looking Glass. He used those very words.”

  A million-point-one, she had said. Like an echo between his ears.

  “Now do you see why turning yourself in is such a no-no? As long as you’re still jaunting around, there’s a mystique that’s working in your favor. It won’t last forever, of course, so we’ll have to bring this to a head and get the deal done before the bubble bursts. Middle of next week at the latest. Maybe sooner. So for now, could you be a dear and try to minimize your risk of exposure?”

  He croaked out that he could.

  “See? You have the easy part now while I do all the work,” she said. “Oh, and Jamey…? If you do get caught prematurely…? Don’t you dare let me see you on the news, scuttling along like a crab trying to cover your head with a jacket. Anybody doing that looks guilty as sin, and everybody here will lose all respect for you.”

  After hanging up the phone, Jamey turned from the bar and drifted toward the glass doors. Moving across the floor, but not really feeling in touch with it.

  “Dawn?” he said. “You two aren’t planning on going anywhere for a few days, are you?”

  “Who, us tumblin’ tumbleweeds?” She looked up from her computer. “Not if we can help it.”

  “In that case…would you mind if I crash here a little longer?”

  “Hey, mi padre’s casa, su casa,” she said. “I always did wonder what it would be like to shack up with two men.”

  21

  IT was a load off Duncan’s mind that his not-quite-double was going to be sticking around for a while. He didn’t really fear that Jamey would head straight for the law with a tip on where to find him—after all, he and Dawn had saved Jamey’s life, something that tended to bring out gratitude in most people. Rather, it was a question of how hard the law would lean on him once he’d come in to clear his name.

  Sure, Jamey could always lie to them—he got paid to fabricate and look good doing it. But being a skilled liar wasn’t going to be enough. Jurisdictions might haggle over who got him, and if they decided to be real bastards—with no reason to believe they wouldn’t—the
y could squeeze until he popped. Threaten prosecution for any one of those deaths…but give them a location and it all goes away. It wouldn’t matter if they couldn’t make their case stick; the ordeal would be threat enough. Jamey would give it up. Anybody would.

  Duncan knew how Jordy would handle a situation like this. But that was Jordy. And why Jordy was going to rot his years away inside a grim little room.

  There would be time enough to figure something out later, because for now Jamey was staying put. Dawn had said he’d phoned his agent, who had advised him to lie low until his lawyer had finished negotiating surrender terms. Which sounded plausible enough, even if it didn’t explain why he had no place else to go.

  Duncan had never met an actor before, and while no law said they all had to be the same, Jamey Sheppard wasn’t what he’d imagined ever since their episode of Fugitives had aired—either insufferably full of himself, or too dense to know where to stand unless someone pointed to a spot and told him what to say once he got there. He came off like a regular guy, instead—a pleasant surprise, if maybe a bit disappointing, too, because first time you meet an actor you want to feel that you’re in the company of a star. A little of his light shining on you.

  Wednesday evening and Sedona had begun to seal over with clouds, sky deepening to indigo when he joined Jamey on the condo’s deck and brought a bottle with him. Two glasses. Offered, and accepted.

  “What are we drinking?” Jamey asked. “It’s like wine, only not.”

  Duncan showed him the label.

  “Mead? Those swords make more sense now.” Jamey took another sip and savored, nodding. Held the glass and stared off into the distant hills. “Southern California—you’ve probably been there, right?”

  “Never to live, but yeah.”

  “It’s always exactly what you think it is, the good and the bad.” Jamey tipped his head back, looking straight up. “I’ve never once seen a sky like this there. Something about the light. The same sun, but it’s not the same light.”