Mad Dogs

by Brian Hodge

  Duncan thought it over for a few moments, decided he was right. “If it wasn’t for the red of the rocks here, these are the same kind of colors I always figured you’d find in Scotland. You know, in the Highlands.”

  “You’ve never been there?” Jamey asked, and Duncan shook his head. “I would’ve thought you might’ve, with a name like MacGregor.”

  “There’s plenty of old men named MacDonald who’ve never had a farm, either.” Duncan looking at that sky again. “Always did want to go there, though. I always thought, for me, it’d be one of those places that when you get there, even if you’ve never been, it still feels like home. First thing I’d do is go visit all the places associated with Rob Roy. You ever heard of him—Rob Roy MacGregor?”

  “Scotland’s version of Robin Hood, wasn’t he?”

  “Well, if there ever really was a Robin Hood, he never stole cattle. And for sure there was a Rob Roy who did. When I was a kid, my dad used to tell me stories out of an old book he had, The Adventures of a Highland Rogue. I think my dad got a charge out of thinking he could’ve been related to this guy. You know—the way people love the idea of having horse thieves and outlaws in the family.”

  “As long as they go back far enough,” said Jamey.

  “Exactly. As long as Christmas dinner’s safe.” The two of them laughing now. “Wherever he is, if he keeps up on the news, I’ll bet he wishes he never told me those stories now.”

  “There had to be more to it than that.”

  “Oh, sure,” Duncan said. Although perhaps the old bedtime stories had stayed inside him, like seeds. “But you know the way parents like to blame themselves.”

  “So how did you get started on this, umm…path of yours?”

  He went for the bottle, topped off his own glass, then Jamey’s. “You played me once already. You think you’re going to get another chance?”

  “You never know. Your career’s not over yet, and mine’s just getting started.”

  “I guess I would have to say,” Duncan mused, “that the nine-to-five world and I are totally unsuited for each other, and always will be.”

  The condos had been built on a hillside, and he pointed down below, toward the roads that wove in and out of Sedona. Toward the thousands who lived here, worked here, made up the tax base.

  “I tried living like that. Like them. I really did. It just didn’t take. I used to sell electronics. Probably didn’t list that in my dossier at American Fugitives, did they?”

  Jamey shook his head no.

  “Stereos, TVs, DVD players, that sort of thing. Next time you’re in the market? Don’t buy the extended service warranty they’ll try to talk you into. It’s one of the biggest scams going. And the repair side of the business? Worse. So I figured if I was going to steal, I’d at least be upfront about it.”

  “When you put it that way, it sounds almost commendable.”

  “How about you?” Duncan wanted to know. “Why acting? I’d think that’s got to make my life seem like the model of stability.”

  “I guess,” Jamey said, “while I was growing up, it always seemed like a better day if I spent it pretending to be somebody else.”

  “So why finish growing up at all, then, right?”

  “I’ve been accused of not, yeah.”

  Duncan decided that he didn’t just accept this guy as okay, but liked him. No fear in him, no intimidation at the strange entangling of their lives. Maybe by this time he’d worked through all that. Asking now, “How’d you do it? How’d you disappear as well as you did, for this long, after that day in Phoenix?”

  “Well, you’re talking trade secrets now. Whatever I tell you, I’ve got to figure it’s going to get repeated to somebody with a badge. Not to say you’re a snitch. Just that you’re in a position to get leaned on. Heavily. By people who would gladly try to ruin your life to advance their careers at the expense of my freedom.”

  Jamey nodded, but didn’t seem convinced there was much left in the way of secrets. “Look, I already know where this place is, right? And Dawn told me yesterday it belongs to her father. Assuming I can’t stonewall anybody on that, at least, how much more do you think they’d need to go on?”

  “She told you that, did she?” Duncan said, but it didn’t matter. He supposed he’d known already that a crossroads had been reached. Once two people let a third in on a single detail, every risk is magnified. Saturday had changed everything.

  No point in clamming up now. Besides, he hadn’t had anybody to brag to for a very long time. You needed that occasionally.

  “The reason most people get caught is because they’re creatures of habit,” Duncan began. “Once the cops know your habits, they’ve got you. It’s only a matter of tracking you down at one habit, or waiting for you to show up at another. So, if something goes the way it’s not supposed to, like it did that day last year, the best thing you can do is break all your habits. Your family, your friends, what the law calls your K.A.’s, your known associates…what you’ve got to do is turn them into a bunch of dead ends for whoever’s looking.”

  “That,” said Jamey, “is cold.”

  “Tell me about it. But it’s survival.” Duncan looked at the sky and tried not to imagine how his mother must have aged. Stepfather too—well, that one he could live with. “Still, I was luckier than most. I never would’ve made it away from the place where that happened if it hadn’t been for Dawn.”

  Explaining how they’d encountered each other in the stairwell, and just kept on going together, as one afternoon turned into a second day, and a third, then a week, a month.

  “During that time when the cops in Phoenix and Tucson—Tucson’s where I’d always lived until then—when they were looking the hardest for me, there wasn’t anybody who could’ve connected me with Dawn. And then, after a few weeks went by and my picture wasn’t being flashed around much anymore, and it didn’t feel as risky to move around outside, that’s when we packed up and moved to Denver.”

  “Why Denver? If it’d been me, rural Maine might’ve looked pretty good.”

  “We go where the vacant condos are.”

  “Dawn’s father owned your place in Denver, too?”

  “He owns hundreds of them. All over the southwest,” Duncan said. “You ever hear of Arthur Kellerman? Kellerman Realtors?”

  Jamey shook his head.

  “Big real estate tycoon. Plus he owns all these rental properties. Dawn used to work for him, in his main Phoenix office, so she knows how to hack their computer files. Which isn’t hugely difficult to begin with. It’s real estate, it’s not the Pentagon. We need to go somewhere new, all she does is dial into their system and hunt around for vacancies. Preferably furnished. She finds one, then she changes the database for it. Puts some fake name in as the tenant, gets the utilities turned on, we move in, then once a month she logs in a rent check that’s never actually existed.”

  Jamey was listening with delight. Duncan knew he would. Everybody loves a good story about getting something for nothing.

  “Keys, though—how do you get the keys to the place?”

  “Before we left Phoenix, I got a set of lock-picks on eBay. Best forty-five dollars I ever spent. Once we’re through a door, that’s all we need. Like when we first got here, Saturday afternoon? That evening I went to a hardware store and got a new knob and deadbolt, and put those on the door instead. Instant keys.”

  “Where were you when I was having trouble making my rent a few years ago?” Jamey said. “You are the most efficient squatters I’ve ever heard of.”

  “And the view’s not bad either.”

  “What about Dawn’s family? Her absence? It’s not like she can hack into their memories and leave a rent check there, too.”

  “They think she’s been in Europe since last October. Oh, they’re all for it. ‘You’re young, see the world.’ But mostly I think they were happy to have her off expending her energy somewhere far away. The way she talks, she was getting to be a handful in Phoenix
, out of boredom. So she really plays it up, too. Calls her dad every few weeks, ‘Hi, I just spit off the Eiffel Tower again today.’ Or, ‘Hey, I figured out how to make the guards at Buckingham Palace smile, but it involves nudity.’”

  “Bashful thing, isn’t she?” Jamey said.

  “You know what she’s doing now? She’s in there writing postcards. Got these friends in Amsterdam, they travel a lot. She sends them a bundle of postcards, already filled out to her parents, and they’ll mail one off whenever they feel like it.”

  Throughout, Duncan had been gauging Jamey’s reactions and hadn’t been disappointed—Jamey identifying, maybe. That he’d been willing to live that starving-artist lifestyle and stick it out, not pack it in after some tough years, he had to be a malcontent to begin with. Refusing to be one of those guys who slaves for thirty-nine years and then, twelve months from retirement, finds out his pension has been plundered. Jamey listening to all this now, maybe plugging himself into the role and imagining life below the radar—no income taxes, no boss, no quarterly evaluations.

  “So I pretty much owe my life to Dawn,” Duncan said. “Maybe I could’ve pulled it off on my own, but if it wasn’t for her, by now I’d probably be having second thoughts if it would’ve been worth it.”

  And here it was happening again, just like the other night in Denver—the mead talking. Because when he’d stepped out here onto the deck, he had not intended to say anywhere near this much.

  “I mean,” Duncan went on, because he was into it now, no turning back, “I don’t know what I am to Dawn, exactly…”

  “This may be a radical thought, but you could always come right out and ask.”

  “And what if I get an answer I don’t like?”

  “Then you join the club.”

  Duncan decided that deserved a toast.

  “If it’s any consolation,” Jamey said, “I’ve got a fiancée…and right now I’m not sure what I am to her, either. When all this started, I was on my way to our wedding.”

  “Yeah, we saw that. When’s the last time you talked to her?”

  “A little past midnight Friday. Just after I got away from the rednecks.”

  “Where is she now?”

  “Still in Flagstaff, I guess.”

  “As far as I know, the phone lines between here and there still work.”

  “I’ve been trying. She just hasn’t been the one answering. It’s not her place, it’s her family’s. All I’ve been getting is their machine, or her father. Either way I hang up. He didn’t much approve of me before. You can imagine what he must think now.”

  Duncan snorted, saying, “Fathers. Kill a couple cops and all of a sudden you’re not good enough for their little girl anymore.”

  Jamey raised a hopeful eyebrow. “I don’t suppose I could borrow the car for a few hours…?”

  “And leave Dawn and me no ride out of here in case something happens? Just because I say ‘No way in hell,’ don’t take it that I don’t sympathize.” Which seemed harsh, but the guy had to have known the answer before he’d asked. “Why not have Dawn call? How many alarms is her voice going to raise in your fiancée’s dad?”

  Jamey lit up. “And she’d be cool with this? Because I get the feeling that for Dawn, calling up someone’s fiancée, this unfamiliar female voice after he’s been missing a week…it might be a big temptation to have a lot of fun with that.”

  “Sounds like you’ve got a fix on her already.”

  But she would do it, probably be glad to. Because she liked the guy; wouldn’t tolerate having him around otherwise.

  Although Duncan suspected, while she would deny it, that Dawn was a bit starstruck, too. Not that either of them had heard of Jamey Sheppard before American Fugitives, and without it maybe they never would have. But he had been on TV, in movies, and been paid for it, and hadn’t had to kill anyone or be linked with someone who had. Fifty years from now, somebody might watch something he’d done. Know his face, his name. All of which, Duncan knew, was more than anything he and Dawn had accomplished. The only impressions he’d left on people were the kind they tried their hardest to forget.

  Although he supposed that one of his own traits that had rubbed off on Dawn was realizing that now she didn’t have to suffer anybody’s company if she didn’t feel like it. She had come to the realization, she’d told him the other night in bed, that she didn’t need nearly as many people in her life as she’d thought at one time. That people were a distraction and they never stopped needing, wanting, demanding. That they ate your softest parts and then looked at you with your blood on their faces, and asked what you had for them next.

  That’s one of the reasons I like you, Duncan, she’d said. You could walk out that door two minutes from now, if you had to, and probably never look back.

  He wondered if she wasn’t giving him too much credit.

  But just in case it ever came to that, or worse, he wondered if she would cry.

  “Now if he’d been black, the closest he’d be to a movie deal is the helicopter view looking down on the cops running up to give his ass a beating.”

  —Chris Rock

  Comedian

  22

  IF it was breakfast, then this must be Thursday.

  Even under the best conditions, prison eroded the differences between one day and the next. But here in the hole even day and night had ceased to exist. There was only time, and the slow crawl of it—no tomorrows, only a now that seemed to last forever. Close gray walls and a crude toilet and a forty-watt bulb in a wire cage too far overhead to reach.

  Every now and then you ran across a cerebral type of convict, a brainy guy who’s finally managed to outsmart even himself. Such a guy was a lifer named Wilcox. Months ago, after Jordy’s first trip to the hole for finishing a fight he hadn’t started, Wilcox cued him in on why solitary confinement was so disorienting. Keep someone underground, or anyplace else with no access to the sun and moon or to clocks, and his mind and body will shift into a twenty-five hour cycle.

  It’s a basic design flaw in the human species, Wilcox had said. Creepy guy who never blinked. Our fundamental rhythms out of sync with nature and the planetary orbit? It’s the greatest argument against the existence of God. We’re an accident.

  It was a revelation. Jordy had always known there had to be compelling reasons to believe this way, if you only looked hard enough. It eased the burden, did away with any lingering need for conscience. No wonder they never taught things like that in schools. The implications were pure anarchy.

  He listened to the clatter of breakfast being served along the hall to the others, men who were nothing but shouts and shrieks behind iron doors, if they made any sound at all. Then it was his turn, Jordy standing at the ready, naked except for boxer shorts, the rectangular panel in his door clanging open like a mail slot, and there was his tray. Bread, juice, bowl of gruel.

  He took the tray and slapped the middle of the door with an open palm.

  “Hey!” he shouted. “Tell ’em to quit making this fucking oatmeal so thick! I still can’t read through it yet!”

  The C.O. answered with a massive kick to the door. The boom filled his cell, a shock wave that rattled bones. Feel a thing like that and you know you’re alive.

  “This ain’t your mama’s cooking, boy,” came its voice. Big and black, with no place on earth he’d rather be than outside a white boy’s cell. “Aw, that’s right, that’s you in there, ain’t it Rabin? Yeah, I forgot. Your mama’s the one who’s done got herself cooked now, ain’t she?”

  “Yeah,” Jordy said. Then shouted loudly enough for everyone to hear: “What’s your mama cook—crack in a pipe?”

  He got the kicked door again, heard the cellblock chorus of cheers and jeers. In a place where you craved distractions as much as water, it was pure dinner theater. And the chuck wagon moved on.

  Jordy dug in with what must’ve been the heartiest appetite down here. One more breakfast like this, then a few hours later he could eat anyt
hing he pleased.

  A tip of the hat to Father Dallas, who must’ve made a truly persuasive case to the warden. Tomorrow’s furlough had been granted. Maybe nothing more than a cheap public relations bone to toss to the liberals who habitually squawked about lockup conditions —See, we don’t have hearts of stone, letting this bereaved son say farewell to his family—but whatever the motivation, he’d take it.

  The concession hadn’t been unconditional. From the warden’s office they had marched him directly to the hole, to spend the remaining time until the funeral in total isolation. It was the only way Warden Foster would deal. Got to allay that risk of flight, prevent him from getting messages to the outside, setting up a plan to exploit family tragedy for gain. Father Dallas had looked downright apologetic when he had relayed the conditions.

  Not a problem, Jordy had told the chaplain. Whatever it takes to get to say goodbye to Mom and Dad and my sister.

  But, as usual, they’d had him figured completely backwards.

  ****

  What did it say about your life, Melissa wondered, when the most relaxing part of your day was the commute through L.A. traffic?

  Day three hundred and twenty-four as Mickey Coffman’s assistant. Mickey was midway through a six-picture deal with Paramount, and his current nerve center on their lot was the most lavish office space he’d ever strongarmed. Seventy-six steps from car door to lobby and Melissa was through the portal to the First Circle of Hell. Over the door, there should have been a paraphrase from Dante: Abandon all dignity, Ye who enter here.

  And. It began.

  “WHENNNN?” Mickey screamed into her face. Stand behind the jets at LAX and the effect would be the same. He hadn’t even had to walk across the reception area. He’d materialized out of nowhere. “WHENNNN IS MY MEETING WITH YOUR BROTHER? WHICH I KNOOOOW YOU’VE SET UP, YOU’VE JUST FORGOTTEN TO TELL ME BECAUSE YOU LOOOOVE THE SOUND OF MY VOICE WHEN I’M FORCED TO ASK YOU THESE THINGS!”