by Brian Hodge
Secretaries flinched, toadies scurried for cover, seismograph needles ticked at Cal Tech. Even the requisite visiting young actor du jour—some flavor-of-the-nanosecond launched by a prime-time teen soap opera and sustained by scripts heavier on beefcake than syllables—looked jolted out of his trés cool posture.
First the storm, then the calm—such was the rhythm of life here. Barring calamity, Mickey would be good for a half-hour or so of tolerable bearing. Like an active volcano that’s just relieved itself by burping off a little steam and ash, rather than all at once burying alive thousands of screaming islanders.
“How does first thing next week sound?” she said. It was so pure a lie as to be consecrated. It could not come back to bite her. Jamey would be actively perished by then. Believe this, and it would happen.
“First thing right now sounds better,” Mickey grumbled.
“Since he still hasn’t come home to roost yet,” Melissa forced to improvise, “I have to assume he hasn’t gotten tired of playing desperado. Or maybe he has one more publicity stunt or two up his sleeve so he can insinuate himself a little deeper into the communal collective consciousness.”
Mickey nodded, scowling but appearing to approve of what he’d heard.
It was her newest way of handling him. That lesson from Kristophe on Saturday, before he and Blayne hit the road, hadn’t been wasted on her. The way he’d strung together agent provocateur, semiotic, and agitprop all in one sentence—it had zinged over Mickey’s head, but had plainly impressed the stuffing out of him. Which was the bottom line. The more pretentious something sounded, the better. Mickey would adore surrounding himself with people who sounded as if they’d gobbled a thesaurus because, one, it reflected well on him that he hired smart people, and two, no matter how brainy they sounded he still made more money than all of them combined.
Mickey took her by the elbow and steered her away from the buzz of the worker bees who kept the hive running. Over her shoulder loomed giant faces on the framed posters from a half-dozen of Mickey’s most recent movies: Harrison Ford, Samuel L. Jackson, Sigourney Weaver.
“Just in case somebody needs a refresher course in priorities this morning, in how important it is that she delivers her brother to me…?” he said. “Your hands. Show your hands.”
Wary, she lifted them to shoulder height. Back to palm to back again.
Mickey nodded. “Those are beautiful hands. Some might even call them exquisite. Feminine, but with strength. The balance between these two qualities? Perfect. And the way your fingers taper just so? Ten little works of art.”
“Thanks,” she mumbled. It was never a good thing when Mickey doled out compliments. She began to lower her arms.
“No no no, leave ’em up there. Let’s not stop gazing at these dainty paws of yours just yet,” he said. “How much do you know about the Yakuza? The Japanese Mafia?”
“The guys with all the tattoos, right?”
“Right.”
“Only that they have a lot of tattoos.”
“Let me tell you something I find fascinating about the Yakuza. Whenever one of the lower-ranking flunkies disappoints his boss, by failing in an assigned duty, he’s expected to demonstrate his contrition by sitting across from his boss, taking a sharp knife, and, without flinching, severing one of his fingers.” Mickey’s face adopted an expression of grave concern as he regarded her exquisite hands. “This time next week, let’s not be looking at nine little works of art and a stub.” He gave a single decisive nod. “Black Rain. 1989, directed by Ridley Scott, starring Michael Douglas and Ken Takakura. Rent it. Do your homework. Avoid the fate.”
“Mickey,” she said, as her hands lowered to her sides, “I can’t think of anyone I’d rather cut off a finger for than you…and I even know which finger it would be.”
He smiled like a benevolent uncle. “That’s my girl.”
“I’m even touched,” she said. “You actually did this discreetly instead of making an office-wide spectacle of it.”
“I know. Now I’ll have to make up for it, won’t I. Just to balance the books.” And with that, Mickey toggled to Stage Three Bluster and stormed over to the nearest secretary. “YOU!” he bellowed. “HOW’D THAT X-RAY COME OUT? ANY SIGN OF ANYTHING GROWING YET FROM THAT LONELY STUMP OF BRAINSTEM?”
“What’d I do?” she squeaked, the poor thing. Even Bambi couldn’t have looked any more stricken, seeing two headlights and eighteen wheels bearing down.
“What’d you do? What didn’t you do?” But if you knew Mickey well, you knew he wasn’t serious, that this was just his idea of fun. When his thermostat was genuinely high, his neck and forehead treated you to a queasy anatomy lesson in engorged veins. “You’ve been sitting there this whole time and haven’t even briefed Melissa on her lunch plans for today!”
“I have lunch plans?”
At her station, Bambi—whatever her name was—juggled pink memo slips. Came up with a winner and thrust it at Melissa as if it were swarming with fire ants.
“At eleven-forty-five, just down Melrose at Fabiolus,” Bambi said. “You’re doing a lunch interview about your brother with a reporter from Variety.”
Melissa snatched the paper and scanned. “‘Jenna Hartigan’?” she read aloud. “I barely know the byline and I sure don’t know her. How did she find out Jamey’s my brother, anyway?”
“How, indeed,” Mickey beamed, and began a quick fade from the scene. He held eye contact, though, and with his Ivan the Terrible grin raised his left hand and wiggled the pinkie. Then mimed lopping it off with the right. When he dropped his arm, it looped around the shoulders of today’s lurking actor, whose name was Tyler, she thought—they were always Tyler, or Elliot, or Josh, some vanilla thing—and steered him toward the private offices. She watched them go, Mickey calling out to induct grunt-level volunteers and three or four eggs.
“So about my script,” Tyler said.
Script! It was worse than she thought.
“Say no more.” Mickey patting his back. “I’ll read it tonight. Absolutely without fail.” No he wouldn’t. It would wind up in her in-box. Like a maybe-poisoned pheasant she was expected to taste before her king would think of going near it. “You got any cash on you?”
“Ummm…yeah, I do plastic mostly,” said Tyler. “But I have some bucks on me.”
“Good. Good good good,” Mickey crooned. “I hope you’re a betting man. Because I want to introduce you to a cherished institution unique to our happy little family here that I like to call ‘the Hard-Boiled Derby.’”
Two minutes later and Melissa sought refuge in the women’s rest room. How much easier to be a man at times like this. You could splash your face with as much water as it took to rinse away the morning’s sour start, and not worry about the makeup you’d applied an hour ago.
She wet a paper towel and dabbed, and it wasn’t the same.
With the place to herself, Melissa lingered, leaning on the vanity and facing the mirror. Liking what she saw—the small nose, the bold eyes, the full lower lip that didn’t overpower the upper, the longish dark hair she’d been thinking about getting cut shorter, sleeker, bitchier—but wondering how everything could look so in-place on the outside when it felt so out-of-place on the inside.
I am twenty-five years old, she thought, and the high point of my morning has been knowing I’m no longer required to get down on the floor in a race to push eggs around with my nose for the amusement of a tyrant and a heart-throb with a shelf-life. And I’ve arranged to have my brother killed and I don’t feel a thing except impatient. Is that normal…?
Then the door banged open and poor run-down Bambi slipped through to sag against the wall. Count of five—Melissa knew this routine by heart—then the girl burst into tears. Not an uncommon sight, their toilet the one inviolable sanctuary for the female staff. No matter how great his fit of pique might be, Mickey would never follow a woman in here. He was too terrified of sexual harassment lawsuits.
Melissa plucked a
tissue from the boxful on the vanity and handed it over. Asking, “What did it? The brainstem crack, or the Derby?”
“It’s…it’s everything,” Bambi sobbed. A strangled sound, as she tried not to be heard beyond the door. Probably twenty, twenty-one, yet at the moment Melissa felt old enough to be her mother. “I have to find another job, you just never know with him, I heard, people warned me and I told them I could put up with it but…but I… “
Another tissue. Bambi nodded, grateful, and honked her nose into it.
“How long have you been here again?” Melissa asked her.
“Three-and-a-half weeks.”
“You will get used to it.”
Bambi raised her face from the tissue, eyes red and brows knitted, and stared at Melissa as if she’d just confessed to conspiracy to commit murder.
“Why would you ever want to?” Bambi whispered.
Which was, of course, a reasonable question, and Melissa thought she had four or five great answers, but when she opened her mouth the words weren’t there. So after a moment she gave up trying. And for some reason, the silence seemed to renew Bambi’s bitterest sobbing. The tissues no longer seemed enough now, so Melissa stepped forward and held the girl, or maybe it was the other way around, held her and let Bambi’s head rest against her shoulder and after a few moments felt the damp warmth as tears seeped through her blouse.
Two minutes, she would give this.
Two minutes pretending to be human.
And then she would have to walk back through that door.
23
WHEN the call came in, Andy Connolly had just finished wrapping an interview with a thirty-something fellow from Mississippi. Overnight, he had killed his girlfriend by slamming the hood of their car down on her head. Five or six times. A trooper had brought him in this morning after stopping to check a broken-down car pulled over on the roadside. Wasn’t usually the first thing you expected to encounter: Need any help, sir? No thanks, she’s already dead. Full of remorse now. They always were. Just couldn’t go through the Kleenex fast enough.
Andy shook off the memory of the photo evidence and answered the phone.
“So what happened to you the other day?” came the voice. No preamble, not even anger to speak of—only a flat tone of suspicion. “Do you have any idea how close that guy came to killing me?”
“By ‘that guy,’” Andy said, “you’re talking about…?”
“Pellegrino, wasn’t that his name?”
“Is that you again, finally, Mister Sheppard?”
“‘Mister’? We were on a first-name basis the other day. What happened?”
“Maybe you’d better tell me. Jamey.”
“What happened was, I trusted you to stick to what I thought was a simple arrangement: I sit quietly, you show up with a ride back to your station, and I’d give you all the cooperation you wanted. How could a thing like that go so wrong?”
“Wish I had an answer for you.”
“You realize that guy showed up with kerosene and road flares and a complete change of clothes in his car, don’t you? This in addition to the gun and his badass little glove. What does that say to you about his intentions? What do you think that says to me about trusting you again?”
Andy began to bristle, knew this would go better if he didn’t let it show. “I agree. It’d be a better world if I knew how to keep a rein on every local yahoo who’s been out in the sun too long.”
First on the scene Saturday, Andy had been the one to find the deputy, bled pale and toppled onto one side in dust turned to maroon mud around him, revolver at his side. After a few stunned moments Andy had recognized the man, remembering his tantrum at the convenience store where Marvin Boyle lay dead.
Andy had stared at Pellegrino’s corpse, cursed him to his slackened face, then radioed in the troopers stationed up and down the highway to move in and secure the scene. He waited until they’d arrived to check the rest stop’s toilets, but Sheppard wasn’t around, only the truck he’d taken from the Hardestys. Jamey had vanished one direction or the other, and probably passed by at least one DPS car in the process.
“From the time you and I spoke on Saturday,” Jamey said, “Pellegrino had an awfully narrow window to come after me the way he did. So how’d he get there that fast? How’d he even know?”
“I think it’s clear enough someone had to have tipped him off.”
The deputy’s widow said he’d gotten a call, then put together several items before heading out in a hurry, with what she’d called “the meanest face I’ve seen on him in two years of mean faces.” Which she’d thought strange beyond belief, since it meant her husband had judged it important enough to skip out on the funeral of the man he’d regarded as a father for more than half his life.
“So if everything was between you, me, and the Mohave County Sheriff’s Department,” Jamey said, “and it wasn’t me, and it wasn’t you, you’ll have to excuse me when I say I’m not all that confident in getting fair treatment just yet.”
The grating thing was that this guy was right, had little incentive to extend any additional trust—and was more right than he even knew. Take the toxicology on Marvin Boyle that had come back to the La Paz County Medical Examiner from the State Crime Lab in Phoenix. Clean. No blood alcohol despite Sheppard’s assertions that Boyle had been drinking, and what Andy’s own nose and gut had been telling him.
So he’d begun tracing Boyle’s movements that last day of his life, recalling that when he’d fumbled his gun, Boyle had been shot in the left side of his chest, and that the bullet had passed through his bank card. It hadn’t seemed important at the time, but now maybe it was. If the card was loose in his pocket, instead of inside his wallet, that implied he’d used it recently.
Andy had checked with the issuing bank for a record of card transactions that day, found that the only one had been a cash withdrawal at an ATM machine twenty-odd miles from the spot where Boyle had died. Innocent enough. But when Andy requested the bank to retrieve the digital photo automatically snapped by the ATM’s security lens, he had the guy: Boyle tipping a flat bottle while he waited for the machine to spit out forty dollars. Dated and timed to the second.
Which called for a drop-in on the La Paz County M.E., armed with a copy of the photo. Explain to me the medical reason why this picture and the toxicology you had run on this man appear to contradict each other. Nothing but a look of shame on the face of Dr. Schreiber. That said it all. Anything you need to get off your chest?
He threatened me, Schreiber had admitted. Deputy Pellegrino did. If I didn’t falsify the evidence by sending in my own blood sample. He said he’d kill me if I didn’t. I was kind of hoping that since he’s dead too, this wouldn’t ever come up.
Even in its low-quality resolution, the photo was a repugnant thing. Shot up from below, into the wattles of Boyle’s bulging throat, his seamed old mouth sucked onto the bottle’s stubby neck. And for the honor of this man Pellegrino had thrown away everything. Whatever ethics he’d had left, his life for sure, maybe his soul too.
You didn’t happen to draw a genuine blood sample and then store it, just in case, did you? Andy had asked then.
Schreiber smiling with relief: Matter of fact, I just might’ve.
“Look,” Andy said into the phone. “You got two raw deals in a row, and that doesn’t include the time you spent with the Hardestys. I guarantee you something like that won’t happen a third time.”
“You forget where I’m from. I know what guarantees are worth,” Jamey said. “What I’d really like to hope for is that whoever’s responsible for Saturday, whoever tipped Pellegrino off, he’ll be held accountable. But I bet he never will. Nothing against you personally, but I’ve had years to see what goes on with the LAPD, and I’ve noticed that when it comes to policing yourselves, people in your line of work have a habit of saying one thing but doing another. You all say you hate bad cops, because they give the good ones a bad name. They’re the standard the rest end up gett
ing judged by. But the one thing you hate more than them is whoever points them out. Because then you have to do something about it, if you can’t sweep it under the rug. You guys resent the hell out of that, don’t you?”
Andy looked down at his free hand, resting on his desk, the knuckles going tight and pale. Sometimes a guy needed to vent before he’d start talking sense, and the only thing to do was let him rant. Andy unclenched the fist and watched the color return.
“How about we finish this call on a constructive note,” he said. “You didn’t call for no reason.”
“Maybe I’ve gotten all I wanted out of this phone call already.”
“Then that does concern me. Boyle? That was his own fault. Jasper Hardesty? He was born in the wrong family. Pellegrino? Maybe you took a more active role in that one and maybe you didn’t, but there’s plenty to suggest it was justified. Maybe you best quit pushing your luck, because the way it’s looking now, you’ve started keeping some interesting company, and that’s not going to help you at all.”
“I’ll take that under advisement,” said Jamey.
And then he hung up. Damn him.
A corner had just been turned here. This was and then again wasn’t the same guy Andy had talked to Saturday morning. Because when they reached out just to pass the time of day, start implying things were going to run according their timetable from now on, what they were really doing was telling you that to them it had all become a game. As they extended the invitation:
Catch me if you can.
****
After he hung up the payphone—this wasn’t a call he would’ve made from the condo—Jamey milled around downtown Sedona. It felt like the first truly free stroll he’d taken in over a week, and he needed it, needed the movement and the time to work out the sludgy feeling that had thickened inside him.
It brought on some heavy apprehension earlier, first setting out on his own in this strange new town, as though any moment its population would start pointing fingers. The feeling faded under continued indifference. Behind his pair of Oakleys and beneath a cap of Duncan’s, he settled into his usual anonymity, able to stand in line at a coffeehouse and carry his iced mocha back out into the sun and blend.