Mad Dogs

by Brian Hodge

  “Okay. I get the point.”

  “Plants. I like plants. They’re so unobtrusive,” Melissa said. “My absolute perfect lover would probably be someone who was comatose.”

  “Why not go all-out and say dead?” Jenna sounding pretty lifeless herself.

  “I have no compunctions about robbing the cradle. But I won’t rob the grave. You’ve got to set some minimum standards.”

  Beside her, Jenna laughed softly in the candlelight, but only to herself, and it wasn’t out of amusement. More the sound of someone who’s rolled over to discover herself in the same situation a few too many times.

  “You’re with somebody, right?” she asked. “Earlier, I couldn’t help noticing a few male touches around the place.”

  “Really?” Melissa said. Never able to think of Kristophe as someone who left a scent trail of testosterone. “Like what?”

  “You mean besides the black Speedos in the corner of the bathroom? Well, there was when I opened the kitchen cabinet for a water glass and saw that mug with boobs. I just don’t see you drinking out of that.”

  “Oh. Right. I intentionally forget that’s there. Kristophe, he thinks it’s a riot.”

  “Kristophe…what’s he like?” Jenna asking this as if to size him up for some future battle over Melissa’s carnal soul.

  “He would lose a depth contest to a thimble—which is fine with me, I’m not implying there’s anything wrong with that. And he pretends to be more German than knockwurst. It’s a ploy to give him this exotic cachet that takes the pressure off of being forced to prove he has a personality and talent.”

  “And I bet it works,” Jenna said.

  “On a bewildering number of people, yeah, it does.”

  “Where is he tonight?”

  “He’s on a trip to raise some backing funds for a project.”

  “And to think you could’ve lied and said he was due back later tonight,” Jenna said. “Even without that, I guess we’re still spared the awkward moment when one or the other of us tries to figure out if we’re spending the night together.”

  Melissa told her she guessed so, and that it really wouldn’t have worked out anyway, not tonight, because Mickey had given her a script this afternoon and was expecting coverage on it tomorrow morning.

  But there was still that bumbling goodbye at the door, Jenna touching the back of her hand and Melissa still feeling weak in the knees while wondering if something inside her had never worked the way it did inside other people, no matter who they fucked, no matter who their siblings were, no matter who signed their paycheck and what was done to earn it.

  “Give me a call if you ever come to any conclusions,” Jenna said, seeming sincere about it, if not quite able to hide the snarky edge to her voice. “And in the meantime, I hope you and your ficus tree over there will be very happy together.”

  Melissa shut the door on the day, the night, and whatever self-recriminations had come with them. While the unexamined life may not have been worth living, it sure did mean putting in a lot of unpaid overtime.

  ****

  Squatting on the Audi’s crumpled hood, Kristophe’s first clue that Blayne was still alive was when he jolted from zero- to one-hundred-percent consciousness and screamed to stop using the tire tool to pry him out of the windshield.

  All the light they had to go by was from the interior dome, and what remained of the moon after being filtered by hundreds of pine branches. But it was plain to see that Blayne had come through this the worst. Not as bad as the Audi, but bad enough.

  Kristophe figured he had his seat belt to thank for his survival, although he was half-blind now, right eye swollen shut after the air bag had ballooned on impact and punched the camera into his skull. From eyebrow to cheek, his face felt as if it were capped with a pulpy mushroom. Never had he suffered so for his art.

  Blayne, though, hadn’t been belted in, managing in some evil miracle of physics to work his way over his own air bag. It had slowed his momentum so that he hadn’t been catapulted from the car, leaving him with just enough velocity to put his head through the windshield, then leave him there. Fractured safety glass bristled around his ears and jaw like a wreath; blood ran from a stripe down the center of his scalp.

  Horribly—Kristophe found the image worse for his immobility—Blayne’s eyes rolled upward to glare hatred at him and the beveled end of the tire tool.

  “Come near me…with that thing…one more time,” Blayne gargled, “I’ll kill you. Even if I have to leave…half my throat hanging on this glass…I’ll kill you.”

  “Is it cut, your throat?”

  “I don’t think so.” He blinked blood from his eyes. “How long’ve we been here?”

  It was the wrong question to ask someone who hadn’t been conscious the entire time either. Kristophe thought he might have blacked out only a few moments. And then…? Then there was inspecting what he’d feared was a dead Blayne, determining the camera still worked and getting a good shot of the corpse, staggering from the car, opening the trunk, and finally clambering atop the ruined hood with the tire tool to lever Blayne’s head back through the hole—which, in his defense, had seemed like a sound idea at the time. All this must’ve taken a good five or six minutes.

  “If my throat was cut…that would’ve been long enough to bleed to death.” Beneath the buckled glass, Blayne’s hands moved gingerly around his neck. “But I can’t say what’ll happen if you keep after me with that fucking crowbar.”

  “What, then? What do we use?” Kristophe was near tears, staring down at his friend’s head as if it were on a platter. “I could get the gun and shoot loose the glass around you.”

  Another hateful glare from Blayne.

  “Ja. Bad idea.”

  “We’ll have to cut it,” he said. “In my gym bag…with all my vitamins and tape and stuff…there’s a knife. Get it out and give it to me.”

  Kristophe crawled down and back inside the car, rummaged through the tossed salad of luggage until he found the knife. Not the impressive bayonet he hoped for, just a pocket knife with a four-inch blade. He opened it and the blade locked into place, then he pressed it into Blayne’s hand. For an instant he feared this was a trick, that Blayne’s vengeful arm would suddenly plunge the blade into his heart.

  “Get out here.” Blayne’s voice, on the other side of the glass. “Now.”

  Kristophe obeyed, stood along the passenger side next to the bossy head. The tip of the blade punched up through the pulverized glass to the right of Blayne’s jaw.

  “How far’s that from me?” he asked. “About six inches?”

  “Five or six, ja.”

  “Tell me if I start to move in too close to skin,” and then Blayne began to saw his way around, the blade jerking through the milky layers of safety glass and the clear plastic sandwiched in between.

  “Would this not be easier for me to do, from out here?”

  “You’re the one who put us down here. You’re the one who wanted to blow out the glass with a machine gun. Give you the knife and it’s my jugular for sure.”

  It was a painful thing to watch, to listen to, Blayne grunting as he cut a sloppy circle in the glass, shifting the knife from one hand to the other. Two warnings for course correction, that was all, until he’d gone a complete three-sixty and could ease back through the windshield, past the deflated air bag, and into his seat again.

  The ragged disc of glass encircled his neck like a wide floppy collar. He craned his head to the right and slipped the blade between the left side of his throat and the disc, held it steady and cut through from inner edge to outer, then peeled it away and tossed it out the window at Kristophe’s feet. Covered with crystalline pebbles and powdered glass, he sat gulping air and staring dull-eyed through the hole he’d made, at the blood he had left behind.

  Kristophe breathed easier, the chilly mountain air tainted with the steamy stink of engine coolant. Still wobbly, he wandered back a dozen yards, out of the cluster of pines they’
d sailed into, and peered one-eyed up the slope. Far above, the darkened incline merged with a starry blue-black sky. He’d heard an occasional car pass by, heard another one now but could barely see the glow of passing headlights. Given the sparseness of traffic up there, it was likely they hadn’t even been seen going over. Meaning that no help was on the way.

  He returned to the car and slumped behind the wheel. Free of the guillotine, Blayne had settled into a daze. With Blayne’s head now under the dome light, Kristophe could see that it was much worse than probably either of them had suspected.

  “Do you have any idea how many thousands of stitches you need?”

  “What do you mean?” Blayne’s voice was slow and thick with dread.

  Kristophe touched a careful finger to the top of Blayne’s head. Moved it a bit and watched the left side of his scalp wiggle. Only the left side. Then touched the right side and watched it wiggle.

  “When I do this, does it hurt?”

  “No…just kind of numb.”

  Kristophe forced down two huge lumps in his throat—his testicles, almost surely—when he realized the degree of damage: a six- or seven-inch split front-to-back along the crown of Blayne’s bloody head.

  “I think this is your skull I see between your scalp.”

  Blayne pivoted down the sun visor, looked into the mirror while probing with his fingertips. For several moments he froze this way, even his eyes, nothing moving but his lips as he muttered something intricate and terrible under his breath.

  “I’ve had worse,” he finally said. “Get me that tape in my gym bag.”

  “No, Blayne, no—we have your cell phone. Remember? I make one call and we soon will have all the help down here we need.”

  But Blayne‘s eyes had glazed over with a determined epiphany. As bad as the outside of his head looked, something more dreadful must have happened to the inside. If they called for help, he argued, that meant police or a sheriff, an ambulance crew—in short, it meant reams of official documentation that they’d been in the area. Not what you want when you’re rolling in to waste someone. And now that they were so close, just a few miles out of Sedona, he wasn’t about to throw in the towel. Not with ten thousand dollars toward his club at stake.

  “But Blayne, your head…”

  “I heal quick,” he said. “I’ll just triple up my Vitamin C intake.”

  Argue as Kristophe might, there was no changing his mind. Blayne was a rock, as steadfast in his resolve as a god. This could be no mere mortal sitting beside him with an unzipped head. Overcome with unworthiness, Kristophe dug into the gym bag for the tape—white cloth tape Blayne had bought for the gym they’d found in Kingman, to wrap his hands for a workout on a heavy bag—and they got to work sealing the split. Slow going, with all that blood-caked hair, but after they topped him off with a billed pink cap silk-screened with the logo of his current gym, it looked as though his head would hold.

  Outside the car, he swayed until he got his legs beneath him. Kristophe emptied the Audi of luggage. With some luck, they could walk ahead, maybe find a spot back up to the highway where the climbing wouldn’t be so steep.

  “What about my car?” Kristophe said, a harsh new reality closing in. “When they find my car, they will know we have been here same as if we go checking into the hospital.”

  “Maybe nobody’ll see it. It’s off the beaten path down here. In these pines.”

  “But is this good enough?” The car was black, which would help, but guaranteed nothing. “We don’t know what people can or can’t see from up there.”

  Blayne glanced around, from earth to sky, at Audi and trees. “Then you can cover the thing up with pine branches until we figure something out later.”

  “What pine branches? I don’t see so many on the ground as we would need.”

  When Blayne groped into his other bag and came out with the machine gun, Kristophe thought that this was it—he had been the voice of reason once too often. Blayne socketed a curved magazine into the belly of the gun and racked back a little slide, the kind of sound that, in the movies, always meant business.

  But it wasn’t murder on his mind, Blayne ignoring him and lurching toward one of the larger trees farthest from the car. He swung the gun upward and let it rip, a plume of white fire stuttering from the barrel as he rocked it in a tight up-and-down pattern. Its ear-splitting roar echoed and rolled from the hills, even for moments after the gun was emptied, and a dense shower of greenery crashed down a few feet in front of him.

  “Those pine branches,” Blayne said.

  “It fills me with a great deal of alarm. Because it’s no longer pornography and violence being offered up as entertainment that we are expected to endure. Now Hollywood has produced someone who may have become a genuine violent public threat. I don’t know if he’s guilty or not…that’ll be determined later, of course…but this is secondary to what’s so disturbing to me about much of the public response, and certainly much of the media coverage Mister Sheppard has been receiving. What I’m seeing is a great willingness to overlook whatever he may have done as long as he makes an interesting enough celebrity.”

  —Reverend Jerry Falwell

  Larry King Live

  27

  THEY had agreed on eleven o’clock Friday morning, but Jamey got to the park half an hour early. Didn’t want any chance of Samantha beating him here and finding him nowhere in sight, thinking he was pulling another no-show. He would have camped out here all night to avoid that.

  He wandered and waited, watching the sky and the late-season tourists of mid-September. Fifteen minutes of that before he recognized the crawly feeling in the pit of his stomach for what it was: pure churning nervousness, the kind he’d not felt since those earliest days when he and Samantha were discovering each other.

  He hadn’t known that such a feeling could return. Had, since that first tentative smile, seen every inch of her. Had tasted her and smelled the sweet natural scents of her, had listened to her laugh and held her when she’d cried; had seen her laid bare and vulnerable with gasping pleasure, or gone wild with the hunger for more; had watched her deep in sleep. He had known her in every moment, and would never have thought that a week-and-a-half could turn back time on so much familiarity.

  But it had.

  And when she came, she was early too. Jamey saw her first—she was moving and he was sitting still, and he picked out her walk in the throng. He knew the way she filled the length of her jeans, the thin knit pullover she’d worn against the taste of early autumn in the mountains. Anybody else who noticed her would’ve realized she was looking for someone, and right now there was nothing better than knowing that he was the one.

  When he stood, it caught her eye, slowed her, as though Samantha might’ve wondered if her eyes deceived. Jamey met her halfway, to prove to her they didn’t.

  “I guess it really is true,” she said. “Some guys’ll do anything to get out of a wedding.”

  He laughed into her hair—loose, not in the fat braid she sometimes wore down her spine—then pulled back to stroke her face, watched her head tip up and her eyes drift closed, lost in it. They could go on this way all day. Telling her how much he’d missed her; listening to her tell him how much she’d worried.

  “You don’t think you were followed?” he had to ask.

  On Wednesday evening they’d talked about this possibility. Sam had told him that her parents’ house had been under watch for a few days, beginning Saturday, after he and Duncan had been spotted near Kingman.

  “I don’t see how I could’ve been,” she said, and explained that even before this morning the vigil appeared to be over, enough days of no results that the stakeout had been pulled. Still, she’d left Flagstaff on the interstate and driven west awhile, pulled in at the rest stop a dozen or so miles later, then turned around and backtracked. Twice, along the highway down to Sedona, she’d pulled off onto side roads that came up after curves, and sat waiting, to be certain.

  “Wh
ere to now?” he said. “Back to the condo, or…?”

  Sam shook her head. “I don’t think I’m ready, just yet, for two strangers. Let’s just walk, why don’t we. And try to remember where we were before.”

  ****

  For anyone who thought they knew what it was like to stand out in a crowd, Jordy Rabin would have suggested that they attend a triple-funeral wearing bright yellow, see how much they really knew about it. That was the crash-course in the subject right there.

  The eyes of his hometown had been on him since the moment he’d wriggled from the back of the sedan, shackled from top to bottom, and into the arms of his guards. Four of them, all shorthaired bruisers who were none too inconspicuous themselves, wearing windbreakers stenciled the same as the car doors: Arizona Department of Corrections. They unfastened the ankle shackles so he could move, then freed his arms from the belly chain and two of them cuffed each wrist to one of their own. Three abreast and two more behind, they walked toward the funeral home, Jordy flanked by his guardian behemoths and wearing the only yellow prison-issue coveralls in sight on this day of somber suits and dresses.

  Hell of a homecoming.

  He’d done some roaming years ago, fresh out of his teens and with an itch for the road, an urge to see what things looked like in Texas, in Louisiana, in Florida. How their women smelled and sounded and felt beneath him, how easy their citizens and businesses were to rob. He’d come back home to Casa Grande after a few years and it seemed that nobody remembered him but the police.

  But they all knew him now. The clothes make the man. Good church folk like his parents—and probably with just as many ugly habits behind closed doors—they didn’t even pretend not to stare. He would be the closest thing this town had to a celebrity. The one discussed over haircuts and coffee. The one they all remembered now, even if they had to invent every detail about their encounters with the monster-in-the-making. The one they were terrified their own kids might turn out to resemble, refusing to admit it could happen but deep down scared of it just the same.