by Brian Hodge
It was the most bloodless thing he’d ever heard.
“Remember something you told me not long after we met?” Samantha said. “That if you didn’t have some kind of breakthrough by the time you turned thirty, you’d quit acting and try something else. Remember that?”
He did.
“Well, your thirtieth birthday’s not for a few more weeks, so it looks like you’re going to squeak this one in under the wire. But…what if you hadn’t?”
“I’d probably look for a loophole so I could push the deadline to thirty-two.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“And you wouldn’t have thought me a cheater?”
“Cheating’s always allowed, when something’s important enough.”
“Which Buddhist philosopher said that?”
“Between the lines, all of them, I think.”
“You’ll have to share that with Duncan. I’m sure he’ll be glad to hear it.”
“Ah, him.” Sam saying this as if Duncan MacGregor were a topic that had to come up sooner or later. “What are they like, both of them?”
He wasn’t sure how to answer with anything more than fragments. He told her about the swords and the mead and Rob Roy MacGregor, about Dawn and her version of that bloody day in Phoenix, how she manipulated her father’s condo rentals. Told Sam how they had worked together to save his life last weekend.
Didn’t tell her about the bank job yesterday.
“I still don’t completely understand why you’re still with them,” Samantha said.
“Where else was I supposed to go? Sherry’s convinced that laying low works in our favor. It’s like a nine-days-wonder, and by instinct or design, that’s pretty much the timeline she’s factored, if you go by last Saturday, with Duncan and me being spotted together, as when this really started to take off. She thinks she’ll firm up the first deal early next week.”
He scooped up a handful of pebbles, started plinking them into the creek.
“So was your family going to take me in?” he said. “I don’t think so. And you’re right—back home, they probably are coming out of the woodwork. So it’s easier just to stay put for now. Because Duncan and Dawn sure aren’t going to give me up. And besides…” Getting into an area that he found even thornier. “I’ve never met anybody who lives the way they do.”
“You don’t admire them for that… do you?”
He didn’t answer. And knowing Sam, he probably didn’t have to.
****
When it came down, it happened so fast that it took Jordy by almost as much surprise as it did his guards. Exactly the kind of pacing you wanted in a prison break.
Cro-Mag waited until the middle of the prayer to make his move, and what better time, every one of these morose church folk standing with their eyes closed and their heads lowered like cattle. Including the C.O.s, lulled into complacency, as though they ran around with Jordy cuffed in the midst of them every day of their lives.
They never knew what hit them. Standing quietly one moment waiting for the preacher to say amen, and the next jolted out of their hides by 300,000-volt lightning strikes, Cro-Mag jabbing each man in the back of his red, smooth-shaved neck with the stun guns he carried in each hand. Two pairs of spiky contacts hit skin and blasted their worlds into supernovas—first one duo, then the other. They all went down hard and jittery, dragging Jordy to the ground with them.
Amen and glory hallelujah.
Cro-Mag was wearing work clothes and looking grubby as a gravedigger. Maybe he’d been lurking out here all along as part of the landscape. The same thick, muscular guy from the cellblock, but Jordy had been watching for a shaved head, too, so the brown wig was a surprise. It had to be a wig—nobody sprouted a headful like that in a few months. He wore it clamped down with a straw hat, some Huckleberry Finn-looking thing, the bottom of the wig sprouting from beneath in curly tufts. Solid thinking, because that furrowed dent along the left side of his skull was better than a fingerprint, and visible from twenty paces.
Cro-Mag dropped the stun guns to the ground beside Jordy and grabbed the bolt cutters hanging beside his leg from a nylon rope tied to his belt. Four seconds since the guards had fallen, and he had the cutters in hand before anyone seemed to know what was happening. Confusion began to ripple through the crowd, and one of the sturdier men got bold, came in spoiling for a righteous fight. Cro-Mag took the belligerence right out of him, whipped the bolt cutters up and around and into the side of his head to lay him flat before he’d gotten within arm’s reach.
That did it—confusion turned to panic. Some of them ran. Some watched. The rest had no idea what to do.
Jordy held up his wrists, hoisting the limp arms of the guards with them. Cro-Mag wedged the V of the cutter’s blades over the short chains between each pair of cuffs, gripping the handles and using three-plus feet of leverage to shear through the links. Freed, Jordy fished into the pocket of one of the guards for a handcuff key, would use it later to shuck the bracelets off his wrists.
He squirmed up from the tangle of bodies and had barely gotten to his feet before he was bulldozed. Just Cro-Mag being himself, everything else forgotten as the guy hugged him. Laughing like a loon and jogging in place because he couldn’t contain his excitement, lifting Jordy off his feet and swinging him so hard his legs swayed. This from a guy five, six inches shorter. It felt like being hugged by a fire hydrant.
“Yeah, I’m glad to see you too, man,” he said. “Now put me down.”
Cro-Mag dropped him, gave him a whack on the shoulder. A grin on his face so big and bright-eyed that you couldn’t connect it with the guy who’d just dropped five big men in fifteen seconds. The same guy who’d filled a house with gas and set it off.
“So what do you wanna do now?” Cro-Mag sounding as though they’d just gotten out of school.
“Get armed,” Jordy said, and relieved the guards of their guns. The guys he’d been cuffed to, closest to, hadn’t been carrying. The other two had revolvers, both .357 Magnums, one with a wooden grip, the other with a black rubberized Pachmayr grip that was easier to hang onto. He kept that one for himself, gave the other to Cro-Mag. When he snatched up the stun guns and started to hand one over, he saw that Cro-Mag was already aiming his revolver down at one of the C.O.s.
“How’d they treat you? They treat you okay?” Cro-Mag asked. “They weren’t mean to you, were they?”
“They were okay.”
“’Cause if they were mean to you, I’ll make ’em sorry.”
“Leave ’em be. They’re not going anywhere for a while.”
Execute them, and it would only make the law that much thirstier for blood.
“Besides,” he said, “kill these cocksuckers and they’re heroes. Let ’em live, and they’re just fuck-ups.”
Cro-Mag motioned for him to follow and began to sprint across the cemetery, weaving around tombstones. Brown curls bouncing under the straw hat. He couldn’t lose those any too soon. They seemed weirder than the dent in his head.
“Those guys weren’t bad, as hacks go,” Jordy told him on the run. “But there was this one that brought meals down to solitary this week, gave me no end of shit.”
Cro-Mag scowled, his brow knotting into a thick ridge and his lower jaw jutting forward. “Let’s go get him, then.”
“Don’t worry about it. Besides, I never saw his face.”
The interesting thing was, Cro-Mag meant it. He was just wired that way now. No thinking it over, no need to know anything more about the situation. Nothing but pure reactive impulse, with all the rest short-circuited by the barroom pool cue that had fractured his skull. It was like having an attack dog, with opposable thumbs.
After a two hundred yard dash through the cemetery and past sparse trees, they came to his car, a filthy beater of a Chevy Impala twenty-five years old if it was a day. Better than a state car, though, and a whole lot better than a smelly busful of other cons. But Jordy couldn’t say he hadn’t been hoping for somethin
g with more style.
“I borrowed it,” Cro-Mag said, apologetic. “I didn’t think my sister’d want me taking hers today.”
“Yeah? Borrowed it from who?”
“I don’t know.”
He had left the windows down, and tossed the bolt cutters into the back seat, next to a change of clothes for Jordy. They chucked in the stun guns next. Only after Cro-Mag opened the driver’s side door did they notice the cat curled into the front seat. A striped gray, Jordy thinking it came with the car until Cro-Mag knelt beside the open door and scratched the cat around the ears. Baby-talking it, asking it where it had come from. Sincere about every question, too, as if expecting an answer.
“Maybe we should keep her.” The only thing on Cro-Mag’s mind now. “She’s got no collar.”
“I don’t think that’s such a good idea.”
“I want to take her with us!”
“Then she goes too,” Jordy sighed. Because Cro-Mag was getting that fearsome scowl again. “Can we just haul ass out of here? Today?”
Far behind them, the cemetery still bustled with figures in somber clothes. None of them giving chase, but among the bunch there had to be at least one cell phone that somebody had already used.
Cro-Mag scooped the cat into his arms, held it against his chest while digging for car keys. “You wanna drive?”
Jordy caught the keys and they switched sides. He slid behind the wheel, had to adjust the seat for more legroom. It didn’t matter that the car was an oven, with that vintage smell of dusty baked vinyl. When he fired it up and gripped the wheel, he didn’t mind the searing heat. First steering wheel he’d held in a year. The instant Cro-Mag hit the passenger seat he punched the gas and sprayed gravel.
“This is Jordy,” Cro-Mag told the cat. “Jordy just lost his whole family. We’re all he’s got now.” Cradling the purring animal in his arms and scratching it beneath the chin. “I’m Gilbert.”
“I don’t know why I have such a hard time remembering that,” Jordy said. He wheeled around a corner, putting some houses between them and the cemetery. “You just did me a big favor, and thanks. But could you do me one more now? Ditch the hat and the wig?”
Cro-Mag looked confused for a moment, then: “Oh. Right.” He dragged them from his head and tossed them into the back, shaved skull running with a downpour of sweat. “No wonder my head was so hot.”
“And tell that cat you were wrong. My family? They’re not quite all gone yet. There’s still one more I plan to lose.”
****
When Jamey and Samantha emerged from the trails late in the afternoon, Kristophe felt closer to death than they were. Except for him the culprit was boredom.
They were holding hands as they walked to her car, and if it was too far to see their faces, Kristophe knew what they looked like anyway. They would be smiling. They would be gazing at each other so intently that they were blind to everything else. Their expressions would be soft as marshmallows. So keep it up, he told them. When the time came, whether he would be taking out Jamey alone, or the both of them, he could dwell on this saccharine moment and it would be that much easier to do the deed.
Because he knew the reception he would be getting from Melissa tomorrow would bear no resemblance to anything he’d seen today.
Hey, what took you so long?
Love the eye—it’s so very you, in its own fucked-up way.
And speaking of fuck, you’re not doing anything for the next ten minutes, are you?
After they were in their car and starting to roll, Kristophe hopped on his rented mountain bike and fell in behind.
29
ANOTHER Friday, another couples’ evening in. One more week of this routine and they could officially call it a habit.
Trying not to be obvious, Dawn had been watching them ever since Jamey had brought Sam back with him—curious, after days of being around Jamey alone, how they would relate to each other. They touched each other a lot, the way people do after time apart. They stood close, they sat close. Strap their thighs together for the three-legged race at a picnic and they would win, they seemed so attuned.
They behaved like people who had a future and knew it, and because of that there were moments it hurt just to look at them.
It seemed to put Samantha at ease that Duncan turned downright courtly upon being introduced, and kissed the back of her hand. The four of them had been together a couple of hours before Dawn told the tale of last Friday, the disastrous dinner with neighbors Kyle and Kayla. Sam prompting it by asking why they’d left Denver, and already, telling it was a fun way to kill a few minutes. If you couldn’t tell stories like this about the guy you were with, you really didn’t have a normal relationship, did you? Stories were history. Stories were the landmarks in your life together.
But telling it had predictable results, she realized too late, Jamey eyeing the pair of swords above the fireplace the way kids eyed candy, and Duncan needing no more provocation than this to leap up, take them down, and hand him one. Had to be a male quirk—able to sit still only so long before they had to start playing with the sharpest things in the room.
“Come on,” she told Sam, and motioned her to follow. “You can’t possibly be interested in watching this, any more than I am. It’s too much like watching bighorn sheep clash heads to see who gets to mate with us.”
Samantha still wore an expression of alarm. “This can’t be safe.”
“Count your blessings. They’re sober.”
Dawn grabbed a bottle of sangria from the refrigerator, then led Sam along the hallway that doglegged back to the bedrooms. She staked a claim on the floor and slid to the carpet, leaning against the wall. Sam took the opposite wall as they faced each other with legs bent at the knee. Dawn tipped a drink and passed her the bottle. From the main room came the jittery clang of metal—Duncan demonstrating the Flamberge again. As long as they kept laughing there wouldn’t be anything to worry about.
“So,” Dawn said. “How prepared were you to hate me?”
Samantha pulled the bottle from her lips. “I don’t hate anybody.”
“Oh come on.” Dawn pushed at her knee. “I call you a couple nights ago, someone you’ve never heard of, and even though I’m trying to get the details out as fast as I can, soon as you heard me saying Jamey was with me, something had to go through your mind.”
“Wellll,” Sam said, self-conscious, toward the floor. As though she’d spent her adult life telling herself it was wrong to feel things like a red surge of jealousy. To get possessive and let her teeth and claws show a little.
“I thought so. You had to.” Dawn took the bottle back. “But we’re okay, right? No problems here? Because last I heard, you’ll be staying put with Jamey a few days, for the duration…so you’re not going to be feeling hinky about anything?”
“Should I?”
“I’ve got Duncan. I’m not greedy.”
But she couldn’t say she hadn’t wondered, had circumstances been different. You couldn’t help undress a good-looking guy who’s out of it, put him to bed, wipe the dirt from his face, and check on him for days without getting curious about the more intimate things about him. She’d peeked inside his underwear and left it at that.
“Was he really almost killed last weekend?” Sam asked. “This isn’t just some sort of hype that got blown out of proportion?”
Dawn pinched her thumb and forefinger. “This close.” She gauged Sam’s reaction—appalled, engrossed, squeamish. “Are you sure you want to know more?”
Sam nodded. “I should, but if I know Jamey, he wouldn’t tell me everything if he thought…” Lower lip curling back between her teeth. “He’s got this way he thinks of me sometimes, I know he does, like I’m this thing removed from the rest of the world, and if he thought it was too much to hear…” Shaking her head. “He could do it for the camera and share it with ten million people that way, but he wouldn’t tell me.”
“That’s sweet, in its way. Naive, but sweet,” Dawn
said softly, then told Sam every detail there was to know about how close Jamey had come to execution.
Samantha lowered her chin to her knees as she hugged them closer and what she’d just heard sunk in. “And he’s laughing now.” Listening to them in the front room, being boys. “How does somebody do that?”
“An experience like that…you stick it in a little box inside yourself, you put it away, then you take it out again to look at it only when you have to,” Dawn told her. “You look like you think there must be something wrong with that.”
“Ignorance never made anything go away. So it’s a little scary. The kind of week-and-a-half he’s had, it’s got to change him some, even if it doesn’t happen right away. These things can be like time bombs. And we didn’t go through it together.” Samantha backed up, not what she’d intended to say. “I mean, we did go through it together, we just did it miles apart. I’ll never know what it was like for him, and he’ll never know what it was like for me.”
In passing the sangria back and forth, Dawn noticed that Sam wasn’t wiping the mouth of the bottle, liked that about her. Couldn’t find anything not to like, really. She was a few inches taller, but hold that against her and Dawn would have to start holding it against every chick who topped five feet tall. Sam was pretty, too, but without flash, as if she’d never paid attention to anyone who might have told her she was. Plus, by comparison, Sam had only half the boob allotment. So there.
“Until the other day,” Dawn said, “the worst Duncan had ever hurt anyone was his own cousin. And that was to stop him. So that deputy last Saturday? He’d never done anything like that before.” Dawn not wanting to say the word. “Never killed anyone. And he hasn’t said a word about it since, what that was like. Already it’s like that moment’s in this little place and he’s just not going there.”