by Brian Hodge
But Emerson had said enough already. More than he was probably aware of. Although they’d never met, Jordy felt he still knew the man through the fathers of the girls he’d known years before. All those fathers who had so clearly disapproved. Men with high standards for daughters who’d grown up well, then rankled their daddies’ expectations by settling for something so far beneath them. And it was plain to see that Emerson’s daughter had grown up very well indeed.
“Then I’ll be blunt about it,” Jordy said. “If something ‘happened’ to Jamey Sheppard, you wouldn’t be all that broken up about it. Would you.”
Emerson leveled a stare at him.
“Not that I’m wishing sorrow on anyone in your family, understand. It’s just that things happen, and grief is a by-product of that.”
“Grief,” Emerson mused. Liking the idea. Sporting a big hard-on for it. Just not coming out and admitting it. “Grief doesn’t last forever…”
“I mean if, say, Jamey were to get in the middle of some other family squabble where he’s got no business being. You take your chances then, don’t you? Any cop’ll tell you that much.”
“This still doesn’t mean I’d have any idea where to find him. And if for one second you think I’ll involve my daughter in any of this—”
Jordy raised empty hands, palms out. “Whoa. We both know that’s off the table. We both know where this’ll go if you think I’m about to put it there. So let’s step away from it before anybody gets the wrong idea.” He lowered his hands. “You don’t miss much. I’ll bet you make a habit of listening to conversations you’re not even part of. You’re probably sitting on something right now that’s all I’ll need to leave here happy.”
Emerson glanced down into the glass, long enough to give something a good careful weighing. “Jamey has a sister. They’re not particularly close either, but I guess she’s had a change of heart about him since his troubles started.”
“What’s her name?”
“Melissa. Melissa…” He groped for a last name. “Gallagher. It’s a married name, but she’s divorced.”
“It’s probably too much to hope for that she lives just across town.”
“She lives in Los Angeles. One of the suburbs. Sherman Oaks, I think it is. She works for a film producer named Mickey Coffman. That should be enough to get you started.”
“No time like right now.” Jordy pointed toward the man’s computer, on a table behind him. “Look her up. See if she’s listed in the white pages out there. If she is, then there’s her address.”
Emerson spun his chair around, switched the computer on, and went to work. Jordy watched the back of his wavy gray head, then stood for a better view of the screen, following along. From power button to payoff, less than three minutes.
“How about that,” Jordy said. “Even draws you a map.”
Emerson glanced back over his shoulder. “Want me to print it out for you?”
Jordy had to laugh. “Almost makes this too easy, doesn’t it?”
Another half a minute and he was folding it into quarters and slipping it into his pocket. Then they were back to squaring off across the monstrous desk.
“You got what you came here for,” Emerson told him, with a glance beyond for Cro-Mag. “That concludes our business.”
“Wellll,” Jordy hedged, fingering the Magnum. “You know what the one thing that nags me is? Soon as we’re out your door, what’s to stop you from picking up your phone and putting a world of heat onto us? Even if we make it out of Flagstaff, there’s only so many roads to L.A., and if they know when we’re coming, they could probably watch ’em all.” He ticked the gun barrel back and forth, upright. “Or you give them the sister’s address, and all the L.A. County Sheriff has to do is wait for us to show up.”
“You must be joking.” Emerson leaned forward, his face set hard. “I just gave you tacit approval to kill my daughter’s fiancé. If I turn around and have you caught, you’re not going to keep your mouth shut about that. You’re many things, but a fool isn’t one of them, and you know damn well this is the last conversation I’d ever want my daughter to learn about.”
He made a good argument. Honestly, there was no desire to shoot this man. It would be like shooting a buffalo, or some sturdy old lion standing in proud defense of his females. Starting to think like Cro-Mag now, a soft spot for animals.
“As long as we’re parting on such good terms,” Jordy said, “and the highway situation being what it is, we may have to swing a little wide. Which brings up the issue of gas money.”
A room like this, a man like Clarence Emerson…Jordy knew he had to keep some cash stashed here for emergencies. Some well-hidden place.
And more and more, Jordy impressed himself as a shrewd judge of character. Reluctantly, Emerson uncovered a panel of the desk to reveal a tight chamber with its own built-in safe. He dialed the door open and they both peered in at the small automatic pistol lying on top of the cash.
“Try your luck?” Jordy grinned.
“Some other time, maybe.”
“Smart man. Mine’s bigger.”
Emerson didn’t insult him by going through the motions of offering only part of what was there. The entire stack came out, maybe two thousand dollars in twenties, fifties, and hundreds. Jordy thought the odds were high that this wasn’t the only stash around, that this was only for show, like a decoy wallet carried to give to a mugger. Too bad the smart move now was to leave Emerson feeling that he’d gotten off cheap.
He ushered them to the door, the two of them leaving by the front this time.
“I feel like I just made a deal with the devil,” Emerson said.
“Really? I don’t see much resemblance,” Jordy said. “The devil’s got more friends left than I do.”
“Of course the marriage proposal’s real. And no it doesn’t bother me that he’s already got a fiancée. She can’t understand him like I can. It’s important everyone realize the distinction that I wouldn’t be marrying him like I would any ordinary guy. I’d be marrying him in his status as an icon. We’d still consummate it, though. Then hopefully he’d get killed right away (like martyred, I mean) so I could go straight into my phase as a professional widow.”
—Natasha Noir
Webmistress,
Renegade Temple of
Jamey Sheppard,
America Online chatroom
37
DO you know what tomorrow would’ve been if you hadn’t stopped at that convenience store?” Samantha asked. That he didn’t only seemed to underscore how far they had stepped through the looking glass into this contorted Wonderland. “It would’ve been our first day back home after the honeymoon.”
Failing to make this connection left Jamey feeling the same way he probably would’ve had she informed him he’d forgotten their anniversary. And she was right. Spared the expense of a lavish wedding, Sam’s parents had decided to compensate with the honeymoon, springing for a week for two in New Zealand. Tonight, the two of them would have stepped off a jet at LAX after long hours over the Pacific.
“I’ve been thinking about driving back today,” she told him then.
She had her reasons and he couldn’t refute them: that she was due back at work in the morning, that she wasn’t rich and neither was he yet, that he couldn’t look her in the eye and tell her how much longer it would take for this situation to be resolved.
“Give it just one more day,” he said. “Tomorrow morning I’ll call Sherry and see if a deal’s about to break. Tomorrow, that’s pretty much the end of the timeline she gave herself to bring everything to a peak. What’s one more day?”
“Why don’t you come back with me, instead? That’s what I was really hoping for, Jamey.”
“Because,” he said, “I don’t know what kind of scenario I could be walking into there. I don’t know whether or not there are still media creeps on stakeout wherever they think I could show up next. I just know I’m not ready for it if they are.”
&n
bsp; She closed her eyes and nodded, didn’t press the matter. As though she’d suspected all along what he was going to say.
All morning he had known something was coming, that Samantha was only waiting for the right moment to get into it. With all she knew about breath and the body, she may have excelled at dealing with other people’s stress, but wasn’t very good at hiding her own. And now was as right a moment as they would have—Duncan was in the shower, and Dawn had gone out to buy muffins for breakfast and a Sunday paper to see if it carried any news about Blayne being found in his motel room yet. Or Kristophe and the wrecked car.
“Since you asked, I’ll tell you what one more day is.” She took both his hands in her own. “I don’t want to spend another day walking around the spot where you beat another human being to death. I understand what the circumstances were, and I know it’s nothing you would ever have done under any other…but it happened. It will always have happened.”
As if she had to tell him this.
“I love you and I’m not turning loose of that,” Samantha went on, “but what happened here two nights ago, we can’t get away from it any too soon. The longer I stay here, the deeper it all sinks into me. If it doesn’t feel that way to you, then that worries me…because it doesn’t fit with who I thought you were.”
“I have the whole rest of my life to live with it.” Jamey glanced over at the spot where it had happened. “I’ll carry it inside. Place doesn’t matter.”
“It does to me,” she said. “I know you like Duncan and Dawn, and I can see why. I like them too. He’s not what I thought he would be. But where do you expect to take that? Six months from now, do you think we could just have them over? Hope they mix with your friends and mine?” Slowly, Sam shook her head no. “What kind of future do you think they have? She knows. Maybe you can’t see it in her, but I can. They are running out of time and she knows it. Do you plan on being there when that happens? Out of some misguided sense of loyalty? This is no movie. You guys aren’t going to shoot your way out of it. You’re not going to head up to the Grand Canyon and drive over the edge, leave everybody saying, ‘Oh wow, weren’t they misunderstood?’ You’ll end up one of two places, and I can’t stand the thought of either one of them.”
“Whatever loyalty I feel, it’s not misguided,” he said. “They saved my life.”
“And I’m the one you’re supposed to spend it with. Remember?”
He had no response to this, so he took a half-step closer, all the distance left between them, and held her. Held her because there was nothing left to say. Sam hadn’t even asked how he planned to return to L.A. if it wasn’t in her car.
He held her until the front door opened, Dawn back with breakfast. Expecting her to walk in and notice the expressions on their faces, and ask What’d I miss? One look at Dawn’s face, though, and he knew she’d learned something worse out there.
She closed the door and locked it, dropped her bag of muffins to the floor, then handed him the newspaper. Tapping her fingernail against the headline of an article above the fold. Jamey read it, had to read it again. Only six words, but it took time to adjust to the ambush:
ESCAPEE JORDAN RABIN STILL AT LARGE
****
A couple of minutes after Jamey walked Sam to her car, Dawn stole outside to watch them in the parking lot, from a distance. Knowing they would never notice.
Go with her, Dawn willed him. Don’t be such an idiot. We’re even now. Don’t come back for anything, just get in the car and go with her.
Jamey’s hands rose to Sam’s shoulders before he pulled her as close as two people could get, and their heads blurred together on each other’s shoulders.
No…stay. Please stay.
This was what voyeurs did, wasn’t it? Watched people who loved each other in the intimate moments of their lives. Maybe wondering what it would feel like to be one of them, to get up each morning and look forward to the same things they did—the same day, the same month. Same lifespan.
Then she decided to let the two of them live the next few minutes unobserved and turned to go back inside, walking past decks with opened doors out of which ebbed the sound of other people’s mornings. Their laughter and their music and their arguments and prayers.
She found Duncan where she’d left him, slumped into the sofa beside the newspaper. After she stood before him for a few moments he dragged his gaze back from some lost and faraway place, and she climbed on board, straddling him and leaning against his chest. He was tense at first, but then she felt him relax, felt his hand move up into her hair.
“When was the last time I told you I love you?” she asked.
He waited awhile before answering. “Have you ever?”
“I don’t remember.” A lie. Dawn breathing him in, fresh and clean from the shower, with his hair damp and unruly. “Maybe I always thought it would be better if that went without saying.” Yet still with a subtly indefinable scent along his jawline that she thought of as, simply, a man-smell. “Maybe that was wrong.”
Her breath was filled with him and she drew it deep. If fifty years from now she caught the slightest whiff of this same scent, she would think of him and no one else, and remember this moment right now…
Remember when I pulled back from his chest as I sat on his lap, so I could take his hand from my hair and hold it between us, between my own? Remember how I touched it and turned it and tried to memorize everything about it—every finger and every line in his palm, and every vein and tiny hair across the back? And remember how fascinated I was by the contrast in all the things I’d ever known him to do with that hand, because I had seen him hurt people with it, really hurt them, but with me it was always the opposite, there was only ever gentleness in that hand, and so much pleasure, and finally after all this time I don’t think it was because he touched me any better than anyone else, but just because I knew he was the one that hand belonged to.
And maybe, too, she would remember the way she leaned forward to close the gap between them once again, moving his hand around her waist and wishing that he could leave it there for hours.
****
When the buzzer from the outside gate ripped apart the stillness of late afternoon, Melissa didn’t know if it was bad, worse, or apocalyptic.
Ever since Jamey’s bombshell phone call yesterday, the capstone to this ill-fated week, an entire campaign of spin control had been whirring inside her head. Whatever fresh predicament arose, there had to be ways of wrestling it into submission. Top to bottom, Hollywood was a town where partnerships were lubed with the unctuous rancor of people who couldn’t stand each other, but played nice for the sake of the payoff. They could be so full of shit that cats tried to bury them in litter boxes, but they still knew how and why to prioritize—nailing the deal was everything.
Again, the buzzer.
She steeled herself for the worst. Filtered out the nobodies and nuisances she could send packing, and the smaller list of somebodies whose presence would do no harm. Which left Kristophe, but only if he’d lost his gate key—hardly an impossibility—or Blayne, in which case some tale of woe was sure to follow, explaining how he’d managed to lose not a key, but an entire human being.
Then again, it could be Jamey down there, making good on implied threats.
The third long rep of the buzzer broke her down and drove her from the sofa where she’d been doing first-hurdle script duty for Mickey again. No loss. No idea whether it was destined for an Oscar or the trash can. She hadn’t been able to focus much past FADE IN at the top of page one. The last twenty-four hours hadn’t been especially productive, as long as you didn’t count the spastic colon.
She keyed the gate intercom, gave a guarded hello. Heard an unfamiliar male voice asking if he was speaking with Melissa Gallagher.
“Who wants to know?”
“This is Detective John Pedimore of the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department,” the voice crackled back. “My partner and I would like to ask you a few questions about
your brother.”
She froze with her fingers poised on the intercom button. A genuine visit, or some new game of Jamey’s? It didn’t sound like him, but it was downright eerie how well he’d pegged Kristophe’s voice yesterday—the best acting she was aware of him ever having done. The frightful implication of this was that you had to study someone to impersonate them so well, and Jamey had never had the opportunity. Brother and beau had met only in passing, months before. So Jamey had obviously increased his exposure to the clash of cultures that was Kristophe—under what circumstances she preferred not to speculate.
Then again, maybe they really were detectives, but here to arrest her. Overall, not much more than an annoying break in the day. Keep her mouth shut and lawyer up, that’s all she would need to do.
“Come on up,” she said, and thumbed the gate release to buzz them through.
Two minutes later they were at the door. When she opened up, Melissa knew instantly that these were no cops. Not even undercover narcs would go to this much trouble to look so red-eyed and road-worn.
The taller of the two already had his foot in the door, like a pushy salesman, and a big black-handled revolver held flat across his chest and belly—not pointing it at her, just showing it off, like a Mexican bandit from a tintype photo.
“Hey there,” he said. “Either we can have a talk about your brother and where I might look for him, or I can start putting holes through your door a lot faster than you can run from them.” He gave her a narrow-eyed smile that, for all its menace, was at least one of the most honest she’d seen since having moved to the state. “I could swing either way.”
She believed him. She believed that the bald guy with the heavy jaw and the cranial dent could nosh through the door on his own.
“The kind of week I’ve been having, so could I,” she said, and he clearly wasn’t expecting that. “Answer me one thing, and tell me the truth. Is it just my imagination, or do you seem not all that concerned with my brother’s health?”