by Brian Hodge
“I’m not all that concerned with my own health,” he said. “You can probably guess where his ranks with me.”
Melissa opened up and with a sweep of her arm ushered them in. Whoever—whatever—they were.
“Has anybody ever told you,” she asked, “that you’re the answer to a girl’s prayers?”
“Not for a good long year or so,” he said.
38
NOW they were three again, as if Samantha had never been there at all.
The rest of Sunday passed with little to do and nothing to look forward to until American Fugitives that evening. Host Barry Lang was on the case and on top of the world, foaming at the mouth for mach-speed justice. Again they were the lead story, with the focus this time on Jordy Rabin’s escape from custody Friday afternoon.
The show had already filmed a re-creation, with Colin Slovik, Jamey’s co-star from the original episode, reprising his role as Duncan’s homicidal cousin. Colin had to have been feeling cheated, his part so passive this time—smirking while cuffed amid a quartet of uniformed extras who dropped on cue from the stun guns wielded by a still-unidentified accomplice charging in to interrupt the graveside prayer and knock a few heads with what looked like a big pair of hedge trimmers. Once freed, the TV-Jordy and his liberator loped whooping into the distance, away from a foreground filled with stunned mourners who did everything but rend their clothes and gnash their teeth.
Next after these commercials, the latest on the mysterious alliance between Duncan MacGregor and actor-turned-fugitive Jamey Sheppard.
“What latest?” Duncan asked the television. “There is no latest. If they had a latest on us, we wouldn’t be sitting here now.”
On the sofa, Dawn turned from the TV to Duncan. “Tell me the truth. Don’t try to spare me. Should we be seriously worried about Jordy?”
“We’re okay,” Duncan said. “They’ll have him caught before he could ever find his way here. Which he couldn’t do even if he had time on his side.” He turned now to Jamey. “It’s what I was saying the other night about K.A.’s…we don’t have anything in common anymore. He’s probably hiding out in Phoenix, looking up the old fences we used to use. Probably he’s thinking he can find me that way, that I’ve still been using one of these people.” Duncan turned back to Dawn now. “That’s how Jordy’ll get caught, too. This guy he had break him loose, it’s probably some prison buddy who got paroled. And somebody’ll get around to checking him out because he’s the next name on a list…and that’s how they’ll find Jordy.”
Duncan made a persuasive case, Jamey thought. That, plus locked doors and handy firearms, should help get them through the night.
And the show was back on. The payoff of the pre-break teaser turned into something Jamey hadn’t expected at all: a familiar name and voice, if not the face.
So that’s what the state cop Andy Connolly looked like. Jamey had expected another version of the vengeful executioner who’d showed up in place of Connolly last weekend. Not this square-faced guy a few years shy of fifty, whose job stress hadn’t destroyed his hairline but still had claimed its due. Pouchy eyes, as if he’d been running on too little sleep lately. He did not look like a liar. He did not look like an evil man.
The show broke into a split-screen, Connolly at a local affiliate station but connected by satellite uplink for this back-and-forth with the show’s set.
“Mister Sheppard made contact with me last Thursday morning,” he told Barry Lang. “A telephone call.”
“You did?” Duncan said.
Dawn slapped Duncan’s knee. “Shh!”
“And what was his purpose in doing that?” Lang asked.
Connolly turned evasive without seeming to: “He had a few thoughts on his situation he felt like sharing. Beyond that, I wouldn’t care to speculate on his reasons. He ended the call before we could make something productive out of it.”
“It’s a reasonable question, I think,” Duncan said. “You called this guy up to pass the time of day, is that it?”
“Pretty much, yeah.”
Dawn glared at them both. “Save it for the commercials.”
“If you had another chance to talk to him, right this moment,” Lang asked his on-set monitor filled with Connolly’s head, “what would you say to him?”
For a moment, Connolly seemed privately amused. “I’d be surprised if I wasn’t talking to him. If he wasn’t tuned in to catch his own coverage.” The split-screen was killed, giving Connolly the full frame. The man was good, too—knew how to project past the lens. “Jamey, whatever I could say to you now I said the other morning. I don’t need to repeat it, I just hope you’re smart enough to do something about it. As far as I know, there’s nothing you’ve done that can’t be worked out. I do know you didn’t get a fair shake from some people here…but don’t let that keep you in a situation that’s going to clean you out of options. I don’t know if your thinking is all that clear now on who your friends are.”
He turned it back over to Lang, who went into the segment wrap-up, toll-free number for the tip hotline returning to the screen.
“So where’d you call him from?” Duncan was on his feet and pacing now.
“From a payphone in town.”
“What for? To play around with him? Show him how smart you are?” Duncan sounded as irritable as Jamey had heard him. “Playing games, that’s how people get caught.”
“Like I’m going to have to one of these days. Not that you’re on the table, if that’s what you’re pissed about, but I’ve got to bargain myself back into my own life soon. And a big chunk of that life walked out the door this morning because she couldn’t deal with this one.”
“You seem to be forgetting something,” Duncan said. “Kristophe didn’t come here to kill me. He came here for you. He walked in here from your life, not mine. I’ve only got one guy that wants to kill me. You seem to have a whole collection of them.”
“Boys,” Dawn stressing the word. “Can we stop this before it gets ugly?” She waited a beat, neither of them saying anything. “That’s better.” She pulled Duncan back to the sofa, let her hand slap onto his thigh. “Something’s eating you. That’s obvious. It’s obvious what it must be, too. So let’s not look for other things to pick fights about.”
His cousin was just a part of it, Jamey knew. They both had lost family this weekend—in different ways, but each loss was equally permanent.
“He killed them,” Duncan said quietly. “Had it done—same thing. Jordy’s entire family, they were his day pass. He knew what he was doing. He got wind of what was going on out here and decided he couldn’t sit inside any longer. And knew what he had to do to get outside that wall.”
“No, no…” Dawn began rubbing his leg. “The paper said they were looking at his brother-in-law for that.”
Duncan shook his head. “You don’t understand. You couldn’t. He got that idea from me. Jordy didn’t think it up on his own—I gave it to him.”
Dawn’s hand crawled for the remote control and she turned the TV off.
“Oh, Duncan,” she whispered. “When?”
“Three or four months before Phoenix. We were in a bar one night after we robbed a place in Scottsdale, one of the first ones we did. It was just one of those conversations you have when you’re drinking. We were coming up with different ideas how to escape prison. That popped out of me. One of those things you say, it’s so extreme it’s a joke you never in a million years meant to be taken seriously.”
Again, Dawn’s whisper, soft as a silken noose: “Oh Duncan…”
“He held onto that. Held onto it the whole time. Found some guy to talk it up to in prison, I bet. To get the job done for him.” Duncan seemed to deflate, a speck beneath the ceiling. “See, this way, he knew that when I first heard about him being loose, we’d both understand who really put the key in his hand.”
****
As soon as American Fugitives was over, Jordy shut off Melissa’s TV. Leaned back with elbows ou
tstretched and his hands linked behind his head, a satisfied grin breaking his face in two. It was tempting to think that right now every con in Florence was cheering him on. But to be realistic, Jordy suspected that tonight’s episode hit a little too close to home for the warden, and had been nixed with blackout conditions.
Which didn’t make him any less a celebrity this evening, merely reduced the size of his most appreciative audience.
“Was that the way it really happened the other day?” Melissa asked.
“Close enough. They did have me being more disrespectful during the prayer than what I was. Not that it matters.”
“I guess not,” she said. “Bringing in somebody with stun guns and handing out contusions left and right, that’s an entirely new level of irreverence.”
“I only hit one guy with those bolt cutters,” Cro-Mag complained from his chair. Weighed down with Taz in his lap, stroking her furry ears. “How many’d they show me hitting—three? I never hit three. That’s not right.”
“So your batting average goes up and you look like that much more of a tough guy. Don’t look for problems where there aren’t any.”
“And that actor playing me,” Cro-Mag went on, as if he hadn’t heard a word, “he didn’t look like me at all. Not even close.”
“You haven’t considered that may be a good thing?”
“First time you’re on TV, you want to be able to recognize yourself. If I hadn’t just done all that on Friday, and I was watching this by accident, I wouldn’t even know that was supposed to be me.”
“But you do. So it doesn’t matter.” Jordy trying to latch onto the reasoning process inside Cro-Mag’s damaged brain. “So why not just consider it our little secret?”
“That’s one thing I’m not totally clear on myself,” Melissa said. Then, to Cro-Mag: “These weren’t all blind people at this funeral, were they? They did see you? Because you have what we sometimes out here call…an interesting look.”
“I wore a wig I got from a joke shop,” he admitted. “And a hat.”
“Well, there you go, then. You hid all your best features.” She turned back to Jordy. “And you. I can’t help noticing you don’t seem to be all that broken up about coming from a funeral for your whole family.”
“You’re one to talk,” he said. “Considering how if you get your way, you’ll be an only child by lunchtime tomorrow.”
“I was only making an observation. Don’t mistake it for a judgment call.”
Jordy grinned for a truce. Something to keep in mind—the last thing he would want to do around this girl was make a mistake. Couldn’t say he didn’t like her, part of the appeal being that Melissa was a top-to-bottom ballsy chick who hadn’t shown one bit of intimidation since they’d turned up at her door. But within two minutes of crossing her threshold he’d known that he couldn’t trust her. They were partners of convenience, with otherwise no use for each other, unless she liked it rough now and then between the sheets. Hard to guess. Sometimes that was exactly what these high-toned, high-maintenance types went in for.
His eyes followed the sway of her ass and the sweep of her hair to the balcony door, where she drew the curtain aside.
“It’s as dark as it’s going to get out there tonight,” she said. “Anybody ready to take that trip to Burbank?”
Jordy saw no reason to put it off. He and Cro-Mag had had a chance to shower off the sweat and grime accumulated along the desert roads that had brought them here from Flagstaff. It wasn’t sleep, but it would suffice.
All this distance just to learn that Duncan and the actor had been only twenty miles away, in Sedona. He hated the idea of turning around later tonight and heading back again. Whatever they did next would depend on how much this roommate of Sheppard’s fiancée could tell them. It was the only resource Melissa knew to try; the last she’d heard, the fiancée was heading down from Flagstaff to link up with Sheppard in Sedona.
So Jordy had to wonder if the girl’s father hadn’t looked him in the eye last night and told a bald-faced lie to throw him off the track, or if Emerson simply hadn’t known. The latter, Jordy suspected—the same sort of bullshit his girlfriends used to spin years ago, lying to their disapproving fathers to keep peace in the household.
But if this Samantha had made contact with her roommate and passed along so much as a phone number, he had them. Had them all.
“Two cars,” he said. “I’d feel better about taking two cars over there.”
Melissa grabbed the keys to hers, and by the time they were down on the lot, Jordy started feeling the hangover from tonight’s Fugitives. Behind one or more of these balconies, someone had to have just finished watching the same thing. Look out their window, and what do you know—there goes life, imitating TV.
He couldn’t duck inside Melissa’s car fast enough. Cro-Mag not helping matters by dawdling now that they were outside, stashing Taz in the Firebird so he could enjoy a romp with a Golden Retriever that had wandered up looking for a friendly hand.
“That’s a regular Doctor Doolittle you’re traveling with,” Melissa said.
“And I’m about sick of it,” Jordy sighed. “Feel like I’m ready to cough up a furball myself.”
They waited for Cro-Mag to graduate from playtime, then Melissa led the way along Ventura, up Woodman, and east onto Burbank Boulevard. Less chance of getting separated this way, she said, than if they took the freeway.
“Why Sedona, that’s what I’ve been wondering since Thursday,” she said. “A week ago, everybody was so sure they were going to Las Vegas.”
“Duncan knew better. Fine by me. I got no desire at all to take my business with him there.”
“Why, what’s the problem? I mean, other than monumental bad taste.”
“What you’ve got to understand is, what Graceland is to Elvis fans, Vegas is to guys on the run. You think the law doesn’t know that? They’ve got a special task force there just for us. It’s called CAT—Criminal Apprehension Team. Three different agencies working together—the FBI, Vegas Metro, and the U.S. Marshals. In a city with wall-to-wall security cameras and people watching them twenty-four hours a day. If that’s not a recipe for getting taken down hard, I don’t know what is.”
While she fiddled with the radio, he watched her hand, the way her fingers pecked at the buttons and twisted the knob. Hadn’t seen a hand like that in a long time, but had no trouble imagining how it would feel unfastening his pants, slipping inside down along the flat of his belly and gripping him where it counted.
“It’s not going to happen,” she said, and at first he thought she’d read his mind, “but my boss would love to meet you. You’d scare him to death, but he’d die happy.”
“That’s one reason I wanted to take two cars,” he said, brusquely maybe, other things on his mind. “So the two of us could have a private conversation.”
“Why, whatever about, Jordy?” But saying it as though she knew already.
“I won’t insult you by going through some routine about what prison does to a man and what he looks forward to when he gets out. You don’t strike me as the type that would mean much to. You’re more the type, if you want something, that’s it, end of story. So you can’t fault that approach in someone else. So let me say it’s been a long time since I spent a few hours in a bed I really wanted to be in, much less shared it.” He shrugged. “At least with me, you wouldn’t have to worry about someone thinking it’s anything more than exactly what it is. You wouldn’t have some dipshit calling you up thinking there was a future in it.”
She almost seemed to consider it for the next half-block. “You know, Jordy, I’m flattered, and you’re a pretty hunky guy, in a Mickey Rourke kind of way. But if you were to stick your nose in my sheets back there, those Thursday-night leftovers you’d smell would be another woman. So don’t take it personally, okay?”
“You’re a dyke?” He’d had no idea.
“Please,” she said. “The term now is lesbian-American.”
&
nbsp; He grumbled down into the seat while she drove. If he were to get insistent about it, even though he’d never thought of himself as a rapist, she really wouldn’t have a choice. It wasn’t as if he didn’t have bullets, brute force, and Cro-Mag on his side. But this might be effort better spent elsewhere. Melissa was turning out to be plenty useful as it was. As for the rest, hers was hardly the only pussy in L.A.
She left the boulevard to drive deep into a residential area full of cottage-sized houses, checking street names and block numbers against a scrap of paper in her hand—the return address from the envelope for a wedding invitation Samantha had sent.
“This roommate of hers,” Jordy said. “What’s her name?”
“I’ve only heard it once or twice, and it’s been awhile,” she said. “Angelina, Angelica, Angelique…some princess name like that.”
“You realize you’ll have to be the one to talk us through that door, don’t you? I got my doubts she’s just gonna open up for two strangers.”
“Hmmm.” Melissa’s eyes narrowed. “I really was hoping to keep my hands as clean as possible in this.”
“Too late now. And just between us, I’ll bet your hands are already a lot dirtier than you’ll ever let on.”
“Jordan Rabin, you are such a cynic,” she said, and parked along the curb. In the rear window, Cro-Mag’s headlights eased closer, stopped, winked out.
It looked like a quiet neighborhood, small houses—stucco mostly—nestled close together behind low chain link fences and palm trees. Jordy strolled back to the Firebird and leaned down into Cro-Mag’s window.
“All that’s supposed to be in there is one girl. I wouldn’t expect trouble, even if she’s got a boyfriend with her. Either way, she’s more likely to open up if there’s just Melissa and me. So how about you keep watch out here for now?”