by Brian Hodge
“Sure. Taz and me’ll be fine.” Petting his damned cat in the passenger seat.
“If something goes hairy, you’ll either hear it, or I’ll send Melissa out.” Pointing at the glove compartment. “Just get me one of those stun guns.”
He rejoined Melissa and they crossed the street, paced up the short walk to the house, two runty palm trees standing on either side of the walk. Wind chimes hung from the porch roof, stilled without even a whisper of breeze. He knuckled the doorbell and stepped aside to let Melissa’s be the first face the roommate saw.
When the door opened, he was too far out of line to see who it was, could just tell that Melissa’s ready-for-anything composure wobbled for a moment. Jordy watched her in profile as she stood blinking through the screen door at someone she plainly hadn’t expected to see. Her brother? His hand dropped to the Magnum tucked between his shirt and denim jacket.
“What do you want?” asked a spiteful female voice. Already some bad blood here. This wasn’t some roommate that Melissa didn’t even know.
“Sam, we’ve got to talk,” she said. Recovering already—this girl was smooth. “I think there’s been some kind of horrible misunderstanding, I got this weird phone call from Jamey yesterday, but I—”
“Save it, all right?” Sam wasn’t even giving her a chance. “You’re not going to use me anymore. I’ve never said this to anybody before…but go fuck yourself.”
“Five minutes,” Melissa trying the screen door to find it locked, “just give me five minutes.”
“And who’s that hiding out there with you?”
“He’s not hiding—his name’s Dominick, we’ve been seeing each other lately. Kristophe and I split earlier this week, and I think he’s gone off on some kind of break with reality.” Melissa pleading, waving her hands—even Jordy almost believed her. “That’s what I need to talk to you about, it’s like Kristophe’s trying to ruin the lives of everybody connected with me that he possibly can. If you won’t let me come in, that’s fine—come out here on the porch, then, to at least hear my side of things. But please, let’s not do this through a door.”
She’d made her appeal, seemed to know exactly when to back off and let the weight of silence do the work. When Jordy heard the click of the latch, he knew this situation had changed for the better. No return trips across the desert tonight. All the bait they would need was right here.
Melissa went on the offensive, yanking the door open and out of Sam’s grasp, then stiff-arming her way straight through. He heard a short cry of surprise and footsteps backpedaling on a hardwood floor. Jordy swung around and followed right behind Melissa, let the screen door bang shut after him. He kicked the main door closed with his heel—and as quickly as that, they were inside.
He had the Magnum out, held it down along his leg until he’d had a chance to slide over to the front window and twist the Levolor blinds closed. When he turned to aim in Sam’s direction, he had to pause and admire this thin, long-limbed woman for a moment, had never seen such a finely-wrought blend of fear and rage. There was no doubt that she recognized him.
“I’m not even going to ask,” she said to Melissa. “Because I know it’ll only be one more lie.”
“Sit down and shut up,” he told Sam, and she did, looking as though she’d been eaten alive here in the middle of her cozy little house, with its candles and its soft fat cushions. He glanced sideways at Melissa. “And who’s Kristophe?”
“Do I really have to spell it out for you?”
“I thought you were a dyke.”
“I’m in flux, okay?”
He decided to leave it alone, not sure what she was, other than the biggest opportunist he’d ever met. He took stock of the place, looking toward the darkened kitchen, then a hallway branching off to the left. Then at Sam.
“You’ve got a roommate. Where is she—down that hall?”
A reluctant nod.
“Anybody else back there with her?”
“No,” Sam mouthed, with scarcely a sound at all. “Please don’t hurt her.”
He stalked the hallway, footsteps loud as he passed closet doors and a bathroom whose air felt heavy with steam and the sweet floral smell of shampoo. Two bedrooms, one dark and empty, the other with light glowing around the edges of a closed door. He wrenched it open and found her sprawled belly-down on her bed, wearing a pair of sweatpants and a tank top. She glanced up from a sheaf of papers spread across her pillow, first in curiosity, then in fear, brushing one long spiral of blond hair from her eye as if that would clear up the confusion. By then he’d already crossed the room, and before she could make a sound he hit her in the shoulder with the twin prongs of the stun gun. He held fast while she jittered, until it was obvious she wouldn’t be going anywhere for a while.
He returned to the main room long enough to hand the stun gun to Melissa.
“Just in case the rest of her gets as bold as her eyes look,” he said, with a tip of his finger toward Sam. “Right now I got some personal business to take care of.”
Melissa glanced down the hallway, at the half-closed door. “You’re not.”
“Any other volunteers?” Knowing he wouldn’t hear a peep. “I thought so.”
In her chair, Sam curled her lower lip between her teeth and bit hard. He circled around the chair and clamped his hand atop her head from behind, felt her stiffen beneath his palm as he leaned over the chairback.
“What I want out of you, a little later on, is your voice,” he said. “’Til then, here’s something for you to think on. ’Cause I know you got to be wondering how, oh how, did I ever find my way here.” From a jacket pocket, he pulled out a piece of quartered paper, dropped it into Sam’s lap and waited as she unfolded the street map detailing the blocks around Melissa’s condo. “A man in Flagstaff printed that up for me last night. Of his own free will, right there in his den. After we’d had a drink together, and he’s got some fine scotch whiskey in those cut-glass bottles of his.” Feeling Sam begin to tremble beneath his hand. “Now, I’m sure he’d’ve tried to kill me if he’d had any idea I’d end up here tonight. But I got the impression that so long as I kept everything strictly within the Sheppard family, he wouldn’t have much of a problem with that at all. Maybe even encouraged it. I don’t think he approves of your choice in men.”
Jordy took his hand from atop her trembling head and saw Melissa staring at him with a kind of awe.
“You,” she said, “play rough.”
“I’m just warming up for tomorrow,” he told her, then headed back down the hallway. Relieved, really, to be clearing out of the front room, because regardless of what either of them might think, on most days he took no enjoyment in hearing a woman cry.
****
When the phone rang that night, the stark sound unnerved Dawn until she realized it was probably Sam. Calling to tell Jamey that she was safely home in L.A., that she missed him.
Dawn answered, and if she’d hoped Sam might sound a little friendlier, well, it had been a long day for everyone. Especially if you’d spent seven or eight hours of it behind the wheel.
“Put Jamey on,” was all she said. “I really need to talk to Jamey.”
Dawn turned the phone over to him, then gave him some space, drifting over to the deck door so she could stand watching Duncan from behind. He’d gone plodding out here earlier to stare at the stars in solitude, he and Jamey both coming down with this male loss of speech from the weight of the day. For the first time, she noticed the pistol in the other chair, beside Duncan’s emptied glass.
“Look,” he said, “Orion. The Hunter.” Until now, she thought she’d been quiet enough that Duncan hadn’t realized she was there. “He’s back.” Pointing into the clear night sky at one of the few constellations she could recognize. “I always know I’m another year older the first night I see him up there. Orion always comes back.”
Two places at once, listening to Duncan with one ear, eavesdropping on Jamey with the other. She winced—judging by the tone of Jame
y’s voice, it didn’t sound as if the conversation was going well.
“My dad first pointed him out to me. So I would’ve been pretty young at the time,” Duncan said. Opening up again, finally, after hours of not much Duncan at all, just a brooding guy who looked like him, sitting in self-judgment. “He’d tell me that Orion had come back to watch over me, and make sure I made it through the winter that was just around the corner. Every year he’d tell me that, when I was little. Like there was this part of him that refused to believe we weren’t in Scotland hundreds of years ago, when you really had to worry about winter. Like this part of him refused to see Arizona, and the calendar on the kitchen wall.”
Neither do you, she told him in her heart, and understood now from where he must have gotten it. But you see me, and that’s what’s meant the most.
Behind her, Jamey’s voice climbed toward a crescendo of anguish, saying things she could never imagine he would say to Sam.
Dawn faced the night, didn’t want to turn around to see Jamey and what the other end of that call was doing to him. Especially when it ended in a crash of telephone and his footsteps across the room. Too late, though—she saw his dim reflection in the glass of the sliding door and knew before he said a word that, while the stars hadn’t fallen from the sky, they might as well have.
39
THIS adventure had begun with one all-night drive, so Duncan found it fitting that it should end with another. From the high country of central Arizona to the parched seaside desert of L.A., and the arid Mojave wastes that lay between.
He steered them through the southwestern night and the landscape that lay past the feeble reach of headlights. He couldn’t see it but he could sense it, vast and ancient like a beach left stranded by a vanished sea, its red ochre towers hammered by lightning, its striped layers chiseled by time into cliffs and chasms.
Next to that, a family squabble didn’t seem to matter much. It buoyed the heart, in a way.
“Hey,” Duncan called to Jamey. Knowing he was busy in the back seat, but as long as there were miles there was time. “Satisfy my curiosity about one thing. How would you have handled it if I’d told you you were on your own? That I wasn’t going to play Jordy’s game, so piss off and good luck to you?”
Jamey’s fingers paused on the keys of Dawn’s PowerBook, his face underlit by the screen’s glow. “What would there have been to handle? No is no.”
“We both know better. You never gave back that pistol I loaned you the other night at the motel,” he said. “That would’ve been one way of handling it.”
“Move you five hundred miles with a gun to your head the whole way? I don’t see that working out very well.”
“But would you have tried it?”
“Duncan,” said Dawn. That tone of voice she used when she’d heard enough of something. “Stop it, okay? We all know it wouldn’t have come to that.”
“There was a time I would’ve never thought it could come to this between Jordy and me. We’re immune to it in this car? I’m not so sure.”
“There’s a difference. You’re not like Jordy. Neither of you,” Dawn said. “There’s a big difference.”
“No there isn’t,” Jamey said. “Maybe we’ve got higher thresholds about some things, but when push comes to this kind of shove…”
“So does that mean you would’ve put a gun to my head?”
Jamey pretended to dwell on it before taking the easy way out. “I guess we’ll never know, will we?” In the rear-view mirror Duncan watched an ambiguous smile play across his face in the ghostly underlight. “Do you think that’s what Jordy might’ve been expecting out of me?”
“For sure he’d be furious if you brought me to him dead. He wants that honor for himself. Past that, I guess he was leaving it up to you how you get me there, since I wasn’t part of that conversation.”
In the mirror, Jamey gave a thoughtful nod. “We might be able to play with that, you know.”
“He’ll know it too.”
And it was time to give Jordy his due. For a guy who had once given no thought to the tomorrows of his life, who gratified urges as soon as they arose, he had learned to bide his time, to calculate and scheme. Prison must have done that to him, a pressurized mold from which he had stepped a more dangerous man.
Certainly he’d known what he was doing when he dictated terms to Jamey. Dangling Samantha’s well-being in the balance, he’d given them a tight nine hours to make the trip, not only putting them into L.A. during the middle of morning rush hour, but assuring that they would arrive after a long, sleepless night.
Moreover, he had denied them the option of calling the police, sending in a hostage rescue team…because they would have no idea where to tell them to go.
All they knew was that at nine o’clock in the morning the phone in Sam’s house would ring, and if Jamey wasn’t there to answer it and find out what to do next…well, he could always catch one of the follow-up attempts that would come in fifteen-minute intervals. But Jordy had promised that in the background he would be able to hear Samantha screaming a little louder for each quarter-hour they were late.
Dawn spun around in her seat. “How are you coming along back there?”
“I’ve got it written up through last Saturday, almost,” Jamey said. “Sunday and Monday and half of Tuesday’ll be easy to cover—I mostly slept through those.”
At first he and Dawn had felt this diversion of Jamey’s was a waste of time and energy. But the more Duncan thought about it, the less there was to object to. For Jamey, at least, it would be important to chronicle the last twelve days. Because none of them knew where this road was heading. Jamey didn’t have to spell it out, but it was there: If these had been the final twelve days of his life, then he wanted them accurately accounted for. Without other people, who hadn’t been there, filling in the gaps with speculation and lies. Who could object to that? Besides, they’d been forced to plan while on the move, and Jamey claimed that this helped him focus. And maybe he was right.
“How much longer before the next stop?” he asked.
“That’ll be Needles, just across the border,” Duncan said. “We’ll want to gas up there, definitely. About another hour or so.”
Jamey asked to see the atlas and Dawn passed it back. He flipped on the dome light and pored over the two-page spread for Southern California.
“Okay, that’ll work,” he said. “I’m going to make a call in Needles. And if that goes okay, how about we stop in Barstow a hundred and fifty or so miles later?”
Duncan caught Jamey’s eye in the mirror. Not knowing what was going through his mind, but liking the confidence in his voice. Partners, they should’ve been, in some other wilder era.
“We’re meeting somebody in Barstow?”
“Let’s hope so,” he said. “What we were just talking about, me bringing you to Jordy by force? It won’t work unless it looks perfect, right? He’s never going to take my word for it, especially if you look like you came along too easy.”
“Probably not. He’d be sniffing for anything that smells the least bit phony.”
“Well,” said Jamey, “I’ve got a way to sell him on it.”
****
A few hours ago they had decided to finish out the night at Melissa’s place, taking Samantha from her house and leaving her roommate tied up inside her own closet, snuffling wide-eyed behind a gag. Leaving Angelique there for Jamey to cut loose in the morning did more than just get her out of the way—it would be one extra thing to throw him off-balance.
Jordy hated to leave the fine little house, but for holding Samantha overnight, the condo was better. Only one door, too high to jump from a window, and Jamey had no idea Melissa was even involved. It wasn’t impossible that he’d figure it out, mention it to the cops if he decided to make a call, but Jordy calculated that the risk was negligible. He’d made it clear what would happen in the earliest seconds of a raid or standoff, who would be first to go. There could be no hostage negotiation
, he had warned, because there would be no hostage left to bargain for. No fugitive to take down, either, because the whole thing would turn into a suicide mission.
“I’ve never much worried about dying alone,” he’d told Jamey. “I always planned on taking a few with me.”
Nothing to do now but rest up, and you’d think that running thirty-some hours and hundreds of miles without sleep would leave you ready to catch a few winks. But here it was past two in the morning and he was having more trouble with nodding off than he would’ve believed possible.
They had scattered to bunk down for the night, Melissa in the main bedroom and Jordy taking the other one, and because a good idea was always worth reusing, they’d stashed Sam in the kitchen pantry with a wedge driven under the door. Not a sound from her in there when he got up after an hour of tossing and turning, to head for the refrigerator. He grabbed a bottle of German beer —all there was to choose from—and carried it into the living room, where Cro-Mag had bedded down on the couch. Or would have, had he not been sitting in front of the fireplace where Taz lay curled onto the hearth, warmed by the fire they’d lit earlier.
“You couldn’t sleep either?” Jordy asked, and fell into a chair with the beer bottle balanced on his stomach.
“I don’t sleep that much. I used to could.” Cro-Mag tilted his head down and ran two fingers along the gully that had been bashed into his skull. It looked deeper than normal, shadowed in the flickering orange glow of the fire. “But ever since this, I hardly sleep at all.”
“I didn’t know that.” Not sharing the same cell with him, though, no reason he should’ve. “Can’t they get you some pills for that?”
“I don’t trust pills. Or the people who give ’em out, either. They can feed you anything that way and tell you it’s something else.”
Jordy took the bottle down by a quarter. One or two of these, maybe they would help switch him off for the next few hours. It wasn’t a problem of not being tired. More like his mind refused to shut down, racing back and forth in ricochets of past and future. Trying to see around the corner of the coming day.