Mad Dogs

by Brian Hodge

  “And getting back to it,” Duncan said. “Wherever they’ll have this set up to happen, do they think you’re dumb enough to believe you’re just going to walk away with Sam? We’ve got to assume we’re going someplace they don’t mean for any of us to leave. Especially if Melissa’s involved.”

  Miles later, Jamey left the 210 at the Sierra Madre exit, made sure in the rear-view that Dawn had followed. She was driving like a case study in road rage, gunning ahead and refusing to let anybody cut between them. Jamey took Sierra Madre down a few blocks to Colorado Boulevard, straight across the heart of lower Pasadena. For three miles it ran parallel to the 210, where they would be able to link up again when the freeway drooped south after a cloverleaf.

  If he couldn’t buy what he realized he needed in three miles of local morning traffic, this was not the L.A. he’d left twelve days ago.

  At the first red light they hit, he had Petra take over the wheel, bailed from the car while she slid across, and circled around the front end to the passenger side. He hit Duncan up for loose cash and scanned the cars around him.

  One stoplight later he had it—beside them, a Lexus whose lone driver kept one hand on the wheel while the other clamped a cell phone to his ear. Jamey stepped from the car and crossed over to his door. Some oblivious guy around forty, shirt and tie, jacket in the other seat, he didn’t notice until Jamey was in his window—coronary-startled at first, then just plain confused, probably expecting a jackboy’s gun in his face instead of cash.

  “I’ll give you five hundred dollars for your phone,” Jamey said.

  The man frowned, his conversation forgotten.

  “If you don’t sell before the green light, someone else will at the next red one.”

  “I’ll call you back,” the guy told whoever was on the other end. In no hurry to turn loose of his phone just yet, trying to figure what the catch was, so Jamey flipped a hundred through the window to flutter to his lap, then followed it with a second.

  “Three more if you want. If you’re worried I’m going to run up a big bill and stick it to you, cancel your account by noon. I’ll be done with it by then.”

  Sold. The man pushed his phone out the window and held open his empty hand beside it, a simultaneous exchange.

  “I know you,” he said, as if he was only now seeing past the cash. “You’re that actor who’s been in the news.”

  “See, that’s thousands more for you, maybe,” Jamey told him. “Just sell your story to a tabloid.”

  The guy nodded toward their car. “What happened to that guy in your back seat?”

  “Him?” Jamey glanced back over his shoulder, Duncan looking like a triage casualty. “That’s what happened to the last guy who wouldn’t sell me his phone.”

  ****

  Most of the time it was bad enough getting up in the morning when there was only one man in the house. Today there were two, and they weren’t nearly as shy as Kristophe about sharing their noises with the world. They groaned and farted and gulped liquids with a zeal that was downright evangelical.

  Endure them this one final day…then she could fumigate.

  After she’d showered and dressed—strictly casual today, black C-K jeans and a T-shirt—Melissa rang up Mickey’s voicemail at the office.

  “I just tried your cell, but it was busy, and I don’t have time to keep trying,” she said. Better a lie than facing the usual litany of Mickey-questions. God bless the digital age, anyway. You could put in a full day’s work and not have to say a direct word to anyone. “Just so you know, I’m not going to be in the offices today, or at least until late. Yes, I realize it’ll be like losing an appendage, but I know you’ll approve of the reason. Jamey’s coming back this morning and desperately wants to be met by a friendly face. So I can either do useful things like toast your bagels, or I can land this deal for you and make you the envy of your peers.”

  Across the living room, Jordy sat hunched over the coffee table and his big black revolver, feeding it bullets, dumping them out of the cylinder, putting them back again. Over and over. Could it be—the most wanted man in the southwest was nervous?

  “I was listening to you on the phone just now,” he said. “Anyone I ever knew who could lie as easy as you, they were behind bars already.”

  “Thanks, Jordy. Is that what passes for a compliment on Death Row?”

  “Never been there. That judge, he decided I was too good-looking to kill.”

  She matched him smirk for smirk. “You don’t lie so bad yourself.”

  In another chair, Cro-Mag sat scooping granola from bowl to mouth with the efficiency of a steam shovel. If only he were able to unhinge his jaw, like a snake, she could see him swallowing live piglets.

  She stepped closer to Jordy and dropped down next to him so they could keep their voices low, from carrying into the kitchen pantry.

  “Whatever you have planned for your cousin,” she said, “you are not doing it where I’m taking you. You understand that, right? Because that would so fuck me over hugely, and I’ve earned better than that, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Yeah. I suppose.” Jordy nodded, noncommittal.

  “I’ve furnished you with everything you need to achieve exactly what you want. But once you get it, it’s carryout service. Take it somewhere else. If it’s uninterrupted privacy you want, we’ve got mountains to the north of town and deserts to the east, so take your pick.”

  “I said okay.”

  “Now. What about my brother and…her?” Pointing toward the kitchen, the door they’d wedged shut last night.

  “What about ’em?”

  “You’ve known all along that Jamey and your cousin are a package deal. And Sam, I don’t have anything against her personally, I really don’t. But it leaves things a lot tidier if she’s part of the package too.”

  He grinned, ran the tip of his tongue along his lower lip. “This package is getting bigger and harder to move all the time.”

  “A big strong guy like you can’t handle a little extra weight? Don’t start disappointing me now, Jordy. And it’s not like you’ll lack for the cars to do it with. Once they get here, you’ll have two.” She swatted one of the stun guns on the coffee table and spun it like a bottle. “Not to mention your magic wand there.”

  “It’s not so much a question of tools. Everybody knows if you want to move more weight, there’s extra freight charges.”

  “I could maybe get my hands on a couple thousand dollars in petty cash from the office. But not until tonight, so you’d have to come back for it.”

  Jordy rubbed at his chin and played some more with his shiny bullets. “Two grand, huh. Not all that impressive for what you’re wanting.”

  Melissa touched fingertips to her temples. “I’m getting a psychic flash. I see a trip to Mexico in your future. Do you know how much farther that would go down there?”

  “If I make it that far. That’s a big if, too.”

  “Now: Here’s the part where we negotiate my guarantee that you don’t ignore every single thing I’ve just said and do exactly what you want…up to and including killing everyone in sight, me along with them.”

  He appeared genuinely startled. “You’ve got one devious mind, you know that?”

  Now this was a compliment. “Here’s what I propose as my guarantee. What you don’t know is that I already had two other guys working on the Jamey problem, and they were willing to do it on credit. Right now I’m clueless what’s happened to them, or even where their allegiances lie anymore, but it’s obvious they didn’t get the job done. Succeed where they’ve failed, and what I was going to pay them eventually, after I get my payday from Jamey’s death, it’s yours.”

  “How much?”

  “Five thousand for each of them.” Like Jordy would know if she cut the figure in half? “Ten total, in a few weeks, give or take. We can work it out.”

  “You’ve probably already guessed I’m not one to extend much long-term faith. What’s my guarantee?”


  She had to laugh. “Umm…your resumé? Really, Jordy. Do you think I want to spend even one day on your shit-list?”

  After countless unloadings and reloadings, he left the bullets in the gun and sat quietly, gazing across the room at the dead gray ashes of last night’s fire.

  “Deal,” he said. “And you know why you won’t have to worry about walking away healthy this morning? And never did?”

  She asked why, sincerely wanting to know. Last night’s fire really seeming to speak to him. But then he pulled his gaze away and shook his head.

  “Let’s just say I got my reasons, and on second thought I’ll hang onto ’em.”

  The funny thing was, she believed him. Melissa checked the clock, closing on a quarter to eight now, and nearly time to roll. She grabbed the stun gun she’d spun and carried it into the kitchen. Kicked the wedge from the pantry door and eased it open a few inches, then waved the zapper in the gap.

  “Whooo’s gonna be a good girl this morning?” she asked, as though talking to a toddler. “Thaaat’s right! You are!”

  But after a night folded up into half again as much floor space as there was in a phone booth, Samantha showed no signs of friskiness. She squeezed her eyes shut at the glare of kitchen light, then stretched out her legs so slowly you could nearly hear them creak. She waited until her eyes adjusted to the light, then peered up from the floor. One night of solitary tears later, she needed to wash her face in the worst way.

  “Why should I make a single thing easy for you this morning?” she said.

  “Because I can make things a lot harder on you than you can on me.” Another visual reminder of the stun gun seemed in order.

  Sam looked at it, its twin prongs. “The other day when I was talking to someone, I told her that I didn’t hate anybody.” Her mouth gave a tic, then she raised her eyes in a gaze of absolute lividity. “Looks like I lied.”

  “Aww,” Melissa said, feigning hurt. “Does that mean you don’t want us to be sisters anymore?”

  “No thanks. I’ll stick to my own species.”

  ****

  While Petra drove, Jamey worked the PowerBook and the phone, first calling Sherry Van Horn on the cell number she’d given him the other day—a perc for A-list clients—instead of going through the agency switchboard.

  “Are you in the office yet?” he asked.

  “Jamey, my ever-deepening gold mine,” she said. “I would’ve thought the first question out of you would be ‘How much am I worth today?’”

  “Okay.” Since she’d put it like that. “Tell.”

  “Prepare to be stunned. A million-four.”

  Strange—his head no longer spun at hearing these numbers. Not that they’d been rendered meaningless, just knocked down the hierarchy of priorities.

  “Today’s the day,” Sherry said. “We’ll have your deal by tea-time.”

  “I’m pushing the schedule ahead a few hours. And brace yourself, because I’m about to get really impertinent. You’ll understand why soon enough—it’s nothing personal with you, and it’s not ego with me. First, where are you?”

  A moment of silence as she digested his tone of voice. Believing him. She had to, to so thoroughly quash her tendency to wrangle. “At the Peninsula Hotel.”

  Breakfast meeting, then. A crucial breakfast meeting, for somebody’s career.

  “Before long, I’m going to be sending you an e-mail,” he said. “It’ll have two documents attached. Nobody else can see them. For now, to be safe, nobody else can even know about them. Print them out, too, just to be safe, and lock them away. If later on today, the next thing you hear about me is the worst kind of bad news, you’ll know what to do with it. Are we together so far?”

  She said they were.

  “One of them is a legal document. An assignment of rights. But since this’ll be sent directly out of a laptop computer, I can’t put my signature on it. If it turns out that you need to put these papers to use, I want you to redo the contract fresh, backdate it a few days, and find the best person you can to forge my name to it. You should have plenty originals of my signature to work from.”

  “Jamey, I can’t help but notice these are not the words of someone who’s still hiding in Arizona like he’s supposed to. Where are you?”

  “Leaving the west side of Pasadena. There’s one last thing I need from you,” he said. “The number for Mickey Coffman’s private cell. At some point he must’ve given it to you, right?”

  “Only more than once.”

  “I may need it. Not to undermine your authority, but we might be going with him. Only I need to be the one to tell him the news…because I have a couple of conditions he shouldn’t have any problem agreeing to.”

  ****

  As soon as she saw him—clearly, not just the back of his head through the rear window of her Dodge—Dawn nearly burst into tears. As if the damage was real and Duncan had suffered each wound. She knew better and still it didn’t matter. This handiwork of paint and latex wasn’t trickery; it was preview, what his cousin wanted to do with him. He wrapped his arms around her from behind, so she wouldn’t have to see the faux damage.

  Moments ago, as she’d stepped from Petra’s car, its clock read 8:23. They’d done it, had gotten here in time. Even if they weren’t yet at Sam’s front door, they were close enough to breathe easier, of Burbank’s stifling air.

  They’d exited the freeway minutes earlier and then pulled into the lot of a strip mall. Without explanation, Jamey had gone sprinting toward one of the storefronts, a hardware store with a CLOSED sign hanging inside the door. Probably didn’t open until nine. As the three of them watched, he repeatedly whacked an open hand against the glass while clutching the PowerBook with the other.

  “What’s he doing?” Dawn asked.

  “He’s sending an e-mail to his agent,” Duncan said. “Why it has to be here, I don’t know. He didn’t say yet. He gets these ideas and just runs with them first. Did you watch him buy that phone earlier?”

  “He took your car keys, too,” Petra said.

  “Five hundred he paid for that phone,” Duncan said. “If he keeps throwing money around this way, we’re going to have to hit another bank before lunchtime.”

  By now Jamey had attracted the attention of someone inside the store. His wallet came out again as he shouted through the door, then he slapped a bill to the glass and held it there. It did the trick, some scarecrow of a boy wearing a garish red vest opening up with a belt-slung ring of keys and letting Jamey inside, then locking the place up again behind him.

  While they waited, Duncan’s gruesome appearance drew glances from pedestrians and the drivers parking nearby. For the squeamish ones, Petra offered apologetic smiles, telling them that the cameraman was late.

  Jamey was out of the store minutes later, jingling a pair of fresh-cut car keys. He gave Dawn one and pocketed the other for himself.

  “Just so everybody can open the trunk, if they need to,” he said, then stowed her PowerBook in the car.

  She pulled away from Duncan’s arms. “I don’t understand.”

  “Where else am I going to ride the last few miles, if we want to make this look good?” Duncan said, as Jamey popped the lid and opened it on the spare tire and dust, jumper cables and old leaves.

  “Now?” she said. “You have to get in there now?”

  “Once we get close to Sam’s neighborhood, we don’t know when or where they’re going to be watching.” He smiled with his cracked face, trying to put her at ease, but not managing very well. “It’ll be fun. Like method acting. It’ll help me get into the part.”

  As far as she was concerned, he was into it already. He looked too real.

  Petra had him sit on the edge of the trunk as she reopened her makeup kit. Dipping a sponge into a jar, she began to daub at his hair with glycerin, spreading it out, then misting it with water from a plastic spray bottle, mussing his hair with her fingers to leave it looking wet and plastered to his scalp as she worked h
er way around his head.

  “This’ll give you that greasy, I’ve-been-roasting-in-the-trunk-for-hours kind of look,” she explained. “I’ll leave you a little bottle of gel, too, so you can clean all this gunk off later.”

  Duncan was truly loving this—she could tell. Like a kid again, the boy she’d never known, engaged in nothing more dangerous than getting ready for his debut in a school play. It felt as if moments were all that mattered to him now, his life parceled into half-hour segments that he was determined to savor. And when he looked up at Jamey with an imperturbable understanding in his eyes, it felt to her as if some bizarre morphing process between them was complete.

  “When did you know?” he asked Jamey. “Leave the place you grew up, come here, do this…when did you know you’d have to?”

  “You ever see a movie called Body Bag Blues?” he said. “With Nick Nolte and Kurt Russell —”

  “And Martin Sheen,” Duncan said. “Yeah. I loved that one.”

  “Remember that scene in the diner where they killed Martin Sheen?”

  “When the ransom drop for Ally Sheedy went wrong. Sure—for my money, that was the most stressed-out gun-at-the-table scene since the Russian Roulette game in The Deer Hunter.”

  “The summer I was twelve,” Jamey said, “we were on vacation, in Utah, and we pulled off at this dinky town after looking at some Indian petroglyphs. We stopped in this diner there for burgers. Turns out it was the place where they’d filmed that scene. The movie had come out only a year or so before, so when I walked in, there was this sense of déjà vu. I guess it was the first time I ever knew I really was in the same world as these people I’d see on the screen.”

  To watch him, you’d think Jamey was never far from that day. That now and again he took it from its box, and turned it within his hands.

  “There was a wolf there, too, at the diner,” he went on. “Hanging around outside. Tame. It let me pet it. Nobody knew where it came from. They told us it had come in out of the desert. And I’d never seen one before, you know? Not alive. So the two of those things together, on top of those thousand-year-old drawings…it was the most magic day I’d ever spent in my life.”