Mad Dogs

by Brian Hodge

  Dawn pictured it in her mind’s eye, the boy who had become the man who had become the actor who had become the fugitive who had become her friend…the branching tree of his life rooted in a single afternoon.

  And if that day had led him here, to this very spot—where Duncan curled into the trunk and they closed the lid on him, and Petra touched Jamey’s cheek, then walked away without her car—Dawn hoped that a little of the magic had followed him down through the years.

  41

  JAMEY pulled into the driveway of Sam’s house ten minutes ahead of deadline. With Duncan out of sight, he was truly alone now. Two blocks earlier he had rested his arm out the window—a casual move to casual observers, but to Dawn, following in Petra’s car, it meant they were nearly there. She’d swung over to the curb to wait, since none of them knew if they would be watched.

  He found the front doors closed but unlocked. Inside, engulfed by the hush of the silent house, he eased the borrowed pistol from beneath his shirt.

  “Sam?” he called out, a dry rasp that hung in the air, unanswered. “Jordy?”

  She loved hardwood floors and rugs, hated carpet, and his footsteps sounded loud as bombs. Quickly but cautiously, he searched the house, peeking into rooms and tensing for the press of a gun to his head from inside each doorway. He’d had enough of that lately to give him a kind of radar.

  Empty, Jamey decided. He had the place to himself. Realizing how parched he felt, flushed out overnight by sweat and coffee, he found a carton of grapefruit juice and guzzled a third of it standing before the opened refrigerator.

  By now, Sherry should have read through the email sent from the hardware store. Every dirty secret, great and small. Probably be looking at him in a whole new way, next time they met face-to-face.

  He carried the juice back out to await the call. And only then spotted the note on the dining room table, block letters inked onto a sheet of paper:

  BETTER CHECK THAT CLOSET IN THE ROOM AT THE END OF THE HALL

  Angelique’s room, not Sam’s. Nine hours ago, on the phone, Jordy hadn’t mentioned Angelique getting caught up in this too. He felt himself start to rattle inside. He was going to find her dead, a brutal reminder of the cost of failing to play by their rules. Samantha-by-proxy, this could be her if you’re not careful—

  And might be even if he was.

  When he twisted the closet knob and let the morning light in, relief flooded him when he saw movement, cloth and bare skin scuttling back to cringe against the wall. Then the plunge, when he saw the binding around her wrists, the gag stretched along her cheeks, the feral red-raw eyes.

  He stepped back and stooped, holding up empty hands, It’s me, it’s Jamey, it’s only me, until she relaxed and her shoulders began to shake. Her ankles had been pinioned together too, then lashed to the bond between her wrists, pulling her forward into an awkward hunch. She must’ve been left like this for hours, cramped into place so long she could scarcely move.

  First he undid the gag, wet and crusted beneath her nose. It seemed the worst indignity, gouging back the corners of her chafed mouth and silencing her to a throaty garble. Next came the stouter bonds, and as Angelique painfully unfolded he could see how incompletely she was dressed—canary yellow tank top and thick grey socks, and nothing at all in between. His gaze was drawn then to the dry flaking residue on her inner thighs, and he understood.

  “Oh, Anj,” he whispered. She met his eyes long enough to pound a stake through his heart, then looked away even while he helped pull her from this makeshift cell.

  Stiffened and sore, she crawled a few feet and then lay upon the cool burnished floor. He tugged a homey-looking afghan from the foot of her bed—something that might have been crocheted by a grandmother—and unfolded it, and she wrapped herself within it. He spied a half-glassful of tea on her nightstand, hours tepid, but when he gave it to her she held it in shaking hands and gulped it down.

  He wanted to hold her, but would she even allow it? For two years he had been her friend, but maybe this mattered a distant second now, because above all he was male, and stank of sweat and fear and anger. His hands were fit only for hurting.

  But he touched her arm anyway, and when she did not shrug it off he scooted closer, until his arm lay light across her shoulders as she fought a bitter struggle against all the tears left unshed…

  Until the phone rang.

  “I have to get that,” he told her. “They took Sam. I have to answer that.”

  She nodded at the floor and Jamey reeled down the hallway. He snatched up the phone on the third ring: “I’m here.”

  “Made a good run of it, then,” Jordy Rabin said.

  The living room swirled in blurs of fabrics and frames. Jamey grabbed for the juice carton he’d set aside minutes ago, something to hang onto.

  “You check that closet yet?”

  It was a game, Jamey knew. They both would have seen enough movies to know how this was supposed to play: Jamey making impotent threats, Jordy laughing at them. It was bait; he would not rise to it.

  “Yeah, I looked,” he said, as flatly as he could. “What was I supposed to find—clothes? I don’t get it.”

  “You looked in that closet and all there was was clothes.”

  “And shoes. She’s got a lot of shoes.”

  “You did go to the right one, didn’t you?” Jordy sounding unnerved by this. “The closet in the room at the end of the hall? That blonde’s room?”

  “Yeah, I can follow directions. But what am I supposed to be looking for here? Seems like a waste of time.”

  Jordy grumbled, as though fighting an urge to hurl the phone. “Fuck it. Never mind. You just better not have made this trip alone. You got my cousin with you?”

  “I brought him.”

  “Prove it. Let me talk to him.”

  “He’s under wraps right now. You don’t think he was cooperative about this, do you? You’ll get your proof when I deliver him. You really think I’d try coming to you empty-handed and appealing to your better nature?”

  “It does sound kinda hopeless, when you put it that way.”

  “Now would you let me talk to Samantha?” Jamey said. “Just a few words. I figure she’s in a lot better shape for talking than Duncan is right now.”

  He could hear muffled movement, the murmur of voices, and then Sam said his name. Do this right, and he could hear her say his name for the next fifty years.

  “Sam, this is important,” he said. “Just yes or no: Do they know about Dawn?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is my sister involved in this?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you say anything about what happened to Kristophe?”

  “No.”

  “You’re okay, aren’t you? He didn’t touch you…did he?”

  “I’m fine, Jamey,” she said, “we’ll be fine,” then the fumbling sound as the phone was pulled from her hand.

  “You got the idea. Nobody’s cut out her tongue,” Jordy told him. “Now, you got one more stop to make in between, so listen up…”

  After Jordy told him where to go next, the phone went dead in his ear. Jamey stared at it a moment before replacing it in its cradle, turned to see Angelique watching from the hallway, with the afghan pulled around her.

  “What is all this?” she asked. “What’s it about…I don’t even know…”

  “Two families,” he said, and wished he had a better answer. “And old grudges.”

  Slowly, she nodded. As if to say, Yeah. That’ll do it.

  “I have to go now,” he said. “Can I call someone for you?”

  She stared at him with hollow-darkened eyes. “He raped me. Whoever he was, he raped me. He didn’t make me forget how to use the phone.” One hand came free of the afghan as she pointed to the table where he’d set the gun aside. “Are you going to use that?”

  “This morning?” he said. “I sort of hope so.”

  “So do I,” she said.

  ****

  D
awn had been tapping a fingernail on the steering wheel and poking at radio presets for twenty minutes before Jamey backtracked up the street. He wheeled over to join her at the curb. And for now, Duncan was out of the trunk.

  She stepped from Petra’s car, leaving the shade of the palm tree she’d parked beneath, and joined them in the back seat.

  “Jamey?” she said. Because now he looked ten times worse than when they’d left the strip mall. “What went on in there?”

  When he told her, she felt awful for Angelique, with that empathy you can have for people you’ve never met. Equally bad was knowing how this must have been affecting Duncan inside, something else he would be adding to the scales weighing his guilt. That courtly part of him that belonged in the past.

  Up in the front seat they were both dreamers, each in his way, and sulking now in that manner of men who’ve just had their noses rubbed in the shitty fact that they can’t always protect everyone.

  “So what’s next?” she asked.

  “Another jump-through-the-hoop kind of stop,” Jamey said. “I’m supposed to drive down to Griffith Park and meet one of them in the observatory parking lot. Then follow to wherever we’re supposed to do this. I guess it’s just one more way of trying to make sure I’m not bringing the police in.”

  “The observatory,” said Duncan. “That’s where they filmed the end of Rebel Without A Cause, isn’t it?”

  Jamey nodded. “That’s the place.”

  From the glove compartment, he grabbed a pen and a scrap of paper and sketched a map of the south side of Griffith Park. Pointing out where they would go in, the route they would follow around to the observatory, and where they could stop to put Duncan back inside the trunk.

  “Sam confirmed it: Melissa’s part of this,” he said. “I’m betting she’s the one they send to the observatory. Let’s hope they do. That’ll mean Jordy’s staying behind with Sam. They don’t realize it, but that’s the best possible thing for us. Because right there’s where I’m going to turn Melissa from their side to ours.”

  Jamey made another phone call—his last and most devious ace in the hole—then pointed out where they were as they rolled. Like his very own tour guide, Duncan thought. They left Burbank on one freeway, then exited onto a straightaway that slashed down the eastern edge of Griffith Park. They doubled back west onto Los Feliz and looped north at Vermont—first through a few blocks of upscale neighborhoods, then into the wilderness of the park.

  The roads here were sparse and winding. They hadn’t gone deeply in before Jamey pulled off at the Greek Theater, where he added a few more details to the map he’d made for Dawn. Tapping it when done, tracing her route with his finger—keep following Vermont Canyon, then left at the T-intersection up here, then keep going down and around, and you can’t miss it.

  They’d decided to send her on ahead, let her beat them to the observatory lot by a few minutes instead of trailing in after them. Alone, in Petra’s car, with its California plates, there shouldn’t be anything about Dawn that seemed out of place. They gave her four minutes, then it was time for him to return to the trunk.

  “How does it ride back here?” Jamey asked.

  For a moment Duncan thought about Kristophe. How this same trunk had transported a dead man. “It’s bumpy and it’s hot and I can’t imagine spending five hundred miles this way.”

  “Good thing you look like you have already.”

  And he didn’t want to go back inside. Didn’t want to go, and could tell that Jamey didn’t want to lock him there. They were down to minutes now, and knew it.

  “I don’t know where this trunk’s going to be opened up again…or who’s going to open it…or what’ll happen next,” Jamey told him, then looked as though he might have thought by the time he got to this point he would know what else to say. But he didn’t. So he held his hand out instead, and Duncan met him halfway.

  “Do we have any idea what we’re doing?” Jamey asked.

  The trunk. He did not want to close that trunk.

  Duncan grinned. “There’s this song by a guy named Steve Earle. You ever hear of him, do you know who I’m talking about?”

  Jamey said he did.

  “This song called ‘Tom Ames’ Prayer.’ It’s about an outlaw in the Old West. First time in his life he ever prays is when he’s down to four bullets and trapped in an alley by a bunch of deputies. Says, ‘I ain’t asking for a miracle, Lord, just a little bit of luck’ll do.’” Duncan eased into the trunk, curling inside like a scarred fetus. “Today I would say I really know how Tom must’ve felt.”

  “How does it end?”

  “You don’t get to find out. He decides he’s just talking to himself, and the last thing he does is cock his pistols and spit in the dirt, and walk out into the street.”

  One side of Jamey’s mouth curled down. “I don’t like the sound of where that’s probably headed.”

  “It’s open to interpretation. Don’t be such a pessimist.” He nodded. “Shut the lid, Jamey. Just shut the lid.”

  Jamey bit his lip. And when the lid swung down, fast as a headsman’s axe against the sky, it hit hard and loud, and brought a darkness thick as midnight.

  ****

  He followed the road’s loops and curves until the pale, round dome of the observatory broke through the trees. Here, in 1955, James Dean emoted over the corpse of Sal Mineo. Here, a couple of pop culture generations later, Jim Morrison balanced atop the observatory enclosure’s wall for his most famous photo shoot. Dead now, all three, two of them never reaching thirty, the other dead years before forty. The weight of history seemed ominous here.

  With stone eyes, more dead men watched him arrive, the path to the dome guarded by statues honoring the likes of Newton and Copernicus and Galileo. He wheeled right, into the parking lot, and passed Dawn while rolling slowly down the line. He dared not even meet her eyes through the glass.

  He spotted Melissa at the far end of the lot, out of her car already and leaning against the trunk of her Nissan Altima. Dark hair whipping about in a hot September wind, and her eyes concealed behind big-lensed shades. Another tactic to keep him off-balance; he wasn’t supposed to know of her involvement until this moment. Jamey entertained a brief impulse—stomp the gas and aim, crush her legs against her bumper. Watch her flop agonized onto his hood and scream, begging for her life.

  Instead he rolled toward the nearest empty spot, and thought he saw, from the corner of his eye, her passenger door start to open.

  They met in the middle, halfway between cars. Months, it had been, since he’d seen her face-to-face. Back in another life when he still had a sister, however strained the bonds, instead of this monster with whom he happened to share a few genes.

  “Surprised?” she said. “I thought you’d look more surprised.”

  “I get over things more quickly than I used to.”

  Melissa craned her neck, peering toward his car. “I was under the impression you’d be bringing someone else.”

  He nodded toward hers. “You’re not alone, I see.”

  “You expect me to risk your now-famous bad-boy wrath?” She looked him up and down and laughed as if to say all she was looking at was the product of a crafty ad campaign. “I mean, I know you only kill authority figures, but I also know how you temperamental creative types are always wanting to expand your repertoires.”

  Jamey glanced over at the guy who had joined her—thick-chested, with a prognathous jaw and a dented skull, wearing a bright green Hawaiian shirt festooned with monkeys and covered with what appeared to be cat hair. If this was Jordy’s accomplice in his break for freedom, then the American Fugitives casting department had, in their rush to make last night’s airtime, hit a new low in matching likenesses.

  “New boyfriend?” he tried.

  She indulged him with an unamused laugh. “He and Jordy are a package deal. You can call him Cro-Mag, or you can call him Gilbert. From what I’ve seen, he’ll answer to either one.”

  Jame
y nodded to him, deploring him on sight, not only because of Sam, but because his presence here had put everything on hold. No chance now to spend two vital minutes alone with Melissa, detailing the ways he had just wrecked her life. “An animal lover, are you?”

  “Yeah,” Cro-Mag said, and seemed to lose some of the menace, even though there was no mistaking the outline of a gun behind his monkey shirt. “How could you tell?” Jamey pointed at the soft fuzz clinging to him from chest to lap, and he brushed at it with swipes of his hand. “Shit. Every time I think I get this cleaned off…”

  “Has a habit of finding its way right back onto you, doesn’t it?”

  “Do you have pets?” he asked. Weirdly, sincerely, interested in the answer.

  “Not right now. But I’d like to,” Jamey said. Thinking maybe this was the way at the guy, some tiny bond he could weave.

  It had been days since he’d had anyone new to play the old workshop game with: What’s my motivation? An animal lover, stipulated already, and not hard to guess why. He’s a scary-looking guy, and doesn’t mind flaunting it when it suits him—he wants that dent to be visible, because if he doesn’t, he would let the stubble on his scalp grow out into hair. Maybe he uses it as a KEEP OUT sign. Easier, safer, to drive other people away than have them laugh at him, getting the wrong ideas about him after what was surely a brain-altering accident. Thinking of him as slow, stupid—exactly the way Melissa had just talked about him—when that isn’t the case at all. No. Because those aren’t stupid eyes. He just sees the world differently, no such divisions as big things and little things—they’re all big to him.

  Except maybe, in his world, animals are the biggest thing of all. Because they don’t judge, don’t laugh, don’t fear. They’re happy to see him just the way he is.

  “Neither one of us has any pets now,” said Jamey, improvising, “but after we get married, Samantha and I want to have a big house, lots of room for animals. It was Sam’s idea.” He read approval on Cro-Mag’s face, then took one more chance: “Strays especially…the ones nobody else wants.”