by Brian Hodge
“That’s a great idea.” Cro-Mag’s face lit up. “I work for a vet. Some days I just want to empty the place out and take ’em all home.”
Melissa cut them both a sharp look and raised her hand in the air, snapping her fingers as if summoning a waiter. “Could we stay on-topic here? Anyone?”
And she missed it, that sudden seething glare from Cro-Mag.
You don’t like her much more than I do right now, Jamey thought, supposing he was putting up with her for Jordy’s sake. Jordy, who must have been shrewd enough to recognize how he could steer him. But maybe you’re not such a bad guy at heart, are you…just as long as they all leave you alone.
“Now. Jamey,” Melissa said. “Unless my eyes deceive me, you look like your all-nighter was solo.”
“What, Mickey’s not enough these days—now you’re Jordy’s errand girl, too?” Jamey said. “He sent you here to check the cargo for him?”
Didn’t like that one bit, did she?
“Pretend you’re standing in a classroom,” she said, “and see if you can use the phrase ‘consequences of my failure’ in a sentence. Can you do that? Because they’re awfully steep.” Pointing at his right cheekbone, the purplish bruise Petra had applied as he drove. “A lot worse than that little boo-boo you’ve got there.”
He dangled the car keys in front of her eyes. “How do you think I got the boo-boo?”
He motioned both of them to follow him to the car, then popped the trunk—one of those moments when it was more fun to watch the audience than the show. Melissa stared down and swallowed a lump in her throat, maybe coming to grips with the fact that twenty-five years of assumptions about her brother had just blown up in her face: She’d had no idea what he was capable of.
“It’s a lot uglier up close, isn’t it?” he said. “Not like sending someone to take care of things five hundred miles away from you.” Jamey slammed the lid down again and threw her own impatience back at her, snapping his fingers in front of her nose. “Don’t flake on me now. C’mon—what’s next?”
Her gaze tracked in slo-mo from the trunk up to him. “Just follow. It’s not far from here. And stick close. You don’t want to get lost.”
From no more than that, he knew where they must be headed now. The Oaks. They would be heading up into The Oaks.
“Hey,” he called, when she was halfway back to her Nissan. “Wouldn’t Dad be so proud, if he could only see us now?”
42
AS she steered along the loops and curves that would take them out the southwest corner of Griffith Park, Melissa noticed her hands on the wheel. Her knuckles gone bloodless from clenching so tight.
“He doesn’t seem like a bad guy to me,” said Cro-Mag. Even if he were outside, on foot, in a losing race with her rear bumper, this freak would still be too close.
“You didn’t grow up with him,” she said. “Your vote doesn’t count.”
She’d gone back to slap Jamey for his parting remark—Wouldn’t Dad be so proud...? He had no right to bring up the memory of the man, much less make snotty remarks about what would make him proud. Jamey had squandered those rights years ago, frittering them away along with the entire decade of his twenties trying to prove, what—that he had talent? That he could, cliché of clichés, make it?
Did you ever think maybe you had a hand in killing him? she’d wanted to shout at Jamey. Did you ever think part of what clogged his heart was disappointment in you? Because if you think his wish for either of us had anything to do with fulfillment, with going off to do what you wanted, you’re a bigger fool than he thought you were.
And how dare Jamey come back here this morning and take the past twelve days of his life and use them to prove Dad wrong.
As they left the park down the shaded length of Fern Dell, Melissa checked the rear-view to make sure he was still with her as she cut a tight right turn onto Black Oak Drive and began the twisty climb into the hills. Unless you knew exactly where you were headed, trying to navigate these oak-named streets was like trying to follow a single strand of linguini in a plateful.
Mickey Coffman and his third wife had moved up here a few years ago, during the time that the Los Feliz Oaks had become some of the hottest residential acreage in town. Youthful garden variety millionaires and movie folk in particular had bought their way in, one magnificent vintage house at a time, eager to live in an echo of old-style Hollywood, but without all the snobby baggage so endemic to such posh West Side enclaves as Beverly Hills and Bel Air.
Plus Mickey never seemed to tire of informing visitors that Cary Grant and Randolph Scott had played house here, boning each other in the big Spanish-style down the street, in the days when Hollywood’s closet doors were still locked tight.
For his hetero role in the Hollywood of today, Mickey played king-of-the-hill inside 8,000 square feet of ostentatious sprawl that crowned West Live Oak Drive. It was an awful lot of house for a man who now lived alone, nearly invisible from the street behind fences and thickets of cypress and palms. During workdays, and whenever else Mickey was away, it was as sequestered a spot as you were likely to find within miles.
And Melissa—like all Mickey’s assistants before her—had been entrusted with the keys to his kingdom.
She stopped before the iron gate, punching the access code into a keypad set into one of the brick pillars flanking the entrance drive. Motors ground into gear and the gate swung inward, swinging shut again after both she and Jamey were through.
They followed the drive along a flat landscaped pad to a roofed carport with room enough for six abreast and only half of the spaces taken: Mickey’s Hummer, for when he was feeling macho, and his Mercedes, for when he was feeling rich. For daily wear—and, she assumed, acute periods of erectile dysfunction—it was the flashy red Lamborghini, replaced at the moment by the Firebird muscle car that had brought two homicidal louts to her door.
Melissa wheeled into one slot; Jamey took another.
He left his car, seemingly confident that this would be a simple trading of lives, even as Cro-Mag patted him down to make sure he wasn’t armed. She couldn’t have asked for a more perfect demonstration of why he and the other Jameys of the world would be forever at the mercy of their agents and managers and the execs that could make and break their careers:
They always trusted that what they were being told was the truth.
****
Melissa and Cro-Mag had him take the lead, empty-handed and walking ahead of them. While there had been a shift in Cro-Mag’s attitude at the observatory, Jamey knew he could never mistake it for alliance. The guy felt more kindly to him, maybe, but one word from Jordy—or hearing one word spoken against Jordy—might nullify it in a heartbeat.
“Mickey’s place?” he asked over his shoulder.
“How’d you guess?” Melissa said.
“Better take a good long look,” he said. “You’ll want it to last you in the future.”
There. Let her chew on that and wonder.
It was a Southern California Taj Mahal with a red tile roof, hugging the hilltop as if the two had always existed together. It was the peak that the millions below, at lesser altitudes, aspired to. Jamey followed the path around its side, a broadly curving walk of dun-colored flagstones filled in between with darker gravel. Down a few brick steps, past terraced gardens, and they were on the patio, with a kidney-shaped pool and million-dollar views—in one direction, vast white letters spelling out HOLLYWOOD across the mountainside; in another, the midcity forest of Griffith Park.
Jordy Rabin sat kicked back in a deck chair, drinking in the vistas as if he were their rightful owner. A few yards away, Samantha sat in another, one leg drawn up beneath her and looking like a casual trophy…until you noticed that her wrist was cuffed to her ankle. Jamey met her eyes and tried to smile.
“And here he is,” Jordy said. “The Pony Express.”
He surveyed the world around him, as if he still could not believe where he’d landed just days out of prison. And he
didn’t want to give it up—Jamey could see this, even if no one else did—Jordy seeming reluctant to get into the reason they were all here, almost lethargic in the way he hoisted himself out of the chair and strolled across blue ceramic tiles to an orange tree. He plucked a juicy one and began to peel it with his fingernails, flinging the scraps of rind over the wrought iron railing where they fell from sight.
Sucking down the slices one crescent at a time, he strolled toward them, shirt open to the waist with a big black pistol tucked snout-first into his jeans. A six-footer, tall enough, but Jamey supposed he’d been expecting a giant, someone who left a trail of misery with every crushing footstep. Jordy veered around the pool and stepped close enough for Jamey to see the trickles of juice in the stubble of his chin.
“I see you,” Jordy told him. Hand on the butt of his gun and orange-blossom sweetness on his breath. “But I don’t see Duncan.”
Jamey held the car keys dangling. “He’s in the trunk.”
Jordy looked to Cro-Mag and got a nod.
So go check now, Jamey willed him. Both of you. Just leave me alone with Melissa for two minutes…
“Let’s go have a look,” he said, then pulled the gun and shoved Jamey by the shoulder to spin him around and start him moving back the direction he’d come.
****
Barely a few steps along and the guy started complaining. This actor whose claim to fame was playing his cousin a little too well: What do you need me for? Take the keys, what more do you want? I can’t spend some time back there with Samantha? Whiny shit like that.
“Because you’re gonna be the one to open up the trunk,” Jordy told him. “How do I know Duncan’s not in there playing possum, just waiting to unload into whoever opens up again?”
“You’ve got a suspicious mind, Jordy.”
“I’ve earned the right to it.”
“And I’ve earned the right to see the look on your face when you see him.” Glancing back over his shoulder with a black-hearted grin as he said it, and the way he’d said it, too—it sounded like the swagger you’d hear from a guy in the yard, the day after he’d shanked another guy and gotten away with it.
With attitude like this coming off him, you had to wonder if Melissa knew her brother half as well as she thought she did. And if that conniving bastard in Flagstaff might not have warmed up to him as a son-in-law after all.
Jordy hung back, held the gun on the trunk while Sheppard popped the lock and raised the lid. Waiting for a jack-in-the-box that never sprang. From this angle, Jordy couldn’t see much more than Duncan’s shoulder, hip, leg. He slid a few cautious steps forward for a better view.
“Jesus! You didn’t leave much for me, did you?”
“You’re the one who set the schedule,” Sheppard said. “You’re the one who pushed things to the point where this is what it took to get it done.”
That he’d done it at all proved the guy had one heavy-hanging pair of stones. Duncan hadn’t merely been coerced; he’d been broken down and packed for travel. It hadn’t been a fistfight, either. Maybe from Duncan’s side it was, with a bruise and a few scrapes on Sheppard’s face, but the whole of Duncan’s head had met something hard and punishing. Hours-old blood had caked solid over swellings and bruises, a lump bulged inside his lower right jaw, and pus oozed from splits in the skin of his forehead and cheekbone and the orbit of one eye. His hair lay matted to his scalp with oily sweat and his face was glazed with an unhealthy sheen. He blinked at the light, slow as a cat made sleepy by the sun.
“What’d you use to work him over?” Jordy asked.
“A gun. One of his. I just got to it first.”
“And he rode back here the whole way like this? All the way from Sedona?”
“No, we shared the driving fifty-fifty.” Sheppard snorted. “What do you think happened? I stopped every so often to let in some fresh air and give him water.”
“He had a piece of tail he was with. They said so on TV, and so did your piece back there. Where is she?”
Sheppard pointed to the trunk. “She wouldn’t fit.”
Jordy couldn’t help but grin. This guy getting almost likeable. “You’re telling me she looks like he does now?”
“Not quite that bad. She’s little. It didn’t take as much to get her off my back.”
“And that gun you used on ’em—where is it now? Because Cro-Mag didn’t say anything about finding one on you, and I don’t think you’d leave it behind.”
Sheppard tipped his head toward the car. “In the glove compartment.”
“Maybe I better confiscate that. Make sure everything stays friendly here.”
Jordy shifted a few steps back so he could keep an eye and his aim on both of them at the same time—the trunk as well as the passenger window, telling Sheppard to reach in and verrry slowly fetch that pistol, and toss it out behind his back. Jordy then had him turn around and kick it to him across the smooth black asphalt.
“Hey,” Sheppard said. “You got any problem with me taking something from inside here back to my sister?”
“Such as?”
“It’s just a camcorder. In a case. Look inside it if you want. I’m not trying to smuggle anything over there.”
Jordy stared him down, sniffing for anything questionable in his motives. The guy now had two guns on him—surely he couldn’t be thinking of making a dive for another. “What do you care if she gets it back or not?”
“Because of something that got filmed with it the other day. I figure you’ll be driving this car away with Duncan in it, so before you do, I want to make sure Melissa gets a chance to see what her boyfriend really thinks of her. It’s pretty harsh.”
“This is that Kristophe guy she mentioned?”
“Yeah.”
“Whatever happened to him, anyway?”
“Change of heart. About everything. Melissa most of all.”
Jordy couldn’t say the idea had no appeal. “Something needs to take that bitch down a peg or two. Okay, get it. Slow and easy, still. Keep your back to me while you do it, and your arms way out to the side.”
Sheppard played along, stooping low as he reached in for a squared-off bag that had been riding in the front floorboard. It was too soft to kick, so Jordy had him walk backward and nudge it along one step at a time, then open it and step aside. Still no surprises—a camera and cables and more.
And it was tough to get a read on the guy, how he thought the rest of the morning was going to proceed—if he’d convinced himself that this was where it ended, that he would be getting Samantha back and they would all go their separate ways. Couldn’t see him being quite that blind, though. Because he was turning out to be a lot cooler in this situation than Jordy had expected, with a clear head and a keen awareness that his sister meant him nothing but the worst.
The more Jordy thought about it, the more it seemed there was something to be said for leaving Sheppard alive and vindictive instead. Let Melissa deal with him by herself. From what Jordy had seen, the two of them were about equal in balls.
Now that he’d had a chance to look Sheppard in the face, see what he was made of, Jordy felt himself losing sympathy for Melissa’s cause. Selling out her own brother for money, and yeah, it was a lot of money, but still…her own brother? Lining up one guy after another to do the work so she wouldn’t have to bother with the messy parts.
His own sister. Closer than cousins, even. And that day in Phoenix wasn’t so far in the past that betrayal wasn’t still a sore subject.
Jordy returned to the trunk to stare at the beaten form inside. A year, almost, since Phoenix. A year to cling to the hope of today. A year to think once an hour about holding Duncan accountable for everything he’d suffered and endured since then…this traitor, this Judas who had shot him and left him for worse than dead.
A day like today, anticipated for so long, should not end in a hurry.
Jordy twitched one of the guns he held, motioning Sheppard over to the trunk.
“
Haul this piece of shit out of there,” Jordy told him. “Get him on his feet again…and if he can’t move, then you carry him.”
****
Regardless of the outcome today, for Samantha one thing was certain: Her father would know everything had happened because of what he’d done. Know, and regret it, because whether she lived or died, he would’ve lost a daughter either way.
She glared at Melissa, standing now near the railing with her back turned, facing the hills. She’d been there ever since Jordy led Jamey away, avoiding eye contact, as if she might stay this way until she could turn around again and find every detail to her liking. All the right people dead and the rest gone from her life, because she had no more use for any of them.
There’s your daughter, Dad, she thought. She’s the one you should’ve had.
“So how big is your house gonna be?”
The question startled her. She had no idea what he was talking about—this strange and usually quiet one with the shaved head. For the past few minutes he’d been sitting hunched over, staring at ants on the patio between his shoes.
“What house?” she asked.
“Your house after you get married. For you and her brother—” a scowl at Melissa’s back “—and the animals.”
“Where…” Sam stopped herself, not wanting to say the wrong thing. “Did Jamey tell you that?”
Cro-Mag nodded. “Back in that parking lot where we met him.”
Ever since she had set eyes on this man, she’d been trying to puzzle him out. No normal person brought a cat to a kidnapping. Normal people weren’t kidnappers, period, but Cro-Mag seemed aberrant even among aberrations. Frightening though he looked, she felt a peculiar pity for him, or would until he hurt someone. Seeing how he expressed such tenderness toward his cat had sparked her hope for finding humanity in him, where Jordy was governed by reckless hate. He had stowed Taz along the back of the house, out of the way, while this was going on.