by Brian Hodge
Whatever he was in this moment, Melissa’s face became the mirror in which he saw it reflected, the hateful force that cast such a freezing shadow over her. This, above all, stopped him from taking it further. He was already too familiar with the formula: Succumb for a moment, regret for a lifetime.
“If you’re thinking of sneaking off, think again,” he told her. “We’re going to have to get some things straight. For the story we tell. We need each other for that much longer, at least.”
She nodded, miserably cowed for perhaps the first time in her life, and cradled the crooked finger against her belly.
“But once we do,” he said, every breath an effort, “and if we make it through this, I don’t want to see you, or hear about you, or know you exist. Ever.”
He left her alone, returning to Sam and the only eyes he wanted to look at now. As she held him, he felt the growing numbness at war with the love and the grief. Every time he thought the numbness would win, all he had to do was look at Duncan.
When Dawn finally came, more footsteps on flagstones, he found it easier to deal with this scene by wondering how it must look to her…
She’s squeezed through or climbed over Mickey Coffman’s fence, drawn by the sound of two lives ending each other. Running at first, then slowing every step closer to the casualties and survivors. Her gaze lingering on Duncan, then turning to Jamey, as he doubled forward on the tiles, his hand clapped before his mouth and his wet eyes confirming everything she dreaded most.
He’d never thought someone so small could make so loud and harrowing a sound as she did then.
Jamey gave her time—not long, but what he thought they could spare—then joined her where she knelt at Duncan’s shoulder, stroking his forehead. Jamey put his arm around her, felt her resist at first, then cave in, mouthing words into his shoulder that he couldn’t understand.
“They’ve never known who you are,” he whispered. “Whatever happens next, you don’t have to be part of it.”
Her bloodshot gaze challenged him. “Do you think I care?”
“Not right now, no.” He brushed his lips through the soft blond bristles of her hair. “But you will. Let us keep you out of this. Where we are now, things get rewritten all the time. Let me rewrite some things for Duncan. And you. Okay?”
Against him, slowly, she nodded.
“But there is one thing you can do for him now. Before the police get here. None of it’ll work if you don’t. Only if you can, though.”
“What is it?”
“I’m thinking of these scenes in sword movies. Probably Duncan’s favorites,” Jamey said. “When a guy from a clan falls…and they bring him home to his village. And the ones who love him most, they wash him.” Jamey looked at the clear blue calm of the swimming pool. “I’ll help you get him in. But would you? Can you?”
She was biting her lip before he’d even finished, and he knew she’d watched those movies too, had been replaying them in her mind, only now seeing Duncan stretched out upon the rough-hewn slab.
“The makeup,” she whispered, a cracked sound. “You’re wanting me to clean that makeup off him, aren’t you?”
She got into the pool first, at the shallow end, and waded along the side until she stood with the water sloshing below her breasts. Then he did the hardest part so far, on his knees and bearing Duncan up into his arms, nothing but weight now, weight and heart devoid of spirit, and lowered him legs-first over the side. Jamey strained to make the transfer gentle, easing him in as tenderly as he might a baby into a bassinet, with Dawn’s arms outstretched to receive. Duncan slipped beneath the surface a few inches at a time, and when the water climbed past his beltline the blood began to dissipate and swirl, in threads and pinkish clouds.
When Jamey was sure she had him, buoyed against her body, he ran to their car to retrieve the cleaning gel that Petra had left with them. He squirted some into his hand. Then, as he gave the plastic bottle to Dawn, he looked her in the eye and felt certain this was no more than she could bear alone. So he turned away to leave her to it, as private a moment as any other act of love, and would have rejoined Sam…
If only she’d still been there.
****
It took a couple of minutes to locate what she’d come for, rooting around at the back of the house where, behind a hedgerow, Mickey Coffman’s lawn service stored hoses and fertilizer and other tools of their trade. Samantha had known only that this was where Cro-Mag had disappeared with his cat after they’d first arrived, emerging empty-handed. Sam found her inside the topmost of a stack of red clay planters, half as big around as barrels, a scrap of wire mesh set over the top and weighted with a brick to keep her from escaping.
Taz stared up with green eyes that seemed to take up half her face, then purred when freed and taken into Sam’s arms.
Jamey met her halfway back to the pool deck, looking relieved to have found her again. The sleeves of his shirt and the knees of his jeans were soaking wet, blood smeared across the front, yet his face was newly unmarked. She cradled Taz with one arm and touched the skin of his cheek—unbruised, unbroken, smooth and warm. As Duncan’s would’ve been, she knew that now, if Jordy hadn’t had his way.
When Jamey started to say something, she skimmed her fingers to his lips. Her turn. It was her turn.
“Do you trust me?”
He seemed unsure what to make of the question. But if there was one thing Jamey knew about her, it was when something had become of great importance.
Yes. He trusted her.
“Then don’t second-guess me on what I’m about to do.”
He looked at the striped gray cat in her arms, then in the direction she’d been headed, where Cro-Mag sat cuffed and wriggling on the tiles.
“You’re letting him go?”
“Do you see any way around it?” She leaned closer to keep her voice low. “I overheard what you said to Melissa. And Dawn. You, me, and your sister sticking to some story. It’s for Duncan—okay, fine. But mostly it’s for you and me. You don’t think I see that?” Discreetly, she tipped her head toward Cro-Mag. “Him, though—don’t you think he’s the weak link? As many times as we’re going to have to tell it, and keep it straight, do you think he’s up to that?”
“Sam,” he said, voice tightening, “if you take those cuffs off him, I’m afraid I’ll have to shoot him.”
“No you won’t.” She had to smile a little then, because underneath it all there was something reassuring about the terror a man could feel on your behalf. “You won’t. Didn’t you just say you trust me?”
So he proved it then, watching as she continued on her way.
But first Sam detoured to where Melissa sat in one of the patio chairs, her face bitter and queasy and starting to bruise, fingers jittering on the arm of the chair.
“Find somewhere else to sweat it out,” Samantha told her. “I don’t want you within fifty feet of me.”
Melissa looked up, trying to be her old irascible self, but running mostly on fumes now. “Or?”
Sam tapped the stun gun she’d retrieved from the tiles and clipped to her hip pocket. “Or I’ll make you wish you’d never brought this thing into my house.”
As Melissa retreated without so much as a sneer, Sam carried the cat over to Cro-Mag and knelt beside him. With every minute that his senses had had to return, he’d struggled more fiercely against the handcuffs. Already the skin of his wrist was chafed and raw, abrasions that matched the cornered look in his eyes. She thought of coyotes that gnawed off their own paws to escape steel-jawed traps.
She handed Taz over, the cat’s presence calming him as nothing else could when he took her with his one free arm. Then Sam showed him the handcuffs key and called to mind every single thing he’d said since last night—some spoken to her directly, the rest overheard, all of which she’d made a point of remembering. In case it might prove useful.
“You live with your sister?” Sam said, and he nodded. “I’ll bet she never calls you Cro-Mag. J
ust Gilbert, right?”
“I don’t think she’s ever heard the other name.”
“I’ll bet right now you’d just like to take Taz and go back there, wouldn’t you? Just like Jamey and I want to go back to our lives…and all the things we want to do, but haven’t yet. Isn’t that the same thing you and Taz want?”
He didn’t answer, merely sat with his breath whistling in and out through flared nostrils. As though scenting a trap.
“Then don’t make Taz or me sorry I decided to give you that chance,” she said. “Please don’t make a liar out of me.”
Then unlocked him.
He seemed wary at first, as if there had to be some trick still to come. Then he shook off the bewilderment and uncoiled from the tiles, regarding her now as though she were no less strange than if she’d come from the sky. She wondered how long it had been since a stranger had shown him trust.
“The car you came in,” Samantha said. “I’m pretty sure the keys are still in it.” Knew it for a fact, actually—had watched Jordy leave them dangling in the ignition earlier because, well, who was going to steal it here?
Gilbert took one step, then another, and while Jamey stood conferring with his sister, he watched, oh how carefully he watched this play out. But when their eyes met he relaxed, as much as he would allow himself, and she hoped he could read in her gaze what she probably would never say: Thank you. Thank you for loving me enough to risk making all of this for nothing.
She’d meant only to walk with Gilbert as far as the flagstones, where perhaps she would’ve said nothing more than good luck, hoping to never hear about him again. But as they passed the lounge chairs—where she’d sat manacled and waiting to live or die, condemned by father and sister-in-law alike—she grabbed Kristophe’s camera case. And wondered if this wasn’t the reason she’d wanted Gilbert turned loose, if what she was about to do hadn’t been lying quietly in the back of her mind all along.
“Take this with you. It’s yours,” she said, handing him the case, camera and all. “Watch the first tape sometime. They’re numbered. Just watch, after you’ve been home awhile. I think you’ll know what to do then.”
He had no idea what she was talking about, nor did she expect him to.
But he would.
And if Gilbert seemed mystified, his demeanor was not ungrateful, while his eyes were fierce as a raptor’s. He suddenly wanted to hug her, except it would crush the cat between them—Sam was certain of this. Equally certain that he would make it a priority to return to L.A. someday. After he’d watched the video of Jamey’s sister kicking that Golden Retriever in the parking lot next to her car.
He would know just the dog, too. Sam had noticed him looking for it last night, calling for it, after they’d taken her from her home and driven her to Sherman Oaks, to hold her the rest of the night at Melissa’s condo.
It hadn’t seemed important at the time, but she’d remembered it anyway.
Because you never knew what you could use.
Samantha returned to the pool, where Dawn was now finished but refusing Jamey’s help as she struggled to heave Duncan’s body back up onto the tiles. Small as she was. Heavy as he must’ve been, clothes soaked with water. Dawn insisting upon doing this herself.
Moments later she heard, from up the drive, the muscular rev of the Firebird’s engine. And nodded as she watched Dawn struggle and succeed.
Sometimes they underestimate us, don’t they? she asked Dawn, in silence.
Then tried her best to put it from her mind, as she went to rejoin Jamey and his sister, and to learn her lines.
44
THE three of them were taken to the Northeast Station on San Fernando Road, where the questioning went on until evening. At least for Jamey it did, by the time his lawyer arrived—Sherry Van Horn protecting her investment and sending in the suit before he said a word. He doubted that Samantha had requested one; nobody could say that she and Angelique weren’t victims here. Since Melissa had once worked for a law firm, she hadn’t thought two seconds about placing the call.
Even though, in the version of events they’d negotiated at poolside, standing over two bodies, Melissa was a hapless victim too.
In the conference-room company of detectives of the LAPD, there was little for the lawyer to do to earn his hourly hundreds. In stark contrast to his experiences with the two rogue deputies who had triggered all this, questioning was dull and repetitive. They wiped his hands with swabs from a kit to test for gunshot residue, but he had no fear of flunking—thought it strange to realize, despite everything that had happened, he hadn’t fired a gun since that first day at the convenience store.
Aside from the GSR test, this didn’t feel much different from any routine audition: performing for a panel of people who held his future in their hands. Except when they finished with him, they demonstrated just how drastically his fortunes had changed by dropping formality and asking for his autograph. Afterward, they seemed almost apologetic when they had to send him to the holding cell, to remain in custody pending questioning by the State of Arizona.
More autographs, signed in the shadow of vertical bars. Word had spread like fire up a parched Malibu hillside—got a celebrity among us, and the guys who hadn’t heard of him yet learned soon enough. Almost to a man, they wanted to know all about it. White guys, black guys, brown guys from East L.A. He was careful of what he said and how he said it, had no illusions that some of this audience wouldn’t take the least tidbit they thought worth trading and try to use it for currency to lessen their own legal burdens.
But no matter how much he downplayed that Day One stigma of cop-killer, he found many of them strangely reluctant to accept its refutation. It still applied because they wanted it to apply—wanting, perhaps, to feel as though they’d shared time with someone who had struck a fatal blow or two against a common enemy who was more uniform than face. So he gave up arguing, and with his silence let their expectations cement their perception of who he was.
It didn’t take long to learn the way the game was played here:
On the surface, they were all innocent men.
And image, same as anywhere else, was still everything.
****
Wednesday morning, Andy Connolly took a dawn flight from Phoenix to the Burbank airport, where one of the L.A. cops he’d spoken with on the phone met him and ran him back down the few miles to the Northeast Station.
Andy cooled his heels alone in an interrogation room while waiting to get started, and when they brought Jamey in, the moment of finally coming face-to-face seemed to verge on unreal in a way he’d thought he would be immune to.
It could be jarring, the first time you set eyes on someone whose face had been preceded by paperwork. They could bear little resemblance to the single mug shot or other photo you had—weight gained or lost, hair grown or cut, beards. Even though he had no trouble recognizing Jamey Sheppard, maybe it was so much prior televised familiarity that made this meeting feel unique before either of them had said a word.
Lock-up was the great equalizer, though, Jamey in less than forty-eight hours and already looking like he’d just gotten out of a cell. Jailhouse funk and the spot-cleaning that’s the best you can manage at a communal sink.
“Inspector Gerard, I presume?” was the first thing he said.
Already catching him off-guard. Andy didn’t get it and knew that it showed. Couldn’t decide if the guy did this on purpose, or if he naturally slid at you sideways.
“The guy who chased Dr. Richard Kimble all through The Fugitive,” Jamey explained, and waved it off. “Where do you want to start?”
Andy nodded around the room, just the two of them, alone except for the video left running by one of the guys who’d brought Jamey in. “No lawyer? I was told you had a lawyer during questioning on Monday.”
“I waived his services today. For you, I waived. All along, I’ve thought that if we could just sit down together, we could put this behind us. For me, that hasn’t changed
.”
Then don’t you dare jam yourself up, Andy thought, and had him start at the beginning—two weeks ago this afternoon, when he and Deputy Marvin Boyle had crossed paths. Jamey took him through the encounter and said nothing that didn’t jibe with what the security cameras had captured, or what Andy himself had turned up later on Boyle’s condition.
Likewise, in detailing his captivity with the Hardestys, and their scheme to get a reinstatement of the reward, there were no real deviations from what had been found at the trailer, or pieced together from the family matriarch’s ramblings.
“And that pick-axe you used to disable the mother’s car,” Andy said, checking notes, “you left it stuck in the radiator.”
Jamey nodded. “Right. One swing, that’s all it took.”
“You didn’t, say, yank it back out and break some glass with it?”
“No. I just wanted to leave.” His eyebrows pinched into a wary frown. “Why?”
“Somebody came along this past weekend and blew half of Rupert Hardesty’s cardiovascular system out his back. You know anything about that?”
Andy gauged Jamey’s reaction as he denied any knowledge—stunned, maybe even regretful, and it read genuine enough.
“You didn’t pay him any return visits? Feeling pissed-off about the days they kept you there?”
“I would’ve thought he’d been in jail, still.”
Sheppard had no worries here. You could follow a through-line on that .357 Magnum with the Pachmayr grip—from the correctional officer who’d lost it along with his man, to the Hardesty trailer, to the poolside where it had killed Duncan MacGregor, and keep it in Jordy Rabin’s hand the whole time.
No, Andy just wanted to see what the guy would look like when he was hit with a surprise. See if it would match up a few minutes later.
Next, Jamey went through the Saturday morning when he’d called to set up his surrender along Route 93, aborted after Russell Pellegrino’s attempt on his life. This settled two things that hadn’t been clarified yet—the massive wound that had severed the deputy’s femoral artery had been caused by a sword, and that Duncan MacGregor had found his way to the scene by eavesdropping on a police band radio.