by Brian Hodge
Except now he would be the one giving her the push.
He knew in his heart that he should say something before he did it, but felt no closer to the right words today than he would’ve been immediately after her death last October. Telling her, finally, that if he wasn’t yet ready to forgive her betrayals, maybe he could manage it someday, and that he was sorry. It wasn’t much, or maybe it was more than she deserved, but either way he rose to his feet at the brink of the cliff and upended the urn, to give the grit and dust of her bones to the wind.
He smashed the urn next, an improvisation that occurred to him only in this moment, dashing it onto the plateau and leaving its porcelain shards where they lay. To perhaps be reassembled a thousand years from now and sit restored on a museum shelf, evidence of a funerary rite that no one could guess.
Jamey then made the cautious descent back to the desert floor. As he drove away, dust boiled behind him like the contrail of a jet, and even now, two seasons and one film shoot later, it seemed wrong to be driving something in which Samantha had never sat. He’d gotten the car a few weeks after…well, whatever had happened between them.
There was no mystery about its timing, at least. Their drift had occurred after Melissa’s murder, one more unsolved Hollywood homicide in which the victim was surmised to have known her killer. No signs of a break-in or a struggle, merely Melissa on the floor of her living room, dead of three devastating blows to the head from a tire iron or some other metal rod.
For Samantha, already weakened by the estrangement from her father, it was as though even more life began to ebb away. Only this time, as near as Jamey could tell, his presence seemed to make it worse. Part of her seemed desperate to tell him what the problem was, while another part held it stubbornly clenched inside, confessing only that she’d done something terrible, and that she needed time—time away from who and what they were together.
Code words, he’d felt on hearing them, to hide a deeper anguish she couldn’t voice. There was no doubt that she still loved him.
So he’d been left to piece it together as best he could. Later, he recalled one of the last things Andy Connolly said as they were parting ways at the Northeast Station, after Jamey had asked him if he’d initially gone into the case thinking, the clean record notwithstanding, that he had a guilty man to chase.
Yeah, Connolly had told him. But what you’ve got to understand is that so much of what I see happens on that one day of the year when somebody does something he never would’ve dreamed of doing the other 364.
And so he had to wonder if, for Samantha, that one day in a year—day in a lifetime—had come last September, beside Mickey Coffman’s pool. Especially since Kristophe’s camera, and all his footage, had vanished in that brief interval between the shootings and the arrival of the LAPD.
Only one person there could’ve carried them away. But would Cro-Mag have done so without first having the camera case handed to him? Reluctantly, Dawn had reached the same conclusion. By then she was an L.A. resident too.
She had gone home to Phoenix the week after Duncan’s death, seeing her family for the first time in nearly a year, and finishing the charade of an extended trip across Europe. But Phoenix was no longer home, she discovered, and more a reminder of Duncan than L.A., even though this was where he’d died.
When Dawn was ready to look for a job, and Mickey Coffman needed a new assistant, to Jamey it seemed only right that he put the two of them together. And later, only right that he and Dawn turn to each other for the things now missing from their lives. Except, after a few days, they had to admit that although friends became lovers all the time, the template between them had already been cast, and perhaps couldn’t so easily be broken apart and pieced into something else after all.
He thought of it this way: Just because Melissa was dead didn’t mean he no longer had a sister. Or need of one.
Jamey followed the dirt road back to that cluster of buildings, houses, and trailers that could charitably be called a town, the sole outpost before the interstate a mile beyond. There had never been any doubt that he would stop at the diner once family matters had been put to rest. Two hours earlier, he’d felt immense relief when driving through and seeing that the diner still existed at the town’s only intersection, had feared he might find it years vacant, door chained and windows opaqued.
No wolf at the door this time, but he’d known that was too much to hope for. When he stepped through, it felt as though two of him were being admitted.
The place had changed, and then again it hadn’t. The smell was the same, dust and grease, an instant trigger that spun him back through the years. Still a pool table, joined now by a wall of rental DVDs. His eyes tracked to the hallway toward the toilets where he’d found the yellowed news clipping about the scene from Body Bag Blues filmed here, but even the corkboard was gone now.
He settled onto a stool at the counter and had the place to himself. Two-thirty in the afternoon, probably a slow time of day. All the other times of day were probably slow, too. No longer the same counterman, strolling over to see what he wanted, but the more Jamey looked at him, the round amiable face and the big belly gone bigger, the man grew familiar just the same.
“Did you used to own a really old pickup truck?” Jamey asked.
“Yeah,” he said, friendly enough but blasé about it. “Me and about eighty percent of everyone else ’round here.”
“Kind of a robin’s egg blue, when it started out…?”
Now he got interested—the Navajo who’d been shooting pool during that other visit, who had spoken to him on the front step. Hair still long, in a ponytail now, and still mostly black as a crow’s wing but starting to show rich silver threads.
“That truck finally fell apart on me…fourteen, fifteen years ago, it musta been. How’d you know a thing like that? ’Cause for sure I know you don’t come from around here.” Saying it as though he knew where Jamey really had come from.
“You recognize me?”
“Sure I know who you are.” He pointed to a small TV bracketed onto the wall behind him. “I know it may come as a surprise, but most days the electricity makes it this far.”
Jamey offered his hand and they shook, the Navajo giving his name as Wayne Weaver.
“I was here once before,” Jamey said. “On family vacation, when I was a kid. The summer I was twelve years old. You were here that day, at the pool table. Then you talked to me out on the stoop for a minute.”
“You remember all that from one day, what, fifteen, twenty years ago, it’d be?” Shaking his head. “What, I guess elephants call you up to remember stuff for ’em, hey?”
“It was an important day. A lot stood out,” Jamey said. “This place is yours now?”
“Since around the same time my truck fell apart. Took that as a sign maybe my ramblin’ days were over and I should stick in one place.” Wayne gave a heavy-shouldered shrug, as if to say there were better places where the machine could’ve given up the ghost. “I bought the place from Ralph, the guy who had it when you woulda been here. His health—” He arced a fingertip high to low, with a descending whistle. “Fixed himself ham three times a day. You can’t do that.”
Jamey patted a hand over his heart. “My dad had the same kind of problem a few years after we were here.”
“Aw. Sorry to hear it. I always think of it as the animals’ revenge, you know?” Wayne Weaver smacked the countertop with a flat, wide palm. “Fix you a cheeseburger or somethin’?”
“Sure,” Jamey nodded. “With bacon.”
“That’s the spirit. To poor old Ralph!”
Without asking, without being asked, Wayne strolled to a silver fridge and set out a cold Mexican beer for him, saying that while he had no liquor license, that didn’t mean he couldn’t give them away to anyone he pleased. Then, as he slapped the meat onto the grill, he asked Jamey what he’d been doing with himself since those days of last September when he’d made it halfway to becoming a household name.
Jamey stuck with the professional news, which was all most people wanted to hear anyway, explaining that he’d spent much of the winter on location in Florida, filming a movie called Ride the Lightning. He played the younger brother of Russell Crowe, whose character was an innocent man—or maybe not—days away from dying in Florida’s electric chair.
Left undisclosed was how he could’ve had his pick of larger roles, but in lesser movies. Ironically, he’d had to fight like hell for the part, with auditions and callbacks and casual sit-downs, but as soon as he read the script he’d known that this was the one, the gem he so desperately needed to prove himself more than just a by-product of freakish publicity, a role that could be the stepping-stone to whatever was to follow.
And now, all he had to do was live through the next eight months of dread, waiting for its release next December.
Because what if the whole world hated him in it?
“Almost forget, hey.” Wayne turned his back on the grill. “Couple minutes ago you said I talked to you out on the stoop, way back. What about? You still remember that too?”
“Sort of,” Jamey said. “Just something about a wolf that I was petting. It used to hang around here, I guess.”
A white lie, because he remembered every word.
It’s a kick, ain’t it?
He had preserved them in a notebook that same afternoon, and must have read them a thousand times in the teenage years that followed.
Sittin’ there, in the company of something that could kill you. Kill you real easylike.
But they made more sense now than they ever had, as though they’d been given to him as something to grow into.
But chooses not to. Or not today, at least. That’s a kick.
“Whatever happened to that wolf, anyway?” Jamey asked, realizing perhaps he shouldn’t have, because a shadow creased Wayne Weaver’s forehead and deepened his eyes. But Jamey knew he could never leave without knowing.
“Aw…a fella on the edge of town…he shot it dead after a few months. Not one good reason why. He just went out and did it.” When Wayne saw the look that crossed Jamey’s face, perhaps he felt safe in adding more than he might have said to any other stranger who’d drifted in off the road. “I had some real problems with that. Spent a year in jail for what I did to that fella the next day. But you know? If they’d told me I’da had to spend two, I probably woulda done it just the same.”
“Good for you,” Jamey said, and meant it.
Wondering if Wayne’s was a tribe that considered the wolf their brother.
Not that it mattered. You took your brothers and sisters wherever you were lucky enough to find them.
Cemetery Dance Publications
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Part Two
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20 Quote
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22 Quote
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27 Quote
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30 Quote
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34 Quote
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37 Quote
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45 Quote
Chapter 45
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