by Candice Fox
MOST DANGEROUS.
‘You one of the big ones or the little ones?’ the kid asked.
‘What do you mean?’
‘There’s a million bucks going for each of the big fugitives,’ the kid said. The piercing at the corner of his eye lifted as he smiled. ‘And ten grand for everybody else. Please tell me you’re one of the big ones.’
‘I’m neither,’ Kradle ventured. ‘I’m just a guy with a broken phone who thought he’d try some kinky sex games with his girlfriend and ended up losing the handcuff key down a drain. Now I’ve got to call a locksmith before I’m forced to turn up at work like this in the morning.’
‘Good story. I like it. You come up with that just now?’
‘Yeah,’ Kradle said.
‘Fast on your feet.’
‘Desperate times.’
‘So, if your story’s true, what’s the phone got to be untraceable for?’
‘I don’t know,’ Kradle said. ‘I’ll come up with something soon as you take this big-ass gun out of my face.’
The kid pulled back the hammer on the gun. Kradle watched the cylinder rotate, loading the bullet into the chamber about eight inches from his nose.
‘Let’s talk about this,’ Kradle said.
‘What makes you think I want to talk?’ the guy asked. Didn’t wait for an answer. ‘Let go of the phone and put your hands on your head.’
‘You haven’t hit the button yet,’ Kradle said.
‘What?’
‘The panic button under the counter. The one that calls the police. You haven’t hit it. So I assume you want to talk.’
‘I haven’t hit the button yet because I’ve got one hand on this gun and one hand on the phone. Let go of the phone and I’ll hit the buzzer.’
‘You’re not delaying the arrival of the cops because you want to hold on to a twenty-dollar piece-of-shit burner phone,’ Kradle said. ‘I’m guessing you’re doing it because there are things in the store you don’t necessarily want the cops looking at.’
‘Okay, fine,’ the kid said. ‘You got me.’ He let go of the phone. Kradle pocketed it. ‘Here’s the plan. You’re going to get down on the floor, nice and slow. I’m going to cuff you all the way up and we’re going to walk down to our sister store on the next block.’
‘Who’s going to lock up this store while you’re taking me to the next store?’ Kradle asked. The guy’s face twitched. Kradle felt a surge of hope and leaped at it. ‘Police!’ he yelled.
‘Shh!’ the kid snarled. ‘Shut your fucking—’
‘Police!’ Kradle yelled again. ‘Everybody get on the ground! This is a raid! Come out with your hands up!’
The dog at Kradle’s side caught the fever of the game and started barking loudly, the noise ear-splitting in the tiny store.
‘Daeshim?’ An elderly lady’s voice came from upstairs. The kid yelled a string of words in Korean. Kradle assumed he was telling the old woman to stay where she was, that it was not the police, that everything was fine, but Kradle could hear boards creaking over his head, a thump like a book hitting the floor.
‘Police! Put the gun down! Put the gun down!’ Kradle bellowed.
‘Shut up!’ Daeshim yelled.
‘Go ahead,’ Kradle said to him. ‘Shoot me. Shoot me. Blow my brains out in front of your grandma just as she gets to the bottom of the stairs.’
Don’t shoot me, Kradle thought. Please don’t shoot me.
‘Daeshim? What’s happening down there?’
‘Go back upstairs!’ Daeshim yelled. The gun was shaking in the kid’s hand, wavering between Kradle’s nose and his left eye. Kradle was waiting for it, watching for it, and as the footsteps down the creaky stairs on the other side of the wall behind the counter became louder, it came. Daeshim turned his head to look for the arrival of the woman. Kradle grabbed the gun with one hand, pushed it sideways, twisted it out of the kid’s grip. He used the other hand to shove the kid so that he fell into a rack of buds and stems and pods or whatever the hell they were against the back wall of the store.
Kradle caught a glimpse of the old woman peering timidly out from the doorway, reflected in the glass doors, as he burst into the street.
Kenny Mystical was overconfident. His momma had been saying it since he was a child. She’d drive him to the local hospital with a broken forearm or a twisted ankle or a fractured skull and tell the nurse behind the counter, who she knew by name, that he’d got overconfident again. That little Kenny had decided, without a shred of credible evidence, that he had the engineering know-how to construct workable wings out of PVC piping and cardboard, and had tried to fly from the roof of the garage to a tree in their backyard, only to land spectacularly on a stack of wrought-iron yard furniture. In high school he had got overconfident about the looks he was receiving from Gretchen Cubby across the science lab and challenged her boyfriend Herb Mirouse to a fight for her devotion, only to have the much larger boy put his head through the glass doors of a cabinet full of frog skeletons. An excess of confidence kept Kenny warm on the streets of Los Angeles for twenty-six years while he pursued Hollywood stardom, until a casting agent told him he was too old and his paunch too prominent for him to be hired anymore as one of the henchmen, security guards, butlers, angry villagers and Egyptian slaves he was accustomed to portraying on screen.
It took confidence for Kenny to pick himself up from that, brush himself off and pack his car for the long and humiliating drive back to Texas to begin again in his home town of Rockwall. He only got as far as Vegas before he had an idea.
The new girl was staring at Kenny’s framed pictures of his Hollywood days as he locked the register and put the day’s takings into his briefcase. It had been a three-wedding day, which was about standard for the end of the year, but Kenny was beat. He took off the shiny, jet-black Elvis wig he’d been wearing all day and slipped it onto a styrofoam head behind the counter just as the new girl got to the picture of him, mid-twenties and oiled and shirtless for his role as a dead gladiator being consumed by a lion.
‘Is that a real lion?’ she asked as he crossed the shop towards her. Kenny had a new girl in the shop about every three months, and every single one of them asked if the lion in the picture was real. His endless renditions of ‘Love Me Tender’ for awkwardly giggling tourists, up to eight pairs of them in a single day, would drive the girl away before long. The itchy wigs, the leering drunks, the crushing monotony of the ceremonies would get to her, and the chapel that had probably seemed kitschy and cute when she arrived looking for casual work would become a hellish place of creaky floorboards, thin carpet, dusty plastic flowers and chipping candy-pink paint before long. But, for now, she was under his spell, and Kenny was confident that he’d bed her before her first week was through, with the help of his wall of silver-screen memories.
‘It’s real,’ he said. ‘Friendly beast, actually. I’ve worked with lions a few times, and they can be a bit unpredictable.’
‘Wow.’
‘Did you see this one? This is me in Cleopatra.’
‘Whoa, with Elizabeth Taylor?’
‘No. How old do you think I am? It was an independent remake.’
‘Oh.’
‘And look at this. This is me auditioning for Mission Impossible.’
‘Amazing!’ She clapped, her platinum-blonde Marilyn wig bouncing. ‘What part did you play? Did you meet Tom Cruise?’
‘Uh, we better lock up.’ Kenny flipped one of her synthetic curls and turned away. ‘And remember not to wear the wig home this time.’ She giggled and took it off, setting it on the wig stand beside his behind the counter. She paused, smoothing the bangs on the inky-black Morticia Addams wig beside it.
‘You going to be okay?’
Kenny laughed.
‘I’m fine.’ He waved her off. Gave her his best Johnny Depp ‘Fuggedaboudit!’
The door shut behind her. He was alone.
The girl’s words were a worrying reminder. Kenny had indeed forgotten abo
ut Ira Kingsley and the breakout, the reason he had shut the store before sunset the past couple of nights and walked out either with the new girl at his side or his phone in his hand, 9-1-1 already dialled. The day’s events – the happy Australian couple who slow-danced to ‘Can’t Help Falling in Love’, and the stonkingly drunk ladies who’d signed their marriage certificate while he crooned ‘Always on My Mind’ – had taken his mind off the danger. Love, even when it was 500 dollars a pop, gimmicky, plastic-wrapped love under fluorescent lights, shot for novelty cardboard frames that would only go in a box somewhere back home, was distracting. Now Kenny faced walking to his car in the dark of the Nevada night, knowing Ira Kingsley, the man who had tried to murder him, was out there somewhere.
Kenny drew a deep breath, held it, and pushed open the door.
He didn’t even get one foot out onto the concrete.
Ira was there in the dark. He pushed a woman wearing a stretchy yellow tracksuit into the shop in front of him. It was all so perfectly in keeping with Kenny’s nightmares that he stood dumbly in the hall, watching with his hands by his sides while Ira shoved the woman to the floor and locked the door, the knife poking from his hand, long and silver and cleaner than the one he’d used to stab Kenny ten years earlier. Kenny stared in wonderment as his night-time imaginings played out right in front of him, and asked himself why, if he’d known so plainly that Ira would come back for him, he’d allowed himself to be cornered alone and defenceless like this.
The answer was simple. Overconfidence.
‘You,’ Kenny managed to say.
‘Yeah.’ Ira grinned, showing those little, beady teeth under his moustache that Kenny remembered like it was only yesterday he’d seen them for the first time. ‘You remember me, don’t you, Kenny?’
The woman on the ground was sobbing. Kenny could see as she rolled onto her side, struggling to sit with her hands tied with wire behind her back, that her belly was swollen with pregnancy.
‘Oh, god,’ Kenny said.
‘You don’t even look surprised,’ Ira said.
‘I’m not.’
‘Then you should know why I’m here,’ Ira said triumphantly, lifting his skinny arms, the knife glinting in the light of the studio lamps. ‘We’re gonna do this, finally. We’re gonna do it right.’
‘Please, help me,’ the woman moaned. ‘Please don’t let him hurt my baby.’
‘Who is this?’ Kenny asked.
‘Don’t you recognise her?’ Ira said. He crouched on the threadbare carpet and yanked the lady’s hair, showed Ira a face he didn’t remember. ‘It’s Marissa. Look. It’s Marissa. You remember her, right? She married some asshole who designs toilet blocks and preschools and let him knock her up. But it’s her, and she’s here, right back where it all started. And you’re gonna marry us, Kenny, like you should have done the first time. Get your fucking wig on. We don’t have a lot of time.’
Kenny didn’t remember Marissa. He remembered Ira, the stupid moustache, the playful mood he’d been in on the day he and the woman now bound on the floor had come in to be wed in the chapel. He remembered ribbing Ira about the French tickler, getting a shark-eyed glare at the counter, deciding that was going to be his thing for this couple. It was supposed to be funny. Supposed to be a gag. He was going to incorporate it throughout the ceremony, hopefully get snickers of delight, the way he did when he sang ‘Oh let me be, your cream eclair’ to French couples, or ‘Don’t you, step on my veal ragu’ to Italians. But he was only three jokes in, and the couple hadn’t yet decided if they wanted Hawaiian Elvis or Rhinestone Elvis, when Ira shoved the butterfly knife into his belly and Kenny knew he’d stepped over the mark with this one.
Kenny pulled his wig off the styrofoam head, held it like a hairy hat in his hands, and went to Marissa, whom Ira was trying to heft into a folding chair.
‘It’s okay, honey,’ Kenny said. ‘We’re going to be okay.’
‘All you had to do was sing a couple of fucking songs,’ Ira said. ‘Get away from her. Get away. Stand over there on the stage. Over there. Behind the microphone. Yeah, look at you. Kenny Mystical. Master showman. A couple of songs, some vows, a certificate. That’s all you had to do. And you go running your goddamn mouth. Trying to be funny. You ruined everything, you fat piece of shit, and I’ve waited ten fucking years to come back and put everything right.’
‘Tell me what you want me to do,’ Kenny said.
‘You know what to do!’ Ira snapped. ‘You do this every day! Sing two songs. Do the ceremony. Sing another song. I paid my money ten years ago, and I want what I goddamn paid for. You’re gonna marry Marissa and me, right here, and I get the twenty-four-photograph package with the bonus DVD. Then you’re gonna die, you motherless fuck.’
‘Okay. Okay. Okay. We can do this. You, uh . . . you just gotta pick the songs,’ Kenny said. ‘That’s part of the deal. There’s a list, there, on the wall.’
Ira stood looking at the laminated list, clutching Marissa’s arm as she hunched in the seat. The man’s eyes lingered over the traditional favourites. ‘Love Me Tender’, the well-used favourite, sat at number one. Kenny let his eyes drift down the list, his brain seeking a distraction from the terror in his gut, and when he landed at number thirty-one his lips twitched with electric anticipation.
He told himself not to. Then he found he couldn’t resist.
‘Can I make a suggestion?’ he ventured.
Ira looked at him.
‘“Jailhouse Rock”?’ Kenny shrugged.
Ira launched himself at the stage.
CHAPTER 31
Celine put her feet up on the dashboard of her car and leaned back in the passenger seat, resting her morning coffee on her stomach. Outside, her garage was unlit, but she could make out the edges of boxes that had stood against the wall since she moved in, taped and labelled in handwriting she didn’t recognise. One of the social workers, she guessed. There were ten boxes of her family’s belongings from her grandfather’s house, all that was left after the massacre. The rest had been destroyed on her request – anything that belonged to Nick, and anything that was even slightly damaged in the event. A single speck of someone’s blood or a fresh nick in the paintwork that could conceivably have come from buckshot, and Celine instructed that the item be incinerated. In the decades since, she had not regretted her decision or ventured into the boxes.
With the phone against her ear, waiting for the line to connect, she wondered if she ever would.
‘Hello?’
‘Hello,’ Celine said. ‘My name is Anita Fulton. I’m calling from the features desk at the LA Times.’
‘The LA Times!’ the voice said. ‘Jeez!’
‘We’re running a story on the Kradle Family murders, in connection with John Kradle, the escaped inmate from Pronghorn Correctional Facility,’ Celine said. ‘I wonder if I could speak to you for a few moments.’
‘Well, I don’t know why you’d want to talk to us,’ the man said. She heard shuffling on the other end of the line. ‘We don’t know anything.’
‘Perhaps.’ Celine chewed her lip. ‘Could I just confirm the spelling of your name, sir? Is it with an “e”?’
‘It’s Aaron Scott,’ the man said. ‘There’s no “e” in it at all.’
Celine cleared her throat. ‘Oh, uh, you never know.’ She wrote the name next to the phone number on the sheet of paper beside her. She had made five calls already that morning, working up the list Kradle had given her. ‘So you remember the murders, Mr Scott?’
‘How could I forget? I’m one of the guys who called 9-1-1. I smelled the smoke from my backyard.’
‘Right, because you lived next door,’ Celine said.
‘Across the street. John Kradle built the deck around my pool. It’s still here. Sturdy as anything. If you want pictures for the article, I can send them to you.’
Celine heard the man’s voice drop to a whisper. ‘It’s the LA Times!’
‘I’m just trying to confirm what you told the poli
ce back when the crimes were committed,’ Celine said. ‘I’ve got your statement here.’ She shuffled the pages of phone records.
‘I never made a formal statement,’ Aaron said.
‘I mean, uh, the police report. The report the detective wrote that, uh, detailed what you said.’
‘Well, it can’t say much. That detective guy never even came to the house. He just called. Must have been two minutes he was on the line.’
Celine glanced at the pages. ‘Three minutes thirty,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘The report says some’—Celine squeezed her eyes shut, struggled—‘interesting things. Would you mind retelling me what you told the detective? Just so I can see if you remember anything new that isn’t already here.’
‘Well, all I told the guy is that John Kradle was innocent,’ Aaron said. ‘I believed it then and I believe it now.’
‘You do?’
‘Yeah. We would go around there for barbecues sometimes. Great guy. One time my car wouldn’t start – me and my wife were supposed to fly to Florida – he drove us all the way to the airport, and when we got home two weeks later he’d fixed the car. Didn’t even charge us! Cracked radiator head, it was. Oh, crap. Hang on a sec. Hang on! Oh, god. Look, my wife wants to speak to you. She wan—’
‘Hello,’ a new voice said. ‘This is Lydia Scott. Wife of Aaron Scott. Former neighbour of John Kradle and the Kradle family.’
‘Okay.’ Celine eased a sigh.
‘We believe John Kradle is innocent.’
‘I know, Mrs Scott. Your husband was just saying so,’ Celine said.
‘I’d like to make it known officially, in an official sense, that if John Kradle turned up here in the middle of the night looking for shelter from the police, I would give it to him. And I don’t care who knows it.’
‘That’s really nice, Mrs Scott, but I’m looking for details,’ Celine said. ‘For the article.’
‘What kind of details?’
‘Something that tells me Kradle is innocent. Something a bit more substantial than the fact that he drove you to the airport once and the guy grilled a mean steak.’
