by Brian Hodge
It had turned contentious enough that they would be exchanging their vows at the Grand Canyon. As a quasi-Buddhist, Samantha had no wish to default to the family Methodist church in which she’d grown up. Although she’d gone the route of the Dalai Lama two years before Jamey had even met her, her parents had refused to admit this spiritual defection had even occurred until they had someone to blame: Jamey was an actor. Richard Gere was an actor and a Buddhist. They must all be Buddhists, then. At least the ones who weren’t Scientologists, God forbid.
Although Jamey had never seen the house, after the engagement went public he imagined Samantha’s father, robbed of the tradition of walking his eldest daughter up the aisle between the pews, seething away each evening in his den. His fist would curl around a tumbler of single malt as he sat barricaded behind trophies and scuffed old footballs and framed x-rays of the shoulders and kneecaps he’d dislocated during his gridiron glory days at Arizona State. Surely one more body writhing in anguish, even that of his future son-in-law, would not weigh on the conscience of Flagstaff’s leading concrete contractor.
He stared at his phone. Really now—did Sam’s family need to hear about today at all? To the contrary, it seemed that the most consideration he could show his future in-laws would be to spare them pointless fretting entirely.
This was Wednesday afternoon. The wedding was on for Saturday, with a mass Friday afternoon departure for a lodge near the Canyon. In the meantime, how long to clear up today’s mess? He ventured a cautious estimate of being a free man within twenty-four hours. It was entirely possible—no, think positive—it was probable that he could arrive at his future in-laws’ tomorrow afternoon and none of them would have to know a thing about today.
There had to be ample evidence back there to exonerate him. Maybe they’d find vodka in the dead deputy’s car; for sure his autopsy would reveal a blood alcohol level. Run a residue test on Jamey’s hand and they’d be forced to admit he couldn’t have shot the man in the first place.
Then his neck went boneless and, moaning, he slapped his forehead into his palm. He’d forgotten about exchanging fire with the clerk. Had he really done that? Jamey moved to the side of the car, peered through the passenger window. There, on the floorboard, nestling against a pair of empty Starbucks bottles: the revolver. His first impulse was to get rid of it, but he fought it back. Innocent victims of circumstance did not flush evidence.
“I am not alone in this.” Pep talk, staring at his reflection in the car window. The same ritual he went through in the bathroom before auditions. “I have people. I have my people on this.”
It was a tougher sell than usual. Dirty, sweaty, bruised, with a scabbed and pulpy eye socket…that was no winner leering back from the window. It was a fugitive. Or a hungover groom who’d tangled with too many strippers at his bachelor party.
Jamey sighed at the dour reflection.
It was time to get this freakshow on the road.
He drove into the dumpy little town, watchful for anything that appeared official, taxpayer-funded. He read signs as he passed them on the roll. Pool hall, closed. Bar and grill, back in five minutes. At a trailer with raked white gravel for a lawn, Adele’s Dog Grooming was open for business, but he couldn’t see walking in and announcing his surrender. Adele guarding him with a pair of electric shears.
The main road pulled him in one side of the village and dumped him out the other. All that lay ahead was a panorama of scrubland and hills and utility poles. Turn around, or keep going? On the faith that where telephone poles led there would have to be some degree of civilization, he decided to at least try a little farther.
He’d gone a mile when the car began to stutter. Speed plunged, gauge needles ticked to the left. The accelerator pedal ignored his foot and the power steering died.
He wrestled the wheel, coasting to the side of the road, where the car coughed itself out, the dashboard ablaze with red lights and the fuel gauge needle buried in the death zone below “E.” Jamey cursed and pounded the wheel as he realized what had happened:
He’d paid for gas he’d never had a chance to pump.
How meteoric, this fall of his. The star of American Fugitives one month, and the next the subject of America’s Dumbest Criminals.
Jamey locked the car and began backtracking, the town the only certainty out here. Surely somebody could spare a gallon or two of gasoline. At this point, the only pride he could salvage would come from surrendering on his own motorized initiative.
Indignity heaped upon indignity, though—halfway back to town, a rust-and-white pickup truck stitched together with body filler and wire careened past, heading in the opposite direction. Inside, a burly pair of slope-shouldered yahoos laughed at the faceful of dust their tires churned up. Something pale flickered through the grit, then Jamey flinched as it slapped him across the cheek. Cackles and guffaws faded behind him. As the cloud settled around their warhead he nudged it with his shoe tip. Half a ham sandwich on white bread, ragged with toothmarks.
After another couple of minutes, they’d turned around and were back with him, crawling up from behind and refusing to pass even when he stepped off the road and onto the hardpan. So this was what his fate had come to. Killed for sport by rednecks before he could clear his name.
With a goose of the gas pedal they pulled up alongside, keeping pace, two big round faces peering at him through the passenger window.
“So what is it this time?” Jamey called. “You forgot to throw the mustard?”
“Mustard,” said the driver, grinning. He looked at the passenger and chortled.
The passenger appeared less amused now. If he wasn’t the other’s brother, he was at least a close cousin, both of them in their mid-twenties, with short Caesar haircuts and browned with the deep, pitted tans that come from outdoor labor instead of hours spent poolside. Something was wrong with the driver’s mouth, but he hadn’t been born with it. Pink scars and a funky twist, as though someone had cut off his lips and sewn them back on in a hurry.
“That your car back there?” the passenger asked.
“Yeah,” Jamey admitted. It was so obvious, there would be no point in lying. “I don’t suppose either of you two good Christian souls would want to help me get some gas for it.”
“Christian,” grinned the driver. He punched the passenger’s shoulder and chortled.
“You ran out of gas way out here?” the passenger said. “That sure is stupid.”
“It’s been a stupid kind of day.”
“Yeah, I guess it would have to be,” he said, sounding almost sympathetic. When his hands came into view he clunked a little club of a shotgun—sawed-off and double-barreled—across the door and held it steady on Jamey’s midsection. “Now let’s see if you can keep from doing anything too awful stupid for the next couple minutes and maybe I won’t have to pull this trigger and let us all see what you had for lunch.”
“I’ll save you the trouble,” Jamey moaned, and doubled over ill.
4
SHERRY Van Horn often thought if she could only learn how to walk in her sleep, she might never have to leave her treadmill at all. It was her throne. It was podium and pulpit, stallion and workhorse. It had more stamina than all the men she’d ever known, and she worked its speed lever with the same sensual bond that stock car racers must surely enjoy with their gearshifts.
Her confidence in the mind-body connection approached a religious magnitude. In her manual, brilliance and sweat were indivisible, and five seconds after terminating Jamey Sheppard’s distress call, her course of action seemed crystalline.
She toggled her headset switch from phone to intercom. “Vicky! Chop chop!”
Her androgynous assistant charged through the doorway.
“Do you believe in God?” Sherry asked.
“What for?” Vicky shrugged it off. “I have you.”
“Good answer. But seriously.”
“Mostly I believe whatever you tell me to.”
“You
realize, Vicky, there’s a fine line between due respect and shameless ass-kissing. I’ll let you know when you cross it.” Sherry eased the treadmill down to a stroll. “Old headlines to the contrary, God is alive and well and amusing himself in Arizona, and in the same magnanimous breath blowing huge opportunity in this direction.”
“In mysterious ways—that’s the buzz on how he works.”
“Recall last month, on an episode of American Fugitives, Jamey Sheppard had a role in the re-enactment segments?”
“Okay.”
“An hour ago he was mistaken for the actual gunman he played. And, if Jamey’s version is to be believed, the mistake was made by a butterfingered officer who drank his lunch and whose manual dexterity was no better than his visual recall.”
Vicky’s eyes gleamed. “Tell me it gets worse.”
“Who accidentally shot himself to death with his own gun. And now, one casualty-free shootout with a trigger-happy convenience store clerk later, Jamey is himself on the run.”
“Omygod!” cried Vicky. “When he said a matter of life and death, I automatically assumed hyperbole.”
“Well, there’s always that one percent. Your schedule is cleared for the day. Whatever’s on your calendar, scratch a line through it. You’re on leak detail as of two minutes ago.”
“We’re leaking this? To the trades? A client wanted for murder?”
“To the trades, to the general media, to anybody who’s got a pair of ears and access to a checkbook. Vicky, Vicky”—snapping her fingers—“come on sweetheart, keep up with me. A little more grasp on the uptake. Besides, it’s not like he really killed anyone, it only looks that way.”
“But all you have is his word for it, right?”
“Please, give me credit for recognizing killer instinct when I see it and when I don’t. Jamey wouldn’t even beat up a curbside hooker if she pointed low and laughed. None of which matters now anyway. And don’t just stand there while we’re talking—mist the ferns or something.”
If there was anything she could not abide, it was inertia. Vicky grabbed the water bottle from a hutch opposite Sherry’s desk and began spritzing.
“We leak this tonight,” Sherry went on, “and by tomorrow the phones should be ringing off the hook with producers sniffing for the rights. And I want them calling me. Struggling, crazy-in-love actor mistaken for the real-life fugitive he’s just portrayed on TV, drunken abusive cop dead, actor forced to flee by vigilante clerk—get the right buzz going and I shouldn’t have to shop this pro-actively at all. First you’ll need to look up who Jamey portrayed on that show, and what the guy’s done. If he killed his whole family, wouldn’t that be perfect! But if it’s something sort of dull, check with me—we might want to embellish, just to get the ball rolling.”
“Clarify for me, would you? By ‘sort of dull’ you mean —”
“Pretty much anything where nobody ended up bleeding.” Sherry throttled the treadmill up to her regular speed. She couldn’t hold back any longer, had to step lively into the flow. “Plus it’s a fabulous opportunity for Jamey as an actor, too. You can’t buy this kind of exposure. It’s got to be the biggest break an actor’s been handed out of the blue since Kato Kaelin and the O.J. trial.”
Vicky paused in mid-spritz, staring.
“Yeah, I know. But this time there’s talent involved. And whatever you do, don’t forget to leak who he’s represented by.”
“Aren’t you afraid that might look a little…obvious?”
“Well, duh. When’s the last time you met a producer who didn’t need clubbing over the head now and then? And forget the ferns. Me now. Mist me. I’m getting overheated. See what this is doing to me? This is a good sign.” Sherry bent at the waist, over the treadmill’s front bar and instrument panel. Vicky hustled over to spritz her face with a cooling dew. “All right, that’s fine. Fly, monkeys, fly!”
Vicky was almost through the doorway. Sherry paused; recovered when the treadmill almost threw her. “Oh, and one more thing.”
“My liege?” Vicky said.
“I just remembered: Jamey’s going to need a lawyer. Put one of the secretaries on it. Call our firm—Doyle, Brecht, and Weinberg—and if they don’t have any partners in criminal law licensed for the Arizona bar, then get a referral for a firm in…well, the Phoenix area, I guess it’ll have to be. Real wolverines. It occurs to me that Jamey might not be allowed to profit from his misadventures if he’s actually convicted of a crime. And he’ll be calling from jail pretty soon. I really should take the call, but put it through only if his lawyer’s already lined up. Otherwise, find out where he is and we’ll get back to him.” Sherry beamed. “You know my policy of delivering only good news.”
“Can I just toss out a mercenary suggestion here?”
“‘Mercenary’ is the magic word. Please.”
“What if,” said Vicky, “you let the lawyer slide for just twenty-four, forty-eight, hours? If the news leak escalates, wouldn’t you think by then you could take your pick of publicity whores willing to represent Jamey pro-bono…thereby saving the agency a bundle in billable hours?”
“Darling!” Sherry flung her arms wide in an air hug. “Big bonus in Vicky’s next paycheck!”
“That’s just me being indispensable.”
“Although,” Sherry said, “in all fairness, I did promise Jamey a lawyer tonight. I’d really hate to leave him cooling his heels on the eve of his wedding. You know he’ll remember it the instant an agent from CAA or ICM comes poaching. And this is a capital offense. The last thing we want to hear from those third-world barbarians who take him into custody is that he was ‘shot while trying to escape.’” Sherry twitched her fingertips to inscribe quotation marks in the air. “Let’s not be dollar-wise and seven-figure-foolish.”
And poor Vicky suddenly lost half a head in height.
“Oh, don’t look like I just squashed your kitten. Your instincts were sound. Besides, we can have it both ways: get Jamey his lawyers tonight to watch out for his immediate interests, and then fire them by the weekend.”
She sent Vicky back to the battle stations and targeted her focus on the next incoming call. The only thing wrong with days like this was that there weren’t more of them, the euphoric sort of day when you knew that even if the entire slab of California snapped loose in a roar of tectonic fury and tidal waves, you could surf all the way to Denver.
So perhaps it was best that she did not hear it when Vicky convened the outer office secretaries and rolled his eyes and announced: “You’ll never guess what goofy scheme that hyperactive, anorexic bitch has come up with now.”
5
AS soon as they had Jamey chained into the chair, they launched into a ritual of self-congratulations, walloping their thick palms together for a high-five that sounded like the slapping of two raw ribeyes. Then they sniggered in glee as each slugged away at the other’s shoulder with bruising might.
They possessed, or were possessed by, the kind of boundless energy that came from being too dense to realize they were ever supposed to tire. Jamey imagined them waking up each morning on floors, on the ground, in highway medians, rubbing their heads and wondering where the sun had come from so suddenly—again!—then resuming their business where they’d left off six or eight hours before.
They looked down at him then, with their Caesar haircuts and their dark little wide-set eyes, like raisins stuck on melons.
“Money in the bank,” they said. Then broke out the Budweiser and sardines.
****
Jamey had picked up their names along the way. He’d become the prisoner of Rupert and Jasper Hardesty. Rupert, with the scarred mouth, wearing overalls over a grimy T-shirt, had been the one driving the truck. Jasper appeared older by a year or two and was—sad to say—the brains of the duo. He’d forced Jamey facedown on the floorboard and used him as a footrest while cradling the stubby shotgun. Jasper wore a green workshirt with a name-patch on the left, but someone else’s name stitched in red thread,
scratched through with black marker. Jamey had learned their last name when Rupert braked for a curve and a prescription bottle came rolling at his head from beneath the truck seat. Jasper’s, dated last spring, for penicillin. It looked nearly full.
They drove and drove, and if Rupert missed any potholes, it was probably because there had been two to choose between, and he’d gone for the deeper one. From the floorboard, any remaining sense of direction was obliterated. For all Jamey knew, they might no longer be in the same state…although when they finally stopped and hustled him from the truck, it all looked the same as before. Austere desert and scrub, and a horizon of craggy hills and ridges. Back on his feet again, with nowhere to run, the sense of isolation felt as immense as the sky.
Then he turned around and saw how they lived.
They were buzzards, gorging on the dregs of planned obsolescence. Their property was a wasteland of Detroit iron and Sears appliances; housefuls of antiques and barnyards of old tools had been swept into the sky by tornadoes, then dumped here. And at the center of this pile of rust and splinters sat their trailer.
They prodded him up the stoop, through the doorway, and into a stale cavern dimmed by closed metal blinds. Behind him, Rupert gathered a clattering handful of chains and padlocks.
“So,” said Jasper, “you kill anybody else before today?”
“No,” Jamey said. “And nobody today, either.”
“Yeah, right. See that chair there? Go sit.” Jasper loosed a long, sighing grunt. “How about blow anything up?”
“No. How did you know about me in the first place?”
“On the radio, stupid. They were interviewing some store clerk who called in. Brave man, sounded like. How about stick up any banks?”
“No,” Jamey groaned. Add Robbie to the list of lawsuits to be filed.
“Well, shit,” Jasper said. “So I don’t suppose you’d know if or not there’s a reward on you yet.”
“If there is, that’d be news to me.”
