by Brian Hodge
“Well, sit tight, there will be,” said Jasper. “I can wait.”
****
Even though they’d chained him in place, he still had mobility. They’d used a rocking chair, so he could at least tip back and forth. Enough to keep his blood moving. The chains had been woven across and around him, through the armrests and their supporting dowels, and up the chair back. Thorough. He supposed they would deal with toilet breaks when the need first arose.
Jasper and Rupert parked themselves on a sagging couch and guzzled away at their twelve-pack. Pull tabs snapped and spouted, and they peeled the lids from tin after tin of sardines. The trailer’s warmth thickened with a fishy reek.
“Hungry?” Jasper asked him. He had to yell to compete with the television. He offered Jamey a sardine, waggling it by the tail. Fat drops of oil slid down its length and plopped to the carpet. “Plenty to go around.”
“I’m allergic to sardines,” Jamey lied.
“Allergic,” Rupert snorted.
“Yeah? If you eat one, what happens?” Jasper said.
Jamey combed his past for allergic responses. Remembered the havoc that cashew butter had wreaked on him the only time he’d eaten it. His palms and crotch had itched mercilessly, his lungs turned every breath into a wheeze, and the lower half of his face had distended into something strangely leonine.
“I swell up like a red balloon,” he told them.
Rupert froze with a sardine halfway to his mangled lips, mean little eyes agleam. “I’d like to see that.”
“My throat swells up too. Can’t breathe. So unless you’ve got some Benadryl around, I’d probably suffocate.”
Rupert blinked as if to say he had no problem with that. Slowly, slyly, he peered down at the sardine dripping in his hand.
“Get that idea out of your head. Right now,” his brother warned. “I don’t think they do dead-or-alive rewards any more. Just alive. If he blimps up and dies, there’s no money in it.”
Rupert grunted and gulped the sardine whole. He downed another Budweiser and unleashed an apocalyptic belch, then gave his belly a test slap. It sounded like a ripe melon. He nodded and elbowed his brother.
“You ready?” Rupert asked.
“Let me shotgun this last sucker and my load’ll be hellacious primed.”
Rupert turned now to Jamey. “Speaking of shotguns.” He reached over to the rickety lamp table at the far end of the couch and hoisted the double-barreled sawed-off. “You know what’s funny?”
“Hey, don’t forget,” Jamey said. “No reward if I’m dead.”
He glanced down at the shotgun, then back at Jamey. “Don’t worry. That’s the funny part. It’s broke.”
He thumbed back the hammer and jammed both barrels into his mouth and pulled the trigger. Just before the snap, Jamey imagined the top half of Rupert’s head erupting from his skull and rocketing into the ceiling. Thinking maybe it wouldn’t make any difference. Just enough reptilian brain stem left to keep him going much as before. Jasper every day having to wrangle his brother’s tongue out of the way, like an unruly cowlick waggling atop the stump of his head, so he could pack sardines and brew down the exposed gullet.
“See?” Rupert crowed. “You got in the truck for nothing!”
“Gimme that thing.” Jasper snatched away the shotgun and dropped it on the floor at the other end of the couch, out of Rupert’s reach. “I would think by now, with your history, you might think twice about putting things in your mouth that way.”
“But it wasn’t loaded and it’s broke,” Rupert grumbled. “I knew that.”
“How’d you know I didn’t stick in a new firing pin and a couple shells?”
“Oh,” said Rupert. “You’d tell me a thing like that. Wouldn’t you?”
“If there’s time, sure. But if you just grab away and do it, how am I supposed to stop you?” Jasper huffed. “Bad enough I gotta clean up your big cantaloupe head all over the place, but then Mom comes home and I gotta listen to her bitch about why didn’t I stop you…’cause you know she’d take a pretty dim view of it.”
Mom comes home. Dear God, they had a mother. They had a mother who still claimed them. There was no way of knowing whether this was good or bad.
“Hey Killer,” Jasper grinned. “I bet you’re dying to know how his mouth got that way.”
Rupert, shaking his head: “No, don’t tell him that.”
“Oh, um,” Jamey waffled. “I, uh, hadn’t really noticed…”
“What, are you blind? Look at him!”
Rupert, whining now: “I mean it, Jasper, don’t, don’t you tell him that.”
“Take a guess. Go on.” Jasper pushed his brother’s pleading hands away. “Just guess how he got that way. What’s it look like to you?”
“I ain’t kidding, Jasper. If you tell, I’m gonna kill him.”
“Really,” said Jamey. “I don’t know and I don’t care.”
“It was two years ago last Thanksgiving,” Jasper began, and Rupert surged to his feet and stomped through an open doorway to the kitchen. He stomped back holding the deputy’s big silver revolver. After grabbing him off the road, they had gone back to rummage through the interior of Samantha’s car for anything worth taking. They’d been made so delirious by the discovery of the gun that, whooping like apes, they had forgotten about the trunk entirely.
Unlike the shotgun, the revolver was working and loaded. Subtract the deputy’s empty chamber, the round that had killed him, and the two or three that Jamey had squeezed off at the clerk, and this left one for sure, maybe two.
He cringed under his wrapping of chains. Again. Again this same gun aimed at his head. But this time he could see it, the big round muzzle inches from his eye. It had tasted blood once already today—easy to imagine it wanted more, that it kept turning toward his skull for a reason and always would until it got what it wanted.
“You say one more word about that and I’ll kill him, reward or not!” Rupert bawled. “You try me! One more word!”
Trembling, Jamey poured sweat and watched Jasper think it over. Big moon face cruel and taunting as he weighed options. Maybe the entertainment value in watching his brother explode would be worth any amount of money that was, after all, only hypothetical. Like babies, now was all that could ever matter to them.
“Just any little word?” Jasper said. “Or are there maybe some particular words you got in mind?”
“You’re pushing me, Jasper. I don’t like it when you push me.”
“Maybe a word like —”
“Shut up,” Jamey whispered.
“— eeeeeeeelectric —”
Déjà vu. Jamey heard the ratcheting of the hammer as the bullet swung around ready to receive.
“Five thousand dollars, maybe!” Rupert jabbed with the gun as he shouted. “Gone in one side of his head and out the other! You wanna see it? Wanna see a five-thousand-dollar mess on the wall? Wanna be the one tell Mom why we’re not five thousand dollars richer?”
Jasper’s grin melted into a reluctant sigh. “Yeah, Mom comes home, sees that first thing…she would get peevish over it.”
Jamey felt that he could pour right through the chains by the time Rupert lowered the gun and eased its hammer back down.
Jasper was laughing. “Well you big crybaby. You were gonna do it, weren’t you?”
“Your fault if I did.” Rupert tossed the gun to the couch and took a playful poke at his brother’s shoulder. “And you’re the one’s gonna be crybabying soon.”
Within moments they appeared to have forgotten all about any antagonism. Jasper finished his last Budweiser and Rupert tipped back his head to drain a thread of chunky oil from the last sardine tin. They looked each other in the eye and smacked their lips and nodded.
Jamey was forgotten as they launched themselves at each other like sumo wrestlers. Rupert took Jasper to the floor with such force the entire trailer shuddered. Arms flailed. Sneakers and boots kicked into the air. Fists rose high, then slammed down
into the center of the tangle. They cackled and whooped, cursed and grunted. They pinballed about the floor, toppling tables and chairs, crushing aluminum cans with their backs. Full of sardines and sloshing with carbonation, they pounded at each other’s bellies and yodeled in pain while Jamey watched with appalled fascination. This seemed to be the sole object of the game: sock your brother in the gut.
With a warble, Rupert thrashed free, then made a frantic scramble for the door. Jamey heard him land in the dust outside and begin to disgorge what sounded like his entire abdominal cavity. Grinning miserably, Jasper clutched an arm across his ribs and staggered to the doorway, and leaned outside to gloat.
“Loser! Like always!” he shouted. “Goddamn pansy!”
More retching.
Jasper lurched toward the couch, where he collapsed onto his spine, panting. Then looked over at Jamey as though only now remembering they had company.
“I’m the one who does sit-ups every day, and he’s the one who always loses,” said Jasper. “And he’s still never put the two of them together.”
6
THE very idea of an autopsy seemed to Russell Pellegrino to be a desecration of the dead. It was plain as daylight what had killed the man. You shouldn’t have to cut him from armpits to crotch just to prove what everyone could see with their own eyes. Shouldn’t, but had to anyway. If you planned on taking the asshole who’d pulled the trigger and trying him for murder in the first, you couldn’t let his lawyer argue the possibility of some other cause of death.
Why there should be the bother of a trial at all was another matter. But: One thing at a time.
Sheriff Beech had requested same-day service on the autopsy. Get Marvin Boyle turned over to his family as soon as possible. Once the body had been released from the site by the state crime lab’s tech unit, it had been whisked up to Parker, the county seat, to await the medical examiner’s scalpel. Later that night, when Pellegrino made it to the morgue, Dr. Schreiber already had his hands sunk up to the wrist in Marvin’s chest cavity.
Pellegrino pointed to the micro-cassette recorder, standing on end upon the instrument tray, little wheels turning inside. Then slashed a finger across his throat.
“How’s that again?” Schreiber going dense on him. Or indignant, thinking this was his room, that he was king in here. Maybe so, but kings got deposed from time to time.
“Off,” Pellegrino said quietly. “Turn that off.”
Their gazes locking for as long as it would take, Pellegrino let his stare say everything he’d left out of his voice. He refused to blink even when the air began to sting his eyes. Didn’t have to say one word that would come back to haunt. Attitude was ten percent content and ninety percent body language.
He waited while Schreiber peeled away a latex glove and stabbed one finger at a button on the tape recorder. The brittle click echoed off tiles and stainless steel. And the smell in here actually hurt, the reek of formaldehyde and disinfectant like a cold icepick driven up his nose and into his brain. Every breath was a scrape inside his head.
“Well?” said Schreiber.
Pellegrino took a few steps closer toward the table. Only one thing a table like that could be for, with those gutters on either side. And Marvin lying flat atop it, big bare feet splayed wide. Multi-toned body without a stitch of clothing to cover him up—most of him chalky pale, some color remaining in his arms and face, toned by twenty thousand suns. He’d gone the color of an eggplant in his rump and thighs, where blood had pooled.
“That click you heard a minute ago was you getting your way,” Schreiber said. “You’ve got my attention. Do I still have yours?”
And the incision. That red canyon split down his middle. A part-time county employee in a mask and gloves rooting around inside him for secrets. Wrong. It was only proper that a man should be able to go to his grave keeping a few secrets.
“I don’t think,” Schreiber said, gently now, the small town doctor, “it’s the best idea for you to be in here right at this time.”
“You’ll be doing a toxicology on him?” asked Pellegrino.
Over his mask, Schreiber blinked a few times before he said that yes, he would be. It was standard procedure.
“But you wouldn’t run the tests here.”
“I send them to a lab over toward Phoenix.”
“Blood. Urine.”
“Right. And this has relevance because…why?”
Pellegrino tried breathing through his mouth, found it worse than breathing through his nose because he was sure he could taste the dead, a putrescence beneath the caustic chemical burn.
“Close to forty years of county service,” he said. “Did you realize that about him? Almost forty years of his life he put into his job. Man like that, he deserves a statue and he’ll never get it. Maybe a plaque on the wall, that’s it, and pretty soon nobody even notices the thing anymore. Got dust on it. So I guess the best he’ll have to show for his life is what people think of him now that he’s gone. And a man like that, he’s given too much to his neighbors to hand them any reason to think less of him than they should. He’s earned that much. Wouldn’t you say?”
“It’d be nice to think so.”
But you couldn’t miss the wariness in Schreiber’s voice. Not wanting to commit to anything here. Wasn’t that just like a man with a diploma. What could he truly understand about the brotherhood of those who wore a uniform? What could he comprehend of the indebtedness between two men who hadn’t been born father and son, yet were closer than many who had?
Hours ago, unnoticed while sitting in Marvin’s cruiser, Pellegrino had pulled a clear pint bottle from beneath the seat. Hadn’t thought twice about it, merely slipped it against the flat of his lower belly and let the elastic of his shorts secure it, concealed by his T-shirt. He later stopped his own car along the roadside; crunched across a hundred yards of hardpan and smashed the bottle. He hadn’t moved until the splash evaporated off the hot stones, leaving only a cap, a torn label, and shards.
“How are those dogs of yours?” he asked.
“My dogs,” Schreiber said, voice gone low and flat. “My dogs are fine.”
Half a dozen of them, all Siberian Huskies, the most beautiful six-pack of dogs anyone could ever want. Black and white, gray and white, sable and white. A couple of them had mismatched eyes, one blue and the other brown. They looked out of place, here near the banks of the Colorado River and romping amidst saguaro cactus, but for years Schreiber had talked about Alaska. Retire to Alaska, take up dogsledding. Turn into something from a Jack London story. All talk, Pellegrino felt. Empty talk.
“And I hope fine is just how they stay,” he told the doctor. “You know, smart dogs like that, how they slip their pen or jump a fence…? I’d hate to think of someone from the highway department having to scrape a couple of them off the pavement. Start out runny, then get all dried out in the sun, birds been picking at ’em…it’s like they’re glued down with epoxy. Gotta pry ’em up with a shovel, and they don’t come loose without a fight. And even then you can’t really get everything. I’d sure hate to hear about that. Hate it if I was the one found ’em, had to come tell you about a thing like that. About your poor dogs. That’d really ruin both our days. Wouldn’t it.”
Schreiber said nothing, just stared at him over Marvin’s body. Steadying himself against the stainless steel table.
“Have you been a clean-living man these last few days?”
The doctor nodded that he had.
“Been a teetotaler today?”
Another nod.
“Well then,” Pellegrino said, “if you’ve gotta mail off blood and piss, you go ahead and do it. Just don’t mail his. Mail off your own. And then you better pray it comes back clean.”
7
HE’D collected five security tapes from cameras scattered inside and outside the convenience store, but Andy Connolly didn’t find himself freed up to watch them until the next day, back at the Wickenburg substation. Thursday morning at the
movies, with his coffee and his remote control in one of the conference rooms. A pad for notes—he would be back on the witness stand this afternoon in Parker, in front of the grand jury, testifying to secure the formal arrest warrant on Jamey Sheppard.
Until the self-deputized clerk opened fire through the window, the interiors were wholly uneventful. Three separate black-and-white views of Sheppard entering the store, homing in on the refrigerated cases, bringing a pair of bottles to the counter. On entering, maybe he did study Marvin Boyle a few beats too long—more than the self-conscious glance most people normally gave cops—but that meant nothing. The best view of him was at the checkout counter. Talking to the clerk, autographing the napkin. No sound, but Sheppard was clearly animated, in an upbeat mood. Peculiar—none of what Andy saw was the body language of a guy who thought he might have to gear up for a confrontation outside.
Everybody knew by now that there had been no dead body in the trunk of the car he’d been driving.
After a couple of rewinds, Andy shifted his focus to Boyle. The deputy and the clerk had been killing time with erratic conversation, Boyle changing visibly seconds after Sheppard walked in—on alert, posture straightening, fists braced on his hips. Watching like a hawk while Sheppard, unaware, got his bottled coffee. That Boyle believed he was onto something couldn’t have been more obvious if he’d jumped up and down and waved. He was out the door, a man on a mission, before Sheppard came anywhere near the cash register.
So why this confusion with Duncan MacGregor? Andy had looked him up on the NCIC database and compared his mug to the Sheppard’s DMV photo. Their basic stats were similar—white males within an inch of the same height and a few pounds of the same weight, both had black hair, and at age twenty-seven MacGregor was two years younger.
In the face, similarities were there but superficial. Sheppard’s had an oval shape. MacGregor’s mug shot—stemming from a burglary prior in Maricopa County a few years back—showed a young man with more of a square-jawed appearance. Pass these two on the street ten seconds apart and you wouldn’t get a feeling of déjà vu.
