by Brian Hodge
“I guess I don’t, Mickey,” she admitted, “and I’m almost afraid to ask.”
He told her. American Fugitives? Jamey must really have been desperate for rent money that month. On the one hand it was laughable, just the sort of comedy of errors she would expect her sole and unwanted sibling to stumble into—even more laughable to think for one moment he would’ve gunned down a deputy. On the other hand, could it be any more galling that this was working out in his favor?
“So some hick cop mistakes my brother for someone who’s actually done something interesting with his life and he ends up dead,” she said. “You’ve got a first act, barely. What’s the big deal? You don’t even know how the story ends.”
“The hell I don’t.” Mickey was going into Cecil B. DeMille mode, she suspected, his vision bringing him to his feet behind the aircraft carrier he called his desk. “I’ve already got the screenwriters in mind I want to adapt this. No made-for-TV movie shit, either. Very Ramboesque. ‘You want a war, I’ll give you a war’ kind of stuff. But hip. Anti-authority all the way. He’s persecuted for something he didn’t do, then decides by god they owe him a spree for the one they’ve already unjustly punished him for. If James Dean were alive and twenty-five, he’d be on his knees in front of me with his jaw unhinged two seconds after the ink hit the story rights contract.” A small, upbeat grunt as some new thought occurred to him. “Monster soundtrack potential, too. Tie-in videos, we’re all over MTV with it.”
Typical Mickey Coffman, already on cross-promotion before he even had a title and the words FADE IN on a script.
Melissa left the balcony and stepped into the living room, where Kristophe was on hands and knees scanning their collective CD stockpile. Probably after something full of pulsing synthesizers, Germanic not only in its precision but its country of origin. She sat on his back and slapped down at his shoulders whenever he tried to scoot out from beneath her.
“Jamey’s got an agent,” she told Mickey. “What do you expect me to do?”
“Run an end-sweep around his agent. Sherry Van Horn. Van Whore, in my book. She basically told me to take a number and stand in line. Didn’t miss a step on that fucking treadmill of hers.” His voice shot into falsetto. “‘Ooops, is that another call from Oliver already? We’ll talk later!’” Now a snarl. “Take a number and stand on her throat is what I’ll do. But you, you’re her client’s sister—you don’t think that’s going to swing weight? Don’t you think he’d rather keep this project in the family? Make sure his own flesh and blood is hanging in there to make sure his story gets handled with the respect it deserves?”
“And maybe,” she said, “convince him to accept a lowball deal upfront in favor of back-end profits?”
“Psychic. You read my mind.”
“Gee, Mickey, you don’t think watching out for my brother’s best interests means financially, too?” She poked a finger down her throat and mimed gag reflex when Kristophe peered up at her with a puzzled look.
“Not if there’s a signing bonus that goes to you instead of him.”
“Ah,” she said. “Otherwise known as the thirty pieces of silver.”
“No, no,” he said in all seriousness. “It’d be a lot more than that.”
Fine—as long he was thinking literally: “So let’s hear a number. And it better be a lot more impressive than my salary.”
“How about a nice round hundred thousand?”
Steady, steady. Don’t scream yes into his ear. He would never respect her again.
“I like the sound of a hundred-and-a-quarter better,” she said, “and that’s just for delivery. If I can get him to agree to a deal that leans heavily on the back end, I think I’m entitled to double that figure.”
“A quarter-million dollars? For a finder’s fee?”
“It’s only studio money. It’s not like it’s coming out of your own pocket.”
“Close enough. It’s coming out of my development budget.”
“Just consider it a commission on everything I’m saving you upfront.”
Mickey’s heavy, dead-giveaway sigh—it sounded uncertain, as though he could go either way, but she knew she had him. Poker players would call it his tell. The same sigh he would make while staring with naked desire at a bagel slathered in cream cheese and counting the cost in calories. Then he always broke down and ate the bagel.
“You can deliver your brother, then,” he said. “You swear this to me. Cross your heart, hope to die, jump into an active volcano if you fail me.”
“Of course I can. He’s my brother and I love him.” Beneath her, Kristophe began to shudder with laughter. She stomped on his Achilles tendon. “He’ll listen to me. I mean, if you can’t listen to your sister in this town, who can you listen to?”
“Then what are you still doing at home? Why aren’t you on your way here?”
“Because we’re not finished. Just one more little demand, so brace yourself.”
“I’m hating the sound of this already,” Mickey complained.
“No more Hard-Boiled Derby for me. It’s the most degrading thing anyone’s ever forced me to do. Ten months is enough. And I don’t care if it is good for your office morale, it’s hell on mine.”
“Oh. That’s it?” He sounded pleasantly surprised. “You had me going there for a minute. I thought it was gonna be a real dealbreaker. Yeah, sure! You’re out of the racehorse class. Welcome to the betting class.”
“And the view’s better already,” she said, and rang off.
Just that quickly, it was done—her life not only back on track, but upgraded. Such had been her life’s tenor all along, the reason she’d quit worrying years ago. A charmed existence, people had noted, and whenever it caused comment, Melissa would always smile, look them in the eye, and ask them if they didn’t think she deserved it.
“I think I’ve just promised the impossible,” she told Kristophe. She got off his back and stretched. “But you know the old saying—the impossible just takes longer.”
“What’s a fluffer?” he asked. “He said he would so badly ruin you, you couldn’t find work as a fluffer on a porn video.”
“That’s the one thing you latched onto from all this?” She laughed. “Fluffers are the bottom-rung chicks who keep the guys erect during the breaks in shooting.”
“This is a genuine job?” Kristophe’s eyes went wide. “And this Hard-Boiled Derby, what is this?”
“It’s one of the ways Mickey amuses himself when he gets stressed.” Couldn’t believe she was sharing something so demeaning. But now that it was a thing of the past: “He has people get down on all fours and race each other by rolling eggs around with their noses. It’s awful.”
“You never tell me these things,” Kristophe said. “These are things about the business I would like to know…”
And she was looking at him with fresh eyes, the news from Mickey not two minutes old and already she was reassessing Kristophe’s worth in her life. He fancied himself a writer-director, and did have some music video credits under his belt, along with a few cans’ worth of film shot for an unfinished feature that lacked funding, but he was still a bottom feeder. Kristophe and forty thousand other self-styled auteurs out here. The writing was on the wall: her career was tracking faster than his was; ergo, it would soon be time for a trade-up in the penile department as well. Theirs had been a lateral relationship, just the way she’d wanted it—unable to bring herself to shack up with anyone plainly beneath her, unwilling to pair off with someone of power as his trophy fuck.
Kristophe’s qualifications had been impeccable. He was buff, he possessed some talent, he was not a deep thinker. And at first his bogus affectations charmed, although they were the sort of thing that would become screamingly intolerable before the year was up. Assuming he was dressed at all, Melissa had never seen him when he was not dressed in black. He’d taken simplicity and gelled it into a uniform: shiny black pants (PVC, usually), black designer T-shirt by Versace (in chilly weather a black
pullover sweater), black lace-up boots from some obscure clothier in Germany. He’d been born Christopher Plunkett, but had amputated his last name and tweaked the first. He would rhapsodize about places he had never come close to visiting—Stuttgart and Amsterdam, usually. He was not Eurotrash, though. It was worse than that. He was born-again Eurotrash. He was Eurotrash from Missoula, Montana.
“Your brother’s career has made a real move, that sounded like,” he said.
“Success desperately seeking Jamey in spite of himself.”
She played him the highlight reel, and while Kristophe of course deemed it delicious, the envy was all over his face. There was nothing quite like hearing about the good fortune of the undeserving to stir the blood.
“You know,” she said, “something’s just occurred to me. Daddy died when I was still in high school, remember, and it’s been awhile since Mom was competent to make her own decisions. So all of that makes Jamey’s heir apparent…me.”
“Ja?” Kristophe gave her a quizzical look. A bottom feeder, now and always, but maybe he still had a few uses around the house.
“Meaning if anything were to ‘happen’ to him,” Melissa said, “those story rights of his…? They’d still be up for grabs. They’d just belong…to me.”
10
IF only he had a free leg and room to swing it, Jamey would have kicked himself. Should’ve knocked a Hardesty or two in the head yesterday and sprinted for freedom when he had the chance and enough foolhardy courage to try. Since the news of the rescinded reward had forced the brothers to improvise, it was as though they’d sniffed out his renewed will to run and made it that much less likely.
More chain. With a clip at one end. They’d fashioned a leash for him now. Walk him outside, and they looped it around his neck. During his toilet breaks it trailed into the hallway, where Jasper and Rupert tittered like schoolboys and delighted in giving it sudden tugs to yank him off balance.
And during their mysterious evening absences it became his anchor, to prevent him from scooting the rocker outside like a sled on its runners—one end clipped to the chains at the back of Jamey’s neck and the other padlocked around a battered console organ on which Sadie, to his dismay, fancied herself a virtuoso.
For two nights running they’d left him alone for hours, with Sadie slinging drinks at the bar in that hamlet where his luck had gone from bad to worse, and her sons intent on restoring him to profitability. Whatever scheme they’d cooked up, they weren’t saying anything about it in front of him, no matter how slyly he tried to make them slip. Imbeciles they may have been, but they could be cagey when it mattered.
All he had to go on was the first cryptic remark Jasper had uttered yesterday: that they needed more bullets for the revolver. Scary enough, right there.
Tonight, as last night, they had driven off after nightfall, leaving the television on and the remote control tossed into his lap. He tuned in and out, sometimes cutting the volume altogether to listen to the blessed quiet—nonexistent with the rest of them at home—and to the sounds of the desert night, the yips and yowls of coyotes drifting in from afar, vibrant with overtones. Jamey could tell they were on the move, tracking their progress across a horizon he couldn’t see and envying them as he’d never envied an animal before.
Eighteen, twenty feet—he’d be ecstatic to move that far, as far as the telephone that hung on the kitchen wall. A cordless unit was floating around, but so far they’d been careful not to leave it lying in sight, much less within reach. And he hadn’t seen his cell phone since they’d taken it from him on the roadside.
Dare to dream: Say he got his hands on one of them, what would be his first call? Samantha, no question. He had to assume that at this moment she was in Flagstaff regarding him with as much goodwill as any jilted bride could muster. Had to assume that her car had been discovered by now, that she and her family knew all there was to know about Wednesday afternoon, except the deputy’s blood alcohol level.
He had to assume, too, that by now they all knew he was innocent and under the circumstances might even be excused for trading shots with Robbie the clerk. But Jamey understood the way minds worked, or at least the minds of prospective in-laws: Maybe he hadn’t killed anyone, but if he was still on the run, then he must be guilty of something.
When network prime time packed it in for the night, he perked up for the local late news. He ignored the more powerful Phoenix stations for a smaller, closer, NBC affiliate. He’d found it last night while channel surfing, and with fleeting satisfaction had watched the talking heads confirm his innocence, even if he hadn’t quite liked the implications of his picture being shown with the caption “Cleared…But Still At Large.”
Tonight, cue introductory fanfare as Camera One zooms in on the male-female combo at the anchor desk, the same scrubbed icons of credibility who, twenty-four hours earlier, announced his exoneration. Tonight’s lead: indictments handed down against some local politico who’d been caught with his hand in the Mohave County till.
Second story: still no leads on last night’s mysterious drive-by shooting at the Alamo Lake State Park campground. Miraculously, there had been no serious injuries—mostly bumps, bruises, and sprains suffered during the scramble for cover by elderly snowbirds getting an early start on the winter season—but five RVs had been blasted with big punishing holes.
On-site footage: a hand-held camera panning over the damage, then looming in on an elderly gent with a fabulous retiree tan and corkscrewed tufts of white hair.
“They came rolling in from one end”—he waved one arm toward the distance off-camera—“and took their potshots at us, and wasn’t two minutes before they were back, coming through from the opposite end to take a few more.” Waving his other arm now. “Just like they went off and reloaded and decided to do it again.”
Jamey had a terrible premonition about this even before the interview took a turn for the official, with a spokesman in a park ranger’s hat. Based on eyewitness accounts, he explained, two individuals had been involved—a driver plus a shooter armed with a large caliber handgun. Probably a revolver, since no shell casings had been recovered along their route.
“Please,” Jamey prayed to the television. “Please not an old white pickup truck.”
It was. He wailed all through the commercial break.
At first he couldn’t fathom what they were up to. Riding around, plinking away at campers with no more concern than they would show a row of cans on a fence—what possible benefit could they derive from this? None. They were only adding to an undoubtedly long list of blue-collar crimes that they’d so far managed to get away with through dumb luck. Accruing longer jail terms that would eventually catch up with them.
But the flaw in his reasoning, Jamey decided, was that he wasn’t thinking like a Hardesty. No. Shave off a hundred thousand years of evolution first, and then could he see the world through Jasper and Rupert’s eyes:
They have a captive, briefly of value, then rendered worthless by the discovery of his innocence. They have the gun he was alleged to have used in the commission of a crime that didn’t actually happen. Their deductive powers must have gone something like this: If they venture out to commit actual crimes with the same gun, it can only be a matter of time before the bullets are analyzed, their source identified, and the bounty reinstated on the head of the last known holder of the gun. Who has been conspicuous in his failure to come forward and resume his place in society.
Jamey had to admit that there was a peculiar genius at work here. That Jasper and Rupert enjoyed a rollicking time in the process would just be icing on their cake. And then it came over him with a chill: At this moment they were out gunning for fresh targets. The thought made him feel sick enough on its own, even if they weren’t trying to sign his name to the casualties.
He heaved forward, thumping along in the chair and feeling his leash drag along behind him. Neck muscles tensing, he braced against the tug, like a cold strangling hand. He gnashed his teeth
as the choker chain tightened, closing off his breath as he strained against the anchor of the console organ. It barely budged. Stop, wheeze a moment, then try again, head tucked as he rocked at the limits of the chain. Cutesy porcelain figurines skittered to the edge of the organ’s top, then plummeted as though driven to suicide.
Come on—strong old men did this all the time to prove how potent they still were. Eighty-five years old and biting on a cable to tow cars. Miracle men. Role models.
But he had no leverage, no leg power. And the pressure was beginning to crush his larynx. He heaved forward one last time out of frustration and found himself spun off balance, whiplashed sideways and dumped toward the floor, chair and all. Moments after he hit, stunned and choking and lying on his side, Jamey knew he was lucky he hadn’t broken his neck.
He inched backward with splayed hands and scrabbling shoe tips to ease the pressure on his throat, then laid gulping air, watching stars sparkle before his eyes. Stuck. He’d sooner take flight than right himself again. He was stuck down here with all the mobility of a beached whale, and his cheek would remain pressed into the grease and grit of the carpet until the boys came home and saw fit to set him vertical again.
And now he couldn’t even change the channel. He’d failed to keep hold of the remote control. It was lying midway between his head and the TV. Time for Letterman, but The Tonight Show it would be, and there was nothing he could do about it. Never had this show had a more captive audience—and by the middle of Leno’s monologue, never an audience so thoroughly maligned.
It was official: He was the laughing-stock of the Universe.
“And speaking of temperamental actors, didja hear about this guy a couple of days ago? This actor on a road trip in Arizona?” First time he makes Jay Leno’s radar and the man is setting him up for ritual slaughter. “This actor, Jamey Sheppard, he’s driving through Arizona the other day, and he’s mistaken for the real-life bad guy he’s just played on American Fugitives, some trigger-happy guy named Duncan MacGregor—you may remember him from one of the livelier episodes of Cops.” Leno’s voice began to crack higher. “Well, now Sheppard’s on the lam too, after the deputy that stopped him wound up dead. Jeez, not even Robert DeNiro ever got that carried away with a role.” Leno started bobbing that huge-chinned head of his. It was coming. It was coming and it would sting like hell: “Mister Sheppard, if you’re out there, I’ve seen your Mountain Dew commercial…and while you may be no Robert DeNiro, that wild enthusiasm you display for chugging things might get you through the next thirty years in cellblock D.”
