by Brian Hodge
Duncan, not through apologizing: “I thought for sure I could do this.”
“Oh shut up, you asshole,” Kayla snapped. “You’ve mutilated him! You’ve mutilated my husband!”
He glanced at Kyle and gave his head a little shake. “Really, I didn’t,” Duncan told him. “You look great.”
“No you don’t!” Kayla shouted. “You look scalped! And you’re an asshole too because you sat there and begged him to do it! ‘Team Kyle’…Jesus!”
Kyle tried to stand but his legs were as wobbly as a fawn’s. He flailed with one arm for balance, kept the other hand slapped across his skull. Duncan moved in to help but Kayla shoved him aside and wedged herself under Kyle’s shoulder for support.
“I’ll bring you the emergency room bill personally, count on it!” was the last thing she clicked as they lurched toward the door like soldiers off to triage.
“Well!” said Dawn. “There goes somebody’s Olympics career. And was it just me, or did she remind you of Jackie Kennedy for a minute there, the way she was hanging onto that piece of his head?”
“This isn’t one bit good,” Duncan said. “What if the ER staff files a report on this? Assault with a deadly weapon—who knows what the story’ll turn into by the time she’s through with it? We can’t just sit still here and wait to find out a thing like that.”
“So we get a change of scenery, then. If you think about it, we’re overdue. No big deal. Dad’s got rentals all over the southwest, some of them have to be empty right now. Let’s pick someplace.”
He dragged the coffee table into position, back to where it had been sitting for the past ten months. Ever since they’d come here after his month of laying low in Phoenix. A Thanksgiving, a Christmas, a New Year’s, a Fourth of July. He’d been invisible here, had almost arrived at a state of mind in which Phoenix hadn’t happened after all. At least until seeing it replayed on American Fugitives.
It felt too quiet. Dawn wasn’t saying anything either now, the reality kicking in for her as well, maybe. He snapped up the TV remote and lifted the mute. The news looked to be winding down, nothing but sports coverage now.
Duncan dropped to the sofa and tapped the remote on his forehead, working out how much time they probably had. Start with Kyle and Kayla and their trip to the hospital—drive time, paperwork, cleaning the wound, then the needlework. Friday night, so figure that the ER would be busier for it—weekend car wrecks, brawls, knifings, shootings. Kyle wasn’t gouting, so they’d leave him sitting awhile, fit him in between the real bleeders. Worst case scenario, with Kayla turning vindictive, add another half-hour minimum to involve the police and bring them up to speed.
Say three hours before any unwanted knocks at the door. If they were out of here in two, that should be a comfortable margin. It wouldn’t be a priority call—no APBs, no roadblocks—because so far as anyone knew, his name was Darrell.
“So what do you think—should I get a tongue stud too?” Dawn asked, trying to lighten the mood.
“Please,” he said. “After what we had to listen to tonight?”
“Wait—you haven’t heard the pro argument yet. It’s supposed to be great for when you’re giving head to someone.”
“That’s about all that would sell me on the idea.” Duncan glanced at the TV, the news over now and the fanfare for The Tonight Show blaring. He peered back at Dawn. “She really told you that, Kayla did?”
“Earlier, when I was getting the lamb out of oven. She said it drives Kyle crazy.”
“Some people, they’ll talk about anything.” Duncan shook his head. “You know what my cousin would call people with piercings above the neck and between the ears? He’d call them tackle-box faces.”
“And this would be the same cousin you —”
“Jordy, right. Him.”
Jordy Rabin, who had earlier been anecdotally reduced to a mere partner in a big disagreement—an understatement, when you were talking about shooting a guy, disarming him, and leaving him on the floor for the cops. Family or not, Duncan had never had much trouble living with this part of the afternoon that had landed them on national television. Jordy had turned a corner that day. Start shooting women getting their roots touched up, and you forfeit something.
Duncan had heard that, while everyone was waiting for the Phoenix PD, stylists and customers alike had gone barbarian on Jordy while he was sprawled on the floor, bleeding from the side and the leg. They’d pulled off his ski mask and blinded him with sprays, pounded him with blow dryers, and someone never identified had taken a pair of scissors and gotten halfway through cutting off an ear before the police swarmed.
In most ways, Jordy no longer existed, a lifetime ward of the Arizona Department of Corrections. The only way Jordy would ever be a problem in his life was if Duncan ended up on the inside with him. Duncan hadn’t spared much thought for his older cousin these past months, until seeing that day played out on TV brought it all back. If there was anything weirder than watching four of the worst minutes of your life reenacted by strangers, he didn’t know what it could be…
Unless it was hearing your name during a Tonight Show monologue.
“—on American Fugitives, some trigger-happy guy named Duncan MacGregor—you may remember him from one of the livelier episodes of Cops.”
What, national notoriety on one show hadn’t been enough?
“Well, now Sheppard’s on the lam too, after the deputy that stopped him wound up dead,” Jay Leno was saying. Talking about him. Millions tuned in right now to hear it. And this other name—for some reason he knew this other name.
“Dawn!” he called, and boosted the volume. “Are you listening to this?”
Leno again: “Mister Sheppard, if you’re out there, I’ve seen your Mountain Dew commercial…and while you may be no Robert DeNiro—”
“Wait, I’m confused,” Dawn said from the back hallway. “Robert DeNiro did a Mountain Dew commercial? No way.”
“But this just keeps getting weirder. Now Duncan MacGregor’s got himself a lawyer and he’s suing Jamey Sheppard for identity theft.”
More jokes, fresh topic; they no longer registered. Dawn wandered in and sank down beside him. First time ever that he’d seen her at a total loss for words. Not like her at all. She was a tiny thing, really, short but compact, shapely as hell, and could fill most any room she wanted, usually by force of sarcasm alone.
“What just happened here?” she said, finally.
“I don’t know. I don’t even know if I should feel flattered or insulted.”
“And who else was that he was talking about? That you’re suing?”
“It took a few seconds for the name to sink in,” he told her. “But remember when that episode of Fugitives was over a few weeks ago, how we watched the credits so we could see who played me? Sheppard, that was the name. Jamey Sheppard.”
“And you’re supposed to be suing him because…why?”
“Something about a dead deputy. Wouldn’t that be a hoot, this actor turns out to be more of a hardcase than I ever dreamed of being.” He put his hand across Dawn’s arm. “Listen, I’ll start loading us up to roll, and as long as you’re on your PowerBook finding us someplace to live, how about you try a search on this actor and see what he did. If it’s part of Leno’s routine tonight, it has to have made the news somewhere.”
Dawn shrugged agreement—better than lifting, lugging, and loading—and shoved a clear space at the dining table. She jacked her computer into the phone line, booted up, and began tapping keys as he rushed back and forth with arms full.
“Albuquerque,” she said eventually. “How about there? Dad’s got a couple of furnished places in Albuquerque that it doesn’t look like anything’s pending on.”
“Sure, grab one,” he said in passing.
Gradually their car began to fill—Dawn’s, from her previous normal life, the same Dodge Intrepid she had used to drive him away from the scene of the heist that wasn’t supposed to turn bloody. Strangers until
that moment, and even now he wasn’t entirely sure why she’d done it—wondering if maybe Dawn had grown so bored with her own existence that she decided that day to accept the most outlandish gamble to come her direction.
Eleven months later, it still wasn’t the kind of relationship where they left places in a moving van. A lot would be left behind, along with dirty dishes and lamb bones. Their stereo? Say goodbye. DVD player and plasma TV? Price of freedom. The swords, though—wherever Duncan went, so did they. Most anything else was just stuff, easily replaced on the other end.
“I found him,” said Dawn. “Jamey Sheppard. I found him. And you think you’re having a bad day?” She filled him in on everything that Jay Leno hadn’t bothered with.
“They thought he was me?” Duncan said, and laughed hard enough that he had to put his suitcase down and take a seat.
“And now these producers fighting for the movie rights to his story—that’s my favorite part,” Dawn said. “It’s so American.”
“First this Sheppard guy plays me—okay, he’s gotta eat but I can’t say it did me any favors—then he’s mistaken for me, a deputy gets killed, and now he might get rich off it?” Duncan sighed. “I really am feeling left out of all the good parts.”
“Look on the bright side. This only works out for him if he lives and stays out of prison. Which right now looks like it could be a toss-up.”
Duncan stood again and grabbed the suitcase. “I say forget about Albuquerque,” he told her, and whatever else may have been behind it, it wasn’t the mead talking this time. “Let’s go back to Arizona. I have got to meet this lad.”
And just like that, packing up and moving on ceased to be drudgery, and began to feel exciting again. Like it was supposed to. He was at heart, after all, a highwayman…and it was hard to feel like a highwayman while peeking out from behind a pair of curtains.
12
JASPER and Rupert made it home shortly before one o’clock in the morning—not late by the standards of eligible young bachelors, but plenty long to wait while parked on your own face.
“How in hell do you fall over in a rocking chair?” Rupert said. “I don’t get that.”
Towering above him, Jasper pointed along the length of the chain. “He’s got it good and stretched out. Looks like he tried making a run for it.”
“Making a run for it,” Rupert snorted. “In a rocking chair? That’d be something to see.”
“Well, he sure looks screwed now,” Jasper said. Then, directly to Jamey: “I seen turtles flipped on their backs that don’t look half as screwed as you do.”
“Leave him that way the rest of the night, is what I say. Teach him a lesson.”
Jasper vetoed this with a shake of his head. “Not unless you’re up to another hour of Ma screeching about abusing her chair.” To Jamey: “How long you been down there, anyway?”
“Since Jay Leno’s monologue.”
“I never have known him to be as funny as that, that you keel over chair and all.”
“I wasn’t laughing,” Jamey said into the grimy carpet. “I was pissed. I was trying to get to the TV to smash it.”
The brothers regarded him with expressions that actually resembled respect—that while he was no killer of deputies, they may have underestimated him just the same. Rage, brute force, mindless destruction…these were virtues they could get behind.
“You’re saying Leno went and made you mad…?” Rupert asked. “How come?”
“It was me he was making jokes about tonight.”
Rupert narrowed an eye. “No. No, I don’t believe a word of that.”
“Get a tape of tonight’s show, then. We’ll watch it together. Maybe it’ll set me off again and you’ll get another chance to see me charge the tube and fall over.”
Rupert grumbled. The way Jamey had him pegged, any challenge he couldn’t immediately undertake was unfinished business. He wouldn’t like it. It would weigh upon him. It would flood his world with doubt.
And it was the perfect set-up. Give him another challenge in a few minutes, with no hindrances, and he’d jump at it that much faster.
One more hour, give or take, and Jamey swore he would be out of here.
Jasper clapped a hand onto his brother’s shoulder. “Hold on. Maybe he’s not so full of shit as you think. He is an actor—we heard that much on the news.”
“Yeah, but Leno,” Rupert said. “That’s the big-time.”
“Well, the man’s gotta make jokes about something. He’s on TV every night. Can’t be that easy to keep thinking up all those new jokes. That’s gotta keep a man busy looking for things. You can’t just walk out there and have nothing to say.”
“Yeah,” Rupert whined, “but Leno…”
The debate continued while they set Jamey upright again. He heard a fresh creak from the chair back as the weight shifted, and felt it flex—maybe, Jamey hoped, the hard landing had started a crack along one of the side spindles. If there was anything he had come to know, intimately, it was every creak of this chair. Jasper and Rupert didn’t appear to notice one more.
“You weren’t ever on that show, were you?” Jasper asked while unclipping the choker chain from around his sore neck.
“I was booked for it once,” Jamey lied, not wanting to push it too far. Lies always sounded more truthful when nudged only halfway. “But I got bumped after Robin Williams ran long.”
“Now there’s a guy who’ll make you fall out of your chair.” Jasper paused, holding the chain. “You need to take a whiz before I put this up for now?”
“Nah, I’m doing okay.” Another lie. He could’ve used a trip to the toilet, but if the chair had begun to weaken, they’d be more likely to notice it if they unwrapped him. Not a thing he wanted them focusing on. He liked them just the way they were right now: relaxed, sure of themselves…and growing intrigued by a side of life they would never get any closer to than they were this instant.
They stank, too. Their breath was heavy with the beer they’d guzzled while on the prowl, which mingled with the gritty reek of smoke and cordite. They’d been out taking potshots with the revolver again; he would probably learn where soon enough.
“Jay Leno making jokes about you,” Jasper said. “That’s some kick in the ass.”
Jamey shrugged it off. “Yeah, but you know what they say in Hollywood.” He gave Jasper an insider’s wink. “There’s no such thing as bad publicity.”
Jasper fixed him with a demanding look. “Who says that?”
“Everybody does. Publicity, that’s worth more than gold.”
Jasper squared his shoulders and peered at him. Bitten. Bitten hard. Jamey could see it take him over.
“Tell me something,” Jasper said, lightly, casually, with only a hint of desperate hope. “Who is it you have to know to get into movies?”
“Why, Jasper, why ever do you ask? For yourself, you mean?”
“Who else?” Jasper flipped a hand toward Rupert. “Sure not him, not with that fucked-up mouth of his.”
Rupert looked up in feeble defiance from the couch. “I’ve seen worse.”
“But me, now I still got my looks. And I always thought maybe I could be in movies, if the right people were to see me.”
“And put you in the right parts,” Jamey said. “It’s like you’ve got this Bruce Willis thing happening for you, and you don’t even have to work at it.”
“You mean you see it too?”
“Duuuude…? Do you even have to ask? You’ve got a look that shouts one hundred percent pure adrenaline. If the right people saw you, next thing you know, you’d be packing huge guns and mowing down acres of terrorists.”
“Told you!” Jasper crowed to his brother. “How many times have you heard me say this same exact thing?” Then, to Jamey: “Problem is, these right people, I don’t know them and they don’t know me.”
“It’s a tragedy for sure.” Jamey shook his head, lamenting such injustice to cinema. “The first thing you might want to think about doin
g is moving someplace that’s not quite so cactus-intensive.”
“Hollywood, you mean.”
“Dude. Six months there, eight at most, and that town could be so yours.”
He’d gradually been letting last year’s pop commercial persona creep over him, the blazed eyes and surfer drawl that lingered on perpetual astonishment. All you had to do was think early Keanu Reeves and you were in The Zone. As a tool of persuasion, it was ideal. Radical Dude Number Three would never lie to you. Radical Dude Number Three was guileless. Because Radical Dude Number Three didn’t have a mind so much as a fuel tank. Dump in a can of Dew, and he was your friend forever.
“I heard worse things about my future, that’s for sure,” Jasper said. “Most of it right here under this roof. Mom, you know…she’s already got plans for what to do with my room when I’m off at prison.”
“Hey, that’s when I get your room,” Rupert told him, “and don’t think it’s not overdue!”
“Fat chance of that. ’Cause the way she sees it, you’ll be locked up with me.”
“Dude! This is totally the kind of thing I’m talking about!” Jamey cried. “Every little thing about you here that’s got your mom on your case, in Hollywood, it’s a career asset. Hollywood loves bad boys. Bad boys, they’re the ones”—Jamey popped a big grin, bringing it full circle—“the ones who get the publicity.”
Jasper nodded, following his drift but underwhelmed by such an intangible benefit.
“And the babes,” Jamey added.
Now Jasper’s eyes lit up.
“And the bitchingest drugs you ever did in your life.”
Rupert sat up straighter. “I can be a pretty bad boy too when I want.”
It was almost cruel in its simplicity, this baited hook he’d dangled before them. He had them now. The babes they could imagine on their own. Their lusts, Jamey guessed, would be basic to the point of primitive, not worth a raised eyelash in a town that catered freely to every kink imaginable and many that weren’t. Kind of wasted on them, really.
Instead, it was the idea of controlled substances that had grabbed them. Jamey didn’t doubt that they’d grown up poking their snouts into each can of solvent and industrial adhesive that crossed their path—and probably still did. As far as L.A. was concerned, they likely knew just enough about the place to suspect that it was like some fairy-tale kingdom where model airplane glue ran like sap from the trees.
