by Brian Hodge
They begged. How they begged to know: What was the best high he’d ever had? Jamey balked, then pretended that they’d finally worn him down.
“Shooting up with marijuana,” he said.
They looked understandably skeptical.
“No,” said Rupert. “No, I don’t believe a word of that.”
Jamey smiled. “Yeah, you’re right. Just forget it. It’s not the buzz for you.”
“Now hold on,” Jasper told his brother. “You don’t know everything and I’ve seen you prove it lots of times. I wanna hear this.” To Jamey: “But…shooting up with weed? Okay, you got leaves, right. But how’re you supposed to get ’em in your arm? I don’t see how that’d work. Too big to fit in a needle. Plus I don’t think you live long if you got solid things in your blood.”
“Stroke,” Rupert nodded. “That’s how Grandpa had his stroke.”
“Duuuudes.” Jamey sighed, rolling his eyes. “When you’re toking the ganja, you don’t jam a fistful of burning leaves down your windpipe, do you? No, you just suck down the smoke. Well, same kind of thing when you shoot up with it.”
“Then how do you get the smoke inside the needle?” Jasper asked.
“Would you forget about the smoke!” On the verge of breaking character, Jamey took a deep breath to restore himself as the voice of beach blanket wisdom. “Dudes. There’s no smoke involved, okay? What you do is, you take a handful of weed and you drop it in a pan of water on the stove and you simmer it awhile, right? Then all that same primo stuff you’d be sucking down if you were blowing a jay instead, it soaks into the water. Then you take the water, and that’s what you shoot up with.”
They looked at him as though he’d just handed them the Holy Grail.
“That’s brilliant,” Jasper whispered in awe.
Rupert bobbed his head. “Me first.”
And for the first time all night, Radical Dude Number Three’s grin was, like, totally sincere.
****
Denver was a memory, Colorado Springs was a dim glow in the rear-view, and they were closing on Pueblo. Dawn Kellerman couldn’t say she was sorry to see them fade into past tense, because this meant something new. As yet unknown, but new, and sometimes that could be all that mattered.
She’d been the one to start out behind the wheel, had had less to drink earlier than Duncan. Last thing they needed, getting stopped on the way out of the city because someone couldn’t hold it steady between two white lines.
Ever since Phoenix, her car had been equipped with a police scanner; socket its power plug into the cigarette lighter and the netherworld was yours for the listening. Duncan had tuned in for any crosstalk of attempted scalpings until they were out of jurisdiction, then switched it off and kissed her and curled into the seat to sleep.
After eleven months, she could still find it amazing that he would sleep in front of her. No one had ever invested that kind of trust in her before. Even from the very first afternoon and night, when he’d had no promises that she wouldn’t come to her senses and pick up a phone. She could’ve said anything to squirm out of it and no one would’ve taken his side: He kidnapped me. He raped me. He said he’d kill me. Me and my whole family. I had no choice. Thank God it’s all over now.
Instead, he’d merely cleaned up and bandaged his face, then slept on her sofa.
Deep sleep, too. All along. Duncan was no snorer—it was as though he threw a switch and turned completely off for the duration. Never a sound but his slow and even breathing, and if he ever had nightmares he kept them to himself.
Sometimes she wondered if something might not be wrong with her because she had no nightmares of her own about the day their paths had crossed. Until that day, the only dead people she’d ever been close to had first been prettied up by the best that mortuary science had to offer. Violence had only been something in movies, and firearms less frightening than photogenic.
And so, when they’d come in to rob the salon—Jordy Rabin with his shotgun and his cousin Duncan MacGregor with his pistol—really, it was as if she had seen it all before. She’d known it was going to go bad because that’s what happened at times like this. Thirty people packed into a place, lots of mirrors to shatter and chrome to reflect muzzle flash and pristine white walls and floor tiles to turn into splattery Jackson Pollock paintings…with all that, of course one dimwit out of thirty was destined to do something stupid to ignite the situation. In retrospect, Dawn thought she understood this a lot better than Duncan had.
The best she could remember—because when these things happened, they happened fast and turned into puzzles that could fit together eight or ten different ways—the dimwit had been a bitchy-looking woman so haughty that she refused to believe she could be relieved of her valuables in the same chair she was being relieved of her split ends.
On the one hand, who could blame her? Because who robs hair salons? On the other hand, while awaiting her turn with the scissors—actually, waiting for the receptionist to get back from the bathroom so she could check in—Dawn recognized a peculiar genius at work here. Why not rob hair salons…at least the upscale ones? Anyplace where people wouldn’t blink at the price of a $150 haircut, plus tip, was someplace into which they would wear diamonds, carry rolls of walking-around cash, and use credit cards whose emergency phone numbers they’d been too lazy to jot down. Plus it wasn’t a place a thief would expect much resistance.
And yet within moments she had known: This is going to go bad.
The bitchy-looking woman, the one most likely to put everyone else at risk—Dawn had never seen her before, but she knew the type. Bony thin, with a glittery rock on a hand she liked to wave around, a vicious mouth with downturned corners, and a neckful of stringy tendons: Once upon a time she’d had looks enough to marry well and had done nothing for the next thirty years but pick at salads, spend her husband’s money, and reclassify her birth as royal.
In short, Dawn was looking at a doppelganger of her own mother.
Two minutes into the robbery and so far, so good, with pockets and purses emptied into a pair of satchels. Dawn was even getting a kick out of watching Duncan MacGregor. She’d seen the good-cop-bad-cop routine played out by a thousand actors; had never thought about it working for the other side before. Despite his ski mask, Duncan MacGregor was solicitous, even courtly, with ready smiles and reassuring winks for all. Once, swear to God, he actually bowed. He told an older woman who’d just gotten a dye job how great the color looked on her; at another station he flirted two-for-one by telling the stylist that she did great work.
For sure it was a welcome counterbalance to his cousin, who bristled with pinprick eyes and a clear shortage of patience.
Two and a half minutes in: Duncan MacGregor kissed the back of the rich bitch’s hand while trying to slide the glittery rock off her finger. She was having none of it, and balled up her fist and let the diamond lead the way as she punched him through the loose weave of the ski mask. He stumbled back, hand clenched under his eye.
On her throne, the woman smirked. Not the type to surrender anything without a fight. And from Duncan, she didn’t get one. He had a pistol in his other hand, but by now Dawn was suspecting that he didn’t regard it as much more than a prop.
“That’ll be enough of that shit,” Jordy Rabin told the woman. “Now let’s have the fucking ring.”
“I will swallow it and pick it from the toilet before I turn it over to someone like you,” she said.
So Jordy grabbed her by the wrist and jammed the shotgun inside the crook of her elbow and blew her arm in two. The mirror behind her went in a cascade of blood and glass. Then he shook her forearm at her, before her huge and shell-shocked eyes, as her stump gouted over the stylist’s counter.
“I guess I’ll be taking the bracelets, too, then,” he told her.
Everyone started screaming at once. Dawn had already leveled herself out on the reception area floor, had been ready to drop for at least a minute. Call it intuition, and call it smart…
because Jordy Rabin lost all restraint and began to fire at random.
Until Duncan—twenty feet away from her and both of them on the tiles—wiped blood from his eye and poked his gun toward his cousin and shot him in the thigh. Duncan wobbled to his feet as Jordy fell, then as Duncan kicked the shotgun from his cousin’s hand he aimed down and let him have another one, in the ribs this time. She could hear Jordy grunt with the impact, a sound like a kicked dog.
For the first time, Dawn realized that, of everyone here, she was closest to the exit. And that no one was paying attention to her. Entrance, exit, one and the same—a simple fire door that opened into a stairwell. It was part of the salon’s second-story exclusivity. Walk-ins couldn’t just stroll in off the sidewalk.
She slithered on her belly and slipped away. One door, a flight of steps, and all seemed jarringly normal with the world again. There: the sound of Phoenix traffic.
She was on the landing between floors, halfway to freedom, when the salon door banged open and he came barreling through, got a few steps down before he noticed her, then froze. The pistol dangled from one hand, the shotgun from the other. Instant recognition—he knew she wasn’t only now arriving. He knew she’d been up there, even if things had gone bad before he’d gotten a chance to flash a rakish grin and add her credit cards to the kitty.
He tucked the pistol into his belt to free one hand and tugged off the ski mask. Staring at her with his hair sweaty and awry, his diamond-cut cheek bleeding. She knew, with the same intuition as before, that she had nothing to fear from him. He wouldn’t be the hostage-taking type. He wasn’t even carrying the satchels they’d been using to collect their plunder.
“So how does it feel,” she blurted, “to fuck up your whole life that fast?”
“It wasn’t supposed to go that way. It never did before.” In the stark acoustics of the stairwell, his voice sounded brittle and shaky. “I don’t know why he did that.”
“I ask, because mine,” she said, “my life, I’ve been slow and steady about fucking it up. I was just wondering what it’s like to get it all done with at once.”
“I think you’ve got the wrong idea,” he said. “You don’t just wake up one day and here you are.”
As for what happened next, Dawn never knew for certain why she’d done it. Maybe it was that godawful bridesmaid dress hanging inside her closet door. Or the three other godawful bridesmaid dresses in the back of her closest, still waiting to go to charity drop-offs.
Check in on the blessed unions that had caused these wastes of chiffon, and the tally was glum: one divorce, one separation, one duo clinging to the life support of counseling. Twice she’d been hit on by the grooms within the first year. Plenty of single friends, too, except you could find deeper souls in movie zombies. They all acquired like fiends, trumping each other with credit card bills as if shoving chips toward the middle of a poker table, then sat around waiting to be happy. They whined that nobody loved them, or because somebody did but it was the wrong somebody. They whined about careers moving too slow, or too fast, about parents who forced subsidies on them when they really wanted to be autonomous. They whined because they had breath in their lungs, and worst of all, Dawn feared she was turning into a whiner, too, because she’d yet to take a single step to distance herself from any of them.
You don’t just wake up one day, this thief had just said, this fugitive, and here you are.
What she did next, Dawn couldn’t have done it if his remorse had been any less than what she saw in his eyes. Nor if it had been any greater, if he’d sunk blubbering to the stairs. If he’d whined.
“Do you need a ride someplace?” she asked.
“Away,” he said. “Away’s good.”
She waited for him on the landing, where he left the shotgun standing in a corner. She almost asked why he didn’t wipe the areas he’d touched, then thought better of it. Stupid question, after he’d just left someone lying on the floor up there with no incentive to safeguard his identity. He untucked his shirt to hide the pistol as they walked down the last flight of stairs, then into the sun, toward her car.
The police visited her apartment the next morning. Just routine follow-up, the detectives were quick to inform her—her name had been listed in the salon’s calendar yesterday, her appointment booked at the same time as the shooting, but they had no record of her giving a statement at the scene.
Dawn told them she’d missed the appointment, had had a hangover from the night before and had overslept into midafternoon. Maybe her name was in the book, but she knew it wouldn’t show that she’d checked in—during those first couple of minutes, the receptionist had been away from the desk. So let history be rewritten: I wasn’t there. Lucky me. Really makes you stop and think, you know?
And after they had left, she locked the door behind them, then walked barefoot back to the bedroom and opened the closet door and told Duncan MacGregor and his bandaged cheek that they were gone.
A few minutes later, over coffee in the kitchen, curiosity got the better of her:
“Suppose they’d known you were here,” Dawn said. “They saw something after they came in and got suspicious. Or somebody yesterday saw you getting in my car and got my license plate number. Or one of the neighbors noticed you come in and recognized you from TV later and tipped them off.”
“Or you told them,” he said. Covering all the bases.
“Or I told them. However it happened, suppose they knew. And went back there after you. Would you have shot them?”
He stared into his coffee awhile. Added more sugar, cream. Stirring, stalling. Yesterday’s second biggest surprise was that he had so readily pulled the trigger on his partner to stop him in mid-slaughter. Until that moment she’d been convinced that Duncan carried his gun the way dancers carried a cane—just part of the act. She hadn’t learned that he’d shot his own cousin until hours later, after he had slept awhile, then gotten up in a more talkative mood.
“I don’t know if I would’ve or not,” he finally answered.
“How about use me as a shield?” Dawn said. “Would you have done that?”
“No,” his answer immediate and firm. “Out of the question.”
“Okay, suppose they’d gone back there after you,” she tried, wondering if she wasn’t getting to the root of something, “but they hadn’t both been men. Would you have considered shooting a policewoman?”
“What is it with these questions?” Duncan began to squirm in the kitchen chair. “If I wanted a bunch of questions I could’ve stuck around yesterday and waited to be arrested.”
“Let’s call it your cab fare because you didn’t have to.” Dawn leaned forward onto her elbows; he sighed and nodded. “So? Would you have shot a policewoman?”
“No,” he said. “I wouldn’t’ve.”
She drew back, satisfied. “Looks like we’ve found your Achilles’ heel, haven’t we? So women are strictly off-limits, is that it? We’re up on some sort of pedestal that says, ‘Don’t shoot, don’t touch’? Our suffering isn’t as good a means to an end as, say, the nosebleed of the average gas station attendant you might punch to hurry him up with the cash register?”
Duncan was looking at her as though she’d just spit in his coffee. “I would’ve thought maybe you’d be a little relieved to know that, instead of…” He shook his head, giving up. “This is a really peculiar conversation.”
“I’m just sitting here trying to figure out this guy who’s decided he won’t take any shit from the world, and he’ll grab whatever he wants instead of playing by the rules, except…” She was starting to laugh. “I mean, send in two geriatric nuns with rulers and you’d let them take you down, wouldn’t you?”
“Would you feel better if I said I’d pistol-whip them?”
“Not really, but you should at least appear to consider it as an option.”
Absently, he scraped at the bottom of his mug with his spoon. And there it was, the first grin she’d seen from him since before his cousi
n had started shooting: “How big are the rulers?”
“Yardsticks. Big as two-by-fours.”
“In that case,” he shrugged, “I’m cracking the skulls of those rosary-counting bitches.”
They laughed together over their coffee, but for Duncan it went on longer than it should have, the sound tinged with desperation. He rested his head against both hands and stared into his mug as if it could tell him how he had ended up here.
Dawn thought there was a sweetness about it, in an archaic way: his code, or however he thought of it. Last night she had made him a bed on the sofa and that was right where he’d stayed. Relatives excluded—most, anyway—she couldn’t think of one guy she knew who could’ve been trusted not to come tapping at her door in the night. She appealed, Dawn had come to suspect, on a level that wasn’t entirely healthy. Her small stature brought out the latent pedophile in guys, while the birthdate on her driver’s license meant she was a street-legal way of indulging the fantasy. Soon as they met her, they wanted to lift their hand to hers, palm-to-palm, show how they could dwarf her, enfold her. It was the acid test, and as soon as they failed she would tune them out like a radio station playing a song she’d grown sick of hearing.
“Don’t you have a job or something to get to?” he raised his head to ask. “The rent for this place can’t be cheap.”
“I work for my father, in his real estate office. What’s he going to do, fire me? And there is no rent, because the condo, he owns it. Along with about eight hundred others across the southwest.” She rolled her eyes so he would know she wasn’t all that impressed with it. Or maybe he would think she was an ungrateful snot with no clue of how most people lived. “How about your father, what’s he like?”
