by Brian Hodge
He took a personal inventory in the men’s room. By any standard, he was a mess. He’d not had a shower or a shave since Wednesday morning, still wore the same jeans and khaki shirt. His scalp itched from his own oils. Dirt, too, and plenty of it. He cranked the faucet, cold water only, and pumped thick pink soap from the dispenser to scrub whatever he could, wadded some toilet paper and used it to scour the scummy film on his teeth.
Finished, Jamey stepped back outside to drip-dry. The sun was alone today, furious in a sky devoid of clouds, a horizon-to-horizon span of cornflower blue. He’d used the sun to navigate after awakening in the stolen truck. Didn’t know how or why it had come to him but it had: that the autumn equinox was days away, close enough to look at the spot on the horizon where this morning’s sun had risen and know it was due east. Nothing that would ever have occurred to him in L.A.
He wandered back to the picnic tables and started creaking through some yoga stretches and sequences he’d learned from Samantha, to fight the soreness and kinks.
Easy to say now, with everything on the verge of resolution, but he wondered if there hadn’t been some advantage to all this. In one of his classes at the Strasberg Institute, the coach had stressed how the depth of the actor was the degree to which the character came alive. No one could say he hadn’t deepened a bit over the past few days—if nothing else, gaining a whole new understanding of fear. And death. No one had ever died in front of him before, violently or otherwise. And never in his life had he felt such rage at another human being that, just for an instant, he wanted to kill.
That was the mutant gene about artists: Everything was material to draw on one day.
Loosened up, Jamey returned to the phone and called Samantha to fill her in.
“I was a joke on Jay Leno last night, did you know that?” he said.
“No!” she cried. “Was he brutal?”
“It felt that way at the time. But, you know, with the chains off, it doesn’t feel nearly as bad.”
“Strange as it sounds, all this could be the biggest boost your career ever had.”
“Five-minute talk show slot, at least. What do you want to bet Sherry’s already trying to get me booked.”
“She wouldn’t be much of an agent if she wasn’t.” Then, the first cloud in the sky: “Maybe that’s why your sister called this morning. Maybe she saw it last night too.”
“Melissa,” he said flatly. “Melissa called you.”
“First thing, just about.”
“What did she want?”
“She was worried about you, what do you think?”
“Worried. That’ll be the day. How’d she even find you? I never gave her your parents’ number. We invited her to the wedding as a formality, her and that German wanna-be she’s living with. I expected her to have an excuse why they wouldn’t be making it, she had one ready to go, and that was that. That’s the way it’s always been between us.”
“No law says it has to be that way between you forever. And as for how Melissa found me, she said she went through every Emerson in Flagstaff until she had the right one. Now, doesn’t that demonstrate some concern?”
“A town of forty-some thousand, how many calls is that?”
“Come on, Jamey, don’t nitpick this.” Sam using her gentle voice of diplomacy. Peacemaker, could never stand the thought that some people just didn’t get along. Okay, so it was one of the reasons he loved her, knowing that here was someone who would never allow the two of them to go to bed mad. “Do you not want to accept that this could’ve been a wake-up for her, hearing that her brother could’ve been killed? Don’t you think that made her stop and think? Made her wonder how it would feel if something had happened to you, how she’d like spending the rest of her life with that on her conscience?”
“What conscience?” Jamey asked. Really, a set-up like that, it was too easy.
“Well, flip it around, then. Because I know you have one. What if it was you hearing that Melissa could be dead? Wouldn’t you be wishing you could go back and make things different?”
Since she put it that way: “Yes,” he said softly, no rebuttals.
“Then give her the benefit of that doubt,” Sam said. “She did call. It won’t hurt to let her know you’re okay. What’s the worst that could happen—you realize you don’t have to hate each other forever?”
“Did she leave you her number? It’s…not one I know off the top of my head.”
She read it to him. He fingered it in a thin layer of dust atop the phone, then retreated to one of the picnic tables to think it over.
Soon the rest stop was doing business, a family pulling in off the two-lane blacktop. A mother, a father, three kids. Subtract one of the boys and it would be the same configuration from his childhood when all four Sheppards would hit the road once a year. At least until he and Melissa had begun to grow out of that, getting older, with their own lives to lead.
The summer vacation when he was twelve, trekking from Portland to the Colorado Rockies by way of Utah, had always been the standout. Meeting a wolf outside a diner in which a scene from a movie had been filmed—it was the first time he’d felt as though he’d come away from a trip with something of his very own.
It’s a kick, ain’t it? that big-bellied Navajo had told him. Sittin’ there, in the company of something that could kill you. Kill you real easylike. But chooses not to. Or not today, at least.
And then Melissa, only eight years old but with awareness beyond her years, intuiting that he had encountered something special, trying to blacken the day for him: If I had a gun, I’d shoot it. If I had a gun, I’d shoot you. He’d refused to let her win. Had taken that day of wolf and petroglyphs, and pressed it into his heart like a rose pressed into a book, a reminder that the world could come together for him.
He had never known what he’d done to offend her so. There had been no fight over money, no friend he’d turned against her—it predated such concerns. What was he supposed to apologize for, then: being born first? Being born at all? From the time she’d learned enough about the world to realize that not everyone had older brothers, it seemed as though she had begrudged him existence itself.
But now he was better equipped to put himself in her place. As an older brother, he could hardly have been ideal. Not one of those championship studs who would go through school ahead of her and pave the way so her own passage was charmed by association. If he’d grown up invisible, distinguished by nothing, maybe Melissa could have lived with that. Instead, he had limped. With a foot that had come in like a crooked tooth, he’d clumped along year after year until the orthopedists had it fixed.
Just try following in those footsteps.
It excused nothing, of course.
But when it came to family, he supposed the hardest thing to do was remember that you weren’t twelve anymore, and it had been a long time since your sister was eight, and that it was pointless to continue behaving as though you were.
He left the picnic table and, now that he had the place to himself again, he went for the phone.
15
THREE days had passed since he’d set foot in that morgue, and even now Russell Pellegrino couldn’t get the smell out of his nostrils. He’d worked at his nose with cotton swabs until its membranes were bleeding and raw, but nothing had helped. That sharp reek of formaldehyde, it burned him still, as though a part of him were dead now too.
“Who was that?”
Felt like maybe he’d be smelling it forever. As permanent as a scar, a lingering souvenir of the night he had walked into a county morgue and made certain that the M.E. would do the right thing for a fallen hero.
“Russ, who was that on the phone just now?”
Marvin Boyle was to be eulogized and buried this afternoon. A countyful of uniforms turning out to pay their respects, and likely some from the surrounding jurisdictions, as well. It would have been Pellegrino’s first hours back in his own uniform since before Marvin was killed, one day off like any other
turning into a week’s leave. Sheriff Beech telling him to take some extra days, that he knew Marvin had been like a father to him.
“Okay, fine. Don’t answer. Be that way.”
If anyone had told him yesterday that he would risk missing any part of this afternoon’s farewell, it would have seemed unthinkable. But that was before this higher calling. Marvin would understand. Marvin would approve.
“But I’d like to know why you think you need to wear your vest to a funeral. You’re expecting trouble at a funeral with nothing but cops around?”
Only after he finished cinching the side straps of the Kevlar vest did he turn in the closet doorway and look at her sitting on the unmade bed. Cheryl Pellegrino. For two years she’d had his last name, but by now, if anyone had asked how he’d let that happen, he wouldn’t have had an answer. Cheryl wasn’t dressed for a funeral either, still in her trashy morning rags, cutoff jeans and a faded cut-down T-shirt and bare feet. You didn’t go to funerals looking the way she did this morning. The big purple shiner puffing one eye halfway shut—he wasn’t sure how that had happened, either. Walked into a door, maybe. Clumsy. Everybody knew she was clumsy that way.
“Oh. He remembers he has a wife, finally.” Cheryl leaned back onto one hand and dragged on a cigarette. Trying to quit but going at it heavy again these past few days. “But how long will his memory last—that’s the question.”
“Just do me a favor and shut up and listen. If anybody asks, and somebody probably will,” he told her, “I was here with you the whole time. Never left the house.”
“I don’t get it,” she said. “You’re not going to the funeral?”
“I took a couple of your sleeping pills last night and this morning you let me go on sleeping.”
“Day of Marvin Boyle’s funeral and people’re supposed to believe you slept in past noon? I don’t much think a thing like that’ll fly, Russ.”
“Then you better work extra hard to be convincing about it.”
He could feel her eyes on his back, following him to the pine dresser as he knelt over the bottom drawer where he kept his handguns: among others, his dad’s service revolver; a few collector’s pieces, like a Civil War Navy Colt that had been passed down from his grandfather; a couple of disposables.
He chose one of the latter, a small .32 revolver he’d salvaged from the car of a Texas kid passing through, bound for parts unknown with two bricks of heroin. The kid had dipped into the stash and OD’d in the toilet stall at a Shell station. Try to trace a weapon like that and its history would usually dead-end years ago. So it never hurt to have one around in case of emergencies. He’d usually carried it with him on patrol, in an ankle holster, should he ever need a throw-down, a piece to slip into the hand of a dead suspect who’d been too fast on the draw with what turned out to be, say, a wallet. After today, this one would never be seen again. A few seconds of heavy use, then by evening it would be sunk into the silt and mire of the Colorado River.
“You gonna at least tell me who it was that just called and put such a change in your plans?” Cheryl asked.
“Anything you need to know, I’ve told you already. But the part about you sitting there with your mouth shut, how about we go over that one more time.”
She sat. She fumed. She gave him the peace he needed.
Before he closed the drawer, Pellegrino removed one more inheritance. A hand-me-down from the man who’d given him his life, his name, his calling. While exploring who his dad had been, in the numb weeks following his fatal wreck, Pellegrino had discovered them in a drawer not unlike this one. Even more so than his dad’s firearms, these had fascinated him most: a pair of sap gloves, tightly-stitched black leather with four ounces of molded lead pocketed into each palm. Wear them and you threw a monster of a punch. He’d been thirteen when he found them, and they’d fit loosely on his hands. It had been a tremendous source of pride when after a few more years his fists had grown to fill them.
He took only the left one. Wanted to keep his shooting hand free.
A lot of men wouldn’t be taking the time to do this properly. Get the kind of call he’d just gotten and out the door they’d fly. They might remember to use a gun they could toss afterward, but in this day and age there was more to it than ballistics. He was taking equal care in the clothing he chose, items he would never miss, because all of it—shirt, pants, shoes, everything but the sap glove—would later be bundled in plastic and burned, the ashes scattered. If it came down to it, if anyone asked and Cheryl couldn’t sell the lie, they could question him all they wanted, could give him plenty of hard looks, but they would never be able to pilfer his bedroom closet and find fibers to match any that might have been tweezed from the corpse of Jamey Sheppard.
As for Sheppard’s supposed innocence, Pellegrino was nowhere near ready to sign off on that yet. Especially after the ballistics match on the other night’s drive-by, Marvin’s sidearm used to blast away at snowbirds in their trailers.
Seemed like the state had been awfully quick to clear Sheppard on the first charge, but whether or not they were right meant as little as Marvin Boyle making the wrong ID on him to begin with. A man didn’t deserve to be killed because he’d made a mistake in identity. You listen to his apology and respect his authority. You don’t scuffle with him until he winds up dead.
A balance had to be restored here before Pellegrino could begin to feel like facing that freshly filled grave.
Thanks, then, were due to a friend on the job up in Mohave County, who looked at life in much the same way. Who had found the nearest phone and given his brother-in-arms to the south a quick call. Guess what just came over the radio, and from then on it just got better. Sheppard alone and sitting still on Route 93, untouchable by the locals while he waited for the guy from the DPS to show.
How far away is he coming from? Pellegrino had asked, and liked what he heard: while the guy worked out of the Wickenburg substation, he lived down closer toward Phoenix. Had a bit of a drive ahead of him.
Close. It would be close. But Pellegrino could get there first. Do the job, in-out, two minutes or less. Briefly he’d considered taking Sheppard from the scene—he was, after all, expecting a ride—and doing it elsewhere, some desolate spot where no one would look for him. But that would introduce another level of risk and complication. Travel time, very vulnerable. Worse, fiber evidence again, an unavoidable two-way exchange between Sheppard and the car. No, better to do it quick and clean, with no contact except between bullets and skull.
Cheryl’s eyes still following him, Pellegrino packed a tote bag with a fresh change of clothes and shoes, then stuffed the sap glove and the .32 inside. He popped a ball cap onto his head, over that arrow of close-cropped hair. He slipped on his dark green aviator shades and assessed himself in the dresser mirror.
Staring back was a man of such anonymity that he scarcely knew who it was.
Exactly what he wanted to see.
He left Cheryl sitting on the bed while he headed to the garage and grabbed the last things he needed…a can of kerosene, a couple of road flares.
****
As soon as Melissa realized that the call was from her brother, she put it on the speakerphone, in case he said anything that begged to be shared with the rest of the room. A bit chancy, perhaps, if it caused Kristophe and his slab-like friend Blayne to start howling, but it was better they both experience the sort of pushing-thirty never-was they’d be dealing with, and anyway, she stood ready to smack the two of them into silence as required.
She needn’t have worried. Jamey sounded too worn out to make any embarrassingly heartfelt attempts at fence mending. Mostly he listened, and it was her own performance that elicited the grins.
Jamey, are you okay? I’ve been so worried for you.
No, I really have, I really really have.
And could her delivery of one-liners this precious have been any more melodramatic? Hardly. By the end of the call she’d be ready to play Evita.
I mean,
even though we’ve had our differences, you’re still my big brother and I’m still your little sister, and when it hits you that you’ve come so close to losing that, what you realize you might’ve been taking for granted for so long, it does something to you, it really does—
Right. Made you want to run out for champagne and pointy hats.
—especially now that you’re about to get married, because I’d be lying if I said I’ve never wondered what it would be like to have a sister, and now that I have the chance to find out, what did I do, I almost blew it.
Laying it on so thick violins should have been playing. Still, she took care not to oversell. A person learned a lot working for Mickey Coffman, including the merits of pushing yourself right up against the threshold of caricature. Overkill would’ve been to blurt something so false that the entire pretense would collapse. Something like, for instance, I love you, Jamey.
When she sensed him weakening on the other end, felt him start to go nice and gooey, she started to dig for useful facts: where was he this instant, what was he going to do next, how long would it take to get his situation straightened out, where would he be the rest of the weekend?
Because, if you’re still planning on going through with the wedding after everything that’s happened, then maybe I could…y’know…I could make plans to be there after all.
Trust—Jamey’s first few stumbling steps down the road to reconciliation. With a flourish of her arm, she whipped a rigid finger at Kristophe to cue him to start taking notes. And saved her bows for when the call was over and the guys sat applauding.
“Delicious,” Kristophe said. “I almost would believe you to be sincere and here I sat watching you with my two own eyes.”
Melissa gave a curtain-call smile. “There was only so much acting talent to go around in the family, and I think everyone here realizes now who got most of it.”
