Mad Dogs

by Brian Hodge

  In fact, the kids—the few that had come today—were the only ones he did not despise. In their eyes he could see they found him fascinating. Over beers and joints, they would talk about him throughout the rest of this desert autumn. Maybe a dozen of them here today, but by winter ten times as many would be claiming the honors. Telling awed friends how he’d looked into their eyes as he passed by. The Rabin family funeral would be the social event of the season.

  A pity he wouldn’t be able to stick around. Attention like that was the sort of thing that could elevate a man from celebrity to legend.

  And kids these days still needed their heroes.

  ****

  After stopping in a sandwich shop for a pair of subs to go, plus bottles of juice, they had taken her car to the north side of town, then to the trails that wound deep into wilderness. Once you’d left the few main roads, it didn’t take long to get confused. Sedona had grown up around great mounds and peaks, in the shadow of vast red stoneworks sculpted by time into ramparts and spires, towers and ruined cathedrals. The hills were riddled with canyons, with routes that looped and twisted, and Jamey was grateful that Sam had known this place since childhood.

  Out here he felt at ease, invisible. The hikers they encountered seemed entirely caught up in the serenity of the place, or on tangents of their own, tramping along with dowsing rods or looking for just the right tree to hug.

  Yet there was always a risk. He wondered how Duncan did it—like living with a bomb that could blow up at any time.

  They chose a spot off the beaten trail, shaded with ponderosa pines. Without a blanket, they settled directly onto the scrubby grass and unwrapped the sandwiches, uncapped the bottles.

  “Did you know there are more millionaires in Sedona, per square foot, than anyplace else in Arizona?” Samantha said.

  Jamey shook his head no. Although this was information that Duncan would no doubt find interesting.

  Sam gave him a quizzical stare. “It hasn’t really sunk in yet that I’m sitting here with the newest of them.”

  It took him a moment to realize what she meant. Enough to make his head spin, and it wasn’t just those famed Sedona energy vortexes.

  “It hasn’t sunk into my bank account yet, either.”

  “It will.” Sam was looking at him with her wide clear eyes, in that comforting way she would sometimes study you as if knowing things you’d never suspected about yourself. “Trust me on this one.”

  Jamey grinned. “So now you love me for all those zeros to the left of my decimal point.”

  “I loved you flat-broke first.” She flicked sweat from the juice bottle at him. “The zeros are just incentive to stick with it longer than I might’ve.”

  And it was all well and good, her faith in his coming fortune…but it wasn’t as though he’d never heard it before. A callback after this or that audition for some plum role, the director or producer wanting to see him again, and Sam would feel it with absolute certainty, that this was the one where it was all coming together. Before the inevitable news that the role had gone to someone else.

  But he supposed that she was due for a hit sometime.

  “All those zeros must be a relief to your dad, too,” he said.

  “I haven’t told him yet. Remember, he doesn’t even know we spoke the other night. I thought for now it’d be best to keep it that way. And as for everything that’s been on TV, Dad doesn’t believe half the hype he sees there…about anything.”

  “Much less about me.”

  “Much much less.” She stroked his knee. “No, as far as Dad’s concerned, I’d like to hold off until something’s a certainty. Not leave one bit of room for doubt. Maybe break the news by faxing him a copy of that first big check. Money, he respects that.”

  “It doesn’t mean he’ll start calling me ‘son,’ does it? I don’t know if I’m ready for that.”

  “‘I knew that boy was going places,’” Sam dropping her voice to mimic a man’s. “‘I knew it all along.’”

  Spoken, of course, with a daughter’s affection, and willingness to overlook the inveterate biases of her old man.

  ****

  Their deaths hadn’t seemed real until Jordy stepped inside the funeral home and saw the trio of caskets.

  Pulled from solitary, allowed to shower and shave and dress, then escorted to a state car for his first trip past the walls…how could a man do anything other than drink in the day? Chasing clouds instead of watching them pass him by. It was a thirty-mile drive from the gates of Florence to his hometown, and after months of concrete and steel, even the desert looked good enough to kneel on and kiss.

  But now there were no more distractions. To the slow tremolo of organ music, the C.O.s walked Jordy up the aisle of the funeral home. His family’s mourners slid out of the way as if he carried a plague. A wave of murmurs followed in his wake, hands lifting to mouths and mouths tipping to neighbors’ ears.

  Closed casket, of course.

  He wondered what all those whispering magpies behind him would say if they knew he’d struck the match from behind Florence’s walls.

  Jordy shuffled from coffin to coffin, and atop the lid of each metal shell sat a small, framed picture. His mother on the left, his father in the middle, and, finally, Shannon on the right.

  He’d never seen this particular picture of his sister before, and wondered if it had come from her husband. The man she’d walked out on. If Shannon hadn’t waited until he was on the inside to tell him how Brant treated her, Jordy knew he would have gone away for murder much sooner.

  And I wish I had, he told her picture. Because you wouldn’t be here now.

  Just look at her in that photo. It would have been taken two or three years ago, because her hair was longer than it had been in a while, blowing back from her face. She had brown hair that shined red in the sun, and brown eyes, and it must’ve been a good day because she was smiling. Not forced, either. More like she’d been caught glowing with the contentment of a quietly perfect afternoon.

  Jordy lifted his wrists, slowly because of the cuffs, and the guards on either side did the same, giving him enough slack to rest both palms on the lid of Shannon’s casket. Big knotty things, his hands were, scarred from fights and accidents and nights he would never remember. His fingers splayed wide as if he could dig in and reach through the metal, through time, and pull her forward into today. Turn back the clock on the only thing that he could say he ever truly regretted.

  I’m so sorry, he told her photo. You weren’t supposed to get caught up in this too. It was just supposed to be them. The ones who tried to beat the devil out of us and the religion in.

  Jordy thinking again about that husband of hers, probably somewhere behind him even now, and how all Shannon had done was trade a belt for a pair of fists.

  I’m sorry, he told her again, meaning it more than he’d meant anything in his life. But at least wherever you are, there’s nobody hitting you now.

  Jordy released his hold on the casket’s cold shell and nodded to the C.O.s. They took the cue and backed away, led him to the empty section waiting for them along a front pew. They rejoined the other two guards and sat as one, a synchronized move, and when they rested their hands, metal cuffs clattered.

  It should help matters, being up front like this.

  It would give Cro-Mag, wherever he was, ample opportunity to study the back of these guards’ fat shaved necks.

  28

  KRISTOPHE concluded it was too much to hope for that this would get solved the easy way—that Jamey and his fiancée would be eaten by mountain lions back in among those trails. Although there was an argument to be made that, to balance the scales after last night’s wreck, he was due for one big-tittied mother lode of luck.

  He and Blayne had slogged back up to the highway, where they’d caught a ride with a trucker. The unshaven, bleary-eyed man hadn’t seemed to think much of that bright pink cap Blayne wore, even if it did have a gym logo on the front. Kristophe, during t
hose last miles down to Sedona, had made note of landmarks so he could later sketch a map to help them find their way back to the concealed wreck.

  They had gone for the first motel they’d seen, where Blayne, Nordic god that he was, finally gave out atop an unmade bed. And he was the lucky one. There was still Melissa to contend with, Kristophe telling her, Sorry if we run a little bit late…but we had car trouble.

  It had gone over about as well as he’d expected. He held the phone away from his head for the duration of her rant. She could give lessons in mean to a scorpion, this woman, sparing no scorn before telling him when and where Jamey and Samantha were to meet in the morning. And why she’d insisted that they fine-tune their work to give it the appearance of being done by an ultra-right-wing death squad. He had to admit that it would be a useful improvisation. And wondered if Melissa might not have started the internet rumor herself, just to divert attention. Wouldn’t put it past her.

  As a born-again fascist, Kristophe had decided that the morning should be devoted to reconnaissance. Give Blayne more time to recuperate while he scoped out this red Martian landscape, and where Jamey was hiding. All he would need to do was lurk around the park, wait for the rendezvous, then follow a discreet distance behind.

  That he no longer had a car wasn’t the handicap he’d feared, not after he checked the Yellow Pages over breakfast and discovered that he could rent a bicycle at a local shop. There were even advantages to this—able to ride places a car couldn’t go, plus zipping around would be a good way to learn the town’s layout. And what a peculiar little town it was turning out to be, too, beginning with the bike shop, where a clerk with blond dreadlocks asked what had happened to his eye.

  “A most jealous husband,” Kristophe had confided. “But with a sucker punch. Very dishonorable.”

  Not even ten in the morning and he’d already wearied of the question. On the walk here, total strangers had stared and whispered, making him feel as though he might as well have a hump on his back and stand next to a big bell. Nothing like a huge purple eye to draw attention. Eventually he’d concluded it was an excellent disguise for an assassin. Nobody would remember another thing about him.

  Except maybe his accent, which Kristophe realized too late that he should’ve left at the edge of town. Because now the clerk wanted to know all about it, thinking him Austrian and, when corrected, babbling about some German occultist named Adam Weishaupt, and how he and George Washington had been the same man, at which point Kristophe had claimed he was late for an eye appointment and begun backing toward the door…

  …out into a town that surely contained more psychic channelers and crystal merchants, Caucasian Indians and past-life regressionists, than anywhere else on earth. Nothing he hadn’t seen in abundance in L.A.—L.A. had everything, it was just that any one kind of weirdness was diluted by so many other kinds of weirdness. Here it was so pure, all this Tinkerbell shit. The whole balance of nature was out of alignment. You wanted to kill someone just to inject a little Darwinism into the environment. Which made what he and Blayne had come here to do seem like a public service.

  Relishing his new role as the ultra-right-wing death squad savior of Sedona, Kristophe kicked back in the shade, with his clear view of Samantha’s car parked in a lot near the trailhead, and waited for them to return.

  ****

  “I know a graveside’s not the best time or place, but I won’t get another chance and that’s just fine with me,” the man said, hushed and low. “If there’s a Hell, I hope you burn there good and long for everything you led Duncan into.”

  Jordy nodded. “Nice to see you again too, Uncle Will.”

  The C.O.s standing around him stared at the ground. Trying to look invisible. Don’t mind us, go on and tear into each other all you want.

  “Duncan had promise once. A future.” The voice was rattlesnake vicious. “But you took that and threw it down a hole along with the rest of your own life.”

  Yeah, you hold onto that, if it helps you sleep through the night, he almost said, but bit down on it. Didn’t want to alienate Uncle Will any more than he had already. Not if he wanted to keep the man in a talkative mood.

  Until he’d spotted them at the funeral home, Jordy had given no thought to seeing Uncle Will and Aunt Glenda, up from Tucson. Duncan’s mother and the stepfather who had come along when he’d been twelve—for years they’d been no more than specters from another life. A couple of dried-up old beans now, in their late fifties but looking older. Every day of the past year spent waiting to hear if Duncan was captured or dead…this could only have deepened the sun-cut lines in their faces.

  “Your personal feelings toward me aside,” he said, “could you answer one thing for me?”

  “Why should I do that?”

  “Because your wife’s sister was my mom. And where I’ve just come from, where these guys’ll be taking me back to, there’s not been anyone to tell me anything about what’s happened. A fire, that’s all I know.” Not getting very far yet, just a stony glare. Have to stick the tip of the knife in, give it a little jiggle. “Not knowing, is that something you’d wish on your own son? I mean, if you’d had one of your own.”

  Hands stuffed into his pockets, Uncle Will stared at the ground in disgust. Aunt Glenda stood yards away, seeming to not want to even look at him. Will’s breath sighed out in a slow, sour rush as he caved in.

  “It wasn’t just a fire. It was an explosion. Set on purpose—it wasn’t any accident. Not with all the gas nozzles cranked up on the kitchen stove the way they found them. Somebody had to blow out the pilot lights and turn the burners on for the house to fill up the way it did. How he set it off after, I don’t know, they haven’t told us if they know yet.”

  How he set it off…?

  At the funeral home, and now as they gathered for the burial, Jordy still hadn’t seen Cro-Mag. Until now it hadn’t dawned on him that, for all he knew, the guy could have gotten arrested for this, just hadn’t yet admitted who’d put him up to it.

  “‘He’ who?” Jordy said. “You’re saying they got somebody for it?”

  Uncle Will nodded toward the ground. “That Brant your sister married. You knew she left him, didn’t you? Left him and went back home for a while?”

  “I heard that, yeah.”

  “Well, you don’t see him here today, do you? That’s because they’ve still got him locked up under suspicion.”

  “But he hasn’t confessed yet?”

  “Not yet,” Uncle Will told the ground. “But he’s got no alibi for the other night, is what they tell me, and not much memory of it, either. I guess he’s been doing a lot of drinking since Shannon went home. Put that all together, what’s it look like to you?”

  Jordy pulled in a slow breath, eased it out while gazing toward the open graves. Three caskets lined up and ready to go, mounds of freshly dug earth covered with green tarps. Lots of sniffling people, most of whom appeared to have grown used to his being here, town pariah, invisible now despite the yellow coveralls.

  “That Brant,” Jordy said. “I never liked him.”

  “Like you’re any better?” Uncle Will raised his head, looking him in the eye as old grudges crept back into his voice. “So now you know. And if you’ll excuse me, your aunt and I are going to be moving as far away from you as we can, and I never want to set eyes on you again.”

  “After today, I don’t expect you’ll have to,” Jordy said.

  Remarkable, the turns that things could take. Getting himself out of prison and his brother-in-law put in, both in the same move—now that was slick. Throw in his relief that Cro-Mag was still on the loose, and he could’ve danced on a grave or two.

  Instead he kept his legs still, saving them until it was time to run.

  ****

  “I guess I haven’t told you yet that a reporter from People called me yesterday, have I?” Sam said.

  “Must’ve slipped your mind.” Jamey felt a momentary jolt. Maybe it was time for a call to Sherr
y for another update. “I hope you were kind, all things considered.”

  “I told him I thought his call was a little premature, and could we try this again later? I promised I wouldn’t talk to anybody but him. But it was obvious he was hoping for something more immediate.”

  They were on the move again now, a hand-in-hand stroll along one of the creeks that splashed down from the mountains north of town.

  “How would People magazine have known to go after you in the first place?”

  “I didn’t ask. But, probably, either one of your friends or mine ratted us out. You know they’ve got to be coming out of the woodwork. People claiming to be your best friend. Anybody you’ve ever worked with.”

  “Radical Dudes One, Two, and Four, for sure.”

  A few silent paces of nothing but the creek and every bird within miles. Then came such a change in the tone of Sam’s voice he thought he’d missed something.

  “I didn’t like it,” she said. “That call. Coming from a magazine named People, it’s funny that it didn’t leave me feeling much like one. A person. It was more like I was an appendage.”

  Jamey squeezed her hand, slipped his arm around her waist to pull her closer, leaned his head against her shoulder. So much was coming up faster now than he’d ever expected, and this was no exception—the size of his shadow, and Samantha being made to feel eclipsed by it. As if her existence didn’t count apart from his own. He’d never wanted to do this to her, but he supposed the only way to prevent it was to fail.

  One thing he could never let Sam know about his agent was Sherry’s reaction last spring to the news of their engagement. She hadn’t met Sam yet, didn’t know her, had nothing against her other than that she was a nobody—which, for some, was just another word for leper. Sherry saying to him, Why would you want to do a thing like that now, Jamey? You’ve got a career that might finally be about to break. Telling him, Hot young actors get more publicity when they’re seen with hot young actresses. So why now, of all times, would you want to go dipping into the population?