Mad Dogs

by Brian Hodge

  Sweep the blinds from his path, step through, slide the door shut behind him, all in one fluid motion…first he saw it happen, then he made it happen. Registering dual targets near the kitchen while he let the gym bag fall away, like drawing the machine-gun from a big holster. Smooth perfection. He curled his other hand around the barrel-grip, snapped the muzzle from one body to the other…and then all three of them stood looking at one another.

  “You’re not Jamey,” he told the imposter.

  “If there’s one thing I wish,” the guy said, defiant and loud about it, “it’s that you wankers would start learning to tell the two of us apart.”

  Who were these people? Then he remembered Melissa telling him that her brother had been spotted with the outlaw he’d been mistaken for. Last weekend, long enough ago to forget they might still be together.

  Maybe he should’ve been keeping up with current events.

  “You’re not Jamey, I see this now.” Kristophe said. “So where is he?”

  “They went out to a movie,” the woman told him.

  “How long ago?”

  “Shouldn’t you be asking when they’ll be back?” she said. “I mean, isn’t that the relevant issue?”

  “I was getting to it!” Kristophe huffed. Making him raise his own voice now—these people did not respect him as they should. “Okay. When will they return?”

  “About…eleven-thirty, didn’t they say?”

  Kristophe checked the electric clock sitting on the kitchen bar. Scheiss! Ninety minutes to wait with these tiresome and disrespectful people?

  The outlaw shrugged. “Unless they have that late dinner they mentioned.”

  “Oh, right.” The short woman turned to stare. “What happened to your eye?”

  “You never mind that.”

  The expedient thing would be to kill them both. But he couldn’t make all that noise and then sit around waiting. A pair of swords was leaning against one end of the sofa, which would be quiet enough…but the thought of cutting this girl’s throat made him queasy. The thought of cutting any part of either of them made him queasy. It was bad enough to look at something like that split down Blayne’s scalp without having to carve it yourself. Pulling a trigger was like using a remote control. Putting a blade to skin, though…so close, so personal. They’d scream, they’d squeal, they’d bleed all over him. And the neighbors still might hear enough to phone the police.

  “Wicked gun,” the outlaw said. “That’s one of those Die Hard kind of guns?”

  “Yes,” Kristophe told him. “German manufacture. Excellent craftsmanship. Very deadly. So don’t bother me while I’m thinking.”

  “What’s to think about? You fucked up,” the girl said.

  “Dawn,” the outlaw warned her.

  “Well, who is he, anyway? He looks like a terrorist, but there’s only one of him, and he’s got that horrible eye.”

  “I once fought with the Baader-Meinhoff Gang,” Kristophe said proudly. The only German terrorists he could think of. He took a few steps closer to the swords, could tell the guy was eyeing them. “Now I work freelance. Like Carlos the Jackal.”

  “So there is only one of you,” Dawn said. Not asking—clarifying. Maybe he shouldn’t have been so quick to admit he was flying solo here.

  Kristophe glanced around for ideas, what he could do with these two for the next hour and a half. He peered down the hallway toward the back, but what really inspired him was the slatted stairway leading up to a loft overlooking the main room. Take them up there, tie them, gag them. He could keep an eye on them and at the same time cover the front door from high ground. Spanning the width of the loft was a low wall of rustic wood. Crouch behind it, and he couldn’t ask for a more perfect spot to set up an ambush. Jamey would walk in, never know anything was wrong, then never know what hit him.

  Kristophe sent Dawn around the bar and into the kitchen for a knife—nothing big, as long as it was sharp enough to slice cloth. She came back with a paring knife. He slipped it into his pocket, then twitched the gun’s muzzle toward the stairway.

  “Over there,” he said. “We go upstairs now, ja?”

  31

  AT first he’d thought that Duncan was yelling at Dawn.

  So far, Jamey had yet to hear an angry word pass between them, but supposed they had to argue sometime. Live the way they did, stress was bound to build up, with only each other to take it out on.

  What had been the trigger, then—bringing Samantha here? They’d led him to believe it wouldn’t be a problem, but maybe four under the same roof wasn’t going to work after all. Something about telling the two of us apart, he’d just said.

  Moments later Jamey heard another shout, male again…and it wasn’t Duncan. He was certain of it. Couldn’t make out what else had just been said, but the voice was not the same. He sat up sharply in bed.

  “What’s wrong?” Sam murmured. They lay together, halfway toward sleep with limbs tangled, fingers loosely intertwined.

  “Somebody’s here. Somebody else is out there.”

  Samantha shook off her languor and pushed up onto her elbows. “Police?”

  Jamey strained, couldn’t hear anything else now. “I don’t think so. If that was it, there’d be a full-on raid. They’d already be on top of us.”

  Dawn’s voice then: Well, who is he, anyway? Maybe the two of them really were as stressed as they sounded, or maybe this boost in volume was for his and Sam’s benefit, a heads-up. Maybe both. He looks like a terrorist—

  “Get dressed,” he whispered, and squeezed Sam’s hand as he slid from beneath the covers. Was already into his jeans before the situation seemed to sink in and she grabbed for her clothes.

  And she looked so alarmed, moonlight on her face and gleaming down the slim sweep of her back. Surprising what stood out in moments of dread, how deeply you saw the things that could get taken away. While he slung on his shirt, his gaze was drawn to the small of Sam’s back, where he had always loved the lines of muscle that ran down either side of her spine. How pronounced they were, making a channel of her backbone above her waist. Suddenly he wanted to touch her there. Just in case.

  “Get on the floor,” he whispered, and waved her down, out of view.

  “Jamey, no,” she said. “Don’t.”

  Barefoot, he crept to the door and slow-turned the knob, opened it a few inches, his eye to the crack. Nothing. He eased it open further and could hear their voices better, even if the words were hard to make out.

  Jamey slipped through the doorway, still buttoning his shirt, flattening himself against one wall as he slid along. Came to the bend in the short hallway and gave a listen, squatted low enough that he wouldn’t be seen from the front room and peeked around the corner in time to see Dawn pass a few feet in front of him, swinging wide as she walked around the bar and into the kitchen.

  Their eyes met but she didn’t show it, Dawn keeping her cool, using her body as she turned to her right to block the sight of her left hand from whoever was out there. She made a quick gesture beside her thigh, a flicking motion to wave him back down the hall, then spreading her fingers and holding her hand tensed. Wait, he translated. Fall back and wait.

  He retreated as far as the bathroom, where he heard the new voice mention something about going upstairs, then crept the rest of the way to their bedroom.

  “Sam,” he whispered from the doorway. Her head poked up between the bed and the far wall. “I know it’s a little drop out there, but can you get out through that window and be quiet about it?”

  “What are you doing, Jamey?” Her whisper was tight, fierce.

  As if he knew. “Can you?”

  And everything that passed between them then, too fast for words…all the doubts and fears in her eyes. Sam, who didn’t like to let the sun set on an argument—part of her had to be thinking this was something Duncan and Dawn had brought upon themselves. Had to be asking if it was worth risking their future together because of some sense of obligation. Nothing
that hadn’t already gone through his own mind.

  Before either of them could say it aloud, he shut the door.

  He’d gotten as far as the kitchen when he heard someone moving overhead in the loft. Knew they had at least one pistol around here, but hadn’t asked where they’d stashed it, and now wasn’t the time to start banging cabinets and drawers.

  Then he saw the swords, still leaning against the sofa.

  He’d just begun to creep toward them when something pale lying on the floor next to the kitchen counter caught his eye. A slip of paper, with a stubby pencil beside it, as if Dawn might have dropped them here moments ago. He snatched the paper up, found it to be a grocery list they’d compiled earlier, then turned it over.

  ITS 4 U, the back read. SED U R OUT.

  Meaning that whoever was here would choose to wait. Get Dawn and Duncan out of the way, then wait.

  ITS 4 U—but that didn’t make sense. No one even knew he was here.

  He padded barefoot to the swords, looking up and over his shoulder toward the loft. Seeing nothing past the low wooden wall. Everyone on the floor, he supposed.

  Jamey had just gotten his hand on the straight-bladed sword when he heard another creak of movement above, someone heading toward the half-wall or the stairs—either way, in full panoramic view of where he stood.

  ****

  The world turned into such a simple place when you held a machine gun. You told people what to do, and they did it. Any act you could come up with, no matter how improbable, they would perform it:

  A guy would take off his flannel shirt and give it to the girl next to him. She would take her stubby kitchen knife and reduce the shirt to strips of cloth. They would use the strips to bind their own ankles—tight, too, because they knew he would check—then the guy would roll over and let the girl tie his wrists behind his back. Then she would belly flop and let the man with the machine gun straddle the backs of her legs while he bound her wrists too. They would open wide, as if they were at the dentist, since there was enough ripped flannel left over to wad up and stuff inside their mouths and let them bite on it.

  Then they would lie there, facedown on the carpet, the most obedient people you could ever ask for. These were people who knew how to take direction. They didn’t try to impose a single idea of their own on the scene. And because the man with the machine gun could then stand over them and see only the backs of their heads—no faces, no eyes—it followed that they would be much easier to kill this way. If it came to that.

  Maybe there would be no reason, as they’d never seen his face. But maybe he would decide he wanted to kill them anyway. Simply because he could. Maybe he would soon discover that he liked the feeling so much the first time he pulled the trigger that he would find it hard to stop.

  It was a real confidence-booster, a machine gun. A man who slung its strap around his neck could walk away from people lying tied up and facedown, and know that whenever he returned, they would still be there. His footsteps would become everything in the world to them. He would be the object of prayers.

  He could walk over to the stairway, turn his back on these untalented people, and not once worry about what they might be scheming. They could never betray him. They would never stab him in the back because they couldn’t reach it. Would never say vicious things about him because they couldn’t talk. All they could do was quake in awe at the power he held.

  So if he had something else to do while they were waiting—like spray-paint slogans on the walls to mislead people who weren’t nearly as smart as he was—he could proceed with assurance. Could head downstairs and get to work.

  He would look around on the way down, though, to make sure everything was exactly as he’d left it. A man with a machine gun still had to pay attention, in particular to things like swords. And if a few minutes ago he’d seen two swords leaning against a sofa and now there was only one, well, that was important.

  But if when he got a little more than halfway down the stairs something shot out from between the slatted steps to bite the back of his leg, he would still probably think it was a snake. Because Arizona had plenty of rattlers, and sometimes they slithered where they shouldn’t.

  It would have to be something mindless like a snake, because no thinking being could be so foolish as to use something as outmatched as a blade to go after a man with a machine gun. Even if the tip ripped into the back of his calf hard enough to send him tumbling the rest of the way down the stairs.

  Because falling a few feet wasn’t the end of the world. Even if he landed on the tile floor and caught all of his weight on one hand. Even if he heard his left wrist snap like a celery stalk. All he had to do was ignore the pain and roll onto his side and level the machine gun at the guy rushing at him from beneath the stairway. The guy he couldn’t have seen hidden even while walking directly over his head. The guy he had come here to shoot. The guy those contemptible people upstairs had lied about and whom he’d come to hate more than anyone in the world.

  The guy who saw the size of the muzzle tracking him and knew he was a heartbeat away from being blown all over the walls.

  And if a man with a machine gun squeezed its trigger while aiming one-handed into the belly of a man with a sword, but nothing happened except a metallic snap that both of them heard, okay, maybe that was the end of the world…

  Because he probably shouldn’t have taken for granted that his partner had reloaded the night before, after expending an entire magazine of bullets to blast limbs from pine trees.

  ****

  Beneath the stairway, Jamey held his breath while the footsteps descended and he saw the intruder’s lace-up boots, the back of his black pantlegs. He raised the sword to shoulder level, like a spear, and jabbed it through the opening between the steps, launching off the balls of his feet and leaning hard into the thrust, and taking a feral satisfaction as the tip of the blade punched deep into the back of the leg.

  He burst from his hiding place while the intruder tumbled, hoping he could get to the guy before he recovered from the fall. Or if the guy had good enough reflexes to get off a shot, that it would be wild, could be dodged.

  But that was working under the assumption that all he had was a handgun. Not this piece of gleaming black assault weaponry. The sight of it sapped the spring from Jamey’s legs—his error in judgment had doomed everyone here—and when he saw it zero in on his midsection, he could practically feel himself tearing in two.

  But all it did was click.

  They locked gazes for an instant, when both of them knew. Jamey didn’t wait for a second chance, lunged forward and chopped down with the sword, a graceless move but it knocked the gun aside, and when he followed with a kick the guy lost his grip on it altogether. Jamey leaned down to yank its nylon strap from around his neck, then flung the weapon onto the sofa.

  He looked like a commando, this man sprawled on the floor. All in black, from his boots to his tight-fitting turtleneck sweater, even the ski mask. And he was more of a mess than Jamey expected. A swollen purple dome bulged from the left eyehole in the ski mask, but clearly that was an older injury. The back of his right leg leaked blood onto the tiles, and as soon as Jamey saw the mangle of his left wrist, he understood why the gun had been aimed one-handed.

  “I’ve never seen a compound fracture before,” Jamey said. Staring at the shard of bone jutting through the skin above his wrist, the unnatural angle of his forearm. “It looks pretty good on you, though.”

  The commando said nothing, not even looking at Jamey now, but instead at the stairs he’d fallen down.

  “You came here after me—is that right?” Jamey asked. “This had nothing to do with Duncan and Dawn?”

  No answer—

  “Why? You don’t even know me…do you?”

  —not a word—

  “How did you even know where to find me?”

  —just the mute knowledge that he was beaten.

  “Answer me!” Jamey shouted, and the commando finally tu
rned that single hateful eye toward him. Jamey whacked the flat of the sword’s tip against the top of the ski mask. “Take that thing off. Take it off, or I’ll start cutting it off, and whatever skin comes with it you can sew back on later.”

  The commando wasn’t quick about it—why hurry, when you were in the shape he was in? He dragged his good hand up from his side and slowly tugged the mask from his head. Tossed it away with a flourish, a final insignificant show of bravado.

  “Oh god,” Jamey breathed. His arm went limp and the tip of the sword clinked against the tiled floor.

  “Maybe you’d rather I put it back on, ja?” Kristophe said.

  Jamey wandered to the stairs and had to sit, trying to piece things together but feeling too numbed to make them all fit.

  He’d met Kristophe just twice, and only in passing, never in depth…but then Jamey hadn’t sensed much depth there to begin with. In that sense, the guy and his put-on accent had probably been a good match for Melissa. He’d seemed as hopeless as he was harmless, and Jamey later remarked to Sam that if he had talent enough to get anywhere, he’d get there only because Melissa, who’d never lacked for ambition, had pushed him.

  And now he lay sprawled and cradling his broken arm against his chest, his complexion gone a curdled, sweaty shade of pale.

  “Whose idea was this?” Jamey asked.

  Kristophe licked his lips. “Whose do you think?”

  Except Jamey was thinking of Melissa already, and when he’d spoken with her Saturday morning. Melissa using Samantha even then, and guileless Sam falling for it: Call her, Jamey, please. She’s your sister. She loves you. She wants to know you’re all right. She wants to start over. Sam asking what was the worst that could happen—the two of them might realize they didn’t have to hate each other forever?

  Oh, Sam. It can get a lot worse than that.