Mad Dogs

by Brian Hodge

  But he had never dreamed that his future could be built on so much blood. He had never dreamed of wrapping a body in a sheet that would later have to be burned, and carrying the corpse from the place where his wife had watched him kill. Never dreamed of riding in a car with that body in the trunk, running a midnight race against rigor mortis in the hunt for an ideal dumping ground.

  After they’d rolled up and down the same stretch of highway enough times to think they had pinpointed the place indicated by Kristophe’s map, Duncan let him out of the car to check, remaining behind in case another vehicle came along.

  Jamey scrabbled down a steep rocky slope, until the ground leveled out into a zone forested with rugged trees. He swept a flashlight beam along as he hunted for evergreens large enough to win a head-on collision with a car, then shield the loser afterward.

  From the ridge above came the triple-toot of the horn, Duncan’s warning that they had company, that he had to roll. Even though Duncan would double back within minutes, the fading sound of him driving away brought on an immense feeling of isolation, left alone on high ground with nothing friendly for miles.

  When he found the wreck, Jamey might have passed it by had the flashlight not caught chrome. A totaled black Audi A4—Kristophe and Blayne had covered it with deadfall. If come upon by day, it wouldn’t have been a thorough enough job to fool anyone, but Jamey had no doubt that the illusion would improve with distance. Up on the road, a lot of traffic could go by before anyone might notice.

  He circled, shining his light along the Audi’s length, the damage getting worse the farther front he went—the mangle of the engine compartment, the blood-streaked hole in the passenger side of the windshield. Seen through pine boughs, it became something eerier than a wreck from the night before. It was part of the landscape now, a cold ruin haunted by ghosts and secrets.

  Jamey stowed the flashlight in his pocket and made the climb up to the highway. Saw headlights waiting idle a couple hundred yards to the north and flashed a beam at them, and Duncan rolled down to join him under the moon.

  “It’s there,” Jamey told him.

  “You know we can’t park here long enough for both of us to take him,” Duncan said. “One or the other of us is going to have to do it alone. You’ve been up and down once already. Want me to do it?”

  Jamey had known it was coming to this, that they couldn’t risk some deputy cruising along and making note of the car, or worse, stopping to check the scene out. He’d known this descent was going to be a solo trip.

  “I’ll handle it,” he said.

  Duncan popped the trunk lid from inside, then helped him unload. They lowered the shrouded body to the pavement and together dragged it clear of the highway, then the first few feet down the slope.

  “Get him down there, and I’ll join you soon as I can,” Duncan said. “When I had to move on because of that other car, I clocked it off on the odometer, and about a mile and a quarter south there’s a spot I should be able to park awhile. Give me fifteen, twenty minutes to make it back here. And don’t panic when you hear me coming.”

  He ripped a swath from the sheet, then dropped it along the shoulder of the road as a marker. Moments later Duncan was no more than taillights dwindling into the night, and Jamey crabbed back down to the body.

  Kristophe was still pliable, scarcely three hours dead. If he’d started to stiffen yet, it would be where it didn’t matter…his eyelids, his jaw, his neck. Jamey tugged him by the ankles and let gravity do the rest, stopping every few yards to catch his breath in the thin, chilly air. Easiest would be to let Kristophe roll, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it, as if remorse would be nullified by an act of convenience.

  Eventually Jamey got him to the wreck and sat beside him, in his sheet an oblong shape pale against the ground. Turn the flashlight on him, though, and the filth was revealed, the grime and the blood seeped through around his head. Jamey looked at him as if expecting Kristophe to sit up and throw off the makeshift shroud and announce that the joke was over.

  “‘Let’s talk of graves,’” Jamey said softly, “‘of worms and epitaphs,’” because by now, from actor to director, no one but Shakespeare seemed worth quoting.

  Together they waited for Duncan, and when Jamey heard him clambering down the slope, he blinked the light and imagined, for an instant, the sinking panic of seeing a uniform instead.

  Duncan waggled his pair of latex gloves. “Time to suit up again.”

  There wasn’t much debate about what to do. They weren’t putting Kristophe in the car—better he remain exposed to the elements. They settled on a spot yards past the front of the Audi, carried him close, unwrapped him, then dragged him the rest of the way to sully him with dirt and pine needles. As though he had staggered from the wreck, then fallen and crawled to where he’d rolled over and died.

  Duncan stuffed his wallet into a pocket. “Flat-out and face-up,” he said, so they rolled Kristophe onto his back. “That’s how he was for the first couple hours when his blood started pooling. It’ll look less like he’s been moved that way.”

  “It’s still not perfect,” Jamey said.

  “I know. But it’s as close as we can get.”

  “He’s got that stab wound in the back of his leg. And his face…if anybody does an autopsy, what if they realize he got hit with the same thing over and over. Not one big impact.”

  “Every day he’s out here, that’s one more day of decay, and less of him left to work with. Bodies go a lot faster outside.” Duncan balled up the sheet with the scrap he’d left along the roadside, so they could burn it someplace miles from here. “As long as there’s no direct tie to you or to me, does it matter if it’s not perfect? Does it matter if anybody thinks something doesn’t fit? We don’t know which name they registered under at their motel, but it was probably Kristophe’s. Not even these guys could’ve been stupid enough to let the one with his head split open walk up to the counter. So if the only connection is between the two of them, that’s where it stays.”

  Duncan made a subtle nod south, toward Sedona, then looked at him as if to ask if he finally understood why they had to leave Blayne the way he was.

  “As for what happened between the two of them,” he went on, “somebody’ll come up with a theory that everyone else is happy enough to sign off on. It’s not like they were locals. It’s not like anybody’ll complain.”

  And could it really be this easy? To get away with murder?

  “Jamey, look at me,” Duncan warned, reading something in him even in the darkness. “I know it doesn’t feel like it. But you are the good guy here.”

  So, like the good guys they were, they shined the flashlight around and used a pine branch to sweep away any tracks or trails they may have left. For the final detail before leaving, Duncan opened the car and held aside the flaccid air bag long enough to return the keys, taken from the motel dresser, to the Audi’s ignition.

  As they walked from the scene, they peeled the gloves from their hands with a snap of latex—like surgeons finished operating, Jamey supposed, except the only lives they’d saved were their own.

  “Everybody’s always asking, ‘Who do I have to kill to get a break in this town?’ I guess now we all know the answer to that.”

  —Colin Slovik

  Actor, “Jordan Rabin,”

  American Fugitives

  Access Hollywood

  34

  BACK in that dustbin of a town, everyone in the bar agreed that he and Cro-Mag would know the place when they found it: the only property within miles where they would find it tough to distinguish where the junk ended and the trailer began.

  This had been no exaggeration.

  What is it you want with the boy? they’d asked, Saturday-morning drinkers sheltering in the bar like snakes from the desert sun. He’s had a rough time of it lately. His Mama came home and killed his brother last weekend.

  Once they’d gotten up to Mohave County, it had been left to Cro-Mag to do the
talking and ask directions to the place where the actor had been held captive. If he was the one Duncan had been keeping company with lately, then it was his trail they would be better off trying to pick up. You could learn only so much from a week’s worth of newspapers, though—who, if not precisely where.

  And it was a risk, letting Cro-Mag handle Q&A without supervising every word, but staying in the Firebird behind its tinted windows was Jordy’s only option. On the morning you’re front-page news, you don’t show your face even to a barful of bleary-eyed losers. No worries, as it happened—Cro-Mag pulled it off fine.

  I’m his court-appointed lawyer, was the only lie he could think to tell.

  When they found the place, Jordy had to stare in awe. This was the grand and rusted outcome of pack-rat behavior on a scale he had never seen.

  “Until this moment,” he said, “I only thought I understood the meaning of white trash.”

  “I like it!” Cro-Mag said. Of course he would. He could bang on things until his arms wore out, and never damage a single item of value. He lifted the cat out of the car to let it explore. “It’s like a playground.”

  Halfway to the trailer steps, they paused to inspect an old hulking Chrysler, still sitting on inflated tires but with the spike of a pick-axe imbedded in its radiator. Cro-Mag grinned and grabbed the axe handle, rocking it back and forth with a screech of metal like a kid who’d discovered how to make an annoying new noise. He cursed when he got a splinter from the ragged wood, then, with a primal roar, wrenched the pick-axe from the grill and hurled it through the windshield.

  Jordy sighed and drew the Pachmayr-grip Magnum he’d taken off one of yesterday’s C.O.s. No point now in pretending they were here for a friendly visit.

  ****

  As exhausted as he’d been when he and Duncan had returned home, Jamey wasn’t sure if he really had slept, or if he’d only dreamed of lying awake all night in dread of knocks at the door. Of having been molded by the expectations of millions to become what he’d been alleged to be after the first deputy had been killed.

  He spent the rest of the night in the loft, with a pillow and a nest of blankets on the floor; had let Samantha have the bed to herself after feeling driven from the room by a barrier that had arisen between them.

  It followed that he was the first one up late Saturday morning, brewing coffee and carrying his mug out onto the deck. To remain inside seemed too close to the night before. Even though Dawn had done everything in her power to purge the place of what had happened. She’d scoured the blood from the tiles, buried Kristophe’s bag in a dumpster, made the scraps of Duncan’s shirt vanish. The camera and case he’d brought back from the motel room she had stowed out of sight in a closet.

  She had, to look at the place, erased a killing.

  Busy though she’d been, it didn’t surprise him that Dawn was next to rise, joining him outside in time for his second coffee. The two of them gazing off at red rocks reaching toward blue sky.

  “Remember the first time you had sex?” Jamey asked. “Personal question, I know. And maybe it wasn’t anything you wanted to remember.”

  “No, I do, I remember. And there was nothing about it that I would’ve wanted to forget. I guess the worst I can say is that I had to forgive it for everything it wasn’t.”

  “Remember how you felt the next day, though?”

  Dawn paused over her mug for a few moments, steam washing past a small bittersweet smile and the tiny crinkle of a frown.

  “I was seventeen,” Jamey said. “It was with my first love, from high school. Andrea Remy. She was this beautiful dark-haired girl, just the most dazzling smile you ever saw. Her family background was French, mostly. Really smart, talented, this wonderful singer and violinist. She ran track. We’d been together more than a year, and pretty physical for most of it, but that final big step was still awhile in coming, because she wanted to be ready. There were a few times she let me slide into her, just to feel what that was like, but it wouldn’t go any further—I mean, you know the average teenage boy, after whatever concession he can get.”

  “Oh yeah. They drive a hard bargain.”

  “One weekend her parents were away and we were making out, and we did that again, but this time it was obvious we’d gotten to critical mass. You both feel a thing like that, like you’re about to tumble off a cliff, so what are you going to do about it—go ahead and fall, or step back? We teetered like that, not even moving, just looking into each other’s eyes and asking that question without having to actually say it. And finally we decided the only thing we could do was fall.

  “You can’t be the same afterward, you know? There’s your life before and your life after. That next day, it was all I could think about. It happened. It felt like the whole world had changed, in both a good way and in a scary way, and Andrea and I were right at the heart of it.”

  “If that was how you felt, you were not the average teenage boy.”

  “I’d always taken for granted that the next thing to follow me up in the morning and make me feel that same way would be a good thing.” Jamey bent back his head to focus up at a passing cloud. And had to ask: “Does she hate me now?”

  “Sam? Of course not. But in case she does, she’ll have to answer to me.”

  “Right now, I can hardly face her, and I can’t stand the thought of her looking at me. You were with her all last night, after. What did she say?”

  “Not much. I think she was close to going into shock. But mostly that she didn’t know you had it inside you to do that.” With her mug balanced in her lap, Dawn stretched out her legs to prop her bare feet on the wooden rail and wiggle her toes at the sun. “Sam understands what that guy came here for. But all she saw was the way it ended. I tried telling her what it was like for five or ten minutes before that. But I don’t guess that goes very far toward erasing what she saw.”

  He shook his head. “It’s not the kind of world she wants to acknowledge exists.”

  “You don’t always have the luxury of choosing. Sometimes it just walks in off the street. I know that as well as anybody.” Dawn drew in a little closer. “Duncan told me you knew the guy. After you came back from the motel. Told me who he was. Who might’ve put him up to it.”

  “Which I don’t even want to think about right now. So you understand, then, maybe, why I went off the way I did. Does Sam know? Did you tell her?”

  “It wasn’t mine to tell. Especially if the last part turned out not to be true.”

  “Tell me what?” Samantha said through the screen door, behind them.

  ****

  Jordy climbed the steps and kicked the trailer’s door in, had Cro-Mag cover the living room while he circled through the kitchen and met him beside the TV. If the last of the Hardestys was home, he had to be somewhere toward the back.

  “Jesus, what a piss-hole,” Jordy said. “I mean, before they sent me to Florence, it’s not like I would’ve ever won any prizes for housekeeping…but this…”

  Cro-Mag was scratching at his dent with the barrel of his Magnum. “The guy that lives here, he kidnapped someone, right? The actor, right? And kept him here in this trailer?”

  “So the papers say.”

  “Then how is it that he gets to stay home? That’s not fair. Why don’t they have him locked up if he kidnapped somebody?”

  “Because the so-called victim’s been too busy running around with my cousin to swear out a formal statement, would be my guess. Gotta have a victim to have a crime. As I imagine one or both of us is about to demonstrate.”

  They found him sacked out in the rear bedroom, shirtless in a pair of overalls whose straps had slipped off his wide sloping shoulders, and snoring facedown on a crumb-strewn bed. Jordy took a half-full pitcher of tepid water sitting on the floor and dashed it over the guy’s head. He came awake sputtering and pulled together an impressively narrow focus on the guns.

  “Sit up,” Jordy told him.

  The Hardesty obeyed, swung his legs around and pla
nted his huge bare feet on the carpet. Round of head and thick of belly, he looked like a big surly baby. A baby prone to chewing on dangerous things, if the jigsaw-puzzle appearance of his mouth was any indication.

  “Who are you guys?” he asked.

  Jordy moved to the end of the bed and hiked one foot onto the mattress, leaned an elbow on one knee with the Magnum dangling from his hand. “We just came by to tell you how sorry we are to hear about your brother. I got this cousin I’m about to lose, but for a few years there he was like a brother, so I have a pretty good idea what you might be going through right now.”

  “No…no…no you didn’t. You didn’t come here for that.”

  “Okay. I lied,” Jordy said. “What’s your name?”

  “Rupert. Rupert Hardesty.”

  “Rupert? Well, I guess it’s good to have parents with a sense of humor. I wouldn’t know.” Then it dawned on him why this elephantine baby’s surname had seemed familiar. “You wouldn’t be related to Zack Hardesty, would you?”

  Rupert’s piggy eyes brightened with hope. “That’s my dad.”

  “Do you have any idea how big a celebrity your old man is? Can’t say I’ve had the honor of meeting him, but I know he’s a legend in his own time.” Jordy grinned at Cro-Mag. “You remember hearing about Zack when you were at Florence, don’t you? He’s the guy that killed his boss and then spent hours taping together a suicide note that’s got his fingerprints on the tape. They call him the number-one dumbest guy in the entire Arizona D.O.C.” Jordy bounced his foot on the mattress and watched Rupert wobble. “That’s an awful big dunce cap you’ve been left to fill, but you know, you look like you just might be the man to do it.”

  Rupert’s round face was starting to twist and squirm. “Who are you guys?”

  “You ever get stung by a hornet?” Jordy asked.