Mad Dogs

by Brian Hodge

  “Yellowjackets,” said Rupert, bewildered. “Same thing, just about.”

  “Think of it this way,” Jordy told him. “I’m the nest,” then hitched his thumb at Cro-Mag in the doorway, “and he’s the hornets. Fuck with me and he’ll be all over you. We clear on that?”

  Rupert nodded, but looked more foggy than frightened. The hornet talk had thrown him.

  “You remember that actor you kept here for a few days?”

  “Oh. So you’re friends of Jamey’s?”

  “Do we look like we’re friends of anybody’s?” Jordy gave Rupert a scowl for punctuation. “Now think hard on this. The whole time he was here, did Jamey say anything about where he might go? Where he might like to go?”

  “He didn’t say much about himself. No matter how nice we were to him, either. And we made him comfortable here.”

  “Yeah, the accommodations are impressing the hell out of us.” Jordy said. “Just how did he get away? Lately I’ve got this intense curiosity about how people get away from places.”

  “He drugged us. Sort of.”

  “Wouldn’t he have to be loose in the first place to do that?”

  Now Rupert looked in need of that dunce cap. “It was more like he talked us into doing it ourselves. Sort of.”

  “And I bet it didn’t take long, did it?” Jordy looked around the room, had no idea what he might be looking for. “When you nabbed Jamey, you probably emptied his pockets, right, took away whatever he had on him?”

  Rupert shrugged. Talking about something he did over a week ago, when two days appeared to be all he could handle without blowing gaskets. “I guess.”

  “When he got away from you, did he collect all his shit again before he left? Wallet, whatever? Or was he in too big a hurry and maybe leave some things behind you’re still hanging onto?”

  “No. He took it all back.” Rupert shifted a little, swallowed hard. “We weren’t in much condition to stop him.”

  “You tell me one thing,” Jordy said, “but your eyes and your big fat itchy ass, they’re telling me something else.”

  “No, honest. I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

  With a disappointed sigh, Jordy turned to Cro-Mag. “Pretend with me for a second, okay? Let’s pretend you’ve made this new friend, and it looks like you’re really hitting it off, everything’s going great. Except then you need this one little favor, and you can just tell by looking that your new friend is lying straight to your face. Your new pal’s got no respect for you at all, to lie to you that way. What do think you should do with a friend like that?”

  Cro-Mag glowered at Rupert, an eerie thing to see evolve—as if he had ceased to merely speculate, and the matter had become a deeply personal affront. His brain left in such a condition that he appeared unable to make the distinction.

  “I smash his head open,” Cro-Mag said, and lurched forward until Jordy patted his shoulder and reminded him that they were only pretending. It was like throwing a switch, turning him off. Watch him wind down, a spectator to the processes inside his own damaged skull.

  Jordy turned back to Rupert. “You want to keep playing games, that’s up to you. I got some really scary ones to try next. Be like a science experiment.”

  “His cell phone,” Rupert mumbled, eyes downcast. “Jamey left his cell phone.”

  Jordy had him fetch, and it was no farther away than fatboy’s ass, the stolen phone slipped between the mattress and box springs. Jordy opened it, thumbed it on; got warnings for low battery and no signal, but neither stopped him from clicking through the phone listings saved into memory. Nearly all had numbers whose area codes he thought were in L.A.…except one near the end of the list. Area code 928, somewhere in northern Arizona, the only local number in the bunch. No name, at least not a complete one. Sam’s parents, was all it said.

  “Anybody name of Sam ever come up in conversation between you two?”

  “Uhhh…I think…that was the name of some girl he’s supposed to marry.”

  Okay, that fit. The news reports had said he was on his way to get married when the deputy mistook him for Duncan. So maybe they had a winner here. Family—or family-to-be—even if they weren’t sheltering him, good chance they’d know how to find him. Jordy found a pen and scrap of paper to jot down the number, then picked up the receiver of a cordless phone from atop a heap of moldering old Playboy magazines.

  “How many telephones you got here?”

  “That one in your hand,” Rupert said, “and the other one on the kitchen wall.”

  Jordy gave the paper to Cro-Mag, then pointed down the trailer’s hallway.

  “Do me a favor,” he said. “Go to the kitchen phone and try this number. And whoever answers, ask if Jamey Sheppard is there.”

  ****

  When telling Samantha whom he had killed, Jamey tried to do so without accusation, hoping it wouldn’t sound as if he were trying to share the blame.

  “Did you tell my sister where to find us?” he asked, and Sam admitted that she had, but not the location of the condo—because she herself hadn’t even known. “Did you tell Melissa where you and I were supposed to meet?”

  The look on Samantha’s face was all the answer either of them needed.

  “Then we weren’t alone yesterday. Kristophe had to have been following us around all day long.”

  This wasn’t a conversation Samantha wanted to have at the condo—neither inside, where it would’ve been shared with Dawn and Duncan, nor out on the deck. Instead, they had found a solitary, foot-worn path that wound past pines and rocks.

  He’d held the urge in check, but Jamey wanted to tell her that this conversation would never have been forced on them at all if she’d kept her mouth shut. If she’d only minded her own business and never appointed herself to the role of mediator, mender of a rift that was old before she’d ever met him.

  Samantha’s fault? Of course not. She had meant only the best. But with some people, all the weakness they would ever need to exploit was someone else’s good intentions.

  “That you knew who it was…you didn’t want to tell me, did you?” Sam said. “Not last night, and not this morning, either.” Her shoulders began to bounce with a caustic and silent laugh, and though her eyes looked close to tears, the rest of her face said she would rather choke on them than let them be seen. “The three of you must think I’m the most naive person that’s ever lived.”

  “No, no one’s thinking that.” He stopped, grasping for more. “Do you know who you are? You’re the one who still notices people on the street when they put their hands out for money and it’s obvious they really are hungry. You still see them. I stopped noticing a long time ago. You’re the first one to talk to somebody at a party when they’re standing around looking like nobody else has said a word to them. I’ve never wanted you to be anyone else but that person. And I never wanted you to have any reason to feel you shouldn’t have been.”

  “But I was once too often, wasn’t I?”

  “I’m not blaming you, Sam. Everyone knows whose fault this is.”

  “Maybe it’s not the way it looks. Maybe Kristophe just had his own ideas, or maybe Melissa said something he took the wrong way…” Sam running ahead with the same flimsy hopes and feeble arguments he had made to Duncan in the car last night, desperate to avoid facing the truth: that to his own sister he was nothing but a commodity, more valuable dead than alive.

  “Yeah, maybe that’s it,” Jamey said, echoing Duncan’s words, remembering how badly he’d needed to hear them at the time.

  As he and Samantha scuffed along the path, only now did he realize that not once had either of them reached for the other’s hand.

  “What have we done to each other here, Jamey?” she asked.

  He honestly didn’t know, and neither did she. And so they walked on for no better reason than that their feet told them to, while Jamey watched their shadows precede them, two dark shapes, each going its own way and cut off from the other by the sea
ring light of day.

  35

  AS Cro-Mag headed for the kitchen phone, at the opposite end of the trailer, Jordy pecked the cordless on so he could listen in. He heard the other extension lifted, the beeping of numbers. A man answered after several rings and Cro-Mag popped the question. Jordy knew they’d stumbled onto something promising before the man said a word. His weary, disgusted sigh was the deadest of giveaways.

  “Is this another reporter, hopping on the bandwagon a little late?” the man asked. Cranky as hell. “Don’t answer that, because I already know, and I don’t care. No, Jamey Sheppard is not here, he never was, and if you have even a partially functioning brain, you can tell by the tone of my voice that he’s unlikely to ever be here.” Hanging up before giving anybody a chance to say another word.

  Cro-Mag returned, looking baffled and aggrieved. “What’d I say? What’d I say to him?”

  “I don’t know…but I like the attitude he’s taken toward this guy.”

  Jordy let several minutes elapse, time enough so that another call to the same number wouldn’t seem like a follow-up, and during which they mostly watched Rupert dig a squeaking finger into his ear and complain about the water trapped there now.

  “Okay, my turn,” Jordy said, and dialed from the cordless. A woman answered this time, so it no longer mattered that he’d been saving his voice for when it counted.

  “Good morning, ma’am,” he said. “My name’s Johnny Lee Pedimore”—name of a guy back in Florence, the first alias to come to mind—“and I’m a driver for Federal Express. I’ve got a package in my truck that must be yours, but most of the airbill’s been torn off. Even the bar code, so I can’t scan it. But the little bit that’s left has your number down as the recipient’s phone. So I’m wondering if I could trouble you for your address, and we’ll get this to you later today.”

  She didn’t think twice about it. Everybody loves getting a package.

  Flagstaff. Jordy jotted down the address, slipped the paper into his pocket, and tossed the phone to the floor.

  “We don’t need to get there before late tonight, and it won’t take us but three or four hours to make the run, so we can kick back here and wait out the day. Maybe get some decent sleep.” He bounced his foot on the bed again to get Rupert’s attention. “All last night, one of us would take a nap while the other guy drove. That’s no way to sleep your first night out of prison. And that shower looks awfully good.” He turned to Cro-Mag. “I’ll take the bed in that other room up the hall. That one looks pretty clean. How about you—you want this bed in here, or the couch?”

  Cro-Mag inspected, looking over the thick rubble of crumbs that Rupert had been content to sleep in. “The couch. That’s just gross, right there.”

  Jordy smiled at Rupert. Got a hopeful smile back. Like everything was going to be hunky-dory now. Everyone going back to sleep.

  “Looks like you won’t have to budge an inch,” Jordy told him, then shot him where he sat, getting his first genuine feel for the Pachmayr-grip Magnum by letting it blow a pair of big holes in the center of Rupert’s chest.

  It did a thorough enough job. But the peculiar thing about getting shot in the heart was that while it was fatal, it wasn’t always immediate. They could still be juiced up for half a minute. Rupert was one of the durable ones, but didn’t do much about it, just lying back in the splash of his exit wounds and blinking with astonishment.

  “You wouldn’t expect me to sleep very easy knowing you were still running around, would you?” Jordy asked him.

  Rupert failed to answer, and after it was obvious he never would, Jordy scooped a handful of Playboy magazines from the floor, then he and Cro-Mag closed the door on the room behind them.

  “Maybe I was a little too quick on that,” he called from the bathroom moments later. “Should’ve made him clean out this shower first.”

  ****

  Soon after he and Samantha returned from outside, Jamey unpacked the digital video camera and a set of composite cables, and connected it to the TV. Not out of any desire to see Kristophe’s abilities as a filmmaker, but because the only thing left to do was learn what was on them.

  With the Mini DV tapes labeled in sequence, he didn’t have to start at random. The first opened abruptly in a kitchen, strictly home movie material—Melissa’s place. Jamey had been there a few times, although never since her divorce. He’d actually liked the guy from back home she’d married. Neal, his name. They’d taken in a few Lakers games together.

  But Neal had been out of her picture for over a year, replaced now by Kristophe and his meandering hand-held shot of Blayne, intact and vertical with the familiar terrorist gun slung around his neck as he demoed his muscles for the lens—and he had a lot of them to show. He gave that up when Kristophe, in his bogus German accent, told him to just be natural, then the camera followed in documentary detail as he loaded a blender with the makings of a protein shake.

  “I heard Andy Warhol once made an eight-hour movie of nothing but some guy sleeping,” Dawn said. “At least this is better than that.”

  Moments later, a doorbell, and the frame panned to catch Melissa as she spoke. It was the first he’d seen of his sister in months, the sight of her reaching into his chest and rearranging his heart with an unstable mix of furious hurt and grinding loss. Not only had he never truly had a sister, now he never would.

  Just a suggestion, guys, she said. You might want to stash the machine gun while the big-name, big-bucks movie producer is here.

  Kristophe’s voice, coming from behind the camera: My impression is that he likes guns. A lot.

  Celluloid guns, loaded with blanks. Wave the real thing at him in a friendly meeting and I shudder to think.

  End of scene.

  One jump-cut later it resumed with more of the same, home movies and aren’t we cute, bumping along while toting luggage down stairways and out onto a sunny Sherman Oaks parking lot. To the Audi, before its transformation into a concealed pile of scrap.

  Kristophe had also captured one impromptu bit of comedy when a Golden Retriever wandered over and snuffled up into Melissa’s crotch. She backpedaled and it followed, eager, with tail wagging. She tried to shoo it away, then jettisoned all patience and delivered a kick to its haunches that brought a piercing yelp and sent the dog cringing tuck-tailed out of frame.

  “Now, if this was in a real movie,” Duncan said, “that’s how we’d first know we were supposed to hate her guts.”

  “I already hate her,” Dawn said. “You know every morning she kisses herself in the mirror.”

  Jamey glanced over at Sam, immobile as she leaned forward with her elbows on her thighs and her fingers steepled before her lips. He let his hand stray toward the camcorder to shut it off for now, because he could tell that it was torture for her, seeing what her goodwill had amounted to—

  Onscreen, Blayne, the mercenary who’d never met him: How about a bonus if we get this taken care of before the weekend’s out?

  —and Jamey stilled his hand. Had to, knowing how this exchange would end.

  Kristophe: Ja, ja, this is a good idea. Like a premium for express delivery.

  Melissa: You’re trying to renegotiate when the only thing you’ve done so far could’ve been handled by bellboys? Laughing, as if she couldn’t believe these two. Bring me his ears by Monday morning and then we’ll talk.

  There it was: all the confirmation he would ever need. Even if it was nothing that would hold up in court. It would shrivel before the interpretations of a defense lawyer. Juries would love her, because Melissa would make it a top priority to be on her best behavior, and judges would be charmed. Prosecutors too. She’d been born that way, blessed with all she had ever needed to get everything she wanted.

  Jamey felt a hand on his shoulder, placed from behind—Duncan, looking down at him as if he knew exactly what it felt like to be both betrayer and betrayed.

  “At least now you know for sure,” Duncan said. “It would be worse if you didn�
�t.”

  “Yeah, I’m sure that’s a great comfort,” Samantha said, not without sarcasm. He couldn’t tell which of them it was meant for.

  Dawn was there too, throwing a quick hug around his neck, and it all seemed too much. Did they think he was going to fall apart? How could they guess the extent to which he felt freed, instead? Sometimes it could be exhilarating to turn loose of hope, and here now was proof that he and Melissa were beyond it. He was excused from all further effort—she would only fling it back in his face.

  And while the rest of them saw little point in letting the video continue to play, Jamey left it on. Because he wasn’t finished studying the audio.

  ****

  Perhaps it was no more than a twenty-four hour case of acid reflux, but her stomach could not handle coffee today. The mere thought of the sacred bean sent her belly into curdled fits. It was Saturday in Mickeyland, with a reduced office staff, and when the bottom-tier lackey scurried for the late-morn latte run, Melissa had to pass, giving him an extra buck to instead fetch a mango lassi from the nearest Indian restaurant—yogurt and rosewater to help soothe the fire.

  The prolonged silence from Kristophe and Blayne, after Thursday night’s news of having trashed their car, had to be their idea of revenge for so many wasted days. Real mature, guys. Probably laughing it up this instant, while her sole entertainment was to eavesdrop on the banter between Mickey and yet another Studly Post-Teenage Actor Desperate To Be Taken Seriously.

  “Let me tell you a not-very-well-kept secret about her,” Mickey was saying to the urchin, mid-tour. Subject: an actress whose career flamed into a tailspin after ditching her cushy sitcom for features. “Not only was she unafraid of the casting couch…she reupholstered it.”

  The actor’s presence this morning had actually inspired her to pray that he too hadn’t brought along his own script, like the Tyler of two days ago. A dreadful piece of work, leaving her with an urge, on behalf of producers’ assistants everywhere, to amputate its author’s hands so he could never type again.