by Brian Hodge
It soon became apparent that her worries were unfounded. The sights of today’s groveling actor were set far higher.
“Not to jump the gun here,” he said, “but have you had any thoughts on who to cast for Jamey Sheppard? Because I’m thinking it might work better to play him younger, you get what I’m saying?”
“Younger,” Mickey mused. “Interesting.”
It had come to this—they were pimping Mickey for the role before he’d even locked down the rights. She was gulping her therapeutic lassi when her phone rang.
Deep breath, now. This could be the call that put it all back into place. The petty waiting game played by Kristophe and Blayne hadn’t been going on so long that she had abandoned hope. Before leaving home this morning, she’d set up call-forwarding to reroute incomings here.
She reached. She answered.
“Somebody, she is ready to be receiving some good news this morning, ja?”
“You dick,” she said, a discreet hand cupped over mouth and phone. “Why didn’t I hear anything from you all day yesterday? And I guess neither of you remembers how to answer Blayne’s cell anymore?”
“Hmm, you talk not so nice and it starts me to thinking I have maybe the wrong number, ja? Because I would be expecting you to sound much happier to be hearing from me.”
“I’ll make it up to you after you’re back. But right now, I am so not in the mood for games.”
“Oh, this is too too bad. I was next about to ask you to beg.”
“Quit fucking around, Kristophe. Has there been a death in the family or not?”
“Oh, that, you mean! When I say good news, I mean for me. For you…not so good.”
And something was happening to his voice, as if it were connected to a rheostat labeled “Silly German Accent” that was being slowly dialed back, so that he lost more of it every few words. Until—
“For you, maybe even a little bit bad.”
—until he no longer sounded anything remotely like Kristophe.
“The news,” he said, “is that despite your best efforts, it looks like I’ll be coming home safe after all. Sis.”
He hung up before giving her a chance to explain that, whatever he’d heard, she must have been quoted out of context.
36
THE worst thing about this neighborhood, to Jordy’s eye, was that the people who lived here probably had little tolerance for strangers who sat parked along the curb in the middle of the night, inside unfamiliar cars. These were not cheap houses. They were big and expensive and well-maintained, and the citizens who bought them would expect prompt civil service for their tax dollars.
This was a risk he would have to take, but an acceptable one. Going by what the grouch who’d answered the phone this morning had said, they’d suffered a plague of reporters lately. Strange cars might be like a way of life by now.
“What are we gonna do in there?” Cro-Mag asked. Not much concerned about details until this instant, not with that cat in his lap the whole trip.
“These were gonna be Sheppard’s in-laws. Except that asshole you talked to this morning didn’t sound like they wanted anything to do with him now. Either way, they’re at the top of the list of people we want to talk to.”
“You mean the same way we talked to that Rupert earlier?”
Jordy kept his eye on the lone light burning in a second-floor window. A corner window with curtains, probably a bedroom. “How about we just decide those things as they come up.”
Cro-Mag nodded, more focused on twirling his finger before the cat’s eyes. Laughed as the cat followed him with jerky circles of her head. When it came to the cat, there was no reasoning with him. Period. The first stop they’d made yesterday was for a bag of chow and a plastic bowl with dual compartments, one for kibble and the other for water. Brings barely enough cash for food and gas and whores, and he’s spending it on a stray cat. He’d found some yarn at the Hardestys’ trailer, liked to dance it in front of the cat and watch it take swipes. Hours, he could do this. The cat would tire of the game before Cro-Mag ever would.
“Until the past couple days,” said Jordy, “you’d always struck me as more of a dog person.”
“I don’t take sides. I like ’em all.”
And this arrangement was getting old fast. Taz, he’d named the thing. Why? Because she looked like a Taz, was Cro-Mag’s explanation. Twice Taz had relieved herself in the floorboard of one of the earlier cars. And would probably keep doing so, as many times as Cro-Mag was willing to clean up the mess.
“Jordy?” he said. “How much longer’s this gonna take to find your cousin?”
“If I knew that, I’d jump to the final step.”
“Think we’ll be done by Tuesday? I really should be home by Tuesday.”
“What’s so important about Tuesday?”
“Tuesday afternoons is when I meet with my parole officer.” Cro-Mag tugging a line of yarn along his thigh while Taz stalked it. Her claws raked at his pantleg, catching skin, and he didn’t even flinch. “He’ll be mad at me for missing all these days of work.”
Cro-Mag putting in hours and drawing a paycheck—Jordy had never given any thought to such a scenario. First get tight with a guy in prison, and you had trouble envisioning him in any other kind of life. He leaves the cellblock, walks out the main gate, someone drives him away, and he goes into hibernation.
Jordy was almost afraid to ask: “What kind of job did your P.O. find for you?”
“I’m working for a vet. I get to make sure the animals all have their food and water. And I get to keep their little cages clean.”
Get to, he’d said. As if it were a privilege, being a janitor for car-struck dogs and diseased parrots. “You like doing that?”
“Yeah!” Cro-Mag said, with disturbing enthusiasm. As though it were impossible to conceive of not liking so menial a daily hell. Jordy decided to leave it alone. Maybe that was the place for him—and there couldn’t be many of those in the world.
Eventually the house’s upstairs light winked out. He gave it another hour for whoever was home to fall deeply asleep. They left the car and paced across the street.
The house was a big brown brick place that looked solid enough to weather the end of the world. Five steps up the driveway, a motion-sensitive light above the garage door blasted on and caught them in white glare.
“What do we do?” Cro-Mag whispered.
“Keep walking and act like we don’t mind that one bit.”
Deciding they might as well be bold about it now, Jordy strutted the rest of the way up the drive, then to the front door. For the benefit of nosy neighbors who might be watching, he pretended to ring the orange-glowing bell as he checked the door for real. Locked.
They stayed put until the security light timed out. Jordy tapped Cro-Mag and they circled around to the back door. Found what he’d been counting on—less formality and a lot more glass.
He took a flashlight salvaged from the Hardesty trailer and cupped his hand over the end, muting the beam to a dull glow that he played around the perimeter of the storm door. He widened a couple of fingers to throw a little extra light at the inner door. Not his specialty, but it didn’t look as though either had been fitted with alarms. And no stickers—people liked to advertise it when they were wired.
He switched off the light and handed it to Cro-Mag. Took a roll of masking tape—another prize from the trailer—and peeled away enough strips to grid off a square near the handle, then whacked it in the middle with the Magnum. It buckled with a soft crunch and he used the barrel to clear enough of a hole to reach through and flip the lock. Opened the storm door and repeated the process on the small pane above the knob of the inner door.
And they were in.
The entrance took them through a mud closet that led to a utility room off one side, the kitchen off the other. Jordy eased into the kitchen, the flashlight on again with his hand filtering the beam. No hurry. You hurried, you could get careless and miss things, or knock
them over.
Cro-Mag nudged his shoulder and whispered, “We just gonna bust in on ’em while they’re sleeping?”
“If we have to. Last resort, though.”
Because Jordy couldn’t say he liked that option. It would mean that, for the first few critical moments, the situation was beyond control. People jolted out of sleep weren’t predictable. They could shout, scream. They could leap out of bed and charge, or grab for a gun in a bedside drawer. They could have heart attacks.
The dining room came next, and beyond it the house started to expand, two and three ways to leave a room. Here a TV lounge, there a parlor with a baby grand piano. They worked their way to the front, passing a broad stairway to the second floor. Across from it, behind wooden double doors and taking up a big corner location, was a room that appeared to be a combination of den and home office. They stepped inside. It even smelled different than the rest of the house—a room of leather and smoke where women were not entirely welcome.
They had already heard the voice that belonged in this room.
Jordy shut the door behind them, then drew the blinds and switched on a brass desk lamp to find that they were surrounded by walnut and oak, bookshelves and cut crystal bottles, trophies and framed photos of groundbreakings and construction sites. The same man recurred in most of the pictures, a sizable guy with wavy graying hair who didn’t look as if smiling came naturally to him. Looked like he’d rather be using those teeth to rip through big slabs of blood-rare beef.
“We could have us a problem here.”
“How’s that?” Cro-Mag said.
“The guy that owns this place? You and me, we could both be pointing our guns at his head, and he still wouldn’t be near as impressed with that as he is with himself.” Jordy shook his head. “We get him in a fighting mood, we’ll have to kill him.”
“Okay.” Cro-Mag saying it with a shrug.
“But I don’t want to kill him. I just want to make a deal with him.”
Emerson was the guy’s name. Clarence Emerson. It was printed on a half-dozen certificates and civic awards framed on the wall with the photos.
Jordy sat in the leather swivel chair behind the man’s desk, at a loss until he scanned the desktop and spotted a cellular phone in one corner, along with a few other neatly-arranged items—ring of keys, engraved pen, pager. He reached for the cellular, bouncing it in one hand, knowing with absolute certainty that this was not the same phone that Jamey Sheppard had called.
“You stay put inside the doorway here, and watch those stairs,” he told Cro-Mag, then left him standing post while he crept back to the kitchen. On their way in, he’d noticed a combination phone and answering machine sitting on the countertop, lights glowing in the gloom like tiny red eyes. He shut the machine off and watched the lights darken.
Back in the den, he pulled out the paper with the number they’d called earlier and dialed it on the man’s cellular.
Few things were as jarring as a phone ringing in the middle of the night in a dark house. Downstairs, upstairs, four or five extensions jangling in concert. Jordy counted eight times before the pick-up, then heard the same voice from this morning, only groggy.
“Right now,” Jordy told him, “one of two things going through your head is why didn’t your answering machine work.”
“Who is this?”
“And that’s the other one. Let me clear up the first for you. The reason your machine didn’t work is because we turned it off. You realize what that means, don’t you? And keep calm while you’re putting it together.”
“Who. Is. This.” More venom in Emerson’s voice than a nest of scorpions.
“Somebody who just wants to have a peaceful conversation. If it turns rough, that’ll be your doing. And I didn’t invent rough, but I did perfect it. So keep that in mind. You got a Missus Emerson up there next to you?”
“She’s still in bed. The phone’s in the hallway.”
“Come on downstairs, then. If it takes you more than a minute, I’ll start to get jumpy, and you won’t want that. Neither will your wife. And you’re probably the sort of man who’s got a gun stashed up there, and I respect that, but leave it where it is. You do that, and we won’t need ours down here. ‘We,’ you notice I said. In case you need a little extra incentive to keep from overreacting. And you probably got friends on the Flagstaff P.D., but don’t call them, either. We can listen in on the kitchen line, or in the TV room…and if there’s an outgoing call, then we’re back to jumpy.”
“Where are you now?”
“Speaking only for myself, I’m sitting in a big comfy leather chair looking at a football that’s forty years old if it’s a day. So be the smart man I know you are. Resist those urges I know you’re feeling, we’ll have our talk and a few minutes later I’ll be gone, and all you’ll have to do is replace some glass in your back doors instead of attending funerals. So I’m gonna start counting now…”
The man from the photographs was down promptly, wearing a maroon velour robe belted around his waist and slippers to match. Close to sixty, Emerson had to be, but it was a solid sixty, the kind of sixty Jordy liked to think he could be if he made it that far. A big, squared-off, barrel-chested guy with a head that looked as hard as a cinderblock. He stepped through the door of his den, eyes set at a controlled glare; looked to his right and spotted Cro-Mag leveling a gun at his head, and didn’t even blink. As though he did this every weekend. Emerson lifted his hands to shoulder-height and let Cro-Mag pat him down before he walked farther into the room.
“Is your wife still sleeping?” Jordy asked. “Won’t interrupt us?”
“I told her it was an employee calling about some vandalism he’d spotted, and to go back to sleep.”
“You strike me as a man who keeps up on current events. Do I need to introduce myself?”
“Jordan Rabin,” he said. “Don’t bother. The news has already taken care of that for you.”
Jordy gestured toward a lesser chair angled off from the desk. “Sit down?”
Emerson wasn’t biting. “That’s my desk, and you’re in my chair. If I take a seat, that’s where it’ll be.”
Jordy couldn’t suppress a grin. Not that he wanted to move, but if prison taught anything, it was the value of giving small to get back big. And not everyone understood how valuable a currency image could be. Let Emerson have his chair, and he got to look in charge. Everyone here knowing he wasn’t, but he would like looking that way. Might make him more cooperative so he wouldn’t lose face for real.
Jordy stood and made a grand it’s-all-yours gesture. “How about you keep your hands on top of the desk. Otherwise —”
“You’ll get jumpy. Right. I heard you the first two times.”
“And how about you pour us a whiskey from those bottles back there. It’s been a while since I’ve had a glass of whiskey.” Jordy turned back to Cro-Mag and asked if he wanted one too, but he just stood back watching with the gun and said no. A knit watch cap was pulled down over his head. Hadn’t had to be told, either. Cro-Mag possessed a keen intuition for when and when not to hide his dent.
“Who’s he?” Emerson asked. “Your designated driver?”
“Oh, he’s a regular Swiss Army knife. Comes in handy a lot of ways.”
Emerson poured from one of the cut crystal bottles into matching tumblers, then reclaimed his chair. He didn’t merely sit in it—he occupied it. Jordy pulled up the smaller chair and accepted the glass the man slid across the desktop. One sip and Jordy was impressed.
“Sure kicks the titties offa Jack Daniel’s,” he said, then nodded toward the old football, the polished trophies. “What position did you play?”
“Tackle.”
Jordy toasted him. “Mean streak, huh? Liked to hurt a guy?”
You could still see the grim snarl he’d probably flashed inside his helmet. “Just part of the game.” Emerson knocked back a sip of that fine whiskey. “Are you planning on getting to a point anytime tonight?”
Jordy was almost sorry to have to bring it around to business. Break into a man’s house, call him down, share his whiskey…there was a lot to savor about it.
“I have it on good authority that this is where Jamey Sheppard was heading last weekend after he got loose from some family of inbreds. I’m betting you might have some ideas on where I might look for him.”
“You’re talking about my daughter’s fiancé. Not mine.”
“It’s not him I want anyway. Just that the last anyone saw of him, or saw of my cousin, they were together. It’s my cousin I want to find. If you got the full story off the news, then you should understand the reasons I want to see Duncan one more time.” Jordy swirled his glass. “Let me tell you, it’s no fun being shot by the closest thing you had to a brother. It’s no fun having a crowd of people hold you down while you’re bleeding and make it halfway through cutting your ear off with scissors. The ear, now that’s something I could live with. They sewed that back on. But the betrayal…that’s the kind of thing you have a hard time letting go of.”
“If the rest of the world doesn’t know where to find Jamey and your cousin, what makes you think I’d have any ideas for you?”
Jordy knew he could not touch the subject of this man’s daughter. Do that and Emerson would go kamikaze, the kind of man who wouldn’t hesitate to die for his family, even though he probably couldn’t talk to them.
“You don’t much like the guy, do you?” Jordy said. “I could hear it in your voice this morning. You got a call, thought it was a reporter. It wasn’t—it was us. I didn’t hear much love for your future son-in-law. If that’s even still on. Is it?”
“God knows,” Emerson grunted.
“Probably all alone in your opinion, too, I bet. Nobody else understanding why you’re having such a hard time warming up to the guy.”
Emerson sat with his brow furrowed and his thick fingers linked around the glass of scotch. “I’ve got nothing to say to you about it. Nothing I could say would have the least meaning to you. So you might as well quit your transparent attempt at trying to be my bar buddy. Because you’re not.”
