by Brian Hodge
He hitched his thumb toward the bedrooms. “Melissa, she’s some piece of work, isn’t she?”
Cro-Mag shrugged, bristling at the flames. “She doesn’t like Taz being here.”
“Cut her, she’d bleed icewater. More than any woman I ever met, she reminds me of that saying: ‘No matter how great she looks, some other guy’s already sick of putting up with her shit.’ Almost makes you feel sorry for the poor son of a bitch actor, stuck with a sister like that.” Jordy tipped the bottle again. “That sister you been staying with…what’s she like?”
“She’s nice. Most of the time. She’ll be mad I took off this way, but she’ll get over it quick if I’m back Tuesday for my P.O. meeting.” Cro-Mag saying this not so much to him, but to the cat on the hearth. “She writes songs.”
“Oh yeah? She any good at it?”
“I guess. It’s just her and her guitar. She must’ve made up a hundred by now, so she must have some idea what she’s doing.”
“Maybe you can put her up to writing one about me someday,” Jordy said. “I always thought if Bruce Springsteen ever wrote a song about me, I’d feel like I really accomplished something. Probably stands a better chance of getting written if your sister does it.”
He leaned forward in his chair, elbows braced on knees as he stared at the fireplace, the dance of flames and shadows. He imagined it unleashed, ravenous, turning every room here into a searing oven.
“When you torched the house last week,” he said, “how’d you do it? What I heard the other day, you must’ve blown out the pilot lights for the stove and oven, then cranked the gas so the place filled up—was that it?”
“Yeah,” Cro-Mag turning around now, finally. Telling him this to his face rather than the cat. “Then I went outside and waited. I forget how long.”
“Then what?”
“I’d made a gasoline bomb from a bottle.” Cro-Mag hunched on the floor before the hearth, his eyes like two darkened hollows. “I lit it and threw it through the kitchen window. From as far back as I could stand and still make the throw.”
“And then the whole place,” Jordy said, never knowing something he hadn’t witnessed could replay so vividly in his mind, “it went up like a bonfire, is that it?”
“I didn’t stick around to watch.”
Jordy felt outside of himself now, hearing the quickened sound of his breath whistling through his nose. Feeling his hands tighten into fists.
“However long you were there, did you see anyone from the house? Or hear anyone calling for help?”
“No.”
“Like from a room up in the northeast corner—you didn’t see or hear anything from her room up there?”
Cro-Mag began to tense up while peering at him, head cocked and a frown pulling his brows close together. Like an animal down there on the floor, reacting to tone of voice instead of words. If he’d had hackles, they would’ve raised by now.
“Jordy…I did what you asked,” he said. “You told me what those people were like to you. I only did what you said.”
“Yeah. You did. You damn well did.”
He wondered if Cro-Mag even realized the extent of it. Likely the closest he ever got to a newspaper was while lining the cages of sick birds at that job of his. Although he’d had to learn the time and place of Friday’s funeral somehow. Had he even noticed there were three obituaries? Three coffins? Maybe he had, and it hadn’t occurred to him that it was supposed to have been any other way.
I did what you asked.
Jordy closed his eyes because it seemed suddenly too bright in here.
You fucking well did, didn’t you…and whenever I slow down long enough to think about it, it’s like you tore out whatever’s left of my heart…and if I was to tell you that right now, what would you do to yourself?
“Jordy, something’s the matter—what is it?”
“Nothing. I’m just tired.” He set his emptied bottle aside. “Think about that song idea, to tell your sister.” He stood, turned to head back to bed. “And tell her I said she’s got a nice voice. On the phone last week, when I called you up? Tell her I liked the sound of her voice.”
****
Needles, California, three-thirty in the morning—while Duncan gassed up the car, Jamey jogged across the truck stop’s lot, through the snort and rumble of diesel engines. The Mojave Desert on one side, the Colorado River on the other, and in between, people wishing they were home in bed. They moved like ghosts, haggard from road nerves, with red eyes and caffeine jitters. He tucked his head low inside the collar of his borrowed jacket.
Inside the building he found a row of telephones near the restrooms, and leaned with his face close to the wall. Took out his Pacific Bell calling card and went to work—information first, then the West Hollywood number he’d been given. Listening to it ring more than two hundred and fifty miles away.
In his pocket, a great weight, a great weapon. Twice he had counted it in the car, more than a thousand dollars for raiding mailboxes the other afternoon. Really—what had he been thinking?
His call was answered by machine, no surprise, You’ve reached Petra Lanier, so he just started talking. An emergency, please, pick up. Wake up. Sorry to call you at this hour. Please. He filled up his thirty seconds, then did it all over again when she failed to respond, and by the third call started to sweat. Never in his life so happy to hear someone so annoyed at him.
“Who the hell?” After he’d told her: “Jamey? If a fraction of what I’ve heard about you in the past week is true…are you sure you have the right number?”
It had been a few months. He’d met Petra last year when they’d worked on a low-budget, direct-to-video horror flick, nothing that would look impressive on either of their resumes. They’d gotten friendly enough during the shoot—coffee a few times, a couple lunches—then he’d let it lapse because he could tell that Samantha seemed not to like where it was going. In hindsight she’d probably been right to worry.
“Are you working today?” he asked.
“Yeah,” she said, voice frowzy and bewildered. “Jamey, why are—”
“Early call?”
“No, afternoon. It’s a photo shoot for some black-metal band and their pretend-victims. It’s so cheesy. They think they’re vampires. Late afternoon’s like the crack of dawn to them.”
“How’d you like to earn over a thousand in cash before you do that job?”
Silence. “Is this some kind of joke?”
“No, but there are a couple of catches,” he said. “First, you’ve got to grab your kit and leave right now, so you can be in Barstow to meet us as soon as we pull in off the highway. We’re in Needles now and heading that way. The second one…you’ll have to work in the back seat of a moving car.”
40
YOU’RE right—the conditions kind of suck,” she said, this woman Jamey had called out into the sunless morning, as she looked into the back of their Dodge. Four of them now, on the far edge of the parking lot of a Barstow gas station. “But it’s still my favorite type of job: grossly overpaid and invisible to the taxman.”
“How many jobs like that do you actually get?” Dawn asked.
“This one’s the first. But I’ve clung to the dream for years.”
They’d been an hour or more into the Mojave, after leaving Needles, before Dawn had made the connection. This was the woman that Samantha had mentioned the other night, cold and shaking in her arms after having watched Jamey kill. I was afraid I was losing him once, last year, Sam had said. Losing him to her, the makeup artist he’d met on the set of some crappy movie.
Petra Lanier was a punky-looking thing, wearing black tights and Doc Marten boots, with a sharp-nosed vixen’s face and a chin-length mop of hair the color of a cherry Popsicle. Probably knew all sorts of skanky clubs to go to in L.A. Dawn looked at Petra’s hands, their nails trimmed and filed short as a guy’s. The hands that would be spending the next hour or so on Duncan’s face.
“Looks like your car�
�ll have to be the one,” Petra said. “Yours has more of a backseat than mine ever will.”
And that settled it, no discussion. Jamey went with her to help lug Petra’s clunky makeup kit over from her puny little GEO Storm.
“You kissed her hand when you met her,” she said to Duncan. “You kissed Sam’s hand when you met her. You never kissed my hand when we met.”
“I was too busy being captivated by the rest of you.”
She laughed. A little. “Good answer. Even if it’s a complete dogpile.”
As she leaned against the fender, Duncan rested both hands on her shoulders. Then put two fingertips beneath her chin, tilting her head up to face him.
“Are you going to be okay with this—taking her car back to L.A.?” he asked.
“Do I look like I’m okay with it?”
“Somebody’s got to, Dawn. And two of us are already going to be busy.”
“So why does it have to be me?”
He leaned closer, forehead to forehead. “We’re still working this out as we go, luv. Jamey and I don’t have all the pieces in place yet.”
At least this part of the improv came with one saving grace: Duncan would be getting a break from driving. He hadn’t wanted to turn loose of the wheel this whole time. A quarter ’til six now and he’d been driving for hours, ever since Sedona—no sleep, refusing offers from her and Jamey to relieve him. As if it had become entirely his responsibility to get them there in time, and Jordy’s being loose was his fault too, and chaining himself to the wheel had become his penance.
“For a fucking grand, I’d think Petra could catch a ride back up here later to pick up her car.” And was this really her own voice she was hearing? She loathed the whine creeping into it. “That way we could all ride together.”
“It can only help, having two cars after we get to L.A.,” Duncan explaining what she knew already. “Assuming she’ll let us borrow hers.”
“There’s just a little over three hours left until Sam’s phone is supposed to ring.” Dawn clamped her lip between her teeth, battling a quaver in her throat. “Do I have to say it—why I want to spend that time in the same car with you? Do I really have to say it out loud?”
“No.” Duncan shook his head and she noticed that behind him the first rose glow of the nascent sun was starting to ignite the eastern sky. “But I wouldn’t complain if you told me one more time you love me.”
****
He felt like a slacker, flatbacking along this last leg of their desert drive. Lulled toward sleep, too—closer now to the mesmerizing drone of tires on pavement as the miles and the long night caught up with him, with those cool fingers on his face.
“Nice bone structure you’ve got,” Petra told him. “It’s not unlike Jamey’s.”
“How do you think he got the job being me?”
From behind the wheel, Jamey glanced over his shoulder. “What we need from you is to take that terrific bone structure and make it look like it’s been run through a meat grinder.”
Duncan waggled an eyebrow at her. “Such a tragic waste, right?”
Balanced on the edge of the backseat, pressed against his hip, Petra studied him from above. It felt like lying back on a doctor’s exam table, looking up to see a face looming overhead as someone else took control. She knew who he was—Jamey hadn’t tried to hide that—but didn’t seem the least bit bothered by it.
“Give me a scenario,” she said. “It’s not like I have a script to work with. Tell me what it’s supposed to look like went down between the two of you.”
“Like he was subdued,” Jamey said. “Very much against his will. Blunt object trauma.”
“How about pistol-whipped?” she said.
“Perfect.”
“So…bruises, blood, lacerations, swelling?” Petra looked down at him with a perverse grin. “These are a few of my favorite things.”
“But not too much of a buildup around his eyes,” Jamey warned. “You can’t obscure his vision.”
“Why not a bullet wound to the shoulder, too, while you’re at it,” Duncan said. “I really would hate to look like all I did was sit still for it.”
“Ah. Pride in the balance. Why am I not surprised?” said Petra. “How about you, Jamey? Are you supposed to look like you came out of it without a scratch?”
“All right. You can give me a scrape or two later.”
Duncan huffed. “You damn well better look worse than that.”
Petra had Jamey flick the dome light on, then leaned down to the floorboard to sift through what resembled a big plastic tackle box. She put a penlight in his hand and stretched out his arm with the beam aimed back at his face.
“Since I don’t have a miner’s helmet handy,” she told him, “I need you to wax catatonic for me anytime I move your arm, and keep this light steady wherever I’m working.”
Back to the tackle box then, for jars and tubes, latex flesh wounds and orange and black sponges, all of which she laid out atop him as if he were a table. Loath to blow this chance for a behind-the-scenes look at how the magic happened, he asked for a tutorial, so Petra gave him the lowdown on how she would be using each component. Spirit gum to attach the latex pieces, and hold flecks of shredded cork to simulate ripped skin. Four colors to blend into bruises. Vaseline and white cream to combine into pus. Scab blood to cake on for an hours-old look. Cotton for a jaw lump. A spray called Kryolan to fix it all into place.
“Jamey?” he said as she started in on him. “I can still kick your ass, if it really did come to that. We’re clear on that, right?”
It was the first laugh, however small, that Duncan had heard out of the guy since Friday. “Sure. If it’s that important to you.”
“I know a thousand bucks should buy a no-questions-asked policy,” Petra said. “But in case you don’t know, back where we’re headed, you two really are the talk of the town. So. Can I ask? What this is for?”
Jamey told her, and it left her leaning momentarily against the passenger seat, rubbing her forehead as though trying to push the words into her brain. Mute as she glanced back and forth between them, then out the rear window to Dawn.
She thinks she’s looking at dead men, Duncan thought, and tried to silence the voices inside that maybe she was right.
“I was thinking this could be some publicity stunt your agent was putting you up to,” she said. “And you have the nerve to offer me money to help you?”
“I figured it was the quickest way to get your attention.”
“Well, yeah, mission accomplished. But I don’t want it now. You think I wouldn’t do this for you, just because?”
Duncan watched him take a hand off the wheel and reach back to squeeze her arm. Something between these two—not now, but once upon a time. Or maybe this was just the way it was between friends who had enough of a history that they could afford to trust on an everyday basis.
“Keep the money,” Jamey told her. “You do this for us, and I guarantee you, you’ve done a lot more to earn it than I did.”
Duncan closed his eyes, tried to remember the last time he had felt that kind of bridge to another human being. Except for Dawn. And the past few days. Years, maybe, if ever. Which didn’t seem as much of a loss as it probably should’ve…but he could live with it, as long as there was now.
****
The rising sun chased them as relentlessly as they chased the clock, as desert became forest and forest became suburb. Highways unfurled extra lanes to become freeways, sunrise triggered the Monday morning commute, and all of L.A. County seemed to hit the road at once.
Home at last.
“Best guess,” Duncan said. This disturbing new Duncan, transformed by latex, paint, and stage blood. “What kind of situation do you think he’s got worked out for us to walk into? I mean, he’ll want you to believe it’s a simple exchange, don’t you think? Me for Sam. Whether I’ve come of my own free will, or you’ve had to drag me there.”
“But because he doesn’t know which it�
��ll be, he’ll want to do it someplace secluded. Lots of privacy. And we’ve got to assume it’s more than just Jordy, that he’s still with the guy who got him loose.”
Earlier, he’d wondered if that nine o’clock phone call hadn’t been a sham from the very beginning—if the house Sam shared with Angelique hadn’t been intended as the site of the end game all along. Get him there under the pretense that it was merely a stop along the way, that he would be walking into an empty house, then…surprise.
But this scenario didn’t feel right. It meant they had complete faith that he would both bring Duncan and refrain from sending the police to the house, and they had to be too wary for that.
“What I can’t figure,” Duncan said, “is how Jordy found Sam in the first place.”
“I’ve been thinking about that,” Jamey said. “Maybe it’s just paranoia, but I keep coming back to wondering if my sister isn’t mixed up with Jordy now.”
“How’s he supposed to have found her, then?”
“I don’t know. One or the other, take your pick. Either way, he’s thinking he’ll get to you through me, and get to me through Sam. He seems to have come up with that too quick not to have had some help somewhere. And knowing what I know now about Melissa, she’s the most likely candidate. I just can’t see total coincidence here.”
“Sam wasn’t even supposed to be home last night,” Duncan said.
“Doesn’t matter. Melissa steers him there and he thinks he’ll just lay low until Sam and I get home. Except she’s already home, so it’s even better for him.”
“This just gets more fucked up by the hour, doesn’t it?” Duncan checked himself in Petra’s mirror and nodded with approval. “You do good work. I even scare myself.”
“High praise, considering the source.” She crawled into the front passenger seat to add some scrapes to Jamey’s face while he drove. “I cannot believe this conversation I’m hearing is for real.”
